On May 1, 1794, a Dublin prisoner slipped away from his own residence, whither his turnkey had escorted him to take supper. He had been preparing his escape since April 28; a rope was waiting behind a window, a horse stood ready in a stable, and a peasant’s frieze cloak was to disguise his station. Archibald Hamilton Rowan was not seeking to overturn his sentence before the magistrates. He sought to reach the sea before the apprehension of another man should drag him back before them.
A few months earlier, the Court of King’s Bench had found him guilty of publishing a seditious libel against the government. The text, presented as an address from the Society of United Irishmen of Dublin to the volunteers of Ireland, bore Rowan’s signature in his capacity as secretary. On January 29, 1794, the court sentenced him to two years’ imprisonment, a fine of five hundred pounds, and the requirement to furnish security for his good behaviour in the sum of four thousand pounds for seven years. The penalty bound together his prospective liberty, his wealth, and his obligation to answer for his conduct. Rowan had served but two or three months of his term when the Reverend William Jackson, an ecclesiastic well known in England, alongside others, was apprehended on a charge of high treason.
Pelham records that Rowan deemed it probable he would in turn be implicated. The text does not affirm that a fresh indictment had already been returned against him. It sets forth an apprehension and the resolve born of it. On April 28, Rowan fixed the hour of his departure for the night of May 1. His first confederate was to be the turnkey himself—a man cognisant of his sentence but, according to the narrative, entirely unaware of the political peril to which his ward believed himself exposed.
Rowan prevailed upon the turnkey to accompany him to his private house. Mrs Rowan received them; the meal had been laid out in an upper chamber. Supper ended, the prisoner requested the gaoler’s leave to converse in private with his wife in an adjoining room. The other consented, on condition that the door between the two chambers remained open. He shifted his chair to maintain a view through the aperture. Surveillance was preserved, yet it was confined to that single threshold, and the house had become the place where the fugitive would least be expected to attempt flight.
Rowan crossed the visible chamber and entered the back room. A rope had been fastened to the window; he lowered himself down to the street below. Pelham’s relation gives neither the name of the person who had procured this cordage nor the hour at which the horse had been brought round. It merely indicates that a saddled mount awaited him in the stable, and that a peasant’s outer cloak was to serve as his disguise. These provisions answered two pressing exigencies: to quit the house without alarming the turnkey, and to put Dublin behind him without being recognised in his ordinary apparel.
Rowan’s first destination was the residence of his attorney, Matthew Dowling, who had agreed to assist him. Yet the house was thronged with company. Dowling gave him to understand that he could not shelter him without grave imprudence, and directed him to wait at the Rotunda, an edifice in Sackville Street, while he rid himself of his guests. Rowan lingered there for an hour and a half. For a man who had already broken Newgate, this delay was no trifling matter: the remainder of his flight still hung upon the arrival of the confederate who had pledged his aid.
Dowling joined him at last. After a brief conference, they resolved that Rowan should proceed to the home of a friend, Mr Sweetman, some four miles north of Dublin Bay. From thence, it was believed, a vessel might take him aboard. Rowan repaired thither; nevertheless, three days elapsed before the design took shape. Sweetman’s house offered no ultimate deliverance, but merely a sanctuary wherein his departure remained to be arranged.
When the pleasure-boat was at length prepared, several local men took Rowan aboard to convey him to the French coast. They put out under cover of night. Adverse winds soon compelled them to put back and take shelter beneath the Hill of Howth. At daybreak, they made a second venture. A small revenue cutter presently crossed their wake and threw aboard copies of a proclamation: the government offered two thousand pounds for the fugitive’s apprehension. The men perused the sheets without remark; then, as they got the craft under way once more, they paid them no further heed.
In the middle of the Channel, the crew examined them afresh. The sailors looked alternately at the printed description and then at Rowan. The resemblance rendered further dissimulation futile. He acknowledged that they had guessed aright, and reminded them that they were all Irishmen. The chronicler sums up their response as an acclamation: they cast the proclamation into the sea and pressed forward on their course. Pelham recounts this resolve of the crew without furnishing independent testimony from the mariners themselves. Yet their act overturned the situation: the description conveyed into their very boat might easily have undone Rowan; they chose instead to hold their course.
On the third morning, shortly after daybreak, the Breton coast hove into view. Their destination was Saint-Pol-de-Léon, which Pelham terms St Paul de Léon. Yet landfall marked no end to their perils. The voyagers were mistaken for spies and conducted to prison. Their true identities had to be established before an order from the French government secured their enlargement several days later. The sailors returned to Dublin with their boat; Rowan, for his part, set out for Paris. Thus the selfsame crossing that had united them against the reward concluded in two divergent destinies: the return of the boatmen, and continued exile for their passenger.
His sojourn in France was itself disrupted by political upheaval. Pelham relates that he subsequently escaped in a wherry upon the Seine, alone, while the banks were occupied by troops. The narrative assigns no date to this second flight. Rowan eventually reached a French port and took passage for the United States, where he lived for several years. A royal pardon brought him home to Ireland at last, unencumbered by any humiliating terms, according to the compilation.
The affair had begun with a political address signed in the name of a society, and had lengthened into judicial sentences, a fine, sureties, and gaol. His flight did not resolve the question of whether the libel warranted the penalty imposed; it rescued Rowan from the perils of a fresh prosecution and carried him beyond the realm. Between the open door under the turnkey’s eye and the proclamation cast into the boat, every step depended upon an exact concurrence of circumstances: the rear window, the horse in readiness, the wait for Dowling, the three days’ delay, and the final resolve of the mariners. The law had laid hold of him by the written word; his liberty, for a season, was bought upon the sea.