The king and his ministers were only thinking of the financial trouble; but by summoning the States General they gave the power of speech to discontented France, and found themselves confronted by a much larger problem. The realm had been grossly misgoverned for the last century by a close ring of royal ministers, who constituted a bureaucracy of the most narrow-minded sort. Lewis XIV. had crushed out all local institutions and liberties, in order to impose his royal will on every man. The lesser kings who followed had allowed the power to slip from their own hands into those of the close oligarchy of bureaucrats whom the Grand Monarque had organized. France under the Ancien Régime was suffering all the evils that result from over-centralization and "red tape." The smallest provincial affairs had to be referred to the ministers at Paris, who tried to settle everything, but only succeeded in meddling, and delaying all local improvements. The most hopeless feature of the time was that the nobility and gentry were excluded from all political power by the Parisian bureaucrats, though suffered to retain all their old feudal privileges and exemptions. Thus they were objects of jealousy to the other classes, yet had no share in the governance of the realm, or opportunity to temper the despotism of the royal ministers. Two old mediaeval abuses survived, to make the situation of the country yet more unbearable: offices of all kinds were openly bought and sold, while taxation was not raised directly by the state, but leased out to greedy tax-farmers, who mulcted the public of far more than they paid into the national treasury.

While the government was in this deplorable condition, public opinion had of late been growing more and more restive. All the educated classes of France were permeated with deep discontent. Ideals of constitutional government, borrowed originally from English political writers, were in the air. The recent alliance with America had familiarized many Frenchmen with republican institutions and notions of self-government. The opposition was headed by the chief literary men of the age. The stinging sarcasms of Voltaire were aimed against all ancient shams and delusions. Nothing was safe from his criticism, and most of all did he ridicule the corrupt Gallican Church, with its hierarchy of luxurious and worldly prelates and its bigoted and superstitious lower clergy. While Voltaire was decrying old institutions and teaching men to be sceptical of all ancient beliefs, his younger contemporary, the sentimental and visionary Rousseau, was advocating a return to the "state of nature." He taught that man was originally virtuous and happy, and that all evil was the result of over-government, the work of priests and kings. He dreamed of a renewal of the Golden Age, and the abolition of laws and states. All men were to be brothers, and to live free and equal without lord or master. Smarting under the narrow and stupid rule of the Ancien Régime, many Frenchmen took these Utopian ideas seriously, and talked of setting up the reign of reason and humanity. Hence it came that all the claims and aspirations of the French Revolution were inspired by vague and visionary ideas of the rights of man, and demanded the destruction of old institutions, unlike our English agitations for reform, which from Magna Carta downwards have always claimed a restoration of ancient liberties, not the setting up of a new constitution.

When the dull but well-intentioned Lewis XVI. had once summoned the States General of 1789, he soon found that he had given himself a master. For the deputies of the Tiers Etat, or Commons, instead of proceeding to vote new taxes, began to clamour for the redress of grievances of all kinds. When the king, like Charles I., threatened to dissolve them, their spokesman answered, "We are here by the will of the people of France, and nothing but the force of bayonets shall disperse us." King Lewis was too weak and slow to send the bayonets. He drew back, and allowed the States General to organize themselves into a National Assembly, and to claim to represent the French nation.

The obvious weakness of the king encouraged the friends of revolution all over France to assert themselves. On July 14, 1789, the mob of Paris stormed the Bastille—the old state prison of the capital—and massacred the garrison. The king made no attempt to resent this riot and murder. Then followed a rapid series of constitutional decrees, by which the Assembly, backed by the pikes of the Parisian mob, abolished all the ancient despotic and feudal customs of the realm. It seemed for a moment as if a solid constitutional monarchy might be established. But the king was too feeble, and the reformers too rash and wild. The taint of riot and murder hung about all their doings, and they were constantly calling in the mob to their aid. Foreseeing a catastrophe, the greater part of the French royal family and noblesse fled the realm. Ere long the king became little better than a prisoner in his own palace.

