was lost by the Austrians. The market town of Aspern, on the north side
of the Danube, was destroyed, and the loss of the Imperialists was
frightful.
After a two days' conflict, there lay on that field the flower of the
Austrian army; 87 field-officers, 4199 subalterns and privates, 12
generals (including the Prince de Rohan), 663 officers, and 15,651
soldiers were wounded; of these, Field-Marshal Webber, with 8 officers,
and 329 men were taken prisoners, with 3 pieces of cannon, 7 powder
waggons, 17,000 muskets, and 3000 corslets. The loss of the French was
terrible! 7000 men and an immense number of horses were buried on the
field; 29,773 wounded men strewed the streets and suburbs of Vienna;
hundreds of corpses, gashed and shattered, floated down the rapid
Danube and were flung upon its shores, where they lay unburied and
decaying, filling the air with pestilence and the place with horror.
In October peace was signed at the camp of Schoenbrunn, and, divorcing
the woman who had loved him when he had only his sword and his
epaulettes, Napoleon espoused Maria Louisa of Austria; and Prince
Charles, who by his accumulated blunders at the battle of Aspern, had
thrown away the fortunes of Continental Europe, received from his
Imperial conqueror the Grand Riband of the Legion of Honour. O'Reilly
came in for a full share of the honours and decorations which were
showered upon the Austrian army.
At the general peace of 1814 the Empire, exhausted by a war of
five-and-twenty years, reduced her vast military establishments to
58 regiments of the line, 12 battalions of chasseurs, and 5 garrison
battalions--in all, 1044 companies of fusiliers, and 116 of grenadiers.
The cavalry were reduced to 36 regiments of cuirassiers, light
dragoons, uhlans and hussars. Of the third regiment of light horse
O'Reilly was colonel and proprietor. He was also High Chamberlain of
the Empire.
At this time Louis Count Taaffe, a noble of Irish parentage, was
Second President of the Austrian High Court of Justice, and General
Count O'Donnel was Military Governor of Austrian Lombardy. One of the
Emperor's most distinguished officers was General Count Nugent, who
in the war of 1847-8 led 30,000 Austrian infantry to succour Marshal
Radetzki, who was then opposed to the troops of Charles Albert.[19]
Count Taaffe was a member of the new ministry formed on the 21st of
March, in the year of the Austrian revolution: but he retired from
office shortly before the appearance of the chartered constitution on
the 19th of April.
O'Reilly lived to see Austria affected by the commotions which pervaded
Europe after the French Revolution of 1830, when the Duke of Modena
and the Archduke of Parma were obliged to quit these states, and a
formidable insurrection broke out in the Patrimony of St. Peter--an
insurrection to quell which 18,000 Austrian troops were marched
towards the frontier; but O'Reilly was too far advanced in years to
draw his sword again in the service of the House of Hapsburg. He died
in October, 1833, at Vienna, after attaining the patriarchal age of
_ninety-two_. He had long survived his countess, and died childless.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 19: Nugent, a field-marshal in 1858, commanded 25,000
Austrian troops at the funeral of Marshal Radetzki, and acted as chief
mourner.]
COUNT O'CONNELL,
KNIGHT OF ST. LOUIS, AND COLONEL OF THE IRISH BRIGADE.
The life of this military wanderer presents, in his chequered career,
the curious anomaly of a general and his soldiers being received into
the service of their native country and native monarch, against whom
they had previously fought with a bravery that too often gave the
laurels of victory to his enemies.
Count Daniel O'Connell was of the same family as the famous political
agitator who bore his name, and he sprang from an old Milesian race
who held the rank of Toparchs in their own province. He was the son
of Daniel O'Connell of Derrynane, and of Mary, daughter of Duffe
O'Donoghue, of Anwys in the county Kerry, Ireland, and was born at
Derrynane Abbey, in 1742. At the early age of fifteen, like others
whose fortunes I have recorded, he left his native country to seek
foreign military service, and in 1757 was appointed a Sub-Lieutenant of
the Irish Brigade in the French service, in the battalion known as the
Infantry regiment of O'Brien, or Lord Clare, and which bore the title
of Clare until its dissolution, thirty-five years after.
