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Theobald Wolfe Tone, posthumously known as Wolfe Tone (Irish: Bhulbh Teón; 20 June 1763 – 19 November 1798), was a revolutionary exponent of Irish independence and is an iconic figure in Irish republicanism. Convinced that, so long as his fellow Protestants feared to make common cause with the Catholic majority, the British Crown would continue to govern Ireland in the interest of England and of its client aristocracy, in 1791 Tone helped form the Society of United Irishmen. Although received in the company of a Catholic delegation by the King and his ministers in London, Tone, with other United Irish leaders, despaired of constitutional reform. Fuelled by the popular grievances of rents, tithes and taxes, and driven by martial-law repression, the society developed as an insurrectionary movement. When, in the early summer of 1798, it broke into open rebellion, Tone was in exile soliciting assistance from the French Republic. In October 1798, on his second attempt to land in Ireland with French troops and supplies, he was taken prisoner. Sentenced to be hanged, he died from a reportedly self-inflicted wound. Since the mid-nineteenth century, his name has been invoked, and his legacy disputed, by different factions of Irish Republicanism. These have held annual, but separate, commemorations at his graveside in Bodenstown, County Kildare. Early life Tone was born on 20 June 1763. His father, Peter Tone, was a prosperous coach-maker who had a farm near Sallins, County Kildare and adhered to the established Anglican church. Although records are absent, he is said to have been the descendant, from the 17th century, of a Cromwellian soldier ("the first Tone to settle in Ireland"): 47  and of French Huguenot refugees. His mother, Margaret Lamport, the daughter of a sea captain in the West India trade, was a Catholic who according to Tone's early biographer, R.R. Madden, converted to her husband's church only when Tone was already eight years old. Tone, nonetheless, was baptised a Protestant, with the name Theobald Wolfe in honour of his godfather, Theobald Wolfe of Blackhall, County Kildare, a first cousin of Arthur Wolfe, 1st Viscount Kilwarden.: 11  In 1783, Tone found work as a tutor to Anthony and Robert, younger half-brothers of Richard Martin, a Patriot member of the Irish Parliament for Jamestown, County Leitrim. Tone fell in love with Martin's well-connected wife, Elizabeth Vesey. While Tone later wrote that it came to nothing, a Martin biographer suspects that he was the father of the Martins' first child Laetitia born in 1785.: 24–25, 29  Tone studied law at Trinity College Dublin, where Kilwarden remembered him as a "sparkling conversationalist and rising talent".: 387  Tone was active in the College Historical Society, which had a record for honing oratory skills and preparing members for a life in politics. He was made a scholar in 1784 and graduated BA in February 1786. In 1798, after training in London's Middle Temple, he qualified in Dublin's King's Inns, as a barrister, a profession with which he was already disenchanted. As a student, he had eloped with Martha (Matilda) Witherington, daughter of William and Catherine Witherington (née Fanning) of Dublin. When they married, Tone was 22, and Matilda was about 16. With the arrival of their first daughter, and his father's bankruptcy denying him an inheritance, he cast about for new employment. To British Prime Minister William Pitt, in 1788 he submitted a plan for a Roman-style military colony on Captain Cook's newly reported Sandwich Islands.: 83–84  When this elicited no response, he sought enlistment as a soldier in the East India Company but applied too late in the year to be shipped to south Asia. Styling himself an "independent Irish Whig", he followed the example of a number of college friends and began reporting on the proceedings of the Irish Parliament and the conduct of the London-appointed Dublin Castle executive.: 40  United Irishman Invitation to Belfast In July 1790 in the visitors' gallery in the Irish House of Commons, Tone met Thomas Russell, a disillusioned East India Company veteran. He found Russell equally critical of the proceedings in the chamber below. Henry Grattan's reform-minded Patriots were floundering in their efforts to build upon the legislative independence from England (the "Constitution of 1782") that the Volunteer militia movement had helped secure. Tone later described the encounter with Russell as "one of the most fortunate" in his life. With Russell providing the introductions,: 49–50  in October 1791 Tone addressed a small reform club in Belfast.: 378  Members were Protestant "Dissenters" from the established church, Presbyterians who, notwithstanding sometimes substantial commercial property, had no elected representation. Belfast was a parliamentary borough in the "pocket" of the town's proprietor, the Marquess of Donegall. They had coalesced around the proposal of one of their number, now resident in Dublin, William Drennan, for "a benevolent conspiracy, a plot for the people" dedicated to "the Rights of Man" and to "Real Independence" for Ireland. (Tone's diary records Thomas Paine's Rights of Man as the "Koran of Belfast"). An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland The Belfast club had invited Tone as the author of An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. It was a tract which they had helped publish and which had appeared, in their honour, as the work of "a Northern Whig". With an eventual print-run of 16,000, in Ireland only the Rights of Man surpassed it in circulation. The Argument embraced what had been the most advanced Volunteer position: that the key to constitutional reform was Catholic emancipation.: 49–50  So long as, "illiberal", "bigoted" and "blind", Irish Protestants indulged their fears of "Popery" and of Catholic repossession, the "boobies and blockheads" in Parliament and Dublin Castle would prevail. The choice was stark: either "Reform, the Catholics, justice and liberty" or "an unconditional submission to the present, and every future administration". Tone was himself suspicious of the Catholic priests (regretting that the Irish people had been "bound" to them by persecution): 369  and hostile to what he saw as "Papal tyranny" (In 1798, he was to applaud Napoleon's deposition and imprisonment of Pope Pius VI). But the Argument presents the French Revolution as evidence that a Catholic people need not endure clericalism: in the French National Assembly, as in the American Congress, "Catholic and Protestant sit equally". It also recalls the Patriot Parliament summoned by James II in 1689. When Irish Catholics had a clearer title to what had been forfeit not ninety but forty years before (in the Cromwellian Settlement), they did not use the opportunity to pursue the wholesale return of their lost estates. As for the existing Irish Parliament "where no Catholic can by law appear", it was the clearest proof that "Prote.... Discover the R T Wolfe popular books. Find the top 100 most popular R T Wolfe books.