The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Westport House

  My dear Mr. Creighton:

  As you represent one of the largest estates in the county, I send to you information which I am sending also to Capt. Sam’l Cooper and several other gentlemen in North Mayo.

  There is evidence in Castlebar, Westport, Killala, Swinford, and elsewhere that the United Irishmen have begun to make themselves busy here. Accordingly, I have petitioned Lord Cornwallis to post troops here for our protection. He has responded with admirable promptness. Two regiments, the Prince of Wales’s Fencibles and the 67th Regiment of Foot are being sent to Castlebar. The 67th will remain in Castlebar, to strengthen the garrison there. The fencibles, Col. Montague commanding, will proceed to Ballina for the better protection of your baronies. The Tyrawley Yeomanry will place themselves under his orders. Connaught has also for its protection, of course, General Trench at Galway City, but his chief duty is the defence of this coastline against the threatened invasion.

  Of the present strength in Mayo of the United Irishmen I have as yet formed no opinion, nor have I knowledge of such alliance as they may have entered into with the local Whiteboys and banditti. Should circumstances require it, I will not hesitate to recommend to Lord Cornwallis that Mayo be placed under martial law. I would however be much saddened by such a necessity. We have flattered ourselves that this remote county would be spared the harsh measures which have been imposed elsewhere. The peasantry of Mayo is ignorant and turbulent, but has thus far been remarkable for loyalty to the Crown. No section of the island, however, is these days so tranquil as to be immune to the blandishments of rebels and traitors. But the military always find it necessary to govern with a heavy hand, and many who are guiltless of any wrongdoing would doubtless suffer side by side with miscreants. Our first requirement is accurate intelligence, and I therefore ask that you inform me posthaste of any United Irish activity which comes to your attention.

  We are living through a time of great danger to the realm. The embers of rebellion are still glowing in Wexford and Antrim. Wide stretches of the midlands, reaching to the borders of Connaught, await but the kindling spark. But I am determined that Mayo shall remain loyal, even should this require a gallows at every crossroads and a triangle and a whipping post in every village.

  Should you have occasion to write to Lord Glenthorne, pray assure him that the safety of his estates is not absent from my thoughts.

  Yours faithfully, Dennis Browne

  It seemed to Creighton an unsatisfactory letter, at once businesslike and ranting, moderate and furious. Mayo lay safely within the political control of Dennis Browne; who would be reluctant to surrender it, even for a time, to the army. At the same time, Browne was frightened and angry. On the few occasions when Creighton and Browne had met, the Scotsman had been unimpressed: Browne was a jovial man with a gift for blarney, and a face of smiles belied by dark eyes as hard as stones. He thrived upon the very untidiness and disorder which had driven Creighton to despair, a witty cajoling man who knew every secret in the county, a man who could drink others under the table and then rise steady to his feet. And he was also, Creighton knew, as shrewd and as unsentimental as an Edinburgh writer to the signet. A mess of Irish contradictions. Creighton hated contradictions.

  Politicians and soldiers played insignificant parts in Creighton’s imagination, and rebels were creatures so lurid as to lack all substance. The grand designs of the Society of United Irishmen, so far as they could be grasped from the two pamphlets he had read, amounted to little more than a romantic phantasy. The language of the pamphlets, with their references to “the rights of man,” “the obligations of patriotism,” “the nobility of sacrifice,” seemed to him claptrap. What did “the rights of man” matter to ragged peasants who stood in far greater need of a fair rent, a secure hold upon their little farms, guidance towards habits of thrift, cleanliness, sobriety? The tree of liberty, indeed! What meaning could the word liberty have for these poor wretches? Perhaps they imagined that all rents were to be swept away, that they would be allowed forever to enjoy their idleness and superstition, their existence an endless succession of fairdays. They had now a bitter lesson to learn, if the troops conducted themselves in Mayo as they had in Wexford and Antrim, placed at free quarters among the people, whipping and torturing suspected rebels, burning out cabins, rampaging drunk and licentious through the villages. Those who whispered words like liberty in the ears of this unfortunate people were worse than wicked, they were irrational and foolish.

