position. Not only had he to keep the captives in order and prevent
escapes, but he had to deal with a swarm of French adventurers of
both sexes who sought to make money by facilitating escapes. It was
accordingly ordered in July 1805 that all suspicious women should be
expelled, and that no passports should be allowed to Verdun unless
good reasons were shown. Frenchmen, like foreigners, could not then
go freely from one town to another.[185] Women who had caused quarrels
among the captives were expelled, but some of them then settled in the
neighbouring villages. An honourable commandant would have found his
post unpleasant and irksome, and Wirion, the son of a pork butcher, was
not even an honourable man. He recognised Lord Barrington’s mistress,
Madame St. Amand, who was at first passed off as his wife, by calling
on her, and he took money for winking at illicit amours. He is said
to have recommended housekeepers or mistresses who were his spies,
and in one case an Englishman who had foolishly told his mistress his
plans of escape was betrayed by her. Wirion may have thought this a
legitimate stratagem, but he likewise unblushingly levied blackmail,
and his subordinates followed suit. He would invite himself or be
invited to dinner with the wealthier captives, and they would allow him
to win from them at cards, in order to obtain small favours or to avoid
being sent to Bitche, to which they were liable at his mere caprice.
He inflicted a fine of 3 francs on men failing to present themselves
at the roll-call morning and night, but not finding many able to pay
6 francs a day for late rising and an evening promenade he commuted
this for 6 francs or 12 francs a month. In the winter of 1804, however,
he made one roll-call a day suffice, and allowed exceptionally good
prisoners to appear only every fifth day.[186] He received, according
to Sturt, 600 francs or 1000 francs a month from the gaming-tables as
the price of his protection, and he is said to have extorted no less
than 136,000 francs from a prisoner named Garland.
Wirion’s gendarmes got up lotteries for articles which sometimes
did not exist, and prisoners had to take tickets as the price of
small favours. Complaints of his extortion were unavailing until the
appointment as Minister of War of General Clarke. Wirion was thereupon
summoned to Paris in 1810, and rather than face a court-martial he shot
himself in the Bois de Boulogne. No French newspaper, indeed, records
this, and though affirmed by Lord Blayney, who arrived at Verdun
shortly afterwards, I should have felt doubts of its accuracy but for
finding a passage in _Letters from the Cape_, a pamphlet dictated
by Napoleon at St. Helena in 1817. It says:--
The English prisoners detained at Verdun were treated with great
attention (_sic_), and a French officer who commanded
that depôt having been guilty of some extortions upon them,
an inquiry was in consequence ordered by the Emperor, and the
culprit was so much afraid of his anger that he committed
suicide.
I have, moreover, discovered in the police bulletin of April 8, 1810,
the following record:--
General Wirion went yesterday morning at ten o’clock in a
hackney coach to the Bois de Boulogne. Alighting a few steps
from the Porte Maillot, he blew out his brains. Upon him was
found a letter to his wife and another to the doctor, asking him
to attend to her in these sad circumstances. It appears that
impatience at the apparent tardiness of the commission deputed
to investigate the complaints against him was the reason of the
suicide.[187]
Wirion’s chief subordinate and successor, Colonel Courselles, though
far from immaculate, was more cautious and moderate in his extortions.
He confined himself to a monopoly of the wine supply, charging
exorbitant rates, and to paying the allowance to the poorer prisoners
in _livres tournois_ in lieu of francs, thus clearing a profit.
Courselles, in his turn, was called to account, but he threw the blame
on his subordinates, one of whom, Lieutenant Massin, shot himself
through apprehension of a court-martial. He had simply by Courselles’
orders destroyed incriminating documents, but thus thrown over by his
chief he left a note stating that though innocent he could not face
threatened dishonour. It is satisfactory to learn that Courselles was
likewise removed, that his successor was so upright a man that on his
death in 1813 all the English attended the funeral, and that the next
commandant was still more indulgent, allowing captives to live not
merely in the outskirts of Verdun but in neighbouring towns.
The captives were popular at Verdun. Some of the inhabitants were
suspected of allowing letters under cover to be directed to them in
order to evade their being opened and read. It is true that a boy five
years old, on being jocularly asked by Eyre whether he would go with
him to England, replied, ‘No, all Englishmen are bad’; but when in
1805 a hundred and seventy of them were transferred to Valenciennes,
Givet, and Sarrelouis, two hundred inhabitants collected to see them
off. Women shook hands, even gave kisses, and exclaimed, ‘Poor young
fellows!’ a proof, says Wirion, that the prisoners had gained great
influence and that their removal was urgent.[188]
Three M.P.’s being among the captives, it will naturally be asked
whether they retained their seats. They could not or did not resign,
but in those days a constituency did not suffer much from going without
a representative. The next general election did not take place till
1806. Lord Yarmouth was then re-elected for the Irish pocket borough of
Lisburn, and continued--we can hardly say to sit--for it. In 1822 he
was called to the Upper House. Lord Lovaine, in like manner, remained
member for Beeralston, Devonshire. He was even nominated in 1804 a
Lord of the Treasury, and in 1807 an India Commissioner. Thomas Brooke
was likewise again re-elected for Newton in 1806, but he, as we shall
see, had escaped from Valenciennes. Green, who is described in the
police register as a man of letters, and Sturt were not re-elected.
Tufton, who with his brother Charles was detained at Fontainebleau, and
Thompson, who at Orleans inveighed against Napoleon, had ceased to be
M.P.’s.
One of the privations of detention was not merely the censorship
exercised over correspondence but the total deprivation of English
newspapers. Even before the rupture, indeed, only one paltry Sunday
paper in the pay of Napoleon[189] was allowed to pass through the
post-office, though the Embassy of course could be subject to no
such restriction, and other journals could be clandestinely perused.
Napoleon in August 1802 rebuked Talleyrand for allowing English
newspapers to reach ‘a large number of persons’ by being addressed
under cover to the Foreign Office,[190] and Galignani’s newly opened
reading-room must have undergone unforeseen restrictions. When the
war broke out Napoleon repeated his order that reading-rooms should
be allowed only one particular English paper, which was supplied
them gratuitously. Madame de Rémusat says he had, however, largely
subsidised English journalists and writers, apparently to little
purpose, but this may be considered an exaggeration. Galignani’s
_Monthly Repertory of English Literature_, started in 1807, did
not compensate for the absence of newspapers. Even the _Morning
Post_, though siding with France, was not admitted.
As long as the _Argus_ lasted the captives were fain to subscribe
to it, for ‘infamous’ as Forbes styles it, it gave copious extracts
from the London press, but in 1810 Napoleon suppressed it, and the
prisoners became dependent on the meagre and carefully manipulated
intelligence of the Paris papers. In 1804–1805 several prisoners had
sent the _Argus_ letters and verses in favour of peace, hoping
thus, perhaps, to procure release.
