A significant postscript to the rebellion was still to come. It revealed once again how little any coherent idea of nationality was as yet an indigenous Irish political force. It also brought to a sombre end the adventures of Wolfe Tone.
For all the United Irishmen’s chronic optimism, they had generally regarded French military help as essential to a successful revolution in Ireland. All their other hopes had been built on it. And the failure of the French to appear in 1797 or in the early months of 1798 had done much to weaken such revolutionary enthusiasm as existed in a movement that in any case always contained more desperation than political consciousness. When the rebels finally did chaotically take the field, uncoordinated as they were with their own leaders, they had no contacts at all with the French. The men of Wexford thought of the French chiefly to revile them for leaving them in the lurch.
Tone himself had spent the early part of the summer with the immobile French invasion fleet at Le Havre, increasingly despondent. Now, in August 1798, such rebellion as had been able to gain momentum was crushed, and the slaughter of the rebels was proceeding so methodically that at least one gaoler felt the need to invent for himself a gallows which would hang thirty at a time.** It may therefore seem the final disastrous absurdity that at this, of all moments, the French should send another expedition to Ireland, and one which this time succeeded at last in landing on Irish soil.
Yet the idea of the expedition was in many ways a credit to the French. If the state of Irish national feeling had been as positive as Tone, O’Connor and others had repeatedly represented it, the plan would not have been unreasonable. For the events of May and June, though terrible and disappointing, could be expected to have inflamed the Irish national spirit still further. It was true that the resolution with which the Catholic militia had fought rebels of their own class and creed in the king’s name had been disconcerting, yet even Tone, when insisting that the militia would come over to a man, had always made the arrival of a French force a necessary proviso. All the French did now was to put to a final test the theories of militant Irish nationality to which they had been converted.
Bonaparte, who after the death of Hoche had inherited the notion of an invasion of Ireland as part of the Directory’s strategic outlook, had been at best non-committal about it when he met Tone in January 1798. But for the next few weeks at least most serious preparations were continued for a major assault on the British Isles. And though Kent and Sussex were clearly in Bonaparte’s mind more than Ireland, it is unlikely that, had that assault been launched, some part of it would not have been concerned with Ireland if only as a diversion. In any case, even a descent on Kent and Sussex might have been expected to have important repercussions in Ireland. The preparations were on a vast scale. The whole of the Channel coast from Antwerp to Cherbourg had been turned into a vast naval area, and other work was proceeding in the Atlantic ports of Brest and La Rochelle.
Why then, knowing as the French did at this time that a rebellion of sorts was about to break out in Ireland, did they not strike immediately in support of it?
The answer is that just before the rebellion’s haphazard outbreak, the French Directory, for whom Ireland was always only one factor in a vastly complex strategic situation, had been persuaded by Bonaparte to change their strategy altogether. An inspection of the Channel in February had convinced Bonaparte that France was not within sight of that mastery of the sea which he considered essential for a successful invasion.1 He persuaded the Directory to switch their attention towards the East. An Army of the Orient was created in April, drawing its strength from the former Army of England, and late in May, as the Irish rebellion lumbered into the open, Buonaparte himself sailed for Egypt.
But, having completed this major readjustment of strategy, the Directory remained honourably true, at least in spirit, to their recent assurances to Tone and Lewins. In July they finally issued the orders containing plans ‘to bring help to the Irish who have taken up arms to shake off the yoke of British domination’.2 Three small separate expeditions were to carry troops, arms and ammunition to the help of the Irish simultaneously by different routes: some light vessels with émigré Irishmen on board were to sail from the Channel ports, another expedition was to leave from Rochefort (by La Rochelle) and a third – the largest, with about three thousand men – from Brest. The overall command of this ‘Army of Ireland’ was given to General Hardy, and of the naval arrangements to Admiral Bompard stationed at Brest. The instructions ended with an exhortation to do everything to encourage Irish morale by keeping up a hate for the name of England, and at the same time to preserve a discipline which would be a model to the Irish troops who, it must not be forgotten, were ‘their persecuted brothers fighting in a common cause’.3 No expedition, concluded the orders, could have greater influence on the political situation in Europe. Command of that part of the expedition which was to sail from Rochefort was given to a general named Humbert.
