you want to tell me about samuel nielsen so bad

YES YES I DO

Here he is, firstly. Samuel Neilson was born on the 17th of September in 1761, to a Protestant minister in Ballyroney. He went to a private school there, and was later shipped off to Belfast where he was apprenticed to a wool trader. In the woollen drapery trade (which was insane & politically charged & actually rather dangerous in late 18th century Belfast. it's a long story) he found considerable success, managing to amass a personal fortune and marry the daughter of one of the more respected drapery traders in the area.

However, this was not enough for Neilson and he had to get involved in politics as well, which he did by being the election agent for none other than Robert Stewart, the future Lord Castlereagh, in 1790. Doing this he won Castlereagh his first seat in the Irish parliament.

Neilson then went on to swing to the opposite extreme of politics, and began to keep company with people such as Henry Joy and Mary Ann McCracken, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and Arthur O'Connor. Neilson was the one to first suggest to McCracken the idea of a society for Irishmen of all religious alignments that would focus on Irish freedom. The fact that the proposed group would be for everyone was a revolutionary suggestion given the violent conflicts between the sectarian Defenders and Peep O'Day Boys, but Neilson and McCracken specifically insisted that it include Catholics as well.

Anyway, McCracken thought this was an excellent idea, and they called people including Theobald Wolfe Tone and his friend Thomas Russell from Dublin to aid in creating the group, which would eventually become the Society of the United Irishmen. Neilson ran their newspaper, the Northern Star, which was a massive undertaking because there was little to no freedom of the press anywhere in the British Isles at the time and there was no concept of a human rights violation because they had suspended Habeas Corpus, and Neilson's writing was so radical that Wolfe Tone called him "The Jacobin."

Eventually Neilson, McCracken, Russell, and a teenager called Charles Teeling were rounded up by Castlereagh and some other people in what was known as the Siege of Belfast. They were then dragged to Dublin and, in Neilson's case, kept imprisoned for 17 months, until he was finally freed under insane circumstances that I wrote a (long & not very serious in tone) post about here. After being freed, Neilson kept his head low and regained his strength after his imprisonment for a while, but then found out that after the government arrested many of the other leaders at Oliver Bond's house, they were planning to arrest him too. After this Neilson threw himself back into planning the rebellion, filling many of the positions where people had been arrested and keeping tabs on Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who was in hiding with a massive bounty on his head.

Lord Edward, however, was captured, and Neilson was captured soon after when he was caught planning to storm Dublin Castle with siege ladders to free Lord Edward (side note: the sheer audacity of Samuel Neilson cannot be fully summed up here. this man was insane and insanely lucky). The government then planned to murder most of the political prisoners in Ireland, but Neilson, along with Arthur O'Connor, convinced all of the prisoners to agree to confess to their crimes in return for being "allowed" to go into exile. Neilson also did it for the life of his friend Oliver Bond, but unfortunately this was all for nothing as Bond died soon after of what... might have been a stroke? we aren't sure.

Neilson was then deported, along with several other leaders, to Scandinavia, after which he made his way to America. He had planned to restart his newspaper there and to bring his family over, but unfortunately an attack of yellow fever hit the city and Neilson died of it while trying to escape.

He is little-remembered today, which is extremely unfortunate because he was one of the most active and important members of the United Irishmen, and his politics were incredibly radical and ahead of his time. If you'd like to know more about him, RR Madden wrote a biography of him in the 1840s (it's old but very good and very complete) and a newer biography of him came out... pretty recently, I can't recall the exact year. Other than those though you sort of just have to wait until he comes up in books about the other United Irishmen.

Tying into the previous ask, how did you become interested in United Irishmen? Why do you admire them? And also, who were they (a bit of a rundown please)?

I became interested them first through my research into Lord Castlereagh, given his involvement in the rebellion. The biggest reasons I admire them are 1. their devotion to the principles of the French Revolution, which was a rare(ish) thing for a group of people in the 18th century British isles; 2. their other principles. I can definitely support the ideas of universal suffrage and Irish republicanism; and 3. I really appreciate the fact that they didn't discriminate based on religious belief, which is also a pretty rare thing for time and place.