These doings across the Channel keenly interested England. At first they met with general approval. It looked as if France was about to become a limited monarchy; and as the personal and dynastic ambition of the Bourbons had always been the cause of our wars with them, English public opinion looked with favour on the substitution of the power of the National Assembly for that of the king. It was thought that France, under a constitutional government founded on English models, could not fail to become the friend of England. Pitt expressed in a guarded way his approbation of the earlier stages of the Revolution. Fox became its vehement admirer and panegyrist; he exclaimed that the storming of the Bastille was the greatest and best event in modern history, conveniently ignoring the cold-blooded massacre of its garrison which had followed. The greater part of the Whig party followed their chief, and expressed unqualified praise for the doings of the French. Some of the more enthusiastic members of the party visited France and corresponded with the leaders of the Revolution; others formed political clubs to encourage and support the reformers across the Channel.

But the mood of generous admiration and universal approval could not last for long. As the Revolution went on developing, while the outbursts of mob violence in France grew more frequent, and the National Assembly plunged into all manner of violence and arbitrary legislation, there began to be a schism in English public opinion. Fox and the more vehement Whigs still persisted in finding nothing to blame across the Channel, explaining the violent deeds of the Parisians as mere effervescence of the mercurial French temperament. But, curiously enough, it was a Whig, and one who never tired of singing the praises of our own Revolution of 1688, who was the first prophet of evil for the French movement. Edmund Burke, Fox's old colleague and ally, was an exponent of that view of constitutional liberty which looked on mob-law as even worse than the despotism of kings. He fixed his eyes on the murderous riots in Paris and the spectacle of the humiliation of Lewis XVI., not on the fair promises of a golden age made by the milder French reformers. The prospect of anarchy shocked him, and he used his unrivalled eloquence to warn the English nation to have nothing to do with a people of assassins and atheists. "When a separation once appears between liberty and law, neither is safe" was his cry. And, unlikely as it appeared at first, Burke was entirely in the right. Nothing which he predicted of the French Revolution could exceed the realities which ere long came to pass.

The consciousness of their own uncontrolled power was turning the brain of the French Assembly, and maddening the Parisian populace. They were irritated, but not checked, by the weak resistance and futile evasions of Lewis XVI. At last they persuaded themselves that the king and the nobility were conspiring to take away their newly won liberties, while in reality Lewis and his nobles alike were paralyzed with dread, and only thinking of saving themselves. In the summer of 1791 the unfortunate king took the fatal step of trying to escape by stealth from Paris. He stole away in disguise with his wife and children, and had got half-way to the eastern frontier before his absence was discovered. A chance caused his stoppage and discovery at Varennes; he was seized and sent back to Paris, where he was for the future treated as a prisoner, not as a king.

From this moment it was the fixed belief in France that Lewis had been about to fly to Germany, in order to incite the despotic monarchs of Austria and Prussia against his country. In the Assembly the wilder party began to come to the front, preaching republicanism, and crying that France could not be saved by constitutional reforms, but required blood-letting. Ere long the symptoms of violence and anarchy, which had frightened Burke in England, exercised a still stronger effect on the rulers of the continent. Francis of Austria and Frederic William II. of Prussia, alarmed as to the republican propaganda in France, and warned by the fate of their fellow-king, began to concentrate their armies on the Rhine, and to concert measures for putting down the Revolution. On learning their plans, the French Assembly declared war on them in April, 1792. But at first their raw levies fared ill against the Germans; defeat—as always in France—was followed by the cry of treason, and on the 10th of August the Parisian mob stormed the Tuileries, slew the king's guards, and called for his deposition.

The democratic National Convention, which now superseded the Assembly, proclaimed a Republic, after the populace had massacred many hundreds of persons who were rightly or wrongly supposed to be the king's friends (September 2, 1792). The Convention gave its tacit sanction to these atrocities, in which some of its more violent members were personally implicated.

