TY - JOUR
AU - Wilson, Evan
AB - Abstract Poor weather was all that prevented the French from landing successfully at Bantry Bay in 1796 – the Royal Navy was noticeably absent. This article examines the British response to this failure, focusing on the early years of the Napoleonic Wars. It reveals not only the continuing significance of the invasion threat but also the challenges facing British military officials. As Irish historians have noted, the first years of the Union were characterized by uncertainty about essential components of that Union: nationalism, patriotism, loyalism and religious identity. What has not been discussed before are the ways in which those forces shaped British naval defence efforts, and vice versa. Drawing on previously unexamined sources, it connects naval defence efforts to broader questions of British and Irish history. Haines asked: – Do you pay rent for this tower? – Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said. – To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder. They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last: – Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it? – Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), i, ch. 1. The Martello tower in which the opening chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses takes place stands today as a museum dedicated to the great novelist and a place of pilgrimage for his followers. Many visitors are aware that the tower was one of many constructed to defend against an invasion, even though in the novel, the only mention of the tower's original purpose comes in the exchange above. As with all of Ulysses, Joyce packs multiple meanings into commonplace exchanges. First, Stephen Dedalus reminds Haines, who is English, that Martello towers are symbols of British imperial rule in Ireland. Then, Buck Mulligan vividly describes their original purpose. Joyce's word choice demands our attention: the French were not threatening to put to sea – they were in fact on the sea. The image of ‘Billy Pitt’ scrambling to construct towers while a French fleet looms on the horizon is, as this article will show, not quite as comical as it might first appear. Irish historians of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars have understandably focused most of their attention on three events in the pivotal five-year period beginning in 1796. The first is the failed French expedition to Bantry Bay, the great ‘what-if’ in Irish history. In that case, the French really were on the sea. The second is the rise and fall of the United Irishmen in 1798, a narrative which is similarly fraught with potential and echoes well into the twentieth century. The third is the passing of the Acts of Union, which fundamentally altered the relationship between Britain and Ireland and shaped the course of Irish politics in the nineteenth century.1 Each of these three events is inextricably and correctly linked to the broader context of the wars.2 But from 1801, the wars recede into the background of Irish historiography. British ministers, we are told, ‘could finally relax’ once the Union was assured. Attention turns to the ways in which Britain and Ireland were moving further apart ‘industrially, agriculturally, demographically, and, not least, religiously’.3 These issues, and their significance for Irish politics, dominate the historical scholarship for the rest of the century.4 British ministers may have been relaxed once the Union was signed, but they were anything but relaxed about the course of the wars and Ireland's role in them. Union did not mean that Ireland was no longer Britain's vulnerable underbelly, nor did it promise to make a significant difference in the conduct of the next fifteen years of war. If anything, the threat to Ireland was more acute in the early years of the Napoleonic Wars than it was in the crises of the seventeen-nineties. Billy Pitt really did need to build those towers. Though there is no dramatic episode like the fiasco at Bantry Bay to capture historical attention, we should nevertheless examine the defence of Ireland in this period. Doing so reveals not only the significance of the threat and the ways in which the British countered it, but also the challenges facing British military officials – challenges that their colleagues tasked with the defence of England, Scotland and Wales did not face. As Irish historians have noted, the first years of the Union were characterized by uncertainty about essential components of that Union: nationalism, patriotism, loyalism and religious identity.5 What has not been discussed before are the ways in which those forces shaped British naval defence efforts, and vice versa. It is unfair to accuse historians of eighteenth-century Ireland of forgetting that their subject is an island, but it is nevertheless surprising the extent to which they have neglected the naval dimension of their story.6 It is a characteristic of islands that they are often seen as safe from invasion, despite ample evidence to the contrary.7 The great eighteenth-century rivalry between Britain and France began with a successful invasion of England, in 1688, which was quickly followed by major landings in Ireland by forces loyal to James II and then forces loyal to William III. Subsequent wars regularly featured serious invasion scares, yet Irish historians have little patience for naval affairs. Far more attention has been paid to the counter-insurgency operations of the British army and the raising of militia forces.8 The Royal Navy's role in the defence of Ireland in the eighteenth century goes unmentioned in most of the leading surveys. Those that do mention it do so in the context of the navy's great failure, the Bantry Bay expedition, the defeat of which, it is generally agreed, was entirely related to the weather and not at all related to British naval power.9 Historians writing from the British perspective have paid more attention to Ireland and its defence because Ireland was an obvious point of weakness in the British efforts against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Not only was it a possible target for an invasion attempt, but it was also in danger of throwing off British rule. Ireland appears in this historiography in two contexts. As the demands of the British warfighting machine increased, restrictions on Catholic participation were gradually lifted, and Ireland became a major source of manpower, both for the army and the navy.10 At the same time, it was also a drain on manpower, because of the necessity of stationing army forces around the countryside.11 While some attention has been paid to Ireland's role in the naval history of this period, there does not yet exist a survey of the British strategy for defending Ireland.12 Before turning to questions of loyalism and religious identity, then, we need to describe the evolution of that strategy, with an emphasis on the naval dimension. In the French Revolutionary Wars, there were four layers to the defence of Ireland. The first layer was located well away from Irish shores. British fleets blockaded or monitored the European ports most likely to host invasion flotillas. The most obvious threat came from Brest, the largest of France's Atlantic bases. The Brest blockade is justly famous, as it required maintaining a major fleet close blockade to the enemy's base in trying conditions. But in the first years of the French Revolutionary Wars, the Brest blockade was anything but close, and indeed barely worthy of the name. Admiral Lord Howe, commanding the Channel Fleet despite being sixty-eight years old and in failing health, favoured a strategy of waiting at Torbay on the Devon coast for intelligence from frigates scouting off Brest. For Howe, this was a comfortable arrangement, and he was eventually able to command the