High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 615
livres in coin.^1 The money was used to help finance Bonaparte’s expedition to
Egypt, which in turn was directed in part against the British in India, where the
Earl of Mornington, the later Marquess of Wellesley, was at war with Tipu Sul-
tan, who had planted a tree of liberty and considered himself an ally of the French
Republic. Mornington was victorious, and while seizing Tipu’s treasure at Serin-
gapatam, worth about 25,000,000 livres in gold and jewels, and while setting up
satellite states in India, and complaining that his own British subordinates were
“vulgar, ignorant, rude, familiar and stupid,” remained very much concerned with
developments at home.^2 In India he received the weekly Anti- Jacobin which the
young George Canning, already employed in the Foreign Office, edited for a few
months in 1798. He was told by Lord Auckland, in April, that there were secret
societies of “United English” committed to the “wildest and bloodiest democ-
racy”; and, as a member of an Irish landed family, he knew the gravity of the
United Irish rebellion at its height in 1798, in which the Irish, as Lord Morning-
ton learned from Lord Hawkesbury, desired a “democratic republic independent
of Great Britain.”^3 Actually, the cause of the United Irish had been lost on the
day when the French Directory had decided to send Bonaparte to Egypt instead
of across the Channel. What the Irish revolutionaries wanted was a republic
under the protection of France, like the Helvetic Republic that followed on the
French occupation of Bern.
Irish patriots, like many from England, had for some years been emigrating to
the United States, where they joined with native republicans to form a growing
“Jacobin” party. Never yet in America had the issue of Jacobinism burned so hot as
in the first months of 1798, especially since the French Directory, favoring for the
moment the spread of international revolution, preparing plans for the invasion of
England, and regarding the American government as intolerably pro- British, re-
fused to deal with American emissaries who had come over to adjust the differ-
ences between the two countries. Mysterious agents, probably representing Talley-
rand and Barras, approached the Americans, in overtures beginning in October
1797, with the suggestion that a treaty might be negotiated if the American envoys
would consent to certain financial arrangements, which in effect were bribes. Wil-
liam Pitt himself, in October, was on the point of accepting almost exactly the
same proposal, which, as it happened had been made to him through the media-
tion of an American living in France, probably a Federalist in American politics. It
involved the taking of certain “rescripts” of the Batavian Republic in exchange for
cash; and Pitt believed it possible to find the necessary £450,000, without the
knowledge of Parliament, in certain revenues that came to the British government
from India.^4 The Americans, however (and especially the Federalists) were shocked
1 J. Godechot, Les commissaires aux armées sous le Directoire (Paris, 1937), II, 58.
2 The Wellesley Papers, 2 vols. (London, 1914), 1, 83–84; R. A. Majumdar et al., An Advanced His-
tory of India (London, 1950), 711 ff.; J. W. Fortescue, History of the British Army, 13 vols. (London,
1902–1930), IV, 715 ff.
3 Wellesley Papers, I, 52–53, 80, 281.
4 Great Britain: Historical Manuscript Commission, Papers of J. B. Fortescue Preserved at Drop-
more, 10 vols. (London, 1892–1927), III, 356, 360, 369, 378–80; E. Channing, History of the United