In the preceding year war had been declared between France and Britain
respecting their mutual territorial claims in North America. The former
prepared a vast military armament to carry on the strife; and in the
army formed on the 12th July, 1759, to be led by the Maréchal Princes
of Condé and Soubise, were the _Irish_ and _Scottish_ Brigades; and
in the former was the Regiment of Clare, with which young O'Connell
was serving as a subaltern. From this period, for some time, little is
known of him, save that he served throughout the Seven Years' War, and
at its close, for his good conduct, was promoted into a new corps which
had recently been embodied.
In 1779, when France espoused the cause of America, and sought to
harass the mother country in Europe, O'Connell was engaged in the
expedition against Portmahon, which is the principal town in Minorca,
situated on a rocky promontory, difficult of access from the landward,
and defended by Fort San Philipo, in which there was a resolute
garrison. O'Connell, with his new regiment, served under the Duc de
Crillon at the siege, and conducted himself with such honour as to be
specially noticed. The operations were severe and protracted, but in
three years the Spaniards and their allies recaptured the whole island
of Minorca, which at the peace of 1763 had been formally ceded to
Britain.
In 1782, O'Connell served with the combined French and Spanish
armament which blockaded Gibraltar, during that memorable siege which
had commenced on the 12th of January in the preceding year. Having
shown considerable skill as an engineer at Minorca, he was one of the
council-of-war appointed to assist the Chevalier d'Arcon in conducting
the grand attempt in which France and Spain had resolved to try their
full strength for the capture of that celebrated rock, the key of
the Mediterranean; and for this purpose, as already related in the
memoir of the Lacys, 40,000 soldiers, with 200 pieces of cannon and
80 mortars, pressed the attack by land, while 47 sail of the line,
10 battering ships, and a multitude of frigates, mounting 1000 guns
and having 12,000 chosen soldiers added to their crews, lay before
the fortress by sea--and in that fortress, to meet all this warlike
preparation, were only 7000 British soldiers!
The French army was commanded by Louis Duc de Crillon-Mahon, the
representative of an ancient noble family in the Vaucluse, who had
commenced his military career in the Grey musketeers, and served under
Marshal Villars in Italy. He had direction of the whole attack; his
engineers were the most expert in Europe, and brave volunteers came
from all quarters to take part in a siege which attracted the attention
and raised the expectation of all Continental Europe.
As a member of the council-of-war, O'Connell repeatedly opposed the
plans of the Duc de Crillon and of the Chevalier d'Arcon, and declared
their system of attack "worthless;" and the sequel, in the triumph of
General Elliot, proved that his observations were correct.
In the grand attack he accepted command of one of the floating
batteries.
Ten of these, mounting from ten to twenty-eight guns, had been built
under the orders of M. d'Arcon. Their bottoms were of solid timber,
their sides were sheathed with wetted cork, and filled with damp sand
between the timbers. They had sloping roofs of raw hides and net--work
to receive the bombs, which thus exploded harmlessly over the heads of
the besiegers. These floating batteries were exposed during the whole
time to that terrible fire of red-hot shot--a suggestion of General
Boyd--which ultimately, by firing the great ship of Buenaventura de
Moreno, struck the Spaniards with confusion and dismay.
O'Connell had one of his ears torn off by a cannon-ball; and by the
explosion of a shell, which by its weight penetrated the roof of skins,
he was covered with wounds and bruises of minor importance.
His services, during this futile and disastrous siege, were considered
so valuable by the King of France, that, on the recommendation of the
Duc de Crillon, he was rewarded with the colonelcy of the Regiment de
Salm-Salm; a German corps raised in the principality of that name; but
this post he held for a short period, being removed to the regiment of
Royal Swedish Infantry.
After this, in 1787, the government of France having resolved that the
military economy of their army should undergo a complete revision and
remodelling, appointed a military board, consisting of four generals
and _one_ colonel to prepare reports and recommend alterations where
necessary. The colonel chosen was O'Connell, who drew up a system of
regimental economy, and a code of tactics, which were afterwards used
with brilliant success against himself and his loyal comrades during
the first campaigns of the revolution. When the labours of the board
ceased, he was appointed to the onerous situation of Inspector-General
of Infantry, with the duty of regulating the new uniforms and equipment
of the Line, when many alterations and improvements were adopted in
1791.