The news of the September massacres and the proclamation of the Republic cleared up for ever the doubts of the English people as to the character of the French Revolution. Pitt's judicial attitude towards the movement had at last changed. In 1790 he had doubted whether it were good or bad; by 1792 he was convinced that it was dangerous, anarchic, and detestable, but still hoped to avoid coming into actual conflict with it. He was in his heart a peace-minister, and it was circumstances, not his own will, which were to make him the fomenter of leagues and confederacies against France for nine long years of war. When Austria and Prussia invited him to join them in their attack, he had at first refused. But he was much disturbed by the bombastic "Edict of Fraternity," which the Convention published, appealing to all the nations of Europe. "All governments are our enemies, all peoples our friends," said this document, and the multitude in every land were invited to overthrow kings and ministers, and receive the aid which France would give. Pitt looked upon this as an appeal to anarchy addressed to the discontented classes in England, and was much disturbed when he found that it was welcomed by some of the Whigs of the more popular and democratic section. A small but compact body of these extreme politicians were doing their best to frighten England into a frenzy of reaction by their unwise and unpatriotic conduct. Two clubs called the Corresponding Society and the Constitutional Society were founded in London for the propagation of revolutionary doctrines. They were composed of men of no weight or importance, visionary politicians with a craze for republicanism, men of disappointed ambitions who longed for a political crisis to bring them into notice, mob-orators, and such like. These bodies deserved contempt rather than notice, but in view of the doings over seas, they attracted attention, and their noisy declamations in favour of the wilder doctrines of the French Revolution frightened the public. Especially was an outcry raised by the books and pamphlets of the celebrated free-thinker and republican writer, Tom Paine, the most blatant apologist of the atrocities in Paris.

The average Englishman was sufficiently disgusted by the language of these home-grown revolutionaries from the first, but when more and more blood was shed in France, a measure of alarm was mixed with his dislike of the noisy clubs. Men began to remember the permanent existence in London of a large body of the dangerous classes; it was easy to assume a connection between the French government, the English revolutionary societies, and the dregs of the London streets. And indeed a few wild spirits do seem to have talked to French agents of foolish plans for starting riots, setting fire to the capital, and seizing the Tower arsenal, in order to arm the mobs who, as they thought, would follow them. But the thousands of rioters and anarchists had no existence save in the brains of the French government and the alarmed and indignant English Tories. Their supposed designs, however, led to an unhappy panic in English legislation; the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, the right of free meeting restricted, even free speech in a measure fettered, by a wholly unnecessary series of Government measures, which were in reality directed against a few hundred silly but noisy fanatics. It was like using a sledge-hammer to crush a wasp.

Unfortunately, the ultimate effects of this scare were destined to endure throughout the twenty-two years of the coming war, and even after its end. The atrocities committed by the French revolutionists, and the foolish talk of their English admirers, were the cause of the cessation of liberal legislation in England for a quarter of a century. Pitt himself, who had hitherto led the party of reform, felt the revulsion. His long series of wise and enlightened bills ceases in 1791, and his name becomes, unhappily, connected with stern and repressive laws of unnecessary severity. But it was not to be wondered at that he should act so, when we find that the larger half of the Whigs, the professors of an exaggerated zeal for liberty and popular government, now joined the Tories. After a continuous existence of a century, the Whig party suffered complete shipwreck. The majority of its members followed Burke in concluding an alliance with Pitt. Only a minority remained in opposition with Fox. In a party division, taken before the actual commencement of the French war, Fox was followed by only 50 of his own party when he attempted to oppose a warlike address to the Crown. It may be worth noting that this wave of revulsion against the French revolution is reflected in the English literature of the times. The younger authors of the day, such as Wordsworth and Southey, are liberal, and even republican, when they begin to write; but after the worse side of the French movement developed, they rapidly slide into enthusiastic patriotism, and denunciations of French anarchy and wickedness.