For a time the captives were buoyed up by the expectation of being
exchanged for French soldiers and sailors, the balance of numbers
being always largely against France; but the British Government
refused to exchange combatants for civilians, as this would have
been a recognition of the validity of the detention. In the autumn
of 1805 the prisoners petitioned the Electress (afterwards Queen) of
Würtemberg, Princess Royal of England, to intercede for them, but she
did not venture to comply, sending word that the matter was one for the
two Governments.[191] There was again a gleam of hope in 1806, when,
as we shall presently see, Lord Yarmouth went to Paris to negotiate,
but the sky was soon overcast. The temptation to escape became stronger
as time elapsed and as it became clear that the fall of Napoleon
would alone bring liberation. Some broke their parole. Others thought
they satisfied honour by sending word just before starting that they
withdrew their parole. Sir James Craufurd, who had been allowed to go
for two months to Aix-la-Chapelle to take the waters, did not return,
but got round to England by Sweden, justifying himself on the ground
that his wife was ill and that a lucrative post had been given to
another man in his absence. The police bulletin scouted his alleged
anxiety for his wife (a daughter of General Gage), stating that he
had scandalously treated her, that she had consequently gone home,
and that he had been living with a mistress.[192] Lord Yarmouth was
informed by a correspondent that the King turned his back on Craufurd
at a levée, telling him that prisoners ought to keep their parole; the
letter added that Craufurd was universally despised in England.[193] A
later report, however, represented him as receiving £1000 a year from
the Government, and the Duke of York was reported to have said that
in such arbitrary detention the parole was not binding. Colombine de
Jersey, allowed a month in England, also did not return. Lord Archibald
Hamilton escaped in January 1804. Sir Beaumont Dixie disappeared from
Verdun in September 1804, leaving his clothes on the river bank as
though he had been drowned; but he had falsified a passport and had
been assisted by neighbouring villagers in his flight.[194] He was,
however, recaptured and sent to Bitche, for attempts to escape or
other misdemeanours entailed removal to that or some other fortress.
‘There,’ says the late Mr. Childers, ‘the younger members of this
unlucky colony appear to have amused themselves _more Britannico_
in cutting deeply their names and descriptions on the outer stone walls
of the barrack which formed their prison, and I read more than one name
belonging to well-known English, Scottish, or Irish families.’[195]
Fox and Addison, doctors on board merchantmen, let themselves down by
a rope from Verdun citadel, but being unable to get across the canal
at the foot they had to give themselves up. Two other doctors, Thomas
Clarke and Farrell Mulvey, were likewise recaptured and sent to the
fortress of Metz, Mulvey, however, in 1806 being allowed to return
on parole to Verdun. Three surgeons, Baird, Cameron, and Hawthorn,
escaped. In 1807 a midshipman named Temple escaped by crouching at the
extremity of a carriage, so as to be concealed by two women, his French
mistress and her maidservant. The carriage got to Strasburg, where the
mistress, being a native of the town, obtained a passport, and Temple
was smuggled in the same manner to Austria, whence he wrote to Colonel
Arthur Annesley expressing a hope that nobody had been molested as an
accomplice. Unfortunately he was not equally solicitous or scrupulous
with regard to his creditors, for he left so many debts behind him that
some of the principal prisoners, revolted by his dishonesty, forwarded
a memorial to the British Government, praying for his dismissal from
the navy. Annesley himself, whose honeymoon had ended in captivity, got
away in December 1811. A Dr. Alderson, married to a Frenchwoman, not
obtaining an answer to an application for a visit to England to recover
£400, took French leave, but his large farm near Lille was consequently
confiscated. Leviscourt, a navy lieutenant, who after several years at
large on parole had been confined in the fortress and was no longer
on parole, endeavoured to escape, but being recaptured was dragged by
gendarmes through Verdun, with a heavy cannon-ball fastened to his
leg. Worsley, the schoolmaster, escaped from Mons to Holland. James
Henry Lawrence, son of a Jamaica planter and himself a Knight of Malta,
escaped in 1810 by pretending on the road to be a German. He had lived
several years in Germany, and had published in German a Malabar
story, which on his arrival in England he issued in English, as also a
_Picture of Verdun_. He subsequently led a roving life, chiefly
on the Continent, and died in 1840. His father remained a captive.
Another foreign knight, of the Order of Maria Theresa, Baron Charles
Blount, obtained permission to reside at Bonn, but went to Cleves
and fled. He was, however, recaptured and sent to Coblentz fortress.
From Valenciennes there were forty escapes, and Lawrence says, ‘Every
morning those who came upon the promenade inquired who had decamped in
the preceding night.’ Fortunately there was yet no electric telegraph
to give the hue and cry. Colonel Hill, of the Shropshire militia,
probably a brother of Lord Hill, escaped and rejoined his regiment.
Brooke, M.P. for Newton, Lancashire, quitting a large dinner-party at
Valenciennes in October 1804, audaciously drove through the town with
his French valet, who had obtained a passport for two merchants, and
safely reached Cologne. Francis and Thomas Jodrell waited in December
1803 on the commandant of Valenciennes, told him they withdrew their
parole, and drove off. Colonel Smyth accompanied them. All three were
recaptured in the duchy of Berg, albeit Bavarian soil, and Napoleon had
ordered a court-martial, but they giving a sentry the slip got clear
off. Francis was High Sheriff of Cheshire in 1813; Thomas was killed
at Rosetta in 1807. Philip de Crespigny, who had been married at the
Danish Embassy in 1809, escaped from St. Germain in 1811. Wright, a
midshipman, brother of the unfortunate Captain John Wesley Wright,
facilitated the escape of a friend by holding the rope with which he
descended from the ramparts at Verdun, whereupon he was consigned to
the fortress. So also was Knox, he having become surety for a Captain
Brown, who escaped but was recaptured.
Wirion, by Napoleon’s orders, gave notice in 1805 after three escapes
that the captives must be responsible for one another if they wished
to be treated as men of honour, and that at the first escape all
would be sent to fortresses. In 1806, moreover, a reward of 50 francs
for the capture of any fugitive was offered at Valenciennes. It was
very hard on the sureties to be shut up in a fortress if the men for
whom they were answerable did not return on the expiration of their
leave of absence, but this may in some cases have been preconcerted.
When in 1807 the Arras and Valenciennes captives were removed to
Verdun, Wirion gave warning that the first man attempting to escape
would be shot, such being the legal punishment for breach of parole.
This excited murmurs against terror and tyranny. Yet very shortly
afterwards he reported escapes, and it does not appear that he ever
enforced his threat, although Napoleon in January 1811 ordered that
attempted escapes should be punished with death and that the sentences
should be placarded.[196] It is obvious, indeed, that England would
have threatened reprisals. Sentences of six years’ confinement in
irons were, however, inflicted on private soldiers and sailors, for
I find that in 1812 Thomas Hudson, who by means of a forged passport
had attempted in 1808 to escape from Metz, had the remainder of
the penalty remitted on the ground that he had been instigated by a
fellow-prisoner.[197] Had such punishments been imposed on captives
of higher status England would manifestly have retaliated. Alexander
Don, heir to a Scottish baronetcy, escaped from Paris in 1810. In 1808
he had been required to leave that city for either Verdun or Melun,
but must have obtained leave to return. An Italian lady, claiming to
have been married to him in Paris, but suspected of being merely his
mistress, was living at Florence in 1812. He became intimate with Sir
Walter Scott, who speaks of his literary and artistic tastes, his
lively manners, his love of sport, and his oratorical powers, while
Lockhart describes him as courteous, elegant, accomplished, and the
model of a cavalier. He was latterly M.P. for Roxburghshire, and died
in 1826 at the age of forty-seven. His uncle, General Sir George Don,
had been captured and detained at Lille in 1799, when he went with
a flag of truce to General Daendels bearing a proclamation from the
exiled Statthalter. The French Government threatened to shoot him in
reprisals if Napper Tandy and his companions were executed. An exchange
for Don with Tandy was declined by England, as also an exchange with a
French general. England in 1800 claimed his unconditional release, on
pain of imprisoning the French generals at liberty on parole. His wife,
seeing no prospect of his release, applied for a passport to join him.
