A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

Suddenly another attempt to help Ireland and harass England was made from the French side of the English Channel. Bonaparte was away on his Egyptian expedition, and the Directory in his absence did not wish to forego all idea of sending a force to Ireland, but were evidently not very strong on the subject and did not seem quite to know how to set about such a business. For awhile they kept two or three small bodies of troops ready at certain ports within easy reach of the English shores, and a number of vessels at each port waiting for sudden orders. General Humbert, an adventurous soldier of fortune, who had courage enough but not much wisdom, grew impatient at the long delay of the Directory, and thought he could not do better to force the hand of the Directory than to start an expedition himself. Accordingly he took command of a force of about a thousand men in number which had been placed at his disposal for an undefined date, and with three or four ships to convey his men he made for the Irish shores. He landed at Killala Bay, in the province of Connaught, and he made his way inland as far as the county of Longford. The Irish peasantry rallied round him in considerable numbers, and were received by him as part of the army and invested with the French uniform. He began his march with a sudden and complete victory over a body of English troops considerably outnumbering his own force, but whom he managed cleverly to surprise, and among whom a regular panic seems to have set in. Humbert's scheme was, however, hopeless. The part of the country through which he was marching was thinly populated, and large bodies of English troops, under experienced commanders, were approaching him from all sides. By the time he had reached the county of Longford he found himself faced, or indeed all but surrounded, by the royal troops under the command of Lord Cornwallis. There was nothing for Humbert but to {324} surrender, and he and his French followers were treated as prisoners of war after a final and brilliant fight and sent back to France. The Irish insurgents who had fought under his leadership dispersed and fled after the surrender, well knowing that they would not be included in its terms and treated as prisoners of war, and they were pursued by the royal troops and most of them were killed. Matthew Tone, a brother of Wolfe Tone, was one of those who had fought under Humbert. He was made prisoner, taken to Dublin, and executed there within a few days. Thus ended the second expedition from France for the relief of Ireland.

Wolfe Tone meanwhile was waiting in France, hoping against hope. He had as yet known nothing of the fortunes and failure of Humbert's expedition. Some extracts from a letter written to his wife about this time have a melancholy interest.

"Touching money matters, I have not yet received a sou, and last night I was obliged to give my last five guineas to my countrymen here. I can shift better than they can. I hope to receive a month's pay to-day, but it will not be possible to remit you any part of it; you must therefore carry on the war as best you can for three or four months, and before that is out we will see further. . . . I am mortified at not being able to send you a remittance, but you know it is not my fault.

"We embark about 3000 men, with 13 pieces of artillery, and I judge about 20,000 stand of arms. We are enough, I trust, to do the business, if we arrive safe.

"With regard to myself, I have had every reason to be satisfied; I stand fair with the General and my camarades; I am in excellent health and spirits; I have great confidence in the success of our enterprise; and, come what may, at least I will do what is right. The time is so short that I must finish this; I will, if possible, write to you again, but if we should unexpectedly sail my next will be, I hope, from Ireland."

[Sidenote: 1798—The capture of Wolfe Tone]