Fleet from Bath; for the safety of the realm, it was less comfortable. On 31 December 1794, the Brest fleet left port for more than a month of cruising, during which it took more than a hundred British prizes and a ship of the line.13 Another fleet monitored the Dutch behind the barrier island of the Texel. Though an invasion of East Anglia or Scotland was certainly possible from the Texel, British ministers worried that in fact the Dutch would sail north around Scotland and land an army in Ireland, where they would be more likely to find a population willing to support their efforts. The British first installed a blockade in 1796, following the establishment of the Batavian Republic the previous year. But as with Brest, the Texel blockade initially operated out of a home port – Yarmouth – in a reactive role.14 Behind the blockades, the second layer of the defence of Ireland was the Irish station, which consisted of roughly a dozen cruisers operating out of Cork.15 It was a rear-admiral's command, and there were rarely ships larger than frigates stationed there. Invasion defence was only one small part of the frigates' assignments – their primary concern was convoys. The frigates escorted the trade connecting Britain and Ireland, the English coastal trade from Liverpool into the Channel, and the West India trade. The last was the most fraught, as they had to shepherd West India-bound convoys up to 200 miles out to sea, and then hope to rendezvous with a homeward-bound convoy and see it safely to the Channel. When not on convoy duty, the frigates at Cork cruised for French privateers. It was occasionally a target-rich environment. In the summer of 1797, after the French had heard about the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, dozens of French privateers sailed in the hopes of finding the British fleets in disarray. The Cork station captains made out remarkably well, taking in four or five privateers a week.16 It was not expected, though, that these frigates could handle forces much stronger than privateers: in the event of a major escape of a dozen or more ships of the line from Brest, they were likely to be overwhelmed and only useful for communicating news of the French fleet to stronger forces. Supplementing the squadron at Cork was a coastal defence scheme, though in the seventeen-nineties that is perhaps too generous a term. There was no comprehensive plan for monitoring the coast, nor for communicating news of enemy ships and landings to naval or military authorities. In some places, leading members of the community, often Protestant gentry, took proactive steps to defend the coast. In Ballyshannon, for example, James Montgomery employed lookouts at Teelin Head and Arranmore light house. As the customs collector in that region he was acting in both a public and private capacity. He used the revenue cutter under his direction to, as he put it, ‘convey intelligence of every kind to our Fleet’. He was provided with private signals to communicate with the ships on the Irish station and constructed primitive signal houses at some key points for that purpose. He also had a small group of men on horseback to move quickly between stations.17 But Montgomery's efforts were not replicated around the coastline, and it was largely thanks to his own initiative that the northern coast of Ireland was in any way prepared for an invasion. The Royal Navy did not have a unified plan for coastal defence in the French Revolutionary Wars. The British army, though, did, and it formed the fourth layer of the defence of Ireland. The land-based defences will be discussed later in this article; for now, our focus remains on the naval defences. How did the naval aspects of the defence scheme perform in the seventeen-nineties? In short, not very well. Dangerous signs began to appear in the early years of the French Revolution, when support for it and for the idea of a French invasion connected to an overthrow of British rule became widespread in Ireland. There were French-Irish contacts between radicals, and conspiracies involving aid from Paris abounded. Recognizing the danger in 1794, British authorities arrested or forced into exile leading United Irishmen like Wolfe Tone, but these actions just served to bring the French and Irish closer together.18 The result of the alliance was General Louis Lazare Hoche's expedition to Bantry Bay. The winter of 1796 saw terrible weather in the western approaches, which forced the Brest blockade all the way back to Spithead. In December, Hoche's expedition of forty-three ships carrying 15,000 men left Brest and sailed for Bantry Bay. The French were unable to land because of the weather; the British were unable to respond in force at all. Wolfe Tone wrote in his journal, ‘I am utterly astonished that we did not see a single English ship of war, going nor coming back’.19 While the British knew that the French had sailed, they did not know if they had landed, how big the force was, or if they could counter it. Despite some scrambling by local members of the yeomanry to serve as lookouts along the south shore, these ad hoc forces struggled to communicate with the frigates at Cork, who were pinned in the harbour by the weather. The first British ships arrived on 7 January, after the French had already abandoned the mission.20 The second test came in 1797. Following the failure at Bantry Bay, Wolfe Tone had gone to the Batavian Republic, where he helped gather twelve ships of the line, thirty-nine smaller warships, twenty-eight transports and 15,000 soldiers, all destined for Ireland. On 10 July, with the British reeling from the great mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, the troops were embarked. But the wind stayed in the west, and supplies began to run low. Eventually the troops were disembarked and paid off, with nothing having come of the plans. Then, in October, Admiral Adam Duncan's blockading squadron off the Texel was forced back to Yarmouth to refit. The Dutch escorting force took this opportunity to sortie into the North Sea, though without any troops. Duncan intercepted the fleet just before they returned to port and won a major victory at the battle of Camperdown.21 As with Bantry Bay, the British defences had been saved by a fortuitous wind and indecision on the part of their opponents. Camperdown was hugely significant, as it restored morale in the aftermath of the mutinies and diminished the threat from the Texel, but that diminution came three months after the threat had been most severe. The outcome of the summer of 1797 in the North Sea could easily have been different. In May 1798, Britain's saviour was not the weather, but rather poor timing and poor communication on the part of both the United Irishmen and their French supporters. The rising, heavily infiltrated by the British, fizzled, and the French were unable to capitalize on the ensuing fighting.22 In the faint hope of inciting a second rising, the French sent a small expedition of 1,025 men not from Brest but from Rochefort. It sailed well out into the Atlantic to avoid the cruisers at Cork and landed in the north-west at Killala. There was no real possibility of reinforcements, and the small force was quickly overwhelmed, surrendering in September.23 The naval campaign of 1799 did little to boost confidence in the British defensive scheme. Early that year, the British gained intelligence that the French fleet in Brest was preparing to sail and that the likely destination was the Mediterranean. In April, under the command of Vice-Admiral Eustache Bruix, it did exactly that. But the commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet, Admiral Lord Bridport, did not trust his intelligence, missed a key signal from the frigate monitoring Brest, and moved north to cover Ireland. In the context of the French