He continued a captive till June 1800. John, afterwards General Sir
John Broughton, a Staffordshire baronet’s heir, got off in the guise of
a courier.
Two sailors named Henson and Butterfield escaped from Verdun, traversed
all France, and reached the Mediterranean coast, but were there
arrested and sent to Bitche. Philip Astley, the circus owner whose
arrival in Paris has been mentioned, obtained a passport for Savoy on
pretence of wishing to open a circus there, but he went on to Italy
and thence escaped. He was destined to revisit and be buried in Paris
in 1814. James Callender or Campbell of Ardinglas, endeavouring to
escape, was sent to Ham, the fortress in store forty years later for
Louis Napoleon. While there he became the successor to a cousin’s
estates of £3000 a year, but it was several years before he heard of
it. He offered to present his horse to Napoleon, thinking thus to be
liberated, but Napoleon insisted on his fixing a price and then sent
him double the sum. Campbell revisited Paris in 1815 and was sent by
Napoleon to the Conciergerie. This was probably at the instigation of
his alleged wife.[198] Captain Charles Cunliffe Owen, father of Sir
Philip of South Kensington fame, seems in 1811 to have shammed lunacy
and was consequently placed in an asylum at Valenciennes.[199] He
had cut a vein, but not dangerously, and had denounced an imaginary
plot for seizing Belleisle. He was transferred to a private asylum in
Paris, whence in July 1812 he escaped. Captain Francis Tulloch, who in
1808 had been removed from Cambrai to Verdun, effected his escape in
December 1810.
John Harvie Christie, who had gone to France to economise, after
spending three weeks in Paris repaired to Bordeaux. Returning after two
months to the capital, he found that arrests had just been ordered.
He went to the Norman coast, hoping to embark as an American, but was
apprehended at Fécamp, having unluckily in his possession a manuscript
copy of satirical verses on Napoleon and Josephine.[200] He was tried
on the charge of espionage, and though acquitted remained a prisoner.
Henry Dillon and Lynch were arrested at Caen in 1809, and Poppleton,
the teacher of English, who with three Frenchwomen had abetted their
escape, was sent to prison for two months.[201] John Giffard, arrested
in 1811 on the point of embarking at Honfleur, was consigned to a
lunatic asylum. William Throckmorton, a friend of Miss Berry, was
also recaptured at Honfleur in the same year. Another fugitive bore
the appropriate name of Hurry, and Wirion being just then absent, his
subordinate Courselles was suspected of having been bribed. Hurry was
a freemason, and with a hundred of the captives had been admitted into
the Verdun lodge. Wirion recommended that such admissions should be
forbidden, for a French mason had confessed in private conversation
that he should have felt bound, had Hurry applied to him, to facilitate
his escape.[202] But non-masons also promoted escapes, for filthy
lucre’s sake. Indeed this became a trade, and in 1811 two captains
at Bruges were arrested for visiting the _dépôts_ and offering
passports.[203] In 1809 six inhabitants of Arras were prosecuted for
facilitating the escape of an English lord, and at Verdun a breach was
discovered in the walls just in time to prevent escapes. These had
been so numerous among captains and officers of merchantmen that, with
the exception of those above fifty years of age or those having their
wives with them, they were ordered to sleep in the citadel. Permission
to go outside the town within four miles was also revoked, but was
afterwards renewed on condition of mutual suretyship. Augustus Bance,
at Valenciennes, applied for French citizenship and for permission to
open a soap factory at Antwerp. The latter application was refused,
on the ground of Antwerp being too near the frontier, but while the
naturalisation question was pending he escaped.
Mogg and three companions escaped from Arras in 1810, concealing
themselves in the day-time and guided at night by the moon towards
the coast. In a wood near Boulogne, they cut down trees and made a
small boat, which a layer of suet rendered watertight, and they had
brought sails and rope with them. They were, however, discovered.
The authorities ordered the boat to be launched as an experiment,
and there was not the slightest leakage. The men’s ingenuity was
admired, and they told the police inspector that if the Emperor was
informed of their daring scheme he would certainly grant them their
liberty. One of them was accordingly taken before Napoleon, who asked
him whether his motive had not been a desire to rejoin a mistress.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘it was to see my aged mother.’ Thereupon Napoleon,
remarking that she must be a good mother to have such a son, released
him, giving him a small sum for his mother. We are not told whether
his companions were also liberated. Equally venturesome was William
Wright. He became interpreter to General Brabançon, and ultimately
contrived to get on board an English flag-of-truce vessel. He crept
into a trunk till the usual search before departure was over, and after
passing an hour in this uneasy posture was safe. In his _Narrative
of the Situation and Treatment of the English arrested by order of
the French Government_, Wright states that at Valenciennes an
English hotelkeeper, King, who had resided there for twenty years, was
very kind to his captive countrymen. Prisoners without money, says
Wright, were harshly treated, but the officials were open to bribes.
William Hamilton, according to a Boulogne tradition, was assisted in
an unsuccessful attempt to escape by his jailer’s daughter, whom he
afterwards married. He had entered the navy in 1803, and was captured
in 1805. In 1817 he was appointed Consul at Flushing, in 1818 at
Ostend, in 1820 at Nieuport, and in 1822 at Boulogne. He was knighted
on his retirement in 1873, and died in 1877, aged eighty-eight, being
probably the last survivor of Napoleon’s prisoners.
Stewart Kyd, the ex-radical, and Dr. Barklimore escaped, but the two
bankers, Boyd and Benfield, had to undergo the full time of detention.
Benfield died in Paris, in straitened circumstances, in 1810. One of
his daughters married Grantley Berkeley. According to a police bulletin
Benfield was a nullity, whereas Boyd was acquiring a thorough knowledge
of French institutions. He arbitrated on a claim against the French
Government by Schweizer, Swan’s partner and antagonist, who pronounced
him to be a man of great culture and acknowledged probity. He also
wrote pamphlets on financial subjects. He was indemnified for French
confiscation, and from 1828 to 1830 was M.P. for Lymington. He died
in 1837. Another man who made good use of his time was Tuckey, who,
captured in 1805, compiled a maritime geography in three volumes. He
had previously published an account of a voyage to Botany Bay with a
cargo of convicts. He died while exploring the River Congo in 1816.
In several instances besides those already mentioned detention was
followed up by actual incarceration. James Smith, the filter-maker, was
sent to the Temple in 1804 for talking against the French and extolling
the defences of England, to which he had paid frequent visits.[204]
Colonel Stack was charged in the same year with espionage. It is even
alleged, but this cannot be verified, that he was condemned to be
shot as an accomplice of the Due d’Enghien, but was reprieved. What
is certain is that he spent three years in Bitche citadel, afterwards
remaining a prisoner at Verdun till 1814. Colonel William Edwards,
a Jamaica planter, brother I think of Bryan Edwards, M.P., was
imprisoned seven years on suspicion of having facilitated escapes. The
youngest of his twenty-nine children, born at Bruges in 1800, was Milne
Edwards, the eminent French naturalist.
