Not since 1066 – at least in popular myth – has an enemy force set foot on British soil. The Declaration of War with Revolutionary France in 1793 changed all that. In Ireland, the desire for home rule led Irish republicans to seek support from France and like-minded radicals in England. The scene was set for the most dangerous period in British history since William the Conqueror. Irish dreams of independence, and of Revolutionary France’s goal of securing her borders against the monarchies of Europe, coalesced. What better way of keeping Britain out of a war if her troops were tied down in Ireland? If the French could support an Irish Revolution, this would ensure the British Crown would be more focused on internal security than fighting overseas. The French, with a network of secret agents in Ireland and England, made their preparations for invasion The invasion plan had been prepared by the English-born American political activist, philosopher, theorist and revolutionary Thomas Paine, whose writings had helped inspire the Americans to fight for independence from Britain. Paine sought to seize on discontent in England against the government of William Pitt and the increasing radicalism fostered by Wolfe Tone in Ireland for home rule, to topple the government, and bring about an Irish and English Republic. A network of spies spread out across the England, Scotland and Ireland gathering information for the French and arming radical groups. Everything was set for an invasion. Mad King George’s throne was set to be toppled, Charles James Fox installed as leader of the embryonic English Republic, while Ireland, under Wolfe Tone, would have home rule – so too Scotland. But it took six years for the French to finally mount their attacks upon Britain. And when the invasions were eventually launched, they crumbled into chaos. This book seeks to charts the events that led up to the French invasion of Ireland in 1798, and how the invasion was foiled by William Pitt’s own web of secret agents. William Huskisson, best known for being killed at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, led a dangerous life as a spy master, whose agents foiled the French at every step. Drawing on documents in the French Army Archives, as well as the records of the French Foreign Ministry and The National Archives in London, the largely forgotten story of the last invasion of Britain in 1797, as well as the final act of 1798, is revealed. Key documents are the campaign diary of the French commander from 1798, General Humbert, which has never been published in French or English. This, then, is the complete untold story of the French invasions and their sabotage, told for the first time in some 200 years.

The three volumes weave together the histories of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales and their peoples. Volume II includes the formation of the nation-state, the industrialization of the British economy and the emergence of Victorian society.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one, quite short, period of his life he held real political power - acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. This was a formative experience for Coleridge which he later identified as being one of the most instructive in his entire life. In this volume Barry Hough and Howard Davis show how Coleridge's actions whilst in a position of power differ markedly from the idealism he had advocated before taking office - shedding new light on Coleridge's sense of political and legal morality.

This book explores the evolution of British identity and participatory politics in the 1790s. Wil Verhoeven argues that in the course of the French Revolution debate in Britain, the idea of 'America' came to represent for the British people the choice between two diametrically opposed models of social justice and political participation. Yet the American Revolution controversy in the 1790s was by no means an isolated phenomenon. The controversy began with the American crisis debate of the 1760s and 1770s, which overlapped with a wider Enlightenment debate about transatlantic utopianism. All of these debates were based in the material world on the availability of vast quantities of cheap American land. Verhoeven investigates the relation that existed throughout the eighteenth century between American soil and the discourse of transatlantic utopianism: between America as a physical, geographical space, and 'America' as a utopian/dystopian idea-image.

Before the French Revolution, tens of thousands of foreigners served in France’s army. They included troops from not only all parts of Europe but also places as far away as Madagascar, West Africa, and New York City. Beginning in 1789, the French revolutionaries, driven by a new political ideology that placed "the nation" at the center of sovereignty, began aggressively purging the army of men they did not consider French, even if those troops supported the new regime. Such efforts proved much more difficult than the revolutionaries anticipated, however, owing to both their need for soldiers as France waged war against much of the rest of Europe and the difficulty of defining nationality cleanly at the dawn of the modern era. Napoleon later faced the same conundrums as he vacillated between policies favoring and rejecting foreigners from his army. It was not until the Bourbon Restoration, when the modern French Foreign Legion appeared, that the French state established an enduring policy on the place of foreigners within its armed forces. By telling the story of France’s noncitizen soldiers—who included men born abroad as well as Jews and blacks whose citizenship rights were subject to contestation—Christopher Tozzi sheds new light on the roots of revolutionary France’s inability to integrate its national community despite the inclusionary promise of French republicanism. Drawing on a range of original, unpublished archival sources, Tozzi also highlights the linguistic, religious, cultural, and racial differences that France’s experiments with noncitizen soldiers introduced to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French society. Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies

A major new history of the Royal Navy during the tumultuous age of revolution The French Revolutionary Wars catapulted Britain into a conflict against a new enemy: Republican France. Britain relied on the Royal Navy to protect its shores and empire, but as radical ideas about rights and liberty spread across the globe, it could not prevent the spirit of revolution from reaching its ships. In this insightful history, James Davey tells the story of Britain’s Royal Navy across the turbulent 1790s. As resistance and rebellion swept through the fleets, the navy itself became a political battleground. This was a conflict fought for principles as well as power. Sailors organized riots, strikes, petitions, and mutinies to achieve their goals. These shocking events dominated public discussion, prompting cynical—and sometimes brutal—responses from the government. Tempest uncovers the voices of ordinary sailors to shed new light on Britain’s war with France, as the age of revolution played out at every level of society.

A Military history of the 1793-95 campaign in Flanders and the Netherlands

A complete and thoroughly researched book about 'The Secret Expedition'; the Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland 1799 and the Franco-Batavian defence. Including numerous first-hand accounts.