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werewolfetone · 2 years

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im begging you to tell me about Edward John Newell & his time as an informer & his disappearance. this will be your only warning.

*Rubs my hands together* right. Edward John Newell.

Firstly, this is him (from a sketch he did of himself, which was first published in his autobiography & was later reproduced by my good friend RR Madden for his The Life and Times of the United Irishmen)

And Mr. Newell was born in Downpatrick in 1771 to Scottish parents. He was noted to be a pathological liar even when he was a child, which. tbh. almost foreshadowed his future activities. Anyway, he had a bit of a falling out with his mother in 1788, which led him to seek work as a seaman. He gave up on that because it was too uncomfortable and eventually moved to Dublin to try and find a job, but couldn't hold one down for long, and when he asked for help his parents denied it to him due to the general animosity between them and due to his support for the United Irishmen. So, he moved to Belfast in 1796, became a portrait painter (despite apparently having little experience in art), and everything swiftly took a turn.

It's not... clear when he became an informer, exactly. It's probable that it was immediately, given that he later admitted to going around dressed like a British soldier with his face painted, pointing out United Irishmen to Lord Carhampton and a group of actual soldiers. Apparently he did this a lot, because Newell claimed to have put 227 people in prison this way, and to have forced upwards of 300 people to flee from their homes for fear of being arrested. Newell wasn't necessarily very good at being a spy, because instantly his superiors in the United Irishmen noticed that he was... overzealous in a weird way... but he did manage to stay under the radar for long enough that he wasn't killed at that point.

Also important: Newell had a friend called George Murdock (or Murdoch, I've seen it spelled both ways). Murdock was the opposite of him politically and also worked for the government and I.... remember reading somewhere that he was in the Orange Order, too, but I can't recall where so I can't provide a source for it. Anyway, the United Irishmen weren't keen on Newell's friendship with Murdock, leading to Murdock's house having to be placed under armed guard lest they try to kill him, but they stayed friends.

Eventually, Edward Cooke (the spymaster for the British government in Ireland at the time, basically. horrible man) brought Newell to Dublin Castle, where he questioned Newell for nine hours. Newell was more than happy to tell him everything, and in return he was rewarded with money and the opportunity to stay in Dublin Castle to learn more about being a spy. While there, he made an absolute nuisance of himself, including shooting at a guard because the guard was slightly too slow in opening the gate for him when he returned past midnight. He also testified before the government's incredibly creatively named (/s) Secret Committee, where he talked for a long time and later admitted that he had made much of his testimony up specifically to scare the people on the Secret Committee.

Eventually, Newell... I don't know, felt bad about what he was doing, maybe? Decided that it was time to change sides again? I don't know. Either way, he asked Cooke if he could stop being a spy, and Cooke agreed to put him into what was basically witness protection, which would allow him to live in England and resume his painting career. Newell could have just taken the offer and gone, but decided, I guess, that that was not enough, and so he wrote and published a book that detailed 1. how very sorry he was for being an informer; 2. everything about his time as an informer; and 3. every single thing he had told the government about the United Irishmen.

You may be thinking "wait that sounds incredibly stupid, why would he do that," which. yeah. I'm not sure why he decided that he needed to do that either. But he did, and predictably, both the government and the United Irishmen were livid. Also, so were the Defenders, who were the Catholic sectarian murder group, because Newell had talked a lot in his book about how they were cooperating with the United Irishmen. So Newell had pissed off not one, not two, but three groups that were all completely willing to kill people to get what they wanted.

But even this was not enough for him! Because it came out with this autobiography that Newell had been having a long-standing affair with Murdock's wife. This pissed off Murdock's people, and it made Murdock so angry that he broke into Newell's room in Dublin Castle to shoot at him multiple times (no one was injured and Murdock even went to jail for a day or two). Newell was evidently very attached to Murdock's wife, which is. kind of sweet I guess. but anyway. At this point, Newell's horrified friends started trying to get him to leave Ireland by any means possible. Remember, there were now four angry groups that wanted him dead, so if he stayed it was pretty much inevitable that he would get a bullet in the head. Newell would not, however, consent to leave without Murdock's wife, who Murdock did not want to let go because y'know... they were married. Since he would not leave immediately as he probably should have done, Newell's friends convinced him to come as far as Bangor, where he stayed in an inn while they tried to convince him to leave for America.

Before I go any further, I feel like I should clarify for people who may not know--there's an important difference between killing someone and disappearing someone. If you were killed by the United Irishmen, maybe they ambush you as you're walking along the road, shoot you and leave your body in the ditch, but your body's still there, and it will be found, and returned to your family, and they know what happened to you, etc etc. But if you were disappeared by the United Irishmen, they might grab you while you're walking along the road, or show up at your house and drag you away, or ambush you at a pub--either way they take you away, and no trace of you is ever seen again. Nobody knows what happened to you, where you are, if you're dead or alive, etc etc--it's almost like you've vanished off the face of the earth. This is often considered worse than killing someone because of the lack of closure, and it's also specifically a human rights violation apart from just normal murder according to the UN.

Having said that, you've probably guessed what happened to Newell. He was at his inn one night, drinking with his friends, and he walked away arm in arm with "two professed friends" who none of my sources name, and he was never seen again. There are conflicting accounts of what exactly happened to him. One says that he was shot to death on the road and his body was buried on the beach. One says that he was thrown off of a ship that was meant to take him to America. One says that they just drowned him. Madden kind of implies that he may have been put into what was basically a saw trap and fallen down a trap door with an axe murderer under it. I've even seen it kind of suggested that hey, maybe he did make it to America after all (unlikely tbh). Whatever happened, no trace of him was ever seen or heard from again. They did later find two separate skeletons that were both theorised to have possibly been him--one under the beach in Bangor in the 1820s, another under the foundation of the house with the axe murderer hole in the 1810s. The other thing all of these accounts agree on is that the United Irishmen were the ones who did it, and that those who did it specifically were probably Newell's own former colleagues.

#thank you for the ask i needed to get all of this out #insane story. insane time period. newell what the fuck #edward john newell #edward cooke #george murdoch #lord carhampton #rr madden #tw violence #tw death #tw sectarianism #united irishmen #irish history #jory.txt

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8trackaxolotl · 2 months

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