The Years of Endurance (42 page)

Deprived of political responsibility, the Irish gentry, both Catholic and Protestant, shirked or evaded the social duties of their station. They were indolent, irr
esponsible and—in the face of po
pular unrest—cowardly. Many were absentees and more rack-renters. They pursued their pleasures and squeezed their tenants to pay for them. The parallel with the pre-Revolution aristocrats of France was alarming. It was almost impossible for a patriot to think of Ireland without trembling.

The Whig nobles who had repudiated Fox's leadership in order to join the Government were acutely conscious of this. They were closely associated with a little group
of liberal-minded Irish aristo
crats who, led by the great patriot Grattan, opposed the corruption and exclusiveness of Dublin Castle. Their mentor was Burke, himself an Irishman, who wrote at the beginning of the war that though he knew of no solid security against Jacobinism—the " grand and dreadful evil of the times "—he was certain that what came nearest it was to interest as many as possible in the present order of things; " to interest them religiously, civilly, politically by all the ties and principles by which men are held."
¹

It was a condition of the Portland Whigs' junction with Pitt that a new spirit should be infused into the Irish administration. The Lord Lieutenancy was expressly promised them. Unfortunately the great nobleman chosen to hold it acted with a lack of rudimentary prudence and tact which brought all their liberal plans and those of Pitt to naught. Before he had even landed in Ireland in 1795, Lord Fitzwilliam had made sweeping promises of immediate Catholic emancipation and announced a wholesale purge of officials. Every outraged vested interest and prejudice was at once mobilised against him. The alarm of the King and of Protestant opinion generally compelled the Cabinet first to repudiate, then to recall,
the
imprudent Viceroy. Only pres
sing danger and the entreaties o
f Burke and Windham prevented the collapse of the Coalition.

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 b
etter-to-do citizens wore mourn
ing.

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 th
e evil. Civil disorder begat mili
tary. The
imperfect discipline of the Mili
tia 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 l
ike Grattan, Curran and the Pon
sonbys 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 t
he 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 hange
d. St. Vincent received the cap
tain 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 s
ign of resistance. As her unwilli
ng 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
th
ree 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