The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  The Whig attempt at Irish reform thus resulted in nothing but an- acute consciousness of Irish grievances. It left the country sad and disappointed. On the day of Fitzwilliam's departure, all shops and businesses were shut and the better-to-do citizens wore mourning.

  1 Lecky, IV, 69.

  He was succeeded by Lord Camden, a narrow if worthy Protestant who endorsed every obscurantist prejudice of Dublin Castle. But, though the public humiliation of the Catholic under British rule was advertised to the whole world, for the moment there was little Catholic feeling. For by a curious paradox the Irish dissentients of the time were not Catholic but Protestant. It was the radical Dissenters of the north who had embraced the heady republican gospel of Revolutionary France. The illiterate Catholic peasantry, taking the lead from its priests, was too shocked by Jacobin atheism and blasphemy to be seduced.

  Thus it was that the appearance of a French armada in Bantry Bay in the Christmastide of 1796 made no impression on the pious south. But in Ulster it had caused the wildest excitement. Everybody except a few terrified gentry appeared to be engaged in making or stealing arms and drilling in anticipation of a French landing. The very garrisons had their arms filched while they slept. Woods were cut down to make pike handles, nocturnal bands broke into houses, burnt barns and destroyed corn only to disappear in the morning as though they had never been, while attempts to arrest were followed by rescue and murder. Mysterious beacons blazed, shots sounded from bog and mountain, and multitudes paraded the fields carrying white banners and singing republican songs. The Irish genius for disorder, for combining to destroy, blew like a gale over the green hills of Ulster.

  Early in March, 1797, Camden placed the province under martial law and ordered General Lake to disarm the people. In the next fortnight nearly 6000 guns were seized and a great quantity of other arms. But as so often in Ireland, the cure only aggravated the evil. Civil disorder begat military. The imperfect discipline of the Militia and Yeomanry broke down under the strain of house-to-house visitations in a hostile countryside. Small bands of soldiers unaccompanied by their officers—of whom there were too few to go round—broke at night into lonely farmhouses and cabins and subjected their occupants to search. Drink was the besetting sin of the British Army and under its influence horrible outrages were committed. A Welsh regiment of Fencible cavalry stationed at Newry won a particularly unenviable reputation. An officer who visited a mountain village it had beaten up found burning houses, piled-up corpses and cowering prisoners.

  When the better type of landlord and magistrate protested, the government at Dublin—after the manner of privileged bureaucracies—turned on the objectors. Its venom against the liberal element of the Irish aristocracy grew more bitter than ever. It stigmatised the demand for parliamentary reform and emancipation as treason. Loyal Irish patriots like Grattan, Curran and the Ponsonbys were almost hounded from public life. When Portland asked on behalf of the English Cabinet whether something might not be done for the Catholics who had proved loyal during Hoche's expedition, Camden replied that concession would only be made an excuse for rebellion, and that, so long as Ireland remained useful to England, she must be governed by an English party.1 From its policy of narrow exclusion Dublin Castle now reverted to one even narrower; the black intolerance of Limerick and the Boyne. It deliberately appeased the Protestant minority by whipping up fanaticism against the Catholic majority. By so doing it unloosed forces beyond its control.

  To the zealots of the north the right to persecute religious enemies appealed far more than any republic. Irish nationalism became a poor, shabby thing in their eyes when it became identified, as of old, with the cause of the priest-ridden "croppies." After the Orange Club boys had been out for a few nights on the war-path, they forgot all about their love for abstract Liberty and Equality. They only remembered their forebears' hatred of Popery and wooden shoes. Before long they were surpassing the military in their savage persecution of every symbol of Irishry. By midsummer, 1797, Republicanism was already dead in the north.

