TWO RESTORATIONS
The Restoration--Aristocrats and Commoners--Unwelcome
Guests--Wellington in Danger--Misgivings--Napoleonic
Emblems--Spectacles--Visits to Elba--Egerton’s Siege--St.
Helena Eyewitnesses and Survivors, 271
APPENDIX
_A._ MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT, 316
_B._ PEERS AND THEIR FAMILIES, 317
_C._ LORD J. RUSSELL AT ELBA (_narrative now first
published_), 319
INDEX OF NAMES, AND LIST OF OTHER VISITORS, 325
I
INTRODUCTORY
The French Revolution, of which--philosophers regarding it as still
unfinished--this book is really a chapter, produced a greater
dislocation of individuals and classes than had been known in modern
times. It scattered thousands of Frenchmen over Europe, some in fact as
far as America and India, while, on the other hand, it attracted men of
all nationalities to France. It was mainly a centrifugal, but it was
partly a centripetal force, especially during the Empire; never before
or since was France so much as then the focus of political and social
life. Men of all ranks shared in both these movements. If princes and
nobles were driven from France there were some who were attracted
thither even in the early stages of the Revolution, while Napoleon
later on drew around him a galaxy of foreign satellites.
To begin with the centrifugal action, history furnishes no parallel to
such an overturn of thrones and flight of monarchs. With the exception
of England, protected by the sea, Scandinavia and Russia by distance,
and Turkey by Oriental lethargy, every dynasty of Europe was shaken or
shattered by the volcano. The Bourbons became wanderers on the face of
the earth. Louis XVI.’s two brothers went hither and thither
before finding a secure resting-place on British soil. The elder,
‘Monsieur,’ Comte de Provence (afterwards Louis XVIII.),
fled from Paris simultaneously with his crowned brother, but, more
fortunate than poor Louis, safely reached Belgium. The younger, Comte
d’Artois (afterwards Charles X.), had preceded him by nine
months. Both re-entered France in 1792 with the German and Royalist
invaders, but had soon to retreat with them. Monsieur betook himself
first to Ham in Westphalia, and next to Verona, but the Doge of Venice,
fearful of displeasing revolutionary France, ‘invited’ him to withdraw.
Russian hospitality likewise proved ephemeral, but in England, first
at Gosfield, then at Wanstead, and lastly at Hartwell, he was able
quietly to await the downfall of the Corsican usurper. D’Artois found
halting-places at Venice, Mantua, Brussels, and St. Petersburg, and for
a few days he was a second time on French soil in the island of Yeu;
but the failure of the expedition to western France soon obliged him
to recross the Channel, where Holyrood and eventually London afforded
him a refuge. Of the jealousies of these two exiled princes, and of
the mortifications and dissensions of their retinues, it is needless
to speak. The Duke of Orleans (the future Louis Philippe), deserting
the Republican army along with Dumouriez, after teaching in a school
in Switzerland, and after a visit to America, where he spent a night
in an Indian wigwam, also repaired to England. There he was doomed to
long years of inactivity, though he would fain have joined the English
forces in Spain, in which case, as having fought against France, he
could scarcely have grasped the French crown. The Duc de Bourbon
likewise settled in England, and it would have been well had his
unfortunate son, the Duc d’Enghien, followed his example. The king’s
two aunts, one of them the reputed mother of the Comte de Narbonne,
himself escorting them and destined to ten years of exile, found their
way to Rome, but driven thence by the French, after many buffetings
they ended their wanderings and their lives at Trieste.
These banished French princes had the doubtful consolation of seeing
other regal or princely personages equally storm-tost. The Statthalter
of Holland had to pass many years of banishment in England, and
even stooped to soliciting a pecuniary indemnity from Napoleon. The
Austrian and Prussian monarchs, though not actually driven out of
their dominions, saw their capitals occupied by French armies, and had
to bow to the stern dictates of the Conqueror. The rulers of German
principalities were swept away by the hurricane. The Spanish royal
family were consigned to the custody of Talleyrand at Valençay. The
Portuguese princes took refuge in Brazil. Italian monarchs fared no
better. The sovereigns of Piedmont had to retire to the island of
Sardinia, the only possession remaining to them. The King of Naples
was likewise driven from his continental dominions, British protection
ensuring him a footing in Sicily. Italian dukes were rudely supplanted
by Napoleon’s relatives or other puppets. Ferdinand III. of
Tuscany was driven to Vienna, though subsequently assigned a duchy
in Germany. Even the Papacy, which had long been unscathed by war or
revolution, was overwhelmed by the current. Forced away from Rome, one
Pope died in the French fortress of Valence, while another became a
prisoner at Savona.
In France not merely the princes, but almost the entire nobility, were
fugitives. England, Germany, Switzerland, and Russia were inundated
with aristocrats, who at first, counting on a speedy and triumphant
return, formed little colonies, in one of which Fanny Burney found a
husband; but the exhaustion of their resources soon scattered them
hither and thither. Some were descendants of Jacobite refugees, who
found shelter in the very country whence their ancestors had fled.
Adversity, in this as in other cases, brought out the best qualities
of some and the worst of others. Frivolity and gravity, self-denial
and selfishness, heroism and poltroonery, intrigue and probity, honour
and unscrupulousness, existed side by side. Some formed royalist corps
subsidised by foreign governments, or actually joined foreign armies,
persuading themselves that they were thus fighting not against France
but against a usurpation. The few who went to America, whether from
choice, like the epicure Brillat Savarin, or from compulsion like
Talleyrand, were spared this sad necessity of accepting foreign alms
or serving foreign states. The Comte d’Estaing took office under an
Indian rajah. Reduced to penury, those who remained in the Old World
resorted to every conceivable expedient. The women were naturally the
greatest sufferers. Delicate fingers which had never done a stroke of
work had to busy themselves in dressing dolls, in embroidery, in flower
or portrait painting, in nursing the sick, and even in milking cows
and making butter for sale. Men brought up in luxury deemed themselves
fortunate if they could earn a livelihood as journalists, translators,
or teachers. More frequently they had to become book-keepers or
tailors, to keep wine shops, to sing at music-halls, to act as
prompters at theatres, and even to be water-carriers. Some, alas! with
the connivance at least for a time of their princes, forged assignats.
Welcomed in some quarters, mobbed or even expelled as vagabonds in
others, they had to exchange palaces for cottages, sumptuous diet
for the roughest fare, jewels and finery for rags. No wonder that
humiliation and anguish drove some to suicide, and the lives of many
others must have been shortened by privations. Yet many, with the
traditional light-heartedness of Frenchmen,
‘Laughed the sense of misery away.’
Besides the _noblesse_, which included the episcopate, there were
thousands of priests and hundreds of nuns, who, fleeing from relentless
persecution, found succour from Protestant governments and Protestant
philanthropy. There were also ex-deputies and publicists, whom the
dungeon, and probably the guillotine, would otherwise have claimed.
Lally Tollendal, the younger Mirabeau, Mounier, and Montlosier, had
sat in the National or Constituent Assembly. Mallet du Pan, Etienne
Dumont, Antraigues, driven to suicide, Lafayette, consigned to an
Austrian fortress, and Dumouriez, offering military counsels to the
English, may also be mentioned. It need hardly be said that wealthy
foreigners like Quintin Craufurd, who had become numerous in Paris
before the Revolution, were frightened away, leaving their property to
be confiscated, for the Jacobins did not even recognise their right to
quit France, which had become not merely inhospitable but dangerous.
Not until the Consulate and the Empire did France again attract wealthy
foreigners, or recover a portion of its then much impoverished nobility.
As for the immigration, though far less important in numbers and
quality, it was not inconsiderable. Men of all nationalities hurried
to Paris between 1789 and 1792 to see or serve the Revolution. There
were English men and women like Paine (or shall we reckon him an
American?), George Grieve, General Money, Thomas Christie, John Oswald,
Helen Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft. There were Americans like
Barlow, Eustace, Paul Jones, and Joshua Barney; Germans like Cloots,
Trenck, and George Forster; Belgians and Dutchmen like de Kock, father
of the novelist, and Proly, a natural son of the Austrian statesman
Kaunitz; Poles like Wittinghoff; Russians like Strogonoff; Italians
like Rotondo, Cerutti, and Buonarotti; Spaniards like Olavide and
Miranda. Most of these men embraced the cause of the Revolution as a
religion, and were quite ready to fight in its behalf, in defence as
they imagined of liberty and enlightenment, even against their native
countries. Some of them paid the penalty of their enthusiasm by the
dungeon or the guillotine. It is true that when Napoleon seized the
reins such illusions could scarcely have remained, but even then there
were numerous foreigners eager to serve him for the sake of lucre or
adventure, not to speak of Irish refugees and Poles, whom he lured by
the expectation of achieving their independence. Prince Leopold of
Saxe-Coburg, little foreseeing his marriage with our Princess Charlotte
or his elevation to the crown of Belgium, was anxious to become one of
his aides-de-camp. Some men fought by turns for and against him. The
Revolution indeed, though it ended by making Europe nationalist, made
it for a time cosmopolitan. Napoleon did much, moreover, to eradicate
patriotism, especially in the military class. Hence Bernadotte was not
the only soldier who changed sides from personal pique or according
to the prospects of victory, and he did not even imagine that by his
appearance as an invader he would disqualify himself for supplanting
Napoleon on the French throne. Jomini, a Swiss, after serving Napoleon
in high rank, offered his sword to Russia, though Napoleon was
compelled to acquit him of having treacherously revealed his military
secrets. And Talleyrand, while accepting Napoleon’s pay, intrigued
with his foes, doubtless salving his conscience, if indeed he had a
conscience, with the notion that he was thus promoting the interests of
France. Few men were so scrupulous as the Duc de Richelieu, a future
French statesman, in stipulating that Russia should not send him to
fight against his countrymen. As to the rank and file, they had of
course no choice. Belgians, Dutchmen, Germans, Poles, Italians, had to
join or combat French armies according to the political exigencies of
the moment or the periphery of French rule. Napoleon’s armies were thus
a medley of nationalities, and the only wonder is that defections so
rarely occurred.
Such was the France, such the Europe, to which this book relates. It
is a chapter in the history both of England and of Napoleon. We first
see Englishmen pouring over to Paris during the interlude or truce
of Amiens, to make or renew acquaintance with it after ten years
of hostilities, or to recover confiscated property. Peers, M.P.’s,
soldiers and sailors, philosophers, scholars, merchants, were all eager
to see the young Corsican who had already accomplished so much and was
evidently marked out to accomplish much more. We next see hundreds of
these non-combatants detained for eleven years on the paltry pretext
of their being liable to militia service at home, and in defiance of
all international courtesies. We see some of them not merely shifted
from place to place, now permitted to reside in Paris, now relegated to
provincial towns, but actually incarcerated in fortresses. We find the
British Government standing on principle, and declining to exchange the
thousands of French captives for these unfortunates, though there were
not wanting men who urged on it the expediency of stooping to deal with
Napoleon as with a mountain brigand or a barbarous chief, especially
as he was arbitrarily imprisoning without trial Frenchmen whom he
suspected or feared. We meet with cases of crying heartlessness among
these detentions, relieved only by a very rare gleam of humanity or
magnanimity. We then see the sudden collapse of this gigantic tyranny
and the liberation, as from an immense aviary suddenly thrown open,
of grey-headed and despondent captives. This flight of caged birds is
quickly followed by, we might almost say is coincident with, an influx
of fresh visitors, mostly so unmindful of the past as to take for
granted the stability of the restored monarchy. We see a few tourists
repairing to Elba to get a glimpse of the dethroned Emperor, one or
two of them sagacious enough to forebode that reappearance on French
soil which was to scare away nearly all their countrymen. The curtain
falls on the Hundred Days, but it is just raised to show us Napoleon
pathetically trying with little success at St. Helena to master the
language of his jailers.
The centenary of the Peace of Amiens seemed a suitable occasion for
writing, not a political history of that truce, for on this there is
nothing new to be said, but an account of its social aspects, of the
visits paid to Paris by Englishmen, which had never before been so
numerous, of the impression made on each other by guests and hosts,
and of the experiences of those who on the resumption of hostilities
found themselves detained as prisoners. French writers have shown how
Napoleon treated his own subjects; it completes the picture of him to
see how he treated Englishmen, who never, except his guardians at St.
Helena when jailer had become prisoner, came into such close relations
with him. I may fairly claim to have broken new ground. It is true that
I gave two brief chapters on this subject in 1889 in my _Englishmen
in the French Revolution_, but I have since met in the French
National Archives and elsewhere with a mass of additional materials
which enable me to go into much greater detail. The starting-point of
my researches was the discovery, for which and for other communications
I am indebted to M. Léonce Grasilier, of a register of the principal
foreign arrivals.[1] I have also been favoured with information from
three correspondents in reply to questions respecting their ancestors,
and the _Dictionary of National Biography_ has of course much
assisted me, though in some instances the dates of birth given or left
in doubt by it may be supplied or corrected by the register above
mentioned, while visits to Paris have sometimes escaped the notice of
its contributors. I have likewise consulted at the Record Office the
despatches of Anthony Merry, the predecessor of Lord Whitworth at the
Paris Embassy, though these, like the Whitworth series edited by Mr.
Oscar Browning, seldom stoop from political to social incidents. But
the most vivid picture of the life and treatment of the captives is
gained from the police bulletin daily prepared for Napoleon and now
preserved in the French Archives.[2] They also throw a flood of light
on the character of Napoleon’s internal rule, yet, so far as I know, no
French historian has as yet utilised them, and I have every reason to
believe that I am the first English writer who has consulted them. They
have furnished me with most of the data respecting the captives.
As for printed sources, the reports of the Historical Manuscripts
Commission have thus far brought to light but few letters written by
visitors to their friends, yet many of these may still be in existence.
The literature of the Verdun and other captives is disappointing.
Sturt, Forbes, Pinkerton, Lawrence, and Blayney necessarily give
individual experiences rather than a general history of the detentions.
Not one of these writers, moreover, ventured on keeping a journal,
which would have been obviously unsafe, and some of them, publishing
their recollections while comrades were still in captivity, naturally
omitted details which might have lessened the pity felt in England by
revealing the failings of a small minority, or which might have goaded
the jailers to increased rigour. The police bulletins, on the other
hand, written for perusal by one man, a man whom it was dangerous to
attempt to hoodwink, had no reason for reticence.
II
THE VISITORS
No Thoroughfare--Occasional Visitors--Negotiations--Fox--M.
P.’s--Ex-and Prospective M. P.’s--Peers and their
Families--Baronets--Soldiers--Sailors--Functionaries--Lawyers
--Doctors--Clergymen--Savants--Artists--Actors--Inventors--
Claimants and Men of Business--Writers on France--Other
Authors--Residents--Ancestors--Fugitives--_Emigrés_.
The Peace of Amiens reopened France, and not merely France but central
and southern Europe, to British travellers. Since the outbreak of
hostilities in 1793 the ‘grand tour’ had been suspended. Maritime
ascendency, indeed, had always ensured our communications with
North Germany and Italy, but the risk of capture by privateers such
as befell Richard (afterwards the Marquis) Wellesley, the Duke of
Wellington’s elder brother, on his return from Lisbon in 1794, coupled
with intermittent campaigns and conquests by France, had virtually
put a stop to foreign travel. Young noblemen in charge of tutors or
‘bear-wards’ had ceased to traverse the Continent, and French schools
had ceased to receive British students. The schools, moreover, had
mostly been closed by the Revolution. An Arthur Wellesley, even if
inclined, could not have studied horsemanship at Angers, nor could a
Gilbert Elliot have been the comrade of a Mirabeau at Fontainebleau.
So also as to girls. Pentemont Abbey in Paris, where daughters of such
aristocratic families as Annesley, Hobart, De Ros and De Bathe had been
educated between 1780 and 1789, was shut, preparatory to conversion
into a barrack,[3] while the English Austin convent, where for 150
years Towneleys, Dormers, and Fermors had been pupils, sometimes
when adults returning as nuns, though still in the possession of the
community, had not yet been reopened as a school. London newspapers
complacently calculated the money thus prevented from leaving the
country.
