On the eighteenth of October, 1798, a dispatch from Dublin Castle disavowed the acquittal pronounced by a court-martial convened in the city barracks. Lord Cornwallis directed the immediate dissolution of that court, and the cashiering of Hugh Wollaghan from the yeomanry corps. Three days earlier, the assembled officers had declared him not guilty of the death of Thomas Dogherty. Between those two acts, a single question had received two divergent answers: had the tribunal established the charge of murder, and could the civil authority brook its verdict?
The proceedings come down to us through the appendix to an 1876 edition of the History of the Irish Rebellion by Charles Hamilton Teeling, who died in 1850. This memoir reprints the trial and the viceregal letter without laying claim to certified stenography; the spoken testimony must therefore remain attributed. Yet the passage shows how the politics of the insurrection entered the courtroom—not as mere background, but woven into the very cross-examination of the witnesses.
The charge laid the deed at Delgany, in County Wicklow, on the first of October. Hugh Wollaghan, a yeoman of the town of Middleton, stood accused of having entered the dwelling of Thomas Dogherty, of having there shot him to death, and of having acted with the instigation and encouragement of Charles and James Fox. The same entry adds that James Fox stood likewise indicted for discharging a shot at Margaret Barry. The heading of the record bears Wollaghan’s name alone; yet throughout the pages, the Foxes appear as co-defendants, without the text supplying any distinct or complete judgment upon their fate. This irregularity of the record must not be patched over by conjecture. Wollaghan pleaded not guilty.
The first deposition was that of Mary Dogherty, mother to Thomas. By her account, Wollaghan came to her house on the preceding Monday—the first of October—and demanded whether there were any rebels within. She answered that there was none but a sick lad. The man asked the boy if he were Dogherty’s eldest son; the lad rose up and said he was. Mary then related a threat of death, followed by an attempt to fire. The piece missed fire at the first. One Charles Fox entered, she said, though she made clear he was not either of the prisoners then standing at the bar.
In the account she subsequently rendered, she seized the musket to turn it from her son. A shot went off, wounding him in the arm; having stepped outside, Wollaghan was said to have returned, and a second discharge proved fatal to Thomas. Mary testified that she held the lad’s head in her lap as he expired. She was the primary witness to the scene. The record notes that Esther Dogherty, sister to the deceased, had been in the house, and summarily records that she was examined upon the same heads and corroborated her mother. Another sister had quitted the cottage before the shot was fired.
Mary assigned a limited role to James Fox, whom she claimed to have seen outside, bearing a gun, yet without taking part, to her knowledge, in the deed. She affirmed she had nothing to lay to his charge. Margaret Barry was called in her turn; the record condenses her answer, stating she had nothing to say against James Fox nor against the prisoners at the bar. The proof against Wollaghan rested thus, in these pages, principally upon the word of Mary, with the brief corroboration attributed to Esther; as to the other defendants, the text leaves their outlines dimmer still.
The cross-examination swiftly shifted the debate from the cottage to political allegiance. Mary was asked whether her husband and another son had been out in the rebellion, and whether that son had been slain at Dunboyne fighting the King’s forces. She replied that the other son was living, working at his trade; the deceased, she said, had indeed been accused of being a rebel, but she denied ever having seen him fight. She explained that he had been detained as a rebel, sent aboard a guardship on account of his sickness, and then removed to the marine hospital upon the intercession, as she believed, of Lord Cornwallis and Mrs. Latouche. The dead youth’s past thus became the matter of the defense, though no witness could transform an allegation of rebellion into a justification for his slaying.
A handwritten scrap was likewise cast into the scales. Richard Byrne, a private in the Wallace Fencibles, related that he had picked it up in the churchyard of Delgany on the day of the coroner’s inquest; he took it at first for a banknote, and thereafter delivered it to Captain Gore. Byrne could not read, and depended upon what a comrade had told him of its contents. The report describes it as a song, without clearly fixing its authorship or demonstrating that Thomas had penned it. The paper cast an added cloud of suspicion over the family, yet its provenance and its tenor remained tenuous.
