Thomas Paliser Russell (21 November 1767 – 21 October 1803) was a founding member, and leading organiser, of the United Irishmen marked by his radical-democratic and millenarian convictions. A member of the movement's northern executive in Belfast, and a key figure in promoting a republican alliance with the agrarian Catholic Defenders, he was arrested in advance of the risings of 1798 and held until 1802. He was executed in 1803, following Robert Emmet's aborted rising in Dublin for which he had tried, but failed, to raise support among United and Defender veterans in the north.
Background
Russell was born in Dromahane, County Cork to an Ascendancy family that, early 1770s, moved to Dublin when his father, a veteran of the American War, was appointed Captain of Invalids at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. At the age of fifteen, he sailed with his brother's regiment to India. In July 1783 he was commissioned ensign in an infantry regiment and saw action in the Second Anglo-Mysore War. At Cannanore he distinguished himself by carrying his wounded commanding officer from the battlefield. His services made him "favourably known" to Sir John Burgoyne and Lord Cornwallis. He was, however, disgusted by what he regarded as "the unjust and rapacious conduct pursued by the authorities in the case of two native women", and returned disaffected to Ireland in 1786. After briefly studying for the church ministry, he spent the next four years as a half-pay officer in Dublin pursuing studies of science, philosophy and politics.
In July 1790 in the visitors' gallery in the Irish House of Commons, he met Theobald Wolfe Tone. He found Tone equally critical of the proceedings in the chamber below where the patriot leader Henry Grattan was unable to capitalise on his triumph in securing Ireland's legislative independence from England (the "Revolution of 1782"") to effect meaningful reform. Writing his Autobiography six years later in Paris, Tone was to describe the encounter with Russell as "one of the most fortunate in my life".
Russell in Belfast
At the end of August 1790, Russell was appointed as an officer to the 64th Regiment of foot stationed in Belfast. As an officer of the garrison, Russell was received into the society of the town's newly emerging professional and business class. Largely Presbyterian, they were resentful of the privileges and monopolies of the Anglican Ascendancy and sympathetic to what they perceived as the democratic ideals of the American, and now French, revolutions.
With his keen mind and his own radical bent, Russell became a confidante of William Drennan, Samuel McTier, Samuel Neilson and later of Henry Joy McCracken, James Hope, and others who were to play a prominent role in the United Irish movement.
It is said that Russell admired and respected men and women alike. Both Drennan's sister Martha McTier and McCracken's sister Mary Ann McCracken took him into their confidence. Mary Ann, who regarded Russell as "a model of manly beauty" with a grace "which nothing but superiority of intellect can give", shared with him her enthusiasm for the female-emancipatory ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft. McTier had Russell address meetings of other radically-minded women and declared: "I admire that man much and had I the power I do believe that he would be the first man that I would serve".
Russell appeared more than willing to join McTier and McCracken in their enthusiasm for Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of their rights as women (1792): "women in public offices", he noted in his Journal, were "as clever as men. Queens, poetesses etc. etc, In merchants houses they keep accounts as well as men". His advanced thoughts on their rights, however, did not preclude a conflicted relationship with women. His Journal was also to record the torment both of a love for the idealised and unapproachable Eliza Goddard (daughter of a close friend of McTier's) and of guilt-ridden visits to Belfast prostitutes.
In October 1791, and in the presence of Tone, invited to Belfast as the proponent of political union with disenfranchised Catholics, Russell attended the inaugural meeting of the Society of United Irishmen. While Tone recapitulated his Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, Russell presented a history of the Catholic Committee in Dublin and of his own negotiations with leading Catholics. The resolutions, which Tone had asked Russell to write, called for the elimination of all remaining sacramental tests and for an "equal representation of all the people" in the Dublin Parliament.