Introduction

Summary

Dublin Castle, 25 December 1803

He lay in a bed set up in his rooms in the dark forbidding castle which only five months before had been the objective of a wildly speculative revolutionary insurrection. He had some reason to feel satisfied, for he had been responsible for successfully excising the poisonous sore of revolutionary Irish nationalism in the aftermath of Robert Emmet's rebellion. But the effort had completely exhausted him, leaving him emotionally drained and the suffering victim of a chronic knee complaint. Even the sound of a door slamming nearby caused tremors of pain to flow through his body and sparked twitches of anxiety in his mind. Too frail to face the short journey to his residence in Pheonix Park, he struggled to write a letter to Charles Abbot, his old friend, confidant and Speaker of the House of Commons. With a shaky hand and sardonic irony, he began: ‘I write to you from my bed where I am keeping a merry Christmas’. The purpose of the letter was twofold: to inform Abbot of the continued internecine warfare between the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Hardwicke, and the commander of the military forces in Ireland, Lord Cathcart; and to announce the surrender of the Dwyer gang, the last significant group of rebels in the country. Ireland, he wrote, was now safe, although he still feared further disorder if the French invaded. Exactly one week later William Wickham resigned his position as Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, an event that marked the end of his decade-long career as one of Britain's great spymasters.

Possibly because of the low-key nature of his resignation from public life, possibly because he had always shunned the limelight, William Wickham's influence on his times has never been fully addressed. Yet he remains the most important British figure in the era of the French Revolution not to have been the subject of a modern biography.