ward 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 No