  But as it died Irish hatred of the Saxon heretic and usurper revived. With Catholic chapels and cabins blazing in half the villages of the north, there began an exodus unparalleled since the bad old days of the seventeenth century. A stream of refugees carried the tale of unmerited woes and wrongs into the rest of Ireland. It lost nothing in the telling, and struck bitter chords in Irish memory. The rumour of the coming of a French army which had scarcely stirred the lazy surface of peasant consciousness at Christmas now assumed an apocalyptic significance. For the French revolutionaries, atheists and blasphemers though they might be, had suddenly become what their forerunners were in the days of

  1 Camden to Portland, 3rd April, 1797.—Lecky, IV, 66.

  James II and Louis XIV: avengers and liberators. Ancient prophecies, long forgotten, were recalled: bards sang how the ancient race and Faith would win back lost lands and the usurpers be expelled for ever:

  " O! the French are on the sea!

  Says the Shan van Vocht,

  And it's where they ought to be,

  Says the Shan van Vocht!

  For ould Ireland shall be free

  From the Shannon to the sea . .

  Ulster ceased to be the mainstay of United Ireland: Catholic, peasant Ireland took its place. Hundreds of thousands swore the fatal oath and dedicated themselves to the dark, treasonable designs of Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy. As immediate assassination was the punishment for even the suspicion of betrayal, and the flame of rebellion spread unchecked, its leaders fanned it by evoking the two most enduring hates of the Irish peasant: for the alien landlord and the heretic tithe-owner.

  The repercussions of Irish unrest beyond the borders of Ireland were serious. In their panic the Irish authorities illegally sent hundreds of arrested suspects to the fleet. These carried the infection of United Irishry to their countrymen serving in the King's ships. Coupled with the news of successful mutiny in England it constituted a major problem for the Navy in every part of the world.

  Nowhere was it so dangerous as in the Fleet off Cadiz. Here Jervis, now Lord St. Vincent, tossing with his crowded ships off the Spanish port, grappled for a whole year with an ugly hydra. The news of the seamen's triumph at Spithead, which reached the Fleet in the second half of May, cast his officers into deep gloom. With so many of the crews miscreants capable of any crime, it was hard to see how they could escape the prevailing infection.

  But St. Vincent no more feared mutiny than he did the Spaniard. He dealt with the least sign of it without hesitation or mercy. Asked to pardon an offender because he was of good character, the grim old man replied that he was glad of it, for till now he had only hanged scoundrels but henceforward men would know that no virtue could atone for mutiny. For more than a year he sat on the lid of a powder barrel, until in May, 1798, the captain of the Marlborough reported that his crew would not permit a shipmate condemned for mutiny to be hanged. St. Vincent received the captain on the quarter-deck of his flagship. He listened in silence to the request that the execution should be carried out on another ship. " Do you mean to tell me, Captain Ellison," he asked, " that you cannot command His Majesty's ship Marlborough? If that is the case, sir, I will immediately send on board an officer who can. That man shall be hanged at 8 o'clock to-morrow morning and by his own ship's company, for not a hand from any other ship in the Fleet shall touch the rope." Next morning armed launches from every ship surrounded the Marlborough with orders to fire into her on the slightest sign of resistance. As her unwilling crew hauled up the victim, every man in the Fleet knew whose will was master.1

  It was not only its chief's resolution that preserved discipline in the former Mediterranean Fleet, but the humane spirit of its captains. Such officers would not countenance the petty tyranny and corruption that had driven ships like the Sandwich to mutiny. They cared for their men, and their men repaid their care. One day early in June, 1797, a paper was found on the quarter-deck of the Theseus:

 
; " Success attend Admiral Nelson! God bless Captain Miller! We thank them for the officers they have placed over us. We are happy and comfortable, and will shed every drop of blood in our veins to support them." 2

  In Collingwood's ship the discipline of the lash was largely superseded by such minor punishments as exclusion from mess and watering the grog. The seamen's recreations and the proper treatment of the sick were their captain's constant care. But on less fortunate stations years elapsed before the Navy was free from the

