Theobald Dillon

XX 92 - L, Valmy. A former Royal general. "Wild Geese." Another Gen. Dillon was also murdered in 1792. - Brother to "Arthur." Murdered. Wild Geese.

Theobald Dillon (c. 1745–1792), elder of the two Dillon brothers and a senior officer of the Irish Brigade in French service, rose through the royal army with the quiet competence expected of that long-established expatriate lineage. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars he held a divisional command in the Army of the North, but in April 1792, during the confused retreat from Tournai, his troops—raw, frightened, and inflamed by Jacobin suspicion of aristocratic officers—mutinied, accusing him of treachery. Dragged from his carriage by a mob at Lille, he was murdered before any inquiry could be made, an early and grim portent of the violence that would engulf many anciens officiers in the months to come. His fate, contrasted with Arthur’s later execution under the Terror, makes the Dillon brothers a sombre emblem of the Irish Brigade’s tragic dissolution as the Revolution devoured its own.