It it true that a few of the Englishmen arrested as hostages for Toulon
in the autumn of 1793, though released after the Terror, had been
unable or unwilling to quit France. Christopher Potter, ex-M.P. for
Colchester, in 1796 offered Lord Malmesbury, on behalf of Barras, to
secure peace for a bribe of half a million. Captain Henry Swinburne,
commissioner for exchanging prisoners, a collateral ancestor of the
poet, likewise found in Paris about that date Mrs. Grace Dalrymple
Elliott, ex-mistress of ‘Egalité’ Orleans, who remained till 1801,
Admiral Rodney’s Portuguese wife and her two daughters, Richard
Chenevix, grand-nephew of a Bishop of Waterford, Walter Smythe, brother
of the famous Mrs. Fitzherbert, two sons of the Whitehall preacher
Charles Este, and George Hamilton, a Jamaica planter whose wife, a
daughter of Lord Leven, was afterwards, as we shall see, the companion
of Sir Herbert Croft; but of course there had been scarcely any
fresh arrivals. Indeed it was illegal for British subjects, unless
with special permission, to cross over to France.[4] They were liable
at home to punishment for the attempt, just as they were liable if
they reached the French shore to being prevented from landing or to
incarceration as spies. Lord Camelford, Pitt’s eccentric cousin, who
threatened if Horne Tooke was refused admission as a clergyman to the
seat for Old Sarum,[5] to nominate in his place his negro servant--a
black man in lieu of a black coat--was arrested in February 1799 when
on the point of crossing the Channel; but as his object was to examine
the Mediterranean ports he was liberated, being, however, deprived of
his naval post. We shall hear of him again. Boyd and Ker, bankers of
whom too we shall hear again, made their way back to Paris in 1797 in
the hope of recovering confiscated property, but were promptly packed
off. A London newspaper of that year mentions that two men who had
paid a Prussian captain eighty guineas for a passage from Dover to
Calais were also unceremoniously expelled. Braham, however, and Miss
Storace got to Paris and gave concerts in 1797. Thomas Hardy, the
radical shoemaker, managed to send Thomas Paine a pair of shoes so good
that Paine lent them as a model to a Parisian craftsman, but Hardy
would not have found it easy to carry them over himself. Fishermen and
smugglers, it is true, kept up intermittent communications, conveying
newspapers or merchandise, but they seldom ran the risk of taking
passengers. Even fishing-boats, moreover, which on both sides had been
unmolested, were in January 1801 declared by the British Government
liable to capture; but Bonaparte’s threat of recalling Otto, the
commissioner of exchanges, from a country where the laws and usages
of war were disregarded and violated,[6] coincidentally with the
resignation of Pitt on account of George III.’s objection to
Catholic emancipation, led to this order being rescinded. Indeed the
explanations given on this point by the new Addington Administration
paved the way for peace negotiations.
There had been, it is true, isolated opportunities for Englishmen
of forming or communicating impressions of France. Malmesbury[7]
had not only been at Paris in 1796, but at Lille in 1797, on both
occasions receiving an offer from Barras through a Bostonian named
Melville--probably the son of Major Thomas Melville, one of the Boston
tea-party, the last American to wear a cocked hat--to conclude peace
for £450,000.[8] Malmesbury[9] and his staff on their return assuredly
found much avidity for information on the France transformed by the
Revolution. That staff consisted at Paris of George Ellis, of the
_Anti-Jacobin_, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, of whom we shall
hear again, and James Talbot, afterwards Secretary of Legation in
Switzerland.[10] To avoid being mobbed they were obliged to wear the
republican cockade whenever they appeared in the street. At Lille
Malmesbury was accompanied not only by Ellis and Talbot, but by Henry
Wellesley, afterwards Earl Cowley, and by Lord Morpeth, afterwards
Earl of Carlisle. Not merely Swinburne but Captain James Cotes and
General Knox were also sent to Paris between 1796 and 1799 to effect
an exchange of prisoners. They must have been eagerly questioned on
their return. The notorious Governor Wall, who, living in the south of
France, had been refused service in the French army,[11] went back to
England in 1797, but clandestinely, and it would have been better for
him had he remained on the Continent. He had to conceal his identity
and his experiences.[12] But Sir Sidney Smith had escaped from the
Temple in 1798 after two years’ incarceration, and Napoleon in the
following year released some English prisoners, sending them home with
professions of a desire for peace. Sir Robert Barclay, a diplomatist
captured at sea, was also, after half an hour’s conversation, liberated
by him. Lord Carysfort, whose mutinous crew had taken him to Brest, was
likewise permitted, in November 1800, after nine months’ detention,
to visit his family on parole. Masquerier managed, moreover, in that
year to visit Paris and to sketch Napoleon’s portrait for exhibition in
London. Tallien, on the other hand, captured by the English on his way
back from Egypt, had been allowed in March 1800 to return to France,
where he could give a glowing account of the attentions paid him by the
Opposition leaders, and of his presence, the observed of all observers,
at parliamentary debates. On re-entering Paris he found that his
handsome wife, Thérése Cabarrus, had become the mistress of the army
contractor Ouvrard, and she never rejoined him.
But, broadly speaking, Englishmen and Frenchmen had for nearly a
decade been perfect strangers, so that a British cartoon entitled ‘The
First Kiss this Ten Years’ depicted Monsieur François stooping to kiss
Britannia with the words, ‘Madam, permit me to pay my profound esteem
to your engaging person and to seal on your divine lips my everlasting
attachment.’ To which Britannia replies, ‘Monsieur, you are truly a
well-bred gentleman, and though you make me blush, yet you kiss so
delicately that I could not refuse you, though I was sure that you
would deceive me again.’
The peace preliminaries were signed on the 1st October 1801. England,
without waiting for the ratifications, released her 14,000 French
prisoners,[13] and on the 23rd October Boulogne, for the first time for
nearly nine years, saw the arrival of an English vessel bringing 160 of
these captives.
It is not my purpose to enter into the details of the negotiations, nor
need I dwell on the rejoicings for the peace. Cobbett in London had his
windows smashed for refusing to illuminate, and the jury recommended
to mercy three of the delinquents, but Cobbett, though invited by
the judge to join in this recommendation, declined, stating that he
expected justice. The London mob took the horses out of Otto’s carriage
and drew it, while Lauriston, grand-nephew of the famous speculator
Law,[14] on coming over with the ratifications received ovations. On
the 1st November Lord Cornwallis, ex-Governor of India, accompanied
by his son, Lord Brome (afterwards the second and last marquis),
by his illegitimate son, Colonel (eventually General Sir Miles)
Nightingale,[15] his son-in-law, Captain Singleton, Colonel Littlehales
(afterwards Sir E. Littlehales Baker), and Francis (brother of Sir
John) Moore, started for Paris.[16]
Amiens had been chosen for the negotiations, but Napoleon, evidently
wishing Lord Cornwallis to see how firmly the Consulate was
established, had invited him to come round by Paris on the plea of
showing him the illuminations of the 9th November in celebration of the
peace with Austria. The road from Calais to Paris, which had since 1793
been almost deserted, was hastily put in repair for him, and was soon
to be dotted with mail-coaches and post-chaises. Cornwallis arrived
on the 7th November; he alighted at the Hotel Grange Batelière, the
finest in Paris, it being an old mansion with spacious grounds, and
he was received by Napoleon on the 10th. Napoleon suggested to him
a reciprocal expulsion of foreign conspirators, the Bourbon princes
to be packed off by England, and the United Irishmen by France; but
Cornwallis naturally evaded so delicate a question. Napoleon did not
invite him to dinner, and did not rise to receive Lord Brome in his
box at the Opera, an incivility much commented upon. Cornwallis gave
a dinner on the 16th to Lord Minto, who was on his way home from the
Vienna Embassy, and five other fellow-countrymen.
‘After dinner,’ says the _Times_, ‘the company went to the
Opera, where the performance was the _Mysteries of Isis_.
Every part of the house was so crowded that numbers were unable
to procure places. Some couplets were sung in celebration of
the union of the two nations, which excited an enthusiasm that
displayed itself by universal and repeated bursts of applause.
‘Lord Cornwallis was so extremely affected by the scene, that he
shed tears! On his rising to go away, the audience recommenced
their testimonies of applause. His Lordship showed how much he
was flattered by the reception he had met with, by bowing to
them in the most affecting manner. The following may be given as
a specimen of the verses sung upon this occasion:--
“Anglais, Français, restez unis,
Qu’à vos chants l’Univers réponde:
Quand de tels rivaux sont amis,
Qui peut troubler la paix du monde?”’
Cornwallis also dined with Talleyrand, and Francis James Jackson,
writing to Speaker Abbot (afterwards Lord Colchester), says:--
‘What do you think of Lord Cornwallis, with all his dignity of
decorum, dining the other day at a table of thirty covers with
the kept mistresses, and being obliged to hand out the ugliest
and frailest of them, because she was in keeping of the minister
for Foreign Affairs?’
On the 28th Cornwallis left for Amiens. There Joseph Bonaparte
conducted the negotiations, and he speaks highly of Cornwallis’s
straightforwardness. Cornwallis carried back with him to England
cotton-velvet goods, to show his countrymen the superiority of Amiens
looms, and the Calais municipality gave him a banquet before he
embarked.[17]
Anthony Merry, who had been Consul in Spain, had been sent to Paris
in July 1801, succeeding Cotes as Commissioner of Exchanges, but he
assisted Cornwallis at Amiens, and during his absence from Paris
Francis James Jackson, who had been Secretary of Legation first at
Madrid, then at Berlin, and afterwards at St. Petersburg, and had
been secretary to Pitt, acted as _chargé d’affaires_. Jackson
was accompanied by his brother George, to whom Parisian sights were
a novelty, and by Dawson Warren[18] and Hill as _attachés_.
Jackson, in reporting his arrival in November, stated that he had been
loaded with attentions such as ‘the most refined system of civility
could suggest.’ On the 4th January 1802 he presented his credentials
to Napoleon, who said, ‘I am very glad to see an English minister
here; it is essential to the civilisation of the world.’[19] Merry
returning from Amiens, Jackson left on the 18th April 1802,[20] and
Merry remained at the head of the embassy till December 1802. He was
reproached with giving no dinner on George III.’s birthday
on the 4th of June, but he was expecting to be superseded by Lord
Whitworth, and his stipend probably did not allow of much display.
The embassy was installed, as before the Revolution, in the Caraman
mansion, faubourg du Roule.
Whitworth, formerly at St. Petersburg, had been appointed ambassador
as early as April 1802, but on account of the delay in the nomination
of the French Envoy to London his instructions were not drawn up till
the 10th September, and he did not start till the 10th November. He
went by Southampton and Havre, and was accompanied by his newly-married
wife, the Duchess of Dorset, widow of the Ambassador to Paris of 1789,
and by her two daughters. Her son, the young Duke of Dorset, remained
at Harrow, where he was the schoolfellow and friend of Byron, but
as we shall see he went over to Paris for the Easter holidays.[21]
Whitworth’s staff consisted of his brother, Colonel Whitworth, James
Talbot, James Henry Mandeville,[22] Captain Edward Pierrepont,[23] and
Benjafield, with the Rev. Thomas Hodgson as chaplain, and Dr. Maclaurin
as physician. The Duchess of Dorset’s retention of her first husband’s
title greatly puzzled the Parisians, many of whom actually believed
that she was not married to Whitworth. According to Maria Edgeworth,
the latter had at Paris the same house, the same wife, and the same
horses as the Duke of Dorset had had in 1789, but the line should
doubtless be drawn at the horses. He took with him six carriages, one
of which had been the admiration of Londoners, though it was less
imposing than that taken over by a Dr. Brodum, whose object was to
promote the sale of his syrup for ensuring longevity. He presented his
credentials on the 6th December 1802, and remained as we shall see till
the 12th May 1803.[24]
The Dover and Calais mail packets did not recommence running till
the 18th November 1801, but English visitors had begun to arrive as
early as September or October, and Savary tells us that these pioneers
facilitated the conclusion of peace, for they returned with assurances
of the stability of the consular government. Napoleon on the 14th
October instructed Fouché freely to admit English visitors, taking
care, however, that they had Foreign Office passports, and were not
French _émigrés_. One of them unfortunately lost his life. Charles
John Clarke, of Hitchin Priory, had gone over with his wife. Their
only child had died two years before, and they sought relief for their
sorrow, intending to go on to Italy. Clarke was on a stand witnessing
the fireworks of the 9th November in the Tuileries gardens when it gave
way, and its eighty occupants were injured, Clarke so seriously, his
spine being fractured, that after lingering nearly a month he expired.
Napoleon sent his surgeon to make inquiries and offer his services,
stating that he should himself call as soon as the patient was well
enough to receive visitors. Clarke, who had been six years married,
was only thirty-one years of age. His widow, several years his junior,
carried his remains home.
Never before had there been such an influx of English visitors as
during these eighteen months. ‘All the idle captives of the land of
fogs,’ says M. Sorel, ‘shook their damp wings and prepared to take
their flight towards the regions of pleasure and brightness.’ Even the
influenza or _grippe_, which prevailed in January and February
1803, did not deter them, and they mostly escaped the malady, an escape
attributed to their being habituated to humidity. ‘Ours,’ says Samuel
Rogers, who was one of the visitors, ‘is a nation of travellers, and no
wonder, when the elements, air, water, and fire attend at our bidding
to transport us from shore to shore, when the ship rushes into the
deep, her track the foam as of some mighty torrent, and in three hours
or less we stand gazing and gazed at among a foreign people. None want
an excuse. If rich, they go to enjoy; if poor, to retrench; if sick,
to recover; if studious, to learn; if learned, to relax from their
studies.’[25] This, though written in 1839, is, with the exception of
the reference to steam, applicable to the influx of 1801–1803. A few
went for health, taking Paris as a stage to Montpellier, then still in
repute, Nice, or Italy, others to recover property or for business, a
few for study, most for pleasure. The current steadily swelled all
the winter, spring, and summer. One of the earliest packets brought
sixty-three ladies, and the Calais hotels were packed, seven hundred
and ninety-eight passengers landing in ten days. In the last decade of
Prairial (June 1802) there were ninety-one arrivals, in the last decade
of Thermidor (August) ninety-seven, in the last decade of Fructidor
(September) one hundred and fifty-six.[26] This last average of fifteen
a day seems small to us, but was surprising for that time. Merry states
that there were once as many as five thousand English in Paris, and
that when he left in December there were one thousand nine hundred.
In the autumn he sent home long lists of persons to whom he had given
return passports, and he had complained in May that he was so busy
in issuing them as to have no time to attend properly to diplomatic
business.
The cost of a trip to Paris was what in those days seemed moderate.
For £4, 13s. you could get a through ticket by Dover and Calais,
starting either from the City at 4.30 A.M. by the old and
now revived line of coaches connected with the rue Notre Dame des
Victoires establishment in Paris, or morning and night by a new line
from Charing Cross.[27] Probably a still cheaper route, though there
were no through tickets, was by Brighton and Dieppe, the crossing
taking 10 or 15 hours. By Calais it seldom took more than 8 hours,
but passengers were advised to carry light refreshments with them.
The diligence from Calais to Paris, going only four miles an hour,
took 54 hours for the journey, but a handsome carriage drawn by three
horses, in a style somewhat similar to the English post-chaise, could
be hired by four or five fellow-travellers, and this made six miles an
hour. £30 would cover the expense of a seven weeks’ visit, including
hotels, sight-seeing, and restaurants.[28] As for fashionable people,
even if they went by coach to Dover, they posted from Calais to Paris,
especially if they formed a family party and took servants with them.
Some, like Lord Guilford, even shipped their own carriages, but he had
to hire four sorry steeds at Calais, for horses were not allowed to
land.[29]
Lord Elgin had four servants, Lord Yarmouth, with his wife and two
children, had eight, Thomas Hope three, and Lady Maynard two. The
journey occupied four days, if we may judge by the French General
Hardy, who, captured in Ireland in 1798, had been exchanged--there
being no English prisoner of equal rank--for four officers, four
non-commissioned officers, and ten privates. It took him a day to get
from London to Dover, another day for the crossing, and two days for
the journey from Calais to Paris.
Passengers by Boulogne if arriving at low tide were landed in a
singular fashion. Thomas Manning, of whom we shall hear presently, in a
letter to his father communicated to me by his grand-nephew, Mr. E. B.
Harris, says:--
‘The tide having ebbed, we were obliged to land without entering
the inner harbour of Boulogne. It was night before the sluggish
boat that the Boulogne mariners sent off could land us all, and
a strange landing it seemed to me. The boat rowed towards the
nearest shore till it ran aground, which happened in the midst
of the breakers. In an instant the boathead was surrounded by a
throng of women up to their middles and over, who were there to
carry us on shore. Not being aware of this manœuvre, we did not
throw ourselves into the arms of these sea-nymphs so instantly
as we ought, whereby those who sat at the stern of the boat were
deluged with sea spray. For myself I was in front, and very
quickly understood the clamour of the mermaids. I flung myself
upon the backs of two of them without reserve, and was safely
and dryly borne on shore, but one poor gentleman slipped through
their fingers and fell over head and ears into the sea.’
This primitive mode of landing had been noted in 1792 by William
Hunter, who states that one of the ‘mermaids,’ unequal to the weight
of a stout Englishman who had been reserved to the last, dropped him
midway. Lanterns dimly lit up this curious scene.[30]
The return voyage had to be made on French bottoms, in order that the
mercantile marine might be encouraged, and this regulation had its
inconvenience, not to say dangers. The _Times_ of 12th January,
1803, says:--
‘A navy Officer, who recently returned from Calais, where he
had spent a few days, was actually under the necessity of giving
directions, and afterwards exerting himself with alacrity, to
preserve his own life and that of the other passengers. The
master of the vessel, who was very much afraid of the violence
of the wind, sat half-way down to the cabin, with his head under
the companion, and covered with a huge night-cap, to prevent its
reaching him, as he was (he said) grievously afflicted with the
rheumatism; and to the repeated demands of the passengers, why
he did not come upon deck and give orders for the safety of the
vessel, he answered, deliberately, taking the pipe out of his
mouth, that there was no immediate danger, and if any should
arise, he had a good sea-boat, which would carry him and all his
crew safe to land.’
