ON THIS DAY
21 October
1803. Thomas Russell is hanged at Downpatrick
Thomas Russell (1767–1803). From Madden’s United Irishmen, after a contemporary sketch.
On the morning of 21 October 1803 Thomas Russell was taken from his cell in Downpatrick jail and hanged. He was then beheaded. That was the sentence for high treason. He was thirty-five, a month short of his thirty-seventh birthday. The day before, 20 October, he had been tried at Downpatrick before Baron George and convicted. He refused to treat the proceedings as a recantation. He spoke of his political course with pride, called himself a soldier of Jesus Christ, and asked for time to finish a commentary on the Book of Revelation. The judge refused.
Russell was the last United Irish leader to be executed, and the only major figure whose revolutionary career ran from the founding of the Society of United Irishmen in 1791 to its last rising in 1803.
18 October 1791 — the Belfast society is inaugurated. Russell is there with Theobald Wolfe Tone. 12 October 1798 — Tone fights his last battle aboard the French ship Hoche. 21 October 1803 — Russell dies at Downpatrick. Three October dates. The same revolutionary generation, from reform meeting to gallows.
From Belfast librarian to Emmet’s general
Russell was born on 21 November 1767 at Drommahane, Kilshannig, near Mallow, County Cork. He served as a young officer with the British army in India, then came home. In Belfast he became librarian of the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge, later the Linen Hall Library. That put him among the Presbyterian radicals Tone needed. The two men were unlike each other. Tone was sociable and ironic. Russell was austere and religious. Both came to believe that Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter had to share one political name.
The society of 1791 began as a campaign for parliamentary reform. War with France, government repression, and the alliance with the Defenders turned it into a clandestine revolutionary organisation. Russell was one of the men who made that turn in Ulster. In September 1796 he was arrested. When the risings of 1798 broke, he was still in prison. Henry Joy McCracken led in Antrim and was hanged. The Down rising failed. Tone died after capture. Russell survived the year he could not fight.
He was released in 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, on condition that he leave the country. He went to the Continent. There he met Robert Emmet. Emmet gave him the rank of general and sent him north to raise Ulster. Russell arrived in July 1803 with James Hope and William Henry Hamilton. The networks of the mid-1790s were gone. Leaders were dead or in exile. Communities remembered what 1798 had cost. Only scattered groups appeared. They had few arms. There was no rising in Antrim or Down.
Emmet’s Dublin rising began on 23 July and collapsed the same day. Lord Kilwarden was killed in the streets. Emmet was taken on 25 August and hanged on 20 September. Russell came south, possibly to attempt a rescue. A reward of £1,500 was on him. On 9 September Major Henry Charles Sirr arrested him at 28 Parliament Street — the same officer who had taken Lord Edward Fitzgerald in 1798. Mary Ann McCracken tried to have him bribed out of Kilmainham. On 12 October he was sent under escort to Downpatrick.
The grave of Russell
Mary Ann McCracken, about 1801, with her niece. She paid for Russell’s grave.
He was buried in the Church of Ireland graveyard beside Downpatrick parish church, now St Margaret’s. The former county gaol is part of Down County Museum. Hundreds of United Irishmen had been held there after 1798. Mary Ann McCracken, sister of Henry Joy and Russell’s steadfast friend, had a slab laid on the grave. The inscription is four words: “The Grave of Russell.”
1920. An RIC party is ambushed near Glandore
Glandore, west Cork. The RIC party from Leap was fired on on the road from this village. The reprisal that night was here.
On the afternoon of 21 October 1920 three RIC men left Leap barracks in west Cork to arrest a man at Glandore. He was not at home. On the road back they were fired on by a party armed mainly with shotguns. They returned fire, moved on in single file, and were fired on again. Constable Bertie Rippingale, twenty-five, from Essex, three months in the force, a former soldier and labourer, was hit in the ankle, leg, thigh, abdomen and head. He died the next day in Cork Military Hospital. One of the other two, Constable Albert Edward Rundle, died of his wounds on 4 November. The third man survived.
That night, and into the early hours of 22 October, Glandore was attacked. The Cork Examiner reported rifle fire from the barracks and, about four in the morning, four uniformed men at the village. Bombs and bullets were fired into Keenan’s Hotel and the houses of the O’Donoghues, Collinses and McCarthys. People ran from their homes. That much is in the contemporary papers assembled by University College Cork’s Cork Fatality Register.
Years later Stephen Holland, adjutant of the Leap company of the Fourth (Skibbereen) Battalion, gave a Bureau of Military History statement. He dated the ambush 24 October. That date is wrong. He remembered four Tans, one killed on the road and two wounded. He said a drunken Black and Tan later threw a grenade that rebounded and killed him. UCC states that the grenade death cannot be confirmed. It was not invented from nothing. The Cork County Eagle of 23 October reported that one of the raiders was seriously injured while throwing a bomb, and that Irish members of the RIC had tried to restrain the Black and Tans. A man can have been there and still move the date, the numbers, and the ending. A newspaper can be closer in time and still serve a side. The secure facts for this day are the ambush of 21 October, Rippingale’s mortal wounds, the reprisal on the village that night, and Rundle’s death a fortnight later.
References
Quinn, J. (2009) ‘Russell, Thomas’, Dictionary of Irish Biography. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. Tried 20 October 1803; hanged and beheaded at Downpatrick jail, 21 October. Last United Irish leader executed; career from 1791 to 1803.
Quinn, J. (2002) Soul on Fire: A Life of Thomas Russell. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.
Quinn, J. (2013) ‘Thomas Russell, United Irishman’, History Ireland.
Woods, C.J. (ed.) (1991) Journals and Memoirs of Thomas Russell, 1791–5. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.
Canavan, T. (2020) ‘Museum Eye: Down County Museum’, History Ireland.
University College Cork, Cork Fatality Register, ‘RIC Constable Bertie Rippingale’, 1920-89. Incident 21 October 1920; death 22 October. Holland WS 649 dated 24 October in error; grenade death unconfirmed; Cork County Eagle, 23 October 1920, reports a bomber seriously injured.
Police Roll of Honour Trust, ‘Bertie Rippingale’; Constable Albert Edward Rundle died of wounds, 4 November 1920.
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