Humbert was a true son of the Revolution. Then a man of thirty, of peasant stock, he had risen from the ranks and had fought in Europe, in the Vendée and at Quiberon Bay. He had taken part in Hoche’s Bantry Bay expedition of 1796, sailing in the ship Les Droits de l’Homme which was intercepted by the British on the return journey and wrecked with the loss of some 1,200 of its 1,800 men. In 1797 Humbert had put up to the Directory ideas for what would now be called commando-type expeditions to be landed in Scotland or Cornwall, and he may have been disappointed not to have been given overall command of the new expedition to Ireland. In any case, he seemed determined to seize the major share of whatever glory was to be had from the enterprise. Held up in port like the other two parts of the expedition for lack of cash, due to the bureaucratic delays of the French Treasury, Humbert succeeded in raising the money himself from local sources, and on 6 August 1798 set sail for Ireland independently with his three frigates, and just over a thousand officers and men, together with some five thousand stand of extra arms and a number of spare French uniforms.
Though audacious, his action was not as absurd as hindsight may make it seem. He knew that the other forces of the invasion were about to follow him to the north-west corner of Ireland. He knew that the force which was sailing from the Channel ports was specially designed to bring extra supplies to those Irish whom his own arrival should bring out in insurrection. Above all he assumed, and this was the premise on which the whole concept of the enterprise was based (for Tone and his friends had done their work well), that the Irish people, though they might have suffered a terrible setback two months earlier, must be only waiting for the chance to rise en masse again. After experience of the chouannerie in the Vendée his military thinking was particularly attuned to the idea of fast-moving commando-type forays behind the enemy lines. And personally he was a very brave man. In any case, the omens seemed on his side. For Humbert’s expedition began with a brilliantly successful evasion of a large British squadron that was patrolling for the French ships just outside Rochefort.
Sixteen days later, on 22 August 1798, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, three men o’ war flying the British flag appeared in the Bay of Killala, a small town in County Mayo which was the seat of both a Protestant and a Catholic bishopric. Two sons of the Protestant bishop were among those who eagerly pushed off in small boats to examine the new arrivals. One British Army officer who had himself only just arrived in Killala to take over command of the garrison there rowed out to offer them a catch of fish he had made on his way from Sligo. He arrived on board to find himself surrounded by Frenchmen and made their prisoner. By the ruse of flying the British flag, Humbert’s expedition had achieved total surprise.4
The French, who on the last few days of their voyage had experienced rough weather and had been unable to get in at their first choice of landing point, Donegal Bay, must have had the disastrous anticlimax of Bantry Bay two years earlier very much in their minds. This small force of about a thousand men now disembarked immediately with efficiency and speed, hidden from the town of Killala itself by a chain of hills and the indentation of the bay.
The Protestant bishop was giving a dinner-party that fine summer evening for three or four visiting clergymen and some officers from Ballina. They were on the point of rising from their wine to join the ladies when a terrified messenger entered the room to say that three hundred Frenchmen were within a mile of the town. After a brief and not particularly heroic stand in the streets by the local yeomanry, the French themselves were in the house, headed by their general, a man of good height and shape, in the full vigour of life but with ‘a small sleepy eye … the eye of a cat preparing to spring on its prey’.5 The bishop, though a liberal-minded man, could not help noticing that Humbert’s ‘education and manners were indicative of a person sprung from the lowest orders of society’, but conceded that he knew how to assume the deportment of a gentleman when he wanted to. Humbert immediately made clear that the French intended to behave with total correctness, in accordance with his orders. Later, the bishop was to pay a glowing tribute to the impeccable discipline with which the French conducted themselves throughout the whole of their stay.6
The next morning a green flag was hoisted over the castle gate, bearing the inscription ‘Erin go Bragh’, or ‘Ireland for Ever’. The moment that the United Irishmen and the Defenders had awaited with such desperate hope for so long, and which the government had so long dreaded, had come at last. A French Army was on Irish soil, calling upon the Irish to rise.
