John Allen (Irish nationalist)
John Allen | |
---|---|
Born | c. 1780 |
Rank | Colonel |
Unit | Irish Legion |
Battles/wars | Irish rebellion of 1803, Peninsular War, Saxon Campaign 1813 |
John Allen (c. 1780–1855) was a United Irishman, committed to an independent Irish republic. After a failed attempt with Robert Emmet in 1803 to renew the United Irish insurrection crushed five years before, he went into French exile and served with distinction in the army of Napoleon.
United Irishman
John Allen was a Protestant native of Dublin, where he was for some time a partner in a drapery business. He joined the Society of United Irishmen in the city and became involved in a broader conspiracy to coordinate an Irish insurrection with a French landing in the British Isles and a rising by Jacobin radicals in England.
Along with Father
Following the suppression of the United Irish insurrection in the summer of 1798, Allen joined Robert Emmet in seeking to re-establish the republican organisation on strictly military lines. In 1800 he is said to have accompanied Emmet on a mission to Irish exiles in Cadiz.[2]
In July 1803, an accidental explosion at one of their arms depots in Dublin forced them to declare themselves and attempt a seizure of the city. Allen led a rebel band, according to one witness of 300, but they failed to effect a conjunction with the command of Emmet and Myles Byrne in Thomas Street.[3] Unaware of Allen's approach, Emmet ordered his men to disband, and the attempt to seize the city broke up in series of disorderly altercations.
Allen is said to have escaped Dublin in the uniform of the Trinity College Yeomanry corps, and to have been "put into a cask, carried to George's Quay and shipped for France".[2]
Irish Legionnaire
In France, Allen joined Myles Byrne in the
In November 1815, Allen was one of six Irish Legion officers, including Myles Byrne, accused by the
In retirement, Allen lived first at Tours near fellow legionnaireGeneral William Lawless and later at Caen in Normandy. In the early 1840s, Allen returned secretly to Ireland to bring his elderly sisters back to Caen. In his Memoirs Byrne records that Allen died at Caen on 10 February 1855 apparently unmarried, his property passing to his sisters. Dr Thomas Dromgoole, a leading member of the Catholic Board (precursor to Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Association), who met Allen in France in 1820, considered that he "was a man of such firmness of character that he would have been fit to fill the highest situation in Ireland".[7]
References
- ^ Madden, Richard Robert (1846). The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times: v. 1. J. Madden & Company. pp. 27–30, 41. Archived from the original on 30 July 2021. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
- ^ a b c Woods, C. J. (2009). "Allen, John | Dictionary of Irish Biography". www.dib.ie. Archived from the original on 30 July 2021. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
- from the original on 30 July 2021. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
- ^ "Arthur O'Connor - Irish Paris". www.irishmeninparis.org. Archived from the original on 11 September 2020. Retrieved 17 August 2022.
- ^ Webb, Alfred (1878). "Colonel John Allen - Irish Biography". www.libraryireland.com. Archived from the original on 30 July 2021. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
- ^ Dunne-Lynch, Nicholas (2009). "Irish Legion officers of Kilkenny origin - Thomas Jackson". In the Shadow of the Steeple. 10: 153, 160. Archived from the original on 31 July 2021. Retrieved 31 July 2021.
- ^ Byrne, Myles (1907). Memoirs of Myles Byrne. London: Maunsel and Co Ltd. pp. Vol iii, pp. 190, 293.