Save Croppies Acre! The Final Letters and Statements of Matthew Tone and Bartholomew Teeling

"Croppies acre" is situated just in front of Collins Barracks (National Museum of Ireland) in Dublin. Hundreds of "croppies" (United Irishmen) were buried here in a mass grave following their execution during the 1798 rising. Up to 300 United Irishmen and sympathizers (suspected or otherwise) are buried here, however we only know the names of a few. The most prominent of these were Bartholomew Teeling and Matthew Tone,  (brother of Theobald Wolfe Tone) who were both hanged at Provost Prison on Arbour Hill before their bodies were dumped into the "Croppy Pit".

Their resting place lay unmarked for hundreds of years and this disgrace finally came to a head in the late nineties when plans were drawn up to turn the site into a carpark for the nearby museum. Following a lengthy and vocal campaign the government capitulated and designated the site as a 1798 Memorial Park. Significant monies were spent developing the site into one worthy of that designation, and the result was very fine indeed.

Some 35,000 Euro was spent rejuvenating the site in 2011 and the displaced Anna Livia statue, formally of O'Connell street, was relocated to Croppies Acre. However since then the site has been disgracefully neglected and has as a result become a haven for anti social activity and drug taking. It is now closed to the public, with the gates permanently padlocked. The Memorial Park has seemingly been given up on and left to rot. 

The Seán Heuston 1916 Society recently took steps to raise awareness about this criminal neglect and their members carried out a clean up of the site. The pictures were shocking.

The OPW and the Dublin government need to take responsibility, clean up the site and reopen it to the public, subject to monitoring - perhaps CCTV would be ideal - with regular checks and maintenance. Memorials and graves of this nature deserve to be cared for, but this neglect typifies the attitude of the Dublin government to National Monuments the length and breadth of the country. Many, such as Moore Street and the surrounding 1916 battlefield site lie in neglect. They are even currently in the process of selling off commercial licenses and interests at historical sites all across the country - see here. This typifies the attitude of the Fine Gael/Labour government, profit is the bottom line and who cares if tourists are ripped off and historical sites are profit generating vehicles for private businesses? Obviously this needs to be opposed. Local and European elections are imminent and I would urge readers to press candidates on the issues raised in this piece. I would also urge people to raise these issues by contacting their local TD's (contact details here) and the OPW who can be contacted through the following: 

The Office of Public Works.
Head Office, Jonathan Swift Street,
Trim, Co. Meath.
Lo-Call: 1890 213 414
PH: (046) 942 6000
FAX: (046) 948 1793
E-mail: info@opw.ie

General Jean Humbert

Reproduced below are the final letters written by Matthew Tone and the final statement of Bartholomew Teeling. They give an insight into the character of these men, and I publish them here in the hope that they will energize readers, motivate them into taking steps to ensure that their sacrifice is not forgotten and their final resting place is given the care and respect it deserves. 

Both of these patriots lie buried in Croppies Acre along with hundreds more like them. Teeling and Tone were both part of the French landing in Kilcummin led by General Humbert. Tone's first letter gives some account of events.

Donegal Bay,

5 Fructidor (August 22nd),

6 o'clock, morning.

Dear Friends Gagin and Matty,

The day I embarked at Rochelle, I wrote to you, in the letter, I gave you account of our Force, but, as it might have miscarried, I shall repeat its contents. We are nine hundred Infantry, and about one hundred Chasseurs and Cannoniers, with twenty or thirty officers a la suite. We have, besides, three field pieces, six thousand stand of arms, and a very adequate quantity of ammunition. I should also mention a large quantity of helmets and odd clothing of various colours which the General found in the magazines at Rochelle. Pat will look droll in a helmet without any corresponding article of dress.

