Napper the politician
To call Napper Tandy larger than life might be simply to describe his physique; the man himself was reportedly seven foot tall and boasted a nose so large that a political adversary once suggested it stand for election in its own right. But if ever one deserved the description, then Napper was that man.
His career saw him develop from a Dublin Corporation member in the 1770s, where he quickly established a reputation for exposing corruption in officialdom, to a seat in the Irish Parliament within a very short time, and it was as an Irish MP that he came into his forte. Tandy, who had long since identified English rule as the root cause of much of Ireland’s ills, used his status to promote his agenda, and it was one that at once horrified and enraged the English.
When the Irish MPs voted a congratulations to the USA on its declaration of independence it was Tandy, already with enough enemies in high places to have cowed a lesser man, who was identified as its author, an action that earned him notoriety in London, where he quickly became a target of ridicule and undisguised odium. But this simply confirmed what Tandy had long believed about how the English political system operated, and sharpened his republican sentiments rather than stifled them. His leadership of a boycott against English businesses in Ireland further increased the comtempt in which he was held, but was instrumental in bringing about the establishment of an Irish Parliament in 1782 - one which, for the first time in Ireland's history, had some real legislative clout. To many Ireland was on a fast track to independence, and events in France only served to heighten this sense of optimism and lead it to be expressed in ever more republican, and revolutionary, terms.
The road to revolution
Tandy led the Dublin branch of Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen and despite, or probably because of, a concerted effort to have him banished from public life by the Crown forces, his popularity in his native city had now become a countrywide phenomenon. Things however were obviously coming to a head, and when England proscribed the United Irishmen in 1795, Tandy, along with its other leaders, found themselves with prices on their heads. He fled to America, while Tone went on to France and began negotiating French support for a revolution in Ireland. By 1798 Tandy, too, was in France and was given command of a small fleet of French ships.
But events conspired to wreck Tone’s vision. General Hoche, the scheme’s main sponsor, died and Napoleon Bonaparte elected to concentrate French policy eastwards. The Irish "revolution" was a military disaster and Tandy’s fleet, arriving in Donegal with the fight already lost, upped anchor and fled to Bergen in Norway (capturing two English ships on the way). In the free city of Hamburg Tandy was controversially arrested and deported by the British, ending up back in Dublin on a charge of treason.
The French ultimatum
If English estimation of Tandy was now bordering on fanatical hatred, his reputation in France however was quite the opposite. The French, regarded his deportation from Hamburg so seriously that they blockaded the port and threatened war. The English capitulated. Tandy was convicted, but allowed into exile, and on his arrival in France was feted as a republican hero. He died there, still revered in both his native and adopted countries, though such reverence would be hard to deduce from histories written by English hands even 200 years later. In death it seemed, as well as life, Napper was a man to be reckoned with!
Source:
"Rebels and Informers: Stirrings of Irish Independence" Author: James Knox Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan 1998 ISBN: 0312210973
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