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  • “Put One Irishman on a Spit and Another Will Turn Him”: A Postrevolutionary Episode in South Carlow, 1804*
  • James G. Patterson (bio)

From August to November 1804 officials at the highest levels of the Irish government came to believe—or more pointedly, found utility in claiming to believe—the information provided by a pair of highly questionable informers. The men had supposedly uncovered a revolutionary plot coordinated by a surviving republican directorate in Dublin and acting in concert with France. The conspirators intended to enlist thousands of disaffected farmers, laborers, and artisans in south Carlow who would then rise in conjunction with a promised French invasion force. At the center of the conspiracy were the Catholic officers and men of the Borris yeomanry corps, whose Lieutenant Hagerty was to lead the rising. However, it is evident that no such conspiracy existed and that ranking members of the Irish administration knew this, or certainly suspected as much. This fact raises the essential questions of what purpose was served by claiming that a plot existed, and who benefited from pretending that it was real and posed a legitimate threat to the state.1

The Irish yeomanry were established in 1796 to serve as a counterweight to the United Irishmen on the local level. From the outset units with substantial Catholic membership were highly suspect in the eyes of Protestant loyalists. This concern was particularly acute [End Page 64] in the politically and religiously charged south Leinster region where the United Irishmen had made serious inroads by 1797. Moreover, the majority of Catholic yeomen served in units commanded by liberal Protestants, making them doubly suspect.2 As tensions mounted through the closing months of 1797, local authorities disbanded a number of such units. On the eve of the rebellion in May 1798 panicked loyalist yeomanry officers and magistrates arrested dozens of Catholic yeomen in Kildare and Wicklow on suspicion of being United Irishmen. When open hostilities commenced on 24 May, militia and loyalist yeomen responded by carrying out mass executions of these prisoners at Carnew and Dunlavin.3

In the rebellion’s aftermath Catholics were systematically driven from the yeomanry, and a second purge of surviving Catholics took place following Robert Emmet’s failed rebellion of July 1803.4 A startlingly frank account of this latter process came in August 1803 when Arthur Browne, the prime sergeant, traveled from the capital to County Clare in order to assess the political environment of the country in the wake of the rising: “The yeomanry corps appear strong and alert. I found that most, if not all, of them from Dublin to [End Page 65] Limerick positively refused to admit any papists.”5 Indeed, by 1804 Catholic membership in the force was a rare phenomenon in south Leinster, and the men of the Borris corps were an imperiled anomaly. The Carlow plot of 1804 may ultimately have proved a chimera. Yet the aggressiveness with which ultraloyalist magistrates drove the investigation, coupled with the willingness of ranking members of the government to act on the words of questionable informers, reveals much about the social, religious, and political environment that existed in south Leinster in the aftermath of Emmet’s rebellion of 1803.

The catalyst for the events that transpired that summer and fall was the discovery on 5 September of 180 pike heads in a rabbit warren on Orchard Island, which sits in the Barrow about a mile south of Leighlin Bridge in west-central Carlow. The “gentleman” who recovered the weapons was Robert Lea, Esq., of Mulberry Place near Camac Bridge on the Grand Canal, south of Dolphin’s Barn.6 Lea, a County Dublin magistrate, immediately contacted the chief secretary Sir Evan Nepean with news of the discovery. In turn, Nepean believed that the information provided warranted his meeting with Lea, and the pair spoke on the night of 8 September. As they talked, Lea revealed the source of his intelligence as an unnamed “Barrow boat builder.” This man had written to the Grand Canal Company in the previous February offering to provide information, for a price, which he claimed would save the company a great deal of revenue. The boat builder...

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