We now come to the liberations and permissions to visit or settle
in various towns, for each of which Napoleon’s express sanction was
necessary, and we may begin with Lord Yarmouth, since he owed his
liberty to negotiations, albeit fruitless, for peace. He had become a
prisoner under trying circumstances. He went over to fetch his wife and
children just as the rupture had occurred, and he inquired at Calais
whether he might safely land. He was answered in the affirmative, yet
no sooner had he done so than he, with all his fellow-passengers,
was declared a prisoner. Curiously enough, however, he professed to
consider the detentions as justified by the embargo in England. He
was sent to Verdun, but it was alleged in March 1804 that he had been
seen in Paris. Wirion, reproached with laxity on this account, denied,
however, that he had gone further afield than Clermont on an affair
of gallantry. He had been exempted, indeed, from the twice-a-day
roll-call till all exemptions had been abolished, and he had also
been allowed to go out shooting; but Wirion urged that permission
to go outside the town tended to prevent escapes by rendering them
dishonourable, and if such permissions were to be refused the garrison
should be strengthened, the walls being so dilapidated that egress was
easy.[205] Yarmouth’s mother had been in favour with the Prince of
Wales, and he himself had then, as a youth, been admitted to Carlton
House. When, therefore, Fox in 1806, on the death of Pitt, became
Foreign Secretary, the Prince asked him to intercede with Talleyrand
for Yarmouth’s release. Napoleon is said to have imagined that Fox was
himself interested in Yarmouth. He consequently not only gave Yarmouth
unlimited leave of absence, but suggested that negotiations should be
opened through this channel. In August 1805 Yarmouth had already been
authorised to quit Verdun for six months and to live near, but not at,
Paris. He announced that he chose Versailles, but nevertheless joined
his wife in Paris. This contravention was reported by the police, but
was winked at for a time.[206] In September, however, he was ordered to
repair to Melun. In May 1806 he was allowed, together with Lord Elgin,
General Abercromby, and Captain Leveson-Gower, to embark at Morlaix
for England. He returned _viâ_ Calais in June with credentials
authorising him to negotiate. He was not a novice in diplomacy, for
in 1793 he had been sent on a mission to Prussia, charging only his
expenses. The police bulletins show how closely all his movements
were now watched. They tell us how he went to the Opera, and how he
wanted to buy French rentes to the amount of a million francs at one
stroke, but could only purchase first 100,000 francs and then 500,000
francs. He called on Quintin Craufurd, Mrs. Sullivan being a friend
of Lady Yarmouth, and he was said to be in love with her daughter,
the so-called Mademoiselle de Dorset.[207] In case of the success of
his mission he was said to intend buying up all the French brandy in
the market and selling it at triple price. A man of pleasure and an
art connoisseur, Yarmouth could scarcely be much of a diplomatist, and
in August Lord Lauderdale was sent to join him. He was believed to
feel annoyance at this. Lauderdale, as we have seen, was a follower
of Fox and had always advocated peace. At the end of August Yarmouth
was recalled, announcing, however, that he should return in January,
and hoped then to conclude peace, but Lauderdale had really superseded
him. Lauderdale nevertheless had committed a mistake at the outset. He
had asked to be presented to Napoleon, and had had to be told that it
was not customary for a plenipotentiary of a country still at war to
be allowed an audience, yet it was evidently no fault of his if the
negotiations proved abortive. According to a French writer who had
studied the documents of the French Foreign Office,[208] Yarmouth on
the 17th July submitted to Champagny a draft treaty by which England
gave up Sicily to Joseph Bonaparte and recognised Napoleon’s conquests
in Holland, Germany, and Italy; but Napoleon, instead of closing with
so advantageous an offer, awaited the result of his negotiations with
Russia. All August was consequently wasted in futile discussions of
formalities, and when the Russian negative answer arrived Napoleon
gave vent to his exasperation by breaking off the negotiations with
England, so that Lauderdale at the beginning of October quitted Paris.
The last police bulletin in which he is mentioned absurdly describes
him as a spy, who had doubtless sent home information of military
movements and of public feeling in Paris.
Both he and Yarmouth now disappear from the scene, but Lady Yarmouth
remained in France, being allowed to pay occasional visits to
England.[209] Lady Hester Stanhope alleges that she had a French lover.
If this scandal has any foundation Yarmouth shared the fate of Lord
Elgin, who, as we have seen, was liberated with him. His too was a
hard case. Returning from the Constantinople Embassy, he had passports
from French consuls in Italy, and though not reaching Paris till after
Whitworth’s departure had been assured by Talleyrand that he might
safely remain, and he doubtless hoped French waters might relieve
his chronic rheumatism. Lord Hawkesbury (afterwards Lord Liverpool),
who, according to Trotter’s _Life of Fox_, had in 1802 accepted
a handsome Sèvres dinner-service from Napoleon, in his diplomatic
circular of the 30th April 1804 made a pointed allusion to Elgin when
he said:--
‘They (the French Government) promised their protection to such
of the subjects of England as were resident in France who might
be desirous of remaining there after the recall of His Majesty’s
ambassador. They revoked this promise without any previous
notice, and condemned these very persons to be prisoners of war,
and still retain as such in defiance of their own engagements
and of the universal usage of all civilised nations. They
applied this new and barbarous rule even to individuals who had
the protection and authority of French ambassadors and ministers
at foreign courts to return in safety through France to their
own country.’
Talleyrand, in his annotations to this circular in the _Moniteur_
of the 5th November 1804, and in his counter-circular, was
significantly silent on this passage, which indeed was obviously
unanswerable. Elgin, at first detained with sixty fellow-captives
at Orleans, was allowed to go to Barèges and to send to England in
October 1803 for Dr. William Scott, on whose report he was permitted
to repair to Paris. Owing, however, to an unfounded rumour that
General Boyer was incarcerated in Scotland, whereas he was really on
parole at Chesterfield, Elgin was ordered back to the Pyrenees. His
wife remained in Paris, and he was not allowed to go thither to her
confinement, which took place on the 4th March 1804; but the infant
expired on the 20th April. He arranged, however, for daily tidings of
her. When Thiébault delivered a message from him to her she showed
no sign of affection, and General Sebastiani was then lolling on her
sofa as though quite at home. She had, however, already made the
acquaintance of Robert Ferguson of Raith, son of William Ferguson, who
in 1793 had succeeded to the property of his uncle Robert Ferguson, a
rich China merchant. Being also one of the British captives, Ferguson
was frequently invited to the Elgins’ Paris house. He was released
as an F.R.S. and a mineralogist in 1805. Lady Elgin, who had joined
her husband at Barèges in June 1804, went over to England in 1806 to
try and get her husband exchanged for General Boyer. Thence she wrote
affectionate letters, and Ferguson also wrote as though interested
in the exchange. But Elgin on his release in 1807 discovered letters
addressed to her by Ferguson, which Garrow, Ferguson’s counsel at
the _crim. con._ trial, described as ‘a most ridiculous medley
of love and madness, or love run mad.’ ‘They would disgrace,’ he
said, ‘the worst novel of the last century.’ £10,000 damages were
awarded. Ferguson married the frail lady--Anne Nesbit was her maiden
name[210]--got into Parliament for Fife in 1806, and died in 1841. He
was cousin to the Miss Berrys, and had once been engaged to Agnes.
Before leaving Elgin, it should be stated that Napoleon, styling him
‘one of the greatest enemies of the nation,’ had rebuked General
Olivier for showing him attentions at Livourne. Napoleon had a grudge
against Elgin, who, he imagined, sent the information which enabled
Nelson to follow the French fleet and destroy it at Aboukir. Elgin
married again in 1810, was the father of Dean Stanley’s wife, and died
in Paris in 1841.
Lady Elgin was not the only faithless wife, for in 1808 Scott, formerly
vice-consul at Naples, declined to take back his wife, who had been
arrested while cohabiting with an Englishman at Saarlibre, and he
recommended her being sent to England, as he had long disowned her
and she was penniless.[211] Lady Webb, letting herself down from a
window in Paris, is said, moreover, to have eloped with Fursy-Guesdon,
a novelist, and grandson of the actor Préville.[212] She knew Madame
Récamier and Chateaubriand.