Let us now see who were the visitors, beginning not with the earliest
but by far the most eminent of them, Fox. He had not seen France
since 1788, when he passed through with Mrs. Armistead on his way
to Switzerland and Italy. Waiting, like many other M.P.’s, till his
election was over, he started at Dover on the 31st July 1802, again
accompanied by the so-called Mrs. Armistead (only now for the first
time publicly figuring as his wife, though they had been privately
married some years previously), by St. Andrew (afterwards Lord) St.
John, M.P., and by John Bernard Trotter, his secretary.[31] His nephew
Lord Holland had engaged rooms for him in the faubourg St. Germain, but
he seems to have removed to the hotel Grange Batelière and eventually
to the hotel Richelieu, the mansion erected and formerly occupied
by the notorious _roué_, Marshal (grand-nephew of Cardinal)
Richelieu, who had entertained him in 1788. Fox’s chief object was
to consult French records for his life of James II., his
ancestor, and he daily frequented the National Archives for that
purpose, in company with St. John, Robert (afterwards Sir Robert)
Adair, and Trotter. Talleyrand, after his return to England, sent him
a complete copy of Barillon’s despatches, which Fox had declared to be
worth their weight in gold.
Many people in England fancied, however, that he was mainly bent on
seeing Napoleon, and the caricaturists did not neglect so tempting
a subject. Gillray, in a cartoon entitled ‘Introduction of Citizen
Volpone and his suite at Paris,’ represented Bonaparte as seated on
a chair surrounded by Mamelukes, while Fox and his wife,[32] both
extremely corpulent, are bowing and curtseying, Erskine, in legal
costume with his hand on his heart, and Lord and Lady Holland making
up the group. Another caricaturist depicted the reception by the First
Consul of Fox, Erskine, and Combe. To Fox he says, ‘Fox, ha! How old
are you?’ To Combe, ‘A brewer, Lord Mayor, ha! great pomp,’ and to
Erskine, ‘Mr. Brief, ha! a great lawyer; can talk well. There, you may
go.’[33] Trotter tells us what really occurred:--
‘Bonaparte, of a small and by no means commanding figure,
dressed plainly though richly in the embroidered consular coat,
without powder in his hair, looked like a private gentleman,
indifferent as to dress, and devoid of all haughtiness in his
air. The English ambassador, after the presentation of some
English noblemen, announced to him Mr. Fox. He was a good deal
flurried, and after indicating considerable emotion said--“Ah,
Mr. Fox; I have heard with pleasure of your arrival, I have
desired much to see you. I have long admired in you the orator
and friend of his country, who, in constantly raising his voice
for peace, consulted that country’s best interests, those of
Europe, and of the human race. The two great nations of Europe
require peace. They have nothing to fear [from each other]. They
ought to understand and value [esteem] one another. In you,
Mr. Fox, I see with much satisfaction that great statesman who
recommended peace because there was no just object of war, who
saw Europe desolated to no purpose and who struggled for its
relief.”’
Trotter adds that Fox, averse to compliments, neither replied to nor
reciprocated them, and that a few questions and answers respecting his
tour terminated the interview.
Napoleon afterwards invited Fox to a dinner of two hundred guests,
to which he went unpowdered. John King, of whom we shall presently
hear, thought it inconsistent of Fox to accept such attentions, which
acceptance he attributes to a desire to please his wife; but Fox
obviously could not decline an invitation from the ruler of the land
whose hospitality he was enjoying, though he felt perfectly free to
refuse to lunch with the brewer Santerre, notorious for his part in the
execution of Louis XVI. According to the Rev. Stephen Weston,
Napoleon complimented Fox as the greatest man of a great nation. Fox,
as was to be expected, combated Napoleon’s accusations against Pitt,
and especially against Windham, of complicity in the infernal-machine
plot of 1800. Thiers gives an account of Fox being taken by Napoleon to
the Industrial Exhibition at the Louvre, when a courtier sarcastically
pointed on a globe to the small space occupied by England, whereupon
Fox, spreading his arms round the globe, said, ‘Yes, but though we all
spring from there we grasp the whole world.’ The truth is that though
Napoleon and Fox happened to be simultaneously at the Exhibition they
did not come across each other.[34] It was Chaptal who conducted Fox
over the Exhibition, and he tells us that Fox admired the specimens,
but thought them too dear for common use, upon which Chaptal took him
to the cutlery department, where Fox filled his pockets with cheap
knives, and then to a watch stall, where he bought half a dozen watches
at 13 f. a piece.[35] He frequented the theatres. Not only, however,
was his French very imperfect, but he committed a great breach of
decorum by not calling on the two minor consuls, Cambacérès and Lebrun.
He had to apologise through Merry. Lebrun overlooked the blunder and
received Fox on his reparatory visit, but Cambacérès was ruffled, and
insisted that Fox should make an unceremonious call as though he had
been before.
We learn this from a secret agent of the Bourbons,[36] who also
tells us that Fox, after his conversation with Napoleon, said, ‘It’s
all up with liberty.’ He could scarcely, however, have needed that
conversation to form this judgment, for Napoleon on the 2nd August
had been elected consul for life. Fox must have felt much more at
home with Lafayette, with whom he spent a fortnight at La Grange,
planting ivy round the newly-erected towers as a memento. He dined
in Paris with Talleyrand and Junot, and went shooting with General
Berthier. Madame Junot thought he looked with his dark grey coat like
a Devonshire farmer, but when talking his countenance was radiant with
intelligence, sagacity, and eloquence.[37] On the 16th September he
attended a sitting of the Tribunat, when the captain on guard, Boyer,
thanked him for having in 1795 obtained the unfettering, and all but
the liberation, of two hundred French officers at Porchester, a benefit
which they would never forget. ‘Our chains were broken,’ said Boyer:
‘we were almost free.’[38] At Versailles, on entering a room which he
was told had long been shut up, he found his own bust, along with those
of Algernon Sidney, Hampden, Chatham, and Washington.[39] But was this
a stratagem of Napoleon to flatter him? Curiously enough, Napoleon on
his dressing-table at the Tuileries had, as the Edgeworths noticed, the
bust not only of Fox but of Nelson, for whom he also entertained great
admiration. He asked Mrs. Damer for a second bust of Fox, a commission
which the lady could not execute till 1815.
Fox was criticised in England for taking tea with Helen Maria Williams,
for it had been erroneously imagined, by Boswell among others, that
she had marched exultantly over the bodies of the Swiss massacred in
1792. He was also twitted with meeting Arthur O’Connor, the United
Irish exile. The fact was that he and Erskine went to dine with
Madame Tallien without knowing that O’Connor would be there. Fox with
great tact made the best of what he considered an unlucky incident by
treating O’Connor exactly like the other guests, but Erskine was more
embarrassed, for as counsel on his trial at Maidstone in 1798 he had
vouched for O’Connor’s loyalty, whereas the latter had since made a
confession of conspiracy.
Fox remained till the 11th November. ‘I have certainly,’ he wrote,
‘seldom spent a time pleasanter than at Paris, but I never in my life
felt such delight in returning home.’ In 1806 he reciprocated the
civilities shown him by sending word to Talleyrand that a Frenchman
called Guillet had called on him and offered to kidnap Napoleon.
Guillet was consequently arrested in Paris, and consigned, not to
prison, but to Bicêtre lunatic asylum, where he died twelve months
afterwards. Canning was guilty of the bad taste, not to say ignominy,
of censuring Fox in Parliament for giving this warning, the generosity
of which was warmly appreciated by Napoleon, as he told Lord Ebrington
at Elba in 1814.
The general election had come rather inopportunely for visits to
Paris, Parliament being dissolved on the 29th June, and the new House
meeting on the 16th November. Elections, moreover, were much less
expeditiously despatched than nowadays. Nevertheless about eighty
M.P.’s, mostly Foxites, as Liberals were then called, but some Pittites
or Ministerialists, went over either before or after the elections.
Some of these M.P.’s are entitled to notice.[40]
Acheson, who in 1807 became Lord Gosford, revisited Paris in 1814,
and became Governor of Canada. Adair, as we have seen, was the friend
of Fox, and indeed was destined to be his last surviving friend. When
visiting St. Petersburg in 1791 his letters home were in cipher, but
forwarded through Whitworth, the ambassador, and he was absurdly
suspected of having been sent thither by Fox to thwart Pitt’s
policy.[41] Barclay, as already mentioned, was a diplomatist, and
had been a prisoner in France. He had just married a German lady at
Hamburg. Baring was the famous banker, and though deaf from his youth
sat and voted in Parliament. Benfield and Boyd not only come together
alphabetically, but had been partners in a London bank which was wound
up in 1799. Paul Benfield went out to India in the Company’s service,
and there made a fortune, partly by trade, partly by fortification
contracts and by loans. He advanced money to the Nawab of the Carnatic,
on conditions for which Burke afterwards, with his customary vehemence,
branded him as ‘a criminal who ought long since to have fattened the
kites with his offal.’ In 1777 he was ordered to quit India, but he
was subsequently reinstated in his post, and returned to Madras. In
1780 he became M.P. for Cricklade, and in 1796 he exchanged that seat
for Shaftesbury, another of his five pocket-boroughs. He was also
recorder for Shaftesbury, such appointments being sometimes conferred
on or sold by corporations to men not even lawyers. In 1796 he assigned
the second seat to Walter Boyd, whose sleeping partner he had become
in 1793. Boyd had had a bank in Paris, and had been an agent for the
French Revolutionary Government in paying for corn from England; but
threatened with arrest in October 1792 he had fled, with his partner
Walter Ker. It was alleged in December 1794 that he had sold to the
French Treasury drafts for ten million francs on London, boasting that
they would be dishonoured; but the Finance Committee, on investigation,
declared the charge unfounded. In 1795 Boyd contracted for an English
loan, but in 1797 his bank fell into difficulties. Boyd had entered
into imprudent speculations, and when he went to Paris, calculating
on the restitution of his property, the change of government there
frustrated his hopes, and he was expelled. In 1799 Pitt, apparently
in order to extricate him from his embarrassments, concluded a second
loan with him without inviting tenders from any other firm, on the plea
that this had been promised him in 1793. A select committee of inquiry
severely condemned this transaction, but an obsequious House of Commons
condoned it. It did not, however, avert Boyd’s bankruptcy. The two
partners were now among the earliest visitors to Paris. They went at
the close of 1801, Boyd still hoping to recover property. They were on
the point of losing their seats for Shaftesbury, Benfield having sold
that borough for £40,000 to a Colonel Wood. We shall see by and by how
they sped in France.
Best, who became successively Serjeant Best, Sir Thomas Best, and Lord
Wynford, reached the judicial bench in 1818, and in 1824 was made
Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas. Originally a Whig, he ended as a
violent Tory. Brodrick was Secretary to the (India) Board of Control.
Burdett speaks for himself, as when, on being greeted at Calais as the
friend of Fox, he exclaimed, ‘No, the friend of liberty.’ In the summer
of 1793 he had attended the clubs and the Convention. Father of Lady
Burdett-Coutts, he began as a demagogue and ended as a reactionary. He
boasted of his election for Middlesex having cost him £100,000. He,
with his friend Bosville, called on Thomas Paine, giving him £240 to
clear off his debts and return to America. He also called, with his old
tutor Lechevalier, on La Réveillère Lepaux, the theophilanthropist, on
whom he made no favourable impression.[42] Burdett, who had witnessed
the early stage of the Revolution with more curiosity than sympathy,
told Arthur Young, who had likewise seen something of that upheaval,
that the Consulate was the completest military despotism that had ever
existed.[43]
Lord George Cavendish became in 1831 Earl of Burlington, and succeeded
his brother as Duke of Devonshire. Alderman Combe had been Sheriff of
London in 1792 and Lord Mayor in 1799. Fox and Sheridan were godfathers
to the son born to him during his mayoralty. Napoleon, according to
Weston, said to him, ‘You were Lord Mayor in a year of dearth. I
know what it is to have to keep people quiet when bread is dear.’
Unsuccessful at a by-election for the City in 1795, he had been elected
in 1796. In 1800 he had convened a common hall to petition for peace.
In 1805 he gave a dinner in his brewery to the Duke and Duchess of
York, the Duke of Cambridge, Lady Anne Fitzroy, and other aristocratic
guests. He ultimately resigned his aldermanic gown and seat in
Parliament and confined himself to his business. He died in 1818.
Cowper was the son of Earl Cowper. Dallas, on returning home from
the service of the East India Company, was the champion of Warren
Hastings, and in 1793 and 1799 had written pamphlets against the French
Government. The Marquis of Douglas, son of the Duke of Hamilton, was
sent in 1807 as Ambassador to St. Petersburg. Ellis was afterwards Lord
Seaford, taking his title from the little Sussex town for which he and
his brother sat. Erskine, of whom we have already heard, became Lord
Chancellor in the thirteen months’ Administration of ‘All the Talents.’
His son David, who accompanied him, succeeded him in the peerage.
Fitzpatrick, the intimate friend of Fox and the uncle of Lord Holland,
was, like Fox, fond both of the classics and of gambling. He was an
amateur actor and a wit. He had made an impressive speech in 1796
in favour of Lafayette, then a prisoner in Austria, and now visited
him at La Grange. In 1806 he became Secretary for War. John Leslie
Foster became an Irish Judge and lived till 1842. Philip Francis, the
Indian councillor commonly regarded as the author of the _Letters
of Junius_, escorted three of his children, Philip, Elizabeth, and
Harriet, who went on to Nice for the benefit of Harriet’s health.
We have no letters from Francis himself, but young Philip tells us
that Bonaparte renewed (?) acquaintance with his father and was very
civil. He likewise tells us that at Madame Bonaparte’s reception he
saw Bonaparte, after watching her play for some time from behind her
chair, drop a purse into her lap as he moved away. Francis, with his
daughter Catherine, was again in Paris in January 1803, apparently from
alarm at the miscarriage of letters from Nice, and while there heard
of Harriet’s death. The Miss Berrys had been very kind to her. Francis
had twice visited Paris in 1791, and his son had learned French at
Rouen in the summer of 1792.[44] Lord Granville Leveson-Gower became
the first Earl Granville and Ambassador to France. His son we all
remember as Foreign Secretary. Graham, the Ripon Graham, was the father
of Sir James Graham the statesman. Hare, who sat from 1781 to 1804 for
the Duke of Devonshire’s borough of Knaresborough, was a wit and a
classical scholar who broke down in his maiden speech and thenceforth
remained silent. He went to Paris for his health or fell ill when
there, and Fox called on the invalid, who died shortly after his
return. Jekyll, too, who had visited France in 1775, was a famous wit
and a great diner-out. He also sat for a pocket-borough from 1787 to
1816, but his wit did not come out in his frequent speeches. The Prince
Regent, fond of good talkers, made him in 1805 his Solicitor-General,
and procured for him a commissionership in lunacy and a mastership in
Chancery.
Johnston had been British Resident at Lucknow, and was an authority on
India. Kinnaird, who in 1803 succeeded to the peerage, being intimately
connected with the Bonapartists, had information in 1817 of Cantillon’s
intended attack on the Duke of Wellington, and sent him an anonymous
warning. He and his wife afterwards went to Paris to give information
on the subject, and the latter was arrested as an accomplice. Kinnaird
naturally complained of this as a violation of a virtual safe-conduct.
He had been expelled from France in the previous year as a political
intriguer. He eventually lived in Italy on an allowance from his
creditors.[45] Long, afterwards Lord Farnborough, had been Secretary
to the Treasury, became a Commissioner of the Treasury in 1804, and
in 1806 was made Secretary for Ireland. He had written pamphlets on
the French Revolution in 1795. Eventually he was known as an art
connoisseur, and George iv. sought his advice on architecture. His
father-in-law, Sir Abraham Hume, accompanied him.
Lord Lovaine in 1830 succeeded his father as Earl of Beverley, and
eventually in 1865, two years before his death, became Duke of
Northumberland. He was the father of the Duke who adopted Irvingism
and married Henry Drummond’s daughter. He went on to Naples with his
newly married wife, Louisa Wortley, and his father, and on their
return they found themselves, as we shall see, prisoners. Macpherson
had in 1785 been Governor-General of India. Sir C. Morgan became
Judge-Advocate. Lord Morpeth became Earl of Carlisle and father of the
distinguished statesman. Nicholl, a frequent speaker and a strenuous
opponent of the war with France, had visited that country in 1788–1789
and had made the acquaintance of the Abbé Raynal and other economists.
