Five hundred gunboats were ordered to be prepared, and three hundred sail of transports were collecting at Dunkirk, to be protected from the British fleet by a Dutch squadron then at the mouth of the Scheldt; and all Britain was in arms on hearing of an armament so formidable.
The condition of France was then desperate; assignats were at 6500 livres the louis; she had to maintain a million of men in arms from an empty treasury; the ruffian demagogues and savage soldiers of the Republic, men steeped to the lips in the blood of women and priests, nobles and aristocrats, hardened by the atrocities in La Vendée, and trained to the war in the campaigns of Austria and Italy, occupied every post and place under the unstable government; a rabble of brutal ministers occupied the palaces of the fallen line of St. Louis, armed with sabres and pistols, to which they resorted in every trivial dispute and on every difference of opinion, and while warring against all manner of title and form, appeared on the rostrum in cassocks and stockings of rose-coloured silk, with knots of scarlet ribands in their shoes; and, with that mixture of ferocity and tom-foolery which caused Paris to be characterized as a city of monkeys and tigers, debated on the cut of a coat and the massacre of a city.
In April, Kilmaine repaired to Paris, after having executed, by order of the government, a survey of the coasts of France and Holland, then reduced to a province of the former; and the chief command of this famous Armée d'Angleterre on which the eyes of all Europe were fixed, and the command of which had been given to the noble Dessaix, the hero of Marengo, was now bestowed upon him.
A French writer asserts that this expedition was destined, not for Britain, but for Egypt; and that Kilmaine received the command of it, not so much for his great military skill, as to deceive our ministry; supposing that the name of an Irishman would cause them to believe that the armament was destined for Ireland; and so they named him General in Chief of the Armée d'Angleterre, which never existed at all. Unfortunately for this writer, history affords abundant proof to the contrary. The number of transports was soon increased to a thousand, and all the naval and military resources of Holland were pressed into the French service.