Foreword

Thomas Ledlie Birch was the son of a County Down farmer. Following his older brother, James Jackson Birch, he studied at the University of Glasgow and entered the ministry of the Presbyterian Church. After spending a period as a licentiate in the care of the presbytery of Belfast, he was ordained at Saintfield in May 1776.

Like many of his fellow clergy who had been educated in the doctrines of the Scottish enlightenment, he looked favourably on the American revolutionists and saw in the Irish Volunteer movement an opportunity for their own enfranchisement at the expense of the Anglican hegemony that had dominated Ulster since the Battle of the Boyne. The coming of the revolution in France appeared to confirm the idea that the day of the middle class had arrived. Birch promoted the ideas of the revolution through the pulpit and a local club of the United Irishmen. The reformers believed that the Volunteer movement had failed because they had neglected to cultivate the interests of the vast majority of their countrymen, the Catholics. The United Irishmen advocated both Parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation.

While Birch occasionally contributed letters to the Northern Star, the house journal of Irish radicalism, his greatest contribution to the cause was through the pulpit. From this vantage point he could regularly preach on the ills of the day and their Biblical parallels. A friendly witness at Birch's Court Martial claimed that the clergyman's preaching "tended towards the instruction of the people & to good order and subordination" (from the minutes of the Court Martial, which are reproduced in this book). However, another witness was probably closer to the mark when he said of Birch's sermons that, their effect was "sometimes to make me loyal, at other times disloyal". A different source for Birch's ministry suggests that he urged the duty of all the people was to oppose landlordism and the Established Church, a type of 18th century 'liberation' theology, that tended to millenarianism.

Such preaching was also the shortest and surest way to earn the enmity of the landlord and of the vicar of Saintfield. Moreover, the fissile quality inherent in Presbyterianism inevitably meant that some of his discontented hearers broke away to join the much more politically orthodox Seceders. Had Birch been even faintly suspected of heresy, this would doubtless have been used against him to support the cause of the Seceders, but there was no evidence for it.

As a result of his outspoken political stance, Birch was harassed by the landlord and subjected to malicious litigation. William Campbell, Presbyterian minister of Armagh and political controversialist, described it thus:

"Mr. Thomas Birch minister of Saintfield in county Down was arrested on a charge of treason, and brought to trial at the Summer assizes of that year [1797], in Downpatrick. Mr. Justice Chamberlain, who presided in court, expressed in the strongest terms his indignation at the base, malicious conduct of the prosecutor—The worthy Rector of the parish, however, gave his testimony in favour of this profligate man, whom the judge represented in the light of an insidious, willing assassin. But this infamous had the merit not only of being an informer, but a conformist also, which must have exalted him highly in the opinion of good churchmen. Mr. Birch was honourably acquitted" (W. Campbell: Sketches Of Presbyterianism In Ireland pp99-100).

Birch's part in the Down rebellion was negligible, and the evidence for him acting as 'chaplain' for the United Irishmen in the field is not at all clear. In the aftermath of the rising the military authorities had the opportunity of making an example of him in a high profile Court Martial.   That he escaped the noose, however,was due to a rich brother with a powerful political influence.

There is no doubt, however, that the local politics of Saintfield were divided along denominational and class lines. The disturbance caused by John Curragh, usurer and middleman, is an example of this which is described by Birch in the Letter reprinted here.

Surprisingly, Birch does not list as a grievance the imposition of parish tithes, collected by John Cleland, rector of Newtownards and one of the "clerical characters" listed by Birch.

The animosity engendered by the strife went so far as to excite attempted and actual assassination of unpopular figures on the one hand and the reaction of the magistracy on the other. That is what led to Carricknacessna, Saintfield's miniature version of Scullabogue (a massacre of captured loyalists), in June 1798.

Unfortunately it is difficult to estimate the extent Birch's role of preacher in the creation of such an atmosphere. The town paid an awful price for its political militancy. Two years after the Rebellion William Gregory, a travelling preacher, found it "much destroyed" and Ballynahinch still "a heap of ruins". The extent of the destruction may be gauged from the extract from the Irish House of Commons Journal (reprinted in this volume). This lists the claims of "suffering loyalists" who had lost homes and livelihoods in the county Down rebellion. Most of the claimants came from Saintfield and Ballynahinch. Presumably those who were notorious United men, such as Col. Richard Frazer, Birch's friend, did not even bother to claim, and Birch lists others like William Murphy, "a most deformed helpless cripple", who probably did not possess either the literacy or wherewithal even to lodge a claim with a local magistrate. While some of the recorded losses were undoubtedly due to the requisitions of the rebel army on Ednavady, overlooking Ballynahinch, a more critical eye may discern in the names of the townlands there recorded the route of Major-General Nugent's expedition as it wended its way through the Castlereagh Hills towards Saintfield and the townlands around Ballynahinch. Wars have always brought plunder and ruin in their train. To the victors went the spoil.

