wounded and taken prisoner. On the 17th of December, after a continued bombardment during twenty-four hours, the French forced the line of defence in two of its most essential points; and now, to use lord Hood's words, "the enemy commanded the town and ships by their shot and shells." In a council of war held the same day it was determined to evacuate the town; and it was also resolved that the French ships which were fitted for sea should sail out with the English fleet, and that those which remained in the harbour, as well as the magazines and arsenal, should be destroyed. Sir Sidney Smith volunteered to conduct the terrible work of destruction. On the evening of the 18th the Vulcan fire-ship was towed into the inner harbour, and placed across the tier of the men-of-war. Preparations had previously been made for burning the arsenal and the storehouses. At ten o'clock a rocket flew up; and then the trains were fired that consigned the stores of this great naval depôt to the flames; and the fireship went amongst the men-of-war and the frigates at their anchorage, and they were quickly burning to the water's edge, amidst the explo sion of powder magazines which threatened to involve the destroyers themselves in the general havoc. Many of the more prominent of the monarchical party had been previously received on board the British and Spanish ships which were about to move into the roads off Toulon; but there was a helpless band of fugitives left behind, who crowded the quays of Toulon, earnestly imploring a refuge in the Allied fleet from the dreaded vengeance of the triumphant republicans. Sir Sidney Smith lingered in the harbour-amidst the bewildering glare and smoke, the tempest of scorching ashes, even the fire of the republican batteries upon the fort,till his own retreat had become difficult, in the endeavour to rescue all who cried to him for succour. Lord Hood, in his despatch of the 20th December, writes, "It is a very comfortable satisfaction to me, that several thousands of the meritorious inhabitants of Toulon were sheltered in his majesty's ships." Those were sedulously cared for who claimed protection as being most compromised. The refugees of Toulon, according to Lamartine, were conveyed to Leghorn, and established themselves in Tuscany. Barère expressed the temper of the French Convention towards Toulon: "The conquest won by the Mountain over the Brissotines must be commemorated by a mark set on the place where Toulon once stood. The national thunder must crush the house of every trader in that town." The Committee of Public Safety had sent thither its commissioners, Barras, Fréron, and the younger Robespierre. On the 24th of December, five days after Toulon had been evacuated by the Allies, Fréron wrote to the Committee in Paris, that he had secured twelve thousand labourers to raze to the ground the buildings of the town; and he added, "Each day I accomplish the fall of two hundred heads; and already eight hundred Toulonese have been shot."

La Vendée,—a tract of about a hundred and fifty miles square, on the southern bank, and at the mouth of the Loire,was a pastoral district, where the resident proprietors lived without pomp or luxury, keeping up an affectionate intercourse with the peasantry; where the curés and their flocks had no differences of opinion, and the philosophy of the Revolution had not come to disturb the old piety and its traditional superstitions. This

A.D. 1793.

THE INSURRECTION IN LA VENDÉE.

713

state of tranquillity was interrupted by the harsh measures of the republican authorities before the death of the king. At La Florent in Anjou, the young men made a forcible resistance to the Commissioners who were superintending the ballot for the levy of troops. Jaques Cathelineau, a hawker of woollens, put himself at the head of a band, whose numbers soon amounted to a thousand. After several successful encounters with the republican troops, they suddenly dispersed to keep the festival of Easter, but they were soon again in the field, many under the command of M. de Charette, who became the principal chief of the district of Bas Poitou. Another leader, the most popular of the insurgents, was young Henri de la Rochejaquelein. There were other chiefs who held commands, some of whom had served in the army. But the discipline of the insurgents was very imperfect, and their organization still more loose. After various successes against the republicans, the contest assumed the most formidable dimensions. Cathelineau was appointed to the chief command of the insurgents; but was soon after killed. General Westermann was dispatched by the Convention, with orders to lay. waste and burn the whole district. The royalists attacked Westermann at Chatillon; and his defeat was followed by fearful massacres of the republicans in revenge of their vindictive acts. The whole country was in the agonies of an internecine conflict. During the summer the English government offered assistance through an emigrant from Brittany, M. de Tinteniac. The Vendean chiefs proposed a place of landing for a British force, and promised to join with fifty thousand men. For months the Vendeans thought that the promised help would come, but the war went on without any assistance from the ministry of Mr. Pitt. The Convention sent two hundred thousand men into La Vendée, with orders that the whole inhabitants should be exterminated without regard to age or sex, the woods in which they sheltered cut down, the habitations given to the flames. The Vendeans obtained a victory over Kleber, at Chollet, in September; but another battle was fought on the same ground, when the overwhelming forces of the republic drove the insurgents to the low country on the bank of the Loire. The people of Brittany invited the fugitives to come over the Loire, and join their fates to theirs. There were five thousand repub