  1 Mahan, Sea Power, I, 238-9.

  2 Only a month earlier St. Vincent had written : " The Theseus is an abomination. ... If I can prevail on Captain Aylmer to go into the Captain, Rear-Admiral Nelson and Captain Miller will soon put Theseus to rights." {Spencer, II, 403.) Nelson's view of the Spithead*mutinies was expressed in a letter on June 30th. " I am entirely with the seamen in their first complaint. We are a neglected set and, when peace comes, are shamefully treated ; but, for the Nore scoundrels, I should be happy to command a ship against them."—Nicolas, II, 402.

  menace of mutiny. In September, 1797, the crew of the Hermione, cruising off Puerto Rico in the West Indies, murdered her officers and delivered the frigate—one of the finest in the Service—to the Spaniards. In July Duncan, blockading the Texel, reported that few of his ships could be depended upon. Later in the year there was serious trouble at the Cape.

  It was with such considerations and the knowledge that all Europe had yielded to the aggressor that Pitt in the summer of 1797 again explored the possibilities of peace. " I feel it my duty as an English Minister and a Christian," he wrote to his Foreign Secretary, who did not share his views, " to use every effort to stop so bloody and wasting a war." Despite the opposition of the King, as well as of the powerful faction that followed Burke and Windham, he carried the Cabinet.

  For with Camden writing urgent warnings from Ireland entreating him to make terms before it was too late, with the fleets still simmering with suppressed mutiny, with three great naval powers at her throat and two armies of invasion preparing to assail her, Britain seemed to have no alternative. " If peace is to be had, we must have it," wrote Canning. " When Windham says we must not, I ask him, * Can we have war? ' It is out of the question, we have not the means; we have not what is of all means the most essential, the mind." 1

  For the country was at last losing faith in its power to achieve its war aims. It was no longer prepared to fight for them. It would make further sacrifices only for bare existence. " We can break off upon nothing but what will rouse us from sleep and stupidity into a new life and action," Canning continued. " We are now soulless and spineless." The desperate unity engendered by the menace of the Nore mutiny had been succeeded by a feeling of exhaustion; the sacrifices of the past four years appeared in vain, victory farther off than ever. Men had momentarily lost confidence in their leaders and the organs of public opinion; a naval officer who that summer captured a French privateer commented bitterly on the lying newspapers that gave out that the French were starving, whereas in

  1 " For my part I adjourn my objects of honour and happiness for, this country beyond the grave of our military and political consequence which you are now digging at Lille. I believe in our resurrection and find my only comfort in it."—Malmesbury, III, 398.

  reality their ships were loaded with luxuries.1 A cartoon of Gillray portrayed Pitt as a sleepwalker descending, with guttering candle and fixed staring eyes, the gaping stairway of a tottering ruin. Nelson, writing from Cadiz at the end of June, heard that he was out; " it is measures must be changed and not men," he commented. The general feeling in the Fleet was that peace was now inevitable.2 Even St. Vincent sent Spencer suggestions for demobilisation.

  Accordingly at the beginning of July Malmesbury set out for Lille where Republican plenipotentiaries had been appointed to meet him. The recent French elections had clearly shown the popular desire for peace. Though three of the five Directors wanted the war to continue at all costs, an open rejection of the British overtures was more than they dared. They had therefore decided to play for time.

  At first the " white lion's " reports were hopeful; he had been treated with courtesy, even old-world ceremony: the French plenipotentiaries were very different from those of the previous year; everywhere the weary, disillusioned country people wanted peace. Britain was no longer under any obligation to press for the return of Austrian territories: she was prepared to abandon the old conception of the balance of power and Tier claim to control the fate of Holland and Belgium. And, as she was also ready to restore unconditionally all her colonial conquests except Spanish Trinidad

  Dutch Ceylon and the Cape, there seemed little to dispute. But soon the old doubts arose: the Directory was making difficulties, demanding unconditional compensation for the ships destroyed at Toulon four years before and the repudiation of the King of England's historic French title as indispensable preliminaries to negotiation. Before long it was asking still more: that before any discussion Britain should surrender every colonial possession she had taken not only from France but from Spain and the Batavian Republic.

