A member of the movement's northern executive in Belfast, and a key figure in promoting a republican alliance with the agrarian Catholic Defenders, he was arrested in advance of the risings of 1798 and held until 1802.

Russell was born in Dromahane, County Cork to an Ascendancy family that, early 1770s, moved to Dublin when his father, a veteran of the American War,[1] was appointed Captain of Invalids at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.

He found Tone even more critical of the proceedings in the chamber below where the patriot leader Henry Grattan was unable to capitalise on his triumph in securing Ireland's legislative independence from England (the "Revolution of 1782"") to effect meaningful reform.

His Journal was also to record the torment both of a love for the idealised and unapproachable Eliza Goddard (daughter of a close friend of McTier's) and of guilt-ridden visits to Belfast prostitutes.

[7] In October 1791, and in the presence of Tone, invited to Belfast as the proponent of political union with disenfranchised Catholics, Russell attended the inaugural meeting of the Society of United Irishmen.

In a letter to Belfast's United Irish paper the Northern Star he denounced Henry Grattan's parliamentary opposition as "insignificant" and accused him of "declaiming, and grinning, and chattering at the abuses of that ministry, which but for him would not now exist".

[2] In Review of the Lion of Old England; or Democracy Confounded (1794) (dedicated to the reputedly enlightened "Empress of all the Russias", Catherine II),[13] Russell and his friend William Sampson (John Philpot Curran's Junior Counsel) suggested that, in Ireland, the English charters Grattan celebrated in his strict constitutionalism—Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus—did little more than "amuse the masses".

At McArt's fort atop Cave Hill overlooking Belfast they swore the celebrated oath "never to desist in our efforts until we had subverted the authority of England over our country, and asserted our independence'".

Russell of Belfast has been appointed to the command of all the societies in the province of Ulster"; while sometime later, one of the government's most reliable agents informed the Castle that the United Irishmen were ready to rise and that "Russell…now conducts all their plans".

[2] Russell looked to a simpler, purer form of government in which the will of a benevolent deity could operate untrammelled by greed and corruption and man could realise those rights accorded him by nature.

In 1795 she wrote approvingly to her brother of Belfast's plebeian Jacobin Club (United Irishmen among them), describing it as composed of "persons and rank long kept down [who] now come forward with a degree of information that might shame their betters".

The veteran anti-slavery campaigner, Henry Joy McCracken's sister Mary Ann, remembered that as a young officer in Belfast, Russell had "abstained from the use of slave labour produce until slavery in the West Indies was abolished, and at the dinner parties to which he was so often invited and when confectionery was so much used he would not take anything with sugar in it".

He cautioned:If the English, or any other people, think gold a sufficient cause to shed blood—if they are satisfied to fill the world with carnage and misery, that they may acquire cloves and nutmegs, and contracts, and slaves—let it not be so with us.

[17]With his close friend Henry Joy McCracken, Russell was a key figure in forming the alliance between the northern United Irishmen and the greatest body, existing, of "men of no property", the Defenders.

A vigilante response to Peep O'Day raids upon Catholic homes in the mid-1780s, by the early 1790s the Defenders (drawing, like the United Irishmen, on the lodge structure of the Masons) were a secret oath-bound fraternity ranging across Ulster and the Irish midlands.

The combined effect of the continuation of the war in Europe, its spread to the Middle East, and the bloody summer of 1798 in Ireland, seems to have only intensified his belief that the world was then engaged in a time of troubles which St John had foretold would precede the coming of Christ's kingdom.

[2] Consistent with this bible faith, Russell's friend, the botanist John Templeton, with whom he continued to correspond from Fort George, could not deflect him from the story of creation as told in Genesis.

To Templeton's report of bivalve shells being discovered in a salt mine, Russell responded: "I am of no theory except the account contained in the Scriptures, which I conceive to be consistent with the wisdom and power of the Creator, and agreeable to the present appearance of the world ...".

[16] Forewarned by Templeton and as cautioned, on his arrival, by Francis McCracken and by the Simms brothers ,[5]: 212–214  Russell found the north subdued following the crushing of the 1798 rebellion and with little appetite for a renewed attempt.

For his biographer James Quinn, "the picture that emerges is of man with a tenuous grip on reality, maintaining a quixotic confidence in victory in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary".

[32]: 102 According to later trial evidence on 24 July, Russell as Member of the Provisional Government, and General in Chief of the Northern District issued (or intended to issue) the following proclamation:[33] Men of Ireland!--Once more in arms to assert the rights of mankind and liberate your country!--you see by the secrecy with which this effort has been conducted, by the multitudes in all parts of Ireland, who are engaged in executing this great object, that your provisional government has acted with wisdom.--- You will see that in Dublin, in the west, the north, and the south, the blow has been struck in the same moment.

The general orders that hostages shall be secured in all quarters; and hereby apprizes the English commander, that any outrage contrary to the acknowledged laws of war, and of morality, shall be retaliated in the severest manner.

And he further makes known, that such Irish, as in ten days from the date of this, as are found in arms against their country, shall be treated as rebels, committed for trial, and their properties confiscated.-But all men behaving peaceably, shall be under the protection of the law.

Head-Quarters, July 24, 1803.Unknown to Russell, in Dublin Emmet, unable to deliver promised firearms, could not draw Michael Dwyer's men down from the Wicklow Mountains[34] nor mobilise the hoped-for support in Kildare.

When the service ended, Russell declared "in the awful presence of God" that he had been guilty of "many immoral acts", but as to his political opinions and actions, he had never intended "any other than the Advantage of my fellow creatures and even the Happiness of my Adversaries" and that whether the "thread" of his existence extended a further 40 years or was cut within the hour, he should not cease from the work he had begun.

[9]: 193 Concluding his remarks to the court, Russell exhorted "those gentlemen who have all the wealth and power of the country in their hands" to "attend to the wants and distresses of the poor"-- "the labouring class of the community, their tenantry and dependants".

[40] In passing sentence on Russell, the Judge said that "he was sorry and surprised that a Gentleman of education could so pervert his understanding, as to imagine that he was acting either honourably, or religiously when he asserted to his ignorant followers what he knew was untrue, namely, that the French were [already] landed in great force at Ballywalter".