attempts on Ireland in the previous two years, this response was reasonable, but it gave Bruix a week's head start. Bruix remained at large for the whole summer, finally returning to Brest on 8 August. Though his expedition had been a ‘brilliant failure’, it demonstrated the weakness of the British blockade system.24 It would be disingenuous to call this combat record, from the British perspective, successful. The French landed once and nearly seriously twice; a major insurgency threatened British rule; and fleets sortied from both the Texel and Brest. Though the British had escaped the French Revolutionary Wars with control over Ireland intact, it was clear to many observers at the onset of the Napoleonic Wars that changes needed to be made. Linda Colley argued that this was the impetus for the Acts of Union, ‘to prevent Napoleon from using [Ireland] as a launching pad for the invasion of Britain’.25 A caricature published in 1803 entitled ‘England and Ireland Defy Bonaparte’ suggested that the Union had solved the problems of the seventeen-nineties: on a globe, an Englishman and an Irishman shake hands in Ireland, while Bonaparte menaces them from Europe.26 This was blatant propaganda, though. Ministers were under no illusions that the Union had diminished the threat posed by a possible French invasion. The connection between Union and invasion defence assumes that there was some tangible benefit from the Union that would assist British military forces in the repelling of Napoleon's flotilla, which by 1804 was ten times larger than any of the invasion forces that had menaced Britain and Ireland in the previous war. In fact, when Ireland became officially part of the United Kingdom on the first day of 1801, it did little to alter the immediate strategic situation. The responsibility for making the changes necessary to respond to the increased threats fell primarily to four men: in London, the first lord of the admiralty, Lord St. Vincent; at Cork, the new commander-in-chief, Admiral Lord Gardner; and in Dublin, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Hardwicke. The latter was, from 1803, assisted by his naval advisor, Rear-Admiral James Hawkins Whitshed, who was tasked with organizing the defence of the bays, coasts, harbours and rivers of Ireland. The remainder of this section relies on the correspondence of Gardner, Whitshed and St. Vincent to explore how naval officers sought to solve the problems that the French had exposed in the Irish coastal defence scheme in the seventeen-nineties. Changes appeared in the Channel Fleet first. Under Bridport, the blockade of Brest had grown progressively tighter; in 1800, St. Vincent succeeded Bridport and tightened it further, before returning to London as first lord; his successor off Brest, Cornwallis, carried on in a similar manner. No longer was the squadron frequently sheltering in Torbay or Spithead: it was a close blockade, and a gruelling one, right off Ushant. Though bad weather could drive them off station, it was much less likely that a major expedition would escape without notice.27 As first lord, St. Vincent deployed his trusted deputy Admiral Lord Keith with a major force in the Channel and the North Sea to watch French preparations at Boulogne, and to intercept the troop transports if they sailed. There continued to be a blockade of the Texel, though it was less serious a threat than it had been before Camperdown.28 By reinforcing and tightening the blockades of continental ports, the British hoped to forestall an invasion at sea, many miles from British shores. There were changes at the Irish station as well. Frigates continued to escort convoys and intercept privateers, but in the autumn of 1803, Gardner had been given four ships of the line and seconded to Cornwallis in the Channel. He was later sent back, but the move indicated that the admiralty recognized the need to reinforce the southern defences of Ireland. Another minor change indicated how British admirals anticipated that the French might invade. Gardner detached an Irish revenue cutter to a station off the coast of northern Scotland: it would warn northern Ireland in the event a fleet escaped through the North Sea, whether from Boulogne or the Texel.29 Why, though, would British admirals be worried about an invasion of Ireland when the most obvious target for Napoleon's army was the English coast, only twenty-two miles away? Gardner and Whitshed were not worried about the entire French army landing in Ireland – it was impossible for 160,000 men to be transported that far, and indeed many informed observers doubted that they could even be transported across the Channel. Instead, the admirals worried about diversionary landings, on the scale of the Bantry Bay expedition. The tighter blockades appeared to make it unlikely that forty or more ships could escape a French port unnoticed, but in the right weather conditions, and with a little luck, all naval officers knew, it was certainly possible. In 1801, Admiral Ganteaume demonstrated the permeability of even the tight Brest blockade by sailing with seven ships of the line in a repeat of Bruix's cruise of 1799.30 Gardner and Whitshed were concerned that if that happened again, the Irish coastline was almost undefended. They therefore set about strengthening the coastal defences, anticipating that despite the new fleet deployments, a French force could be expected to land at any time. When Whitshed arrived in Ireland in 1803, he was tasked with mimicking the coastal defence preparations in England. Gardner was well ahead of him, having been on station since 1800, and he bombarded both the admiralty and Whitshed with repeated and insistent letters calling for signal posts, gun boats and Sea Fencibles. ‘[They] ought to have been established in my humble opinion long ago’, Gardner wrote in October 1803, ‘and not at a time when it is reported the enemy are landing on the coast, wither a few miles of Sligo, which report I hope is not correct’.31 (It was not.) In another letter, Gardner explained, ‘There is much required, and a great deal necessary to be done for the defence of the Coasts of this Kingdom’. He demanded small vessels off the southern and western harbours and bays, better communication with the army, and signal stations ‘on the same principle as those on the coast of England’.32 Whitshed established the first signal stations east and west of Cork along the southern coast. He then extended them along the east coast to Dublin, and in the northwest near where the Killala expedition had landed.33 Each station consisted of a two-room building housing a lieutenant, a midshipman, and two enlisted men. Next to the small building was a flagpole – a spare mast from the nearest dockyard – and both were situated in as exposed a location as possible, usually on a headland, to facilitate communication with ships at sea and nearby stations. Construction of the stations began in October 1803, but the process was slow. Not only did it take time to survey the locations of the stations so that they could most effectively cover the coast, but it also took time to build the houses. In some cases, the stations were initially manned by men living in tents next to a signal mast; in other cases, the newly-built houses were so exposed and poorly-constructed that they became uninhabitable. Because so much of the Irish coastline is remote and difficult to reach, some stations existed only on paper. The admiralty did not help matters, sending material for only sixteen stations by December 1803, but by June 1804, Whitshed had successfully overseen the construction of seventy stations, sixty-seven of which were manned (see Figure 1).34 Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘A New Map of Ireland … for the use of Travellers’ by Alexander Taylor (1793), annotated and