The Hampshire Family Historian | Vol.49 No.2 | September 2022

Member’s article

Government measures, it evolved into a revolutionary republican organisation and launched the Irish Rebellion of 1798 with the object of ending British rule over Ireland and founding an independent Irish republic. It was put down with great ferocity by the Government. Rebels taken alive after battle, being regarded as traitors to the Crown, were not treated as prisoners of war but executed usually by hanging. Wilson at Cape Colony Having been betrayed and captured, Adam Wilson, helped by friends, evidently escaped from Armagh while still on trial. No evidence was found to substantiate various stories about his alleged subsequent adventures including the suggestion that he was spirited away on a merchant vessel owned by Isaac. It is however abundantly clear that blood was thicker than water and that – albeit an ambitious establishment figure – Isaac helped his brother a lot in his dangerous predicament. In a letter of 26 December 1799 written from the Naval Hospital Cape Town, Isaac sought the Governor’s permission for Adam to remain in the Colony, undertaking to be answerable for his conduct. This letter and various other items held by the Cape Town Archive Repository of the South African National Archives confirm, as Isaac claimed, that Adam had a “concern in a merchantile house” (sic) at the Cape and that he remained there with Isaac until the Colony was handed back to the Dutch in 1802. Established facts seem to bear out the conclusion of Adam Wilson’s story as told in Marshall’s biography. This said he “returned to his native Drumrusk, where his brother, the doctor, still befriending him, he was supplied with sufficient funds to lend money and discount bills. He married a

lady of some property near Enniskillen, by whom he had one son John, and a daughter.” Adam is understood to have died in 1805 and, under Sir Isaac’s 1839 Will which divided his residuary estate equally between his seven siblings or their surviving offspring, John inherited his deceased father’s share. Besides attending to his medical duties at the Cape, Isaac Wilson was also continuing to pursue business ventures and cultivate influential contacts. A telling assessment of him appears in the Cape Diaries of Lady Anne

Barnard 1799-1800 . She was the wife of Andrew Barnard, the colonial secretary at the Cape and her Diaries show her humane concern for the welfare of ailing

seamen, as well as her perceptive observation of those whom she met. When on 20 March 1799 Wilson came from his post as surgeon at the Cape Town Naval Hospital to the Barnard's Lady Ann Barnard and "Paradise", her South African residence

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