Secret Service Under PittFitz-Patrick, William J. (William John)
History
Secret Service Under Pitt
Fitz-Patrick, William J. (William John)
Ireland -- History -- 1760-1820; Pitt, William, 1759-1806; Secret service -- Ireland
Ignorant of the source to which his betrayal was due, it did not
occur to Tandy that the speeches of Elliot and others may have aimed
at diverting suspicion from their real informant. Tandy, in reply,
advanced merely the suspicion that the charge of being an informer was
fulminated to excite the jealousy and disgust of his adopted country
France, which, unlike America, had opened her arms to afford him
protection.[228]
The wearing worry of Tandy's later life had sapped his strength,
and left him sensitively open to hostile shafts, which his conduct
provoked. His vanity was commensurate with his patriotism, and in
his stoutest day was easily wounded. He gradually sank, and died
at Bordeaux in 1803. 'His private character,' writes Barrington,
'furnished no ground to doubt the integrity of his public one.' He
died, as he had lived, a staunch Protestant.[229]
Much has been written of the wonderful escape from Kilmainham Gaol
of Corbet, afterwards a general in the French service, and one of
the prisoners captured with Tandy at Hamburg, and thence removed to
Dublin. Miss Edgeworth was so much struck by this romantic escape, that
she made it the leading incident of her best novel. But, considering
the subtle international difficulties that had arisen, and with the
suggestion of Under-Secretary Marsden before us, it is a question how
far Corbet's escape may not have been connived at by Castlereagh.
The sermon which Napoleon preached to the Hamburg deputies on their
infringement of the law of nations was in the mouths of his admirers
for years after; but it lost in impressiveness by his own violation
of the neutral territory of Baden, when, on the night of March 17,
1804, he sent a strong guard to seize and carry off to France the
Duc d'Enghien. After a hasty trial by court-martial, and on unproven
charges of conspiracy, he was cruelly put to death in the Castle of
Vincennes. In the heated discussions to which this outrage gave rise,
Buonaparte more than once quoted the case of Tandy, and feebly sought
to find in the past conduct of Hamburg a precedent and justification.
Thomas Addis Emmet accused him of coldness and indecision as regards
the long threatened invasion of Ireland, because, instead of steering
for Erin in 1798, he changed his plan and went to Egypt. The arrest
of Tandy in Hamburg rekindled Napoleon's hostile feeling, and
shortly after the death of that general he resolved to carry out
comprehensively his oft-mooted design.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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