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intervention gradually faded; it remained faintly alive for weeks, while Bonaparte
and his army were at sea, until the news came, stupefying to the Irish, that the
French were in the most incredible of all places, at the far opposite end of the
world of Europe and of republican revolution, contending in the desert with the
Mamelukes of Egypt. Humbert’s landing in August was for the United Irish only
a tragic reminder of what might have been.
It was clear by July that the revolt had failed, but sporadic fighting continued,
and the repressive measures used to prevent rebellion before it came were contin-
ued with a new intensity after the worst of the danger was over. Many Englishmen
were disgusted by what they saw. Cornwallis, who had commanded in America
and who was sent to Ireland in 1798, thought the conversation of officers at his
own table too extreme; it was all about “hanging, shooting, burning, etc., etc., and
if a priest is put to death the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company.”^61 One
is reminded of Nelson and his officers at Naples a year later. The Marquis of Buck-
ingham thought Cornwallis’ generals “the worst in Europe”; the “rapine and cruel-
ties” of his troops were “atrocious”; rebels were afraid to surrender; and with forty-
three generals the government forces were undisciplined and “licentious.”^62
No estimate of the number who died in the rebellion and in its repression has
ever been possible. Many were sent to Australia. Various leaders were executed for
treason; and Wolfe Tone, who had slipped into Ireland from France during the
fighting, and who was captured and faced certain hanging, cut his throat in prison.
The time was far distant when inmates of British prisons could emerge as heads of
independent states on good terms with their former rulers.
The rebellion was followed by the Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland.
The union, which lasted until the First World War, was clearly one of the diverse
products of the revolutionary era. There were at least three good reasons for it. It
was strategically necessary to Great Britain; the French had threatened an invasion
of Ireland in every war since the days of William III, and this time they had come
uncomfortably close to causing real trouble by their efforts. The union was in-
tended also, by Pitt, Buckingham and others, as a system within which Irish Cath-
olics could safely be granted political rights. How this intention came to nothing is
a fact well known and requiring no elaboration here. Finally, and more often for-
gotten, the union was a phase in the general movement of counter- revolution, or
anti- republicanism, throughout the British Isles and the Continent. It was a device
for suppressing Jacobinism in Ireland.
In 1799, during the debates on the union, one of the new peers, Lord Minto, the
former Sir Gilbert Elliot, delivered a long speech in the British House of Lords.
He gave a good many reasons for a union of Ireland with Great Britain. One of
61 Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, 3 vols. (London, 1859), II, 369, his letter
from Dublin Castle, July 24, 1798: “Except in the instances of the six state trials that are going on
here, there is no law either in town or country but martial law... conducted by Irishmen heated with
passion and revenge. But this is trifling compared to the numberless murders that are hourly commit-
ted by our people without any process or examination whatever. The yeomanry are in the style of the
Loyalists in America, only much more numerous and powerful, and a thousand times more
ferocious.”
62 Dropmore Papers, IV, 264, 266.