The embarking to which Tone referred was that of an expedition which the Directory had at last resolved to {325} despatch from Brest for the Irish shore. By a somewhat touching coincidence Tone found himself on board a war-vessel called the "Hoche," which was under the command of the admiral of the little fleet. This expedition consisted of one sail of the line and eight frigates, with 3000 French soldiers. It sailed on September 30, 1798; but the destinies were against it, as they had been against its predecessors, and contrary winds compelled the admiral to make a wide sweep out of what would otherwise have been its natural course. It was not until October 10 that the little fleet, then reduced to four vessels—the others had been scattered—reached the shore of Lough Swilly, on the northwest coast of Ireland, and was there encountered by a fleet of six English sail of the line and two frigates. The admiral of the French fleet saw that there was no chance whatever of his fighting his way through such an opposition, and he made up his mind to offer the best resistance he could for the honor of the French flag. He promptly gave signals for the lighter vessels, which would have been of little practical service in such a struggle, to make the safest retreat they could, and with his own vessel resolved rather perhaps to do and die than to do or die. A boat came from one of the frigates to take his final instructions, and he and all the French officers, naval and military, who were on board the "Hoche" strongly urged Wolfe Tone to go to the frigate in the boat and thus save his life. They pointed out to him that if they were captured they must be treated as prisoners of war, but that no mercy would be shown to him, a subject of King George, taken in French uniform. Wolfe Tone peremptorily declined to accept the General's advice. It should never be said of him, he declared, that he saved his life and left Frenchmen to fight and die in the cause of his country. A fierce naval battle took place, and the French admiral fought until he was overpowered, and had no course left to him but to surrender. The French officers who had survived the fight were all taken to Letterkenny, Tone among the number. Tone was in French uniform, and might have passed unrecognized as a French officer but that {326} an Ulster magnate, Sir George Hill, who had known him in earlier days, became at once aware of his identity, and addressed him by name. Tone calmly and civilly replied to the greeting, and courteously asked after the health of the wife of his discoverer. Then all was over so far as Tone was concerned. He was conveyed to Dublin and tried by court-martial as a rebel and a traitor to George the Third. He defended himself in a speech of remarkable eloquence—that is, if he can be said to have defended himself when his whole speech was a frank avowal of his purpose to fight for the independence of Ireland. He declared that he thoroughly understood the consequences of his failure, and was prepared to abide by them. "Washington," he said, "succeeded, and Kosciusko failed;" and he only insisted that in his case, as in that of Kosciusko, failure brought with it no dishonor. The one sole appeal which he made was that he might be allowed to die a soldier's death—that he might be shot and not hanged. Tone was found guilty, of course; there was no choice left to the court-martial on that question, and his appeal as to the mode of his death was refused by the Lord-Lieutenant. John Philpot Curran, the great advocate, made a motion in the King's Bench to the effect that Tone should be removed from the custody of the Provost-Marshal and tried before a civil tribunal, on the ground that Tone was not in the English army, and that, as the civil courts were sitting, there was no warrant for the interference of martial law. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Kilwarden, a man whose public spirit and whose devotion to law and justice would have done honor to any bench, ruled in favor of Curran's appeal, and ordered that Tone be removed from the custody of the Provost-Marshal. When the Provost-Marshal declined to obey the order the Chief Justice directed that the Provost-Marshal be taken into custody, and that he, along with Tone, be brought before the Court. The decision came too late so far as Tone was concerned. Bather than endure the ignominy of a public execution by the gallows, which he believed to be awaiting him, he had found means to open a vein in his throat. {327} "You see I am but a poor anatomist," he said with a quiet smile to the surgeon who was brought to his bedside. He lingered in a half-unconscious state for a few days and then died. His death was the closing event of the Irish insurrection of 1798.

[Sidenote: 1778-1803—Robert Emmet]