To come to our actual situation. Yesterday morning we arrived at the mouth of the Bay after a passage of thirteen days without seeing anything. We stood up toward .Killybegs harbour with a light breeze, and got within two hours' sail of our landing place when the wind died away. This is dammed unlucky, and has entirely deprived (us) of the advantage of surprise. The wind springing up contrary in the evening, we stood right across the bay to the County Mayo, where Killala, I believe, affords a place proper to debark. Night, and the want of a pilot obliges us to anchor in the middle of the bay. This morning, we are underway again, endeavouring to get into Killala, the wind not very good. I refer you to the map where you will see that we are both in sight of Killybegs and Killala Bays without the power of entering either - Pause here, my friends, and pay a compliment to my Patience, which suffers me to write in such a situation you cannot expect any coherency.

We are surrounded on all sides by very high mountains. If there is any aristocrat within ten leagues of us with his glass on the top of some hill watching our motions and sending expresses in every direction these are pleasant speculations. I hope the rogues won't have the wit to destroy all the fishing boats round the bay for we are in great need of some to help us to debark. We have not as yet seen a single boat round the bay; on dit that we shall be in Killala in a couple of hours. Our Grenadiers will debark in their own boats, and if there be any fishermen, the rascals shall be made useful. I have no more to add; you shall have a line from me written on the back of my hat, I have seen a print of Bonaparte in that attitude.

1 o'clock in the afternoon.

My Dear Friends,

I ask pardon of the Gods for having repined; we are clear in with Killala and have taken a little brig, a thing absolutely necesssary as our Frigates are too large to run close in. We have also some fishing boats. The pilot, who is up* [A United Irishman] gives us the best intelligence in the world. Scarcely any troops to oppose us and Jemmy Plunket is at the head of the insurgents who are up in the County of Roscommon ; we have also taken a Lieutenant in the Prince of Wales' Regiment of Fencibles, going from Sligo to Killala, to take the command, or rather to join a company of Infants there, ditto a gentleman of Sligo, with him, a yeoman. They, I believe, are aristocrats. I offered to lay a guinea that if we please, we will be masters of Sligo tomorrow, without firing a shot at six. God bless you. Postscript shall be dated from Killala ; en attendant I apprize you that we hear nothing of any other squadron having arrived. Burke considers this letter as from himself.

Killala. 6 Fructidor.

Yesterday evening we landed, and drove sixty yeomen and regulars like sheep before us, a few of our Grenadiers only were landed and engaged. We killed twenty and made a dozen prisoners. The people will join us in myriads, they throw themselves on their knees as we pass along and extend their arms for our success; we will be masters of Connaught in a few days. Erin go bragh.

M. TONE.

Alas this optimism was misplaced and their enterprise was met with disaster when they were defeated at the Battle of Ballinamuck. Matthew Tone and Bartholomew Teeling (a prominent United Irishman and Captain in the French Army, noted for, among other things, his heroism and bravery in the Battle of Collooney where he single-handedly disabled and captured a Britsh gunner post when he broke ranks, galloped towards it on his horse and shot the soldiers manning it.) along with hundreds of French soldiers were captured. The French were treated as prisoners of war but the Irish were tried for treason, in courts-martial, and executed. 

Here follows Matthew Tone's final letter, written after he found out that he was to be executed the following day, addressed to his legal counsel. Also a statement Teeling intended to read from the scaffold but was ultimately prevented from doing so:

28th September, 1798.

Dear Sir,

As I know from experience that suspense is the worst of all states, I hasten to relieve my friends from it ; the business is determined on - tomorrow is the day fixt.

I request that no friend may come near me - sorrow is contagious, and I would not willingly betray any weakness on the occasion.

Accept a thousand thanks for the interest you have taken in my affairs.  Farewell.

MATTHEW TONE.

Bartholomew Teeling

Teeling's statement;

"Fellow-citizens, I have been condemned by a military tribunal to suffer what they call an ignominious death, but what appears, from the number of its illustrious victims, to be glorious in the highest degree. It is not in the power of men to abase virtue nor the man who dies for it. His death must be glorious in the field of battle or on the scaffold.