Lord Beverley and Lord Lovaine, the eldest of his fourteen children,
found more indulgence. Though not released, they were permitted in 1805
to reside at Moulins, which Lovaine liked so well that he remained with
his young family after 1814, though no longer a captive. He was fond
of hunting, lived in style, and was very charitable. At the age of
eighty-seven he became Duke of Northumberland, but enjoyed the honour
only two years. Just after the capitulation of Paris in 1814 he and two
of his sons lunched with Josephine, who told him that the English were
the only people generous enough to speak respectfully of the fallen
Napoleon. In order to have done with peers, let me here note that Lord
Duncannon must have been released before November 1805, when he married
in England, and that the Duke of Newcastle, who came just within the
age of Napoleon’s terrible decree, was released with his mother in
1807. The mother had pleaded ill-health and family affairs, had offered
a profusion of compliments to Napoleon, and had adduced her succour to
French prisoners previously to the peace. She had been allowed in 1804
to go to the Pyrenees and in 1806 to settle at Tours.
Some scientists, scholars, and physicians owed their release to Banks
and Jenner on the one hand, and Carnot, Cuvier, and French doctors
on the other. Lord Shaftesbury appears to have been liberated as an
F.R.S., but possibly as a friend of Fox. James Forbes, another F.R.S.,
who with his wife and daughter arrived in Paris from Brussels the very
day after the decree was issued, was liberated in June 1804 through
Carnot. He had previously been allowed to visit at Tours his brother
Major Charles Forbes, with his wife and five children.[213] Pinkerton,
the geographer, was likewise released in 1805. Dr. Carmichael Smyth,
having in early life travelled in France and kept up a correspondence
with French physicians, profited by their intervention.[214] Dr.
Maclean urged that he had not been in England for ten years, and this
plea availed him. Jenner sent a letter to Napoleon in behalf of William
Thomas Williams, which Napoleon at first cast aside, but Josephine
picking it up told him it was from Jenner. ‘Ah,’ he then exclaimed,
‘I can refuse nothing to so great a man.’ Williams, who on watching
Napoleon for a full hour at the Paris Opera had noticed that he never
once smiled, thought his countenance, on seeing him again at Nancy in
1805, mild, though haughty. Jenner, a correspondent of the Institute
in 1808 and a foreign associate of it on the death of Maskelyne in
1811, also secured the release of Dr. Wickham,[215] and through
Corvisart, the Emperor’s physician, that of Nathaniel Garland and
Valentine Goold. Corvisart likewise intervened for Dr. Burrell Davis,
who after graduating in medicine at Montpellier had been relegated to
Verdun, and who published a striking pamphlet against premature burial.
This he forwarded to Corvisart, along with a petition to Napoleon.
Doctors indeed, as was but right, were less harshly treated. They were
permitted to make journeys to English patients, and in 1810 nine were
granted passports for England. Alexander Hamilton, though not yet an
F.R.S., doubtless owed his release to having catalogued the Sanscrit
manuscripts in the Paris Library. Colclough became a member of a
literary society at Nîmes, in order to procure release as a scholar,
but whether this availed him is doubtful, for we do not hear of him as
a resident Irish landlord till after Napoleon’s fall.
John Spencer Stanhope, of Cannon Hall, Yorkshire, treacherously
delivered up in 1810 by a Gibraltar privateer, was liberated in March
1813, at the intercession of the Institute, in order to make an
archæological visit to Greece: but literary or artistic accomplishments
did not always secure release. Joseph Forsyth discovered this to his
cost. An Elgin man, his father intimate with Isaac Watts, he had
eagerly embraced the opportunity of visiting Italy. Starting as early
as October 1801, he reached Nice on Christmas Day and spent seventeen
months in Italy, but on re-entering France in May 1803 he found himself
a prisoner and was confined at Nîmes. Attempting in the winter to
escape, he was relegated to Bitche, where for two years he was in close
confinement. He was then allowed to go on parole to Verdun. There he
prepared and published in London an account of his artistic tour, and
had copies sent to France in the hope that it would serve him a good
turn. But from want of interest, perhaps too on account of his unlucky
attempt to escape, he could obtain no greater favour than permission
to live in Paris, and even this after four months was revoked. He had
to repair to Valenciennes and wait till 1814. He died in the following
year. Curiously enough, he regretted the publication of his book,
albeit it possessed considerable merit.
Monroe, author of the famous ‘doctrine,’ then American Ambassador at
London, was applied to by prisoners’ friends to solicit their liberty
through his Paris colleague Livingston, whose dispatches to Washington
were sent by flag of truce through Morlaix. Ferguson, Lady Elgin’s
paramour, seems to have been thus released, and a Colonel Johnston was
thus allowed to go to France to see a kinsman named Oliphant.
But while release came to some after a few months, it did not come to
others till after long years. Robson, ex-M.P., confined at Nîmes, must
have had influential friends to obtain permission to embark at Emden as
early as November 1803. Sir Thomas Hare and young Augustus Foster were
apparently indebted to friends in high quarters for release. A wife’s
heroic efforts, which, however, are not particularised, also effected
the liberation of General Sir Charles Shipley.
Chenevix, whose friendship with Berthollet stood him in good stead,
in July 1803 read a paper before the Institute on ‘palladium,’ the
metal discovered in platinum ore by Wollaston, and sent articles to a
French chemical journal. He was one of the original contributors to
the _Edinburgh Review_, in which, according to Thomas Moore, who
met him at Paris in 1821, he wrote against France. He was able without
hindrance to visit Germany and Spain, as well as the Black Sea. In 1812
he married a French countess, and remained in France until his death in
1830.
One of the likeliest ways of obtaining release was to petition Napoleon
or Josephine in person. Mrs. Tuthill managed to present her petition to
the Emperor while out hunting, and he could not deny a lady, especially
a great beauty. Mrs. Cockburn obtained an introduction to her
fellow-Creole Josephine, whereupon Napoleon[216] in July 1803 wrote,
‘Do what is proper for Coxburn’ (_sic_). It was not, however, till
1805 that he obtained permission to go to England for twelve months,
doubtless a euphemism for release. Cockburn, like Yarmouth, had been
allowed to go out hunting at Verdun. John Maunde, an old Bluecoat
scholar, was released in 1807, whereupon he went to Oxford to study for
the Church, became curate of Kenilworth, and formed an intimacy with
Lucien Bonaparte, in his turn a captive, whose poem he was translating
into English when he died in 1813.
Sir Grenville Temple was allowed in 1804 to go to Switzerland, and in
1810 to embark for America with his rich Bostonian wife and their four
children. Sampson Eardley was released in March 1806. Captain Walter
Stirling was liberated in time to testify at the Elgin trial to the
conjugal harmony which had previously existed. Colonel Molesworth in
1804 had permission to visit England, which probably meant release.