It is very unlikely that Birch was the author of The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland disclosed… (1798), previously published by Athol Books under Birch's name in 1991. If we look at the titles of its publisher, Joseph S. Jordan, we find that he was a prominent radical bookseller in London. He had published Paine's Rights Of Man for which he was prosecuted. In July 1798 he was arrested for publishing Gilbert Wakefield's Reply To Bishop Watson, in which Wakefield charged Pitt with so grinding down the poor with tax that they would not resist a French invasion. Jordan also published other pamphlets critical of Pitt's policy in Ireland. These publications concerning Ireland are of a similar nature and come from the pens of the parliamentary opposition in Ireland:

The Address of the Rt. Hon. Henry Grattan to his constituents… on his retiring from the Parliament (1797)

Speech of the Earl of Moira, on the present alarming and dreadful state of Ireland, in the [British] House of Lords… (1797)

A View of the Present State of Ireland… by an Observer (1797)

Report of the Debate on Lord Moira's motion for an address to the Lord Lieutenant recommending conciliatory measures on behalf of the people of Ireland (1798)

Scholars have suggested that A View Of The Present State of Ireland (1797) was written by William Sampson or James Coigley. Francis Plowden, a contemporary historian, suspected the hand of Arthur O'Connor, one of the leading United Irish ideologues. By the time Causes was published around June 1798, Coigley had already been hanged in Kent for his part in the attempt to negotiate a French invasion of Ireland. Sampson had been arrested in Whitehaven in Westmorland on the 17th April and remained in custody. So it is unlikely that either of these United apologists wrote Causes. Moreover, the tone of the pamphlet, while highly critical of government policy in Ireland, has a measured, parliamentary sound, and was therefore unlikely to have been written by any who had caught the ungentle attention of the Dublin Castle authorities. The Monthly Review for September 1798 commented on the author of Causes that "in many parts of his statement, and particularly in his invectives, he has rather the air of a declamatory advocate than of a impartial narrator".

In his Memoirs, Sampson claimed to have—

"instituted a society, of which were men undoubtedly the most distinguished in Ireland ; such as Grattan, the Ponsonbys, Curran, Fletcher, the brave old Montgomery, with some others of the patriotic members of parliament, and uncorrupted lawyers, and certain of the influential Catholics and merchants, whose credit and correspondence was necessary to the object in view, which was to collect true and authenticated facts to be opposed as a bulwark to falsehood and national calumny, and possibly by their great enormity to appal those immediately responsible…" (Memoirs, 1817 pp72-3).

This society hoped to supply its only high-profile friend in the Irish House of Lords, Lord Moira, with the information to shame the government into calling a halt to its reckless policy of repression. It is likely that Causes was written by one of those named in this group. Pamphlets had long been used as a means of shaping public opinion, especially when the opposition had no hope of winning the argument in the Houses of Parliament. In his Life, Tone commented that friends of the Ponsonbys, leaders of the Irish opposition, complimented him on his pamphlets and that the Northern Whig Club reprinted them for lobbying purposes.

Over half of Causes dwells on the pre-1795 period and centres on parliamentary issues. The author condemns Parliament for its approval of Government policy. United Irish politics, by contrast, had become so radicalised by 1798 that 'Grattan's Parliament' was regarded as an irrelevance as it was not representative of the Irish people. The writer makes frequent use of the terms "the lower orders" or "the lower class of people", evidently writing from an aristocratic viewpoint. The pamphlet makes out a strong case against the Camden regime in Ireland and the subversion of law by the authorities.

On its title page the pamphlet claims to have been written by "an Irish emigrant". Curran and George Ponsonby had been retained as counsel for the high-profile United Irish prisoners in Dublin, and so were unlikely to have had the leisure for pamphleteering. If we take the nom-de-plume, "Irish emigrant" at face value, then one of this group fits the bill. The pamphleteer calls upon his "fellow subjects… to rouze the people of England not merely to commiserate a distressed country, but excite them to exert their constitutional endeavours, as head of the British empire, to avert the destruction of its principle member". Henry Grattan made a similar appeal in the debate on the "disarming of Ulster" in the Irish House of Commons on the 20th March 1797, where "he would advise the injured people of Ulster to an appeal to the sympathy, to the generosity, to the justice of the of the English nation…" (Times Mon. 27.3.1797 p3). Grattan was out of the country for most of 1798. He had withdrawn from the Dublin Parliament in May 1797 after the failure of George Ponsonby's motion on parliamentary reform, setting an example for Fox to follow at Westminster, who had taken a similar opposition line on Ireland. The Westminster opposition had been equally powerless to challenge the policy of Pitt in face of the large loyalist majority. Grattan's Address, published by Jordan, explains the reasons for his withdrawal from the Irish Commons.

Grattan had moved to England perhaps as a safety measure, as respect for law and order declined amongst Irish loyalist and Irish rebel alike. (Moira had, for similar reasons, offered Sampson a safe haven at his stately pile at Donington Park in Leicestershire.) The Term 'emigrant' could therefore be fairly applied to him.

Even in England, Grattan aroused some suspicions. The Times reported that on the last day of May he had been arrested in error for "a person of consequence from Ireland", possibly Valentine Lawless, a student at the Middle Temple who was also arrested on the same day. But when the evidence of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords was published, Grattan was implicated in the United Irish conspiracy. An informer claimed that the previous April Grattan had met Samuel Neilson, one of the chief United men in Dublin, at Tinnehinch, Grattan's home, where he had been sworn a United Irishman by Neilson. Despite Neilson's denial that Grattan had been sworn in, a storm of controversy broke over Grattan's head. His name was removed from the list of Irish Privy Counsellors; the fellows of Trinity College removed his portrait from their hallowed walls; Dublin Corporation removed him from its list of freemen, setting him amongst notorious United Irishmen, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, James Napper Tandy and Henry Jackson. Dr. Patrick Duigenan, the shrill mouthpiece of the Established Church in the Irish Commons, so annoyed Grattan with his pamphlet slanders, that he returned briefly to Ireland to arrange a duel, for which he was arrested and sent back to England. In frustration, Grattan could only vent his rage in a letter to the opposition paper, the Courier, "because", he wrote, "I have no opportunity of vindication but the Press, and no Press but that of England". Perhaps also, part of that vindication was via the publication of Causes.

The page numbers in Thomas Ledlie Birch's Letter From An Irish Emigrant are taken from the page numbers in the original edition. So far as is known, this is the first time that the pamphlet has been reprinted since 1799.

Kenneth Robinson
May 2005