Paget, afterwards Sir Edward Paget, son of the Earl of Uxbridge, was
destined, as we shall find, to pay a second and involuntary visit. He
had already served in Flanders, Minorca, and Egypt. He had been one of
the hostages given to the French at Cairo till they embarked in July
1801. He afterwards served in Sicily and the Peninsula and was Governor
of Ceylon. Parnell was the great-uncle of the Home Rule leader. He
became Secretary for War, Paymaster-General, and Treasurer of the Navy,
and in 1841 was created Lord Congleton. Lord Henry Petty, Chancellor
of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-five, and Pitt’s successor
in the representation of Cambridge University (where he defeated
Lord Palmerston), became on his brother’s death in 1809 Marquis of
Lansdowne. After filling various high offices he survived till 1863
to the age of eighty, the Nestor of the House of Lords. Pollen, the
accomplished son of a Surrey clergyman, had by one vote defeated the
Duke of Norfolk’s nominee at Leominster. He afterwards raised a corps
of Fencibles, whom he accompanied to Nova Scotia. On his way home
in 1808, after several years’ travel in Russia and other countries,
he was wrecked and drowned off Memel at the age of thirty-two. His
wife applied for permission to return home through France, but the
favourable answer being delayed, she embarked at Königsberg for
England.[46] St. John, as we have seen, was the companion of Fox, and
afterwards succeeded to a peerage. Scott was the elder son of Lord
Chancellor Eldon, but predeceased his father, leaving a son to succeed
to the title.
John Spencer Smith, page in his youth to Queen Charlotte, was a
diplomatist. He was asked by Napoleon whether he was not Sidney Smith’s
brother, and Napoleon, on being answered in the affirmative, rejoined,
‘He is a good fellow and a good officer.’ Spencer Smith had been
_chargé d’affaires_ at Constantinople from 1796 to 1799, and there
was a legend of his having married a rich Turkish widow. The truth is,
his wife was daughter of the Austrian Baron Ratzbael. While staying at
Venice for her health with her two sons in 1806, she was arrested as
an alleged spy, and was to have been sent on to Valenciennes, but at
Brescia, through the Marquis di Salvo, a friendly Sicilian, she escaped
by a ladder from the window and made her way first to Austria and
Russia, and ultimately to England.[47] Napoleon had at the same time
tried to arrest her husband, then Ambassador at Würtemberg, but burning
his papers he fled in time. Occupying himself with archæology, Smith
ultimately settled at Caen, where he died.
William Smith interests us as the grandfather of Miss Florence
Nightingale, and also of George Eliot’s friend, Barbara Smith, Madame
Bodichon, whose husband introduced the eucalyptus into Algeria. He is
said to have been the only English Nonconformist in the Parliament
of 1802, and his name was given to an Act of 1819, which relieved
Unitarians from speaking of the Trinity in the marriage-service
responses. Lord Hardwicke’s Act of 1752, while repressing irregular
marriages, had inflicted a grievance on Dissenters by requiring
all marriages except those of Quakers and Jews to be solemnised in
churches. Smith, in 1822, tried to follow up his success of 1819 by
introducing civil marriage, but his bill, though passing through
the Commons, was shelved in the Lords, so that it was not till 1836
that Lord John Russell revived and carried it. A London merchant,
Smith had sat for Sudbury and Camelford. On his standing in 1802
for Norwich, where Dissenters were and still are numerous, Thomas
Grenville, foreseeing that he would oust Windham, directed his brother
the Duke of Buckingham to return Windham for St. Mawes. ‘Smith,’ said
Grenville, ‘was cooping up voters in barns and houses, where they are
kept drunk till the day of poll; and in short, trying all the means
of mischief that his fertile talents can supply in the mysteries of
electioneering.’[48] Smith, who was much respected, sat for Norwich
till his death in 1835, and was succeeded by his son, Benjamin Smith.
Sturt, member for Bridport since 1784, was bred to the sea, but came
unexpectedly into possession of the family estate in Dorsetshire. He
retained, however, his liking for the water, had a narrow escape in a
cutter race, and in 1800 was awarded the Humane Society’s medal for
rescuing a man from drowning. He now went to stay at Havre. In 1801 he
had obtained £100 damages from the Marquis of Blandford, son of the
Duke of Marlborough, for the seduction of his wife, Lady Mary Anne
Ashley, daughter of the Earl of Shaftesbury, whom he had married in
1788. The damages were small because Sturt himself had had an intrigue
with Madame Krumholz, a famous harpist. Sturt’s sister, and he himself
doubtless, had known Madame Dubarry on her visit to London in search of
her stolen jewels. His nephew and namesake was an eminent Australian
explorer. His grandson was in 1876 created Lord Alington.
The brothers Thellusson were sons of the Swiss merchant Pierre
Thellusson, who settled in England, married in 1761 Anne Woodford
of Southampton, and died in 1797, leaving a strange will, by which
two-thirds of his property was to accumulate until the death of his
nine then living descendants for the benefit of the eldest male
descendant of his three sons. The sons disputed the will, but it
was pronounced valid, though an Act of 1800 prevented any similar
eccentricities. The testator’s object, moreover, deservedly failed,
for the litigation of 1856–1859 on the construction of the will
devoured a large portion of the inheritance, which meanwhile had not
inordinately increased. In visiting Paris the Thellussons may have
hoped to recover money due to their father, for he had been French
Consul in London, and was denounced by John Oswald at the Jacobin
Club on the 30th September 1792, on the authority of Paine and Frost,
as a vilifier of the Revolution and a friend of Pitt. Thellusson,
Oswald alleged, had refused to forward consignments of arms to France.
If we are to believe a scurrilous pamphlet by Rutledge, Necker, who
was originally clerk to Thellusson’s brother George in Paris, made
the acquaintance of his future wife, Suzanne Curchod, through her
being governess to the children of the Thellussons’ sister, Madame de
Vermeron. Fournier[49] suggests that the testator’s object was not for
the money to accumulate, but to meet the possible claims of descendants
of guillotined Frenchmen who had intrusted funds to him; but this is
obviously far-fetched. The eldest son, who did not visit Paris, was in
1806 created Lord Rendlesham.
Thompson, if, as seems probable, the same man as the M.P. for Midhurst
1807–1818, was the father of General Thomas Perronet Thompson, M.P.,
the free-trade orator. Tierney spent the summer and autumn of 1802 at
Boulogne, but did not go on to Paris. One would have expected him,
however, to search there for traces of his father, who died during the
Revolution after thirty years’ residence in that capital. Tyrrwhitt
was secretary to the Prince of Wales, and was afterwards Usher of the
Black Rod. He was knighted in 1814. Villiers, eventually third Earl of
Clarendon, was famous for telling long-winded stories. He was Envoy
to Portugal from 1808 to 1810, and was uncle to the diplomatist of
our own time. On his honeymoon in 1791, on his way to Rome, he saw
the French king and queen dine in public at the Tuileries. Coulson
Walhope, son of the Earl of Portsmouth, was on his honeymoon trip,
from which, as we shall see, he never returned. Sir Thomas Wallace had
previously visited Italy. He subsequently held various public posts,
and in 1828 became Lord Wallace. Wyndham was brother of Lord Egremont;
his other brother William, ambassador at Florence, had visited Paris
in 1791. Lord Yarmouth, son and successor of the Marquis of Hertford,
was destined to be depicted in _Vanity Fair_ as Lord Steyne and
in _Coningsby_ as Lord Monmouth. He had in 1798 married Maria
Fagniani, putative daughter of John Baptist Fagniani. Her paternity was
claimed both by George Selwyn and the Marquis of Queensberry, commonly
known as ‘Old Q.’ The latter bequeathed his property to Lord and Lady
Yarmouth, a codicil which reduced the amount to £250,000 being declared
invalid.
Eight of these M.P.’s, Erskine, Fitzpatrick, Francis, Jekyll, St. John,
William Smith, Lord R. Spencer, and Thompson had voted with Fox in 1794
for peace with France.
Several ex-M.P.’s may be here mentioned. Passing over Beckford,
of whom we shall speak hereafter, there was Philip Champion de
Crespigny, King’s Proctor, who sat for Sudbury in 1796. Sir Harry
Featherstonehaugh had sat in two Parliaments for Portsmouth. Sir
Abraham Hume, an F.R.S., had represented Petersfield from 1774 to 1780.
He collected old paintings, fossils, and minerals, and ultimately
published a biography of Titian. Sir Elijah Impey, ex-Chief-Justice of
Bengal, had sat for New Romney in 1790. He was solicitous of recovering
money invested in the French funds, and Madame Grand is said to have
welcomed his arrival as likely to facilitate proof of the divorce
required for her marriage to Talleyrand, for Impey had tried Grand’s
suit against her. Sir John Ingilby was elected for East Retford in
1781. Temple Luttrell, who sat for Melbourne Port from 1774 to 1780,
was son of Lord Irnham and brother to the Earl of Carhampton. His
sister Anne, widow of Christopher Horton, had married the Duke of
Cumberland, so that when Luttrell was arrested at Boulogne in 1793 he
was styled George III.’s brother-in-law. In 1789, as a member of the
Jamaica Council, he drew up a remonstrance to Parliament against the
suppression of the slave-trade. He had shown more enlightenment in the
House of Commons in advocating conciliation to the American colonies
and in predicting their indomitable resistance. Matthew Montagu, nephew
and heir of the great society leader Elizabeth Montagu (_née_
Robinson), to whose gatherings the term blue-stocking was first
applied, had sat in Parliament from 1786 to 1790 and was destined to
re-enter it in 1806. In 1820 he succeeded his brother as Lord Rokeby.
Richard Oliver had in 1790 represented the County Limerick, for which
his son now sat; we shall hear of him again. William Maule Ramsay,
younger son of the Earl of Dalhousie, regained his seat in Parliament
in 1805. In 1831 he was created Lord Panmure, and afterwards succeeded
his cousin in the title of Lord Dalhousie. We shall hear of him, too,
again. Henry Seymour, a kinsman of the Duke of Somerset, had been the
penultimate lover of Madame Dubarry.[50] He arrived with his daughter
Georgina, widow of Comte de Durfort, as early as the 1st November
1801, but did not think it necessary or feasible, it seems, to claim
the restitution of his private papers, confiscated on his flight in
1792. Even if he had claimed them he would have missed a bundle of
Madame Dubarry’s love-letters, which had somehow been abstracted, and
was discovered many years afterwards in a Paris bookstall. Possibly
having been registered as an _émigré_, as though a foreigner could
logically be so treated, he feared that to claim his papers might have
entailed a denial of his right to revisit France. His French wife, whom
he had dismissed on good grounds, was probably the ‘Lady’ Seymour who
in 1806 was living on a handsome income at Cleves. Sir Robert Smyth,
who had been unseated at Cardigan in 1775, but had sat for Colchester
in 1785–1790, had, like Luttrell, suffered imprisonment in Paris during
the Revolution, but through Paine, with whom his wife corresponded
while he was in prison, had in 1796 obtained a passport for Hamburg.
He now returned to Paris to open a bank, but making a journey back to
London he suddenly died there in April 1802.
Prospective M.P.’s may here be mentioned. There was Lord Althorp,
who, just of age, was sent by his father Earl Spencer, the great
bibliophile, to France and Italy in order to cease running into
debt and to acquire polish; but he refused to go into Continental
society, was bored by pictures, and came home as unmannerly as ever,
without having even learned French. He nevertheless developed into a
prominent Whig statesman, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the
Grey Cabinet. His accession to the Upper House in 1835 gave William
IV. a pretext for dismissing the ministry. He then retired
into private life. Alexander Baring, son of Sir Francis and afterwards
Lord Ashburton, sat in the House of Commons from 1806 to 1835, was
President of the Board of Trade in 1834, and in 1842 negotiated
the Maine Boundary Treaty with America. A Mr. Benyon was probably
Benjamin Benyon, M.P. for Stafford in 1819. Lord Blayney, who in 1806
was returned for Old Sarum, was shortly destined to revisit France
against his will. Sir Charles Burrell, another visitor, was elected in
the same year for Shoreham. Arthur Harrington Champernowne, elected
for Saltash in 1806, was a friend of Samuel Rogers. Cæsar Colclough,
who, imprisoned in 1793–1794,[51] had apparently remained in France,
became in 1818 M.P. for Wexford. William Congreve, the inventor of the
rocket bearing his name, became in 1812 member for Gatton, and in
1814 succeeded to his father’s baronetcy. Sir Arthur Chichester sat
for Carrickfergus in 1812. General Sir Charles Grogan Craufurd, son
of Sir Alexander and nephew of Quintin Craufurd, translated Tieck’s
_History of the Seven Years’ War_, and in 1800 had married the
Dowager-Duchess of Newcastle. Sent as Commissioner to the Austrian
army, he was wounded, and resigned his post in favour of his brother
Robert, M.P. for East Retford in 1806. He died in 1821.
Lord Duncannon, who in 1844 succeeded his father as Earl of
Bessborough, but in 1802 was only just of age, supported Catholic
Emancipation, introduced O’Connell to the House of Commons when he
refused to take the oath, and helped to frame the Reform Bill. In
1831 he was Commissioner of Woods and Forests; in 1834 he was called
up to the Lords, and from 1846 till his death in 1848 he was Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland. Robert Ferguson of Raith was a Scottish member
in 1806–1807 and again in 1831–1841. Of him we shall hear, not to his
credit. Hudson Gurney, a Norwich banker, of a famous Quaker family, had
an uncle Bartlett Gurney, F.S.A., who in 1796 all but defeated Windham
at Norwich. Bartlett had turned Unitarian, but in 1803 was buried with
the Quakers. Hudson also renounced Quakerism, or rather Quakerism
renounced him, on account of his contributing to the war patriotic fund
of 1804, yet friendly relations were afterwards revived. He sat in six
parliaments, and died in 1864 at the age of eighty-nine. I remember
seeing him as a corpulent old man, who had to be lifted in and out of
his carriage.
William Haldimand, son of a Swiss merchant settled in London, was so
precocious a financier that at twenty-five years of age--seven years
after his Paris visit--he became a director of the Bank of England.
His brother, who accompanied him, apparently died young. William
represented Ipswich from 1820 to 1826. He was munificent in his gifts
to charities and to the Greek war of liberation. In 1828 he retired
to Lausanne, and on his death in 1862 bequeathed most of his property
to a blind asylum there. His sister was Mrs. Marcet, the friend of
Sydney Smith, and well known as a populariser of science and political
economy. Hugh Hamersley, M.P. for Helston in 1812, will come under
another category. Richard Heber, elder brother of the bishop, and a
great book-collector, was member for Oxford University from 1821 to
1826. Sir Thomas Liddell, elected for Durham in 1806, became Lord
Ravensworth and father of a Dean of Christchurch. James Mackintosh, who
in 1813, on his return from Bombay, where he had been recorder, was
elected for Nairn, and retained the seat till his death in 1832, was
the author of the famous answer to Burke. Napoleon, unaware that he had
since ‘abhorred, abjured, and for ever renounced the French Revolution,
the greatest scourge of the world, and the chief stain upon human
annals,’ complimented Mackintosh on his pamphlet,--or rather intended
to have done so--for the order of presentations having been altered he
addressed the compliment to some other Englishman. Shortly after his
return Mackintosh defended Peltier, prosecuted for libelling Napoleon.
Viscount Maitland, afterwards Earl of Lauderdale, was returned for
Camelford in 1806. William (afterwards Sir William) Oglander sat for
Bodmin. Viscount Ossulston sat for Berwick in 1820. Samuel Romilly,
who in 1806 became Solicitor-General and M.P. for Queensborough, was
the great advocate of the mitigation of the penal code, so as to limit
capital punishment to cases of murder. He had seen Paris in August
1789. Sir William Rowley represented Suffolk in 1812, Sir Thomas
Turton, Southwark in 1810–1820, and Sir Walter Stirling, St. Ives in
1807. William Young, whose father wrote a history of Athens, sat for
St. Mawes and became Governor of Tobago.
There was a perfect swarm of peers and peers’ sons;[52] the elderly
or middle-aged anxious to see how Paris looked after the Revolution,
the younger eager to make acquaintance with it. Some, moreover, were
on their way to Italy, for Lemaitre found at Naples, in February
1803, Lords Aberdeen, Mount Cashell, Grantham, Althorp, Brooke, and
Beverley, besides Sir Charles Douglas, Sir Thomas Tancred, and the
Cheshire Egertons, with Lady Hester Stanhope in their charge. The
Dowager-Duchess of Cumberland, whose marriage led to the Royal Marriage
Act, a widow since 1790, was also on her way to Nice, but stayed a
month in Paris for medical advice. According to the _Times_ she
paid a hundred guineas a month for second-rate apartments, and not
having been presented at the Court of St. James’s was not received by
Madame Bonaparte, although previously to the Revolution she had been
treated at Metz as a royal personage.
The Duke of Bedford interests us chiefly as the father of Lord John
Russell, then a boy of eleven, who was left behind with his two
brothers at school. The Duke was not a stranger to France. In March
1788 he and his wife, the latter on the verge of her confinement,
were staying at Montpellier and waiting for that event. Her father,
Viscount Torrington, who was apparently living in Paris, wrote to Louis
XVI.’s Minister of the Household to ask what should be done
to certify the expected birth. This was of some importance, for the
traveller’s elder brother was unlikely to marry. The Minister advised
him to call in two local notaries, adding that it might be well to get
a certificate also from the British Embassy at Paris.[53] The child was
born on the 13th May, and became heir to the Duke of Bedford, for his
father had in March 1802 succeeded his brother, who bequeathed £5000
to Fox. He had learned French when a youth at Orleans, together with
the Duke of Cleveland, and the Duke of Dorset then took them both to
Versailles, where Marie Antoinette played billiards with them. Both
went on to Rome where they went to Cardinal York’s weekly receptions.
Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh was now his travelling companion. The
Duke’s arrival on the 20th April 1803 was considered a sign of the
duration of peace, but he apparently went over to fetch the Duchess
of Gordon and her daughter Lady Georgina, whom he, a widower since
October 1801, took for his second wife five weeks after his return.
Georgina had been engaged to his deceased brother, who left her a
lock of his hair, and her mother made her go into mourning for him,
saying, ‘It is a feather in a girl’s cap to have been intended for
the Duke of Bedford.’[54] The Duchess was reported to have said that
she hoped to see Napoleon breakfast in Ireland, dine in London, and
sup at Gordon Castle, but this is a manifest invention. There may be
more truth in the story that she obtained recruits in 1794 for her
son’s Highland regiment (now the 2nd Gordon Highlanders) by placing
a shilling between her lips to be kissed by them, yet this seems a
variation of the Duchess of Devonshire’s kiss to a Westminster elector.
She died in 1812. As for her daughter Georgina, who had an illness in
Paris, she was a great dancer, and frequently danced, as Napoleon told
Lord Ebrington at Elba in 1814, with his step-son Eugène Beauharnais.
The _Times_, indeed, insinuated that she set her cap at the
step-father himself. ‘It is certain,’ said that journal on the 12th
January 1803,
‘that some of our travelling Nudes of Fashion intended to
conquer the Conqueror of the Continent. What glory would it
have brought to this Country, if it could have boasted of
giving a Mistress, or a Wife, to the First CONSUL. How
pretty would sound Lady G---- (we mean Lady GODIVA)
BONAPARTE?’
Wraxall’s story that the Duchess wanted to wed her daughter to Eugène
is confirmed by Maurice Dupin, George Sand’s father, who met them at a
dinner-party, and wrote to his mother that they were in love with each
other, but that Napoleon would not listen to the match. Georgina, he
added, was reputed a beauty, but like Eugène lacked a good mouth and
teeth.[55]
The Duke of Newcastle, afterwards famous for justifying the eviction at
Newark of forty tenants who refused to vote for his nominee by saying,
‘May I not do what I will with my own?’ was destined to give Gladstone
his first seat in the House of Commons; which Gladstone, however,
resigned in 1846 on joining Peel in free-trade. The Duke was yet only a
youth of seventeen, in charge of his step-father Sir Charles Craufurd,
who has been already mentioned. The Duke of Somerset deserves notice
only as the father of the Duke of our time, who was first Lord of the
Admiralty and an agnostic writer.
The Marchioness of Donegal was accompanied by her sisters Mary and
Philippa Godfrey, friends of Thomas Moore. The Marquis and Marchioness
of Tweeddale (she was daughter of Lord Lauderdale) took with them their
young son, Lord James Hay.
Of the Earls, Aberdeen--Byron’s ‘travelled thane, Athenian
Aberdeen’--was the future Prime Minister of 1852. His six weeks in
Paris were said to have cost him £3000. Lady Bessborough had been
at school at Versailles before the Revolution, and had been noticed
by Marie Antoinette. Beverley, a son of the Duke of Northumberland,
had been created a peer in 1790. He had distinguished himself by his
courage during the riots of 1780, and we have already heard of his
son. Cadogan had divorced his wife in 1796, so that she travelled
by herself. Camelford had refused to illuminate for the peace, and
his house had consequently been sacked. He pretended in 1801 to be
an American named Rushworth, but was arrested, and after some days
expelled. In March 1803 he again landed at Calais, but was discovered
and apprehended, for he was said to have boasted in London that he
would kill Bonaparte. He wrote, however, from the Temple prison an
abject letter to Napoleon, pleading that his mother would die if she
heard of his arrest. He also threw out of the window a letter to
Lord Grenville, which the picker-up was requested to forward, but it
was intercepted. He was sent to Boulogne and shipped to England.[56]
Jackson was afraid of his committing suicide, so that he must have
shown symptoms of the mental derangement which led in 1804 to a fatal
duel with Captain Best. He was reputed to be the best shot in England.
Carhampton had in 1796 been commander-in-chief in Ireland. It was
reported that incensed at having, in company with other English, to
wait three hours in an anteroom without chairs, before being received
by Talleyrand, he went next day to the Tuileries in colonel’s uniform
without epaulettes. Bonaparte asked him therefore whether he was a
militia officer. ‘No,’ he proudly replied. ‘Then what is your rank in
the army?’ ‘I was Commander-in-Chief when the French army under General
Hoche endeavoured to land in Ireland.’[57] It was scarcely fair of
Carhampton thus to retaliate on Napoleon for Talleyrand’s discourtesy.
Cavan had just returned from Egypt, where he had commanded a division
under Abercromby. The Cholmondeleys had been in Paris in 1791, their
son and heir being born there. We shall hear presently of their
equipages. The Countess (afterwards Marchioness) Conyngham is notorious
for her _liaison_ with George IV. Egremont was long a prominent figure
in London society, but is more deserving of notice as one of the
earliest patrons of Turner the artist. Elgin, of marble fame, was on
his way home from the Constantinople embassy. We shall have to speak
hereafter of his wife and her paramour Ferguson. Fife, afterwards a
distinguished general in the Peninsular War, wounded at Talavera and
Cadiz, was great-uncle of the present Duke of Fife. Fitzwilliam had in
1794 been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, where his three months’ rule was
looked back to with regret. Lady Granard, sister of the Earl of Moira,
on her honeymoon in 1780 had seen Cardinal York, and had also witnessed
a review by Frederic II. Guilford was the son of the Lord North who
lost us our American colonies. He stayed seven months, and would have
remained longer but for the rupture.
Lady Kenmare (Mary, daughter of Michael Aylmer) was known for her
Sunday evening receptions in London, and for a romantic story of her
husband’s attachment to her before his first wife’s death, or even
before his first marriage. A Gerald Aylmer, who also visited Paris,
was probably her kinsman. The Countess of Kingston, who must not be
confused with the Duchess of Kingston, the notorious bigamist, was
accompanied by two unmarried daughters, probably also by her other
daughter, Lady Mount Cashell. One of these daughters had in 1798 been
the occasion of a duel in which her brother shot his adversary. Lady
Lanesborough, daughter of the Earl of Belvedere, had, as we shall
see, found a second and plebeian husband. Lauderdale had witnessed
and sympathised with the Revolution, Dr. (father of Sir John) Moore
then accompanying him as physician. His Whig opinions had made him
lose his seat as a Scottish representative peer in the House of Lords,
and his anxiety for the maintenance of peace made Whitworth shut
his door to him as one of ‘our rascally countrymen.’[58] His son,
moreover, a youth of eighteen, styled himself ‘citizen’ Maitland.[59]
Minto, the Gilbert Elliot who, ward of David Hume, was at school
with Mirabeau, and was consequently sent over in 1790 to bribe him
into keeping France neutral in our threatened quarrel with Spain
over Nootka Sound, had been Governor of Corsica. He was one of the
earliest visitors, was on his way home from the Vienna Embassy, and was
destined to be Viceroy of India. Mount Edgecumbe was an amateur actor
and musical composer. His wife,[60] with their young daughter Emma
Sophia, afterwards Countess Brownlow and writer of _Reminiscences of
a Septuagenarian_, had previously been to Spa, where she met the
Duchess of Gordon, the Conynghams, the Bradfords, Charles and Lady
Charlotte Greville, and Dudley and Lady Susan Ryder. She had a serious
illness in Paris. Lord Oxford had a great admiration for Napoleon
and also for Murat. His wife, who required change of climate, was
very handsome, though not rivalling Madame Tallien. Pembroke was the
father of Sidney Herbert, the statesman of our time, and in 1806 was
Ambassador at Vienna. He stayed three months, and being an excellent
observer and a patient listener, his account of Paris was eagerly
sought for. Shaftesbury, uncle of the philanthropist of our day, took
his wife, a daughter of Sir John Webb, and their daughter. Winchilsea
was the father of the fanatical Orangeman who in 1829 fought a duel,
on account of Catholic Emancipation, with Wellington, but happily
without bloodshed. Viscount Falkland, less fortunate, was killed in
a duel in 1809. Viscountess Maynard was the notorious Nancy Parsons
whom Lord Maynard had married in 1766, in spite of her antecedents.
She had been a widow since 1775, and had been the mistress of the late
Duke of Bedford, who, by his will, continued his annuity to her of
£2000. Lord Monck, who took over his wife and two daughters, was the
grandfather of the Viceroy of Canada. He died shortly after his return,
in June 1802. Viscount Strangford was afterwards Ambassador at Lisbon,
Stockholm, Constantinople, and St. Petersburg, and translated Camoëns’
_Lusiad_. Moore, Rogers, and Croker were among his friends.
We now come to the lowest grade of the peerage. Barrington, leaving a
wife behind, but taking a mistress with him, probably went, from what
we afterwards hear, to escape his English creditors; but we shall find
that he got into debt in France. Blayney has been already mentioned
among prospective M.P.’s, for, being an Irish peer like Palmerston, he
was eligible for the Lower House. Cahir, who crossed over as early as
June 1801, was afterwards created Earl of Glengall; he remained till
April 1802. Invitations to Madame Bonaparte’s receptions were commonly
obtained through his wife’s good offices. Lady Carington was the wife
of one of Pitt’s banker peers. There was a rumour that Pitt intended
to marry her eldest daughter. It was her grandson who, in 1872, having
horsewhipped Grenville Murray on the steps of the Reform Club on
account of a scurrilous article on his family in _Broad Arrow_,
was convicted of assault at Clerkenwell sessions, but was simply bound
over to keep the peace. Murray shortly afterwards became an outlaw.
Cloncurry in 1859 published his reminiscences. He was accompanied by
his three sisters, of whom more anon. He dined with Napoleon, and made
acquaintance with Kosciusko, Helen Williams, and Madame Récamier.
He invited the two Emmets to dinner the day before Robert’s return
to Ireland, from which he could not be dissuaded. Cloncurry in the
winter of 1802 proceeded to Italy, where he presented a telescope to
Cardinal York, who gave him one of his medals, and he returned home
after the rupture by way of Germany.[61] Lady Crofton, widow of Sir
Thomas Crofton, was a baroness in her own right. Her daughter Frances
accompanied her. Grantham, who was on his way to Italy, in 1833
succeeded his aunt in the De Grey earldom. He was first Lord of the
Admiralty in 1834–1835, and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1841–1844,
was a collector of sculptures, was President of the Institution of
British Architects, and published _Characteristics of the Duke
of Wellington_. He was uncle of the present Marquis of Ripon,
ex-Viceroy of India. Holland, who had seen Paris in 1791, protested in
1815 against Napoleon’s captivity at St. Helena, and Lady Holland, the
divorced wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, forwarded the prisoner books,
in gratitude for which kindness Napoleon sent her an antique diamond
presented to him by the Pope. Lady Holland’s receptions were afterwards
famous. Hutchinson had succeeded Sir Ralph Abercromby in Egypt. On his
brother’s death he became Earl of Donoughmore. In the autumn of 1789
he had applied at Paris for an escort to go and rejoin his family near
Amiens, disturbances having broken out there, but was told that order
had been restored. He was Lafayette’s aide-de-camp from 1789 to 1792.
Northwick was an art connoisseur. Stawell was Surveyor of Customs for
the Port of London.
Of the eldest sons or other successors of peers, Eardley deserves
notice on account of the history of his family. Sampson Gideon, a
Portuguese Jew, made a fortune in London, and as a reward for financial
services obtained a baronetcy, not for himself, for a Jew was then
deemed ineligible, but for his son, then at Eton, at the age of
fifteen. That son, Sampson the second, was brought up a Christian by
his English mother, and was nicknamed ‘Mr. Pitt’s Jew.’ In 1789 he was
made an Irish peer as Lord Eardley, a title explained by his having
married, in 1766, Maria, the daughter of Sir John Eardley Wilmot,
Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas. He was elected first for Coventry
and afterwards for Wallingford, but retired in 1802. He had two sons,
Sampson and William; the former was the visitor to Paris, but both
died before their father, with whom the peerage expired in 1824. His
three daughters married Lord Say and Sele, Sir Culling Smith, M.P.,
and Colonel Childers. Childers, the well-known member of the Gladstone
Cabinet, was doubly descended from Pitt’s Jew, for his father was an
Eardley Childers, and his mother a Culling Smith. Colonel Molesworth
was drowned with his wife on his way to the Cape in 1815.
The younger sons of peers comprised Arthur Annesley (son of Viscount
Annesley), Lord William Bentinck, afterwards Viceroy of India (Duke of
Portland), William Brodrick (Viscount Midleton), Lord John Campbell
(Duke of Argyll), Lord George Cavendish (Duke of Devonshire), Robert
Clifford (Lord Clifford), Colonel Robert Clive (Lord Clive), Edward
Spencer Cowper (Earl Cowper), Keppel Craven (Lord Craven), Francis
Cust (Earl Brownlow), Henry Dillon (Viscount Dillon), Lord Robert
Stephen Fitzgerald (Duke of Leinster), Lord Archibald Hamilton (Duke of
Hamilton), William Hill (Lord Berwick), John King (Lord King), George
Knox (Lord Northland), Lord Frederic Montagu (Duke of Manchester),
Augustus John Francis Moreton (Earl of Ducie), Arthur Paget (Lord
Uxbridge), Henry Pierrepont (Viscount Newark), Lord Arthur Somerset
(Duke of Beaufort), John Talbot (Baroness Talbot de Malahide), and John
Trevor (Viscount Hampden). Charles James Fox, Edward Paget, General
Fitzpatrick, Lord Robert Spencer, and Charles Wyndham, have been
already mentioned as M.P.’s.
There were also several daughters of peers. Lady Elizabeth Foster,
widow of John Thomas Foster, M.P., was daughter of the Earl of
Bristol, and there were strange stories of her relations with the
Duke of Devonshire. According to the generally accepted version[62]
the Duchess, famous in election annals, was forced by her parents, at
sixteen years of age, to marry the Duke, though she was in love with
the Duke of Hamilton, who killed himself in despair. She refused,
however, to allow him the rights of a husband, and Lady Elizabeth
Foster, living harmoniously with them, had several children by the
Duke, who were brought up under an assumed name. In 1789, however, the
Duchess losing £100,000 at play at Spa, the Duke went over and paid
her debts on condition of consummating the marriage. The result was
the birth of a son and heir at Paris in January 1790. The Duchess died
in 1806, and three years afterwards Lady Elizabeth agreed to marry
the widower. Gainsborough painted her as Lady Foster in the picture
mysteriously stolen in London in 1875 and recovered in America in
1900. She was now accompanied to Paris by her legitimate son, Augustus
John Foster, who was just of age. In 1811 he was sent as Envoy to
Washington, in 1814 to Copenhagen, and in 1824 to Turin. In 1831 he
received a baronetcy. Lady Isabel Style, daughter of Lord Powerscourt,
and widow since 1774 of Sir Charles Style, had been a prisoner in
France in 1793, and now revisited France. Lady Anne Saltmarsh was
daughter of the Earl of Fingall. Lady Hester Stanhope, daughter of Earl
Stanhope, who was not yet her uncle Pitt’s housekeeper, was, to avoid a
stepmother, travelling with the Egertons, probably Sir Peter Warburton
Egerton.
There was also Lady Mary Whaley, _née_ Lawless, the widow since
1800 of an Irish M.P., nicknamed Jerusalem Whaley, for, having said
in joke that he was going to Jerusalem, he won a bet (of £15,000 it
is said) that he would really go thither. At sixteen years of age
this Thomas Whaley, inheriting £15,000 from his father, was sent to
Paris with a ‘bear-leader’ to learn French. He there bought a town and
country house, kept a pack of hounds, entertained company, and gambled,
losing £14,000 at a sitting. He returned to Ireland, compounded with
his creditors, and squandered the Jerusalem bet money. He revisited
Paris in 1791, and witnessed the King’s return from Varennes. He became
a cripple for life by jumping from a drawing-room window on to the
roof of a passing hackney-coach, or, as we should now say, cab.[63]
He gambled at Newmarket, Brighton, and London, and eventually settled
in the Isle of Man, where he brought up an illegitimate family.[64]
He married, in January 1800, Lady Mary Catherine Lawless, daughter
of Lord Cloncurry, but died in the following November. His widow
lived till 1831. She was accompanied by her sister, Lady Valentia
Lawless, who afterwards married Sir Francis Burton, Lord Conyngham’s
half-brother, and by Lady Charlotte, who became Lady Dunsany. There
was likewise a Lady Giffard, probably Lady Charlotte Courtenay,
daughter of the Earl of Devon, who in 1788 had married Thomas Giffard
of Chillington, Staffordshire. Lady Charlotte Greville, _née_
Charlotte Bentinck, daughter of the Duke of Portland, was there with
her husband Charles Greville, father of the diarist. Miss Caroline
Vernon, maid of honour to the Queen, was a daughter of Lord Vernon and
died in 1815. Lady Catherine Beauclerk was daughter of the Duke of St
Albans.