John Parry, more fortunate than his brother James, was struck off the
list of captives. He alleged that he had been expelled from England for
writing in favour of peace, and he solicited and obtained permission in
1809 to go and see after his brother’s property, intending to return
and marry at Tours. Henry Seymour, the ex-M.P. and lover of Madame
Dubarry, was allowed in 1809 to go to Switzerland. He had previously
been permitted to reside at Melun and Paris. Richard Trench, who had
been married at the British Embassy in March 1803 to Melesina, daughter
of the Rev. Philip Chenevix and widow of Colonel St. George, was
allowed in August 1803, on account of ill-health, to go to Orleans,
his wife having managed through influence to save her husband from
being sent to Verdun. From Orleans she made repeated visits to Paris
to intercede for him. Her husband once in 1805 accompanied her, and
in a secluded part of the Bois de Boulogne meeting the Emperor, told
him which way the stag had gone. Napoleon, however, was angry at thus
meeting alone a tall young Englishman who had come to Paris without
leave, and after a night in prison Trench was ordered to Verdun. He
was soon allowed to live in Paris, but it was not till 1807 that Mrs.
Trench, by personally presenting her petition, secured her husband’s
release.[217] Meanwhile she had given birth to Francis, a theological
writer whom I remember as rector of Islip, but Richard, the archbishop,
was not born till 1808, after her return to Dublin.
There is no record in the police bulletins of the release of Thomas
Manning, who hastened to Paris from Angers on hearing of the rupture.
The family tradition is that he owed his deliverance to Carnot and
Talleyrand. Let us hope that he got back in time to be one of the Diss
volunteers who in October 1803 received notice to be in readiness to
march to London on the first notification of a French invasion--an
invasion, however, which, argued a letter in the _Times_, should
be welcomed as ensuring a grand haul of prisoners. In 1817, on his way
back from Tibet, he stopped at St. Helena and presented the captive
Emperor--their positions had been almost reversed--with tea, coffee,
tobacco, two silk pocket-handkerchiefs, and two feather fans.[218] He
had been strictly charged to address Napoleon as ‘general,’ but when
asked by whom his passport in 1803 had been signed, he replied, ‘By
yourself, by the Emperor.’ Napoleon’s face lit up at this recognition
of his rank by an Englishman. Impey was released in July 1804, perhaps
through Madame Talleyrand, whom he must have known at Calcutta. Sir
James de Bathe is said to have procured the intercession of the Pope,
to whom it was represented that his children in England might in his
absence be made Protestants. His son and heir was then only a boy of
ten. Sir James died in 1808. Greathead, the lifeboat inventor, was
released in December 1804, quite cured of democracy, it was said, by
his French treatment. Greatheed, with whom he must not be confused,
was allowed with his son to go to Dresden and thence to Italy. The son
died at Vicenza in 1804 at the age of twenty-three. Granby Sloper, who
had settled at Paris in 1789 and had been imprisoned there in 1794,
though struck off the list of captives in 1803 and allowed to live in
Paris, had been arrested in 1806 as an accomplice of Wickham; but on
proof that he had simply when at Berne asked the latter for a passport
for England he was liberated.[219] William Stone, who, as already
stated, had taken refuge in France after his acquittal of high treason
in London in 1796, was unmolested, and became eventually steward to an
Englishman named Parker at Villeneuve St. George.
One of the most singular cases of lenity is the permission given
in 1808, on the recommendation of a Paris professor, to the two
brothers Lambert to leave Givet and exhibit themselves all over
France. For several generations their family had had a scaly or horny
epidermis.[220]
There is a solitary case of refusal to accept release. Richard Oliver,
ex-M.P. for the county of Limerick, though in ill-health and anxious
to leave with his mother and sister, declined without consulting them
on learning that the passport had been granted at the instance of
Arthur O’Connor, whom he had formerly known. He disdained to be under
obligation to a conspirator.
It would have been strange if money as well as influence had not
sometimes secured release. The Rev. W. H. Churchill, of Colliton,
Devon, was on his way to Lyons in May 1803 when he was stopped and
ordered to return to Paris. There he was dismayed to learn that all the
English had been consigned to Verdun. He pleaded for leave to escort
an invalid brother home, but was told by Junot that unless he repaired
to Verdun he would be sent to the Temple prison. He nevertheless
resolved to wait and see what would happen. A gendarme duly appeared
with an order to take him to the Temple, but the name was misspelt,
and the gendarme for a consideration withdrew, promising to say that
he had not found the man. Churchill then feigned illness, and a French
doctor prescribed for an ulcerated throat. In January 1804 Churchill,
through bribery, as is believed, was permitted to escort his invalid
brother.[221]
Next to freedom the greatest favour was leave to visit or reside where
the prisoners chose. Ill-health was naturally one of the commonest
grounds for such applications, and naturally these were viewed with
some scepticism. Lawrence states that Dr. Madan at Verdun made money
by giving certificates of indisposition for exemption from morning
roll-call. Two ex-M.P.’s, Nicholl and Waller, obtained permission
to repair respectively to Lyons and Nîmes. Nicholl’s son was also
allowed to go to a neighbouring town to marry a Miss Mount.[222] He
was ultimately released. The bookseller Payne was authorised to go to
Plombières and Barèges. We thus see that watering-places profited, as
well as Verdun, by the detentions.
Sir Thomas and Lady Webb were in 1809 allowed to go to Savoy. Lady
Webb, a convert to Catholicism, adopted in 1813 a little English girl
seemingly lost by her parents and found among a troop of jugglers at
Lyons.[223] The waif, after being educated and apprenticed, became
a nun. Macnab was permitted to study medicine at Montpellier. James
Heath, the engraver, was allowed in 1810 two months at Paris to copy
architectural designs. In that year also visits to the capital were
permitted to two clergymen, Maude and Lancelot Lee, as well as to Lord
Shaftesbury, Captain Lovelace, Colonel de Blaquiere, and the brothers
Tichborne, Henry being in ill-health. In June 1810, however, all or
nearly all permissions for Paris were revoked. But in 1813 Halpin
was allowed to return to Paris to complete his art studies. Colonel
Phillips, who had accompanied Cook round the world, was permitted to
visit England in the summer of 1804, and General Scott was allowed to
visit his family at Versailles; but on refusing to name a man who had
extorted money from him by pretending to have obtained such permission
he was ordered back to Verdun.[224] Sir Thomas Clavering, whose father
had been one of Warren Hastings’ opponents at Calcutta, had married a
Frenchwoman, the daughter of an Angers dressmaker, and was consequently
allowed to remain at Orleans. There he drove his own carriage and
had fine English horses. He was friendly with his neighbour, the
actress Raucourt, and once took young Bonneval (afterwards Marquis
and General) to her house, where there was much card-playing and the
youth lost all his pocket-money. In 1808 he was permitted to live at
St. Germain. In 1810 he sent his wife to England to try and effect an
exchange. Meanwhile he was at Paris, living with a Vaudeville actress,
Arsène. She treacherously sent the police an anonymous letter warning
them that he talked against Napoleon and intended to escape. Cuthbert
Sharpe, through Regnier, Minister of Justice, was in 1804 struck
off the list of captives, allowed to live in Paris, and ultimately
liberated. Cramer, a man of a good Irish Protestant family, though
originally detained at Verdun, had leave, on its being known that he
was against the war, to travel freely about France. Settling at Tours,
he married a Mademoiselle Fereau and made the acquaintance of Courier,
the future pamphleteer. He died at Florence in 1827. Edward Dillon,
a naval cadet, being related to General Clarke, was permitted to
complete his education in Paris. Sir John Morshead had permission to
go to Versailles to undergo an operation, and was ultimately released.
As near the end of the war as January 1814, Colonel William Cox,
ex-governor of Almeida, solicited permission to visit Paris.
Among the _détenus_ permitted to visit or reside in Paris between
1806 and 1811[225] were Colonel Arthur Annesley, Charles Jerningham,
Lovell Edgeworth, Charlotte, Elizabeth, and Henry (sisters and son of
Sir William) Wolseley, John Daniel, ex-president of Douai College,
Thomas William Atkinson, Theobald, Henry, and William Dillon, the Rev.