When this was the state of English public feeling, two events conspired to urge the nation into the war for which men had gradually been preparing themselves. The first was the trial and execution of the unfortunate king of France. The "Jacobin" party, the followers of the bloodthirsty Marat, the blatant Danton, and the coldly ferocious Robespierre, were now swaying the Convention. They impeached Lewis, not so much for any definite acts of his, as to show that they were determined to be rid of monarchy. "The coalized kings of Europe threaten us," said Danton; "let us hurl at their feet as a gage the head of a king." Lewis was sent to the guillotine on the most empty and frivolous charges (January 21, 1793). His unfortunate wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, followed him thither a few months after. Pitt immediately withdrew the English ambassador from Paris, and began to prepare for war. But the actual casus belli was the determination of the French, who had now overrun Belgium, to open the Scheldt, and make Antwerp a great naval arsenal. When Pitt protested, the Convention declared war on George III., under the vain belief that the English people would take their side, and overturn Pitt and his master. "The king and his Parliament mean to make war on us," wrote a French minister, "but the Republicans of England will not permit it. Already these freemen show their discontent, and refuse to bear arms against their brethren. We will fly to their succour. We will lodge 50,000 caps of liberty in England; and when we stretch out our arm to these Republicans, the tyranny of their monarchy will be overthrown."

So, on February 8, 1793, began the great war, which was to last, with two short intervals, till July 7, 1815. If England and France alone had been engaged in the struggle, the famous saying about the impossibility of a duel between the whale and the elephant might have been applicable. France, with her new levies just rushing into the field, had an army of something like 500,000 men. The English regular troops, available for war over-seas, were, in 1792, about 30,000 strong. On the other hand, the English fleet had 153 line-of-battle ships, the French only 86. The one nation was almost as superior by sea as the other by land. It was evident that we could only attack the French by land if we had continental allies, while France could not harm us by sea until she had secured assistance from other powers to increase her navy. But if with our limited army we could not hope to equal in the field the legions of France, we had one means of attacking her on land—the use of our power as the richest nation in Europe. Austria, Prussia, and the German states had large armies, but little money; England had much money, if few men. Accordingly, it was by liberal subsidies to the military powers of the continent that we from first to last fought France on land. History records nine separate coalitions which Pitt and his successors drew together and cemented with English gold, in order to stay the progress, first of the French Republic, then of the great man who inherited its position.

The moment that the war began, the naval supremacy of England enabled her to seize most of the outlying French colonies. At the same time our fleets moved down to blockade the great naval arsenals of Brest, Toulon, and Rochefort, where the French navy was cooped up. So thoroughly were the hostile fleets held in restraint, that there was only one important sea-fight in the first three years of the war. In the summer of 1794 the Brest squadron came out to convoy a merchant fleet, and was caught and completely beaten by Lord Howe on "the glorious First of June."

The years 1793-1794 were the hardest part of the war for the French. The coalition against them now comprised England, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Holland, and Sardinia. Assailed on every frontier by foreign enemies, they had also to face a formidable royalist rising in La Vendée and Brittany. Yet the Convention made head against all its foes. The Jacobin faction, headed by the ruthless Robespierre, put a fearful energy into its generals, by the summary method of sending every officer who failed to the guillotine. The sanguinary despotism which they exercised was a thing of which the most tyrannical monarch would never have dreamed. They had impeached and slain the Girondists, or moderate Republicans, in the summer of 1793. Six months later, Robespierre, determined to be supreme, had seized and executed his colleague and rival Danton, and all his faction. The "Reign of Terror" made Paris a perfect shambles: 1400 prisoners were guillotined in six weeks, and Robespierre called for yet more blood.

But these horrors within were accompanied by vigour without. Quickened by the axe hanging over their necks, the generals did their best, and finally succeeded in beating back the allies, whose motley armies failed to co-operate with each other, and had no one commander who could direct the whole course of the war to a single end.

England's part in these early years of the war was neither important nor glorious. The Duke of York, the second son of George III., was sent with 20,000 men to aid the Austrians in Flanders. But he was a very incapable commander, got beaten by the French at Hondeschoote near Dunkirk, and was forced back into Holland, and at last chased as far as Hanover (1793-94). Another failure was seen at Toulon in the same year. The royalist inhabitants of that town called in the English to their aid, and surrendered its arsenal and fleet. But the place was indifferently defended by General O'Hara, and fell back into the hands of the Republicans after a short siege, mainly owing to the ability displayed by a young artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. The only compensating advantage was that, before evacuating the place, the English were able to burn the French fleet and arsenal.

