James Coigly

James Coigly (sometimes rendered Quigley or "O'Coigly") was born 1761 into a small farming/weaving family Kilmore, County Armagh in the Kingdom of Ireland. During his formative years the Penal Laws, which had systematically excluded the Kingdom's Roman Catholic majority from land ownership, the professions and public office, were by stages relaxed. Catholic families of at least middling income could aspire to educating their sons. Coigly was sent to Dundalk Grammar School for classical studies. Despite this being a Protestant school he acquired a religious vocation.[1]

After Dundalk Coigly entered the priesthood in the archdiocese of Armagh. In January 1785 he was ordained by the Coadjutor Bishop of Armagh Richard O'Reilly. In the absence of a seminary in Ireland, he was sent for further studies, to the Collège des Lombards in Paris where Irish students, bound for careers not only in the Church but also in law, medicine, or in service with the Irish Brigade in the French army were taught.

Discounting a report hat he had been involved in the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 along with fellow student James Blackwell,[2] Coigly has been described as "no friend of the revolution".[3] He stayed in Paris until 12 October 1789, by which time Louis XVI had been brought back from Versailles by the women of Paris and clerical members had been hounded from National Assembly. Coigly himself narrowly escaped "lanternisation" (being hung from a street lantern) by a mob who took his clerical garb as a token of royalist sympathies. [1] But already at the College Coigly had already demonstrated what the historian of the diocese of Down and Conor recorded as the "systematic insubordination" that was the "forerunner of his sad and subsequent career, which terminated on the scaffold". Coigly took the unprecedented step of initiating legal proceedings against the college to secure a scholarship, and then followed this up with an appeal to restore to students the right to elect their superiors.[4]

In Ireland the French Revolution had revived the Volunteer movement in Presbyterian Belfast and its hinterlands and emboldened the Catholic Committee in Dublin. As government made clear the limits for potential reform, more radical elements in the two centres formed themselves as the United Irishmen. Drawing on the growing discontents of tenant farmers, market-town traders, journeymen and weavers, United Irish "societies" multiplied rapidly across Ulster and the Irish midlands.

In 1791 Coigly returned to the Armagh diocese (where he held a curacy in Dundalk, 1793–6) to find "the inhabitants of . . . County Armagh engaged in a civil war, and religion made the pretext".[5]--the Armagh disturbances. Armagh had been the premier volunteering county in Ireland, but in contrast to Belfast and the surrounding Presbyterian-majority districts of Down and Antrim, it was a sectarian borderland with comparatively large English-descendant Established Church population. Lord Charlemont Volunteers refused to admit Catholics, and collaborated with the Peep o' Day Boys who, to secure Protestant claims to tenancies and employment, engaged in "wrecking"--terrorising Catholic families and destroying their homes under the pretext of searching for illegally held arms (Coigly's family home, itself, was ransacked). In celebrations following the defeat of Catholic "Defenders" in the Battle of the Diamond, the combination of local vigilantism and gentry patronage led to the formation in 1795 of the Orange Order.

Pursuing a "union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion", the United Irish societies reached out to the Defenders. They were able to offer practical assistance: legal counsel, aid and refuge. Displaced families were sheltered on Presbyterian farms in Down and Antrim, and the goodwill earned used to open the Defenders to trusted republicans.[6] There was "little doubt" that Coigly’s efforts to protect, and seek out support for, his parishioners "merged into the 'uniting business’ of Theobald Wolfe Tone, Samuel Neilson, and John Keogh" in the neigbouring centres of sectarian conflict in south Down. The first biographer of the United Irishmen, R.R. Madden, claimed that it was Coigly who introduced the Defenders of County Louth to Napper Tandy.[4]

By January 1797 Coigly is said to have been a member of the United Irishmen's Ulster Council, having been sworn into the movement at the house of Valentine Lawless in Dublin. His profile within the United Irish movement had increased following a series of arrests in the Autumn of 1796, including of Charles Teeling who had been securing command over the Down, Antrim and Armagh Defenders,[7] and by his association with Lord Edward Fitzgerald and others impatient with the incumbent leadership.[2] In February 1797, the informer Leonard MacNally reported on Coigly’s "political mission at Dundalk and Armagh’"; he had met with Richard McCormick (United Irishman and Catholic Committee activist) and other leading radicals, and had also made visits to the state prisoners at Kilmainham.[4]

Coigly played a leading role in what proved to be the United Irishmen's last test of constitutional means: campaigns to return Lord Edward Fitzgerald from Down and Arthur O’Connor from Antrim in the 1797 parliamentary elections. Coigly made himself "as active as possible" and is suspected of having been the author of the campaign pamphlet, A view of the present state of Ireland (sometimes attributed to Arthur O'Connor). Jemmy Hope declared that it "contained more truth than all the volumes I have seen written on the events of 1797 and 1798".[4]

