The Wearing of the Green: The Life of James Napper Tandy

The Wearing of the Green: The Life of James Napper Tandy

James Napper Tandy, ironmonger's son, Dublin municipal agitator, Volunteer artillery commander, co-founder of the Society of United Irishmen, French général de brigade, and the revolutionary immortalised in "The Wearing of the Green", was one of the most consequential and most contradictory political figures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Born in the Cornmarket district of Dublin in 1739 and educated at the celebrated Quaker school at Ballitore alongside Edmund Burke, Tandy devoted thirty years to the transformation of the political order that governed Ireland, building his popular authority through the guild halls and council chambers of his native city before helping to found the United Irishmen alongside Wolfe Tone. He took the oath of the Catholic Defenders, commanded Volunteer artillery before the Irish Parliament, and eventually sailed as a French general toward the Donegal coast in 1798, arriving to find the rebellion already crushed. Arrested in Hamburg, tried for treason in Dublin, sentenced to death in Lifford Jail, and ultimately released through Napoleon Bonaparte's personal intervention during the Peace of Amiens negotiations, Tandy died in Bordeaux in August 1803, just weeks after Robert Emmet's final failed rising. This is the first full narrative biography of a founding figure of Irish republicanism, honest about his failures, generous toward his courage, and attentive throughout to the world that made him and the world he helped to make.

Rowan MacRowan is an independent historian and writer based in County Wicklow, whose work focuses on the political, social, and cultural history of Ireland from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth. Raised in the shadow of the Wicklow Mountains - a landscape whose own deep connections to the 1798 rebellion, as the refuge of Joseph Holt and other insurgents in the years of its aftermath, shaped his earliest understanding of Irish history - MacRowan developed a particular interest in the revolutionary period and the complex, often contradictory figures it produced. He has spent many years researching the organisational and institutional dimensions of the United Irish movement, arguing that the popular political culture of Dublin's guild and municipal world has been consistently undervalued in accounts that privilege the intellectual leadership of the United Irishmen over the popular organising that gave their ideas their mass character. His approach to historical biography is grounded in the conviction that the most instructive historical figures are not those whose lives are simplest but those whose lives are most fully human - people of genuine courage and genuine failing, whose careers reveal the actual texture of political life under the pressures of their time. In James Napper Tandy he found a subject who exemplified that conviction in every chapter of a remarkable and remarkably under-examined life. MacRowan writes and researches from his home in County Wicklow, where the past is never entirely past and the questions that animated the United Irish generation continue to find new forms and new urgency in every generation that inherits them.