Irish Volunteers (18th century)
The Irish Volunteers were patriot militia formed in the Kingdom of Ireland during the American War of Independence. Massing under arms in the capital, and inspired by American example, in 1782 the Volunteers persuaded the British Crown to renounce its previously asserted right to overrule the Parliament in Dublin and to legislate for Ireland from Westminster. The movement subsequently split over the question of whether reform of Ireland's Parliament and Vice-regal administration should encompass emancipation of the Kingdom's Roman Catholic majority, Protestants alone having a right to vote, to assume office and to carry arms.
Following the onset of war in 1793 with the new French Republic, the government moved to suppress extra-parliamentary opposition and to induct Volunteers into a Crown militia. Concentrated among the Protestant "Dissenters" in Ulster, the more uncompromising elements entered into a republican conspiracy, breaking into open rebellion in 1798. In the wake of the rebellion, the Volunteer achievement, the "Constitution of 1782", was overturned by the abolition of the Irish Parliament under the Acts of Union 1800.
In Ireland, in the twentieth century, paramilitaries, both unionist and nationalist, claimed the Volunteers as precedent.
Origin and character
In 1776, as regular troops were withdrawn for service across the Atlantic, Volunteer companies formed around the depleted garrisons in the south: the Limerick Union, the Youghal Cavalry and, in Cork, the Cork Union, the Cork Boyne, and the Blackpool Horse. Following her recognition of the United States, the declaration of war against France in February 1778 triggered the movement in the north. Memories of the French in 1760, during the Seven Years War, seizing the castle at Carrickfergus, prompted Belfast to form what was to be the town's First Volunteer Company in March. When in April, the American privateer John Paul Jones captured a Royal Navy sloop sent to block his entry to Belfast Lough recruitment surged, with the new formations following in Lisburn and Derry. Further driven, with Spain's entry into the war by fears of a Franco-Spanish armada, during the summer of 1779 Volunteer numbers rose to some 30,000 organised across the country in hundreds of independent companies.By the summer of 1780, these part-time units, typically in the range of 60 to 100 men, were associating in larger battalions and in Ulster, the strongest Volunteer province, in regiments. They were also parading in reviews before their "Commander-in-Chief". Choice for this, as it transpired largely titular, position fell to the colonel of the First Ulster Volunteer Regiment, James Caulfeild, Earl of Charlemont. Charlemont was a confidante of the leaders of the Patriot opposition in Irish House of Commons, Henry Grattan and Henry Flood.
There was alarm in Dublin Castle. As early as May 1779, the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Buckinghamshire, had canvassed the possibility of disarming the Volunteers and preventing their assembly. Such was the shortage of reliable troops at his command, that he was persuaded, not only that this was impracticable, but that he had no choice but to accede to pressure, and release arms to the very men whom he would have dispersed by military force. These were to remain independent of his vice-regal administration and of the Parliament. Volunteer officers accepted their commission, not from the Crown, but through election from the ranks.
As far back as 1715 and 1745, self-constituted local defensive forces had mustered in anticipation of Stuart invasions. In the 1760s, these reassembled to help break Whiteboy resistance to rack-renting, tithe-collection, and enclosure. Such companies or posses often comprised little more than landowners enlisting, however few, Protestants they could count upon among their tenants. Where, in the south, there had been a resurgence of Whiteboy activity, this remained the character of the new the Volunteer corps, which consequently tended to "reinforce, rather than destabilise, the local hierarchy".
In the areas of greater Protestant concentration, in Cork, in Waterford, in Dublin city and County, and in the Presbyterian north-east Volunteers might assist in the same policing functions. There is record of the Belfast companies, at the request of the county sheriffs, marching with their six pounders into Antrim and Down to enforce evictions. But their ranks were filled with the broader "Protestant tenantry of Ireland". This was a middle class of freehold farmers, merchants, manufacturers, and attendant professionals, whose properties, even where extensive, were commonly held on lease from an aristocracy formed, and reformed, in the Irish land settlements of the preceding century.
