Volunteers

Volunteers, a part‐time military force raised by local initiative during 1778–9. Its original purpose was to guard against invasion and to preserve law and order, at a time when regular troops had been removed to combat the American Revolution, and government lacked the money to revive the militia. Numbers rose from an estimated 12,000 in spring 1779 to 40,000 by September and to over 60,000 by May 1782. Members were drawn mainly from the urban and rural middle classes; officers, though elected by the rank and file, were generally from the gentry and aristocracy. The movement soon took on a wider political importance, both as the expression of an emerging middle‐class consciousness and as the basis of a new kind of organized extra‐parliamentary support for popular causes. Grattan, the duke of Leinster (see kildare), and other patriots took leading positions in the Volunteers, and under their leadership the movement played a central part in the campaign during 1779 for free trade. During 1780–2 the Volunteers gave continued support to the more militant patriots, their Convention at Dungannon (Feb. 1782) providing the starting point for the final, successful drive for legislative independence.

Following the Renunciation Act controversy the Volunteers, now under the leadership of Flood and Bishop Hervey, took up the issue of parliamentary reform. A Volunteer National Convention in Dublin (10 Nov.–2 Dec. 1783) drew up a detailed reform plan, but the House of Commons rejected bills based on its principles on 29 November and again on 21 March 1784. By this time the majority of the landed and parliamentary elite had reverted to open hostility towards the sort of ‘out of doors’ opinion represented by the Volunteers. During 1784 some Dublin radicals, notably Tandy, sought to broaden the base of the movement, recruiting growing numbers of working‐class Protestants, and also of Catholics, who had up to this point been largely excluded from the movement in deference to the continued legal prohibition on their bearing arms. However, this attempt to compensate for the loss of elite patronage by creating a mass movement proved ineffective. Meanwhile Charlemont, alarmed by signs that government might suppress Volunteering, successfully used his influence as commander‐in‐chief to damp down political agitation within the movement.

Enthusiasm for Volunteering recovered after 1789, as part of the general radical revival following the French Revolution. The early United Irishmen in particular looked to the resurgent movement as the instrument of reform, the staging of a third Dungannon convention (15–16 Feb. 1793) testifying to their hopes of repeating the triumphs of 1779–82. During 1793, however, the Gunpowder Act, prohibiting the import of arms, and the Convention Act effectively killed off Volunteering, while the raising of a new militia, followed by the yeomanry, removed its ostensible justification as a voluntary defence force.

Bibliography

O'Connell, M. R. , Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution (1965)