Ireland has no quarrel, but, on the contrary, a very beneficial intercourse with Spain, which she is required to renounce to her infinite present detriment; she is called on, likewise, to squander her wealth and shed her blood in this English East Indian quarrel.
The man who tried in vain to enlist in the East India Company less than two years previously was no longer contented to be ‘the subaltern instrument’ of artful and ambitious England. As long as the good of the Empire was defined as the good of England, Ireland would suffer. If England’s warships were built in Irish harbours, if Ireland had its own navy, army, flag and colonies, only then would Ireland have a legitimate interest in England’s war.
Tone was a constitutional patriot before he became a rebel. Like other Protestant patriots he was preoccupied with Ireland’s lesser status compared to England. The aim of his Argument on Behalf of Catholics, he recalled in his autobiography, was to assert the independence of his country, to unite the whole people of Ireland and to ‘substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic’. The pamphlet was addressed to Protestant Dissenters rather than to members of the Established Church or to Catholics:
The Protestants I despaired of from the outset for obvious reasons. Already in possession by an unjust monopoly of the whole power and patronage of the country, it was not to be supposed they would ever concur in measures the certain tendency of which must be to lessen their influence as a party, how much so ever the nation might gain. To the Catholics I thought it unnecessary to address myself, because, that as no change could make their political situation worse, I reckoned upon their support to a certainty; besides, they had already begun to manifest a strong sense of their wrongs and oppressions; and, finally, I well knew that, however it might be disguised or suppressed, there existed in the breast of every Irish Catholic an inextirpable abhorrence of the English name and power. There remained only the Dissenters, whom I knew to be patriotic and enlightened; however, the recent events at Belfast had showed me that all prejudice was not yet entirely removed from their minds. I sat down accordingly, and wrote a pamphlet addressed to the Dissenters, and which I entitled, An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, the object of which was to convince them that they and the Catholics had but one common interest and one common enemy; that the depression and slavery of Ireland was produced and perpetuated by the divisions existing between them, and that, consequently, to assert the independence of their country, and their own individual liberties, it was necessary to forget all former feuds, to consolidate the entire strength of the whole nation, and to form for the future but; one people. These principles I supported by the best arguments which suggested themselves to me, and particularly by demonstrating that the cause of the failure of all former efforts, and more especially of the Volunteer Convention in 1783, was the unjust neglect of the claims of their Catholic brethren.
An Argument on Behalf of Catholics opened with an account of Ireland and its people that is echoed in how Ireland continues to represent itself. Ireland was ‘blessed with a temperate sky and fruitful soil’, ‘abounding with all the material for unlimited commerce’, ‘filled by 4,000,000 of an ingenious and gallant people’, ‘posted right in the track between Europe and America, within 50 miles of England, 300 of France’, yet, as he argued in Spanish War!, ‘with all these great advantages unheard of and unknown, without pride, or power, or name; without ambassadors, army or navy; nor of half the consequence in the empire she has the honour to make a part, with the single county of York, or the loyal and well regulated town of Birmingham!’ The choice facing the Protestant Irish was to preside over a stunted and inglorious country (‘unknown and unheard of in Europe, the prey of England, the laughing stock of the knaves who plunder us’) or to exert their power constitutionally to procure a complete and radical emancipation of their country, ‘by a reform in the representation of the people’. This new element to his political philosophy was his insistence of the need for solidarity with Catholics.
Tone’s proposal for dealing with the political fallout of Catholic Emancipation was to enfranchise such Catholics who had a freehold of £10 per year and to strike off ‘the wretched tribe of forty shilling freeholders’ whose votes were as much the property of their landlords as the sheep or the bullocks which they brand with their names. Doing so, would purge in one stroke, ‘the gross and feculent mass which contaminates the Protestant interest, and restore their natural weight to the sound and respectable part of the Catholic community, without throwing into their hands so much power as might enable them to dictate the law’.
An Argument on Behalf of Catholics addressed hackneyed Protestant fears of what would happen if Catholics were emancipated. There was, he argued, no threat of Rome rule (the Pope was being burned in effigy in Catholic France), or of a Catholic monarch (the Pretender to the throne was dead, Jacobitism was finished); he also dismissed the argument that if Catholics got the upper hand they would ally against England with France.
His solidarity with Catholics was, at this stage, mostly intellectual. How, he asked, could the Dissenters ground their title to liberty in Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man whilst riveting the fetters of the wretched Roman Catholics? As explained by his son William in the foreword to the first edition of the Autobiography:
When he first wrote his pamphlet in favour of Catholics he was not acquainted with a single individual of that religion, so complete at that period was the distinction in society between the several sects. In a few months he was a prime mover of their councils and accomplished the union between them and the dissenters of the North.
His diaries for late-1791 record a drink-fuelled debate (one of many) with a fellow Protestant who argued that for all protestations of good wishes towards Roman Catholics, thirty-nine out of forty Protestants would be found, whenever the question came forward, to be hostile to the liberation of the Roman Catholics.
The first volume of the Autobiography covered the period prior to his departure to the United States. The second volume of the diaries, written from France, depicts his involvement in three French efforts to invade Ireland between 1796 and 1798 and the articulation of his political aspirations for Ireland. An 18 July 1796 entry recorded a conversation with his French government liaison General Henri Clarke (whose father was an Irishman) about what kind of government might be installed in Ireland. Clarke favoured some kind of monarchy. ‘Where on God’s earth’, Tone replied, ‘would we go look for a King?’ There was no obvious candidate amongst the Irish nobility and he could not see, in any case, the Irish people spilling their blood for any monarch. ‘Maybe, after all,’ Clarke suggested, ‘you will choose one of your own leaders; who knows but it may be yourself?’ Tone replied that he had neither the desire nor the talents to aspire so high. He then outlined his own hopes and fears for an Irish revolution:
I summed up all by telling him that, as to religion, my belief was we should content ourselves with pulling down the Establishment without setting up any other; that we would have no State religion, but let every sect pay their own clergy voluntarily; and that, as to royalty and aristocracy, they were both odious in Ireland to that degree, that I apprehended much more a general massacre of the gentry, and a distribution of the entire of their property, than the establishment of any form of government that would perpetuate their influence; that I hoped this massacre would not happen, and that I, for one, would do all that lay in my power to prevent it, because I did not like to spill the blood, even of the guilty; at the same time, that the pride, cruelty, and oppression of the Irish aristocracy were so great, that I apprehended every excess from the just resentment of the people.
Tone went to sea with a French fleet three times between December 1796 and August 1798. Each attempt to land in Ireland ended in failure due to bad weather, poor leadership or poor seamanship. On Christmas Day 1796, contemplating failure, he recorded in his diary that if captured, the best he could expect was to be shot or killed in action. Perhaps there would be trial for the sake of striking terror into others, and then perhaps a hanging or disembowelling, which he wouldn’t mind as long as he was dead first. During a sea battle in August 1798 during