The Naval Mutinies of 1798: The Irish Plot to Seize the Channel Fleet

232 pages

Mike Farquharson-Roberts PhD (Mar Hist)

The prologue to this book recounts the arrival of HMS Defiance, a 74-gun third rate, at Brest on 7 Fructidor (on the French revolutionary calendar, 24 August elsewhere) at ‘[a]round midday’ having been taken by Irish mutineers led by William Lindsey but captained by John Hopkins of the Society of United Irishmen. She was almost immediately visited by Adjutant General Theobald Wolfe Tone, the society’s founder and she was surveyed and ‘bought’ by the Directory then ruling France to French service, the proceeds being divided among the mutineers.

It is a detailed account, but it never happened. There was a mutiny in 1798 in Defiance, one of a series of smaller mutinies that followed on from the fleet mutinies the previous year at Spithead and the Nore. Despite the assertion that the “ship was to play a key role in the Irish mutinies of 1798”, the mutineers were apprehended in the planning stage, and among the twenty who were hung were William Lindsey and John Hopkins. Wolfe Tone was captured by the Royal Navy later in the year and sentenced to death.

Having opened with an episode of fiction in a purported work of history, this book is very lacking. It gives a good concise social history of contemporary Ireland, including the ‘hedge schools’ which maintained the nationalist ethos. In passing it would have been helpful if ‘Dowling’ who apparently wrote ‘a fairly detailed history’ of the schools, was accorded a reference or even a place in the very idiosyncratic bibliography. After that scene setting, the book looks at the broader picture. However, of what relevance to an Irish plot to seize the Channel Fleet is the mutiny in Hermione in the Caribbean, or the mutiny in the South Atlantic on a merchant ship, the Lady Shore transporting convicts to Australia, or the mutiny (actually in 1797) at the Cape? There were Irishmen involved, hardly surprising since around 20 percent of the lower deck at the time were Irish, and courts martial records often include reports of Irish nationalistic statements made by mutineers, but no evidence is set out of a general conspiracy apart from coincidence.

Many have ascribed the mutinies of this period in various ways to the Quota Acts. There were three quota acts prior to 1798. They were not a form of conscription; they introduced a system of voluntary recruitment of men from inland parishes aided by a bounty. They only applied to England, Wales and Scotland; any Irishman entered under the Acts would have been resident in one of those three countries. The author seems uncertain as to whether quota men were better educated and thus a disruptive influence or “idlers, poachers, beggars, minor thieves and pickpockets” but nonetheless “aware of the continuance of underlying seething discontent, efforts to send more United Irishmen into the navy intensified, with a possible 1,200 United Irish sympathisers reported to have joined by July [1797]”. Once entered they were distributed through the fleet, and then apparently started conspiring to take over ships of the Channel Fleet and take them into Brest. The author presents no hard evidence beyond simple assertions that there was any conspiracy, but supposes that there was contact between ships. He concentrates on Caesar, Captain, Defiance and Neptune which were stationed together off Ushant on blockade returning on a regular basis to Cawsand Bay to ‘re-victual’ when there was “much evidence of leading conspirators meeting together”. At the same time, “[f]urther co-ordinating the conspiracy, and providing a link between the ships arriving at ports on different rotas, were agents on shore who not only met with Irish radicals on board numerous warships but who also provided a link with the central committee of the Society of United Irishmen and possibly other radical groups”. While the book includes extensive quotations from courts martial transcripts, there are no references to support these meetings or the existence of these agents. Indeed, it is frankly unbelievable that this supposed organisation was put into place at the same time as the planning and execution of the failed 1798 uprising in Ireland itself; in modern terminology, there wasn’t the staff horsepower.

Irish involvement in the mutinies of 1797 (Spithead and the Nore) and the sporadic mutinies thereafter have been the subject of much speculation, usually involving infiltration of the service by quota act men. The last words must be those of Professor Rodger: “It is only possible to believe that the [mutineers leaders] were straw men concealing the real leaders or the real leader…the mysterious genius who ‘must’ have organised the mutiny but who covered his tracks so perfectly that no trace of his existence survives…conspiracy theory in its purest form, in which the entire absence of evidence only serves to prove the fiendish cunning of the conspirators”.[1]

Is this book readable? Yes. Is it reliable history? No.

[1] N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815, (Allen Lane: London, 2004), p.449.