revised in 1804. This altered version of a commercially-produced map shows the location of the signal stations, gun vessels, Sea Fencibles and proposed Martello towers.38 [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] The same process was happening simultaneously along the English coastline. But in Ireland, Whitshed had to provide one further component that was not included in the stations popping up along the coasts of Kent and Sussex. A fully-completed Irish signal station also had a defensible guard house. Both navy and army officers were clear that these guard houses were not to protect the station from the French but rather from what they called the ‘disaffected’. The most valuable contents of each signal station were the private signals, which allowed secure communication with friendly ships and the identification of enemy ships.35 When the signals had to be changed after a French privateer captured a naval vessel in November 1803, it caused Gardner significant trouble. Communicating with each station took time, and ensuring that every station and every convoy knew of the change in signals proved challenging. Not only were the stations remotely situated, but the Irish station was highly transient, with convoys coming and going throughout the year.36 Gardner and Whitshed sought to prevent Irish rebels from stealing the signals and sending them to the French. They were particularly concerned about the stations on the southeast coast. St. Vincent wrote to Whitshed in October 1803: ‘A very well informed person has communicated to a member of this Board that in the neighbourhood of Wicklow, Wexford, and Waterford few, if any, of the inhabitants are to be confided in’.37 One way to ensure the safety of the signals was to combine the signal station and guard house into one round brick-built building and arm it with artillery. What came to be known as Martello towers were inspired by a tower at Mortella Point in Corsica that had resisted British assaults in 1794, which was itself based on a medieval Genoese design. The suitability of such towers for Irish coastal defence attracted British ministers in the autumn of 1803.39 St. Vincent was optimistic and emphasized their versatility: ‘If the situations [of the towers] are well chosen, they may bid defiance to Insurgents and even to the best French troops’.40 Recall the scene from Ulysses at the beginning of the article, where Joyce cleverly evokes both the counter-insurgency and counter-invasion purposes of the towers. For Dedalus, they were a British imperial project, even if they were also intended to repel the French. In the end, there was some disagreement among British ministers about the cost-effectiveness of Martello towers. St. Vincent saw them as inexpensive, but ministers in Dublin were less convinced. One tower, they argued, cost as much as seven or eight guard houses, and given the length of the Irish coastline, quantity of guarded signal stations seemed to be a more pressing concern than the defensibility of any one point.41 Perhaps for this reason, only fourteen towers were built in Ireland by 1806, compared with seventy-four in England.42 In setting up signal stations, guard houses and Martello towers, the Royal Navy, which had hitherto maintained a light footprint on Irish soil outside of its base at Cork, ensnared itself in the politics of military forces in Ireland. The establishment of fortified signal stations owned and operated by the navy marked a significant change in the navy's relationship with Ireland. Gardner, Whitshed and St. Vincent now had to navigate the intersection of patriotism and loyalism, insurgency and rebellion, and religious identity. It is worth stepping back here to survey the complex history of the British military presence in Ireland in the decades leading up to the Union. Over the course of the French Revolutionary Wars, responsibility for defending Ireland had fallen first to regular regiments in the British army, then to the Irish militia, then to the English and Scottish Fencibles, and finally to the Irish yeomanry. As responsibility shifted, the strategic demands of the wars, the interplay of religions identity and insurgency, and the legacy of centuries of Protestant rule from Dublin called into question the military effectiveness of each force. By the time that Whitshed established the first naval signal stations in 1803, all four armed groups were still operating in the Irish countryside, and they provide the context for how naval commanders made decisions about the land-based aspects of coastal defence. The army maintained a significant presence in Ireland throughout the eighteenth century for two reasons. Ireland was a staging ground for the British strategic reserve, to be deployed as an expeditionary force if the opportunity arose. This strategy had the added benefit that before they were deployed, troops could be used for counter-insurgency operations. To do so, they were dispersed into small detachments around the country. This deployment scheme made it more likely that there would be at least some troops available quickly in the event of an enemy landing, but it also meant that it would take a long time to concentrate British forces to face a large body of troops.43 Complicating matters, ministers in London kept finding reasons to deploy their strategic reserve of regular troops, and they frequently failed to replace them. Early in the French Revolutionary Wars, they sent troops to attack French and Dutch colonies as had been done so successfully in the Seven Years' War. Ministers believed that the navy's defences were sufficient to prevent a French landing.44 By the crisis years of 1796 to 1798, there were not enough regular troops to play a significant role in either invasion response or counter-insurgency operations. Historians disagree about the exact number of troops deployed, but the general outline is clear: no more than 4,000 regular troops, and perhaps as few as 2,000, were available to the crown. Had the French landed at Bantry Bay, they would have substantially outnumbered British regular forces. The same mistake would not be made in the Napoleonic Wars. The navy's failures at Bantry and Killala, combined with the events of 1798, convinced ministers that regular forces were necessary in Ireland, and by 1803 there were more than 10,000 regular troops at the crown's disposal, rising to more than 20,000 by 1811.45 During the lowest ebb of regular troops in Ireland, Fencible regiments had been brought from England and Scotland as replacements. Men serving in the Fencibles were only liable for service in Great Britain and Ireland, and they enlisted only for the duration of hostilities. The Fencibles were a half-way measure between regulars and militiamen. They did not carry with them the potential dangers of an armed citizenry, as the militia did, nor did they require parliamentary approval to be raised, as regulars did. It was doubtful that they would be as effective as regular forces, but few other options presented themselves to ministers in 1795. Fencibles initially arrived in small numbers – only 800 deployed in 1795. But their numbers grew rapidly as they assumed more responsibilities, and by 1802 there were between 15,000 and 20,000 Fencibles serving in Ireland.46 Even though there were roughly 30,000 troops on the ground in Ireland in 1803, most armed men there were not members of either regular or Fencible regiments. Ireland was overrun with irregular or paramilitary forces. The longest tenured of these was the militia. For most of the eighteenth century, the militia had emerged in times of crisis to defend the Protestant community, and militiamen were required to be Protestants. Three forces combined to defray the connection between Protestants and the militia, culminating in an Act of 1793 that opened