The same Tribunal which has condemned me —Citizens, I do not speak to you here of the constitutional right of such a Tribunal, —has stamped me a traitor. If to have been active in endeavouring to put a stop to the blood-thirsty policy of an oppressive Government has been treason, I am guilty. If to have endeavoured to give my native country a place among the nations of the earth was treason, then I am guilty indeed. If to have been active in endeavouring to remove the fangs of oppression from the head of the devoted Irish peasant was treason, I am guilty.

Finally, if to have striven to make my fellow-men love each other was guilt, then I am guilty. You, my countrymen, may perhaps one day be able to tell whether these were the acts of a traitor or deserved death. My own heart tells me they were not and, conscious of my innocence, I would not change my present situation for that of the highest of my enemies.

Fellow-citizens, I leave you with the heartfelt satisfaction of having kept my oath as a United Irishman, and also with the glorious prospect of the success of the cause in which we have been engaged. Persevere, my beloved countrymen. Your cause is the cause of Truth. It must and will ultimately triumph."

Wolfe Tone's Speech From The Dock

This week (19th November) marks the 215th anniversary of Theobald Wolfe Tone's death. To mark this occasion here is the speech he made from the dock during his trial by court martial in which he defends his actions and explains his motives.

'Memoirs of Myles Byrne' - Introduction by Stephen Gwynn with link to full text

Myles Byrne

INTRODUCTION 

I OWE my acquaintance with these Memoirs to Mr. John Dillon, who spoke of them as the best of all books dealing with Ireland ; and a reading of the volumes left me inclined to agree with him. The intrinsic interest of Byrne's narrative, its easy unaffected flow, and above all the high and chivalrous temper which pervades the whole, give it an excellence, rare anywhere, but which in all the bitter records of Irish warfare is without parallel. No man could have subjects more painful than the Wexford Rebellion and Emmet's rising ; no man could have handled them more frankly, whether in stating facts or in judgments upon conduct. Yet of all books dealing with modern Irish history this is the least painful to read that is known to me.

But Byrne's Memoirs were not only concerned with Irish rebellion ; he wrote as a veteran who had seen war in half the countries of Europe. The title of the original edition is;

" Memoirs of Miles Byrne. Chef de Bataillon in the Service of France :Officer of the Legion of Honour, Knight of St. Louis, etc. Edited by his Widow. Paris : Bossange et Cie. 1863." 

A brief sketch of his career will best explain the nature of the Memoirs.

In 1798 Miles Byrne was a young and well-to-do farmer at Monaseed on the northern border of county Wexford. He was a sworn United Irishman, and, before the rebellion actually broke out, was in hiding. From the first raising of the standard he was active, but his narrative leaves us in doubt by what deeds of bravery he attained to the position of leader; no soldier was ever more modest. After fighting through the whole series of actions, he led a body into the Wicklow hills, where he and his held out along with Holt and Dwyer till the general dispersal which took place on the news of Humbert's surrender. Byrne made his way to Dublin, and found means to conceal himself and gradually to find occupation in supervising a builder's workmen. Four years passed by and he had nothing to apprehend ; yet when Robert Emmet came to Dublin in the winter of 1802-3, Byrne promptly associated himself in the new peril. The story of that unhappy enterprise is nowhere so clearly and consistently told as in these Memoirs ; and whoever else may slight the memory of Emmet, Byrne, the soldier of Napoleon, looking back from a long life's experience, offers more heartfelt homage to this ill-starred leader than to any of the great men whose names figure in his record.