And a rundown on who the United Irishmen were:

They originally began as a political debating club in Belfast, growing out of groups such as the Northern Whig Club. They were also influenced significantly by the Volunteers, which were groups of local militia originally raised to protect against invaders while the regular army was off fighting in American in the 1770s, but who went rogue and started putting extremely effective pressure on the British government for increased rights for non-Anglicans in Ireland.

The group was peaceful at first, being just a place for people of all religious affiliations to discuss new radical political ideas, but when the pro Catholic Lord Lieutenant was kicked out and replaced by the more harsh Lord Camden, they began to grow more militant. Not helping the matter, also, was the fact that their ranks were swelled by members of the Defenders (secret underground Catholic murder gang) who had been run out of Ulster by the Peep O' Day Boys (secret underground Protestant murder gang), and who were more than happy to kill government agents. Eventually they planned a rebellion, which involved a French invasion, but unfortunately this failed (twice). There was a rebellion, but it was disorganised, leaderless, and was easily crushed.

Notable members:

Theobald Wolfe Tone: Probably the most famous member, he wrote An Argument On Behalf Of The Catholics In Ireland (despite being Protestant himself), which protested the Penal Laws and argued for Catholic Emancipation. He was kicked out of Ireland in 1795 after he was caught speaking with a French spy, and after some time in America he sailed to France, where he helped put together a planned French invasion of Ireland, which failed, and then put together another, smaller one, which succeeded. However, the French still lost and he was caught by the British and dragged to Dublin, where he was sentenced to death and committed suicide the night before he was supposed to be executed.

Lord Edward FitzGerald: The other most famous member, he was a veteran of the American War of Independence and a soldier who had the job of arming the rebels. He also spent time with Thomas Paine in revolutionary France before returning to Ireland and going into hiding after most of the other leaders were arrested, but he was eventually captured (in an extremely dramatic fashion) and he died in prison. Also, fun fact, he was Charles James Fox's cousin.

Samuel Neilson: A Belfast wool merchant who originally came up with the idea of the United Irishmen as a group for people of all religious groups who wanted Irish independence. He also ran the Northern Star newspaper, which was the United Irishmen's propaganda organ. This led to him being arrested multiple times, and eventually he was exiled to America, where he died of yellow fever.

Henry Joy McCracken: Another wool merchant who ended up running the... ah... more militant arm of the organisation. He was (probably) in charge of many of the assassinations pulled off in the 1790s, and he went to prison several times for it. He also led armies in multiple actual formal battles, before being captured and hanged despite his sister's attempts to save him.

Mary Ann McCracken: Henry Joy's sister, she ran the family business and campaigned for women's rights and for worker's rights. She was also in charge of the women's wing of the United Irishmen.

Thomas Russell: A close friend or McCracken and Tone, he was a key figure in organising an alliance with the militant Catholic Defenders. He was arrested in 1798 and held until 1802, after which he promptly got involved in Emmet's rebellion, which he died for.

Arthur O'Connor: A leader who was basically forced to do all of the paperwork all of the time. He went to prison early on, and from there negotiated for the lives of many of the prisoners, which involved the government "allowing" them to go into exile in return for confessions. He went to France after the failed uprising and tried to get Bonaparte to give him a fleet to invade Ireland, but they disagreed because O'Connor refused to give up his principles and become a Bonapartist, so the plans fell through and O'Connor was forced to sort through the wills of dead United Irishmen from France for the rest of his life.

Oliver Bond: He didn't really do anything incredibly important BUT a lot of the leaders were arrested at his house, which was their meeting place. If you ever see "arrested at Bond's," that's what that means.

William Orr: A farmer who was accused of being a United Irishman and who was killed for it despite strong evidence that he didn't do anything. He became a martyr for the whole movement, with "Remember Orr" being their rallying cry.

Robert Emmet: The man who led the 1803 rebellion. He's honestly his own thing but I'm including him here for completion.

I've finished the BBC terror documentary, which was honestly like being psychologically tortured--I'm sure the Frev people on here know what I'm talking about, I don't need to go into it from a French Revolution perspective. What I'm more interested in saying, however, is that it was really absolutely dreadful from a British history perspective as well.