In his Life, Coigly attributed his decision to leave Ireland in June 1797 to the persecution of his enemies. But divisions sharpened by the failure of the French under General Lazare Hoche to effect a landing at Bantry Bay in December 1796 and by the ruthlessness of government counter-measures may have played a role. While the dominant view in the leadership was that a resort to arms had to await a further French attempt, Coigly "took the radical view of O’Connor, Fitzgerald and Neilson, that independent action was essential".[4]

Coigly, however, took the opportunity of exile to form the alliances that would reassure the more hesitant leaders in Ireland and advance the call for a general insurrection. He had been to Paris in 1796 and on that occasion had carried an address from the "Secret Committee of England" to the French Directory. Coigly radicalism was closer to egalitarianism of the Defenders than to the liberal constitutionalism of many the leading United Irishmen. He found that it resonated with the distressed textile workers of Lancashire as it had with artisans, journeymen and their apprentices in Belfast and Dublin.[4]

In Manchester Coigly, describing himself as an emissary of the United Irish executive, made contact with James Dixon, a cotton spinner from Belfast. Dixon had been instrumental in converting the Manchester Corresponding Society into the republican, United Englishmen bound by a test that promised to "Remove the diadem and take off the crown ... [and to] exalt him that is low and abuse him that is high".[8] Coigly assisted the spread of the United system to Stockport, Bolton, Warrington and Birmingham, while further north, contact was made with the United Scotsmen.[4]

From Manchester, Coigly travelled on to London where he conferred with those Irishmen who had hastened the radicalisation of the London Corresponding Society: among them Colonel Edward Despard (who was to be executed for high treason in 1803), brothers Benjamin and John Binns, Valentine Brown, Roger O'Connor and LCS president Alexander Galloway. Meetings were held at Furnival’s Inn, Holborn, where delegates from London, Scotland and the regions committed themselves "to overthrow the present Government, and to join the French as soon as they made a landing in England".[4]

Travelling to Paris with Arthur MacMahon, a Presbyterian minister from Holywood, Coigly presented this resolution to Talleyrand. In Paris, Edward Lewins, seconded by Wolfe Tone, was recognised as the official United Irish delegate, but his position was challenged by the arrival from the United States in June 1797 of the very much more impatient Napper Tandy, and by the sudden death, in September, General Hoche their key ally in the French leadership. Siding with Tandy, Coigly resolved to secure in Dublin Lewins’s replacement. Coigly crossed to London via Hamburg where he stayed some days with Samuel Turner of Newry, the United Irish representative in the city. Turner was a British informer so that on his arrival in England, Coigly's every move was monitored by Bow Street Runners.[4]

In London Coigly attended a meeting of the newly formed national committee of the "United Britons" on 5 January 1798 and, crossing to Ireland, took with him their fraternal address. It was widely circulated among the United Irish and encouraged their military preparations. Lord Edward Fitzgerald granted Coigly a commission to replace Lewins in Paris with Arthur O’Connor. On 28 February 1798 Coigly was apprehended in a party with O'Connor and three others as they were about to embark from Margate on a Channel crossing to France.

Brought before the Privy Council, Coigly denied under questioning from William Pitt ever being a member of the Corresponding Society, the Whig Club or "any other of the political societies" in England or to have ever attended their meetings.[9] The arrests and the appearance of the prisoners before the Privy Council caused great excitement and occasioned, on grounds of conspiracy with France, the arrest, in a raid on Oliver Bond's house in Dublin, of almost the entire Leinster directory of the United Irishmen, and a round up of English radicals extending to Manchester, Leicester and Birmingham.

O'Connor impressed the jurors with an appearance on his behalf by Charles James Fox, while mounting a defence in which he was reprimanded by the judge for prejudicing the case of the other defendants. In Coigly's coatpocket had been found what proved to be the only admissible evidence of treason: an address from the United Britons to the French Directory. While its suggestion of a mass movement primed for insurrection was scarcely credible, it was proof that Coigly intent was to invite and encourage a French invasion. Coigley refused the offer of his life in return for implicating O’Connor.[4]

In response to Coigly's request for last sacraments, his jailers delivered a loyalist priest (a "Castle-Catholic") who refused rites unless Coigly revealed to him the names of those the authorities still hoped to implicate in his conspiracy. Father Coigly would not talk and without final absolution Coigly was hanged at Penenden Heath, Maidstone on 7 June 1798.[4]

On receiving the news of Coigly’s execution, Tone, wrote in his diary: "If I ever reach Ireland I will be the first to propose a monument to his memory".[10] Yet Coigly was written out of the general narrative history of 1798. For the centenary of the rebellion pilgrimages were organised to Maidstone and addressed by member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, but the events attracted little attention.[11]