This is long, because I haven nothing better to do after midnight on a weekday than write alternate history.
Triumvirs of the Hibernian Republic
1797- 1798: Arthur O’Connor
1797-1799: Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1)
1797-1800: Theobald Wolfe Tone
1798-1801: Samuel Nielson
1799-1802: William Drennan
1800-1802: Henry Joy McCracken
1801-1802: Theobald Wolfe Tone (2)
1802: Archibald Hamilton Rowan
Presidents of the United Irish Republic
1802-1804: James Napper Tandy
1804: Robert Emmet
Lord Lieutenants of Ireland
1804-1807: Charles Lennox (3)
1807- 1812: Richard Wellesley
1812-1813: William Beresford
Taoiseachs of the United Irish Republic (4)
1813- ? Henry Grattan
Spain’s Armada was wrecked by a ‘Protestant Wind.’ When Lazare Hoche, with much trepidation, landed his forces in Ireland while his foes in the Royal Navy found themselves battered by gales, Talleyrand remarked that the general had crossed an ‘atheist sea.’
Hoche thus found himself far better supplied and with far more initiative than he had anticipated, and he made the most of it. Speed was the watchword of the Irish campaign, and though the French had little luck in resupplying Hoche across a sea that had apparently found religion again, the United Irishmen were able to raise large militia forces as reinforcements. Dublin fell in March 1797, and while Hoche pushed north the United Irishmen proclaimed a new Hibernian Republic. After some hints, the constitution was heavily modelled on the French directory, which was to prove inconvenient almost immediately. A Triumivirate with overlapping terms was marginally more efficient than five directors, but almost all constitutions were. Still, as Hoche remained as commander of an ‘allied garrison’ even after the last British troops were evacuated from Belfast, the Triumvirs had little choice but to be a good little satellite republic.
The prestige of a major military victory against the British helped secure the Directory’s legitimacy for a final few years. What looked like a brewing monarchist victory in the elections of 1797 evaporated with the news that the British were seeking terms, and Director Carnot was particularly strengthened as the arch-military man of the government. Peace, of course, would take a few more years to actually arrive.
In 1798, Marquis Cornwallis’s abortive attempt to liberate, counter-invade or reoccupy Ireland- choose your sectarian verb of preference- was countered superbly by Hoche. The French were backed by the new Hibernian Army, which relied heavily upon veterans of the British army for its junior officers and French ‘advisors’ for its senior leadership. Still, Generals Joseph Holt and James Napper Tandy distinguished themselves in the last year of the ‘First War for Irish Independence.’
With the triumphs in Italy and Ireland, France was finally able to secure peace with its enemies. After the embarrassment of Generals Bonaparte and Masséna negotiating their own peace with Austria, the Treaty of Anvers with Britain was more conventional. The Anvers Peace was a prosperous time for France and her satellites. In 1799, the Directory was ‘reorganised’ into the Consulate, at which point Carnot’s fellow directors were thanked for their service and shunted into obscurity. While France entered the decades of the ‘Citizen Generals,’ Hibernia took the opportunity for its own reorganisation.
Archibald Rowan was the last Triumvir elected. In 1802, after receiving the tacit approval of the Consulate, the Hibernians wrote a new constitution that better served their needs than 1796’s ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Directory!’ The new constitution was modelled as closely on Britain’s as its framers believed their French patrons would permit. The role of the Presidency was established as a constitutional figurehead elected from the Dublin Parliament. The former Triumvirs settled themselves into the House of Commons and continued to rule- until in 1804, Horatio Nelson burnt the French fleet at anchor in Brest and the peace was shattered.
President Tandy rode out to take command of the Republic’s forces himself. General Hoche was long since gone, and in the event was about to die of yellow fever in an (as it would transpire, unnecessary) attempt to relieve General L’Ouverture’s forces in Sainte-Domingue. The French garrison was commanded by Michel Ney. Ney was a far braver man than Hoche, which is why he is such a beloved martyr in Ireland to this day. He was also a far worse general, which is why he became a martyr at all.
Nandy was captured during the government’s doomed attempt to withdraw from Dublin. As much of the Parliament began to scatter, to their own estates or to boats to the continent, the rump convened in Cork. They would elect as their symbolic final leader the young firebrand Robert Emmet, who spoke very nobly and would hang very quickly.