Humbert issued a proclamation headed ‘LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, UNION!’
Irishmen, you have not forgot Bantry Bay – you know what efforts France has made to assist you. Her affections for you, her desire for avenging your wrongs, and assuring your independence, can never be impaired.
After several unsuccessful attempts, behold Frenchmen arrived amongst you.
They come to support your courage, to share your dangers, to join their arms, and to mix their blood with yours in the sacred cause of liberty. They are the forerunners of other Frenchmen whom you shall soon infold in your arms …
We swear the most inviolable respect for your properties, your laws and all your religious opinions. Be free; be masters in your own country. We look for no other conquest than that of your own liberty – no other success than yours.
The moment of breaking your chains has arrived …. Can there be any Irishman base enough to separate himself at such a juncture from the grand interests of his country? If such there be, brave friends, let him be chased from the country he betrays, and let his property become the reward of those generous men who know how to fight and die.
Irishmen … recollect America, free from the moment she wished to be so.
The contest between you and your oppressors cannot be long.
Union! Liberty! the Irish Republic! – such is our shout. Let us march. Our hearts are devoted to you; our glory is in your happiness.7
A measure of the sort of response that Humbert had hoped for is shown by his treatment of the first two officer prisoners he took. One of these, a Lieutenant Sills, was sent on board his ships to be conveyed to France because he was an officer in an English regiment, the Leicester Fencibles. The other, a Captain Kirkwood of the local yeomanry unit, he released on parole because he was an Irishman. Indeed, on the very evening of his arrival Humbert made a vain attempt to get the bishop himself to join the Irish Republic, offering him a post in the Directory of Connaught which he was about to form and telling him that such powerful other forces would soon be on their way from French ports that Ireland would be free within a month.8
The French, as they admitted afterwards, had been led by the Irish in France to expect that ‘a numerous and well-disciplined army, headed by the gentry and chief land-owners, would join them’.9 Their hopes of the peasantry had, of course, been even higher, but these too were to be no less seriously disappointed.
It may be asked, as the Bishop of Killala asked himself, why the French should have landed in this particular north-west corner of Ireland at all, where so far there had been virtually no suspicion of disloyalty among the population. But they had received many assurances, such as one from MacNeven in the previous year in which he declared with typical over-optimism that … ‘Even in the places where the United Irish system has not been fully adopted, the cooperation of the poor and middle classes can be counted on.’10 Moreover, in June 1798, Lewins, urging the Directory to take action, had given them details which may well have been accurate of the disposition of loyalist troops in Ireland and the fact that in the north-west these were thinly distributed. He had added assurances similar to MacNeven’s about the Irish patriotism of the greater part of the militia and the yeomanry as well (Lewins’s italics).
The reality of Humbert’s reception was very different from what he had been led to expect. Certainly the peasantry turned out to welcome him rapturously on the roadside. And when on the very first day the French started distributing arms and uniforms in the castle yard at Killala, there was no shortage of customers. The bishop estimated they arrived in thousands to take part in the share-out. But campaign-toughened French republicans fresh from chasing the Pope out of Italy, were rather astonished to hear them say that they had come to take arms for France and the blessed Virgin. About a thousand were given complete blue uniforms, including helmets edged with spotted brown paper to make them look like leopard skins. A French naval officer stood on a barrel thumping the helmets down on to peasant heads to make them fit. Some 5,500 muskets were also distributed. Swords and pistols were reserved for rebel officers.
