Life
1753-1798; b. Tamna Wood, Ballindrait, Co Donegal, farmer’s son; ed. Glasgow; ord. Greyabbey, Co. Down, 1787; edited first two editions of Paddy’s Resource (1785, 1786); a principal contributor to The Northern Star from 1793; reputedly hanged for publishing Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand (1796), a collection of articles impugning the aristocracy as a ‘fungus on society’ with ‘rotten roots, filthy stems, and spongey heads’, in which Lord Londonderry (father of Lord Castlereagh) was portrayed as Lord Mountmumble, amusingly characterising Paddy’s Resource as ‘Paddy’s Race-horse’ through the mouth of the obsequious Billy;
Portrt abstained from participation in the United Irishmen’s rebellion but was tried for high treason and convicted on evidence of an informer, being hanged at the rere of his own Meeting House (where he had preached ‘Wind and Weather’) in Greyabbey, 2 July 1798; he is the subject of a play by Séamus Ó Néill (Faill ar an bhFeart, Abbey Th., 1967); a son became Attorney General in Louisiana. ODNB PI DIB DIW OCIL.
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Criticism
Denis Carroll, Unusual Suspects: Twelve Radical Clergymen (Dublin: Columba Press 1998). brief account in Cathal O’Byrne, As I Roved Out (1946), pp.111-12; Flann Campbell, Protestant Dissenters (1990). See also see Irish Book Lover, Vols. 4, 13.
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Commentary
Sir Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland [...] (1801): ‘The clerk of the crown informed me, that he asked the reverend doctor Porter, a presbyterian minifter, at Newtownards, a short time before he was put upon his trial, how a person of his education and connections came to be embarked in fo dreadful a rebellion? and he candidly acknowledged, that republican liberty was his object; and that when he saw that the French were actuated by nothing but a desire of conqueft and plunder, and not by the generous design of promoting univerfal liberty, which they evinced by their treatment of the American deputies, he resolved to renounce his connection with the conspirators; but he found it too late, as his life would have fallen a sacrifice to any attempt to do so. [184] He at the fame time attempted to defend his conduct, on the ground that every person had a right to form his own opinion on the eligibility of what kind of government he would wish to live under. This doctrine has been inculcated by Price and Priestley. This man was hanged in the rear of his conventicle at Gray Abbey.’ (pp.184-85.)
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References
Dictionary of National Biography, 1753-1798; Presbyt. minister at Greyabbey, Co. Down, 1787-98; Volunteer in 1778; contributed to Northern Star a series of letters forming an admirable satire on local tyranny in Ireland, which were at once reprinted with the title ‘Billy Bluff &c.’, and made his name a household word in Ulster; captured in the hills of Co. Down on outbreak of ’98; convicted on testimony of an informer without defence allowed, and hanged at Greyabbey. Book collector, and owner of scientific apparatus unrivalled in the North of Ireland till today; Wind and Weather (1797), ridicules the fast-day appointed for the dispersal of the French fleet at Bantry Bay. PI tells the substance of Billy Bluff (2nd ed. 1812) and Porter’s fate in more detail than other sources.
Alfred Webb, Compendium of Irish Biography (Dublin 1878), notes that he suffered with fortitude; his remains are buried under marble slab in Grey Abbey Church.
Brian Cleeve & Ann Brady, A Dictionary of Irish Writers (Dublin: Lilliput 1985) has it that he was hanged for Billy Bluff. Henry Boylan, A Dictionary of Irish Biography [rev. edn.] (Gill & Macmillan 1988) gets it right and has a source other than Dictionary of National Biography.
Ulster Libraries: Univ. of Ulster (Coleraine) holds Squire Firebrand, a sample of the times (1796, 1829). Belfast Central Public Library holds ‘Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand’ (1796), in Northern Star (1868) [coll.?]; also J. J. Phillips, Grey-abbey, Co. Down (1874) [Belfast Central Public Library].
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Notes
In Ulser folkore, he was hanged for Billy Bluff, but this involes a considerable telescoping of dates and events. His fate is recorded in Madden, and also in Flann Campbell’s work on United Irishmen (Protestant Dissenters, 1990).
John Hewitt - Porter is cited in Hewitt’s, The Rhyming Weavers (1974).
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