The Wearing of the Green

The Wearing of the Green: The Life of James Napper Tandy

James Napper Tandy, ironmonger's son, Dublin municipal agitator, Volunteer artillery commander, co-founder of the Society of United Irishmen, French général de brigade, and the revolutionary immortalised in "The Wearing of the Green", was one of the most consequential and most contradictory political figures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Born in the Cornmarket district of Dublin in 1739 and educated at the celebrated Quaker school at Ballitore alongside Edmund Burke, Tandy devoted thirty years to the transformation of the political order that governed Ireland, building his popular authority through the guild halls and council chambers of his native city before helping to found the United Irishmen alongside Wolfe Tone. He took the oath of the Catholic Defenders, commanded Volunteer artillery before the Irish Parliament, and eventually sailed as a French general toward the Donegal coast in 1798, arriving to find the rebellion already crushed. Arrested in Hamburg, tried for treason in Dublin, sentenced to death in Lifford Jail, and ultimately released through Napoleon Bonaparte's personal intervention during the Peace of Amiens negotiations, Tandy died in Bordeaux in August 1803, just weeks after Robert Emmet's final failed rising. This is the first full narrative biography of a founding figure of Irish republicanism, honest about his failures, generous toward his courage, and attentive throughout to the world that made him and the world he helped to make.