The distribution of the muskets together with ball and powder proved rash, for the peasantry were not naturally disciplined soldiers. In the course of experimentation with the new weapons Humbert himself narrowly escaped death from a clumsy recruit whose gun went off accidentally in the yard, sending a bullet past the general’s ear as he stood at a window, to lodge in the ceiling just behind him. The French soon refused to hand out any more ammunition until the peasantry agreed to cease using it for shooting at ravens.11
Although the Irish who rallied to Humbert were occasionally, like the rebels in Wexford, to give proof of great quixotic courage and bravado, they proved a military disappointment. Their rapaciousness and lack of discipline appalled their French commander and he more than once had to deal with them severely. One senior officer later told the bishop that he would never trust himself to such a horde of savages again.12 It seemed particularly inappropriate to the French, too, that these Irish should consider themselves as fighting primarily for their religion. As one officer remarked: ‘God help these simpletons. If they knew how little we care about the Pope or his religion they would not be so hot in expecting help from us …. We have just sent Mr Pope away from Italy, and who knows but that we may find him in this country?’13
He also commented that if it were up to him he would pick one-third of them and shoot the rest.
Humbert had been led to expect something like a national revolutionary organization at work in Ireland. He found only an ignorant, neglected peasantry. In them, a sometimes desperate sense of being on their own in society could be momentarily excited into a spirit of revolt, but at the same time their long hard training in individual survival at all costs made them individualists to the end.
The size of the French force was in any case hardly large enough to inspire any but the most foolhardy or dedicated to chance their new arms, particularly after the terrible retribution that had so recently overtaken those who took to arms in Wexford. When Humbert sent his first dispatch to the French Admiralty a few days later, he reported, in spite of the eager acceptance of arms and uniforms, that ‘The Irish have until this day hung back. The County of Mayo has never been disturbed and this must account for the slowness of our approach which in other parts would have been very different.’14
By then, in fact, about six hundred Irish had already been in battle with him, but they had fled at the first cannon shot, though, he wrote, ‘I expected as much and their panic in no way deranged my operations.’15 The final words of that sentence were no boast. By contrast with the rest of his news, this disappointing showing of the Irish seemed insignificant. For the dispatch also contained accurate details of a sensational success of French arms.
Leaving about a fifth of his small army behind at Killala as a garrison, Humbert quickly moved south, and within a week had met and totally defeated a much superior British force under General Lake at Castlebar. Lake lost more than fifty of his men killed and the rest fled in panic, some of them falling back as far as Athlone, a distance of sixty-three miles said to have been covered in twenty-seven hours. The battle has gone down to history as ‘the races of Castlebar’.
Humbert immediately set up a Provisional Government, making its President a young Catholic Irish gentleman named John Moore, and ‘in the name of the Irish Republic’ required everyone between the ages of sixteen and forty inclusive to rally at once to the French camp and march en masse ‘against the common enemy, the Tyrant of Ireland – the English; whose destruction is the only way of ensuring the independence and happiness of ancient Hibernia’.16 He also incidentally declared traitors to their country all those who having received arms did not rejoin the army within twenty-four hours.
At the same time Humbert sent for the two hundred Frenchmen he had left to garrison Killala. The bishop and the Protestant citizens of that town now had only three French officers between themselves and the rough Irish levies Humbert had armed. Everything the Protestants had heard about the recent massacres in Wexford was naturally very much in their minds. But it is to the credit of the trio of French officers that nothing of the sort occurred in Mayo. They acted quickly as soon as any signs of unmilitary personal vengeance appeared among their Irish followers, and in this, on the bishop’s evidence, had the support of some Irish officers among the rebels who, like their less successful counterparts in Wexford, wished to prevent any degradation of their cause. Sixty Protestants imprisoned in Ballina as alleged Orangemen had the narrowest escape. They were released on the immediate intervention of one of the three Frenchmen. Otherwise, though it proved impossible to prevent looting of Protestant houses which took place on a considerable scale, there was not a single attempt to kill Protestants in cold blood during the entire month in which Connaught – or more accurately the country round Killala – was under the nominal government of the ‘Irish Republic’. Creditable as this was, both to the French and certain Irish rebel captains, it is difficult not to conclude that it was due as much to the absence so far of any government terror of the sort that had inspired such a desperate desire for revenge in Wexford.