lican prisoners with the Vendean army. It was proposed to shoot them. De Lescure, one of the most beloved chiefs, interfered, and they were spared. De Lescure had previously been wounded. Almost in his dying hours this devoted royalist heard of the queen's death. He cried out, "Ah! the monsters have killed her! I fought to deliver her! If I live it will be to revenge her. No more quarter." De Lescure died but his words were not forgotten. Then came a series of battles in which no quarter was given on either side. The harassed fugitives again tried to repass the Loire, reduced in number to ten thousand survivors. The final destruction of the "Catholic army" soon closed the first great struggle of the Vendeans. The brave Henri de la Rochejaquelein was killed. The horrible proceedings of the Jacobin Proconsul Carrier at Nantes-his noyades, in which boat-loads of victims were sunk daily by this exulting ruffian,—these formed the climax of the horrors of the royalist war. At the moment when the Vendeans had re-crossed the Loire, unable to

maintain their position in Brittany, an expedition under the command of lord Moira, with eight English battalions and ten thousand Hanoverians and emigrants, was dispatched to their assistance. There was no signal from the shore. The help had come too late.

From her prison in the Temple, where she had been brutally separated from her son, queen Marie Antoinette was removed to the dens of the Conciergerie. After a mock trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was dragged to the scaffold, on the 10th of October-dying with the same mixture of pious fortitude and lofty contempt of her persecutors which she had shown through all her sufferings. Vergniaud, the young and eloquent, and twenty-one other Girondin deputies, were put to death on the 31st of October. The enthusiastic Madame Roland; Bailly, once so venerated as a patriot; and the duke of Orleans, whose fate nobody deplored, were executed early in November. Jourdan drove the prince of Cobourg over the Sambre on the 16th of October. Success threw a veil over the crimes of the Jacobin government.

CHAPTER LIV.

AT this season, when Englishmen were hearing and reading of the atrocities of the Reign of Terror, and were seeing obscure corners of London filled with emigrant nobility and clergy, the government chose to fancy that revolutionary principles had an especial attraction for some portion of the people of this country. According to the belief of the great parliamentary majority, the advocates of Reform were the high-priests of anarchy. Thomas Muir, a young advocate at the Scotch bar, and Thomas Fysshe Palmer, an English clergyman, were agitators for Reform in the representation of the people. They were prosecuted under the Scotch law. The lord justice clerk Braxfield summed up violently against Muir, and he was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation. Seven years' transportation was the punishment inflicted upon Palmer. These arbitrary proceedings formed the subject of several debates in the House of Commons; and Mr. Pitt had on this occasion, as in many other instances, to endure the reproach of departing from the principles he once professed, in now sanctioning the execution of the sentences upon these men.

On the 12th of May a Message from the king was delivered to the House of Commons by Mr. Secretary Dundas, in which it was stated that upon information of seditious practices carried on by "The Society for Constitutional Information," and "The London Corresponding Society," their books and papers had been seized; and that his majesty had ordered them to be laid before the House. A Committee of Secresy was appointed by ballot to examine these papers, and on the 16th they presented their first Report. Mr. Pitt then moved the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. This measure was opposed strenuously by the usual small minority, but was rapidly carried through the Commons; and was passed at three

A.D. 1794. HARDY, TOOKE, AND THELWALL ACQUITTED. 715

o'clock on Sunday morning, the 18th. On the 23rd it passed the House of Lords. On the 19th, after examinations before the Privy Council, six persons were committed to the Tower, charged with high treason; amongst whom were the Rev. Jeremiah Joyce, private secretary to earl Stanhope, Horne Tooke, and John Thelwall. Five months were employed by the government in preparation for the arraignment of thirteen persons to be charged with "compassing the death of our Lord the King." The Grand Jury of Middlesex having found an indictment against twelve persons for high-treason, and a Special Commission having been appointed for their trials, this memorable proceeding commenced at the Session House in the Old Bailey, on the 28th of October, with the trial of Thomas Hardy. Erskine and Gibbs were assigned as counsel for the prisoner. Sir John Scott, Attorney-General, opened the case for the prosecution in a speech of nine hours, in which he maintained that the evidence would establish the fact of a conspiracy to depose the king. This evidence occupied five days, from an early hour of each morning till midnight. It embraced a vast variety of matters whieh Erskine, in his reply, described as not the peculiar transactions of the prisoners, but of immense bodies of the king's subjects in various parts of the kingdom, assembled without the smallest reserve. The reply of the great advocate occupied seven hours in the delivery. In the whole compass of forensic eloquence is not to be found a nobler display of impressive reasoning, of constitutional learning, of earnestness in the assertion of the great principles of liberty, of fearlessness in the exposure of the tendencies towards arbitrary government. After nine days' close confinement, the jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty. Tooke and Thelwall were arraigned upon the same charge, and with the same evidence. They were both defended by the same eloquent advocate, and, in each case, the same verdict of Not Guilty was returned.