There was, however, a sort of afterbirth of the struggle of "Ninety-Eight" in the attempt hazarded by Robert Emmet, to which we have already made anticipatory allusion. Robert Emmet, the brother of Thomas Addis Emmet, was a young Irishman of great abilities and of generous, unselfish, imprudent enthusiasm. He could not bring himself to believe that the hopes of Irish independence were buried even in the graves of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone. He had no trust whatever in any assistance to be given from France, but he set himself to organize a movement which should be Irish only and should find its whole organization and its battle-field on the soil of Ireland. He found numbers of brave and ardent young men to assist him, and he planned out another rising, which was to begin with a seizure of Dublin Castle and a holding of the capital as a centre and a citadel of the new movement for Irish independence. Emmet's passion for national independence had been strengthened by the passing of the Act of Union. The Act of Union had long been a project in the mind of Pitt, and indeed it was the opinion of many observers then, and of some historical students from that time to the present, that Pitt had forced on the Irish rebellion in order to give an excuse for the absolute extinction of the Irish Parliament and the centralization of the system of government in the Parliament sitting at Westminster. It is, at all events, quite certain that Pitt accomplished his scheme for a legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland by a wholesale system of bribery, the bribery taking the form of peerages, of high-salaried appointments, of liberal pensions, and even of sums of ready money. All that was really national in the Irish Parliament fought to the last against Pitt's Act of Union, but the Act was carried, and it came into operation on January 1, 1801. The Act itself and the methods by which {328} it was passed only gave to Robert Emmet a fresh stimulus to prepare his plans for the independence of Ireland. We need not follow in detail the story of these plans and the attempt to put them into execution. Robert Emmet's projects were, no doubt, all well known to the authorities of Dublin Castle before any attempt could be made to carry them out. In any case their chances of success seem to have depended very much upon the simultaneous action of a great number of persons in a great number of different places, and the history of every secret revolutionary movement tells us of the almost insuperable difficulty there is in getting all the actors of such a drama to appear upon the stage at the same moment and at the right moment. Emmet's plan broke down, and it ended not even in a general rising of the nationalists of Dublin, but in a mere street riot, the most sad and shocking event in which was the murder of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Kilwarden. While Emmet, in another part of the city, was vainly striving to retrieve the disorder into which the excesses of some of his followers had broken up the plan of attack, Lord Kilwarden's carriage was stopped by a body of undisciplined and infuriated rioters, and one man thrust a pike into Kilwarden's body. Emmet himself came too late upon the scene to rescue the Chief Justice, and from that moment he gave up all hope of anything like orderly action on the part of the insurgents, and indeed his whole effort was to get his followers to disperse and to stop any rising in the adjacent counties. Kilwarden died soon after he had received his wound, but not before he had uttered the noble injunction that no man should suffer for his death without full and lawful trial. Seldom has even the assassin's hand stricken a worse blow than that which killed Lord Kilwarden. In an age when corrupt judges and partial judges were not uncommon, Kilwarden was upright, honorable and just. The fiercest nationalist of the day lamented his death. He had again and again stood before the Crown officials and interposed the shield of law between them and the victims whom they strove by any process to bring to death. Emmet made his way into Wicklow with {329} the main purpose of stopping the intended outbreak of insurrection there, as he saw now that no such attempts could, under the conditions, end in anything but useless bloodshed. His friends urged him to make his escape to France, and he might easily have escaped but that he went back to Dublin with the hope of seeing once again Sarah Curran, the youngest daughter of the great advocate, with whom he was devotedly in love. He was recognized, arrested, and sent to trial before Lord Norbury, a judge who bore a very different sort of reputation from that which honored Lord Kilwarden. Emmet made a brilliant and touching speech, not in defence of himself against the charge of trying to create a rebellion, for he avowed his purpose and glorified it, but in vindication of his cause and in utter denial of the accusation commonly brought against him that he intended to make his country the subject of France. [Sidenote: 1803—The execution of Robert Emmet] He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed on the morning after his trial. Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, who was a college friend of Emmet's, has embalmed his memory in three beautiful songs, "She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps," she being of course Sarah Curran, to whom Emmet addressed his last written words; "Oh, breathe not his name," and "When he who adores thee," an appeal to Ireland to remember him who had at least "the pride of thus dying for thee." Washington Irving, the American author, devoted a touching essay, called "The Broken Heart," to the story of Robert Emmet and his blighted passion. The lovers of romance may be somewhat disconcerted to hear that Sarah Curran married after her young hero's death; but she remained single many years, and there is no reason to suppose that she ever forgot or disclaimed her affection for Robert Emmet. Wolfe Tone's wife married again some sixteen years after the husband of her youth had passed away. Her grave is to be seen in a cemetery close to Washington, in the United States, the land in which Wolfe Tone's widow passed all the later years of her life.

With the failure and the death of Robert Emmet closed the last rebellious rising in Ireland which belongs to the {330} history of the Georges. Pitt's Act of Union is still in force, but it would be idle to say that it is anything more than in force. The union between England and Scotland, to which Pitt's supporters so often triumphantly appealed, was made under conditions and on terms totally different from those which had to do with the union between England and Ireland.