Archibald Hamilton Rowan

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Archibald Hamilton Rowan (May 1, 1751 - November 1, 1834), christened Archibald Hamilton, was born in London, son of Gawen Hamilton of Killyleagh Castle, Co. Down and Lady Rowan Hamilton. Rowan was an Irish celebrity and founding member of The Dublin Society of The United Irishmen.

Contents 1 Early Life 2 Society of The United Irishman 3 Treason and Exile 4 Later Life 5 Notes 6 Footnotes

[edit] Early Life

Archibald Hamilton Rowan was born in the home of his grandfather, William Rowan, in London, and lived there for much of his early life, along with his mother and sister. When his grandfather died in 1767, he inherited a large sum of money under the stipulation that he would add the maternal name Rowan, receive an Oxbridge education, and not visit Ireland before his 25^th birthday. He attended Cambridge, and was rusticated for throwing a tutor into the River Cam. Upon his return he fulfilled his duty to his grandfather's will, graduating from Jesus College.^[1]

Rowan traveled throughout the 1770's and 1780's, visiting parts of Europe, the Americas, and Northern Africa. During his travels, he witnessed early signs of revolutionary sentiment in America. While serving as private secretary to Lord Charles Montague, the governor of South Carolina, he witnessed the South Carolina legislature's vote to repaint the railings around the statue of Pitt the Elder, an affront to the ministry of Lord North under which Montague served. Montague dissolved the legislature, only to see all the members re-elected ^[2].

In 1781 Rowan married Sarah Dawson in Paris. Miss Dawson was the daughter of a former neighbor and did not have any fortune of her own. She was brought into the family by Mrs. Hamilton who took her as her ward. Mrs. Hamilton thought to make a match for Sarah with the Reverend Benjamin Beresford, but the plan went awry when Beresford eloped with Rowan's younger sister. The elopement caused great scandal which reached all the way to Paris where the young couple had settled. Rowan fell in love with Miss Dawson and married her.^[3]. The marriage proved to be a love match, Dawson stood by her husband through all his later struggles and was his most important advocate during his appeals for pardon. The couple had ten children.

[edit] Society of The United Irishman

Upon his return to Ireland in his thirties, Rowan became a celebrity an advocate for Irish liberty despite his wealth and privilege. In 1784 Rowan returned to Ireland and joined the Killyleagh Volunteers (a militia group later associated with radical reform) under his father's command. Rowan gained public attention championing fourteen year-old Mary Neal in 1788.^[4] Neal had been lured into a brothel and then assaulted by Lord Carhampton. Rowan publicly denounced him and published a pamphlet A Brief Investigation of the Sufferings of John, Anne, and Mary Neal in the same year. An imposing man in excess of six feet, Rowan's notoriety grew when he entered a Dublin dining club threatening several of Mary Neal's detractors, with his massive Newfoundland at his side, and a Shillelagh in hand. The incident won him public applause and celebrity as a champion of the poor^[5].

During the 1790's Rowan became involved with the United Irishmen, working alongside famous radicals such as William Drennan, and Theobald Wolfe Tone. In 1790 Rowan joined the Northern Whig Club, and by October had become a founding member of the Dublin Society of the United Irishmen^[6]. Rowan was arrested for seditious libel in 1792 when caught handing out An Address to the Volunteers of Ireland, a piece of United Irishmen propaganda, but would not go to trial for nearly two years.

During this time Rowan left Ireland to confront the Lord Advocate of Scotland about comments made in respect to his character and that of members of the Society of the United Irishmen. As a prominent member of the Irish gentry Rowan was an important figure in the United Irishmen and became the contact for the Scottish radical societies as a result of his visit. Upon his return to Dublin, Rowan went to trial and was found guilty of seditious libel, even though he was excellently defended by John Philpot Curran. Rowan was sentenced to two years imprisonment, received a fine of ₤500, and was forced to pay two assurities for good behavior of ₤1,000 each. In January of 1794 Rowan retired to his apartments in Newgate Prison.

[edit] Treason and Exile

While imprisoned, Rowan met The Reverend William Jackson a Church of Ireland political figure, who was working for the French Directory. Jackson’s mission was to assess Ireland’s readiness for revolution and French invasion. Jackson, Wolfe Tone, and others met in Rowan's Newgate cell to discuss the state of Ireland in its preparation to overthrow British rule. But, Jackson was betrayed by a friend who had been spying for the British Government, and was charged with treason. The day after Jackson's arrest, Rowan fled in order to escape being tried for high treason. Rowan convinced his jailer to allow him to visit his wife on the pretense of signing legal documents. While the jailer sat in the dining room of Rowan’s home in Dublin, Rowan climbed down a rope made of knotted bed sheets to a waiting horse. Unwilling to be taken alive, he kept a razor blade in his sleeve and fled South to the coast. There he hired a boat to sail to France, and upon his arrival he was immediately arrested as a British spy. While in prison Rowan was interrogated by Robespierre, who found him innocent of the charges against him and had him freed. In Paris, Rowan became close friends with Mary Wollstonecraft and kept a faithful correspondence with her for many years. Rowan soon found himself in the middle of the Thermidor Revolution. He recalls:

