The French left wing advanced towards Breda with equal success, and stormed the lines between that city and Gertrudenberg in Northern Brabant; forced the entrenchments at Capellan in Gueldreland, and stormed Waspick. In this series of reverses the allied British, Dutch, and Austrians lost one hundred pieces of cannon, and had more than a thousand prisoners taken; while the French securely established themselves far beyond the contested river. Ere long all resistance to their progress ceased; every fortress, city, and castle submitted to them in succession, till the desperation of his affairs compelled the Stadtholder to seek refuge in Britain, while his allies retreated by the way of Amersfort to cross the Issel, abandoning Holland to its fate, and to the armies of Pichegreu and Macdonald.
For his services in this campaign the latter was now made a General of Division. Every officer under whom he served mentioned him with honour in their reports to the Directory; but while, with that openness which is characteristic of soldiers, his comrades thus rendered every justice and tribute to his worth and bravery, the suspicious representatives of the people, who followed the Army of the North, and thrust their officious counsels upon its generals, occasioned him constant anxiety. Their dislike of his Scottish name was never concealed, and his natural frankness unfortunately laid him but too open to their insidious attacks; till ultimately their animosity was gratified by the Directory depriving him of his command. Of this injustice Pichegreu complained bitterly, and said, "My army will soon become disorganized, if thus wantonly deprived of its best officer."
"We have dismissed Macdonald," was the coarse reply of the Deputy St. Just, "because neither his face nor his name are republican; but we will restore him, Pichegreu, to thee, and with thy head shalt thou answer for him."
This opinion of the Committee of Public Safety so far influenced the Directory, that, until he replaced Championnet in Italy, Macdonald was never entrusted with an independent command. Soon after this mortification in Holland, the convention for a peace between France and Austria was held at Leoben, and on its conclusion he repaired to Cologne, and, quitting the army of the Rhine, joined that of Italy, where the bright star of Napoleon was now in the ascendant. By the nature of his frontier service Macdonald had hitherto little or no correspondence with the future Emperor, who having also imbibed the suspicions of the Directory, was long in discovering the worth or relying on the fidelity of the only Scottish soldier in his service. Macdonald appeared in Italy too late to bear any part in the first events of the campaign of 1797, when the armies of the aggressive republic marched to spread their new political principles throughout the Italian peninsula; but in the following year he was at the invasion of the Papal States, with the terrible Massena and with Berthier, who proclaimed the republic at Rome, on which the Pope fled to Florence. One of the early measures of the French generals was the suppression of the English, Scottish, and Irish colleges, all the effects in which were seized and the students dispersed.
To the Pope they sent a tricoloured cockade and the offer of a pension, to which he made the following reply:—
"I acknowledge no uniform save that with which the Church has adorned me. My life is at your disposal, but my soul is beyond your power. I cannot be ignorant of the hand whence the scourge proceeds which chastises the sheep and afflicts the pastor for the errors of his flock; but I submit to the Divine will. Your pension I need not. A staff and scrip are sufficient for an old man who must pass the remainder of his days in sackcloth and ashes. Rob, pillage, burn as you please, and destroy the monuments of antiquity, but religion you cannot destroy: it will, in defiance of your efforts, exist to the end of time!"
Macdonald's Scottish surname was a puzzle to the Italians, who styled him Maldonaldo, Mardona, and every possible variety of the original. After occupying the States of the Church, and leaving Macdonald with his corps to overawe them, the French armies, whose line of march was everywhere marked by flames, plunder, and barbarity, advanced into Naples to expel the old Bourbon king, and erect an affiliated republic on the ruins of his throne. On this service our hero commanded under Championnet. Prior to this he had been charged with the duty of repressing the insurrections which broke out among the Romans, who massacred or assassinated the French soldiers whenever an opportunity of doing so occurred. The most serious of these risings was at Froisinone, a village in the valley of the Apennines. This he suppressed with great severity, and, to strike terror into the peasantry, shot all prisoners taken in arms. The barbarities of the French, during their brief ascendency, are still remembered with horror in Italy. They and their partisans hunted and destroyed the Neapolitan royalists like wild beasts, and made a desert of all Apulia. It was in this province that Ettore Caraffa, Conti di Ruvo, and heir of the Duke of Andria, joined the invaders of his native country, and, after storming and reducing to ashes Andria, a prosperous and populous city in the province of Bari, he was so extolled by the Directory for his generous republicanism, that "when General Broussier carried the town of Trani by storm, Caraffa recommended that it should be burned also—and burned it was, with nearly all that were in it—the wounded and the dead, with those that were living and unhurt. They made, in fact, a hell of all that smiling Adriatic coast long before Cardinal Ruffo had passed the first defile in the Calabrias."
At Froisinone the Roman insurgents murdered the son of the Consul Mathei merely because his father was at the head of the new government. Macdonald offered from fifty to five hundred piastres for the chiefs of the insurrection, dead or alive. He issued a proclamation to the Romans inviting them to obedience and respect for the new authorities put over them, as being the only means of raising the Roman Republic to the rank she should occupy; and he concludes thus: "The great nation wills it so, and its will must be executed.—Macdonald."
Towards the end of 1798, as Commander-in-chief of the Roman territory, he ordained the Consulate to raise two regiments of horse and a battalion of infantry in each department.
The Court of Naples had now been subverted; under the protection of a British fleet and army, the king retired to Sicily, and a republic was supposed to be quietly established at the extremity of the peninsula, when the brave Calabrese, a race of hardy mountaineers, who were living in wild places in all the simple civilization of three centuries ago, rose in arms, and, uniting with the Apulians from the plains, poured against the French in tumultuary hordes—half robbers and wholly patriots. Then began a war of torture and extermination. These new insurgents demanded a general from their foolish and feeble king; but, instead of a soldier, he sent them a priest—a man of peace to oppose armies led by such men as Championnet, Macdonald, Berthier, and Massena!