740 Chapter XXX
revolution were well advanced in 1797. An expedition of almost 15,000 troops was
organized with a minimum of French aid, and a Dutch fleet ready to escort them
stood at the Texel. Weeks of dead calm, broken only by contrary winds, held the
expedition in total immobility while the British fleet recovered from the mutinies
at Spithead and the Nore. It was not British sea power that prevented invasion in
1796 and 1797.^56 England, as Tone remarked, had had its greatest escape since the
Spanish Armada, which also had been defeated by the wind.
In October 1797 the British inflicted severe damage on the Dutch naval power
at Camperdown, reducing the escort available to prospective invaders, though not
enough to make them give up their plans. Early in 1798 an even more imposing
force was assembled, the famous if shadowy Armée d ’Angleterre, composed of both
French and Dutch units, and with Bonaparte, just returned from Italy, assigned to
command it. It was commonly believed in the British government that the enemy
was about to attack either England or Ireland. No moment in Ireland could be
more propitious, for the United Irish preparations were as well developed as they
ever became. The Directory, however, advised by Bonaparte and Talleyrand, de-
cided at the last moment against the risk of a channel crossing. Bonaparte with an
army of 38,000 men sailed for Egypt instead. It is possible that this was one of the
worst strategic blunders ever made.^57 The French started for Egypt on May 19,
1798, just as the Irish rebellion, having broken out in April, was raging at its
height. So far as the Egyptian expedition was part of an intelligible strategy, it was
designed as an alternative means of weakening the power of England—this time
by threatening the Indian sources of British wealth. The campaign in Egypt and
the Levant, however, instead of weakening England, the only European power
with which France was then at war, reactivated war in the Mediterranean and
opened the way to the Second Coalition. An invasion of Ireland in 1798 might
have been no more costly than the invasion of Egypt, in which, eventually, the
French lost both a fleet and an army. Supposing that a French army were to land in
Ireland at all, which was not impossible—the French had landed there in 1689,
and spent sixteen days in Bantry Bay in 1796—such an army, even if its communi-
cations were cut off, would be more embarrassing to the British than the French
army isolated in Egypt, which surrendered in 1801. Had the French occupied Ire-
land for any length of time, it may be doubtful that a viable Irish Republic would
have resulted. The Directory might even have traded Ireland away at the peace
table, as Venice had been traded away to the Austrians. But the British might have
been obliged to make peace on terms favorable to the French Republic; and if the
French had had troops in Ireland and not in Egypt, and if Nelson’s fleet had been
on the coasts of Ireland and not of Naples, the Continental powers, which were
hardly likely to come to the rescue of England, would have formed no Second
Coalition. To pursue speculation even further, the Directory, by making a relatively
lasting peace, might have established itself as a relatively lasting regime.
56 The judgment of Commander E. H. Stuart Jones, R. N., An Invasion that Failed: The French
Expedition to Ireland, 1796 (Oxford, 1950). See Tone’s diary, Life, II, 205–447, for the Bantry Bay and
the Dutch expeditions, with the allusion to the Spanish Armada on p. 266.
57 The point is developed in an unpublished doctoral dissertation at Princeton University (1963),
by Steven T. Ross, “The War of the Second Coalition.”