  Creighton stood before his huge map, emblem and chart of his sprawling petty kingdom. It was speckled with dots of ink, as though flyblown, and each dot a cabin: more than four hundred of them. Fresh dots were added each month, and yet the map was never either accurate or complete. Peasants were forever subdividing their tiny holdings so that a son might marry, build his cabin, dig his lazybed of potatoes. Families from other baronies would drift onto mountain wastes and squat there for months until he became aware of their existence. If the soil proved too thin or too acid, they would drift away again. Riding his boundaries, he would discover their abandoned cabin, stone and mud, low windowless lumps. A drifting tide of people, anonymous and unknowable.

  Facing the map, the Judgement of Paris: a nude hero, globed prize cupped in languorous hand; three nude goddesses, strands of long, golden hair falling over breasts, wisps of cloth floating across their loins. Surrounding them, draped in elegance across the lawn, courtiers, musicians, dressed in elaborate silks and velvets.

  Creighton stared at the painting, as he had done many times before, puzzled and suspicious. What world of hedonism and soft pleasures nourished such a painting, what sensuous oils?

  The Concorde, at sea, August 16

  It was a clear night, with a strong easterly wind. Bartholemew Teeling walked along the deck towards the captain’s cabin, elbowing his way past soldiers in undress who had come topside to drink in the air. They leaned against the gunwales, or squatted, talking quietly, with practised indifference, bare-chested or with opened shirts. They were seasoned troops. Here, at least, the Ministry of War had not skimped. Many, like Teeling himself, had served on the Rhine; others had crossed the Alps with Buonaparte. Most of them were shorter than Teeling, their bodies wiry and dark. Teeling was a tall, solemn man, flat-chested. Even aboard ship, he walked with a springing gait.

  Closely following the Concorde, the other frigates sailed with full canvas, the Franchise, with forty guns, like the Concorde, and the Medée, with thirty-eight. The Irish coast was still a long way off, and the next dip of the horizon might bring into view the sails of Admiral Warren’s squadron. Three armies, despatched from different ports at different times, must contrive to slip past that squadron. This army of Humbert’s, the smallest of the three, had been the first to sail. A miniature army, infantry of the line, two companies of grenadiers, a squadron of the Third Regiment of Chasseurs—some 1,060 men and 70 officers. They carried with them light artillery, and 5,500 stands of arms for distribution to the Irish rebels.

  What most concerned Teeling, goading him beneath his sober Ulster exterior, was the urgency of getting those firelocks to Henry Joy MacCracken, the commander of rebel forces in the north. News of the insurrection had reached La Rochelle with agonising slowness. On August 3, the day before Humbert set sail, Paris forwarded some English newspapers. MacCracken had risen up with an army of six thousand, Catholics and Presbyterians marching together in what one paper described as an unnatural and hellish combination. Antrim and Down had been captured, but a large English army was moving north along the Dublin road. But the papers were two months old. By now, MacCracken might have been defeated, or he might have fallen back into the glens of Antrim.

  Those hills and steep glens were more real to Teeling than the oak planks beneath his feet or the creaking canvas or the dark waves of the Atlantic. He did not know what circumstances had forced MacCracken into rebellion without proper arms and without help from France. Perhaps he had despaired of that help. Six tho
usand men armed with pikes, peasants and small farmers and tradesmen from the snug townlands of Ulster. In his imagination, Teeling saw them trudging along roads which wound past valley and moorland, pikes sloped against the dull greys and duns of their jackets. An army moved against them, jackets of fiery red against the rich green of the Meath pastureland, the metallic jangle of cavalry, the snouts of cannon.

  Two months ago or more, Ulster had risen in rebellion; now three ships of Frenchmen were sailing to its assistance. In those months, battles had been fought and won or fought and lost, towns taken and retaken, men piked or shot down or blown apart. His principles had forced him into flight from Ireland, into service as a French officer, had placed him among the quarrelling idealists and rogues of the Irish colony in Paris. Now they carried him to an insurrection which might already have been crushed. He wore his principles like chains of iron looped across his shoulders, without pride, a burden.

