Matilda Tone's New World
Wolfe Tone's widow made a new life for herself in America, but longed for home
By 'Brigadier'
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Emblem of the United Irishmen |
When he returned from a brief sojourn near Princeton, New Jersey, to France in 1796, Wolfe Tone left behind Matilda Witherington Tone, a wife (baptised as Martha) as committed to the United Irish ideals of Catholic-Protestant fraternity and equality as was her soon-to-be-martyred husband. She now lies in a Brooklyn grave at Green-Wood Cemetery, flanked by her son, William, and William's spouse, the daughter of famed attorney William Sampson. Wolfe Tone lies honored in Bodenstown, County Kildare, where annual pilgrimages are made to the grave described by Patrick Pearse as the holiest spot in Ireland.
Also buried in Greenwood are Matilda's husband of later years and long-time friend, Thomas Wilson, a Scotsman, as well as a goodly number of the related Maxwell family. In 1998, the bicentennial year of Ireland's "Year of Liberty," the eroding headstone of soft white marble over Matilda's grave was restored and re-inscribed by a coalition of labor and Irish activist and historical groups in the New York area.
After Wolfe Tone's return to Europe, he would soon be commissioned a general in the French Army's strike force, assembled by the French Directory for the liberation of Ireland. Matilda, meanwhile, took up residence in Washington's fashionable Georgetown section. On the Irish coast, Tone was captured as head of the French-Irish force, and taken to Dublin, where he committed suicide rather than be hanged for his political beliefs.
| Irish history isn't just about men. You can read more about Matilda Tone and other Irish heroines in THE WOMEN OF 1798. Also available in SOFTCOVER
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While Matilda Tone was widely known as a firmly committed republican theorist she was also viewed as a realist whose grasp of political and historical nuances were widely respected. She was ahead of her times, a moderate feminist before the term even became current, a modern woman who despite her progressive ideals, barely made her mark in America. She didn't hesitate to take to task the leading historian of the United Irish period, Doctor Madden, for failing to take into account the role of women in the liberation movement.
Matilda was an acquaintance of Napoleon Bonaparte, who, out of respect for her martyred husband, made arrangements for the education of William (born in 1791) in a French military school (see related story).
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Ulster Museum, Belfast
Theobald Wolfe Tone, Matilda's first husband, served as a general in the French army in 1798. (Reversed image) |
Soon after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, where William surrendered along with the rest of the battered French army, Captain Tone came to America and soon was commissioned in the United States Army after the intercession of John C. Calhoun, who would rise to Secretary of War (1817-25) and Vice-President (1825-32). Captain Tone was the author of two books on military tactics, each commissioned by the War Department for use at the US Military Academy at West Point. He died in 1828.
His father-in-law, William Sampson, in a dramatic case in a New York courtroom (actually the new City Hall) in 1813, defended successfully the principle of the "priest-penitent privilege" that allowed a Jesuit priest to refuse in court to disclose the details of a confession. The scene would have pleased Wolfe Tone, Matilda Tone and all United Irish adherents: a Catholic priest in an American court defended by an Irishman (just recently a republican political prisoner) of the Anglican faith -- from whose pioneering legal strategy arose the lawyer-client privilege and the inviolability of the doctor-patient relationship.
In the end, Matilda Tone outlived both her husbands, Thomas Wilson passing on in 1824, and even her son. She died in 1849, just in time to approve of the Men of 1848, who saw the Tones as their guiding lights and most revered of political mentors. Matilda in March 1849 wrote wistfully that she had lived for 30 years in America but "never had an easy hour -- longing after my native land."
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