Two years afterward another invading expedition
had still worse fortune. General Humbert, who in 1796 had been one of
Hoche's officers, did succeed in effecting a landing at Killala Bay, in
Mayo; but he and the whole of his force was speedily surrounded, and
compelled to surrender; and a month afterward a large squadron, with a
more powerful division of troops, under General Hardy, on board, found
itself unable to effect a landing, but fell in with a squadron under Sir
John Warren, who captured every ship but two; Wolfe Tone, who was on
board one of them, being taken prisoner, and only escaping the gallows
by suicide.
This happened in October, 1798. But it is difficult to conceive with
what object these last expeditions had been despatched from France at
all; for in the preceding summer the rebellion of the Irish had broken
out, and had been totally crushed in a few weeks;[136] not without
terrible loss of life on both sides, nor without the insurgent
leaders--though many of them were gentlemen of good birth, fortune, and
education, and still more were clergy--showing a ferocity and ingenuity
in cruelty which the worst of the French Jacobins had scarcely exceeded;
one of the saddest circumstances of the whole rebellion being, that the
insurgents, who had burnt men, women, and children alive, who had
deliberately hacked others to pieces against whom they did not profess
to have a single ground of complaint beyond the fact that they were
English and Protestant, found advocates in both Houses of the English
Parliament, who declared that the rebellion was owing to the severity of
the Irish Viceroy and his chief councillors, who denied that the rebels
had solicited French aid, and who even voted against granting to the
government the re-enforcements necessary to prevent a revival of the
treason.
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