The final decade of British rule in Ireland has been mythologised to the point where one would expect every Irishman to have been a republican and every Englishman a baby-eating potato-snatcher. Certainly, the British drastically underestimated how deeply six years of republican nationalist rhetoric had cut across class, geographic and sectarian lines. But they still enjoyed great support, and it speaks to the poor choices made by the Lords Lieutenant that the quick destruction of the Republic was followed by years of mass insurgency.
After Charles Lennox’s assassination in 1807, the Wellesley brothers were appointed to get the island in order. It was felt that Lennox had tried to run both the army and the government from one desk, so Richard Wellesley governed as a more traditional Lord-Lieutenant while his brother Arthur cracked down hard. They were certainly more successful than Lennox at finding Irishmen to hang, but their ruthlessness proved counterproductive. Arthur Wellesley hanged Michael Dwyer, and Richard Wellesley transported so many ‘rebels’ to Port Jackson that the colony grew beyond all expectations- but while they had ‘won’ the war by 1810, they had very much driven many previously loyal Irish citizens into romanticising the peaceful years of the Republic. Worse still, their support for the Act of Union in 1809 firmly established that rather than restoring old British freedoms, they were actively taking them away. When Galway Bay turned atheist long enough for General Davout to make anchor in 1812, the country rose. The brothers were withdrawn in 1813 in a doomed attempt by Westminster to win back support with a more genial Lord Lieutenant, which was not only too late, but took away the British army’s most capable general on the island when he was needed most. Their replacement, William ‘Bungler’ Beresford, was not the man to face Davout. He had the good grace at least to surrender Dublin intact.
Though formal independence would wait until the Congress of Venice formalised the new peace in Europe in the closest that could be found to neutral ground, it became a reality in 1813. The nature of that independence was contested. Many younger radicals, romanticising the ancient Gaels and disenchanted with Britain wanted a new constitution; many older United Irishmen wanted a revival of the 1802 constitution. In the meantime, the respected elder statesman Henry Grattan formed a provisional government. Oddly, Grattan had never been a Republican during the first years of independence. During the hated years of the occupation, however, he had won wide respect for his peaceful and persistent denunciations of the mistreatment of the nation from his seat in the reconstituted Irish Parliament. The only man left in Parliament to thunder against the Act of Union, he became a model of the loyal Irishmen turned reluctant republican. His government had many challenges to face- to turn the unity of wartime struggle into peaceful patriotism, to respect the fact of French hegemony while not trading one overlord for another, to carry Ireland forward into the strange new era of the Revolutions Victorious.
Still, the potato harvests were good.
(1) Though the early Irish Republic never went so far as to ban noble titles per se, the state helped to finance itself during the first years of its existence by seizing the lands and properties of any landowner who did not live on the island. The Anglo-Irish absentee nobility found they had lost everything save their titles; this was a key reason for the bitterness and harsh measures of many Anglo-Irish officers who returned in 1804.
(2) Out of a fear of despotism, the Hibernian constitution forbade a Triumvir’s re-election, but perhaps as a legacy of its hasty drafting allowed a former Triumvir to stand for a seat someone else had departed.
(3) A soldier and statesman, Lennox has the odd distinction of being remembered chiefly for his cultural legacy. In sport, he helped found the MCC and backed Thomas Lord’s cricket ground. In literature, his death inspired Percy Shelley’s savage poem ‘The Fox-Hunt,’ who found in Lennox’s personal (and fatal) supervision of the hunt for Michael Dwyer (The ‘Wicklow Fox’) a fable of hubris and the revenge of the oppressed. In music, the fact that during the occupation of Dublin his troops seized and then killed his cousin (and former triumvir) Fitzgerald led to the renowned folk ballad ‘The Wreck of Lord Edward Fitzgerald.’ I’m not sorry.
(4) While OTL the association of the Irish language and Irish nationalism was a later development, the framers of the new constitution are trying to move away from the faux-classicism of the French both as a way of quietly asserting themselves and also to foster a sense of ‘Irishness’ in the general population. Also, I like the word Taoiseach.
