23 Facts About James Coigly

Father James Coigly was a Roman Catholic priest in Ireland active in the republican movement against the British Crown and the kingdom's Protestant Ascendancy.

James Coigly served the Society of United Irishmen as a mediator in the sectarian Armagh Disturbances and as an envoy both to the government of the French Republic and to radical circles in England with whom he sought to coordinate an insurrection.

James Coigly was proud of his ancestry, having had great grandfathers who had fought and died in the Jacobite cause at Derry and the Boyne.

James Coigly has been described as "no friend of the [French] revolution".

At the College in Paris, James Coigly had already demonstrated what the historian of the diocese of Down and Conor recorded as the "systematic insubordination" that was the "forerunner of his sad and subsequent career, which terminated on the scaffold".

James Coigly took the unprecedented step of initiating legal proceedings against the college to secure a scholarship, and then followed this up with an appeal to restore to students the right to elect their superiors.

In Paris, James Coigly would have been familiar with the work of the Irish theologian Luke Joseph Hooke.

Madden, believes that it was James Coigly who introduced the Defenders of County Louth to the Dublin United Irish leader Napper Tandy.

James Coigly played a leading role in what proved to be the United Irishmen's last test of constitutional means: campaigns to return Lord Edward Fitzgerald from Down and Arthur O'Connor from Antrim in the 1797 parliamentary elections.

James Coigly made himself "as active as possible" and is suspected of having been the author of the campaign pamphlet, A view of the present state of Ireland.

In Ulster, where the Catholic Church was "almost totally united in its condemnation of disaffection", James Coigly is thought to have been one of only half a dozen priests, out of seventy in the province, active in the republican movement, and by far the most prominent.

James Coigly walked the streets of Paris, not in clerical garb, but in a military tunic.

James Coigly took the opportunity of exile to form the alliances that would reassure the more hesitant leaders in Ireland and advance the call for a general insurrection.

James Coigly had been to Paris in 1796 and on that occasion had carried an address from the "Secret Committee of England" to the French Directory.

James Coigly radicalism was closer to the egalitarianism of the Defenders than to the liberal constitutionalism of many the leading United Irishmen.

James Coigly found that it resonated with the distressed textile workers of Lancashire as it had with artisans, journeymen and their apprentices in Belfast and Dublin.

From Manchester, James Coigly travelled on to London where he conferred with those Irishmen who had hastened the radicalisation of the London Corresponding Society.

James Coigly travelled via Hamburg with Arthur MacMahon, a Presbyterian minister and United Irish "colonel" from Holywood, County Down.

Turner was a British informer so on his arrival in England, James Coigly's every move was monitored by Bow Street Runners.

James Coigly met with the north of England radicals en route, informing them that this would be his last visit; if he returned it would be to see the Tree of Liberty planted in Manchester.

James Coigly refused the offer of his life in return for implicating his fellow defendants who were acquitted.

James Coigly had refused an offer from John Binns to take the blame for the seditious address.

Yet James Coigly was written out of the general narrative history of 1798.