Pitt had said that when all Europe united against a nation of wild beasts and madmen, two campaigns would settle the business. But at the end of 1794 things seemed further from a settlement than ever. For the coalition against France, after faring ill in the field, both in Flanders and on the Rhine, began to show signs of breaking up. That this was possible came from the fact that the "Reign of Terror" and the domination of the implacable Robespierre were at last ended. The time had come when he and his associates, having guillotined all available Royalists and Moderates, were reduced to preying upon their own party, in their insane desire to find imaginary conspirators against the Republic. Robespierre fell at the hands of the rank and file of the Jacobins, who found the rule of the dictator intolerable, when it began to imperil their own necks. Having long shared in his misdoings, they sent him to the guillotine, when he began to terrify them (July, 1794). Tallien, Barrère, Barras, and the other leaders in Robespierre's overthrow were, if less ferocious than their master, full of vices of which he could never be accused, profligate, venal, and corrupt. But, however bad they were, they yet reversed Robespierre's policy. The executions and massacres ceased, and the reign of the guillotine came to an end. The Convention dissolved itself in 1795, and gave place to the government of the "Directory," a committee of five ministers, of whom Barras was chief.

This "Directory," though venal and greedy, was a settled government, with which foreign powers could treat, not a gang of bloodthirsty madmen like Robespierre and his crew. When the Jacobin propaganda of murder and massacre was ended, several of the powers of the coalition determined to make peace with France. Prussia and Spain had drawn no profit from the war, and had lost men and money in it. Accordingly they withdrew their armies and acknowledged the Republic. Holland had been overrun by the French in 1794, after the Duke of York's defeat, and forced to become the ally of her conqueror. Hence the strong and well-equipped Dutch fleet is found for the rest of the war on the side of France.

Thus England, Austria, and Sardinia alone remained of the original confederates, and the war began to grow more like the old struggles in the early years of the century. It ceased to be a war of opinion between England as representing constitutional monarchy, and France as representing rampant and militant democracy. We find the Directory taking up the old policy of the Bourbons, claiming the frontier of the Rhine on land, and aiming at breaking the strength of England at sea, in order to seize our colonies and ruin our commerce. For the future, the French government was not set on stirring up the London mob, and deposing George III., but on fomenting war in India, and rebellion in Ireland, so as to break our national strength. The likeness of the struggle to the old times of the "Family Compact" became still more notable when, in 1796, Spain, from reasons of old commercial jealousy, was induced to declare war on England, and join France. We had now to face the united fleets of France, Holland, and Spain, a much more formidable task than had hitherto been our lot.

Things seemed almost desperate for England in 1797, when we lost our last continental allies. The Directory had made Napoleon Bonaparte commander of the army of Italy in 1796. In two campaigns that marvellous general overran the Austrian and Sardinian dominions in the valley of the Po, and then pushing on, crossed the Alps and invaded Austria from the south. When he was less than a hundred miles from Vienna, the emperor asked for peace, and obtained it from Bonaparte by the Treaty of Campo Formio, at the price of surrendering Belgium and Lombardy (October, 1797).

Thus England was left alone to face France, Holland, and Spain, whose fleets, if united, outnumbered our own. For the next three years the safety of England hung on the power of our admirals to keep the junction from taking place. Six English fleets were always at sea, facing the six great naval ports of the allies, the Texel, Brest, Ferrol, Cadiz, Cartagena, and Toulon. It was clear that if one or more of the blockaded fleets got away and joined another, the English would be outnumbered at the critical point and if once beaten could not prevent an invasion of England. If only the command of the Channel were lost, there was nothing to prevent the victorious armies that had overrun Germany, Holland, and Italy, from coming ashore in Kent or Sussex.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

