Of this trip Tone kept for his wife’s amusement a diary, a practice which he continued, when he was absent from her, to the end of his life. He and she were diligent readers of Swift, and he invokes the memory of Swift and Stella when he writes to tell her of all the news he has “journalised” for her, and which he looks forward to reading over with her when he gets home. He has christened his friend, Russell, “P.P. or Clerk of this Parish”—another reminiscence of Swift,[[62]] and he promises his wife she will be much amused by said P.P.’s “exploits in my journal, which is a thousand times wittier than Swift’s, as in justice it ought, for it is written for the amusement of one a thousand times more amiable than Stella.”
[62]. In the “Memoirs of the Clerk of the Parish,” Swift parodied Bishop Burton’s “History of His Own Times.”
Little, perhaps, did this dear lady, “a thousand times more amiable than Stella,” think, as her charming face dimpled over her husband’s ludicrous account of his own and his friend’s adventures, that she was reading one of the most important chapters in Irish history. For the business afoot in Belfast—the aim and object of Tone’s and Russell’s embassy was nothing less than the establishment of the United Irishmen—the union of Irish Catholics, Irish Protestants and Irish Dissenters under the common name of Irish men against the common enemy. But perhaps she did, for nobody can have known better than she what a serious aim, what strength of will and tenacity of purpose, what a steel-like grip of principles and logical fidelity to their consequences lay under the light surface of her husband’s wit and drollery. The best minds in Ireland were the quickest to grasp Tone’s greatness and genius: Thomas Addis Emmet, John Keogh, Plunkett—to take three, out of three very different types. The best minds in France showed, afterwards, a like readiness of appreciation: Carnot, the Organiser of Victory, and General Hoche.
One thing, however, it is certain, Matilda Tone never dreamed of: the way in which the Journal’s family jokes—bad, if you like, as family jokes always are, except to the “family” itself, to whom they seem irresistibly funny—were to be interpreted against the diarist and his friend. It was one of the favourite jests of the merry little party of holiday-makers at Irishtown to represent “Tom” Russell, who was dignity and solemnity itself, something like a Spanish Don, in his courtesy and punctilio,[[63]] as a desperate character, a regular Jonah Barrington type of “Irishman.” It tickled their sense of the ludicrous, something in the same way as when they found Tone setting his dignified friend to cook the dinner in his “fine suit of laced regimentals.” “If you do not know who P.P. was, the joke will be lost on you,” writes Tone à propos to the incidents in which solemn “P.P.” is made to figure as a regular “hell of a fellow.”
[63]. We have, among a host of other witnesses on this point, Charles Hamilton Teeling, himself a man of the finest courtesy, most fastidious sense of honour and highest breeding. When Lord Castlereagh, on the day of his own arrest, informed him that Russell was also among those arrested, Charles exclaimed: “Russell! then the soul of honour is captive.” (“Personal Narrative,” p. 19). He tells further on how Russell, when the prisoners were brought to Judge Boyd’s house for their committment, was pained by Neilson’s levity. “No man regarded etiquette and the punctilios of politeness more. He looked solemn, stroked up his fine black hair, and with a sweetness of countenance peculiarly his own, and in a gently modulated but sufficiently audible tone of voice he begged of his friend Neilson to respect the dignity of the Bench.” Russell was a deeply religious character, with that combined humility, consciousness of his own weakness, and striving after perfection which is the foundation of saintliness. There is nothing nobler, more touching, or more edifying in our history than the story of how he went to his death.
Unfortunately, later readers of the Journal, not knowing “P.P.,” nor the incorrigible practical joker who was his friend, have missed the point of the jokes and have taken the Journal’s accusations of excessive drinking and other peccadilloes as literal transcripts of facts. I do not here merely speak of Froude, who treats the Journal with his usual absence of all honesty in handling documents, detaches all the references to hard drinking, omits, as a matter of course, all reference to the fact that this Journal was written by Tone for his wife’s amusement, and on the strength of the diarist’s jokes against himself and his friend, makes out Russell and Tone as a pair of “ne’er-do-wells,” who, on a drunken spree, set out “to measure swords against the British Empire.”[[64]] We expect nothing better from Froude; but it is disconcerting to find Lecky and Barry O’Brien equally misled by Tone’s flippancy.
[64]. Froude, “English in Ireland,” III., 19.
We pass over a year or two, during which Tone was fully occupied by his work for the Catholic Committee, and the organisation of the first branches of the United Irishmen, and come to the year 1795, which was to be a turning point in his own life and in that of his dear ones—the beloved wife, their little nine-year-old daughter, and the two small sons, William, now aged four, and three-year-old Frank.
Tone was spending a pleasant musical evening with a friend of his in Merrion Square, when a servant was introduced bearing a letter which he had strict orders to deliver only into Mr. Tone’s hands. The latter read the letter and then said quietly to his friend, “Phil, we must finish this duet; I must go when it is done.” It transpired afterwards that the letter had come from Tone’s good friend of the old Temple days in London, Hon. George Knox, Lord Northland’s son, and its purport was to warn Tone that the Government had information of his connection with Jackson, the emissary of the French Government, and that it would be advisable for him to get out of the country as quickly as possible.