In his dispatches after Castlebar Humbert wrote confidently to the French Directory that he hoped to link with Irish insurgents either in the North or in Roscommon, and then march on Dublin. At the same time he recommended a suitable anchorage for the fleet that was to follow him. But the Bishop of Killala noted in his diary that in spite of the early success the French officers with him were soon considering themselves a forlorn hope with little more than nuisance value and little other future than surrender. In fact, their fate still very much depended on whether or not the two eventualities for which Humbert was hoping took place: the rising of substantial bodies of rebels in Ireland and the arrival of the planned reinforcements from France.
From Castlebar he marched North again with his army – only just over eight hundred men now, for his losses at Castlebar had been proportionately high – in the direction of Sligo which he seemed to intend to seize as a suitable harbour for the eventual arrival of Bompard’s fleet. But on coming into contact with a small British force close by he wrongly supposed it to be the vanguard of a much larger army and turned away eastwards into County Leitrim where he had hopes of being joined by a considerable body of rebels. Unpleasantly harassed, though from a respectful distance, by troops under Lake, the general he had defeated at Castlebar, Humbert knew now that Cornwallis himself, the lord lieutenant and commander-in-chief, was moving towards him with a great new army of some twenty thousand men against which even his hardened veterans of the Army of Italy, now of the Army of Ireland, could have little chance. As there was still no word of any of the other expeditions from France, his one hope lay with a major rising of Irish rebels. News of an important rising near Granard in Leitrim now came in, reported to the French as a success.
Humbert ordered an immediate march in the direction of Granard, telling his men that they would be in Dublin in two days.17 At Cloon they were met by a rebel chief, armed, according to one of the French officers, from head to foot and looking like one of the knights errant of the thirteenth century.18 He asked them to wait for a day while he mustered ten thousand men. But the very next day Humbert received a terrible blow. As his third-in-command put it, ‘He was astonished to learn that the insurgents, informed of the state of our forces, and judging them too weak to resist Lord Cornwallis … no longer wanted to swell our ranks and make common cause with us. The fear of seeing their women and children murdered, if they abandoned their homesteads, was another reason for deciding to play for safety and run no further risks.’19
In fact, the rising at Granard had been bloodily repulsed by the military, and equally disastrous failure met an attempted simultaneous rising in County Westmeath. So much for all the assurances Tone and the United Irishmen had been giving the French for so long. They had been given honestly enough. But they had been based on a concept of how they thought things ought to have been rather than of how they were. The only evidence Humbert had had of the national rising promised to the Directory had been utterly insignificant. The crude levies of peasantry who had presented themselves at Killala had fought bravely when they had fought at all, but they were unpredictable and ungovernable and in the long run more an embarrassment than an asset. More relevant had been the ninety-odd men of the Longford and Kilkenny militias who had deserted to the French after Castlebar. The Bishop of Killala had watched them come into his yard after the battle with their coats turned. But after all the French had been told about the state of mind of the militia such members were pitifully few.