These conspirators did not at first intend to rise without getting aid from France, and till 1796 there was never much chance of their friends over-sea being able to send them help. But when the fleets of France, Spain, and Holland were united, it seemed possible to send an expedition to Ireland. In December, 1796, the Brest squadron took on board 16,000 men, under the young and vigorous General Hoche, and made a dash for the coast of Munster. Slipping out while the English blockading squadron was blown off by a storm, Hoche's fleet got safely to sea. But the ships met with a hurricane, and were so beaten about and dispersed that only half of them reached their rendezvous at Bantry Bay in County Kerry. Hoche, their leader, never appeared, and Grouchy, his lieutenant—the man who in later years was Napoleon's unlucky marshal—shrank from landing with 7000 men in an unknown country where he could detect no signs of the promised insurrection. He lost heart and returned to Brest, without having been met or molested by the English. If he had landed, there is no doubt that the whole south of Ireland would have risen to join him. In the next year there was an even greater peril of invasion while the English fleet was in mutiny. The Dutch squadron, which was beaten at Camperdown, had been given Ireland as its goal, and might have got there unopposed if it had started six weeks earlier.

Conscious of the danger which it was incurring, the Irish government was stirred up to vigorous measures. All the loyalists of Ireland—the Orangemen, as they were now called [53]—had already been embodied in regiments of yeomanry, and were ready to move at the first alarm of rebellion. Lord Lake, the commander-in-chief in Ireland, was directed to disarm the whole Catholic population, and to search everywhere for concealed arms. The order was carried out with more vigilance than mercy, as the task of finding the weapons was entrusted to the Orangemen of the yeomanry corps, who were determined to crush their rebellious countrymen at any cost. They employed the roughest measures to elicit information, flogging the suspected peasants and torturing them with pitch-caps and pointed stakes, till they revealed the hiding-place of their weapons. But, if cruel, Lake's measures were completely successful. In Ulster, where the search began, no less than 50,000 muskets and 70,000 pikes were seized, and if the same energy had been displayed in other parts of Ireland, the rebellion of 1798 would have been impossible. But the outcry caused in the Irish and English Parliaments by the rough doings of the yeomanry prevented the full execution of the disarmament, and the United Irishmen of the south retained their concealed weapons, and waited for the signal of revolt.

The crisis came in the spring of 1798, when the government were at last put by an informer on the track of the central committee of the United Irishmen. The leaders and organizers who had so long eluded them were at last caught and lodged in Dublin Castle, save Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who fought with the police who came to arrest him, slew two, and was himself killed in the struggle. The seizure of the chiefs, instead of wrecking the conspiracy, caused it to burst out with sudden violence, for the Irish thought that all was discovered, and that rebellion was the only way to save their necks. An abortive rising in Ulster was easily put down, but in the south-east of Ireland the whole countryside rose in arms, and great bodies of insurgents attacked not only the loyal yeomanry but every Protestant family in the district. The rebels were under no central control, and were headed only by village ruffians and ignorant and bigoted priests. Acts worthy of the Parisian mob were perpetrated by the peasantry of Wexford, where the rebellion was strongest. They shot the Bishop of Ferns, and many other noncombatants, including women and children. On Wexford bridge they put several scores of persons to death by tossing them in the air and catching them on pikes. At Scullabogue they burnt alive a whole barnful of prisoners.

For a fortnight there was sharp fighting in the south, for the rebels showed as much courage as ferocity. But the Orange yeomanry were stirred to frantic wrath by the atrocities of their enemies, and put down the insurrection with little aid from the regular troops. The decisive fight was at the fortified camp of Vinegar Hill, the chief stronghold of the rebels. When it was stormed, and when Father Murphy, the leader of the Wexford men, had fallen, the peasants dispersed. The atrocities which they had committed were promptly avenged, and the triumphant Orangemen hanged or shot hundreds of prisoners, with small attentions to the forms of justice.

Two months after the battle of Vinegar Hill, a small French expedition succeeded in slipping out of Rochefort and landed in Connaught. But the back of the rebellion was broken, and though General Humbert routed some militia at Castlebar, he was soon surrounded and captured by Lord Cornwallis, the Lord-Lieutenant, who beset him with a tenfold superiority of numbers.