The baronets included, besides several already mentioned, William Call,
John Chichester, Simon Clark, John Coghill, William Cooper, James
Craufurd, Herbert Croft, Thomas Clavering, Michael Cromie, George
Dallas, James De Bathe, Beaumont Dixie, N. Dukinfield, Alexander Grant,
John Honywood, John Hope, John Ingilby, William James, Richard Jodrell,
Thomas Lavie, John Morshead, George Prescott, George Shipley, Charles
Talbot, Thomas Tancred, Grenville Temple, Henry Tichborne, Thomas Webb,
Robert John Wilmot, and Charles Wolseley.
Some of these will be mentioned hereafter. At present we need speak
only of Sir Charles Wolseley, who, like Sir Francis Burdett, boxed the
political compass. He witnessed, and apparently took part in, the
capture of the Bastille. In 1819 the Birmingham Radicals nominated
him their so-called ‘legislatorial attorney,’ and in the following
year he was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for a seditious
speech at Stockport. He ultimately gave up political life, embraced
Catholicism in 1837, and died in 1846.
Then there were also sons of baronets: William Abdy, who succeeded to
the title in July 1803, Ashby Apreece, who predeceased his father in
1807, Alexander Don, Charles Jerningham, Raymond Pelly, John Wombwell,
formerly a merchant at Alicante, Ralph Woodford, afterwards Governor of
Bermuda, John Broughton, and William Oglander, who, already mentioned,
succeeded to the title in 1806, while there were two future baronets,
Thomas Hare and Charles Cockerell.
Next to legislators and aristocrats, military men were the most
numerous class of visitors. Some passed through Paris on their way home
from Egypt, which had just been evacuated, and others were actuated
not so much by curiosity or love of dissipation as by professional
duty, for they did not know how soon they might not have to encounter
Bonaparte’s legions. Of this swarm of visitors I can only mention a
few. There were the two sons of Sir Ralph Abercromby, who had been
killed at Alexandria. The elder was General George already mentioned,
who, eventually succeeding his mother in the peerage, became Lord
Abercromby. The younger, Colonel Sir John, served with distinction, but
died at forty-four years of age without reaching the highest grade.
Sir Charles Ashworth became a general. Captain Benjamin Bathurst,
son of the Bishop of Norwich, then eighteen years of age, was the
diplomatist who in 1809 mysteriously disappeared on returning from a
mission to Vienna. Napoleon was accused of having him murdered, but the
probability is that he was killed for the sake of his valuables by the
ostler of a German inn who was afterwards unaccountably affluent. His
daughter Rose, at the age of seventeen, was drowned at Rome in 1824 by
her horse slipping backwards into the Tiber, and his brother in a race
at Rome was killed by a fall from his horse. Three disasters in one
family.
William Bosville, commonly styled Colonel, though he had only been a
lieutenant in the Guards, must be ranked with soldiers for want of any
other suitable category, though he was more wit than soldier. He had,
however, served in the American War. He dined every Sunday with Horne
Tooke, and, as we have seen, accompanied Sir F. Burdett, whose election
he had zealously promoted. He dressed like a courtier of George II.’s
time. He visited Cobbett in prison and presented him with £1000. Paine,
on reaching the United States, sent a message to ‘my good friend
Bosville.’ Francis Burke, who had been in the Franco-Irish brigade,
became a British general.
General James Callender had served in the Seven Years’ War and had been
Secretary to the Paris Embassy under the Duke of Dorset, who, on his
recall in October 1789, deputed him to wind up his accounts. He had
more recently been Inspector-General at Naples, and had been sent by
Nelson to the Ionian Islands, where he remained till the peace. While
in Paris he made the acquaintance of a Madame Sassen, a German, and
on being detained he sent her to Scotland with a power of attorney,
styling her his beloved wife, to see after his affairs. When released,
however, he denied having married her, and the Court of Session
declared the marriage not proven, but awarded the lady £300 damages.
This latter decision was annulled by the House of Lords, and the lady
passed the rest of her life in fruitless litigation. Callender, who
married three times, died in 1832 at the age of eighty-seven. The
French Police Register describes him, the reason why is not obvious,
as a swindler. On succeeding in 1810 to the estates of his cousin, Sir
Alexander Campbell, he assumed the baronetcy also, but without right
to it.[65] General John Francis Cradock had served in India and in
Egypt, was destined to serve in Spain, and in 1819 became Lord Howden.
He altered the spelling of his name to Caradoc. His son, aide-de-camp
to Wellington in Paris in 1814, and afterwards military _attaché_
at the Paris Embassy, there married in 1830 the widow of the Russian
General Bagration, an ex-mistress of Metternich. In July 1830 he
was deputed by the Duke of Orleans to follow the fugitive Charles
X. and ask him to confide to him his grandson that he might
be proclaimed king. Charles was inclined to consent, but the child’s
mother, the Duchess of Berri, dissuaded him, not thinking that her
boy would be in safe keeping. On Caradoc reporting his failure Louis
Philippe accepted the crown.
James Ferrier, brother of Susan the novelist, had figured in the
siege of Seringapatam, and was questioned about it by Napoleon,
always interested in India, which he thought he should have conquered
but for Sir Sidney Smith and Acre. ‘When he speaks,’ Ferrier wrote
home to his sister, ‘he has one of the finest expressions possible.’
General Dalrymple had visited Paris in 1791. General Henry Edward Fox
was a brother of the great statesman. He was on his way home from
Egypt, where he had refused to allow Lord Cavan to ship Cleopatra’s
needle.[66] Cavan had dug it out of the sand of centuries and set it
upright, but Fox seems to have thought Cavan’s love of antiquities an
absurd craze, and the needle consequently had to wait seventy years
for transport to England. Afterwards Commander-in-Chief in Ireland,
Ambassador at Palermo, and Governor of Portsmouth, Fox was accompanied
by his son Stephen, also destined for diplomacy. General George
Higginson, who married in 1825 a daughter of Lord Kilmorey, lived till
1866, and his widow reached the age of ninety-eight, surviving till
1890. General Baron Charles Hompesch was a Hanoverian in the English
service. Very shortsighted, in 1806 he brushed against a man named
Richardson and two ladies in a London street, and a duel ensued, in
which his antagonist was wounded. On his death in 1822, at the age of
sixty-six, he could boast of having taken part in three sieges, seven
pitched battles, and thirteen minor engagements. Robert Lovelace,
probably a son of Robert Lovelace of Clapham, was reminded by Napoleon
that he bore the name of Richardson’s hero. Napoleon at eighteen
had devoured _Clarissa Harlowe_, but at St. Helena he found it
unreadable.
General John Money served in America under Burgoyne, and not finding
employment at home had fought for the Belgian insurgents in 1788, had
joined the French army in 1792, and had witnessed the capture of the
Tuileries. The German Œlsner, who met him at Verdun in October 1792,
describes him as a thoroughly English Hotspur (_degenkopf_).[67]
In 1761, aide-de-camp to General Townshend, he was famed for standing
on a horse’s back without a saddle and then leaping with it at full
speed over a five-barred gate. Hyde Park was the scene of his feats of
horsemanship. He had a perilous balloon ascent in 1785, being nearly
drowned in the North Sea. George Monro, probably a son of Sir Harry
Monro, M.P., was apparently the Captain George Monro who was sent
to Paris in September 1792 to send reports after the suspension of
diplomatic relations.[68] He had to pretend to fraternise with the
British Jacobins in Paris, but he became suspected and left in January
1793. In 1796 he complained that though promised a handsome provision
no fresh post had been conferred on him.[69] General George Morgan, who
went on to Nice, had been Commander-in-Chief in India, Sir Hildebrand
Oakes, afterwards Governor of Malta, had served in America and Egypt.
Captain Charles John O’Hara was doubtless one of the illegitimate sons
of the general who should have married Mary Berry, and who was captured
by the French at Toulon in 1793. Captain Samuel Owens was an equerry to
George III. Major William Norman Ramsay had served in Egypt,
was afterwards in the Peninsula, and was killed at Waterloo. Colonel
John Rowley, of the Engineers, was an F.R.S. and inspector-general of
fortifications. He became a general in 1821, and died in 1824. General
Sir Charles Shipley, a distinguished military engineer, became in 1813
Governor of Granada. Colonel Edward Stack, a native of Kerry, had
served in the Franco-Irish brigade before the Revolution, had been
aide-de-camp to Louis XV., and had accompanied Lafayette to
America. He was on board Paul Jones’s _Bonhomme Richard_ when it
captured the _Serapis_. He belonged to the orders of St. Louis and
Cincinnatus. He joined the _émigrés_ at Coblentz, but afterwards
entered the English army, in which he rose during his detention in
France to be major-general. He was arrested as a spy in May 1803,
but was liberated on parole. If his age is correctly registered as
forty-five in 1802, he was seventy-six at his death at Calais in 1833.
Captain Francis Tulloch, of the Artillery, had in singular
circumstances made the acquaintance of Chateaubriand. Converted to
Catholicism in London in 1790 by the Abbé Nagot, he had been induced to
resign his commission and to sail with Nagot and three other priests
from St. Malo for Baltimore, in order to become a priest and settle
in America. Chateaubriand, a fellow-passenger, remonstrated with him,
urging that, however ardent a Catholic, he ought not to abandon his
family and his profession. The young man seemed to listen to him,
but the priests recovered their ascendency, and on reaching port he
left with them, not even bidding Chateaubriand farewell. He must,
nevertheless, have changed his purpose, for in 1802 he was still in
the army, and he eventually married and had seven children, two of
whom wedded French noblemen. In 1822 Tulloch renewed acquaintance with
Chateaubriand, then Ambassador at London. In 1827 there were family
differences among his children, which gave rise to recriminatory
pamphlets. Lastly, there was John Alexander Woodford, son of Sir Ralph
Woodford (afterwards Governor of Trinidad, Envoy to the Hanse towns,
and to Denmark). He was apparently the Colonel Woodford who in 1815
began digging up the bones of the killed at the battle of Agincourt,
exciting such a commotion in the district that the French Government
asked the Duke of Wellington to stop him.
Naval officers had less inducement to visit Paris, yet a number of
them figure on the register. One of them, moreover, was a claimant to
a French dukedom. Philippe d’Auvergne, a Jersey man, son of a navy
lieutenant, had been adopted in 1788 by the last Duc de Bouillon, a
descendant of Turenne, as a remote kinsman and heir (his only son being
an idiot), in preference to nearer relations whom he disliked.[70]
The fascinating young sailor, whose elder brother had declined the
heirship, lived with the old duke till the Revolution, when he rejoined
the English navy, and from his station at Montorgueil in Jersey
superintended the despatch of men and money to assist the Chouans.
The duke having died in 1802, d’Auvergne now went over to try and
recover his confiscated estates, but the French Government arrested
him in September 1802 on the ground of his co-operation in the civil
war. If a French duke he was of course liable to punishment, but if
still or again a British subject he could not be prosecuted for the
performance of professional duties. Merry, his letter to whom was at
first suppressed, claimed him as a British subject, and he was released
after about a week from the Temple but expelled. Major Dumaresq, a
fellow Jersey man, had been arrested with him. D’Auvergne rose to be
an admiral, but the Congress of Vienna rejected his pretensions to the
dukedom. His romantic career ended in 1816 at the age of seventy-one.
Admiral Tollemache (afterwards Lord Huntingtower) had an adventure at
Paris. He was playing billiards when a French bully nudged his arm
and spoilt his stroke. On the man doing this a second time Tollemache
pitched him out of the window and then, warned by the landlord, ran
for his life.[71] Other actual or prospective admirals included Sir
Eliab Harvey, who fought at Trafalgar, Francis Ommaney, William Hoste,
Robert Dudley Oliver, John (afterwards Sir John) Talbot, John Temple,
Sir John West, Sir James Hawkins Whitshed, and Sir Edward Berry.
Nelson, on being condoled with by George III. on the loss of
his right arm, presented Berry as his right hand, and it was Berry who
caught him in his arms when wounded at the battle of the Nile.
But the most interesting and tragic naval visitor was Captain John
Wesley Wright, an Irishman and secretary to Sir Sidney Smith. He had
in 1796 been captured and imprisoned with Smith, and had escaped
with him by means of a forged order. He was sent in March 1803 as an
_attaché_ to the Paris Embassy, albeit Whitworth pointed out to
his Government that this was a very injudicious selection. Whether he
remained at the embassy till Whitworth’s departure is not clear, but in
May 1804 he was again captured off the coast, where he had been landing
royalist insurgents. He was consequently regarded as an accomplice
of Georges in the conspiracy to assassinate Napoleon, and was again
confined in the Temple. Gravina, the Spanish Ambassador, interceded
for his being treated as a prisoner of war, but Napoleon replied that
as a criminal he could not be exchanged for an honest French officer,
though he might be given up to the British Government to be dealt with
as it chose, he being convinced that Lord Hawkesbury (afterwards Lord
Liverpool) was alone responsible for having thrice landed conspirators
against his life. This overture, if indeed it was an overture, came
to nothing, and at Georges’ trial Wright was brought up as a witness.
He was threatened with sentence of death by court-martial if he
refused to give testimony, but he insisted on the status of a prisoner
of war, responsible solely to his own Government for his acts. In
October 1805 he attempted to escape, whereupon Napoleon ordered the
‘wretched assassin’ to be immured in a cell in lieu of having the run
of the building. On the 25th October he was found dead in his cell.
He seems to have been a religious man, and a few days before, on his
mathematical instruments being taken from him, he had emphatically
repudiated resort to suicide. Moreover he had on the previous day
ordered three shirts and a French conversation book. The French
Government, however, maintained that he had killed himself on hearing
of the defeat and surrender of the Austrian army at Ulm. Sidney Smith,
on revisiting France after Waterloo, made minute inquiries, and all
the documents were shown him, but he could come to no positive result.
Lewis Goldsmith says he was told by Réal and Desmarets that Wright had
been tortured like Pichegru in order to extract evidence from him, and
consequently could not have been released without this infamy committed
by Fouché being exposed; but he was certainly not tortured prior to
Georges’ trial, and why should he have been tortured afterwards, or,
if tortured, why should he have been allowed to live till October
1805? Sidney Smith erected a monument over his tomb in Père Lachaise.
It had a long Latin inscription which, without directly accusing
the Napoleonic authorities, insinuated foul play, for it described
Smith as ‘confined in the Temple, a prison infamous for its midnight
murders.’ Strange to say this monument is now undiscoverable, and the
cemetery keepers deny that Wright is on their registers, yet the record
of his interment was found and duly copied in 1814.[72] Mystery is thus
added to mystery.
William Sidney Smith, nephew of Sir Sidney, was captured along with
Wright and was sent to Verdun. His knowledge of French proved useful in
1814, when on board the vessel which conveyed Napoleon to Elba.
Diplomatists and other public functionaries took the opportunity of
making acquaintance with France or French statesmen. Francis Drake,
bearing the name of the Elizabethan hero, but claiming descent from
an older family, had been at the Copenhagen legation, and was in
1794 Minister at Genoa, whence he sent Grenville letters from Paris
furnished to him by the royalist agent d’Antraigues, who was then
at Venice, and at first in the service of Spain; but the agency
was transferred to ‘Monsieur’ (afterwards Louis XVIII.),
who was living at Verona.[73] D’Antraigues employed correspondents
or spies in Paris who, whether from credulity or knavery, sent him
the most fabulous stories written in sympathetic ink or in cipher.
The letters of which Drake thus received copies were published in
the second volume of the _Dropmore Papers_ of the Historical
Manuscripts Commission, where they were heralded with a flourish, but
their worthlessness has been exposed by M. Aulard, the most competent
French critic. This royalist agency in Paris was discovered in 1797,
and on Napoleon’s advance into Italy Drake fled to Udine. Temporarily
unemployed by the Foreign Office, Drake in 1802 seems to have visited
not only France but Italy. In 1803 he was Minister at Munich, and was
enticed by Napoleon into dealings with Méhée de la Touche, a spy who
sold himself to all parties and betrayed all. Méhée was for a time
a secretary to the Paris Commune and had a long career of trickery.
