Of the many heroes of Irish nationalist tradition Wolfe Tone must surely enjoy the widest appeal. The reason for such appeal is Tone's Life. Its style and intimacy are ageless and it has been packaged over the years to reach the widest audience. The severe editing of successive editions, giving prominence to the retrospective autobiography while omitting the bulk of the journals and writings, has allowed Tone to be presented as an unflinching republican. In the twentieth century his name was increasingly attached to the armed-force, anti-English and exclusively Catholic brand of Irish republicanism, and the Life itself condensed into his famous declaration penned in Mlle Boivet's lodgings in August 1796:

It has become the most quoted passage of Irish history.

I

The Tone cult only came to maturity a century after his death. It was not created by the publication of the Life in 1826, but it would not have developed as it did without it. Matilda's reluctance to have the journals published evaporated after Wilson's death in 1824 and more immediately after the appearance in the New Monthly Magazine of two articles containing detailed extracts from them and highly inaccurate passages about her own life after Tone's death. How the journals fell into the hands of the author of the magazine articles is a mystery. There is no evidence that Tone kept copies, though he did of important correspondence. But Matilda was forever lending papers and the author may have seen them in this manner. The Life appeared at the height of the campaign for Catholic emancipation in 1826, and was used by one of the leading campaigners, Richard Lalor Sheil, as an object-lesson to England and to Irish Protestant landlords of the consequences of again refusing Catholic rights.