The Years of Endurance (49 page)

Accordingly on May 2nd, 1798, Cabinet instructions were sent to St. Vincent to detach part of his fleet for a sweep in the Mediterranean. They were accompanied by a private letter from Spencer. " When you are apprised,' he wrote, " that the appearance of a British squadron in the Mediterranean is a condition on which the fate of Europe may at this moment be said to depend, you will not be surprised that we are disposed to strain every nerve and incur considerable hazard in effecting it." And the First Lord went on to suggest that in the event of St. Vincent not commanding it in person, it should be entrusted to the junior flag ofEcer on the station, Sir Horatio Nelson.

By a strange coincidence, on the day that this letter was written Nelson left St. Vincent's fleet for the Mediterranean. Only a month before he had sailed from England after a long and painful convalescence. " The wind is fair," he had written to his father from Portsmouth, " in two hours I shall be on board and with the lark I shall be off to-morrow morning." He reached the blockading fleet on April 30th, a little depressed at the prospect of an uneventful summer off Cadiz. Within two days he had been ordered

¹
See
Spencer Papers,
II,
317.

²
See
Spencer Papers,
II,
353.

³
"
An
English
fleet,"
he
had
written
at
an
earlier
juncture,
should
be
.
.
. in
the
Mediterranean
to
give
that
succour
and
protection
which
I
conceive all
the
countries
upon
those
shores
are
looking
for
at
our
hands
and
which it
would
be
a
proud
distinction
in
us
to
grant.
I
long
to
think
that
Rome, our
common
mother,
should
owe
her
safety
...
to
the
protecting
justice
of Great
Britain."—
Windham Papers,
I,
119-20.

by St. Vi
ncent to proceed with three battl
eships and five small craft to Toulon to report on the preparations and destination of a powerful French fleet. His mission was not to fight but to obtain information.

For, despite French attempts at secrecy and Bonaparte's studied delay at Paris, news of immense concentrations in Provencal and Italian ports had reached St. Vincent. At Toulon and Marseilles, at Genoa, Civita Vecchia and in Corsica hundreds of transports were assembling, troops embarking and battleships, frigates and corvettes moving into position for some great venture. As early as April 24th, only twelve days after the Directors in Paris had signed the formal order for the Egyptian expedition,
The Times
printed circumstantial details of the force. Three days later the same paper reported its destination to be either Ireland or Portugal. Colling-wood wrote on
May 1
st that the French had announced the objective to be Naples and Sicily—a view strongly held by the terrified Court of Naples—but that the Americans who had brought the intelligence to Cadiz were convinced that it was England.

The possibility of Egypt does not appear to have been seriously canvassed in London. This was the more curious because during April Dundas received warning from a spy of a scheme for sending 400 French officers via Egypt and Suez to India to offer their services to Tippoo Sahib and the Mahratta chiefs and stir up war in Hindustan.
¹
And India was always the apple of Dundas's eye. Only a few days earlier in a letter to Spencer he had stated his belief that any European Power gaining control of Egypt would acquire the master key of
the
world's commerce.

But for the moment the obvious danger to the Empire was not to its circumference but its heart. It never seems to have seriously occurred to the Cabinet that France's impending blow could fall elsewhere. If the new armada in the south was not, like that at Brest, Cadiz and the Texel, intended for the British Isles, it must be bound for Naples and Sicily to forestall any new Coalition and so safeguard the French rear during the hazards of an invasion. By far its most likely destination was Ireland. This was the firm conviction both of the Irish Government and of Pitt. The dispatch of part of St. Vincent's fleet to the Mediterranean seemed an

¹
News
of
the
landing
of
French
engineers
at
Alexandria
on
April
20th, 1798,
did
not
reach
the
British
Government
till
July
5th.

antici
pation of an encounter which must otherwise be fought off the Irish coast.

For here in the island which she had conquered, misgoverned and never understood, proud England was faced with disaster and defeat. Four million Irish were united in a sudden resolve to fling off the yoke of ten million English, Scots and Welsh, themselves engaged in a life-and-death struggle with more than forty million Frenchmen, Spaniards and Dutchmen. To crush the republicans of United Ir
eland, Dublin Castl
e had played its time-honoured trump card of Protestant ascendancy. But instead of crushing republicanism the Protestant ascendancy was itself threatened by a fanatic Catholic insurgence. Holy Ireland had been transformed by the bureaucracy into a Jacobin province.

Dublin
Castle
had been repeatedly warned of its folly. It had paid no heed. In November, 1797, that fine soldier, Lord Moira— himself an Irish landlord—had declared in the English House of Lords that he had witnessed in Ireland " the most absurd as well as the most disgusting tyranny that any nation ever groaned under." Three months later another soldier made an appeal for a wiser policy. At the end of 1797 Sir Ralph Abercromby, back from the West Indies, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Ireland. He found its demoralisation a greater menace to English rule than any invader. At the end of February, 1798, appalled by the outrages that followed the Lord Lieutenant's illegal licence to the military to aid the civil power without magisterial authority— in Irish to act as agents of partisan warfare—the old soldier took the grave step of issuing a general order in which he described his army as being in a state of licentiousness that made it " formidable to every one but the enemy."

