End of the Irish Invasion. . .
This amazing print was prompted by the spectacular failure of the French invasion of Ireland in December 1796 when a French force of 44 ships and nearly 20,000 men was defeated not by the British navy but by bad weather, resulting in the loss of 12 French ships, and approximately 3200 men. The account of the invasion, well documented in the Wikipedia article mentioned below, reads like a textbook example of Murphy's Law: what CAN go wrong, WILL go wrong. In the end not a single French soldier, apart from prisoners of war, reached Irish shores.
© Trustees of the British Museum
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Gillray had already gained experience portraying naval disasters in "serious" prints such as The Nancy Packet (1784), The Duke of Athol, East Indiaman (1785) and, most recently, The Loss of the Halsewell, East Indiaman(1787). Here he puts that considerable design and printmaking experience in the service of caricature, brilliantly capturing the swirling seas, changing lights, and contrary winds of a storm in ways that even J.M.W. Turner would have admired.
But the disaster Gillray portrays is not really a millitary event but a political one. For now that the intentions of the French to invade Ireland and support discord throughout the kingdom were fully apparent, the Whig support of revolutionary principles was correspondingly compromised. A massive French defeat was then a victory for Pitt and the Tories. So in this print, the overpowering winds come from the Tory Ministry including from left to right: William Pitt (Prime Minister), Henry Dundas (Secretary of State for War), William Grenville (Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs), and William Windham (Secretary of War)
The French Armada is, of course, represented by Fox and his Whig associates. Fox is shown as the figurehead of the now dismasted boat Le Revolutionaire. But as Fox goes down so do his political allies in the revolution's Jolly Boat. They include prominent Whigs: playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the liberal barrister Thomas Erskine, the Whig MP Michael Angelo Taylor, the radical journalist and lecturer John Thelwall, and the boots and cards of a man who might represent Colonel George Hanger who had appeared in several recent caricatures with Sheridan and Angelo. On the far left yet another French boat (and principle) L'Egalite is about to be swamped.
Sources and Reading
- Commentary from the British Museum on End of the Irish Invasion. . .
- Draper Hill, The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray, 1976, #47
- "Expedition d'Irlande," Wikipedia
- Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #159
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