Myles Byrne

Myles (or Miles) Byrne (20 March 1780 – 24 January 1862) was an Irish rebel leader. He played a role during Wexford in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and as a fighter in the continued guerrilla struggle against British Crown forces in the Wicklow Hills until 1802. In 1803 collaborated closely with Robert Emmet in plans for a renewed insurrection in Dublin. After these misfired, he took a commission in Napoleon's Irish Legion, seeing action in the Low Countries, Spain and at the Battle of Leipzig. Under the Bourbon Restoration he was deployed to Greece, and retired as a chef de bataillon. In his later years, he was the Paris correspondent for the Young Irelander paper The Nation, and dictated his memoirs. In these, he advanced the image of the United Irishmen as a cohesive revolutionary organisation dedicated to the achievement of a national democratic government.

Myles (he usually spelt his name Miles) Byrne was born in the townland of Ballylusk near Monaseed, County Wexford, Ireland, on 20 March 1780, into a Catholic farming family.

At the age of 17 Byrne was asked to join the government Yeomanry. He choose instead to join the Society of United Irish. In defiance of the British Crown and the Protestant Ascendancy the oath-bound movement was determined to achieve an independent and representative government for Ireland. He participated in preparations in Wexford for the 1798 Rebellion, and at the age of 18 fought at the Battle of Tubberneeing on 4 June and, in command of a division of pikemen, in the attack on Arklow (9 June) in which the rebel leader Father Michael Murphy was killed. In the face of a general rout, he led a rebel charge in the Battle of Vinegar Hill (21 June), in the defence a position he considered impossibly exposed and a measure of the profoundly misguided strategy of the rebel leadership.

Keeping command of a small band, Byrne seized Goresbridge (23 June) but had to deplore the murder of several prisoners and other atrocities committed by his men in revenge for the torture and executions that had been visited upon the peasantry by the yeomanry and government militia. After further skirmishes, he joined Joseph Holt and Michael Dwyer in taking to the Wicklow Hills to continue a guerrilla resistance. The failure of General Humbert in Connacht to take the same course with his expeditionary force in August – to take to the mountains and await renewed rebel mobilisation and reinforcement – and to seek open battle with the "English army", he attributed to the French commander's vanity.

After Holt accepted terms (transportation to Australia) in November, Byrne, assisted by his sister, escaped to Dublin. He recalled of his sister: "If I had not remarked a long scar on her neck, she would not have mentioned anything herself. A yeoman ... threatened to cut her throat with his sabre if she did not tell instantly the place in which I was hiding. The cowardly villain, no doubt, would have put his threat in execution had not some of his comrades interfered to prevent him".

In the winter of 1802-03 Byrne entered into the plans of Robert Emmet and Anne Devlin for a renewed uprising. In his Memoirs, Byrne describes a meeting he arranged between Robert Emmet and the Wexford rebel leader Thomas Cloney at Harold's Cross Green, Dublin, just prior to Emmet's Rebellion: "I can never forget the impression this meeting made on me at the time – to see two heroic patriots, equally devoted to poor Ireland, discussing the best means of obtaining her freedom".

In July 1803, the plans unravelled when Michael Dwyer (Devlin's cousin), still holding out in Wicklow, recognised that there were neither the promised arms nor convincing proof of an intended French landing. In the north Thomas Russell and James Hope found no enthusiasm for a renewal of the struggle in what in '98 had been the strongest United Irish and Catholic Defender districts.

In Dublin, with their preparations revealed by an accidental explosion of a rebel arms depot, Emmet proceeded with a plan to seize the centres of government. The rising, for which Byrne turned out with Emmet and Malachy Delaney in gold-trimmed green uniforms, was broken up after a brief confrontation in Thomas Street. Unaware that John Allen was approaching with a band, according to one witness, of 300, Emmet ordered what R.R. Madden recorded as "a motley assemblage of [80] armed men ... under the evident excitement of drink" to disperse.