Life
?1764-1846 [James Hope]; weaver and United Irishman; b. 25 Aug., Templemore,
Co. Antrim; mbr. of Roughfort Volunteers; joined United Irishmen in 1795;
enlisted members as cotton weaver in Dublin, acting as recruiting agent;
took part in Battle of Antrim [var. Ballynahinch], 1798; escaped to Dublin
after five months hiding in Ulster; acted as Emmet’s quartermaster
in 1803, and endeavoured with Russell to ‘rise’ the North, in
Co. Down, 1803; eluded arrest and returned to Belfast on political amnesty
in 1806;
later claimed that Bonaparte colluded with the English to deport Irish political exiles such as Thomas Russell [“their residence not being considered favourable to Napoleon's imperial views”]; employed by McCracken family; clerk to Joseph Smyth, proprietor
of Belfast Almanac; his poetry is collected in Madden’s Literary
Remains of the United Irishmen; Hope was still alive in 1846, when
Madden published his memoirs; regarded as fore-runner of Irish socialists;
there is a biography in Irish by Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin,
a Catholic Gaelic syndicalist and Gaelic League member in the 1930s. DIB
DIH DUB
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Criticism
(inter al.) Cathal O’Byrne, As I Roved Out (1946); A. T. Q.
Stewart, The Summer Soldiers, The 1798 Rebellion in Antrim and Down (Belfast: Blackstaff 1995).
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Quotations
Letter to Robert R. Madden: ‘At the time that politics were first
mooted in the north ... the mass confided in the writers and speakers,
as men who were necessarily competent to the direction of public affairs,
and laid more on them than they were able to perform, had they even been
all honest men ... The cause of ireland was the [sic] confined to a few
individuals. The masses had no idea of the possibility of managing their
own affairs.’ (Memoirs of Jemmy Hope, Belfast: British and
Irish Communist Organisation, 1972; quoted in Luke Gibbons, ‘The Politics
of Silence: Anne Devlin, Women and Irish Cinema’, Transformations
in Irish Culture, Field Day/Cork UP 1996, ftn. 7; p.196.) Gibbons
further remarks on James Hope’s criticism of the role of rhetoric
in the attempted revolution.
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Notes
R. R. Madden rescued Hope in Dublin and collected his papers; Note that, at
the end of Stewart Parker’s Northern Star (1984), McCracken
recognises in Hope the ‘real Northern Star’ [cf. United Irish
newspaper]. Also, Hope is a heroic figure in The Northern Iron
by George Birmingham [Hannay].
Portrait, James [Jemmie] Hope by William Charles Nixon, 1840, Bigger Collection; see Anne Crookshank, ed., Irish Portraits [Catalogue] (Ulster Mus. 1965). NOTE that Jemmy Hope is a character in Stewart Parker’s play on Henry Joy McCracken, Northern Star.
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