Archibald Hamilton Rowan

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.

Early life

Archibald Hamilton Rowan was born in the home of his grandfather, William Rowan, in London, and lived there with his mother and sister for much of his early life. 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 obeyed his grandfather's wishes by staying out of Ireland and graduating from Jesus College. [Matthew, H. C. G., and Brian Howard Harrison. 2004. Oxford dictionary of national biography: in association with the British Academy : from the earliest times to the year 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. vol. 47 p.982 ]

Hamilton Rowan traveled throughout the 1770s and 1780's, visiting parts of Europe, the Americas, and Northern Africa. During his travels, he witnessed early signs of revolutionary sentiment in America that may have planted the seeds of revolutionary inclinations that would flower later in his life. 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 [The Autobiography of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, p. 32] .

In 1781 Hamilton Rowan married Sarah Dawson in Paris, France. 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 on as a ward. Mrs. Hamilton thought to make a match for Sarah with the Reverend Benjamin Beresford, but the plan went awry when Beresford eloped with Hamilton Rowan's younger sister. Meanwhile, Hamilton Rowan fell in love with Dawson and married her. [Matthew, H. C. G., and Brian Howard Harrison. 2004. Oxford dictionary of national biography: in association with the British Academy : from the earliest times to the year 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. vol. 47 p.982] . The marriage proved to be an enduring love match, Sarah stood by her husband through all his later struggles and was the most important advocate for his pardon during his exile. The couple had ten children.

ociety of The United Irishman

Hamilton Rowan eventually returned to Ireland in his thirties and became a celebrity and (despite his wealth and privilege) a strong advocate for Irish liberty. In 1784 he joined the Killyleagh Volunteers (a militia group later associated with radical reform) under his father's command. Hamilton Rowan first gained public attention by championing the cause of fourteen-year-old Mary Neal in 1788. [Autbiography of Archibald Hamilton Rowan] Neal had been lured into a brothel and then assaulted by Lord Carhampton. Hamilton Rowan publicly denounced Carhampton and published a pamphlet "A Brief Investigation of the Sufferings of John, Anne, and Mary Neal" in the same year. An imposing figure at more than six feet tall, Hamilton 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 [Nicholson, Harold A Desire to Please: a story of Hamilton Rowan and the United Irishmen (1943) p 80-82] .

During the 1790s Hamilton Rowan became involved with the Society of the United Irishmen, working alongside famous radicals such as William Drennan, and Theobald Wolfe Tone. In 1790 Hamilton Rowan joined the Northern Whig Club, and by October had become a founding member of the Dublin Society of the United Irishmen [Wilson, David A. 1998. United Irishmen, United States: immigrant radicals in the early republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. p.17] . Hamilton Rowan was arrested for seditious libel in 1792 when caught handing out "An Address to the Volunteers of Ireland," a piece of United Irish propaganda.

Hamilton Rowan’s reputation for radicalism and bluster grew during this time when he left Ireland to confront the Lord Advocate of Scotland about negative 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, Hamilton 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, he went to trial and was found guilty of seditious libel, even though he was excellently defended by the famous John Philpot Curran. Hamilton 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 Hamilton Rowan retired to his apartments in Dublin’s Newgate Prison.

Treason and Exile

While imprisoned, Hamilton Rowan met The Reverend William Jackson an Irish-born Anglican clergyman who was working as a spy for the French Committee of Public Safety. Jackson’s mission was to assess Ireland’s readiness for revolution and French invasion. Jackson, Tone, and others met in Hamilton Rowan's Newgate cell to discuss the state of Ireland and the population’s willingness to overthrow British rule. But Jackson was betrayed by a friend acting as a spy for the British Government, was arrested and charged with high treason. Immediately following Jackson's arrest, Hamilton Rowan fled in order to escape being tried for high treason. He 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 their home in Dublin, Hamilton Rowan excused himself to the bedroom, where he 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 he was interrogated by Robespierre, who found him innocent of the charges raised against him and had Hamilton Rowan freed. In Paris, Hamilton Rowan became close friends with Mary Wollstonecraft and kept a faithful correspondence with her for many years. Hamilton 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. [The Autobiography of Archibald Hamilton Rowan p. 237-238]

Deciding that France was too dangerous, Hamilton Rowan moved next to Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States. He reached Philadelphia on July 4, 1795, reuniting with fellow United Irishmen in exile. To his dismay, he discovered Philadelphia to be as full of backstabbing and partisanship as France (albeit of a less bloody nature). His more radical Irish friends were already inserting themselves into the dispute between Jefferson’s Republican faction against Adams’ Federalists. He chose to leave Philadelphia for the more peaceful and less expensive shores of the Brandywine River in Delaware.

After fleeing Ireland, Hamilton Rowan was unable to access his fortune and was reduced to supporting himself by his own labor. He was able to borrow money from William Poole, a prominent Quaker in Wilmington, and purchase a calico mill [Ibid. p 308-309] . In Wilmington, Hamilton 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. Living in constant fear of summary deportation under the Alien and Sedition Acts, Hamilton Rowan took pains to socialize with both Federalists and Republicans, and he studiously avoided American politics. On Christmas Day 1797 his 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 Hamilton 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. Hamilton Rowan then worked for the flour mills hauling grain and flour by wheelbarrow to and from Wilmington.

During his time in America, Hamilton Rowan began writing his Memoirs, fearing he would never return to Ireland. He begins with an address to his family,

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. [Introduction to Autobiography]

However, thanks to the persistence of his wife, in 1801 he received a conditional pardon from the English Government and was able to leave Wilmington unmolested travel to Hamburg, Germany where he was reunited with his wife and children and lived until 1803.

Later life

Hamilton Rowan returned to the ancestral home of Killyleagh Castle, County Down, receiving a hero’s welcome. He was a respected figure, spending time in both Killyleagh and Dublin. While he had agreed to be a model citizen under the conditions of his return to Ireland, he remained somewhat active in politics and (contrary to the biographical tradition) never lost his youthful radicalism. Following his last public appearance at a meeting in the Rotunda in Dublin "organized by the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty" on the 20^th of January 1829, he was lifted up by a mob and paraded through the streets. [Nicholson, Harold A Desire to Please p. 188] . After the death of his wife and eldest son in quick succession, Hamilton Rowan passed away in his home on 1^st of November 1834, an old man. While several of his radical acquaintances, like Tone and Jackson, died as a result of their political activities, Archibald Hamilton Rowan was able to escape this fate and live to the full age of 84.

Hamilton Rowan was unable to finish his memoirs, and after his death, his family handed his papers and the task off to his friend, Thomas Kennedy Lowrey, who was also unable to finish them. Lowrey in turn passed them off to William Hamilton Drummond who finished the job and published Hamilton Rowan’s Autobiography in 1840. According to Harold Nicholson, none of Hamilton Rowan's working papers exist, and some of them were burned by either his great-aunt Fanny or his great-aunt Jane [Ibid p. 58] . However, Hamilton Rowan produced several versions of his memoirs (in varying degrees of completion) at his own lithographic press in Dublin. These can be found in libraries in Ireland (Royal Irish Academy, National Library) and in Wilmington, Delaware (The Historical Society of Delaware). And manuscript versions of the memoirs by various hands (again, in varying degrees of completion) are preserved in the Royal Irish Academy, The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and The Delaware Historical Society.

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.

Hamilton Rowan, Archibald. 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.

Footnotes