  In Admiral Savary’s cabin he sat down beside Fontaine and Sarrizen, his fellow officers, and waited for Humbert. A map of Ireland was spread across the table, turned towards Humbert’s empty chair. If Teeling reached out his hand towards the map, he could touch Antrim and Donegal. Beyond Donegal stretched the bare expanse of Mayo, white save for a chain of carets which signified mountains.

  Humbert entered the cabin without fuss and seated himself, a tall, muscular man in a rumpled uniform. He unbuckled his belt, rubbed his stomach, and smiled at his officers.

  “So, gentlemen. Savary informs me that the southern tip of Ireland lies to our right some fifty miles distant. If the weather holds good and Warren stays away from us, we will make a wide circle around the island and in less than a week we will see the shores of Ulster.” His speech, as even Teeling knew, was rough and provincial. When the Revolution broke out, Humbert had been a small trader in the skins of goats and rabbits, tramping from village to village in the Vosges, a peasant’s son who could read a bit and was able to write out his name, Jean-Joseph Humbert. Now, at thirty-one, he was one of the most celebrated of French generals. Teeling would once have thought his an exemplary career, a proof that energy and intelligence are rewarded in a revolutionary society. Two years in the France of the Directory had tempered his illusions.

  By 1793, already a maréchal de camp, Humbert had distinguished himself by his audacity and skill, only to find his advancement blocked. For a time thereafter, he served as one of the government’s numerous informers, ferreting out disloyalty among his fellow soldiers. The Revolution, a benevolent cyclone, had lifted him up from obscurity and meaningless toil; by defending it against internal enemies, he defended himself. Later, in Paris, assigned to the Directory itself for unspecified tasks, he gained the confidence of ministers and generals, and flattered their wives and mistresses. He frequented the opera and the theatre, large, puzzled eyes studying incomprehensible dramas, flutes and trumpets a jumble of sounds echoing in his ears. He spent his afternoons with a clerk, improving his ability to read and write. He had two ambitions, to advance himself and to defend the Revolution: he could not separate them.

  At last he received his command, and was posted to the Vendée to assist Hoche in the suppression of the Chouans. It was there that he earned his fame. A master of improvisation and of irregular warfare, he moved where conventional generals never ventured, through forests and marshlands. He fought as the Chouans themselves fought, by sudden marches and night raids, by ambuscades and swift retreats. He was as ruthless as the Chouans and as fearless. He respected them. They too were peasants, simple men and brave fighters. But he was savage towards the returned émigrés who led them. When a nobleman was captured, Humbert hanged him without trial. He attacked and defeated the army of English and royalists at Quiberon, and then, four days later, stormed their garrison at Penthièvre. His politics were simple, and in their simplicity terrifying to moderates, who once had called him, in contempt, marchand des peaux de lapin. The Revolution must be preserved and extended, and England, the chief enemy of the Revolution, must be destroyed. In a time of trimmers and opportunists, Humbert was a Jacobin.

  “Now, gentlemen,” he said. “It is important that you should know under what orders we have set sail, and what instructions we have been given by the Directory. We constitute one of the three elements of the army of Ireland. We are to disembark on the coast of Ulster, establish a position there, and distribute arms to our Irish allies. When General Hardy’s army arrives, we shall march to meet him, and shall place ourselves under his orders. He has been given latitude in his use of this combined force. He may move it to the support of the rebel army in Ulster, or he may attack in a different direction. What is essential is that he must have victories. Our army is a minute one, and his is not large. The true army of Ireland is its third element, the nine thousand men under General Kilmaine. And it will not move unless we demonstrate that we can hold a position and win victories.”

  “If General Hardy succeeds in reaching Ireland,” Sarrizen said. “We do not even know if he has set sail from Brest.”

  “I am coming to that, Colonel Sarrizen. Have a little patience. You will learn in time that fighting battles is only a part of a soldier’s task. He must first scheme to be allowed to fight them. There would be no army of Ireland at all, if it were not for the persistence of a few Frenchmen like myself and a few Irishmen like Colonel Teeling here, and his friend, Colonel Wolfe Tone. The Directory is only interested in General Buonaparte’s Egyptian adventure. But they are willing—not eager, mind you, only willing—to venture a few francs on Ireland, like a cautious gambler making a side wager. Hardy and myself, we are the little wager. But if we succeed, they will plunge. They will put on the board those nine thousand men that Kilmaine had to scheme and bluster to keep away from the sands of Egypt.”

