Insane as the idea appears, looked back at from this distance, it evidently was not viewed in the same light by those at hand.  England and France, it must be remembered, were at fierce war, and a descent upon the Irish coast was then, as afterwards by Napoleon, regarded as a natural and obvious part of the aggressive policy of the latter.  In the summer of 1796 Lord Edward Fitzgerald went to Paris to open negotiations with the French Directory, and there met Wolfe Tone, who had been induced some time before to leave Ireland in order to avoid arrest.  Lord Edward’s Orleanist connection proving a bar to his negotiations, he left Paris, and the whole of the arrangements devolved into the latter’s hand.  He so fired Carnot, one of the Directory, and still more General Hoche, with a belief of the feasibility of his scheme of descent, that, in December of the same year a French fleet of forty-three vessels containing fifteen thousand troops were actually despatched under Hoche’s command, Wolfe Tone being on board of one of them, which vessels, slipping past the English fleet in the Channel, bore down upon the Irish coast, and suddenly appeared off Cape Clear.

[Illustration:  THEOBALD WOLFE TONE. (From a lithograph after a sketch by Hullmandel.)]

All Ireland was thrown into the wildest panic.  There were only a small body of troops in the south and not a war-ship upon the coast.  The peasantry of the district, it is true, showed no disposition to rise, but for all that had the French landed, nothing could have hindered them from marching upon the capital.  But—­“those ancient and unsubsidised allies of England upon which English ministers depend as much for saving kingdoms as washerwomen for drying clothes,”—­the winds again stood true to their ancient alliance.  The vessel with Hoche on board got separated from the rest of the fleet, and while the troops were waiting for him to arrive a violent gale accompanied with snow suddenly sprang up.  The fleet moved on to Bear Island, and tried to anchor there, but the storm increased, the shelter was insufficient, the vessels dragged their anchors, were driven out to sea and forced to return to Brest.  The ship containing Hoche had before this been forced to put back to France, and so ended the first and by far the most formidable of the perils which threatened England under this new combination.

One very unfortunate result of the narrowness of this escape was that the Irish Executive—­stung by the sense of their own supineness, and utterly scared by the recent peril—­threw themselves into the most violent and arbitrary measures of repression.  The Habeas Corpus Act had already been suspended, and now martial law was proclaimed in five of the northern counties at once.  The committee of the United Irishmen was seized, the office of their organ The Northern Star destroyed, and an immense number of people hurried into gaol.  What was much more serious throughout the proclaimed districts, the soldiery and militia regiments which had been brought over from England were kept under no discipline, but were allowed to ill-use the population almost at their own discretion.  Gross excesses were committed, whole villages being in some instances plundered and the people turned adrift, while half hangings, floggings and picketings, were freely resorted to to extort confessions of concealed arms.