militia service to Catholics. The manpower demands of the British state from 1793 were such that it was impractical to restrict militia service to the Protestant minority. At the same time, increasing calls for Catholic emancipation put pressure on Dublin and London. Finally, Dublin hoped that embodying the militia would pre-empt the resurgence of the Volunteers. Predominantly Protestant and consisting of, in many cases, former militiamen, the Volunteers had emerged as an extra-legal force during the invasion scare of 1778. By 1793, Volunteers were associated with parliamentary reform and a generally positive view of the French Revolution, and it is this latter issue that explains why Dublin thought the militia was the only way to secure the countryside. The irony of the political economy of the defence of Ireland meant that the Protestant government in Dublin sought to raise an irregular force of Catholics to counter the resurgence of another irregular force of Protestants.47 On a practical level, the 1793 version of the militia consisted of one regiment from each county or county borough in Ireland, resulting in thirty-eight regiments in total. The militia's general officers were mostly Englishmen serving in the regular forces, and the regiments were fundamentally an extension of the regular army, but their combat efficiency was unknown. For the first four years of the wars, the militia was the largest single armed body in Ireland, with about 10,000 members in 1794, rising to 20,000 in 1797. The United Irishmen infiltrated the militia, however, and a purge of the militia's ranks on the eve of the rising meant that officials in Dublin were sceptical about their reliability. Nevertheless, the militia played an essential, if misunderstood, role in suppressing the rising of 1798. By the Napoleonic Wars, the militia had been eclipsed by the yeomanry, but they still constituted a substantial armed force of about 25,000 men.48 The dominant paramilitary force in 1803 was the yeomanry. From its establishment in September 1796, its growth was astonishing. 36,854 men had been mobilized by 1798, rising to 66,082 by 1800. The yeomanry was distinguished from the militia by three characteristics. Whereas the militia could not be deployed in the county in which it was raised, the yeomanry was expected to be a local police force. One could be compelled to join the militia, but the yeomanry were entirely volunteers. Though not explicitly Protestant, it was substantially more Protestant than the militia, with only a smattering of Catholic members. Its centre of gravity was the north, and in places entire lodges of Orangemen were enlisted. The yeomanry was raised quickly in part because it signalled a recommitment on the part of Dublin to the Protestant Ascendancy. The pro-Catholic measures adopted in 1793, including the rights of Catholics to vote on the same terms as Protestants, had unnerved many Irish Protestants, and the yeomanry provided an outlet for those concerns.49 This was the witches' brew of paramilitaries, insurgents and religious strife into which the navy stepped in 1803. The initial impetus for the navy was to find guards for the signal stations and Martello towers, and this problem proved relatively easy to solve. The yeomanry had both the local knowledge and the manpower resources to do so. Dublin and London trusted them to be loyal. Guard duty did not require the military training of regular infantry, but rather a commitment to protecting naval personnel and signals from the ‘disaffected’. The yeomanry quickly took up their roles as guards of the signal stations and Martello towers.50 A more complicated problem concerned the second key aspect of coastal defence: gun boats. Intended to harass vulnerable landing craft, gun boats were small, highly-manoeuvrable and armed usually with one gun in the bow. Not intended for deep-water service, they deployed to guard harbours and patrol likely landing beaches. Gardner and Whitshed both thought that there were insufficient numbers of gun boats in Ireland in the fall of 1803, and they convinced the admiralty to let them send a captain to Liverpool to purchase some and man them. Manning them in Liverpool had the distinct advantage of sidestepping the loyalty question, as the captain happily reported back in November 1803: ‘I have great pleasure in acquainting you that I have this day completed the crews of the Flatts [gun boats], and not a man Irish’.51 It quickly became clear that this was not a sustainable solution. Unlike the army, which could raise and deploy English and Scottish Fencibles, the navy had no system in place for transferring men from Britain to Ireland. Gardner and Whitshed would have to engage with Irish manpower. In doing so, the navy added yet another paramilitary force to the Irish countryside: the Sea Fencibles. First established in 1798 in Britain, they were greatly expanded in both Britain and Ireland in 1803, just as Gardner and Whitshed were scrambling to find manpower for coastal defence. As their name suggests, they shared some characteristics with the English and Scottish Fencibles; in the Irish case, the Sea Fencibles were also similar to the yeomanry. As a volunteer force led by naval officers, they were not deployed beyond their local communities. Often married and older than average naval seamen, they brought with them into naval service practical knowledge of local coastal conditions. Many were fishermen. If the French landed in force, it was doubtful they would be of much practical military use, but they demonstrated to a nervous public that the government was taking steps to combat the invasion. They frequently paraded through towns to demonstrate the resolve of the British (and Irish) people in resisting the French. There are also examples of Sea Fencibles demonstrating military effectiveness, as when 200 Fencibles in the Firth of Forth volunteered to man and equip a ship to protect whalers from French frigates that had been spotted off the coast.52 But could the Irish Sea Fencibles be trusted? They differed from the yeomanry in one key respect: they were not a Protestant organization, either in theory or practice. Given the demographics of Ireland, in fact, it is likely that most Sea Fencibles were Catholics. As we have seen, loyalty and religious identity were intertwined in Ireland, but they did not always break down on straightforward confessional lines. Protestant leaders in Dublin had raised the militia in part to pre-empt the emergence of the paramilitary Protestant Volunteers, and then entrusted the mostly Catholic militia with the defence of Ireland before the rising of 1798. British opinion on the loyalty of the Sea Fencibles was split. The commander on the spot, Gardner, saw no reason to hesitate. He needed warm bodies in gunboats. He wrote to Whitshed in November 1803: I sincerely wish that Government would set seriously to work, and that no time may be lost in establishing not only these Coast Signal Stations, but also a sufficient number of proper gun boats and Sea Fencibles to work and to fight them. Wexford, Waterford, Youghal, Bantry, Shannon, Galway, and Blacksod and Broadhaven should, in my humble opinion, be attended to in the first place.53 The view from London was different. In the wake of 1798, ministers felt more confident entrusting domestic security in Ireland to the mostly-Protestant yeomanry rather than the decidedly Catholic militia, and it is in that context that we can understand their failure to ‘set seriously to work’ on arming the Sea Fencibles. Official scepticism about the desirability of arming more Catholic Irishmen was reinforced in 1802 and 1803 by a resurgence of rebellious activity. Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, a former army officer, was arrested in November 1802, and then tried for treason, convicted, and hanged in February 1803. Though the grandest claims of the prosecution were probably false – that he was trying to incite simultaneous risings in London and Ireland and planned to assassinate the king – the historical consensus is that some sort of rebellion was being planned. Meanwhile, there is no doubt that Robert Emmet was plotting his own rebellion. Hoping, as the United Irishmen had, to connect his rising with a French invasion, Emmet gathered arms and ammunition in the spring of 1803. In July, he attempted to seize five strategic points, though bad luck and poor planning forced him to reduce his target to Dublin castle. His assault failed – he was arrested in August and executed in September – but the attempt demonstrated that the Union had not eliminated the threat of an Irish rebellion.54 Who, then, could be trusted to defend the Irish coast? Frustratingly for ministers in London, the alternatives to the Sea Fencibles did not show much promise, as it had become clear by March 1804 that sending men from Liverpool to defend the Irish coast was impractical. Sir Evan Nepean, secretary of the admiralty, wrote to Whitshed and asked, sceptically: ‘[W]hether in the present state of [Galway], Persons who have enrolled themselves to serve as Sea Fencibles can with any reasonable degree of safety be entrusted with arms, and if so, what description of arms it may be most advisable to place in their hands’.55 Giving some middle-aged fishermen some pikes and asking them to parade through town occasionally was one thing; equipping potential rebels with guns and ammunition was quite another. The compromise solution was to equip the Sea Fencibles with firearms, but only those who had been vetted by local magistrates. In rural Ireland, however, the nearest magistrate might be quite far away and captains of the Sea Fencibles quickly pointed out how impractical this was. As a second option, the admiralty instructed captains to consult with the local Protestant gentry before enrolling new men. The admiralty's decision, taken in May 1804, to arm the Sea Fencibles demonstrated a recognition that the service would be relatively useless without guns; the vetting scheme, ministers could only hope, would prevent those guns from reaching the ‘disaffected’.56 The revised defences of Ireland settled into place through the summer of 1804. Yet as they increased in strength, so too did the threats to Britain and Ireland. Napoleon's army, and the capacity of the flotilla to carry it, grew daily. In October 1804, the British pre-emptively attacked four Spanish treasure ships, which at a stroke nearly doubled the naval forces opposed to them. Pitt justified this act of aggression to parliament by claiming that had they done nothing, a Franco-Spanish invasion of Ireland would have been imminent.57 By the summer of 1805, British blockading squadrons were stretched thinly: not only could they be found off Brest and the Texel, but now also off Ferrol, Cadiz and Toulon, not to mention the fleet monitoring the invasion flotilla at Boulogne. Behind them, Gardner fretted at Cork while his frigates escorted convoys and scouted for escaped enemy squadrons. Ashore, signal stations now dotted the Irish coastline from Dublin to Waterford to Cork to Galway to Londonderry. Yeomanry detachments guarded the signals and naval personnel at each station; gunboats patrolled the harbours and landing beaches; and Sea Fencibles organized local communities to resist the French. As noted earlier in the article, most Irish historians have missed these important developments. The Union has generally marked the transition from discussing the turbulent seventeen-nineties to exploring, for example, the emergence of Daniel O'Connell as the leading force in Irish politics.58 The historical ignorance of naval defence developments has not been helped by the apparent quiet on the Irish front from 1801 onwards: no Bantry Bay or even Killala incident tested the new defences in the last decade of the wars. Yet Ireland became progressively more, not less, fortified in these years, suggesting that the military officers responsible for organizing Ireland's defence continued to be concerned about the possibility of a French invasion. There were good reasons for them to be worried. Multiple versions of Napoleon's invasion plan in 1804 and 1805 included squadrons sent to Ireland. Napoleon's May 1804 plan noted that the cruisers on the Cork station should be avoided at all costs, particularly after French intelligence learned of the four ships of the line that had been sent to reinforce Gardner. In September 1804, Napoleon ordered 18,000 men and 500 horses to Brest, with the intention of sending them to Ireland. He told the admiral in command that if he could land in Ireland he would cause ‘incalculable havoc’ and the result would be fatal for the British. The plan called for the expedition to sail far out to the west, then north, then east to feign an invasion of Scotland, before finally landing at Lough Swilly on the north coast of Ireland. Simultaneously, Napoleon sought to concentrate his naval forces in the western approaches to cover the invasion of Kent. He admitted that the planned feint to Scotland was a strategic preference rather than a requirement – he did not know if it was nautically feasible. A later version of the plan scrapped the Brest expedition and shifted responsibility for landing in Ireland to an army of 25,000 men at the Texel.59 Throughout this period, Napoleon later claimed, communication with Irish rebels had been good: he had ‘arranged everything’ with Ireland and ‘kept up constant communication with the disaffected party, which was by no means confined to the Roman Catholics’.60 The plan eventually executed in the summer of 1805 did not include an attempted invasion of Ireland, but the threat remained in the forefront of ministers' minds throughout the wars. Leading members of Portland's 1807 government, including Spencer Perceval and George Canning, justified the bombardment of Copenhagen as pre-empting an invasion of Ireland. Lord Hawkesbury (later Lord Liverpool) even claimed that Irish rebels had been in contact with the Danes and knew of a planned invasion.61 As with the strike on the Spanish treasure ships, the threat of an invasion of Ireland was a convenient way for ministers to deflect criticism. That is not to argue that it was a manufactured threat; instead, we should see the success with which ministers deployed it as evidence that fear of an invasion of Ireland remained widely shared well past the Union, and even after Trafalgar. Defending Ireland was a crucial component of British strategy in the period. The increasing deployment of regular forces to Ireland during the Napoleonic Wars, noted earlier, reflected invasion fears as much as counter-insurgency requirements. Barracks were constructed in likely landing places, at Bantry, Beerhaven, Bere Island, Buncrana, Dunree Fort, Knockalla Fort and Rathmullen.62 Signal stations continued to be manned until December 1814, seven months after Napoleon's exile to Elba.63 The Royal Navy was slow to react to the threat of an invasion of Ireland. The naval defence of Ireland in the French Revolutionary Wars relied on bad weather and poor enemy planning. Gardner seems to have learned the lessons of those failures better than most. He took a broad view of the responsibilities of the commander-in-chief of the Irish station. His predecessor, Sir Robert Kingsmill, was by all accounts a competent admiral, but he seems to have focused most of his attention on convoy protection and cruising against privateers. Gardner understood his first responsibility to be warning about French expeditions, fighting them if possible, and concentrating British forces if they landed. His persistence eventually resulted in a coastal