a general, the island might well have been lost to the English Crown.
But the winds fought against France, as they had fought against the
Armada of Spain; and the ships were parted from one another by a gale
which burst on them as they put to sea. Seventeen reached Bantry Bay,
but hearing nothing of their leader or of the rest, they sailed back
again to Brest, in spite of the entreaties of the soldiers to be
suffered to land. Another division reached the Shannon to be scattered
and driven home again by a second storm. Twelve vessels were wrecked or
captured, and the frigate in which Hoche had embarked returned to port
without having seen any of its companions. The invasion had failed, but
the panic which it roused woke passions of cruelty and tyranny which
turned Ireland into a hell. Soldiers and yeomanry marched over the
country torturing and scourging the "croppies," as the Irish peasantry
were termed from their short-cut hair; robbing, ravishing, and murdering
at their will. The lightest suspicion, the most unfounded charges, were
taken as warrants for bloodshed. So hideous were these outrages that the
news of them as it reached England woke a thrill of horror in the minds
of even the blindest Tories; but by the landowners who formed the Irish
Parliament they were sanctioned in a Bill of Indemnity and protected for
the future by an Insurrection Act. The terror however only woke a
universal spirit of revolt. Ireland drank in greedily that hatred of
England and of English rule which all the justice and moderation of
later government has failed to destroy; and the United Irishmen looked
with more passionate longing than ever to France.

[Sidenote: The struggle for the Sea.]

Nor had France abandoned the design of invasion; while her victories
made such a design every day more formidable. The war was going steadily
in her favour. A fresh victory at Rivoli, the surrender of Mantua, and
an advance through Styria on Vienna, enabled Buonaparte to wring a peace
from England's one ally, Austria. The armistice was concluded in April
1797, and the final treaty which was signed at Campo Formio in October
not only gave France the Ionian Islands, a part of the old territory of
Venice (whose Italian possessions passed to the Emperor), as well as the
Netherlands and the whole left bank of the Rhine, but united Lombardy
with the Duchies south of the Po and the Papal States as far as the
Rubicon into a "Cisalpine Republic," which was