He was succeeded as colonel of the Swedish regiment by Count Pherson,
afterwards one of the principal agents in the escape of Louis XVI. from
Paris.
O'Connell now enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most
distinguished officers in France.
Besides his very extensive knowledge of mathematics and military
strategy, says a French writer, he was well versed in the study of
languages; and although Latin and Greek were to him alike familiar,
he spoke with equal fluency French, English, Italian, and German. He
had conceived a great predilection for the Erse (_gallique_) of the
mountains of Kerry, and he was never more happy than when he could
converse in this dear old idiom, of which he could so well appreciate
the beauties.[20]
Now came the fatal, the culminating, point of the once splendid
monarchy of France--the dark days of the Revolution; of the captivity
and death of the weak, but unhappy Louis; of the flight or destruction
of his nobles. Before the final catastrophe of the royal execution, a
proposal was made by the National Assembly, which deeply interested
Count O'Connell and others who had made France the land of their
adoption. This was the intended expulsion from her soil of all
foreign officers and soldiers who had served King Louis, including
Irish, Scots, and Switzers. While this ungenerous measure was being
debated, the gallant Duke of Fitzjames, in February, 1791, addressed
to Louis XVI. a letter on behalf of the exiles; and this document is
so remarkable in its tenor, that I may be pardoned in quoting from it
one or two paragraphs. After briefly and modestly stating the services
rendered by his father and grandfather to the line of St. Louis, he
thus advanced the claims of the Irish in France:--
"Sire, my grandfather came not alone into France! His brave companions
are now mine, and the dearest friends of my heart! He was accompanied
by Thirty Thousand Irishmen, who abandoned home, fortune, and honour
to follow their unfortunate king. For the descendants of those brave
men, whom your ancestors deemed so worthy of protection because they
had been faithful to their sovereign, I now entreat the same bounty
from the great-grandson of Louis XIV. It is reported that the National
Assembly propose disbanding the Irish regiments as foreign troops. The
blood they have shed in the cause of France ought to have procured
them the right of being denizens of that kingdom, even though their
capitulation had not entitled them to that privilege.
"Sire, permit me to lay at your Majesty's feet the ardent wish of
the Irish regiments, who are as much attached to France by gratitude
as formerly they were to the _House of Stuart_ by love and duty. If
the Assembly now reject their services, they implore your Majesty's
_recommendation_ to the prince of your family now reigning in Spain,
presuming to assure you that the present will be worthy of being made
by a King of France, and of being favourably received by a prince of
your royal race.
"Fidelity and valour are their titles to recommendation! Of the former
they expect an authentic testimonial from the French nation, as they
have never ONCE failed in their duty during a century, and wherever
they have fought their valour has been conspicuous in battle.
"Sire, I entreat you to listen to their request; for myself I ask no
compensation--for me there is none! The honour of commanding _them_
cannot be repaid. It secures my glory, as to lead them against a foe
ensures immediate victory!"
But this spirited and touching letter failed to stay the popular
clamour against these military strangers in the sequel.
In July the Assembly decreed that the standards of the Irish, German,
and Liegoise infantry should be the tri-colour, inscribed "Discipline
and obedience to the law;" but when the princes, Monsieur of France (or
Comte de Provence) and Charles Philippe, the Count d'Artois, fled to
Coblentz, the formal defection of several Irish officers hastened the
destruction of the old brigade of immortal memory; and with it, after
the 10th of August, disappeared the ancient Swiss, German, Italian,
Scottish, and Catalonian regiments of the monarchy.
During the crumbling of that monarchy, O'Connell, though in secret
communication with the princes at Coblentz, lingered in Paris until
the close of 1791, when that strange convention was held at Pilnitz
between the Emperor Leopold and the Prussian king, who formed a league
to invade France and remodel its government. In a letter from Pavia,
dated 6th July, the Emperor had already openly avowed his intentions
in this new war, and invited all European powers to co-operate with
him. At this crisis the French government proposed to place O'Connell
at the head of one of their many armies levied to meet this European
combination; but the count, despite the earnest recommendations of
Carnot and of his friend the celebrated General Dumouriez, declined;
and then, unable to withstand the issue of the suspicions which this
refusal excited in Paris after the terrible 10th of August, 1792, when
the attack of the Tuileries and massacre of the Swiss took place,
he secretly left the city, and repairing to the princes, offered
to them his sword and fealty at Coblentz; which, being within the
Prussian frontier, became the head-quarters of all those emigrants
and Prussian troops destined to form the army of the Prince of Conti,
who vainly hoped to restore the line of St. Louis to the throne of
his forefathers. His chief aid-de-camp was the Comte de Macarthy, an
emigrant officer of distinction, a marshal-de-camp of horse in 1791.