From the commencement of the war, the spirit of Reform in England was abundantly neutralised by the spirit of Patriotism. The French government at the beginning of 1794 threatened invasion. The English government not only increased the regular forces, but advocated the formation of bodies of Volunteers in every county. This arming of the people was principally confined to corps of yeomanry cavalry. A great naval commander, the earl of Dundonald, says of this period, "The energy of the government kept pace with the patriotism of the nation. That fearful system of naval jobbery, -which unhappily characterized the subsequent progress of the war, crowding the seas with worthless vessels, purchased into the service in exchange for borough influence,-had not as yet begun to thwart the unity of purpose and action." There was no false economy in the supply of means for manning the navy; although the want of men was sensibly felt. The number of 85,000 seamen and marines, voted by Parliament for the year, could only be obtained by the wretched system of impressment. The signal triumphs of the British fleets were the counterbalance to the long series of disasters and mistakes in the employment of the British armies. The earliest in the series of great naval victories was that of earl Howe, on the first of June. This veteran sailed from St. Helen's, on the 2nd of May, and, with twenty-six sail of the line, and five frigates, cruised for many days off Ushant, in foggy weather. At last it

That fleet was de

was ascertained that the Brest fleet had put to sea. clared by the French journalists to be the most formidable that had ever anchored in Brest harbour. In the number of line-of-battle ships the French were equal to the English; in size, and in the weight of metal and the number of men, they were superior. On the evening of the 28th there was a partial engagement, in which one English, and one French ship were disabled. There was much firing between the English van and the French rear on the following day. On the 30th and 31st, a heavy fog prevented any decisive movement. On the morning of the 1st of June, the sky was bright; and the French were seen under easy sail, in order of battle. Then began one of the most desperate actions in our maritime records. The close fighting lasted little more than an hour; when the French admiral, who had been engaged with Howe's own ship, the Queen Charlotte, crowded off, followed by all who could carry sail, leaving half his dismasted fleet behind him. "Seven ships," says lord Howe in his despatch, "remained in our possession; one of which, however, sank before the adequate assistance could be given to her crew; but many were saved."

Five days before the first of June, the National Convention, upon the motion of Barère, had decreed that no quarter should be given to Englishmen or Hanoverians. Fortunately for the honour of the French soldiers, no respect was paid to the order of the Convention. The system of terror, of the theory of which this odious decree was the exponent, was approaching its termination. But in France it was not a theory as long as Robespierre was the real ruler of the unhappy country. The Notabilities of the Revolution had fallen in quick succession. For republicans and royalists, for rich and poor, for either sex, for bedridden fourscore and for blooming sixteen, the Revolutionary Tribunal had its infallible prescription. In April and May the dread machine did its work upon five hundred and twenty-seven select victims. In the months of June and July fifteen hundred and seven persons were condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal, and were carted every day to the guillotine-every day, with the exception during these two months of five décadi, the décadi being the public holiday substituted for Sunday. The work went on, although the Convention had deposed the Goddess of Reason and decreed “the existence of the Supreme Being." The festival of this newly discovered Divinity of the Revolution was celebrated by a miserable extravaganza, in which Robespierre officiated as High Priest. Two days after this festival, which was to be the herald of gladness for all the earth, it was decreed in the Convention that the Revolutionary Tribunal should be divided into four Tribunals, so as to do its work more expeditiously. Members of the Committee of Public Safety began to tremble for their own lives. On the 26th of July, the speech which Robespierre delivered from the tribune, calling, in the old terms, for vengeance upon traitors, was received with no applause. The next day in the Convention loud shouts of fury rose against the tyrant and his two ferocious colleagues-Conthon and St. Just. "Decree of Accusation," was roared out on all sides. Robespierre and his brother Augustin, Couthon, St. Just, Lebas, were decreed. The accused were sent off to prison; but the gaolers had orders from the Municipality not to admit any brought in custody. They were taken to the town hall. Paris was in tumult through