  In this doubtful season and while the,Dutch invasion fleet with its transports waited for westerly winds to veer to the east, Burke died. For long he had been in despair. " If I live much longer," he

  1 " Barrels of meat of every description—alamode beef, ham, fowls, and tongues, casks filled with eggs, coffee, tea and sugar, all kinds of cordial, with plenty of brandy and different wines; so that instead of starvation, there appeared the luxury of Lucullus."—Gardner, 200.

  2 Wynne Diaries, II, 183.

  had written, " I shall see an end of all that is worth living for in this world' The departure of Malmesbury on yet another abject mission had been the final blow to the angry, vehement old man: he could not survive it. But as he lay dying in his home at Beaconsfield and his anguished disciples stood around him, a flash of the old prophetic power returned. "Never," he whispered, " succumb to these difficulties. It is a struggle for your existence as a nation, and, if you must die, die with the sword in your hand."

  Far away off Cadiz, Nelson was preparing with three ships of the line and four frigates to storm the great Spanish island fortress of Tenerife and capture the Mexican treasure fleet which was believed to be sheltering there. On July 15 th, 1797, he parted from St. Vincent and five days later sighted the snow-capped peak and frowning cliffs under which he proposed to take his ships. A more desperate enterprise was never attempted: the fortress of Santa Cruz bristled with guns and was defended by 8000 Spanish troops. Against them Nelson could oppose a bare 1000 sailors and marines. On the night of the 24th, he brought his landing boats to within half a gunshot of the shore before the church bells sounded the alarm and a hurricane of grapeshot swept the harbour. With his right arm shattered to the bone Nelson was borne back half-unconscious to his flagship, while a forlorn hope of four hundred men under Troubridge carried the mole and, driving through the deserted streets, actually reached the great square before their ammunition ran out. Here from a convent into which they retired they prepared fireballs and torches to storm their way into the citadel until the governor—a kindly and sensible man—admiring the extravagance of these mad Englishmen, made propositions so generous that they yielded. Providing them with boats to depart— for their own had been dashed to pieces—he gave to each man a loaf and a pint of wine and sent them back to their ships.1

  1 He entertained Captain Troubridge and Captain Hood to dinner and, with the chivalry of his proud race, showed them every kindness. The courtesy was returned by Nelson, who carried the Spaniard's official report of his successful defence to Cadiz. Earl Spencer, on hearing of the episode, wrote to his colleague, the Foreign Secretary : " Being on the subject of compliments, I really think that some notice should be taken (but I don't exactly know the proper mode) of the Spanish Governor of Santa Cruz who behaved so well to our people after the treaty they made for retreating to their ships."—H. M. C. Dropmore, III, 375. />
  At Lille the prospects of peace depended on the moderates in the Legislative Councils prevailing over the corrupt Directors. A secret approach to Malmesbury by one of the plenipotentiaries, urging him to await the triumph of the peace party, prolonged negotiations for many weeks after rational hope of a successful issue had faded. The British Government, needing it so much and assured by Malmesbury that peace would sap the failing strength of the Revolution, abased itself and went on exchanging notes about the return of Dutch and Spanish colonies. It subsequently transpired that the new French Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, was using these delays to speculate in British Funds.

  With the expiry of Carnot's term as President of the Directory on August 24th, 1797, his colleagues completed their plans for an appeal to the sword. Behind them were the power and prestige of the young hero to whom their leader, Barras, had given his first chance. General Bonaparte did not love Barras, but he loved the peace party and the Royalists of the Club de Clichy even less. At the moment he was negotiating the final formalities of the Treaty of Campo Formio, which was to set the seal on the preliminary peace of Leoben and substitute France for Austria as the dominant power in Italy and the Adriatic. His bloodless conquest of Venice and the Ionian Islands had fired his imagination: he saw himself as the successor of the Doges, holding the golden East in fee, using the Venetian fleet to seize Malta from the Knights of St. John and striking through Egypt to found a new empire in the Levant and India. Such a policy was utterly incompatible with peace with England: now, when that greedy, soulless power was decaying at the centre, was the moment to strike off her eastern tentacles. Her subsidised allies were all gone and she could do nothing without them.