Tandy, James (c.1766–1836?), soldier, wine merchant, and early United Irishman, was born possibly in the Cornmarket area of Dublin, only son of James Napper Tandy (qv), ironmonger and radical politician, and his wife, Ann, daughter of James Jones of Whitehall, Platten, Co. Meath, whose superior means prompted her husband to abandon ironmongery for the more respectable occupations of land agent and rent collector. James attended Oswald's School, Dopping Court, off Golden Lane, near Dublin castle. As a lieutenant serving with the East India Company in Bengal during the mid-1780s he was a severe but efficient commander. Entering the Dublin wine trade and working from Chancery Lane, he was admitted 16 July 1787 as a freeman of the Dublin guild of merchants (of which his father was warden). He also served (1790–98) on the common council of Dublin corporation. With the emergence of the United Irishmen, of whose Dublin branch Napper Tandy was secretary from its first meeting on 9 November 1791, James became an early member, though he subsequently claimed to have withdrawn in 1792, reputedly in opposition to universal suffrage. Whether he fully relinquished his membership is unclear, as his name appears in proceedings until at least 1794, although his father allegedly disinherited him and severed relations for some time.
As father and son drifted apart politically, James never wavered in his personal loyalty. The elder Tandy, extreme to the point of recklessness, was by now linked to the insurgent catholic Defenders and forced to flee, first to the relative anonymity of London (1793), then to Philadelphia (1795), and finally, at the invitation of the French revolutionary government, to Paris (1797), where he was appointed a general in preparation for an invasion of Ireland during the crisis of 1798. In Dublin, James received correspondence from his father which revealed as much about the trials of exile and financial difficulty as it did of politics. However, there was sufficient news for the barrister Leonard MacNally (qv), United Irishman turned informer and intimate friend of James, to supply Dublin Castle with second-hand knowledge of Napper Tandy's treasonous designs with France. In McNally's shrewd opinion, James Tandy was hostile to the 1798 insurrection: he recommended vigilante patrols of Dublin and remained friendly with the incoming lord lieutenant, Cornwallis (qv), under whom he had served in Bengal. Any sympathy for the United Irishmen seems motivated more by filial loyalty than political interest. He was undoubtedly concerned for his thriving business and could ill afford the disapproval of the authorities.
Napper Tandy, captured in Hamburg after attempting to land in Co. Donegal (16 September 1798) and extradited to Dublin, was lodged in Kilmainham jail (November 1799) to await trial for high treason. James devoted the months before an initial trial (May 1800), to gathering vital witnesses to prove his father could not have surrendered within stated time limits owing to his detention in Hamburg. Successful in proving his case, he next petitioned Cornwallis to obtain a royal pardon which, however, arrived too late to prevent Napper being sentenced to death for treason at Lifford assizes in Co. Donegal (April 1801). However the pardon prevented the sentence from being carried out.
With his father consigned to Lifford jail, James sought in vain to have him returned to Kilmainham. From Dublin he monitored his situation through frequent correspondence. Their exchanges were interrupted in late 1801 by the prospect of Napper Tandy's transportation to Australia as a new condition of his pardon, the original documents having disappeared. The earl of Hardwicke (qv) was now lord lieutenant, and James found the administration unwilling to intervene, citing his father's alleged outrageous conduct in Lifford jail. Conducting his own inquiry, James had his father's jailers vouch for his exemplary behaviour, and drafted a new petition to Cornwallis, then negotiating the peace of Amiens with the French. Once again, Cornwallis obliged. Furthermore, according to James, the French first consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, refused to conclude the peace until Napper Tandy was returned to France. An embarrassed Irish administration yielded him up and he reached Bordeaux 14 March 1802, a fortnight before the Anglo–French agreement.
Visiting him in October–November, James ostensibly conducted commercial business but also met United veterans including Thomas Russell (qv). Clandestine correspondence between father and son, and the unhealthy frequency of sympathisers visiting James Tandy's home at Gloucester St., Dublin, where he lived with his wife Sally, son Robert and daughter Sally, provided circumstantial evidence to link James with the renewed United threat surrounding the abortive rebellion of Robert Emmet (qv) in July 1803. Revenge, long postponed, was taken by a Dublin administration still smarting from James Tandy's overriding influence with Cornwallis. Although James had no obvious connection with the rebellion, the die was cast. Meanwhile, Napper Tandy died in Bordeaux 24 August 1803 (leaving an estranged wife, a mistress, a child, and an estate of which he bequeathed his military chest to James and the remainder to Marie Barrière, his mistress). The will was angrily contested by James and his mother, with no known outcome. Worse was to follow.
Almost shot outside his home by an unknown assailant in late October 1803, then arrested (29 October) for treasonable activities and his papers seized, James Tandy became a state prisoner in Kilmainham jail between 16 November 1803 and 18 September 1804. In a rare instance of attempted assassination of women, his wife and daughter narrowly escaped being shot on Dublin's South Circular Road after a prison visit. His mother too was injured in her home by an object thrown through her window. James appealed to Lord Hardwicke, pleading love of his father but hatred of his politics, and threatened to horsewhip Alexander Marsden (qv), military under-secretary, for his present predicament. On release, he found his business ruined, but appeared recurrently in the Dublin Directory until 1808 as a wine merchant at 177 Abbey St. He published his case in 1807 as An appeal to the public, with a dedication to the prince of Wales. He subsequently served for some time as a stipendiary magistrate, possibly the same (Maj.) James Tandy whose record – from senior membership of the peace preservation force through the chief magistracy (1819–23) and resident magistracy (1824–36), mainly in Co. Dublin and Co. Kildare and in south Leinster, retiring on pension in 1836 – is sketched by Jim Herlihy in Royal Irish Constabulary officers (2005). Tandy lived latterly in Co. Meath but, although he was buried at Castlebellingham, his date of death is unknown. His extant papers are among the Rebellion papers in the National Archives, Dublin.