Thomas Muir, badly injured and disfigured by an English cannonball whilst he was aboard a Spanish ship taking him to Europe, was put ashore at Cadiz in April 1797 and spent months languishing there, awaiting word from the Spanish authorities on his fate. Eventually, in September, they acceded to representations from the Directoire that he be allowed to travel to revolutionary France. Weakened by his injuries, he travelled overland via Madrid, reaching Bordeaux in early November. His arrival there was celebrated with great enthusiasm, for by now news of his survival after so many adversities had reached the radical liberals and democrats of Europe, who hailed him as a 'Hero of the Revolution'. He reached Paris in the following February, where public acclaim and celebrations reached new heights.
When word of Muir's arrival in Europe reached Scotland, the effect in his homeland was electrifying. By now the Scottish radicals, and especially the virulent and growing clandestine radical organisation the United Scotsmen, had come to regard him as their movement's most prominent and able leader, and their most famous martyr. 1797 was the year the Scottish radicals conspired with the republican leaders of Europe in a scheme that might have changed European history had it come about. The plan was for nothing less than the landing of 50,000 troops of the Batavian Republic in lowland Scotland. The Dutch fleet assembled in the Texel was ready to transport them, and with the Royal Navy in disarray at that time, the subject of mutinies at the Nore and Spithead, there were high hopes of their getting across the North Sea to the Firth of Forth. The troops were to land and seize the capital, initiating a general rising across Scotland, a very realistic prospect with the Militia Act of that year creating outbreaks of resistence in even the country districts. The United Scotsman planned to create a Scottish Republic with Thomas Muir as its first President, and the Revolution would be carried into Ireland and then England thereafter. Bad weather delayed the scheme, and in the event the Royal Navy under Admiral Duncan defeated the Dutch fleet, against all the odds, at the Battle of Camperdown in October 1797, and the invasion plans were placed on hold.
Learning of the strength of radicalism in Scotland after reaching Paris, Muir began consulting with Scottish exiles and emissaries there. However, his health had never recovered from the devastating injuries he incurred off Cadiz. He fell into decline, and died suddenly in Chantilly on 26 January 1799, alone in his cottage whilst awaiting his political colleagues.
A monument to Thomas Muir and the other Scottish radical 'martyrs', so notoriously victimised in a series of rigged show trials in the 1790s, was erected in the Calton cemetery in Edinburgh in
1844 and can be seen there today. The other men celebrated there are Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald.
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