The only effect of this bombshell was a clamour by the Irish bureaucracy for Abercromby's recall: a demand to which Pitt and Portland gave way.
¹
Nothing could shake the obstinacy of Dublin Castle: at every moderating suggestion it pointed to the very real horror of Irish atrocities as a reason for increasing its own oppressions. It was even accused by the Opposition of deliberately

¹
The
King,
whose
narrowness
in
religious
matters
did
not
extend
to questions
of
Army
discipline,
refused
to
countenance
his
Ministers*
betrayal of
this
brave
old
soldier
and
showed
him
marked
attention
at
the
next
Levee.

in
citing a rebellion in order to discredit its opponents. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Yet nothing could have seemed more like it. For in its intemperate fear of Papist risings, massacres and French landings, it invited all three.

By the spring of 1798 the British garrisons in Ireland outside the Protestant pale were barely holding down the native population. Everywhere little islands of red were receding before a rising tide of sullen green. " The lower ranks," Abercromby wrote in January, " heartily hate the
gentle
men because they oppress them and the gentlemen hate the peasants because they know they deserve to be hated."
¹
Every one was waiting for the French. A discovery at the end of February revealed the existence of an elaborate channel of communication between Ireland and the Continent. A round of arrests in London was followed on May 19th by the seizure of Lord Edward Fitzgerald in a Dublin slum. Mortally wounded in the encounter the brilliant young Irish aristocrat died a fortnight later.

His arrest threw the Irish leaders into confusion, for he was the pivot on which rebellion turned. It had been planned for the night of May 23rd. But that day the authorities, acting on information, seized thousands of arms. Only a discouraged handful of rebels, assembling in the suburbs of the capital, obeyed the orders of the Irish Rebel Directory. Farther afield in Kildare and Wicklow bands of insurgents attempted to seize strong points on the roads into Dublin but were everywhere repelled.

But on the 26th the revolt broke out in a more serious form and where it was least expected. Led by Father Murphy, a Catholic priest, more than 30,000 armed peasants rose in the thriving countryside of Wexford. Believing their leader to be under the special protection of Heaven, they seized the hill of Oulart, annihilated a force of Militia and, advancing on Ferns, burnt the episcopal palace.

Whitsunday, May 27th, was a day of terror. In England it was marked by intense heat and by a strange encounter in a lonely dell of gorse and silver birches on Putney Common. For two days before, during a debate on manning the Navy, Pitt, maddened by the obstructive tactics of the Opposition, had accused Tierney of deliberately sabotaging the country's defence and had been ruled out of order by the Speaker. Refusing to withdraw his words, he had been challenged by the stout irascible Irishman and, before either

¹
William Pitt and the Great War,
352.

the King or public opinion could intervene to prevent the scandal, the two statesmen had met and fired off pistols at one another— fortunately without effect. The public alarm was immense.
¹
That night London learnt of the rising in Wexford.

Next day the rebels captured Enniscorthy, celebrating their triumph by a night of massacre and arson. Scarcely a Protestant escaped. On the 30th Camden, beside himself with terror, believed the situation to be beyond repair. To crown his fears he had heard three days earlier from Portland: that nine battleships had been sent from the Irish station to reinforce St. Vincent's fleet off Cadiz. He wrote to Pitt on the 29th telling him that Ireland was irretrievably lost without reinforcements from England: it was useless to send cavalry as they were powerless against the pikes of the fanatic peasantry. Pitt replied on June 2nd with the calm habitual to him in time of crisis: the troops, including Guards, had already been dispatched but should be returned as soon as possible so as not to dislocate the general conduct of the war. About the same time he received intelligence that the French fleet had left Toulon, bound, as he believed, for Ireland.

But it was not for Ireland, where on Vinegar Hill 30,0
00 victorious rebels awaited th
eir long-promised coming, that the French had sailed. Instead of seizing the greatest chance he was ever
to
know for striking England to the heart, Bonaparte was receding into the Orient for his own personal glory. A moral flaw in her rule of a subject people had placed England at her foe's mercy. A still greater flaw in her foe caused the chance to be neglected. Had the logic of Jacobin philosophy resulted in the rule of a selfless patriot like Carnot, such
a
blunder could never have been made. But it had led inevitably—as Burke had always foretold—to the dictatorship of
a
scoundrel like Barras and a military adventurer like Bonaparte. For their failings France had
to
pay dear.

The opportunity which the Corsican missed now passed
to
another. In his public actions Nelson was swayed by only one thought—love of country. " In my mind's eye," he told Hardy, "
I
ever saw
a
radiant orb suspended which beckoned me onwards
to
renown." But by renown he meant not glory for its own sake but for the good of his country. For all the failings of an ardent nature,
¹
Hannah More,
II,
14-15.