Napoleon, always anxious to bring British diplomacy into ridicule, gave
orders that a suitable man should be found to entrap Drake, and Méhée
answered his purpose admirably. He pretended to give information of
political feeling in France and to concert a royalist rising for the
overthrow, if not for the kidnapping (a euphemism for assassination),
of Napoleon. Drake advanced money to this pretended spy, who took all
the letters to Paris, where they were forthwith published, bringing
odium and derision on the English Foreign Office. An attempt was also
made to capture Drake, as well as Spencer Smith, who was slightly
implicated; but he fled precipitately, and the Elector of Bavaria
at the instance of Napoleon refused any longer to recognise him as
envoy. He had obviously broken the eleventh commandment, so vital in
diplomacy, ‘thou shalt not be found out,’ and neither he nor Spencer
Smith was again sent abroad. Wickham, however, who had equally
committed himself, became in 1802 Chief Secretary for Ireland, and
would have been sent as Envoy to Austria and Prussia, but that those
powers, afraid of offending Napoleon, declined to receive him. He
consequently retired on a pension of £1800. English diplomacy was
no match for Napoleon with his flagrant violation of traditions and
courtesies. Retiring to his Somerset home, Drake was highly esteemed
by his neighbours; for his tombstone at St. Cuthbert’s, Wells, speaks
of his integrity and firmness as a magistrate and as recorder of that
city.[74] He married a daughter of Sir Herbert Mackworth, an ancestor
of the poet Mackworth Praed.
Alexander Cockburn, consul at Hamburg, took the opportunity of visiting
Paris with his Creole wife, Yolande de Vignier, and his son, the future
Lord Chief-Justice, was born in France during this visit. Cockburn
was in 1825 appointed Minister to the Central American Republics.
Sir John Craufurd, another nephew of Quintin Craufurd, was Minister
to Lower Saxony from 1795 to 1803. He had visited Paris in 1791, and
he now repeated his visit. We shall see that he stayed longer than
he liked and took French leave. Charles Richard Vaughan, afterwards
knighted, made a tour in France and Germany, and then accompanied Sir
Charles Stuart (ultimately Lord Stuart de Rothesay) to Spain, where
he wrote an account of the siege of Saragossa. He rejoined Stuart as
Secretary at the Paris Embassy at the Restoration, and was eventually
Envoy to Washington. Arthur Paget, son of Lord Uxbridge, was one of
the earliest visitors, being allowed a passport through France in
September 1801 on his way to succeed Minto at Vienna. He reported to
Lord Hawkesbury that he found the roads much better than he expected
and the land well cultivated, but the towns manufacturing silk and
velvet complained of bad trade, and peace with England was universally
desired. Bonaparte, he said, was generally liked, for people dreaded a
revolution, yet Sieyès, he was told at Vienna, had declared that the
Consulate would not last through the winter.[75] George Stuart, his
chief subordinate at Vienna, also visited Paris. Sir Robert Liston,
originally tutor to Gilbert and Hugh Elliot at Paris, and afterwards
secretary to the latter, was Ambassador in America from 1796 to 1802,
was afterwards sent to Holland and Turkey, and lived to the age of
ninety-three. Colonel Neil was Consul at Lisbon. We may also mention a
future diplomatist, Charles (afterwards Sir Charles) Oakley, son of the
ex-Governor of Madras, who, when at the Washington legation, offered
to marry Madame Patterson, and she was not then disinclined to accept
a suitable successor to Jerome Bonaparte. Those who were or had been
in other departments of the public service included Thomas Steele,
Paymaster-General, John King, Under-Secretary at the Home Office, Henry
William Bentinck, Governor of St. Vincent, Perkins Magra, Consul at
Malta and naturally interested in the fate of that island, Donkin,
secretary to George III., and Brook, head of the London detective
force, who was sent to report on the Paris system, while Napoleon sent
a French detective to see what was done in London. There were also
Sir Charles Warre Malet, ex-acting Governor of Bombay, and Sir Robert
Chambers, late Chief-Justice of Calcutta, who before going out to India
had been intimate with Dr. Johnson. This, as we shall see, proved to be
his last journey.
Law, physic, and divinity were not numerously represented. Besides
Erskine and other barristers sitting or destined to sit in the House
of Commons, there was John Campbell, a future Lord Chief-Justice
and Lord Chancellor, and the biographer of his class. He saw the
‘little Corsican,’ and visited Tallien. Thomas Wilde, afterwards Lord
Chancellor Truro, was registered, doubtless in joke by himself or his
companions, as M.P., though he was as yet only twenty years of age.
Curran, who had been before in 1787, dined with Fox. Deploring the
failure of the Revolution, he disliked Napoleon. He little foresaw
that he was about meanly to disown his daughter Sarah on account of
her attachment to Emmet.[76] Stewart Kyd, a friend of Horne Tooke,
prosecuted with other Radicals in 1794, had passed four months in the
Tower, but had now sobered down and become a legal writer. The French
police suspected him of being a spy. He had, in 1796, assisted Erskine
in defending Thomas Williams, the publisher of Paine’s _Age of
Reason_. A native of Arbroath, he died in London in 1811. William
Duppa is best known as brother of the artist and as the biographer of
Michael Angelo. Charles Henry Okey ultimately settled in Paris.
The physicians included Charles Maclean, who had been with Lord Elgin
at Constantinople, and had also been in the East India Company’s
service, but had been sent home by Wellesley on account of his
quarrelsome disposition. Landing at Hamburg in 1801, he proceeded
through Holland to Paris, in order to advocate the establishment at
Constantinople of an international institute for the study of the
plague. He was anxious for information on French suicides, and Holcroft
had recommended him to apply not to a specialist but to Fauriel, the
Sanscrit scholar. He denied the contagiousness of epidemics, and his
medical crotchets, coupled with his controversial temper, prevented
his being employed by the Government, wherefore he considered himself
an ill-used man. George Birkbeck, the future founder of mechanics’
institutes, must be reckoned among the doctors: he accompanied Curran.
Peter Mark Roget, a nephew of Romilly and a friend of Bentham, as yet
Swiss rather than English, went as travelling tutor to the two sons
of John Philips, a Manchester merchant, Edgeworth’s son accompanying
them. His _Treasury of English Synonyms_ is well known. William
Woodville, the disciple of Jenner, and physician to the Smallpox
Hospital, had been with Nowel to Boulogne in the summer of 1801, at the
solicitation of Dr. Antoine Ambert, to introduce vaccination during
a smallpox epidemic. He was an accomplished botanist. Dr. Wickham,
another visitor, was likewise a friend of Jenner. On the other hand
there were two strong opponents of vaccination. William Rowley,
physician to the Marylebone Infirmary and an accoucheur of repute,
and Benjamin Moseley, of Chelsea Hospital, who had been trained in
Paris, and who had a strange theory that the changes of the moon
influenced hemorrhage of the lungs. Tuthill (afterwards Sir George
Tuthill) took over his handsome wife, of whom we shall hear again.
James Carrick Moore, brother of Sir John, became director of Jenner’s
vaccine institute. Benjamin Travers, as yet articled pupil to Sir
Paston Cooper, was the first hospital surgeon to make of ophthalmia a
special study. Thomas Young was inspector-general of hospitals. Of his
distinguished homonym, although also a doctor, we shall speak among
scientists. Of John Bunnell Davis and Farrell Mulvey we shall hear
later on. James Carmichael Smyth, physician to George III.,
was destined to be the step-grandfather of Thackeray, for his son Major
Henry Carmichael Smyth married Thackeray’s mother in India, and ‘sat’
for the character of Colonel Newcome. The physician received £5000 from
Parliament for curing a jail distemper at Winchester in 1796 by nitrous
acid; albeit a Dr. Johnston and a Frenchman also claimed the discovery.
James Chichester Maclaurin, physician to the Paris Embassy 1790–1792,
returned in the same capacity in 1802. He died in 1804 at the age of
thirty-nine. His predecessor Macdonnal also revisited Paris. Michael
O’Ryan had practised at Lyons, where Louis Badger, a silk-spinner of
English descent, one of the victims of the Revolution--mistaken for his
brother Pierre, he refused to undeceive his executioners, but Pierre
was shot a week later--had married his wife’s sister. Fleeing from the
Revolution back to Ireland, O’Ryan now went and settled in Paris. He
was a great advocate of quinine.
Cardinal Charles Erskine, by virtue of his rank, claims priority among
the clerical visitors. His father, Colin Erskine, son of Sir Charles,
a Fifeshire baronet, was an artist at Rome, where he married a Roman
lady. A letter to the French Government of 1808 giving an account of
the College of Cardinals says:--
‘Erskine, 65 years of age, affects the greatest indifference to
the present state of things (Napoleon’s rule), speaking of the
Emperor with apparent moderation, but a dangerous man, perhaps
the most dangerous of all; educated at the English college.’[77]
He was on his way back to Rome, after having been a kind of legate in
England, where in 1801 he had had the invidious task of requiring the
resignations of the French _émigré_ bishops on account of the
Concordat. Fourteen, however, out of the eighteen, headed by Arthur
Dillon, Archbishop of Narbonne, refused to comply, and seven colleagues
on the Continent followed their example. A good scholar, excellent
company, and a loyal Briton, Erskine died in 1811 in Paris, having been
interned there by Napoleon, and was buried in the Pantheon.[78] Dr.
Gregory Stapleton, Bishop of the English midland district, went to St.
Omer to try and recover the property of the English college of which
he had been the head until the Revolution, but he died there, without
having continued his journey to Paris, on the 5th April 1802. A fellow
prelate was Dr. Troy, President of Maynooth, and ultimately Catholic
Archbishop of Dublin, who was anxious to obtain fuller restitution of
the confiscated property of the Irish colleges in France and to re-open
them, for Maynooth with its two hundred seminarists was insufficient.
He went to Lord Cornwallis, who, however, was unable to help him.
A staunch loyalist, he had assisted in carrying the Union, and was
consequently in receipt of a State pension. William Walsh until the
Revolution had been the head of the Irish college in Paris. Driven away
by that event, he eventually recovered his post. Father Peter Flood,
who had narrowly escaped the massacre of September 1792,[79] was sent
over by the Irish Catholic bishops to effect the fusion of all the
Franco-Irish colleges. Tuite, who till the Revolution had been head of
the English college at Paris, found that building converted to secular
uses. John Chetwode Eustace, formerly chaplain to the Jerninghams,
a Maynooth professor and a very liberal Catholic, had visited Paris
in 1790, and was destined to pay a third visit in company with Lord
Brownlow, Robert Rushbrooke, and Philip Roche.
Edward Stanley, the future Bishop of Norwich, and father of Dean
Stanley, represented the Church of England, for he had just been
ordained. He was on his way to Switzerland, and was disappointed at
not seeing Napoleon. He was over again in 1816, when he heard drunken
English soldiers singing on the boulevards:
‘Louis Dix-huit, Louis Dix-huit,
We’ve licked all your armies
and sunk all your fleet.’
And the French royalists imagined the song to be complimentary.[80]
Anglicanism was also represented by Stephen Weston, grandson of a
bishop, who had been to Paris in 1791, and published rather flippant
accounts of both trips. Then there was John Glasse, rector of Hanwell,
a good classical scholar, whose sermon in 1793 on behalf of the French
_émigré_ priests made light of the differences between Catholicism
and Protestantism. Hanwell is associated with lunacy, and Glasse in
1810, in a fit of mental derangement, hung himself at the Bull and
Mouth Inn, London. John Sanford was a witness of the scene between
Napoleon and Lord Whitworth on the 13th March 1803, and in _Notes and
Queries_ of the 3rd April 1852, as the only surviving witness--for
the Duchess of Gordon, her daughters, and Mrs. Greatheed were then
dead--he gave an account of it. W. Hughes, landing at Dieppe in June
1802, visited Rouen, Caen, Blois, and other provincial towns before
proceeding to Paris. Of John Maude, fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford,
we shall hear hereafter, as also of Churchill.
The Church of Scotland may be credited with John Paterson, for he was
probably the future missionary to Russia and Scandinavia. Alexander and
Joseph Paterson may have been his brothers.
Nonconformity was represented by William Shepherd of Gatacre,
Lancashire, an intimate friend of Brougham, author of a life of Poggio,
and also of a history of the American Revolution. The latter work
Lord John Russell read in manuscript before publication. Shepherd
had educated one of Roscoe’s sons, and was now escorting members
of the Roscoe family. He took with him a letter of introduction to
Miss Williams, at whose house he met Carnot and Kosciusko, spending
a most agreeable evening. On repeating his visit in 1814, however,
he apparently, judging by the silence of his _Paris in 1802 and
1814_, neglected to renew the lady’s acquaintance.
Turning to philosophers, scholars, and scientists, priority is due to
Jeremy Bentham and Malthus. Bentham exercised the French citizenship
conferred on him in 1792 by voting for Bonaparte’s life-consulate, an
act not very consistent with his radical doctrines.[81] His father had
taken him over to France in 1764. Malthus, who, though a clergyman,
should be classed as a philosopher or economist, little imagined how
Frenchmen, mostly without having heard of him, would practise his
principle. He revisited the Continent in 1825. Richard Chenevix,
the mineralogist, who had witnessed and been imprisoned during the
Revolution, had taken Brussels and Jena on his way to Paris.
The Institute had in December 1801 elected as foreign associates Banks,
Priestley, Herschel, Neville Maskelyne, James Rennell, the geographer,
and Henry Cavendish in the class of physics and mathematics; Fox in
that of history and classics, and Sir Benjamin West in that of art.
There had apparently been an idea of also electing Arthur Young,
Horne Tooke, Sheridan, Watt, and Sir John Sinclair. Herschel, Fox,
and West were the only three of the eight nominees who acknowledged
the compliment in person. Herschel had the more reason for doing so
as he had in 1790 been elected an associate of the old Academy of
Sciences before it was swept away by the Revolution. Sir Charles
Blagden, Secretary of the Royal Society, whose name is attached to
the law of congelation, was presented to Napoleon, who told him that
Banks was much esteemed in France, and indeed Banks had repeatedly
obtained the restitution of consignments to the Jardin des Plantes
captured at sea by the English.[82] Blagden seems, though a scientist,
to have had a mission from the English Government, for Andreossi,
the French Ambassador at London, writing to Regnier on the 8th April
1803, reported a statement of General Miranda, who was intimate
with Blagden: ‘He is in the pay of the Government; they were not at
first satisfied with his reports, but he has changed his tone, and
they are now better pleased.’ Andreossi added: ‘I am certain that he
has spread it about here (in London) that I was in treaty on behalf
of the Minister of the Interior for the purchase of a machine for
“dividing” mathematical instruments, an object of great advantage to
French industry, and requiring some precautions in order to be carried
out.’ Blagden doubtless renewed his acquaintance with Desgenettes,
the army doctor, who since his visit as a young man to London in 1784
had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, and was destined to accompany him
to Moscow. Blagden, pronounced by Dr. Johnson ‘a delightful fellow,’
was also acquainted with Count Rumford, for whose daughter’s hand
he was an unsuccessful suitor.[83] After Waterloo he spent half the
year in France and died there. Bonnycastle, Professor of Mathematics
at Woolwich Academy, described by Leigh Hunt as rather vain of his
acquirements, but a good fellow, fond of quoting Shakespeare and of
telling stories, was another visitor, probably in the company of his
friend Fuseli. Dr. John Fleming, Professor of Natural Philosophy at
Aberdeen, published in 1842 a _History of British Animals_.
Osborn, an F.R.S., was living in 1806 at Weimar, where he explained to
Goethe the battle of Trafalgar. Edward Pigott, the discoverer of the
variable star in Sobieski’s belt or sword, had observed the transit
of Venus at Caen in 1769, and that of Mercury at Louvain in 1786. He
dated an astronomical paper from Fontainebleau in 1803, and in 1807
he observed the great comet, but the date and place of his death are
uncertain.[84]
Perhaps the most eminent man of this category, scarcely less eminent
than Herschel (though the latter discovered the planet now named after
him, but originally styled by him the Georgium Sidus and by Frenchmen,
Napoleon), was Thomas Young. He was the author of the undulatory theory
of light, ridiculed at the time in the _Edinburgh Review_ by that
shallow scientist Brougham, yet now almost universally accepted, and he
was the first to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. His uncle, Richard
Brocklesby, the physician and friend of Johnson, Burke, Reynolds,
and Wilkes, bequeathed him £10,000, besides his house, library, and
pictures. In 1801 Young, originally tutor to Hudson Gurney--both being
then Quakers, but both destined to renounce Quakerism--and a medical
practitioner, had found his true vocation as Professor of Natural
Philosophy at the Royal Institution and editor of the _Nautical
Almanac_. He has a nephew, a rent-collector at Bristol, who, however
tells me that he was not born till after his illustrious uncle’s death.