With the collapse of all hopes of serious help from the Irish, and still no sign of the other expeditions from France, it was inevitably only a short time before Humbert was cornered. On 8 September 1798 he found himself trapped by Cornwallis at Ballinamuck and, after a short battle in which the French put up little more than a token fight, he surrendered. The French prisoners, consisting of 884 officers and men, were treated with the greatest respect by their captors, and their week’s journey across Ireland to Dublin by mail coach and canal, during which they played cards, sang the Marseillaise and attended dances, had something of a triumphant progress about it. One of the officers of Humbert’s escort was reported as saying that Humbert had little but contempt for the allies he had come to liberate, and complained that on the very first day of his landing they had immediately relieved him of £50 and his watch.20 On arrival in Dublin, they were given a banquet in their honour before being put on a ship to England from which they were soon afterwards returned to France.**
A starker fate awaited the Irish. One French officer has recorded how, at least at Ballinamuck, some three hundred of them had ‘fought bravely to the last and were cut to pieces, selling their lives dearly’.21 The usual indiscriminate slaughter overtook most of those who fled. A fortnight later, a detachment of the loyalist army consisting of some Highlanders and the Queen’s County, Downshire and Kerry militias (the latter under the command of Maurice Fitzgerald, the Knight of Kerry), marched inexorably against Killala itself. The town had remained throughout this fortnight in the hands of three French officers and the Irish rebels, a further 750 of whom had actually come to offer their services to the French after the battle of Ballinamuck. (‘A great crowd of clowns came in this day, armed with pikes …’ was how the bishop reported their arrival.) There were in fact about nine hundred rebels in the town of Killala as the loyalist army approached it along the road from Ballina on 22 September.22 Some of these rebels ran away before any battle could take place, but others were soon ‘running on death with as little appearance of reflection or concern as if they were hastening to a show’.23 They posted themselves behind the low stone walls on either side of the road and awaited the assault of their fellow countrymen wearing the king’s uniform.
They stood bravely for about twenty minutes, firing too high as usual, and then broke and ran. Some four hundred of them were killed during the fighting, and in the usual savage mopping-up operations that followed. The always fair-minded bishop commented of his deliverers: ‘Their rapacity differed in no respect from that of the rebels, except that they seized upon things with somewhat less of ceremony or excuse, and that his Majesty’s soldiers were incomparably superior to the Irish traitors in dexterity at stealing.’24
Though Cornwallis issued ‘protections’ for those ‘deluded’ people who had served the French as rank and file, there followed the usual savage courts-martial for those who had served in any position of authority. Some ninety death sentences were carried out, and among the victims were Wolfe Tone’s brother, Matthew, and another Irishman who had accompanied the expedition, Bartholomew Teeling. They had been taken wearing French officer’s uniform but, in spite of the plea of their commander Humbert that they were entitled to be treated as prisoners under the laws of war, they were shown no mercy. As a passionate loyalist of the day remarked with approval in the context of loyalist severity throughout the rebellion as a whole: ‘Where the sword of civil war is drawn, the laws are silent.’25
But the year still held a few more surprises. For, unaware of what had happened to Humbert, except for the news of his early successes, two other components of the multiple French expedition to Ireland had already set sail.
The first had left Dunkirk on 4 September, four days before Humbert’s surrender at Ballinamuck. This new expedition was a minute one, consisting solely of one of the fastest sailing corvettes in the French navy, the yellow-painted Anacreon, with some 180 men on board and a large supply of arms, including artillery, and saddles and bridles for Irish cavalry. The whole expedition in fact was prepared on the assumption that Ireland had risen in revolt. There were also a number of émigré Irishmen on board, including the remarkable Napper Tandy, now boasting the rank of a French general, while the overall command was held by a French American called Rey.26
They landed on Rutland Island off County Donegal at midday on 16 September, with Tandy one of the first ashore. Appeals to the population were immediately distributed. One of these, signed by Rey, was headed:
‘Liberty or Death! Northern Army of Avengers. Headquarters, the first year of Irish Liberty.’
