Britain 739
Anglo- Irish authorities, who now had evidence against various English and Irish
conspirators. Benjamin Vaughan, Hamilton Rowan, and Wolfe Tone all fled, by
different routes, to America.
The authorities, detecting collusion with the enemy in wartime, and regarding
the United Irish program as subversive in any case, declared the United Irish soci-
eties to be illegal. Driven underground, they became more positively revolutionary.
They began to accumulate arms, impose secret oaths, hold clandestine meetings,
and plan rebellion, counting on French aid. They aspired to set up a republic, and
after 1795 took the Batavian Republic as their model. To Wolfe Tone, at least,
when he was in Paris in 1796 (assisted by money given privately by the American
minister, James Monroe), it seemed that the “moderation” of the French in Hol-
land was an inspiration to the Irish.^55
The French, from 1796 to 1798, along with their Dutch allies, made three at-
tempts at invasion of the British Isles. The first two were of large scale, but unsuc-
cessful; the third was successful, but the force put ashore was too little and too late.
The French Directory could never commit itself wholeheartedly to an invasion of
Ireland. It was not only that the hazards of the sea and the British fleet had to be
faced, and that the war required, until late in 1797, the concentration of French
forces in Italy. There was a feeling in Paris, among those willing to venture on an
amphibious operation, that if an overseas attack were to be launched it should be
launched directly against England itself. The public tumults in England and Scot-
land, the outcries in the British press, the state trials, the alarm loudly voiced by
conservatives, the messages brought to Paris from English clubs, reinforced in
1797 by the naval mutinies and the suspension of gold payments by the Bank of
England, gave a kind of credibility to the reports of a tiny handful of British vi-
sionaries, that revolution would break out in England if only a French army could
be brought in. By the French Directory these reports were relished rather than
believed. It seemed likely enough, however, that if a few tens of thousands of vet-
eran French troops could set foot in England, the British army would be too small
and ineffectual to prevent their marching into London. The idea of invading En-
gland directly, or at least of stirring up an inverse Vendée in the West (as in Colo-
nel Tate’s raid in Wales), was a source of consternation to the Irish in Paris, who
believed it to be a diversion and a delusion, ruinous to Irish hopes.
In 1796 a force of 15,000 French soldiers, commanded by Hoche, and with
Wolfe Tone in a French uniform as his aide, reached Bantry Bay, on the southwest
coast of Ireland, without interception by the British fleet. The site was a poor one
in that the United Irish were not yet organized in the southwest, so that no prepa-
rations had been made to receive them. Stormy weather in any case made disem-
barkation impossible, and after sixteen days of agonizing uncertainty the fleet
withdrew. In 1797 the Dutch prepared an invasion. The Batavian leaders were
strongly hostile to England, remembering the events of the 1780’s, the flight of
William V to England in 1795, and the constant British threats to the Dutch co-
lonial empire. Among the shifting plans there was one for landing in Scotland,
crossing that country, and ferrying over to Ulster, where the United Irish plans for
55 Tone, II, 164, 169, 173, 196, 203.