It is difficult to draw an exact line between scholars, connoisseurs,
and savants. Charles Towneley was famous, like Elgin, for his marbles,
the fruits of his Italian travels from 1765 to 1772, and purchased
after his death in 1805 by the British Museum. Turberville Needham, the
scientist, had been his tutor in Paris in 1752, when his uncle John,
translator of _Hudibras_ into French verse, seems to have looked
after him. Sir Abraham Hume, who has been already mentioned, was a
famous collector of minerals and precious stones, and had purchased
pictures by the old masters at Vienna and Bologna. He was one of the
founders of the Geological Society, and lived to be at eighty-eight
the senior F.R.S. Joseph Ritson, the antiquary, had been in Paris in
1791, when he was enthusiastic for the Revolution, and he actually
adopted the Jacobin calendar. A strict vegetarian and an avowed
materialist, he was latterly insane. Stephen Martin-Leake, herald
and numismatist, sent over three of his sons, William, Stephen, and
John, the two last likewise heralds. William Taylor, the friend of
Southey, son of a Norwich manufacturer, and educated by Mrs. Barbauld,
at Palgrave, Suffolk, had been sent on the Continent by his father in
1779, went again in 1788, and now repeated his visit. He was one of the
first to introduce German literature to English readers. He met Paine
at a dinner given by Holcroft, and had an introduction to Lafayette
from his uncle Dyson, a Norfolk man whose son had taught Lafayette
farming.[85] Taylor went back an anti-Bonapartist. Paine had probably
opened his eyes to Napoleon’s tyranny. Alexander Hamilton, a future
F.R.S., had been in the East India Company’s service in Bengal, and on
returning to England, after accompanying Lord Elgin to Constantinople,
had continued his Sanscrit studies. He took with him his Creole wife
and a promising son. Few as were then the students of Sanscrit, fewer
still were the students of Chinese. Thomas Manning was one of them.
Son of the rector of Diss, Norfolk, in whose church Wesley preached a
few weeks before his death, though all other church pulpits had long
been closed to him, Manning was also at Holcroft’s dinner, and we
may imagine his being questioned about Diss by Paine, who had been a
journeyman staymaker there. In his letters to his father--all beginning
‘Honoured sir,’ and subscribed ‘your dutiful son’--he mentions the Abbé
Sicard, the teacher of the deaf and dumb, Carnot, Madame de Staël,
Chateaubriand, and Laharpe. Manning, who suggested to Charles Lamb his
roast pig essay, and was also intimate with Coleridge, is buried, like
Malthus, in Bath Abbey.
Artists flocked to Paris to see the spoils from Italy collected at
the Louvre. There was West (not yet Sir Benjamin West), with his son
Raphael, who was expected to prove himself worthy of his Christian
name, but failed to do so. It was this visit, perhaps, which left
West no time to send a new picture to the Royal Academy exhibition in
1803; but he should not have attempted to palm off as new a ‘Hagar
and Ishmael’ which he had exhibited in 1776. President though he was,
the Academy insisted on its withdrawal. Opie was there with his wife,
Amelia Alderson, who years afterwards gave an account of her visit in
_Tait’s Magazine_. Seated on the boulevards, the future Quakeress
sang ‘Fall, tyrants, fall,’ a pæan on the Revolution singularly
out of place under the iron rule of Napoleon; but she had not yet
discovered him to be a tyrant. Opie was so dazzled the first day by
the white glare of Paris houses that he talked of leaving at once to
avoid blindness, but the alarm soon passed off. Bertie Greatheed,
the dramatist, was accompanied by his son, who copied assiduously at
the Louvre, besides sketching a capital likeness of Napoleon. His
copies were said to be so good that Napoleon refused at first to
let them leave France, but relented on the young man’s death.[86]
Erskine also induced Napoleon to sit for his portrait to Philips,
R.A., who finished it through the courtesy of Josephine while her
husband was at supper. The portrait was sold at Erskine’s death and
was apparently purchased by Lord Howden. Howden, who latterly lived at
Bayonne, bequeathed it to the sub-prefecture of that town, where it
still hangs, but not in a prominent place, so that it escaped notice
till 1895, when, in a controversy on the colour of Napoleon’s eyes,
attention was called to it.[87] Richard Cosway, the miniaturist, and
his wife, the musician and historical painter, repeated their visit
of 1786, when Richard was trying to sell to Louis XVI. some
Raphael cartoons which he had bought of Bonfield. André Chénier, the
poet destined to the guillotine, was then passionately in love with
Mrs. Cosway. He addressed verses to her, some in her name in full,
others inscribed ‘d. r.,’ a contraction for d’Arno, on the banks of
which river she was born. A Polish poet, Niemcewics, likewise enamoured
of her, went to see her in London in 1787. She now studied at the
Louvre, next went to Lyons, and then to Lodi.[88] She subsequently
started a school in Paris, which did not succeed, went again to Lyons,
and eventually became head of a convent near that city. Daughter
of an English hotelkeeper at Leghorn, she thus played many parts.
Another female artist, Mrs. Damer, had been captured by a French
privateer in 1779, but gallantly allowed to proceed to Jersey, where
her father, Field-Marshal Conway, was governor. Josephine, whom she
had known before her marriage, introduced her to Napoleon, who, as
previously stated, bespoke a bust of Fox. Strawberry Hill House had
been bequeathed to her by Horace Walpole. John Claude Nattes, one of
the earliest of water-colourists and a topographical draftsman, took
views of Paris, Versailles, and St. Denis. For unaccountably exhibiting
drawings not his own, he was in 1807 expelled from the Water Colour
Society, but he then resumed sending to the Royal Academy. Masquerier,
of whom we have already heard, was again in Paris. Let it suffice to
name Sir Martin Shee, President of the Royal Academy; Fuseli; Flaxman,
who with his wife accompanied West; Duppa, who had witnessed French
spoliation at Rome in 1798; Farrington, who accompanied Rogers;
Bowyer, the fashionable portrait painter and illustrator of Hume’s
_History_; Edward Hayes, the miniaturist, and his father, the
more distinguished painter, Michael Angelo Hayes; George Bryant,
engaged by the sportsman Thornton; William Dickinson, with his son,
of whom we shall hear later on; Boddington; Hoppner, the naturalised
German;[89] Thomas Daniell; William Turner; Andrew Wilson; John Wright;
Robert Flin; William Sherlock, who forty years before had studied in
Paris, the illustrator of Smollett’s _History_, B. D. Wyatt, the
architect; Abraham Raimbach, the engraver; Charles and James Heath
and Jervis, also engravers; and Thomas Richard Underwood. Likewise
an artist in her way was Mary Linwood, who in 1798 had opened an
exhibition of art needlework, viz. copies of a hundred pictures of old
masters and modern painters, and who went on working till the age of
seventy-five, when eyesight failed her. Her Napoleon in woolwork is now
in the South Kensington Museum.
But few actors had time--they can scarcely have lacked inclination--to
visit Paris. John Philip Kemble, however, described in the register as
_rentier_, went to see his old college at Douai, which he found so
dilapidated that he had not the heart to inspect his old room. Arriving
in Paris in July 1802, he made the acquaintance of Talma, who showed
him, with his companions Lords Hollands and Cloncurry, over the Louvre.
He then proceeded to Madrid to study Spanish acting. His brother
Charles likewise went to Paris on his way to Vienna and St. Petersburg,
not reappearing in London till September 1803. Their father Roger, a
less accomplished actor, who never played but once in London, and then
for the benefit of his son Stephen, is said to have spent from May 1799
to October 1802 in Italy and France; but this seems unlikely at his
age, for at his death in December 1802 he was over eighty. Edmond John
Eyre, the son of a clergyman, had left Cambridge without a degree in
order to take to the stage. He was, however, an indifferent actor at
Bath and Bristol. He published his _Observations made at Paris_.
We may couple with the Kembles and Eyre Mrs. Charlotte Atkyns, though
she had long left Drury Lane where she was known as ‘the pretty Miss
Walpole.’ She married in 1779, at the age of twenty-five, Edward
Atkyns of Ketteringham Hall, Norfolk, who died in 1794. She was in
Paris during the Revolution, and was one of those who endeavoured to
effect the escape of Marie Antoinette. In 1809 she celebrated George
III.’s Jubilee by a feast to the villagers of Ketteringham, at
which she herself proposed the loyal toasts. The death of her only son
in 1804 had then left her sole mistress of Ketteringham, but she seems
ultimately to have lost her property. She was an ardent believer in
the sham Dauphin Bruneau, but was nevertheless pensioned after 1815 by
Louis XVIII. and died in Paris about 1829.
Let us turn to inventors. Congreve has been already named. James
Watt had not seen France since 1786, when his advice was called for
on the Marly aqueduct. This time he does not appear to have had any
professional purpose, albeit that aqueduct was again out of repair.
Thomas Wedgwood, one of the three sons of the great potter, was the
future inventor of photography. An invalid in search of health, he
required change of scene. He deserves mention for settling an annuity
on Coleridge, and as the friend of Sydney Smith. He first went to
Brussels, joined Poole in Paris, went on with him to Switzerland, and
returned home in August 1803. Greathead, another inventor, doubtless
wished to introduce his lifeboat. Robert Salmon, steward to the Duke
of Norfolk and clerk of the works at the rebuilding of Carlton House,
had invented a chaff-cutting machine, and probably wished to make it
known in France, while William Story took out a patent for a blue dye.
There were also men of business and men who went over on business. Sir
Elijah Impey, who has been named among the ex-M.P’s, had been chosen
as delegate by a meeting in London of claimants for compensation for
confiscated property, an article in the treaty having stipulated that
such claims should be promptly settled by the tribunals. The article
was nominally applicable to both countries, but England, of course, had
had no revolution and had confiscated little, if any, French property.
No such claims were settled before the renewal of hostilities, for
Whitworth, reporting a conversation with Napoleon on the 23rd February
1803, says:--
‘I alleged as a cause of mistrust and jealousy the impossibility
of obtaining justice or any kind of redress for any of His
Majesty’s subjects. He asked me in what respect. I told him that
since the signing of the treaty not one British claimant had
been satisfied, though every Frenchman of that description had
been so within one month after that period.’
The claims, as we shall see, were revived in 1815, when France gave
a lump sum of sixty millions, leaving the English authorities to
adjudicate on the separate claims. The claims certainly presented
difficulties, for Merry, on the 12th May 1802, speaks of ‘clamorous
demands,’ and on the 23rd June of ‘incessant and sometimes intemperate
applications’; while on taking his departure in December he expressed
mortification at having the claims unredressed.[90] Even private papers
were not restored, perhaps because being mostly tradesmen’s bills they
were not thought worth reclaiming, but possibly because troublesome
formalities were necessary. Merry had been directed to back the claim
of the Duke of Richmond to the Aubigny estates conferred by Louis
XIV. on his ancestress, Charles _II._’s mistress, but in January 1803
Napoleon decreed that no British subject could possess landed property
in France, and in 1807 Aubigny was definitely confiscated.
Among the business men, bankers may be allowed precedence. I do
not reckon Rogers among them, for his visit had no more to do with
banking than that of his brother-in-law Sutton Sharpe with brewing.
But there were Boyd and Benfield, of whom I have already spoken. I
have also mentioned Sir Francis Baring and his son Alexander. Hugh
Hamersley, son of an Oxfordshire clergyman, and named Hugh on account
of descent from Sir Hugh Hamersley, Lord Mayor of London in 1627,
was one of the earliest lovers of Théroigne de Méricourt. According
to her confessions or interrogatories when a prisoner in Austria, he
promised her marriage, and she remained with him till 1785; but on
coming into possession of his patrimony he took her to Paris, there
indulged in dissipation, and returned without her, but settled 200,000
f. on her. Such a statement of course requires verification, but the
tradition at her birthplace is that she eloped with an Englishman in
the hope of becoming a public singer in London, for she had a fine
voice. (Œlsner states, however, that after bearing a son to Persan de
Doublet, who dismissed her with an annuity of 12,000 f., she went to
London and lived with the Italian singer Carducci, a eunuch whom she
induced to take with him to Italy, but they quarrelled and parted at
Genoa.[91] Œlsner is likely to have ascertained the true version of her
antecedents. Did Hamersley inquire for the poor lunatic in 1802?[92]
He had been agent for the French Government in the maintenance of
French prisoners in England until it changed its system and left
England to support them. Madame Dubarry, on recovering her stolen
jewels in London, deposited them with Hamersley. He subscribed £315 to
the patriotic fund of 1803, and in 1812 was M.P. for Helston. On his
death in 1840 his bank was wound up and yielded only 10s. in the pound.
He had married in 1810 Margaret, daughter of John Bevan, a Quaker
banker, and I remember his nephew or cousin as Chairman of Oxfordshire
Quarter Sessions. Herries, brother of Sir Charles Herries, probably
went to fetch his wife, who had been an eyewitness of the Revolution.
Thornton and Power, English bankers at Hamburg and other Continental
towns, opened a branch at Paris in 1802, and in 1805 John Power applied
for French citizenship; but the police reported unfavourably on the
application, alleging that the Hamburg bank acted for the English
Government and that the Paris branch had furnished money to the
conspirator Georges, though pleading ignorance of his criminal purpose.
Thornton, they added, was an illegitimate son of the well-known M.P.
and writer on finance.[93] Thornton and Power seem to have amalgamated
with Perregaux, who had dealings with London banks. Kensington was
another London banker. William Dawes, assistant secretary to the
Bank of England, was probably commissioned to report on the newly
established Bank of France, and Mollien relates how Napoleon, on being
shown an intercepted letter from a Paris to an English banker advising
him to subscribe for its shares, exclaimed, ‘Such are merchants!
Disputes between governments do not disturb their alliances.’
Speaking of merchants, William Ewart was the eminent Liverpool merchant
after whom Gladstone was named on account of his father’s intimacy
with him, while Judah, Henry, and Abraham Salomons were doubtless the
uncles of Sir David Salomons, the first Jew returned to Parliament.
There were also Joseph,[94] Leon, and Moses Montefiore, of Bologna
origin, the first of them already the father of Sir Moses Montefiore
the philanthropist, then a youth of eighteen. This Moses Montefiore was
on his way to Leghorn. James and Thomas Payne, eminent booksellers of
the second generation, were doubtless bent on picking up rare volumes.
James, succeeding to the business of Elmsley, had already profited
by the dispersion of such treasures in the Revolution--the Lamoignon
collection for instance. He had secured many prizes for Lord Spencer
to enrich the famous Althorp collection, which in 1899 was purchased
by Mrs. Rylands and presented to Manchester. He also had dealings with
the British Museum and the Bodleian; and had supplied some rare English
books to the Paris National Library, and helped in its catalogue.
William Hayes was another bookselling tourist, and there was John
Nichols, the printer and publisher, the biographer of Hogarth and for
nearly half a century editor of the _Gentleman’s Magazine_. He
had just retired from business, and with his two daughters went to the
south of France. Then there was Thomas Poole, the friend of Paine, the
friend also of Coleridge and Sir Humphry Davy. He went to hear the Abbé
Sicard lecture to the deaf and dumb.
From books to horses is a long jump. Edward Tattersall had been sent
over in 1775 on an invitation from M. de Mezières, equerry to Louis
XVI., and had much enjoyed himself. His father Richard, who
supplied horses for the French royal stud, told the French host not
to spoil the boy, but to make him keep his place, as he would have
to earn his own livelihood.[95] The mention of Tattersall naturally
suggests Philip Astley, who hoped to recover ten years’ rent for his
old circus, which had been converted into barracks; but while engaged
in securing this, his London circus, in which he had introduced French
performances, was burnt down. William Boffin Kennedy was a well-known
florist who had Josephine as a customer, for in 1801, in a letter to
Otto at London, she sent a list of flowers to be ordered of him. Lastly
there was Dorant, proprietor of the York Hotel, Albemarle Street,
London, who went over to cash £2000 in assignats, but found them worth
just 12 f. He acted as cicerone, familiar as he was with Paris, to
young George Jackson of the Embassy.
We now come to authors, whom we have reserved till nearly the last,
not because they were the least important, rather the reverse, but
because they are the most numerous. They may be conveniently divided
into writers on Paris--chiels taking notes--and writers on other
subjects. As to the former, it must be confessed that few of these
accounts of Paris possess much merit or interest. There are, however,
some notable exceptions. Thomas Holcroft, as ‘dogmatic, virulent,
and splenetic as ever’ says King, had been prosecuted in 1794; but
on the acquittal of Horne Tooke and others the case against him was
abandoned. He had been to Paris in 1783, and again in 1785 to fetch
his son back from school, when along with Bonneville, Paine’s future
host, he wrote down Beaumarchais’s _Figaro_ from hearing it at
the theatre, being unable otherwise to procure a copy in order to have
it performed in London. He had paid a third visit in 1799–1801, and he
was now accompanied by his second wife Louise Mercier, who was born
in France but brought up in England.[96] He also took his daughter
Fanny, the future novelist and translator, who married first Dr. Badams
and secondly Danton’s nephew Merget. Holcroft in his _Travels from
Hamburg to Paris_ (1804) gives a good picture of Parisian society.
J. G. Lemaistre, who went to claim a legacy, was one of the earliest
visitors, for he started in October or November 1801, remaining
till May 1802. In the latter year he published a _Rough Sketch of
Paris_. He went on to Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, and in his
_Travels after the Peace of Amiens_ (1806) he gave a curious
account of his dining with Cardinal York, then already getting into
his dotage. Lemaistre was the son of an Indian judge, was described
by Erskine as ‘a most agreeable, good-natured, sensible man,’ and was
obviously of French or Channel Isle descent. Sir John Carr, a Rugby
scholar, wrote numerous books of travel, his _Stranger in France_
(1803) being his first attempt. In 1898 it was translated into French
by M. Albert Babeau. No other visitor of 1802 has had a similar honour,
but _Paris as it was and as it is_ by Francis William Blagdon, a
teacher of languages, was translated at the time into German.