Robert Bland, Count Daniel O’Connell, and George Woodyatt, a student
from Westphalia, afterwards a doctor at Worcester, and grandfather of
George Woodyatt Hastings, president of the Social Science Association,
the M.P. who misappropriated his ward’s money, making the usual plea
that he intended to refund it. They also included General Lord John
Murray, General Sir Edward Paget, Sir Herbert Croft, Archdall Cope and
his brother, students in Paris since their childhood, Blount, another
student, Atkinson, a medical student, John Jervis, the engraver,
Terence M’Mahon, Christopher Potter, Smith, an engraver, Laurence
Stoddart, a paralytic Scotsman, Edward Hayes, the miniature painter,
and his father, Sir John Coghill, and Benfield, the banker.
Although women and children were not included in the decree they
could not always leave without difficulty. In July 1803 some girls,
who had been imprudently sent to school at Rouen, had got to Calais
on their way home when an order came to detain them as hostages for
a young nephew and niece of Madame Bonaparte who had apparently been
captured on their voyage from Martinique. There may have been some
delay in the passage to France of this ‘Master and Miss la Pagerie,’
as the _Times_ styled them; but assuredly England had no thought
of detaining children, and it may be presumed that the exchange
was promptly effected. As for women, Anne Plumptre, as free in her
movements as at home, easily procured a passport in 1805; but her
Francomania was in her favour. The divorced wife of Comte de Melfort
(she was sister of the Earl of Barrymore, and her husband a descendant
of the Scottish Drummonds) was allowed in 1810 to go to England with
her two daughters to look after property, leaving behind her two sons,
one page to the Emperor, and the other at St. Cyr military college.
She is said to have had a _liaison_ with the Prince Regent, and
Melfort alleged that his marriage at the British Embassy had been
invalid on account of the difference of religion; but he was himself
a debauchee. Arrested in London for debt, he found a titled lady to
pay the amount and elope with him to France. Lady Donegal[226] and her
sisters, Mary and Philippa Godfrey, got back to England as early as
October 1803. Lady Maynard and Lady Ancram also obtained passports.
A woman named Thompson, ninety-two years of age, captured in 1809
on board a merchantman which stranded off Calais, was at once, in
consideration of her age, sent back to England.
Sometimes women who had gone home on business did not find return an
altogether easy matter. Thus Mrs. Clarke, who had obtained a passport
for England _viâ_ Holland in April 1807, was arrested by the
English authorities on attempting to return, was sent in custody to
London, and was interrogated on suspicion of being a spy in the French
service. She easily cleared herself, but then waited to see her elder
daughter Eleanor married to Frewen-Turner, M.P. for Athlone, and in
1808 she landed in France from Jersey. She was arrested, however, at
St. Lô, and had to give an account of herself. She stated that in 1791
she visited Toulouse with her daughter and her mother, Mrs. Hay,[227]
and that in 1801 she took her mother and a younger daughter Mary to
Toulouse; that they removed to Paris two days before Whitworth’s
departure, that her visit to England had been purely on business,
and that had she not got a passage from Jersey she should have tried
going round by America. She was allowed, on her story being verified,
to rejoin her mother and daughter.[228] The latter as Madame Mohl,
ultimately famous for her receptions in Paris, coquettishly concealed
her age, not liking to confess to seniority to her German husband. At
her death in 1883 she was ninety years of age. Miss Lemprière, probably
sister of the author of the _Classical Dictionary_, was permitted
to return. Mary Masquerier, a governess, sister, doubtless, of the
artist already named, was allowed in 1812 to embark at Morlaix for
London. A Mrs. Cornuel in the same year obtained permission to go to
England to fetch her two daughters, one of whom had for ten years been
in the charge of an uncle in London, and all three returned on board
a smuggling vessel.[229] A girl named Warren, eleven years of age,
on board a vessel captured by a privateer in 1805, was restored to
her father, quartermaster at Malta. Three children named Crane, aged
from ten to sixteen, who had been sent to school in Paris in 1802,
but whose father could no longer afford to pay for their education,
were permitted in 1805 to embark at Rotterdam.[230] Mrs. Story and her
four little children, also captured by a privateer, were liberated in
December 1813, as likewise ‘Madame Kirkpatrick’ with her four children
and two nieces, who had all been residing in Paris. We shall hear
presently of her husband. Catherine Russell, a young woman captured
in 1812 by a privateer and landed at Amsterdam, showed such despair
at being parted from her friends that she was allowed to return
to England.[231] Mrs. Mary Bishop in 1813 had leave with her four
daughters to pay a visit to England, ostensibly to obtain possession
of property, but really, so she alleged after the Restoration when
appealing to Louis XVIII. for recompense, on a mission from
royalists. Lady Boyle had like permission in July 1813, but her
husband, the future Earl of Glasgow, could merely obtain leave to visit
Paris. Occasionally the English authorities objected to the landing
of such passengers. Thus a Mrs. Borel, wife of a London merchant, was
refused permission to land at Dartmouth in 1813 for want of a formal
permit; she took passage on another vessel for Portsmouth in the
hope of there finding less difficulty.[232] The English Government
apparently suspected that some of these arrivals might be spies in
French pay.
Englishwomen, sometimes accompanied by little children, having obtained
leave from both Governments, mostly in order to rejoin captive
husbands, continued to land at Morlaix up to 1813. Thus Mrs. Dorothy
Silburn, who had liberally befriended French _émigré_ priests in
England, was authorised in 1807 to settle at Roscoff, where she spent
the remainder of her life, her tomb being still prominent in the old
churchyard. The Countess Bruce, separated wife of Puschkin--he made
in 1810 curious experiments in galvanism, as it was then called--went
from Venice to Paris in 1811 to solicit the pardon of a negro servant
who had been condemned to death for the murder of a female servant,
whereas the two domestics had agreed to die together because they
could not legally marry. He accordingly shot her, and wounded, but
failed to kill, himself. Among the arrivals was also the notorious Lady
Craven, Margravine of Anspach. This fair but frail lady, who had sat
to Reynolds and Romney, had visited the Austrian and Russian Courts,
had immediately on becoming a widow married the Margrave, a nephew
of Frederick II., and had lived with him at Hammersmith,
but had been cold-shouldered by London society and even by her own
daughters. She had paid a short visit to Paris in 1802, and she went
again in 1807 to take possession of her second husband’s property. We
hear little more of her till her death at Naples in 1828, where she
had settled in 1805, being joined by one of her sons, Keppel Craven,
of whom we have already heard.[233] Another restless woman, wife of
Colonel Henry (brother of Viscount) Dillon, arrived in Paris in 1808,
ostensibly to join her husband but really to bring over letters from
royalist exiles, perhaps also to meet her lover, Latour du Pin. She
was arrested, and her husband disowned her. In 1810 he notified the
police that she had taken her children from Bordeaux and gone with them
without his knowledge to England, where he feared she would divulge his
offer to join the French army. Sir Robert Adair’s French wife in 1808
obtained leave to remove from Vienna to Rheims, in order to bring up
her daughters by her former marriage.
The celebrated Pamela, widow of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, was allowed
in 1810 to come to Paris, Napoleon directing Fouché to ‘pump’ her on
English and Irish affairs,[234] as also probably on Count Stahremberg,
Austrian Ambassador at London, her reputed lover, for she had quitted
her second husband Pitcairn, American Consul at Hamburg. Her daughter
by the latter, who survived till a few years ago, seems to have been
left behind, either in Germany or in England.