O'Connell, relinquishing his higher claims among the crowd of noble
applicants for service, accepted the command of a regiment as colonel,
and left nothing undone to improve its discipline and efficiency, for
his whole energies and enthusiasm were devoted to the reconstitution of
the French monarchy.
The first of the French troops to proffer their loyalty, on this
occasion, were the Scottish and Irish soldiers of the old Regiment de
Berwick. The depôt of this corps was then quartered at the strong town
of Givet, on the frontiers of France, under the command of Sir Charles
MacCarthy-Lyragh, who immediately marched his men to Coblentz, and
joined the battalion. Sir Charles afterwards passed into the British
service, when he was made a Colonel and Governor of Senegal, where in
1824 he fought a battle with the Ashantees, by whom he was slain and
beheaded. The loyalty of the Irish brigade met with a warm response
from the fugitive princes. "This offer," replied Monsieur to the
deputation who came to proffer fealty, "will mitigate the sufferings
of the king, who will receive from you with pleasure the same mark of
fidelity which James II. received from your ancestors. This double
epoch ought for ever to furnish a device for the Regiment de Berwick!
It will henceforth be seen upon your colours; every faithful subject
will there read his duty, and behold the model he ought to imitate."
"The colours of Berwick," added Charles Philippe the Comte d'Artois,
"are, and always will be, in the path to honour, and we will march at
their head!"[21]
The king perished, and then followed the campaign of 1793, a period
most disastrous to the emigrants; but amid all the slaughter and
merciless butchery, with which the republicans inspired the war--a
war, to maintain which, the fiery zeal of Carnot enrolled no less than
_fourteen_ armies, mustering 1,400,000 men--O'Connell led his battalion
with honour to himself and to the cause he served, till all hope was
lost, and then with others he fled to England in the beginning of 1794.
Among those condemned by Robespierre's tribunal in that year, were
two distinguished officers of the Irish brigade--General O'Moran, who
defended Dunkirk against the Duke of York; and John O'Donoghue, General
de Brigade in the Army of the Rhine.
At the same time were condemned, M. Murdoch, a Scotsman in the service
of the Comte de Montmorin; and W. Newton, an English colonel of the
Dragoon Regiment de Liberté, and formerly an officer in the Russian
service.
In reduced circumstances O'Connell reached London, where he resided
for a time in comparative obscurity; and where, for many reasons, his
residence was far from being a pleasant one. Still, undiscouraged by
the aspect of affairs in France, and by the numerous bloody defeats and
massacres sustained by the emigrant troops and other supporters of the
Bourbons, he took a warm interest in the attempts meditated in 1794;
but fresh conflicts seemed only to fire the zeal of the republicans
anew, till the French armies, following their victories, drove their
enemies across the Meuse and then beyond the Rhine; after which they
penetrated into Holland, revolutionized it, and succeeded in detaching
Prussia from its alliance with Britain.
At this epoch O'Connell laid before William Pitt the plan of a new
campaign, which so pleased that minister, that he made the count,
then in his fifty-second year, an offer of military service under the
British government. This he at once accepted, and proposed to form
a new brigade to be named _the Irish_, and to be raised principally
from remnants of the regiments of Clare, Lally, Dillon, Berwick, &c.,
emigrant officers, and men who represented the old brigade of King
James; but here O'Connell's religion, which was strictly Catholic,
prevented him, in those days of intolerance, prior to the Emancipation
Act, attaining in the British service a higher rank than Colonel; and
this rank he held till the day of his death.
The brigade consisted of six battalions, each of the strength usual
on a war establishment; but O'Connell had the mortification to find
himself gazetted by the Horse Guards Colonel of the _fourth_ regiment
instead of the first, to which he was justly entitled, by his previous
position and general military character.
