r son of the Duke of Leinster, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a man of
very slender capacity, who, at his first entrance into Parliament, when
scarcely more than of age, had made himself remarkable by a furious
denunciation of Pitt's Irish propositions; had married a natural
daughter of the Duke of Orleans, a prince, in spite of his royal birth,
one of the most profligate and ferocious of the French Jacobins; and had
caught the revolutionary mania to such a degree that he abjured his
nobility, and substituted for the appellation which marked his rank the
title of "Citizen Fitzgerald." He had enrolled himself in a society
known as the United Irishmen, and had gone to France, as its
plenipotentiary, to arrange with Hoche, one of the most brilliant and
popular of the French generals, a scheme for the invasion of Ireland, in
which he promised him that, on his landing, he should be joined by tens
of thousands of armed Irishmen. Hoche entered warmly into the plan, was
furnished with a splendid army by the Directors, and in December, 1796,
set sail for Ireland; but the fleet which carried him was dispersed in a
storm; many of the ships were wrecked, others were captured by the
British cruisers, and the remnant of the fleet, sadly crippled, was glad
to regain its harbors. 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;
o