It began: ‘United Irishmen …’ and declared that the French, with Napper Tandy at their head, sworn to lead them on to victory or die, had come ‘to break your fetters, and restore you to the blessings of liberty …. The Trumpet calls …’ Another proclamation, similarly headed, and signed by Tandy himself, told the people that it was their duty ‘to strike on their blood-cemented thrones the murderers of your friends’ and ‘to wage a war of extermination against your oppressors, the war of liberty against tyranny, and liberty shall triumph’.27
The number of Irish who could then read English in that part of Donegal must have been very few. In any case, the local population had fled to the mountains and showed no inclination to join the invaders at all.28 Tandy and his allies who, as they told the local postmaster, had come expressly ‘to try the pulse of the people’, were shattered by the disappointment; their discomfort was completed by news of the fate of Humbert’s army at Ballinamuck. After a meal, which they asked for politely, and paid for, they returned to their ship and sailed away again. Tandy, who was fond of drink, had to be carried on board and was in such a state that he made water on the shoulders of those carrying him.29
Their ship, the Anacreon, had an encounter with an armed merchantman off the Orkneys on the way back, in the course of which Tandy sat on deck drinking brandy with eight-pound cannon balls in his pockets, ready to leap overboard and drown himself if necessary rather than submit to capture.30 But the French were victorious, and after escaping all pursuing British warships the corvette reached Hamburg. From there, however, the British Government managed to secure Tandy’s extradition. He was brought to England, kept in prison a long time, but finally reprieved, partly thanks to the intercession of the lord lieutenant, Cornwallis, who stressed ‘the incapacity of this old man to do further mischief’.31 Tandy was eventually returned to France in 1802, during the short Peace of Amiens, and died soon afterwards.
Long before this, the British Government had at last caught up with the most attractive personality of all among the early United Irishmen, Wolfe Tone. Tone had set off for Ireland on the last instalment of the French invasion just two days before Tandy and co. made their dismal landfall on Rutland Island. The fleet which Tone accompanied was the largest to set sail for Ireland since the expedition to Bantry Bay nearly two years before. It was, however, considerably smaller than that, being composed of only ten ships altogether: of which only one was a ship of the line, appropriately named the Hoche of 74 guns with Admiral Bompard, General Hardy and Tone himself on board. The rest of the fleet consisted of eight heavy frigates of between 24 guns and 12 guns, and one fast schooner.32 They carried some three thousand men in all and quantities of stores. It was at least better than the ‘corporal’s guard’, which Tone had always said he was ready to go to Ireland with if necessary, and it was still not known what had happened to Humbert.
At 5.30 on the morning of 12 October, after a twenty-three day voyage, the French were intercepted off the northern coast of Donegal by a British squadron under Sir John Warren which, though numerically smaller, was much more heavily gunned, including as it did six ships of the line.33 Seeing that a battle was inevitable, and defeat more than likely, the French tried to persuade Tone to leave the Hoche and escape to France in the fast sailing schooner. But, as one would expect from his character, he refused to go and commanded a battery on board during the fight.34 An action began about 7.30 a.m. The Hoche suffered the handicap of being without her main top-mast which had been carried away in the rough weather of the previous days. Castlereagh’s uncle, Sir James Stewart, watched the battle from Horn Head.35 It took place too far out to sea for him to be quite certain of the outcome, but he thought it had gone favourably for the British. In fact, the Hoche put up a gallant defence, but after four hours struck her colours. The other nine ships all tried to make their escape back to France but six were eventually taken and found to be ‘full of troops and stores’.36
Three weeks later, when several hundred prisoners were being landed from Lough Swilly to which the Hoche had been brought for repair, one of the first men to step out of one of the boats in the uniform of a French officer was Tone himself. The British Government had known he was on board the Hoche, but he seems to have made no attempt to conceal his identity. Recognizing a loyalist bystander on the shore, who had been at Trinity with him, he spoke to him at once.37 He was taken to Dublin in irons, an insult to the French uniform which he much resented, and on Saturday, 10 November, appeared in court in that uniform: ‘a large and fiercely cocked hat with broad gold lace and the tricoloured cockade, a blue uniform coat, with gold and embroidered collar and two large epaulettes, blue pantaloons with gold-laced garters at the knees, and short boots bound at the top with gold lace’.38
The result of the trial was a foregone conclusion. Tone admitted the charge of acting hostilely to the king, though he refused to use the word guilty himself, simply saying that he had admitted the charge ‘and consequently the appellation by which I am technically described’.39 He delivered a rather high-flown but dignified address to the court, which he was made to abbreviate because of its inflammatory irrelevance, but he concluded with the words:
Success is all in this life; and, unfavoured of her, virtue becomes vicious in the ephemeral estimation of those who attach every merit to posterity. In the glorious race of patriotism, I have pursued the path chalked out by Washington in America and Kosciusco in Poland. Like the latter I have failed to emancipate my country; and unlike both I have forfeited my life. I have done my duty, and I have no doubt the Court will do theirs. I have only to add that a man who has thought and acted as I have done should be armed against fear of death.40
Except for a moment right at the beginning of the trial when he had asked rather agitatedly for a glass of water, he seemed to some ‘unmoved and unterrified throughout’.41 But the Marquis of Buckingham who was present at the trial commented the same day that he thought Tone was ‘much agitated and I cannot help thinking that he means to destroy himself on Monday’ (the day appointed for his execution).42 Cooke, the under secretary, expressed the same fears to Cornwallis on the Saturday.