His commission was dated 1st October, 1794.[22]
The list of colonels was as follows:--
1st Regiment--the Duke of Fitzjames.
2nd Regiment--Anthony, Count Walsh de Serrant.
3rd Regiment--Honourable Henry Dillon.
4th Regiment--Count Daniel O'Connell.
5th Regiment--Charles, Viscount Walsh de Serrant,
6th Regiment--James Henry, Count Conway.[23]
Several of his old friends were appointed to the corps; among these
were Bartholomew, Count O'Mahoney, Colonel, 1st January, 1801; John
O'Toole, Colonel, 1805; and Colonel James O'Moore, who was appointed
Major-General in 1801.
This brigade, which was embodied under circumstances so singular,
instead of being sent to fight upon the continent of Europe, as
O'Connell and his brother emigrants had fondly anticipated, after many
changes in its constitution and organization, was ordered to Nova
Scotia, to Cape Breton, and to the then pestilential West India Isles.
The snows of America and the burning sun of the tropics soon had a
fatal effect upon these unfortunate wanderers, and they were nearly all
swept away by disease and death.
Of the six regiments, only thirty-four officers of all ranks were alive
in 1818, on the Irish half-pay.
On the 25th December, 1797, O'Connell, weary of a service so heartless,
and so little conducive to the welfare of the cause he loved so much,
retired upon the full-pay of colonel unattached, and returned home.[24]
In 1802 he profited by the Treaty of Amiens, when peace was negotiated
between Great Britain and France, to return to the latter; but the
frail bond of unity was soon broken, and he was comprehended in the
harsh decree which seized, as prisoners of war, all British subjects
remaining in France.
At the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 he regained his liberty,
and Louis XVIII. restored to him his rank of General, and with it the
Colonelcy of a regiment and the pension and Grand Cross of St. Louis,
which he enjoyed with his retired full pay as a British Colonel. This
was after the decree of the 16th July, by which the whole of the old
army was disbanded, and the command conferred upon Marshal Macdonald,
who remodelled a new army from the wreck of Napoleon's veterans.
O'Connell lived in tranquillity and honour, a remnant of other days
and of old romantic sympathies, until 1830, when he was again deprived
of his French emoluments for his unwavering fidelity to Charles X. and
the elder branch of the Bourbons. After this he retired to his château
at Meudon, near Blois, where he died, on the 9th of July, 1833, in the
ninety-first year of his age, the oldest Colonel of the British army,
and the senior general of the French.
Such was the chequered career of one of the last of the brave old Irish
Brigade.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 20: _Biographie Universelle._]
[Footnote 21: _Scots' Magazine_, 1791.]
[Footnote 22: War-Office Records--communicated.]
[Footnote 23: War-Office Record.]
[Footnote 24: _Ibid._]
MARSHAL MACDONALD.
Stephen James Joseph Macdonald, Marshal of France and Duke of Tarentum,
was the son of Neil MacEachin Macdonald (a gentleman sprung from the
branch of the Clanranald in Uist), who served in France as a lieutenant
in the Scottish Regiment of Ogilvie, to which he had been appointed by
the recommendation of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, whom he had served
bravely and loyally even after the close of his disastrous campaign
in Scotland, and whom he had followed into exile after materially
contributing to that deliverance which was effected by the celebrated
Flora Macdonald. He was one of the hundred and thirty Highlanders who
gathered on the shore of Loch nan Uamh after the horrors of Culloden,
and embarked with Prince Charles for France.
Neil MacEachin (_i.e._, the son of Hugh) had been a preceptor in the
family of his chief, Clanranald, and being originally designed for the
Catholic Church, had been educated at the Scottish College in Paris.
He spoke French with great fluency, and to the exiled prince proved a
faithful adherent, friend, and solace, in all his wanderings; and when
Charles was so ungenerously committed to a dungeon at Vincennes by
order of the French government, his captivity was shared alone by the
brave islesman from Uist. According to Mr. Chambers, there is every
reason to believe that he was the author of a little work entitled
_Alexis_, in which he preserved a minute record of the prince's
wanderings and dangers in the Western Isles of Scotland.
His son, the future Marshal of the Empire, was born on the 17th of
November, 1765, in the old fortified town of Sedan, in the departement
of the Ardennes.