His
penetrating insight soon enabled him to see its impracticability
until the French had won the command of the Channel. Of that
there was not much likelihood; and at the first favourable moment
he dissociated himself from all connection with an enterprise
which offered so little promise of a successful termination that
it was all but certain not to be begun. An essential condition,
as already pointed out, of all the projected invasions was the
receipt of assistance from sympathisers in the enemy's country.
Hoche himself expected this even in Tate's case; but experience
proved the expectation to be baseless. When the prisoners taken
with Tate were being conducted to their place of confinement,
the difficulty was to protect them, 'car la population furieuse
contre les Francais voulait les lyncher.' Captain Desbriere dwells
at some length on the mutinies in the British fleet in 1797, and
asks regretfully, 'Qu'avait-on fait pour profiter de cette chance
unique?' He remarks on the undoubted and really lamentable fact
that English historians have usually paid insufficient attention
to these occurrences. One, and perhaps the principal reason of their
silence, was the difficulty, at all events till quite lately, of
getting materials with which to compose a narrative. The result is
that the real character of the great mutinies has been altogether
misunderstood. Lord Camperdown's recently published life of his
great ancestor, Lord Duncan, has done something to put them in
their right light.
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