In two days after the execution of Robespierre, the whole commune of Paris, consisting of about sixty persons, were guillotined in less than one hour and a half, in the Place de la Revolution; and though I was standing above a hundred paces from the place of execution, the blood of the victims streamed under my feet.^[7]

Rowan decided that France was too dangerous and as a matter of personal safety, he took a small boat down river towards Le Havre, but

an alarmist sans culotte espied me, and immediately denounced me as 'Un deputé qui s'evadoit avec l'or de la nation.' He procured a musket, which he from time to time leveled at me, and threatened to fire, as often as the boat, either driven by the current or to avoid barges, approached so near the side he was on that the battlements prevented his having full view of me.^[8]

By the time he reached the shore, a sizable crowd had assembled and Rowan was forced to show his papers to a guard, and meet the Mayor of Passy, in order to avoid being killed as a traitor to the Revolution. Rowan chartered a boat from Le Havre to Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States. Rowan reached Philadelphia on July 4, 1795, reuniting with fellow United Irishmen in exile. Rowan discovered Philadelphia to be as full of backstabbing and partisanship as France. Rowan’s more radical friends were already inserting themselves into Jefferson’s Republican faction against Adam’s Federalists. So he chose to leave Philadelphia for the peaceful shores of the Brandywine River in Delaware.

After fleeing Ireland, Rowan was unable to access his fortunes and left was destitute. Rowan was forced to work and rely on the compassion of others to keep food on his table. Rowan was able to borrow money from William Poole, a prominent Quaker in Wilmington, and purchase a calico mill^[9]. In Wilmington, Rowan led a very public life, enjoying the company of prominent Wilmingtonians such as Poole, John Dickinson, and Caesar A. Rodney, who later became Secretary of State for Jefferson. On Christmas Day 1797 Rowan's cottage on the Brandywine burned to the ground killing his two dogs, destroying most of his library, and leaving him homeless. The next year his business partner refused to make up the accounts for the calico mill, so Rowan was forced to pay the bills out of pocket, and take over the entire operation himself. But with little knowledge of the operations or business, the press was sold at a loss of $500. Rowan then worked for the flour mills hauling grain and flour by wheelbarrow to and from Wilmington.

During his time in America, Rowan began writing his Memoirs, fearing he would never return to Ireland. From the forward,

My dear Children, Whilst residing at Wilmington on the Delaware, in the United States of America, not expecting to return to Europe, and unwilling to solicit my family to rejoin me there, I was anxious to leave you some memorial of a parent whom in all probability you would never know personally.^[10]

Yet, in 1801 he received a conditional pardon from the English Government, to travel unmolested and left Wilmington for Hamburg, Germany where he lived until 1803 where he reunited with his adoring wife and beloved children. When, because of his good behavior, the British Government allowed Rowan to retake his lands and seat at Killyleagh Castle, his father having recently died,

[edit] Later Life

Rowan became a respected landlord, spending time in both Killyleagh and Dublin. While Rowan had agreed to be a model citizen under the conditions of his return to Ireland, he remained active in politics. Following his last public appearance at a meeting in the Rotunda "organized by the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty" on the 20^th of January 1829, he was recognized in the street only to be lifted up by a mob and paraded through Dublin.^[11] Rowan stayed active in liberal, if not radical, circles for his entire life. After the death of his wife and eldest son in quick succession, Rowan passed away in his home on 1^st of November 1834, an old man. While most of his contemporary radical friends died from unnatural early deaths, Archibald Hamilton Rowan was able to escape this fate and live to the full age of 84.

Rowan was unable to finish his memoirs, so they were handed off to his friend who was unable to finish editing them and passed them off to William Drummond who had them published in 1840. According to Harold Nicolson, no copies of Rowan's original manuscript edition of his biography exist and that the original was burned by either his great-aunt Fanny or his great-aunt Jane^[12], however several partial editions are scattered throughout libraries in Ireland and Wilmington, many were gifts to friends printed on Rowan’s personal lithographic press

[edit] Notes

Matthew, H. C. G., and Brian Howard Harrison. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In Association with the British Academy : from the Earliest Times to the Year 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Rowan, Archibald Hamilton. The Autobiography of Archibald Hamilton Rowan. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972.

Nicolson, Harold George. The Desire to Please, A Story of Hamilton Rowan and the United Irishmen. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943.

[edit] Footnotes