defence system that appeared significantly more robust than that of 1796. It was not impenetrable, and there were significant teething problems. Some of the stations were poorly sited, as they began to realize once they were manned in the summer of 1804, and there were never enough gun boats. It also took far too long to get the system up and running, and if one of Napoleon's plans in 1803 or early 1804 had been executed, a French force would have been able to land largely unnoticed and unopposed. But Gardner's and Whitshed's efforts meant that by late 1804, such a force would have probably been spotted and a response could have been co-ordinated. Who would meet the French when they landed was a more challenging question. In November 1803, Nepean explained to Whitshed that the Sea Fencibles in Ireland ‘must be conducted upon a different footing to that of the Sea Fencible Service in England’.64 Ireland presented challenges to a defending force that England did not. If the loyalty of the men and women being defended could not be guaranteed, then the calculus of coastal and interior defence changed. The army's priority was counter-insurgency not counter-invasion. When the army left, Dublin turned to the militia, and then to the Protestant and Orangist yeomanry, who were trustworthy in part because they were Protestant. This is not to argue that the British could only and did only trust Protestants. In fact, the Sea Fencibles are a good example of an organization that was not Protestant but that Dublin and London grudgingly came to trust, perhaps because they had no other choice. As other historians have shown, the demands of warfare in the late eighteenth century grew to such a degree that the British state could no longer afford to exclude Catholics from the pool of available resources. War accelerated the debate about Catholic emancipation and the Union, and military service was one important way in which Catholics assimilated. We should not view being Irish, Catholic and loyal as a paradox, particularly when we consider that the British were not fighting Catholics in the Great Wars: they were fighting revolutionaries and Napoleonic tyranny.65 Many Irish Catholics also supported the Union because they expected that it would be followed by comprehensive Catholic emancipation.66 On the other hand, though, we should not underestimate the mistrust that the rising of 1798 – and the subsequent plots of Despard and Emmet – generated among ministers in both London and Dublin.67 What has not been noted before is the role the navy played in this process of integration in the face of insurgency and invasion. The story told here suggests a further intervention in the debate about the nature of warfare at the beginning of the nineteenth century. David Bell's argument that the wars of 1792–1815 were the first total wars emphasized the cultural differences between warfare before and after the French Revolution.68 From the perspective of the British military, though, the difference is less stark. In naval, military and strategic terms, the British fought the French Revolutionary Wars much as they had previous eighteenth-century wars.69 Though it is tempting to treat the ‘Great Wars’, as they came to be known in the nineteenth century, as two decades of nearly-continuous conflict, in fact the strategic situation in 1803 presented challenges unlike any the British had faced in earlier eighteenth-century wars. In Ireland, their response was to systematize their defensive scheme, demand more of their soldiers and sailors, and impose more on civilian populations. A stronger case for total war can be made after 1803. The establishment of the Sea Fencibles added yet another paramilitary group to Ireland, forcing commanders and naval ministers to grapple with questions of Catholic loyalty in a time of domestic insurrections. Building coastal signal stations on every headland, equipping gun boats in every harbour and river, arming every able-bodied seafarer despite significant questions about loyalty: these were the actions of a desperate government looking to mobilize as many resources as possible. The efforts would have been obvious to nearly everyone in Ireland, regardless of their combatant status. In the French Revolutionary Wars, the British had not utilized all the resources available to them for the defence of Ireland, and it had nearly cost them dearly; in the Napoleonic Wars, they could not afford to run the same risks. The navy was at the heart of these British efforts, and the decisions made by its officers shaped the course of the wars on land – on British and Irish soil – as well as at sea. Footnotes 1 U. Gillen, ‘Ascendancy Ireland, 1660–1800’, and J. Bew, ‘Ireland under the Union, 1801–1922’, in The Princeton History of Modern Ireland, ed. R. Bourke and I. McBride (Princeton, N.J. and Oxford, 2016), pp. 48–109; R. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (New York, 1988), pp. 270–96; S. J. Connolly, ‘Aftermath and adjustment’, ‘The Catholic question’ and ‘Union government, 1812–23’, in A New History of Ireland, ed. F. X. Martin and others (10 vols., Oxford, 1978–89), v. 1–47. 2 Of the general surveys, the best on this connection is T. Bartlett, Ireland: a History (Cambridge, 2010). 3 Bartlett, Ireland, p. 236. 4 In addition to the general surveys already cited, which tend to focus on religious and political developments, see also the work of Louis Cullen and other members of the Irish Economic and Social History Society, or David Dickson's work on urbanization, agriculture and emigration in the 18th and 19th centuries. For the effects of the Napoleonic Wars on Ireland, see A. J. Fitzpatrick, ‘The economic effects of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on Ireland’ (unpublished University of Manchester Ph.D. thesis, 1973). 5 Bartlett, Ireland, p. 236. 6 The exception for all centuries is J. de Courcy Ireland in works such as ‘The place of Ireland in naval history’, Irish Sword, xxii (2002), 211–34. In general, though, the attention paid to the 18th century pales in comparison to the attention paid to the 17th. See, e.g., E. Murphy, Ireland and the War at Sea, 1641–53 (2012); J. Linge, ‘The Royal Navy and the Irish civil war’, Irish Hist. Studies, xxxi (1998), 60–71. 7 N. A. M. Rodger, ‘War as an economic activity in the “long” 18th century’, Internat. Jour. Maritime History, xxii (2010), 1–18. 8 The militia has been the subject of extensive recent scholarship: I. Nelson, The Irish Militia, 1793–1802: Ireland's Forgotten Army (Dublin, 2007); N. Garnham, The Militia in 18th-Century Ireland: in Defence of the Protestant Interest (Woodbridge, 2012); Bartlett, Ireland, pp. 97, 170–7, 195, 197; Foster, pp. 278–82. 9 T. Bartlett, ‘Defence, counter-insurgency and rebellion: Ireland, 1793–1803’, in A Military History of Ireland, ed. T. Bartlett and K. Jeffery (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 247–93; Bartlett, Ireland, pp. 216–18. 10 J. R. Dancy, The Myth of the Press Gang: Volunteers, Impressment and the Naval Manpower Problem in the Late 18th Century (Woodbridge, 2015), pp. 50–2; D. Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the 18th-Century Atlantic World (2013), pp. 78–80; C. D. Hall, British Strategy in the Napoleonic War, 1803–15 (Manchester, 1992), pp. 1–10; T. Denman, ‘“Hibernia officina militum”: Irish recruitment to the British regular army, 1660–1815’, Irish Sword, xx (1996), 148–66; C. Kennedy, ‘“True Britons and Real Irish”: Irish Catholics in the British army during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, in Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1850, ed. C. Kennedy and M. McCormack (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 37–56. 