  “We are only a gamble, then,” Fontaine said. “A small wager. That is not a comfortable thought.”

  Humbert, leaning back in his chair, rubbed his hands again across his stomach. He had the eyes of a cat, quick and wary, trapped within a pale, heavy face.

  “A cautious gambler is likely to be a miserly one. It is a certain way to lose. As you know, we were both delayed, Hardy at Brest and ourselves at Rochefort. Supplies did not arrive, the shipments of firelocks did not arrive, we received no money with which to pay the troops. There was inefficiency perhaps. Or perhaps there were those who did not wish success for the army of Ireland. Is that possible, do you think?”

  Fontaine and Sarrizen looked neither at Humbert nor at each other. Sarrizen stared intently at the map.

  “That is sensible of you, gentlemen. Stay away from politics. If there was to be an invasion of Ireland, it was up to me to act. The paymaster at Rochefort was so kind as to advance me forty-seven thousand francs without a formal order from Paris. Certain friends in the army of the Rhine have lent me supplies. Even our artillery has been borrowed. I obtained the firelocks by asserting an authority which I do not in fact possess. Most important of all, I was under strict orders not to sail in advance of Hardy. I have disobeyed that order.”

  The lamp above the table creaked gently with the motion of the ship.

  Humbert waited for their comment. “You think that I have been wicked? So will the Directory. Very wicked. If I fail. But if I can hold, you will be astonished at how swiftly Hardy and Kilmaine will be sent out after me.” He turned towards Teeling. “That, Colonel, if you will pardon my bluntness, is why I chose you as my aide de camp, and not my old companion Wolfe Tone. It is because I need a man like Wolfe Tone to stay beside Hardy, to urge him on, a man as unscrupulous as myself. You Irish, if you will forgive me for saying so, you Irish have only begun this business of revolution. You are like the fine liberal gentlemen who began our revolution in France. Revolution is a nasty, conniving trade. Wolfe Tone understands that. He has great natural talent for it. Well, gentlemen? I have no intention that you should sit there, silent and prudent. Speak up.”

  “I intend to, General,” Sarrizen said. “You propose to land one
thousand men on an island which contains, how many British troops?”

  “Many more.” Humbert shrugged. “British regulars, militia, and the locals . . . what are they called, Teeling?”

  “The yeomanry.”

  “I think, then,” Sarrizen said, “that you have thrown us away.”

  “You are wrong,” Humbert said. “As you will discover. We are a thousand men who have been sent to join a people in rebellion against their oppressors. They are Chouans, like my old opponents in the Vendée. There are special ways to fight that kind of war, and I know them better than any soldier in Europe. Two days after we have landed, every one of those five thousand firelocks will be in the hands of an Irishman. And they will know how to use them, will they not, Teeling?”

  Teeling smiled. “I doubt that. But they can be taught.”

  “Exactly,” Humbert said. “Ignorant men. Men kept in ignorance by their oppressors. But they can be taught.”

  Sarrizen, olive skin, black, close-curled hair, traced the table edge with his forefinger. “We land, then, General. We establish a position, we distribute the weapons to the rebels, we wait for General Hardy. Is that all?”

  “If the opportunity offers itself,” Humbert said, “I do not intend to wait. I will take the offensive. With any luck at all, I will have an army of six thousand at least under my command.”

  Teeling said, “Do not misunderstand me, General. But I would remind you of the assurances which Tone obtained from the Directory. The battle is to be waged by the army of the Irish Republic. The French soldiers are to serve as their auxiliaries.”

  Humbert smiled and lifted his hands. “Certainly, Colonel. If such an army still exists. If this friend of yours who commands in the north—”

  “MacCracken,” Teeling said.

  “—if he is still in the field, my force will work with him. But if the peasants must be recruited, taught to fight, taught, as you suggest, even how to use their weapons, then I will place them under my command.”