Read all about it: Felix M Larkin on the early years of the Freeman’s Journal, 1763-1802

The Freeman’s Journal commenced publication on September 10th, 1763. It quickly established itself as the most influential newspaper in opposition to the government in Dublin, the first significant Irish newspaper to publish original and independent political essays and the only one at that time that “achieved a reputation in controversy” (to quote Brian Inglis, a former writer of this Diary).

It would later claim to have been founded by Charles Lucas, Henry Grattan and Henry Flood, leaders of the “patriot” opposition party in the Irish House of Commons, which sought parliamentary reform and legislative independence for the Irish parliament – achieved in 1782. Lucas and his nephew, John Lucas, are believed to have conceived the idea of starting the newspaper, and Charles Lucas certainly assisted in its establishment, but the founding owners and managers were an anonymous “Committee for the Free Press”, which comprised 13 Dublin merchants and tradesmen who acted much like the board of directors of a company.

In 1779, it was sold to Isaac Colles, a Dublin bookseller.

The identification of the Freeman with Lucas, Grattan and Flood arises because the columns of the newspaper were open to them, as to other “patriot” MPs, to advance their political ideas. The Freeman and certain other newspapers that likewise pursued a reformist agenda put the government in Ireland, in Prof James Kelly’s words, “on the back foot in the public sphere for most of the 1770s and 1780s”.

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Grattan wrote of the Freeman in this phase of its history that it was a newspaper “that upheld liberal principles, that raised a public spirit where there had been none, and kept up a public feeling when it was sinking, and to which, in a great degree, Ireland was indebted for her liberties”.

These “liberties” would be extinguished by the Act of Union of 1800, but they did not, of course, extend to the majority Catholic population of Ireland; the “patriot” party, and the Freeman’s Journal as its organ, represented an Irish Protestant separatist tradition – a form of “colonial nationalism”.

Francis Higgins, who had been associated with the Freeman probably from as early as 1779 when Isaac Colles bought it, became its owner in 1783 when he suddenly called in a loan that he had advanced to Colles.

Under Higgins, the Freeman became a government organ. It was the beneficiary of lucrative sums for publishing government proclamations – in effect, a government subsidy.

In 1800, it supported the Act of Union, illustrating just how far the newspaper had by then departed from the principles that had earlier guided its fortunes.

Higgins, known to history as “the Sham Squire”, is characterised in the Dictionary of Irish Biography as an “adventurer” and a “plausible rogue”. Arthur Griffith wrote of him: “Higgins, who was originally a pot-boy in a public house in Fishamble Street, Dublin, became successively a forger, a convict, a brothel-keeper, a gambling house owner, a blackmailer, and editor and proprietor of the Freeman’s Journal”. As owner of the Freeman, he attained a position of some prominence and respectability in Dublin, practising as an attorney and becoming a justice of the peace.

By 1795, Higgins was serving the government directly, but secretly, as a spy.

He ran a network of agents throughout Dublin who supplied him with information that was relayed by him to the authorities. The most important of these was Francis Magan, and he gave Higgins the information on the whereabouts of Lord Edward FitzGerald – the most charismatic of the leaders of the 1798 rebellion – that facilitated FitzGerald’s capture. Higgins was awarded a secret service pension of £300 per annum plus a bounty of £1,000 for this information, and he was in receipt of numerous other government payments for information and other services.

Higgins died on January 19th, 1802, bequeathing the Freeman and most of the rest of his considerable estate to his ward, Frances Tracy – who may have been his illegitimate daughter. On her marriage in September 1802, the newspaper passed to her husband Philip Whitfield Harvey, the nephew of a former business associate of Higgins. Under Harvey’s ownership, the Freeman gradually regained its independent voice, leaving it well placed to become the foremost Irish nationalist daily newspaper in Dublin by the mid-19th century.

It went into decline in the early years of the 20th century, and closed in 1924.