A history of England

by Charles Oman

In return, Pitt called on England for a great effort; the war expenditure was increased to £42,000,000 a year, and every nerve was strained to keep up the fleet. This enormous outpouring of money drained the exchequer to such a degree that public confidence began to fail, and in February, 1797, there almost occurred the national disaster of the bankruptcy of the Bank of England. A long and steady demand for hard cash, by creditors who feared the worst, drained the bank reserve till there was no more gold left. A crash was only staved off by Pitt passing in a single night a bill for suspending payments in gold, and for making bank-notes legal tender to any amount, so that no one could demand as a right from the bank five guineas for his five-guinea note. This state of things lasted till 1819, when cash payments were renewed.

The Mutiny at the Nore.

But this trouble was nothing, compared to the awful danger three months later, when the Channel and North Sea fleets burst out into mutiny in April, 1797. These mutinies were early examples of the phenomena which we know so well in our own days under the name of "strikes." The sailors had suffered greatly from the long blockading service, which kept them perpetually at sea, off the French and Dutch ports. Their pay was low, their food bad, and their commanders in many cases harsh and cruel. They had, therefore, much excuse for themselves, when they demanded a better diet, higher pay, a fairer distribution of prize-money, and the dismissal of certain tyrannous officers. But the time they chose for their strike was inexcusable, for, while they lay idle at the Nore and Spithead, the French and Dutch might have sailed out, joined, and mastered the Channel. At first it was feared that the navy had been corrupted by French principles, and was about to declare for a republic, and join the enemy. But it was soon found that with a few exceptions the men were loyal, and only wanted redress of grievances. Pitt wisely granted their demands, and they returned to duty, refusing to follow a few wild spirits who wished to begin a political insurrection. Few or none protested when Parker, the sailor-demagogue, was hanged, and the fleet, which had been in mutiny in the summer, went out in the autumn to victory.

Battles of Camperdown and Cape St. Vincent.

Some weeks after their opportunity was passed, the Dutch fleet came out of the Texel, hoping to find the North Sea still unguarded. But Admiral Duncan absolutely annihilated his enemies at the hard-fought battle of Camperdown (October, 1797). Some time earlier another decisive victory had crushed the Spanish fleet. The Cadiz squadron of twenty-seven line-of-battle ships had slipped out to sea. But Admiral Jervis, well seconded by his great lieutenant Nelson, followed them, and beat them off Cape St. Vincent, though he had only fourteen ships with him. This was the most extraordinary victory in the whole war, when the disparity of numbers is taken into consideration.

The victories of St. Vincent and Camperdown were the salvation of England, for the naval crisis was tided over, and the union of the hostile fleets prevented. During the remainder of the war the French often threatened invasion, but were never able to get that command of the Channel which they might have seized without trouble during the mutiny at the Nore. The restored dominion of England at sea was all the more important because of the danger in Ireland, which was now impending.

Ireland under the Parliament of 1782.

Though Ireland had obtained her Home Rule Parliament in 1782, her troubles were as far from an end as ever. The government of the island was still in the hands of the Protestants of the Church of Ireland alone, and the Romanists and Protestant dissenters were still excluded from many political rights. Thus six-sevenths of the people had no part in governing themselves, and the five-sevenths who were Romanists were even yet subject to many of the repressive laws against their religion, passed in the reign of William III. [52] Though in 1792 they were at last granted freedom of public worship, and allowed to vote for members of Parliament, they could not sit therein. The rule of the Irish Tories was harsh and arbitrary. From the outbreak of the French Revolution onward, they had suspected—and with justice—that the French would endeavour to raise trouble in Ireland. For there alone in the British Isles was to be found a discontented population, held down by a minority which governed entirely in its own interests, and took no heed of the desires of its subjects. There had always been close communication between France and Ireland since the old Jacobite days, and many Irish exiles were living beyond the seas. Hence it was not strange that first the discontented Protestant dissenters and afterwards the Roman Catholics put themselves into communication with the French—the latter more reluctantly than the former, for they were the most bigoted of Papists, and much disliked the atheists and free-thinkers who guided the Revolution. From 1793 to 1798 Ireland was being undermined with secret societies, much like the Fenians of our own days, whose intrigues the Tory government strove in vain to detect and frustrate.

The "United Irishmen."

The chief of these associations was called the "United Irishmen," because it worked for the combination of the Dissenters of the north and the Romanists of the south in the common end of rebellion. The original leaders in the conspiracy were all hot-headed Radical politicians, who had been fired with the enthusiasm of the French Revolution. Their chiefs were Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a young nobleman of republican proclivities, Wolfe Tone, a violent party pamphleteer, who had hitherto called himself a Whig, and Bond, a Dublin tradesman.