er body of insurgents, frenzied by the
cruelties of the royal troops, massacred a hundred Protestants in cool
blood. The atrocities of the soldiers and the yeomanry were avenged with
a fiendish ruthlessness. Loyalists were lashed and tortured in their
turn, and every soldier taken was butchered without mercy. The result of
these outrages was fatal to the insurrection. The Ulster Protestants,
who formed the strength of the United Irishmen, stood sullenly aloof
from rebels who murdered Protestants. The Catholic gentry threw
themselves on the side of the government against a rising which
threatened the country with massacre and anarchy. Few in fact had joined
the insurgents in Wexford when Lord Lake appeared before their camp
upon Vinegar Hill with a strong force of English troops on the 21st of
May. The camp was stormed, and with the dispersion of its defenders the
revolt came suddenly to an end. But its suppression came only just in
time to prevent greater disasters; for a few weeks after the close of
the rebellion the long-expected aid arrived from France. The news of the
outbreak had forced the armament which was being equipped in the French
ports to put to sea with forces utterly inadequate to the task it had
set itself, but fresh aid was promised to follow, and the nine hundred
soldiers who landed in August under General Humbert on the coast of Mayo
showed by their first successes how formidable a centre they would have
given to the revolt had the revolt held its ground. But in the two
months which had passed since Vinegar Hill all trace of resistance to
the English rule had been trodden out in blood, and Humbert found
himself alone in a country exhausted and panic-stricken. He marched
however boldly on Castlebar, broke a force of yeomanry and volunteers
three times his number, and only surrendered when Lord Cornwallis, who
had succeeded to the Lord-Lieutenancy, faced him with thirty thousand
men.

[Sidenote: French designs on India.]

Of the threefold attack on which the Directory had relied for the ruin
of England two parts had now broken down. Humbert's surrender and the
failure of the native insurrection left little hope for future attack
on the side of Ireland. The naval confederacy which was to rob England
of the command of the seas had been foiled by the utter wreck of the
Dutch fleet, and the imprisonment of the Spanish fleet in Cadiz. But the
genius of Buonaparte had seized on the schemes for a rising again