11 Hall, pp. 57–8; A. J. Guy, ‘The army of the Georges’, in The Oxford History of the British Army, ed. D. Chandler and I. Beckett (Oxford, 1994), pp. 94–110; Nelson, p. 248; Bartlett, ‘Defence, counter-insurgency and rebellion’, p. 249. 12 N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: a Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (2004), pp. 432–7. 13 Dispatches and Letters Relating to the Blockade of Brest, 1803–5, ed. J. Leyland (Navy Records Society, 2 vols., 1898–1901); The Channel Fleet and the Blockade of Brest, 1793–1801, ed. R. Morriss (Navy Records Society, 2001); Rodger, Command of the Ocean, p. 432. 14 Rodger, Command of the Ocean, pp. 432–7. 15 There were occasionally as few as eight and as many as 15. The National Archives of the U.K., ADM 8/72 (list book, showing the disposition of ships, names of officers, etc., 1796); ADM 8/90 (list book, showing the disposition of ships, names of officers, etc., July–Dec. 1805). 16 T.N.A., ADM 1/614 (letters from commander-in-chief, Cork, 1797). 17 U.S. Naval War College, MS. Coll. 279 (Whitshed, James H., ADM, RN), box 3, no. 4 [hereafter Whitshed Correspondence], William Wickham to James Hawkins Whitshed, 26 Sept. 1803. 18 Foster, pp. 270–96. 19 P. M. Kerrigan, ‘The French expedition to Bantry Bay, 1796, and the boat from the Résolue’, Irish Sword, xxi (1999), 65–84. 20 T.N.A., ADM 1/613 (letters from commander-in-chief, Cork, 1796); Kerrigan, ‘The French expedition’, pp. 65–84. 21 Rodger, Command of the Ocean, p. 456; C. J. M. Kramers, ‘The Batavian Republic and Ireland, 1797’, Irish Sword, xx (1996), 145–7. 22 Bartlett, Ireland, pp. 221–7; M. Durey, ‘William Wickham, the Christ Church connection and the rise and fall of the security service in Britain, 1793–1801’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxxi (2006), 714–45. 23 Nelson, pp. 217–28. 24 Rodger, Command of the Ocean, pp. 462–3. 25 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992), p. 322. 26 H. F. B. Wheeler and A. Meyrick, Napoleon and the Invasion of England: the Story of the Great Terror (1908), pp. 280–1. 27 The Channel Fleet and the Blockade of Brest, pp. 454–572. 28 Rodger, Command of the Ocean, pp. 530–1. 29 Whitshed Correspondence, Alan Gardner to Whitshed, 13 Nov. 1803 and Sir Evan Nepean to Whitshed, 2 Jan. 1804. 30 Rodger, Command of the Ocean, p. 466. 31 Whitshed Correspondence, Gardner to Whitshed, Oct. 1803. 32 Whitshed Correspondence, Gardner to Whitshed, 27 Sept. 1803. 33 Whitshed Correspondence, Correspondence Book, 1803–4. 34 Whitshed Correspondence, letters to Whitshed received 1 Feb., 27 March, 25 and 28 June, 4 and 29 Aug., 31 Oct. and 1 Nov. 1804. 38 M. Swift, Historical Maps of Ireland (Edison, N.J., 1999), p. 94. 35 Whitshed Correspondence, Sir Edward Baker Littlehales to Whitshed, 8 Oct. 1803; F. Beckwith to Whitshed, 25 Oct. 1803. 36 Whitshed Correspondence, Gardner to Whitshed, 13 Nov. 1803. 37 Whitshed Correspondence, Earl St. Vincent to Whitshed, 18 Oct. 1803. 39 S. G. P. Ward, ‘Defence works in Britain, 1803–5’, Jour. Soc. Army Hist. Research, xxvii (1949), 18–37. 40 Whitshed Correspondence, St. Vincent to Whitshed, 12 Nov. 1803. 41 Whitshed Correspondence, acting military secretary to the commander of the forces to Whitshed, 14 July 1804. For an analysis of the likely military effectiveness of the towers, see P. M. Kerrigan, ‘Minorca and Ireland – an architectural connection; the Martello towers of Dublin Bay’, Irish Sword, xv (1983), 192–5. 42 Ward, pp. 32–3. 43 A. J. Guy, ‘The Irish military establishment, 1660–1776’, in Military History of Ireland, p. 216; Bartlett, Ireland, pp. 216–18. 44 Bartlett, ‘Defence, counter-insurgency and rebellion’, pp. 249–50. 45 For numbers of troops in the French Revolutionary Wars, compare Nelson, p. 248 and Bartlett, ‘Defence, counter-insurgency and rebellion’, p. 249. For troops in 1811, see P. M. Kerrigan, ‘A return of barracks in Ireland, 1811’, Irish Sword, xv (1983), 277–83. 46 Roughly half of the Fencibles deployed to Ireland were Scottish (see A. L. Carswell, ‘The Scottish Fencible regiments in Ireland’, Irish Sword, xxi (1998), 155–62). See also Nelson, pp. 15, 124–6, 248; Bartlett, ‘Defence, counter-insurgency and rebellion’, p. 249; Garnham, p. 124. The Fencibles should not be confused with the Sea Fencibles, discussed below. 47 Bartlett, Ireland, pp. 179–88; Bartlett, ‘Defence, counter-insurgency and rebellion’, pp. 248–50. 48 Nelson, pp. 248–58; Garnham, pp. 164–9; 49 Bartlett, ‘Defence, counter-insurgency and rebellion’, pp. 264–8. 50 Whitshed Correspondence, Wickham to Whitshed, 21 Oct. 1803; acting military secretary to the commander of the forces to Whitshed, 14 July 1804. 51 Whitshed Correspondence, letters from W. McGwire to Whitshed, 6 Oct. to 4 Nov. 1803. 52 J. Davey, In Nelson's Wake: the Navy and the Napoleonic Wars (2015), pp. 166–70. Sea Fencibles were exempt from impressment and there is a separate debate about whether that was the primary attraction of service in them (N. Rogers, ‘The Sea Fencibles, loyalism and the reach of the state’, in Resisting Napoleon: the British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815, ed. M. Philp (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 41–60). 53 Whitshed Correspondence, Gardner to Whitshed, 13 Nov. 1803. 54 Emmett worried that Napoleon wouldn't help Ireland as a liberator but instead come as a conqueror, but still thought that was preferable to the status quo (Connolly, ‘The Catholic question’, pp. 11–17). 55 Whitshed Correspondence, Nepean to Whitshed, 29 March 1804. 56 Whitshed Correspondence, Marsden and Nepean to Whitshed, 9 and 26 Apr., 11 and 14 May 1804. 57 Hall, p. 113. 58 Foster, pp. 270–96. 59 É. Desbrière, 1793–1805: projets et tentatives de débarquement aux îles Britannique (4 vols., Paris, 1900–2), iv. 8–11, 166, 180, 192–3. 60 T. Ussher and J. R. Glover, Napoleon's Last Voyages: Being the Diary of Admiral Sir Thomas Ussher, R.N., K.C.B. (On Board the ‘Undaunted’), and John R. Glover, Secretary to Rear Admiral Cockburn (On Board the ‘Northumberland’) (New York, 1926), pp. 194–5. 61 Hall, p. 160. 62 Kerrigan, ‘A return of barracks’, pp. 277–83. 63 Davey, p. 167. 64 Whitshed Correspondence, Nepean to Whitshed, 12 Nov. 1803. 65 Colley, pp. 324–34; Kennedy, ‘“True Britons and Real Irish”’, pp. 37–56. For a more exact parsing of the various versions of loyalty after the Union, see A. Blackstock, ‘The trajectories of loyalty and loyalism in Ireland, 1793–1849’, in Loyalism and the Formation of the British World, 1775–1914, ed. A. Blackstock and F. O'Gorman (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 103–24. 66 S. J. Connolly, ‘Varieties of Britishness: Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the Hanoverian state’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant and K. Stringer (1995), pp. 193–207. By 1822, Daniel O'Connell told his wife that Irish Catholics were ‘ready to become a kind of West Britons’ (quoted in T. Corrigan, ‘Catholic loyalism in Georgian Ireland, c.1724–1823’ (unpublished Syracuse University Ph.D. thesis, 2014), pp. 246–7. 67 Whitshed Correspondence, St. Vincent to Whitshed, 18 Oct. 1803 and Nepean to Whitshed, 12 Nov. 1803. 68 D. A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (New York, 2007), passim. 69 This argument can be found woven into the recent work of R. Knight, Britain Against Napoleon: the Organisation of Victory, 1793–1815 (New York, 2013). © 2019 Institute of Historical Research This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © 2019 Institute of Historical Research
TI - The naval defence of Ireland during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
JO - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/1468-2281.12238
DA - 2019-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-naval-defence-of-ireland-during-the-french-revolutionary-and-p971H2XlQQ
SP - 568
EP - 584
VL - 92
IS - 257
DP - DeepDyve
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