When the rising had failed, Emmet made his way back to Dublin and asked Byrne to carry news to the United Irishmen in Paris. This service of danger was faithfully performed, and the exile found himself among a group of Irishmen, all in the same unhappy situation, yet all hoping for another French invasion in which they should take part. Their hopes ran high when they were formed into the cadre or skeleton of a regiment which should be filled up with men when they landed in Ireland, and were sent to be trained on the Breton coast. But months and years passed, and when the Irish Legion was called into service and its ranks filled up, the service was on the Continent. In the Low Countries, in the Spanish Peninsula, on the Elbe, and on the Rhine, Byrne and his comrades fought for Napoleon, till the great general's star set finally in disaster. Then they or what was left of them were dismissed the French service, for the Bourbons were naturally eager to pleasure the Court of England Some were actually banished from France ; some, more fortunate, had leave to remain on half-pay, and of the latter Byrne was one.

But in 1830 the revolution which dethroned Charles X. brought better days for Miles Byrne. He was not only recalled to full pay, and given the rank of chef de bataillon (equivalent to lieutenant-colonel) which had been promised him under Napoleon, but he was at once actively employed, and in the cause of freedom. He held a high command in the first expedition dispatched for the liberation of Greece.

For many years after this he was an ordinary regimental officer in the French army ; these Memoirs were the occupation of his leisure after he had finally retired, and the latter part of them was clearly never finished. The book, as it originally appeared, was edited by Mrs. Byrne, and it made three volumes, of which the first was occupied with the description of his experiences of rebellion in Ireland, while the second gave an admirable narrative of his campaigns under Buonaparte, including the whole history of Napoleon's Irish Legion from its formation to its dissolution. These two volumes are evidently as their author intended them to be. The third is little more than loose leaves from a notebook but a notebook full of interesting material. Opening with an account of Byrne's own life in Paris before the formation of the Legion, it passes into a general characterisation of the Irish exiles then in France. The account of the Greek campaign is fragmentary ; and there is a good deal of repetition and defective arrangement

In the present edition the eleven hundred odd pages of the original have been reduced into the compass of two volumes; and even so the book remains so large that it has seemed best to add nothing by way of illustrative comment. My task as editor, then, has reduced itself to seeing the pages through the press, correcting the spelling of proper names, suppressing actual repretitions, and  here and there altering the arrangement. I have dealt a little more freely with the third volume, omitting here and there what seemed to lack interest. But care has been taken to leave in full Byrne's judgment on the men with whom he served or whom he met during his residence in Paris ; for nothing is more remarkable in the book than the clearness and justice of perception which these judgments display. Byrne's mind was neither subtle nor brilliant ; but it was evidently rich in common sense, an it combined generosity with a rigorous conception of honour and principle.

As a soldier, he seems to have been the very type of a regimental officer, whose place is in the fighting Hne[sic], whose concern is not with the general conduct of a campaign or an action, but who can be trusted to act boldly, decisively and intelligently in the individual circumstances of war. His book throughout makes one feel the most agreeable and most human aspect of warfare the generous relations between man and man, the cordiality of comradeship, the interludes of gaiety and good-humoured pleasure better than any other known to me except the admirable autobiography which General Sir George Napier wrote, to tell his children how he and his brothers and their brothers in arms fought in the Peninsula "for fun and glory."

But there one strikes a contrast and a sad one. Byrne was not, like the Napiers, a soldier by choice; necessity and unjust dominion drove him from his farm- He and his comrades were the descendants of the Wild Geese "war-dogs battered in every clime," fighters in every cause but their own. His book gives an extraordinary picture of the dispersion of his race : Irish names figure in it under every flag in Europe. And the book is naturally pervaded from first to last with a fierce resentment, the exile's anger against those who keep him from his home, against those who hold
his native country in subjection. Byrne and his comrades fight for France against England with more than a Frenchman's detestation of the enemy. Is this to be wondered at ?

To those Irishmen who know the book this publication will need little commendation. To those who do not, it may be said that it is a trial whether it be possible to find a public ready to buy reprints of books which have a high value in the study of Irish history, and which having passed out of general circulation, are only to be had at a high price ; and upon the success of this venture must depend the subsequent undertaking of similar publications.

STEPHEN GWYNN. 1907

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The full text of these excellent memoirs is available for free in numerous formats over on the excellent website http://archive.org/ at this link.