Lives and deaths of the brothers Sheares

John and Henry Sheares

The Brothers Sheares were natives of Cork, whither the younger had proceeded, early in May 1798, for the purpose of organising that county. An energetic co-operator in this movement was a silversmith named Conway, a native of Dublin. The treachery of this man was so art fully concealed that his most intimate friends never suspected him.

“If those who join secret societies,” writes a Cork correspondent, “could get a peep at the records of patriotic perfidy kept in the Castle, they would get some insight into the dangerous consequences of meddling with them. There is a proverbial honour amongst thieves; there seems to be none amongst traitors.

The publication of the official correspondence about the end of the last century made some strange revelations. In Cork, there lived a watch-maker, named Conway, one of the directory of the United Irishmen there. So public and open a professor of disloyal sentiments was he, that on the plates of his watches he had engraved as a device a harp without a crown. For a whole generation this man s name was preserved as ‘a sufferer for his country,’ like his ill-fated townsmen, John and Henry Sheares.

The ‘Cornwallis Correspondence,’ (vol. iii., p.85,) reveals the fact that Conway was a double-dyed traitor; that he had offered to become a secret agent for detecting the leaders of the United Irishmen, and that the information he gave was very valuable, particularly as confirming that received from a solicitor in Belfast, who, whilst acting as agent and solicitor to the disaffected party, was betraying their secrets to the executive, and earning, in his vile *role *of informer, a pension, from 1799 to 1804, of £150, and the sum of £1,460, the wages he received for his services.

The fate of the Sheares has been invested with something of a romantic interest; and not a few traditional accounts describe their end as not less saintly than that of Charles the First. Into their ease, as in that of other political martyrs, some romance has been imported; and as truth is stranger than fiction, we may tell an anecdote communicated to us by the late John Patten, brother-in law of Thomas Addis Emmet. The Sheareses, though nominally Protestants, were tinged with deistical ideas. “I heard it stated,” observed Mr Patten, “that when the hangman was in the act of adjusting the noose round the neck of John Sheares before proceeding to the scaffold, he exclaimed, ‘D—n you, do you want to kill me before my time?’ I could not credit it, and asked the Rev. Dr Gamble, who attended them in their last moments, if the statement were correct. ‘I am sorry to say,’ replied Dr Gamble, ‘that it is perfectly true. I myself pressed my hand against his mouth to prevent a repetition of the imprecation.’”

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