Theobald Wolfe Tone (1798)
Donald R. Thomas · 2024
At the end of the eighteenth century, England faced the hostility of two groups in Ireland: Catholic nationalists and Protestant republicans. The second group derived some of its inspiration from the revolution in France and was often hostile to Catholic Ireland as well as to monarchist England. To this second group Theobald Wolfe Tone belonged, though he was also sympathetic to the Catholics as victims of political oppression. Born in 1763, Tone was a reluctant student at Trinity College, Dublin, and was called to the Bar before he started his first political club in the city during the winter of 1790–1. His aim was threefold: to destroy the existing form of government in Ireland; ‘to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils’; and to unite Catholics and Protestants as Irish patriots.