This is a fascinating source (online here) of first-hand accounts of the events prior to, during, and after, the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland. Archibald Hamilton Rowan (1757–1834) was the son of Gawen Hamilton of Killyleagh Castle in County Down, and Jane Rowan, but AHR was born and raised among the "privileged elite" of London society.
AHR had never set foot in Ireland until 1784, aged 27, after some years of living with his mother in Paris. AHR bought an estate at Rathcoffy in County Kildare just west of Dublin - only about 7 miles away from palatial Carton House, (which today is a luxury 5 star hotel and resort, where Real Madrid have stayed - website here).
Carton House was the family seat of AHR's contemporary and fellow United Irishman, Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763-1798), who was one of the sons of the 1st Duke of Leinster, and whom AHR described in his autobiography as a 'high-spirited young nobleman'.
The French Revolution began in May 1789 and AHR was back in France in early 1794. His accounts of what he witnessed and experienced there are illuminating. The high-minded revolutionary ideals had become La Terreur, bloodletting and anarchy, as power shifted from side to side. Here's one example.
"It now became a measure of personal safety, to be able to declare that one had been imprisoned during Robespierre's tyranny. It was dangerous even to appear like a Jacobin, as several persons were murdered in the streets, by La Jeunesse Parisienne, merely because they wore long coats and short hair."
AHR left France for America in June 1795, under the pseudonym of James Thomson, and eventually came back to Europe in 1800, and then to Killyleagh in 1806 on the death of his father.
I've been meaning to read this for a very long time, and it's proving a rich source.
More thoughts to follow.
• BBC History Extra: The Story of the French Revolution through 7 severed heads (click here)
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