High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 621
Directory set up a “commercial agency” which was in fact, as Talleyrand admitted,
“an insurrectionary committee for the Greeks of Albania and the Morea against
the Ottoman Porte.”^22 The much traveled militant, Mangourit, who had shown his
revolutionary sentiments in America, Switzerland, and Spain, was put in charge at
Ancona. The Roman Catholic bishop of Scutari offered his help, and a Spanish
ex- Jesuit born at Oran contributed his knowledge of Near Eastern affairs. But the
most useful member of the secret committee was Constantine Stamati, a Greek
who had gone to Paris in 1787 as a medical student and who had worked for the
Revolution ever since. He had been a secret emissary of the Committee of Public
Safety to the hospidars of Moldavia and Wallachia, and now, at the turn of 1798–
1799, from the base at Ancona, he despatched shipments of muskets and ammuni-
tion into Greece and Rumelia. Provision was also made for more peaceful penetra-
tion; or at least Talleyrand, still Foreign Minister, directed his agents at Rome and
Corfu to send fonts of Greek and Turkish type to Ancona. The type never arrived,
nor did the Directory ever supply the Ancona mission with any money. The enter-
prise collapsed in 1799, when the French were driven by the Russians, Austrians,
and Turks from the Gallo- Greek departments and from Italy.
Nor, on the opposite side of Western Civilization, was the English- speaking
world unaffected by these excitements of 1798. England itself, threatened by inva-
sion, was not immune. A secret committee of the House of Commons, appointed to
look into such matters, could find no evidence, by name, of a single Frenchman or
other foreign agent in concerted action in England with the English clubs. The
committee believed, however (the belief is not shared by later historians), that the
naval mutinies of 1797 had been precipitated and given a political character by sub-
versives and spies. It believed also that there were, in 1798, in and near Manchester,
some eighty local units of United Englishmen, who in fact included a great many
Irish drawn as working people to that city. The committee seized certain documents
of the United Englishmen, and when one of their leaders, an Irish priest named
O’Coigly, was arrested in February on his way to France, he was found to be bearing
a letter to the Directory. In this letter, the United English tried to persuade the Di-
rectory that England would rise in revolution at the moment of French invasion.^23
Among the United Irish in Ireland, as among the Irish exiles in France, there
were high hopes for a French landing in either one of the British Isles. As for the
Greek patriots or for Thomas Jefferson (who was impressed by “that wonderful
man Bonaparte”) or Andrew Jackson (who hoped that Bonaparte would liberate
England), the twenty- nine- year- old French general exerted a fascination for the
Irish. A street ballad went:
Oh! may the wind of Freedom
Soon send young Boney o’er,
And we’ll plant the Tree of Liberty
Upon our Irish Shore!^2422 Pappas, 124.
23 House of Commons, Report of the Committee of Secrecy, 1799; printed also in the Annual Register
for 1799 (London, 1801), 150–82, and in Mallet du Pan’s British Mercury, II.
24 Jefferson to Madison, June 4, 1797, quoted by S. Kurtz, Presidency of John Adams (Philadelphia,