Reflecting on Thomas Muir’s legacy

AS 2025 came to a close, a fascinating presentation was delivered by Jimmy Watson, Chair of the Friends of Thomas Muir, in Grace’s Irish Centre in Glasgow (above).

The 1916 Rising Centenary Committee (Scotland) wish to place on record our thanks everyone who attended the successful event, especially those who travelled long distances.

Thomas Muir was born in Glasgow on August 25, 1765. A gifted student who graduated from Glasgow University with an MA aged 17, he became a member of the Faculty of Advocates. His passionate campaigning for freedom of speech and democracy was instrumental in sowing the seeds that brought about jury reforms and the universal right to vote.

Muir whose short life included a trial for alleged sedition, transportation to New South Wales, a dramatic escape from there on an American ship and adventures in Spanish Mexico and Cuba. He was seriously wounded in a naval battle off Cadiz, listed as ‘dead’ and then joyously welcomed to France as a ‘Hero of the French Republic.’

It is fitting to recall Muir’s connections with the United Irishmen in the 1790s. Although the movement which Muir helped to establish in Edinburgh in 1792—the Friends of the People—was initially concerned chiefly with reform of the parliament, Muir himself was associating with more radical elements and in September 1792 began a correspondence with Archibald Hamilton Rowan, secretary of the United Irishmen in Dublin.

Muir suggested closer liaison between his organisation and the Irish group and as a result received an Address of Fraternity from Dublin, which he circulated among delegates to a convention of the Friends of the People. When he rose to present the United Irish address, he was strongly opposed by conservative elements on the grounds that the address contained ‘treason against the union with England.’ Although the address was rejected, Muir soon became a marked man and shortly afterwards was arrested on a charge of sedition.

Released on bail, and abandoned by many of his former reformist colleagues, Muir headed for France, where he was greeted by many of the personalities of the Revolution, including Thomas Paine, and by some Irish emigré conspirators. In his absence, he was declared an outlaw in Scotland and expelled from his legal representative body. He sailed for Belfast and in July 1793 arrived in Dublin. He was immediately met by members of the United Irishmen, attended their meetings at Tailors’ Hall and was sworn in as a full member of the society. He spent a week with Hamilton Rowan at Rathcoffey and then decided to return to Scotland armed with masses of literature and letters for Scottish Republicans. Undoubtedly Muir was impressed and enthused by the revolutionary mood in Dublin and Belfast and may have decided that it was time to return, clear his name and renew his activities.

He was arrested as soon as he set foot in Stranraer, tried for ‘seditious speeches, circulating seditious publications, such as The Rights of Man, and reading a seditious document in public, viz. the United Irishmen’s address.’ The sentence was 14 years transportation; a vindictive verdict aimed at destroying the Scottish revolutionary movement. But Muir’s three-hour speech from the dock and his manly behaviour turned him into a national hero. After his trial, and before he was deported, Muir was visited in jail by Hamilton Rowan and Simon Butler from the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, an event that did nothing to endear him to the authorities, particularly as four pistols, given to him by Hamilton Rowan, were discovered in his possession afterwards.

By this time, the reform movement in Scotland had become a totally revolutionary organisation modelled on the United Irishmen. It even adopted the name United Scotsmen and drew its main strength from the many immigrant weavers from Ulster who were already members of the United Irishmen. In fact, almost everyone accused of sedition in Scotland between 1797 and 1803 was a weaver; the best-known United Scotsman and martyr was George Mealmaker, a weaver who was transported to Botany Bay in 1798.

Napoleon Bonaparte had other ideas, of course, and neither Ireland nor Scotland obtained the French aid necessary for a successful revolution. Humbert’s small expeditionary force which landed at Killala was quickly routed. Napper Tandy, with 300 comrades, made a mere symbolic landing in County Donegal and sailed away again. No French troops ever set out for Scotland, despite Muir’s persistent representations to the Directory to the very end. He died, alone and unknown, in a small cottage at Chantilly in January 1799.

His legacy to Scotland, however, is abiding. With a new impetus towards national independence his life, deeds and words may once again be evoked by those who wish ‘to revive the spirit of our country and give it a national existence,’ as Muir himself said in 1798. A 90-foot monument on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, dedicated to the Scottish martyrs and carrying quotations from their trial speeches, was erected in 1844 with thousands attending the completion ceremony. The extract from Muir's speech from the dock reads: “I have devoted myself to the cause of the People; it is a good cause; it shall finally triumph.”