Tone’s one request in court had been that instead of being hanged he should, out of respect for the uniform he wore, be shot ‘by a file of grenadiers’. The request was transmitted to Cornwallis. All weekend Tone lay in prison listening to the gallows being erected outside his window and waiting for an answer. On the Sunday evening he was told that his request had been refused. The government’s intention was to make as public an example of him as possible.
Next morning, when the gaoler came to rouse Tone at about four o’clock, he found him exhausted and weltering in his own blood with his throat cut. He had in fact missed the main artery but cut through his windpipe with a penknife he had kept concealed. ‘I find then I am but a bad anatomist’, he is reported as saying.43 His head was kept in one position and a sentry placed over him to prevent him moving.44
While a legal wrangle proceeded as to whether or not Tone should have been tried by a court-martial at all since he was not one of His Majesty’s soldiers and the normal processes of law were available, Cornwallis suspended the execution, though there were those, including the fellow student from Trinity who had greeted him on landing, who thought his neck should be sewn up immediately and he should be summarily hanged. After a week of agony his condition deteriorated and it is said that on hearing a surgeon remark that if he were to move or speak it would be fatal to him, he managed to utter: ‘I can yet find word to thank you, sir. It is the most welcome news you could give me,’ and died at once.45
Whether or not the story is mythical is unimportant, for it was as a mythical figure that Tone was to make his greatest contribution to history. For to this sympathetic young man, most remote of all the influential United Irishmen from practical events in Ireland during the years of conspiracy and rebellion, but most articulate expounder of the theory that Ireland should be a sovereign independent country separate from England, there was to attach a legendary significance which long after his death did more for the cause in which he believed than he himself had ever been able to do during his lifetime.
After the great events of the decade to which Tone had been witness, political attitudes in Ireland could never be the same again. Up to this point in Irish history no Irishman, of whatever origin, when thinking of his country had considered it as being one that had to be made separate from the Crown that was shared with England. Now at least that idea had been planted. And with it had been planted that notion of a republic which, originally adopted as the desirable constitutional form in imitation of America and France, was long afterwards to become an Irish ark of the covenant in its own right.
From these years, at the end of the eighteenth century, dates much of the manner and style of a movement that was often to be mannered and stylized. A song of the period runs:
See, Erin’s song, you rising beam
The eastern hills adorning,
Now freedom’s sun begins to gleam
And break a glorious morning …
Such a golden sunrise, literally depicted against an emerald green background, was to become the standard of the republican movement in the course of the nineteenth century. ‘Sunburstry’, as it came to be called, or the habit of talking of freedom with this sort of flourish without actually getting down to more practical politics, became one of its most popular vices. An increasingly rhetorical question was to arise: how far were separatists prepared to try to make separatism practical politics? How far was it practical politics at all?
‘Plant, plant the tree, fair freedom’s tree’ – the song’s chorus continues –
Midst danger, wounds and slaughter,
Erin’s green fields its soil shall be,
Her tyrants’ blood its water.
In this decade after the French Revolution blood – though not so much of the tyrants – had flowed in plenty. And by blood too, for all the fanciful sunburstry, freedom of a sort was to be won in the end.