A Nation of Politicians: Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland

5 A Rage Militaire: The Volunteers

5 A Rage Militaire The Volunteers In August 1780 land agent John Moore of Clough, Co. Down, wrote to his employer Arthur Annesley on the subject of this swift rise of volunteer militia companies in his locality. Moore regarded this voluntary militia force with a mix of suspicion and apprehension. He admitted that while he “at first no means liked the scheme,” after witnessing a large review he could no longer withhold his amazement and admiration: “I am so surprised at what I see that I can scarcely trust the evidence of my own senses. To observe a large body of men assembled in every part of the country compleatly armed, under Voluntary control only, put to enormous expense in their various appointments, drawn from their trades and professions, paying implicit obedience to officers of their own election and guarded by a sense of honour and emulation only, against every irregularity incident to mobs, is almost without parallel in History.”1 Moore’s change of opinion captures many of the features of this movement that seemed novel, worrisome, or awe inspiring to contemporaries. Protestant men had joined voluntary military organizations throughout the century for defense against invasion or to quell local disturbances . The Volunteers emerged from this tradition and were organized in the context of fears of a French invasion in 1778. Initially, many companies were under the command of traditional grandees and borough patrons, such as Lord Shannon in Cork and the Duke of Leinster in Dublin. As Moore observes, however, they were also innovative in many regards. They were military bodies independent of the government , organizing themselves in many instances along democratic lines, 128
electing officers, and bearing much of the expense of military practice themselves. Grandees too eager to assert their influence or wary of Volunteer interference in politics could find themselves humiliated and marginalized, a fate that eventually befell both Shannon and Leinster.2 By 1779 the Volunteers numbered forty thousand, and this figure may have risen as high as an extraordinary eighty thousand by the middle of 1782.3 They came to encompass Protestant men from all social classes and eventually even Catholics, while overcoming the localism of their origins to create a regional and national structure and emerging as a powerful political force in their own right. Many historians have stressed the continuity between the traditional militia and the Volunteers. Padraig Ó Snodaigh in particular has attempted in numerous local studies to “remilitarize” the Volunteers and relate them to the militia in opposition to what he sees as the excessive attention historians have given to their role in contemporary political conflict. Focusing exclusively on the officers of these forces rather than the rank and file, he argues that the Volunteers should be placed in “the pattern and tradition of loyal, local, military service” and has persistently portrayed the Volunteers as heirs of the militia and ancestors of the yeomanry.4 In addressing the origins of the Volunteers as a loyal defense force against foreign invasion as well as their role in maintaining local law and order, Ó Snodaigh and others have indeed provided a valuable corrective to accounts that overemphasize Volunteer radicalism and even nationalist separatist tendencies. This narrow focus on the militia and the Volunteers as a military force nevertheless ignores the interaction of military and political cultures. Much recent work has examined the complex interactions between the experience of part-time soldiering and military ceremony and the articulation and negotiation of national identities, patriotism, and others forms of political subjectivity.5 The Volunteers were, of course, a military force but at the same time a form of voluntary association. They were part of an “associational world” along with convivial or political clubs, loyal societies, charitable organizations, voluntary hospitals, Masonic lodges, debating societies, and benefit clubs, which flourished in the eighteenth century.6 Many companies emerged from these very forms of associational life, with existing Masonic lodges and political and convivial clubs particularly well represented.7 Some lodges simply embodied themselves as Volunteer companies, as did existing patriotic and loyal clubs.8 Although the Volunteers clearly emerged out of traditional forms of military organization and social interaction, in their internal regulation they instituted A Rage Militaire 129 structures that were often democratic and self-financed through the associational instrument of the subscription. They created rules to organize and discipline themselves that were also martial and associational. Like other associations, they socialized...