Fenian Rising (1867): The Irish Republican Brotherhood Revolts

The Fenian Rising was a short-lived rebellion against British rule in Ireland launched by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) on the night of 5–6 March 1867. Badly armed, infiltrated by informers and hampered by a snowstorm, the rebels were dispersed within days. The events that followed in England, above all the Manchester executions and the Clerkenwell explosion, gave the rising a significance far greater than its military results.

Background: the Fenian movement

The failure of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 and the devastation of the Great Irish Famine left a generation of nationalists convinced that only force could end British rule. On 17 March 1858 James Stephens, a veteran of 1848, founded a secret oath-bound organisation in Dublin, later known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

In the United States, John O’Mahony led a sister organisation, the Fenian Brotherhood, which raised money among Irish emigrants. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, many Irish-American veterans offered their military experience to the cause.

The British authorities were well informed through spies. In September 1865 police raided the offices of the Fenian newspaper The Irish People and arrested leaders such as Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, John O’Leary and Thomas Clarke Luby. Stephens himself was arrested in November 1865 but escaped from Richmond Bridewell prison in Dublin within two weeks. In 1866 the government suspended habeas corpus in Ireland, allowing detention without trial.

The rising

Stephens repeatedly postponed the promised insurrection and was deposed by Irish-American officers late in 1866. Leadership passed to Colonel Thomas J. Kelly. A planned raid on the arsenal at Chester Castle in February 1867 was abandoned after an informer warned the authorities.

The rising began on the night of 5 March 1867. In County Dublin, several thousand men gathered on Tallaght Hill but were scattered by a small force of police. Rebels captured police barracks at Stepaside and Glencullen. In County Cork, groups attacked police posts and a coastguard station, and in County Limerick rebels attacked the police barracks at Kilmallock. There were smaller actions in Tipperary, Clare and Waterford.

A heavy snowfall in the following days made it hard for rebels to stay in the hills. Most went home or were arrested. One of the best-remembered leaders, Peter O’Neill Crowley, was mortally wounded in a fight with troops in Kilclooney Wood, County Cork, on 31 March. In May a small ship from America, renamed Erin’s Hope, reached Sligo Bay with weapons and officers, but found no rising to support.

The Manchester Martyrs

On 11 September 1867 police in Manchester arrested Kelly and another Fenian officer, Timothy Deasy. A week later, on 18 September, a group of Fenians ambushed the police van taking them to Belle Vue gaol. Kelly and Deasy escaped and were never recaptured, but Police Sergeant Charles Brett was killed when a shot was fired through the van’s lock.

Five men were sentenced to death. Three of them, William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O’Brien, were hanged in public at Salford on 23 November 1867. Many in Ireland believed the trial had been unfair, and the three became known as the Manchester Martyrs. T. D. Sullivan’s song “God Save Ireland”, inspired by them, was widely sung by nationalists for decades.

The Clerkenwell explosion

On 13 December 1867 Fenians tried to free the arms agent Richard O’Sullivan Burke from the Clerkenwell House of Detention in London by blowing a hole in the prison wall. The explosion destroyed a row of houses opposite. About a dozen local residents died and many more were injured; figures vary between sources.

The outrage turned English opinion sharply against the Fenians. Michael Barrett was convicted for his part and hanged outside Newgate prison on 26 May 1868, the last public execution in England.

Consequences

The rising failed completely as a military enterprise. Yet William Gladstone, who became prime minister in December 1868, later said the Fenian crisis had convinced him of the urgency of Irish reform. His government disestablished the Church of Ireland in 1869 and passed the first Irish Land Act in 1870, beginning a long debate that would lead to the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886.

Timeline

• 1858, 17 March: James Stephens founds the IRB in Dublin.
• 1865, September: Police suppress The Irish People and arrest leading Fenians.
• 1867, 11 February: Planned raid on Chester Castle is abandoned.
• 1867, 5–6 March: The rising begins in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and elsewhere.
• 1867, 18 September: Rescue of Kelly and Deasy in Manchester.
• 1867, 23 November: Execution of the Manchester Martyrs.
• 1867, 13 December: Clerkenwell explosion in London.

Why it matters

The Fenian Rising showed how hard it was to defeat British power by force in the nineteenth century, but it created martyrs and an organisation that survived. The IRB endured for decades and helped plan the Easter Rising of 1916, linking 1867 directly to the struggle for Irish independence in the twentieth century.