In these city and market-town companies, the "drilling and training, purchasing of uniforms and arms, drawing up articles of association, electing their officers, instructing delegates" for Volunteer conventions, "contributed to greater political awareness". For Presbyterians, this included a consciousness of sharing, if only in part, the disabilities imposed upon the Roman Catholic majority by the landowning Anglican establishment. In Belfast, this "Protestant Ascendency" was represented by the Marquess of Donegall. Like the proprietors of numerous other parliamentary boroughs in the Kingdom, Donegall exercised an exclusive right to appoint the town's burgesses—public offices from which as "Dissenters" from the established church Presbyterians were excluded—and through the burgesses, to the "elect" those who would sit for the borough in the Irish House of Commons.Few Presbyterians ever reached in Commons, and none sat among the Lords in the upper house.
Opportunity to challenge the Ascendancy interest was confined to a small number of county and municipal contests were enfranchised freeholders might, in defiance of their landlords, be induced to vote for the promise of reform. Voting instead with their feet, Presbyterians had in large numbers been emigrating to the American colonies. Assessing their loyalty on the eve of their kinsmen's final break with the Crown, the Buckinghamshire's predecessor as vice-roy, Lord Harcourt, described the Presbyterians of Ulster as "Americans in their hearts".
In January 1780, victory over a Spanish squadron at Cape St. Vincent, restored faith the in the ability of the Royal navy to defend its home waters and the fear of invasion abated. But with all ranks recognising "parallels between the issues animating the American struggle and their own grievances", Volunteering had acquired a momentum of its own. Like their often parallel masonic lodges, Volunteer companies were becoming "a battleground for political ideas".
"Free Trade"
Had Parliament been able to finance a militia bill enacted in March 1778, the Volunteer movement might have been stillborn. The difficulty was a sharp drop in excise, and other tax, revenues resulting from the war's disruption, first of Atlantic trade and then, with the entry of France and Spain, of trade with the European continent; a problem further compounded by a British decision to embargo the export of Irish provisions so as to secure supplies for its armed forces.The fiscal crisis and economic distress highlighted not only the incapacity of the Irish Parliament, but also what was almost universally regarded in Ireland as the injustice of British applied legislation. Legislating for Ireland, the British Parliament had banned the Irish export of wool, glass and other goods competitive with British producers and, through its Navigation Acts had sought to direct Irish foreign and colonial trade through British ports. In response, the Volunteers moved down a path travelled by the Patriots in America: mounting public campaigns to highlight the material costs of submitting to the "Imperial Crown" at Westminster, before advancing a radical constitutional remedy.
As had American colonists before 1776, Volunteers arranged local "non-importation agreements". The signatories undertook to buy Irish and boycott British goods, with the Volunteers themselves making much of having their uniforms tailored in home-spun cloth. The government of Prime Minister Lord North prepared a package of commercial concessions, but watered down by British mercantile interests these paled in comparison to the conditions extended to the Americans by the Carlisle Peace Commission. Britain, it seemed was "prepared to recompense American rebelliousness better than Irish loyalty".
In November 1779, on the annual commemoration of King William III's birthday, Volunteers marched to his statue in front of Parliament on College Green. Presenting themselves as "50,000 joined together, ready to die for their fatherland," they saluted "Free Trade" with volleys of shot and with cannon decked with banners threatening "Free Trade or this", "Free trade or a Speedy Revolution". Ireland was be free, within the terms of her own tariff policies, to develop her manufactures and to have access to foreign and colonial trade unrestricted by rival British interests.
In London, the North ministry, still at that point contending with the prospect of a joint French and Spanish Channel crossing, capitulated. The Crown lifted the bans on Irish exports, and granted the right to trade directly with the plantation colonies. As an additional conciliatory gesture to the northern merchant class, the government relieved Presbyterians of the tests of Anglican conformity that, since the Popery Act of 1704, had excluded both they and Catholics them from municipal corporations and other public service.
The "Revolution of 1782"
See also: Constitution of 1782 § The "Revolution of 1782"First Dungannon Convention
Neither the Patriots in Parliament nor the Volunteers were satisfied. As the British opposition, under Charles James Fox, reminded them, so long as Great Britain maintained her right to legislate for Ireland as a subordinate kingdom, her mercantilist restrictions on Irish industry and commerce lifted in wartime, could be as readily re-imposed in time of peace. Against the background of the American crisis and economic recession, the concessions wrung from the Crown in London had also "whetted appetites" for further assertions of Irish interests and of Irish rights.In February 1782, delegates from 360 Volunteer companies in Ulster gathered in Dungannon. Taking on "the substance of a national assembly", the convention delegates resolved that "the claim of any body of men, other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland, to make laws to bind this kingdom, is unconstitutional, illegal and a grievance".