There's a few specific things I'd like to mention with that. Firstly, all of the stereotypical "the government killed whoever the hell they wanted just because people said something that they kind of didn't agree with" talk. It's really bold, actually, for a British person to say with their whole chest that acting like that in the 1790s is bad, because they did the exact same thing at the exact same time in Ireland, with the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion. In fact, several of the things that the documentary says about Robespierre would probably be better applied to the British government's Lord Camden--the idea of sham trials applied to anyone who even slightly opposes you simply because, for instance, happened with William Orr, and the idea of arresting people in pubs for making a remark that you didn't entirely agree with happened to Charles Hamilton Teeling, and violently silencing journalists you don't agree with happened with Samuel Neilson, all on Camden's orders. There was an undercurrent throughout the entire thing, I felt, of "we did this as well, to the Irish, but we're going to ignore that bit," that made it at some points genuinely sickening to watch.

Secondly, there was a line about Robespierre not having a concept of controlled opposition that I found extremely ironic as well, because neither did the UK. The opposition of the time was considered borderline treasonous, and in some cases was considered actually treasonous (they would have tried and killed opposition leader Henry Grattan had Castlereagh not stopped them). In fact, when George Canning went into opposition in the 1800s he was told that it would be ungentlemanly and unfair to put up a real fight against the government, that it would be better of him to simply go along with them and only put up token opposition. So it's bold, as well, for the BBC to accuse someone from the 1790s of not having a concept of controlled opposition.

Overall I felt as if they, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the gaggle of British historians they had on there, didn't really know their British history either, and were just pretending that Ireland didn't exist for an hour and a half. Which is just laughable, really. What were they even trying to do with this film.

Image ID: text reading "Brought before the Privy Council, Coigly (or O'Coigley as he was commonly referred to in reports) denied under questioning from William Pitt ever being a member of the Corresponding Society, the Whig Club or "any other of the political societies" in England or to have ever attended their meetings. The arrests and". end ID.

This is so silly. there were several "Whig Club" groups but most likely he either meant an absolutely cringe fail group of wealthy British politicians who required a payment of multiple guineas to join and who did shit like splitting into two separate groups over the issue of whether or not their pro-reform group supported reform, OR the group of people including Lord Castlereagh who met in Dublin who Samuel Neilson specifically singled out as bad reformers because they all but included WE HATE CATHOLICS in their manifesto. and the Privy Council was asking Coigly, the Irish priest from rural Armagh, if he was part of either of those clubs. me when my intelligence on reform groups is definitely up to date

23,24,25,30

(30 is this - which historical inaccuracy and/or conspiracy theory annoys you the most?)

23. What’s your favourite historical song or song containing historical references?

That's a hard one. In terms of a song containing historical references, House of Borden is from the musical Lizzie and it's an absolute banger. In terms of an actual historical piece of music I have an obsession with the Nutcracker.

24. Who do you consider to be one of the most underrated historical figures?

Pretty much any of the United Irishmen other than Tone and Fitzgerald, take your pick. The one that comes to mind first is probably Samuel Neilson (of course). Thomas De Quincey, also. And Dorothy Wordsworth and Lord Castlereagh.

25. Who is the most overrated historical figure, in your opinion?

Alright so nobody shoot me for this but. I really do not like the overhype that Winston Churchill gets. I'm sure he's interesting in his own way but also the man was a raging bigot and also the UK's hero worship of him is haha. weird. also his biographies are fucking everywhere and I hate it when I go into a bookshop and it's like oh you want biographies? We have ones on Winston Churchill,

30. Which historical inaccuracy and/or conspiracy theory annoys you the most?

I'm putting this under a readmore because it involves incest

The conspiracy theory that William and Dorothy Wordsworth were in (romantic) love drives me. up the fucking wall. There's almost no evidence for it, other than the fact that they were very close and the way that she was acting weird when he got married, both of which can much more easily be explained by them 1. having a loving sibling relationship and 2. going through events such as the death of their parents together, which will have made them even more close. It's just very reminiscent of when two siblings hug and people are like ooooooh incesssst and I really do not like it.