The Great Rebellion of 1798 led to the legislative union of England and Ireland. Pitt and his lieutenant, Cornwallis, thought, rightly enough, that the rising had come from the fact that the large majority of the Irish were handed over, without representation or political rights, to be governed by the minority. They devised two schemes for bettering the state of the land—the Romanists were to receive "Emancipation," that is, the same rights as their neighbours of the Church of Ireland—and at the same time an end was to be put to the Dublin Parliament, and the Irish members incorporated in the Parliament of Great Britain. For Emancipation without union would have given the Romanists a majority in the Dublin Parliament and led to a bitter struggle between them and their old masters, which must have ended in a second civil war.

The process of persuading or bribing the Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocracy to give up their national Parliament took two years. They bitterly disliked the idea, and were only induced to yield by a liberal shower of titles and pensions, and a goodly compensation in cash distributed among the chief borough owners and peers. It was not till February 18, 1800, twenty months after the rebellion had been crushed, that the Irish Houses voted their own destruction. For the future Ireland was represented by thirty-two peers and one hundred commoners in the Parliament of the "United Kingdom."

After completing the Union, Pitt began to take in hand his scheme of Catholic Emancipation. But he was not destined to carry it through—a fact which was in a short time to have a widely felt influence on English politics.

Meanwhile the French war was still raging. Having failed to win command of the seas, and having been equally disappointed in their plans for causing rebellion in Ireland, the French Directory tried another scheme for injuring England. Napoleon Bonaparte, the young general who had conquered Italy in 1796-7, was now the first man in France. He had lately formed a grandiose scheme for erecting a great empire in the Levant. From thence he intended to strike a blow at the English dominions in India, which he regarded as the chief source of our wealth. The venal and incapable members of the Directory feared Bonaparte, and were glad to get him out of France. They at once fell in with his plan, and gave him the Toulon fleet and an army of 30,000 men. Keeping his destination a profound secret, Bonaparte sailed from Toulon in May, 1798. He piratically seized Malta from the Knights of St. John as he passed, to make it a half-way house to his intended goal. Then, pushing on eastwards, he landed at Alexandria, and in a few weeks overran the whole of Egypt, though France had never declared war on the Sultan of Turkey, the ruler of that land. Once seated there, he began to develop a gigantic scheme for the conquest of the whole East, vowing that he would build up an Oriental empire and "attack Europe from the rear." His first care was to send emissaries to Tippoo Sultan, the son of our old Indian enemy Haider Ali, bidding him to attack the English in India with the assurance of French support.

Soon after Bonaparte had taken Cairo, he heard that the ships which had brought him to Egypt had been destroyed. Admiral Nelson, the commander of the English Mediterranean fleet, had arrived too late to prevent the French army from disembarking. But, finding their squadron lying in Aboukir Bay, he determined to destroy it. The enemy lay moored in shallow water, close to the land, but Nelson resolved to follow them into their anchorage. Sending half his ships to slip in between the enemy and the shore, he led the other half to attack them on the side of the open sea. This difficult manœuvre was carried out with perfect success; first the van, then the centre, then the rear of the French fleet was beset on two sides. The squadrons were exactly equal in numbers, each counting thirteen line-of-battle ships. But so great was the superiority of the English seamanship and gunnery, that eleven out of the thirteen French vessels were sunk or taken in a few hours. This brilliant feat of naval tactics had the important result of cutting off Bonaparte's power to return to France. He was penned up in Egypt as in an island, with no way of egress save by the desert route to Syria. Nor could any further reinforcements reach him from France, since the victory of the Nile gave Nelson complete command of the Mediterranean. But Bonaparte did not at first show any dismay; he was firmly established in Egypt, and had resolved to persevere in his attempt to conquer the whole East with his own army.

In the winter of 1798-99 he crossed the desert and flung himself upon Syria. He turned the Turks out of the southern part of the land, and won a great victory over them at Mount Tabor. But before the walls of the seaport of Acre he was brought to a standstill, not so much by the gallantry of the Turkish garrison, as by the activity of a small English squadron under Sir Sidney Smith, which harassed the besiegers, threw supplies into the town, and landed men to assist the pasha when the French tried to take the place by storm. Bonaparte used to say in later days that but for Sidney Smith he might have died as Emperor of the East. At last he was forced to raise the siege and to retreat on Egypt, where he found startling news awaiting him [May, 1799].