James "Jemmy" Hope (25 August 1764 – 10 February 1847) was a radical democrat in Ireland who organised among tenant farmers, tradesmen and labourers for the Society of the United Irishmen. In the Rebellion of 1798 he fought alongside Henry Joy McCracken at the Battle of Antrim. In 1803 he attempted to renew the insurrection against the British Crown in an uprising coordinated by Robert Emmett and the new republican directorate in Dublin. Among United Irishmen, Hope was distinguished by his conviction that "the fundamental question at issue between the rulers and the people" was "the condition of the labouring class".
Early life and family
Hope was born in Mallusk (parish of Templepatrick), County Antrim. His father, John Hope, a Scottish highlander and linen weaver, had emigrated from Scotland rather than compromise his Presbyterian Covenanter faith.
At age ten Hope was hired on a nearby farm. On winter evenings his master would make him sit "while he read in the Histories of Greece and Rome, and also Ireland, Scotland and England." Hope recalls that, together with comments on the news of the day, this turned his attention "early to the nature of the relations between the different classes of society". Labouring on the land, at a time when in Antrim the tenant Hearts of Steel led a violent resistance into the exactions of the largely Anglican landlords, Hope came to believe that "The Most High is lord of the soil; the cultivator is his tenant". Landlords who interceded in this relationship were oppressors.
Hope was later apprenticed as a linen weaver, then as a journeyman, while continuing his education at night classes. He married Rose Mullan, the daughter of a master weaver. Her brother, Luke Mullan, was a United Irishman. They had 4 surviving children, Luke Mullan Hope (1794–1827), editor of the Rushlight, Henry Joy McCracken Hope (1809–1872), writer of some religious verse, Robert Emmet Hope (1812–1864) and a daughter, Mathilda Hope. Rose died on 25 May 1830. Hope described her as a "gifted" woman who "with every advantage of mind and person, she was everything in this world to me, and when I lost her my happiness went to the grave with her".
Irish Volunteer
In the wake of the American Revolution, Hope joined the Roughfort Corps of the Irish Volunteers. By his own account, his "connection with politics began in the ranks of the Volunteers": they were "the means of breaking the first link in the penal chain". He identified the source of the country's poverty and distress.As a people, we were excluded from any share in framing the laws by which we were governed ... By force the poor were subdued and dispossessed of their interests in the soil; by fiction, the titles of the spoilers were established; and by fraud on the productive industry of future generations, the usurpation was continued.
In the Belfast Volunteer Review in 1792, marking the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, Hope paraded not with his Roughfort Corps but with 180 green-cockaded civilians from Carmoney and Templepatrick (common people who may not have been able to afford the costs of equipping themselves for the Volunteer ranks). They carried aloft a banner designed by Hope and painted by his brother-in-law with the inscription; "Our Gallic brother was born on the 14th July 1789; alas we are still in embryo. Superstitious galaxy. The cause of the Irish Bastille; let us unite to destroy it."
It was in the Volunteers that Hope first met Henry Joy McCracken and Samuel Neilson. After the Volunteer movement split on the question of full and immediate Catholic emancipation and was suppressed by the government in 1793, he joined them in the Society of the United Irishmen, albeit with some reservation. He "lamented that we should shrink from an open declaration of our views into conspiracy".
United Irishman
Hope concluded that in some quarters the movement for reform had been "merely between commercial and aristocratical interests, to determine which should have the people as its prey". In 1795, he took the United Irish pledge or “test” to "persevere in endeavouring to form a brotherhood of affection among Irishmen of every religious persuasion", and "to obtain an equal, full and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland". But by then, the Society was abandoning its hopes for parliamentary reform. Increasingly, thoughts turned toward insurrection and to prospects for assistance from the new French Republic.