Byrne affirmed he had seen the Doghertys exercising with poles or pikes in the spring, and attributed a phrase to Thomas inviting him to join their party. E. Weyman, another witness for the defense, swore that the family was reputedly rebel. He related that in early June Mary had committed some leather and other goods to his care in a sack; when he spoke to her of the perils of the rebellion, she had cursed those who brought it on, saying it had ruined her family. These testimonies proved nothing as to who pulled the trigger on the first of October. Rather, they formed a political portrait of the victim and his mother, from which the defense sought an implied justification, while the prosecution could see in it only a diversion from the homicide on trial.
The court adjourned until Monday, the fifteenth of October; the printed page indeed bears that date, where the optical character recognition distorts it. Thomas Vicars was then examined touching Dogherty’s former confinement. He stated his understanding that the young man had been taken in arms, tried by another court-martial, and sent to the tender before being set at liberty. Yet Vicars knew not whether Dogherty had received a protection or taken the oath of allegiance, nor did he know of any act of rebellion subsequent to his enlargement. The gulf between what he had heard and what he knew of his own knowledge weighed heavier here than the assurance of his phrasing.
Isaac Sutton deposed that one Thomas Dogherty had stood guard over him while he was a prisoner to the insurgents near Roundwood in May. Pressed to identify the dead youth, he acknowledged the limits of his recollection: he had not seen the man since his captivity, and could not swear that the Dogherty he had known was the one who had been slain. This hesitation did not impeach the mother’s word, but it reveals how deeply the trial traversed a countryside where names, arrests, and political factions circulated through a web of secondhand report.
The weightiest issue arose with the deposition of Corporal George Kennedy. He attributed to Captain Armstrong an order anterior to Dogherty’s death: yeomanry patrols, sent out in parties, were not to bring in men known or suspected to be rebels, but were to shoot them upon the spot. Kennedy swore he had communicated these orders to the corps, and believed Wollaghan had heard them. Yet, when questioned whether any patrol had been dispatched on the first of October, he could not recollect one. His testimony bore upon a general rule, not upon a specific mandate issued on that day.
Sergeant Hayes testified that Armstrong had spoken of shooting or hanging suspected rebels; he had conceived himself authorized to act accordingly. Lieutenant Tomlinson described a general practice consisting, as he understood it, in not bringing in prisoners but shooting those reputed to be rebels, though he confessed he knew not whence those instructions originated. Sundry officers likewise bore witness to Wollaghan’s conduct in the corps: they described him as sober, obedient, brave, or inclined to clemency. These certificates of character might illustrate his reputation; they could not determine the scene within Mary’s cottage.
Thus two distinct cases lay side by side. In the one, Mary affirmed that the prisoner had shot her son, and the family denied that Thomas had been seen in arms. In the other, the soldiery maintained the existence of standing orders to dispatch suspects, though none established that on the first of October any patrol had been sent to the Doghertys’ dwelling. The record states that upon the closing of the defense and the reading of an address by his counsel, Wollaghan was acquitted. It preserves neither the reasoning of the members of the court nor the details of their deliberations; the verdict cannot therefore be resolved into any certain explanation of their doubts.
Then follows the letter from Dublin Castle, dated the eighteenth of October and subscribed by H. Taylor, secretary. It conveys that the Lord Lieutenant entirely disapproved of the finding, which he regarded as an acquittal upon what appeared to him clear evidence of murder. His Excellency ordered the immediate dissolution of the court and directed that Wollaghan be dismissed from the yeomanry, being rendered incapable of serving in any corps of His Majesty’s forces. A postscript directed that a new court be convened for such prisoners as might be brought before it, from which the officers of the former court were to be expressly excluded.
This section of the text relates neither an arrest of judgment nor a second trial. It attaches to the verdict an executive disavowal and administrative penalties; the postscript calls for a new court to try any further prisoners, but affords no proof that Wollaghan was ever arraigned anew. In the record that preserves it, the mother gave her testimony, the soldiers pleaded their orders, the court acquitted, and the Crown dissolved it. The death of Thomas Dogherty remains at the heart of the matter; but the question history retains is that of justice dispensed in the throes of civil war: who answers for the discharge of a musket when the very chain of authority is called into dispute?