Britain 741
As it turned out, the French went to Egypt, and all that happened, so far as in-
vasion of Ireland was concerned, or French aid to an Irish revolution, was that
General Humbert with a thousand men landed on the western coast, at Killala, in
August 1798.^58 Another 10,000 French troops were ready to follow, should Hum-
bert have enough initial success. By this time, however, the strength of the United
Irish uprising had already been broken. Although the extreme western part of the
island, where the people still largely spoke Gaelic, was the least affected by the
United Irish organization, Humbert found several hundred Irish who were willing
to join him. The astonished Anglican bishop of Killala found his palace swarming
with Frenchmen and native Irish. The Franco- Irish force repelled a party of cavalry
sent against them, and penetrated the country for some fifty miles. Excitement ran
high for a moment; songs of liberation were composed:
Ireland’s sons, be not faint hearted,
Welcome, sing them Ça Ira.
From Killala they are marching
To the tune of Vive la.
Vive la, United heroes,
Triumphant always may they be,
Vive la, our brave French brethren
That have come to set us free.Humbert was soon obliged to surrender; there were, after all, 140,000 British
troops in the island. Exchanged and returned to France, he was too much of a re-
publican to suit Napoleon a few years later, and withdrew to America. He had the
pleasure of fighting the British again in the War of 1812, was mentioned in des-
patches by Andrew Jackson, and died at New Orleans in 1823.
To recur to the Irish themselves. As they proceeded after 1796 secretly to accu-
mulate arms, the British proceeded to disarm them; and as they built up an orga-
nization, from the local to the national level, the British arrested their leaders. The
“British,” it must always be understood in this connection, included those Irish
who either upheld the established order, or who, whatever their doubts, were op-
posed to armed insurrection or to separation from England. Almost half the Brit-
ish troops in Ireland were Irish yeomanry or militia of various degrees of reliability.
Presbyterian Ulster was a hotbed of the United Irish movement and of democratic
republicanism, but it produced also in 1795 the Orange lodges, ultra- Protestant,
violently anti- Catholic, and determined to crush the United Irish at any price. The
troubles rekindled the religious hatreds that had slowly been burning out. In the
worst of the atrocities that followed, it was often Irish against Irish.
The United Irish armed themselves by accumulating pikes and pitchforks, or
fitting up the weapons they had had since 1780, or stealing firearms from military
depots. The French Republic seems to have done less in the way of surreptitious
arming of potential revolutionaries in Ireland than the French monarchy had done
58 R. Hayes, The Last Invasion of Ireland: When Connacht Rose (Dublin, 1939). The verses quoted
here are from Hayes, the page preceding the table of contents.