tanning are carried on. There is some traffic on the Medway, which is navigable for barges.
Tonbridge owed its early importance to the castle built by Richard, earl of Clare, in the reign of Henry I. The castle was besieged by William Rufus, was taken by John in the wars with the barons, and again by Prince Edward, son of Henry III. After being in the possession of the earls of Clare and Hertford, and of the earls of Gloucester, it became the property of the Staffords, and on the attainder of the duke of Buckingham in the reign of Henry VIII. was taken by the Crown. It was dismantled during the Civil War. The lords of the castle had the right of attending the archbishops of Canterbury on state occasions as chief butlers.
TONDERN, is town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein, on the Widane, 8 m. from the North Sea at Hoyer, opposite the island of Sylt, and 42 m. by rail N.W. from Flensburg. Pop. (1900), 4244. Tondern was in early days a seaport, but since the reclamation of the marshes and the dredging of the Widane navigation has ceased, and vessels load and unload at Hoyer, with which the place has direct railway communication. The trade consists chiefly in agricultural produce and cattle, and there is an important horse market.
In the village of Galhus, lying about 4 m. N., were discovered, in 1639 and 1734 respectively, two golden horns of the Scandinavian period; these were stolen in 1802 from the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen, where they had been treasured, and have never been recovered.
See Karstens, Die Stadt Tondern (Tondern, 1861).
TONE, THEOBALD WOLFE (1763-1798), Irish rebel, the son of Peter Tone, a Dublin coachmaker, was born in Dublin on the 20th of June 1763. His grandfather was a small farmer in county Kildare, and his mother was the daughter of a captain in the merchant service. Though entered as a student at Trinity College, Dublin, Tone gave little attention to study, his inclination being for a military career; but after eloping with Matilda Witherington, a girl of sixteen, he took his degree in 1786, and read law in London at the Middle Temple and afterwards in Dublin, being called to the Irish bar in 1789. Though idle, Tone had considerable ability. Chagrined at finding no notice taken of a wild scheme for founding a military colony in the South Seas which he had submitted to Pitt, he turned to Irish politics. An able pamphlet attacking the administration of the marquess of Buckingham in 1790 brought him to the notice of the Whig club; and in September 1791 he wrote a remarkable essay over the signature “A Northern Whig,” of which 10,000 copies are said to have been sold. The principles of the French Revolution were at this time being eagerly embraced in Ireland, especially among the Presbyterians of Ulster, and two months before the appearance of Tone's essay a great meeting had been held in Belfast, where republican toasts had been drunk with enthusiasm, and a resolution in favour of the abolition of religious disqualifications had given the first sign of political sympathy between the Roman Catholics and the Protestant dissenters of the north. The essay of “A Northern Whig” emphasized the growing breach between the Whig patriots like Flood and Grattan, who aimed at Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform without disloyalty to the connexion with England, and the men who desired to establish a separate Irish republic. Tone expressed in his pamphlet unqualified contempt for the constitution which Grattan had so triumphantly extorted from the English government in 1782; and, himself a Protestant, he urged co-operation between the different religious sects in Ireland as the only means of obtaining complete redress of Irish grievances.
In October 1791 Tone converted these ideas into practical policy by founding, in conjunction with Thomas Russell (1767-1803), Napper Tandy (q.v.) and others, the society of the “United Irishmen.” The original purpose of this society was no more than the formation of a political union between Roman Catholics and Protestants, with a view to obtaining a liberal measure of parliamentary reform; it was only when that object appeared to be unattainable by constitutional methods that the majority of the members adopted the more uncompromising opinions which Wolfe Tone held from the first, and conspired to establish an Irish republic by armed rebellion. Tone himself admitted that with him hatred of England had always been “rather an instinct than a principle,” though until his views should become more generally accepted in Ireland he was prepared to work for reform as distinguished from revolution. But he desired to root out the popular respect for the names of Charlemont and Grattan, and to transfer to more violent leaders the conduct of the national movement. Grattan was a reformer and a patriot without a tincture of democratic ideas; Wolfe Tone was a revolutionary whose principles were drawn from the French Convention. Grattan's political philosophy was allied to that of Edmund Burke; Tone was a disciple of Danton and Thomas Paine.
Democratic principles were gaining ground among the Roman Catholics as well as the Presbyterians. A quarrel between the moderate and the more advanced sections of the Roman Catholic Committee led, in December 1791, to the secession of sixty-eight of the former, led by Lord Kenmare; and the direction of the committee then passed to more violent leaders, of whom the most prominent was John Keogh, a Dublin tradesman. The active participation of the Roman Catholics in the movement of the United Irishmen was strengthened by the appointment of Tone as paid secretary of the Roman Catholic Committee in the spring of 1792. When the legality of the Roman Catholic Convention in 1792 was called in question by the government, Tone drew up for the committee a statement of the case on which a favourable opinion of counsel was obtained; and a sum of £1500 with a gold medal was voted to Tone by the Convention when it dissolved itself in April 1793. Burke and Grattan were anxious that provision should be made for the education of Irish Roman Catholic priests at home, to preserve them from the contagion of Jacobinism in France; Wolfe Tone, “with an incomparably juster forecast,” as Lecky observes, “advocated the same measure for exactly opposite reasons.” He rejoiced that the breaking up of the French schools by the revolution had rendered necessary the foundation of Maynooth College, which he foresaw would draw the sympathies of the clergy into more democratic channels. In 1794 the United Irishmen, persuaded that their scheme of universal suffrage and equal electoral districts was not likely to be accepted by any party in the Irish parliament, began to found their hopes on a French invasion. An English clergyman named William Jackson, a man of infamous notoriety who had long lived in France, where he had imbibed revolutionary opinions, came to Ireland to negotiate between the French committee of public safety and the United Irishmen. For this emissary Tone drew up a memorandum on the state of Ireland, which he described as ripe for revolution; the paper was betrayed to the government by an attorney named Cockayne to whom Jackson had imprudently disclosed his mission; and in April 1794 Jackson was arrested on a charge of treason. Several of the leading United Irishmen, including Reynolds and Hamilton Rowan, immediately fled the country; the papers of the United Irishmen were seized; and for a time the organization was broken up. Tone, who had not attended meetings of the society since May 1793, remained in Ireland till after the trial and suicide of Jackson in April 1795. Having friends among the government party, including members of the Beresford family, he was enabled to make terms with the government, and in return for information as to what had passed between Jackson, Rowan and himself he was permitted to emigrate to America, where he arrived in May 1795. Taking up his residence at Philadelphia, he wrote a few months later to Thomas Russell expressing unqualified dislike of the American people, whom he was disappointed to find no more truly democratic in sentiment and no less attached to order and authority than the English; he described George Washington as a “high-flying aristocrat,” and he found the aristocracy of money in America still less to his liking than the European aristocracy of birth.
Tone did not feel himself bound in honour by his compact