Julia Sayers, who had been a visitor in 1802, was allowed in 1805 to
come over and marry Pougens, the blind author,[235] natural son of
the Prince de Conti, to whom she had been introduced in London in
1786. His fortune had disappeared in the Revolution, and he had turned
bookseller. She was a niece of Admiral Boscawen and of the Duchess of
Beaufort.
Wives were sometimes, however, refused permission to come over and
join their captive husbands. Margaret Stuart, who in 1806 had married
Hingston Tuckey, both having been captured at sea, on returning in 1810
from a visit to England was unceremoniously shipped back. Sir Thomas
Lavie, stranded on the French coast in 1806, was refused his wife’s
company, whereupon England forbade the wives of French prisoners to
land in England. This retaliation apparently brought the French to
reason, for as late as January 1813--so little was Napoleon’s fall
foreseen--Englishwomen landed at Morlaix.[236]
Nor did women always escape imprisonment. A Mrs. Moore was arrested in
1810 on the charge of facilitating her husband’s escape from Bitche.
She was, however, soon released. Again in 1812 an Englishwoman named
Taylor, living at Rouen, returning to Morlaix after a visit to England,
met at the inn three sailors who had just been liberated from British
pontoons. ‘Ah,’ said she, ‘you only come from one prison to enter
another. You will be forced to serve in the French navy, and will be no
better off than in English prisons. You will never be better off till
Bonaparte’--here she made a gesture indicating the guillotine. On being
arrested for this imprudent speech she at first denied everything, but
on being confronted with the sailors admitted all except the remark on
Bonaparte. She was ordered to be sent back to England.[237]
The banker Coutts wrote in 1810 to Lafayette, asking him to obtain
passports for the south of France for his invalid daughter, Lady
Bute, her husband[238] and two children, a doctor and two servants.
Lafayette, in endorsing the application, stated that Coutts was banker
(he should have said son-in-law) to Burdett, who had rendered service
to the French prisoners. Lady Bute and her sister had been educated in
Paris previously to the Revolution by Madame Daubenton. Lord Bute died
at Geneva in November 1814, and his remains were conveyed to England.
Coutts also obtained permission for another son-in-law, Lord Guilford,
to revisit France, but Guilford died before being able to profit by it.
He had long suffered from injury to the spine, occasioned by a fall
from his horse in the act of presenting a basket of fruit to his future
wife. His brother, who succeeded to the title, established himself at
Corfu during the Greek struggle for independence, and was attired like
a Greek professor.
J. Cleaver Bankes was allowed, on the recommendation of Benjamin
Constant, to come and examine Sanscrit manuscripts at the National
Library. In 1813 Sir Humphry Davy and his wife, with his secretary
young Faraday, passed through Paris on their way to Italy. They
visited the laboratory of Chevreul (not the future centenarian) at the
Jardin des Plantes, and at Malmaison were shown by Josephine books
and extracts relating to Cromwell, marked in pencil by Napoleon. The
institute had in 1809 awarded Davy the £60,000 prize for electrical
improvements.
Mrs. Bathurst and her brother, George Call, were allowed to pass
through France in 1810, on their search for her husband. Call on
his way back solicited an audience of Napoleon,[239] whose portrait
adorned his snuff-box, a request which shows that he had not the
slightest idea of accusing Napoleon. His belief, indeed, and that of
the widow, was that Bathurst had been wrecked in the Baltic.[240]
Colonel Macleod of Colbeck, uncle of Lord Moira, after being liberated,
actually in 1810 asked leave to settle in France. He was described by
the police bulletin as honest but weak-minded, and as having incurred
unpleasantness in Scotland by his liking for France and his advocacy of
peace.
Shirley, a Jamaica planter, was also allowed in 1806 to settle in
the south, and Colonel Vesey, on the recommendation of the King of
Prussia, was permitted to go to Barèges on account of his wound.
The British blockade of course barred the way by sea. The Marquis of
Douglas in 1808 was allowed to pass through France on his way home
from Russia, his health being unequal to a sea passage. Talleyrand
had recommended him as favourable to France. Father Gordon in 1810
solicited leave to return to Paris to urge his reinstatement as head
of the Scots College. He apparently did not know that that institution
had been fused with the Irish College, where Walsh had, it seems, been
reinstated, for in 1807 Walsh had asked permission for some students
to come over from Ireland. Walsh himself, however, along with other
Irish priests, was not allowed by the British Government to return in
1811 to Ireland, such journeys to and fro being considered suspicious.
Five quasi-Britons--Admiral Alexis Greig, born in Russia of Scottish
parents; Admiral Robert Elphinstone, a native of Plymouth; Captain
Thomas Candler, of Dublin; Moffat, of Dalkeith; and William Crowe--all
in the Russian navy, were authorised in 1808 to pass through France on
their way back from Lisbon.
Turning to involuntary visitors, precedence is due to Lord Blayney,
who, sent with troops to Malaga in 1810, imprudently allowed himself
to be captured by the French immediately on landing. His book gives an
interesting account of his journey across Spain and France to Verdun.
He was treated with great respect, and in Spain could hunt and make
excursions without restriction. He does not tell us much, however, of
life at Verdun, where he passed three years. In 1812 England offered
to exchange for him General Simon, who had been wounded and required
mineral waters, but Napoleon apparently did not consider him equal in
rank to Blayney, although assured by General Clarke that the latter had
not held a high military post.[241] Another general captured in Spain
was Sir Edward Paget, who had previously lost his right arm in battle,
but was able, after about three years’ detention, to resume active
service. He had in 1806 resigned his seat for Carnarvon. Lord John
Murray seems likewise to have been captured in Spain. Sir Thomas Lavie,
as already mentioned, who was wrecked on the French coast, was for
some months confined in the citadel of Montmédy and debarred writing
materials. He was very kind to his fellow-captives at Verdun, and was
allowed to go to Melun. Governor of the Royal Naval Asylum, he died in
1821.
Roger Langton, captured at sea in 1808, made an unsuccessful attempt
to escape, and remained at Verdun till 1814.[242] Aytoun, an Edinburgh
man, captured in an Austrian vessel in 1806 and sent to Verdun, was
probably a kinsman--perhaps Richard the father--of William Edmonstoune
Aytoun, the champion of Mary Stuart.
Another involuntary visitor was Captain Donat Henchy O’Brien, of the
Hussars, who was wrecked off Brest in February 1804, and was sent
first to Bitche and ultimately to Verdun. Two unsuccessful attempts to
escape--the first time he was recaptured at Étaples, and the second,
after crouching among a drove of oxen to pass the Rhine, he was
given up by the German authorities at Lindau--entailed incarceration
in filthy and stifling casemates, but in a third attempt in 1808 he
reached the Austrian frontier and was able to resume service. He
published a full account of his adventures,[243] which was reprinted
in 1902. Another sailor, Miller, captured in 1804 in the man-of-war
_Wolverine_, escaped in 1811, and published an anonymous
narrative. Moir, a naval surgeon captured at sea, was joined by his
wife, who in 1808 gave birth to a son, destined to become the ‘father’
of the Royal College of Physicians, and to reach the age of ninety-one.
That son, John Moir, a prominent Free Churchman, remembered being
taken in his mother’s arms or by her hand when she waited on Napoleon
to entreat her husband’s liberation, but we are not told whether she
was successful. Moir on regaining his liberty settled in Edinburgh.
Francis Milman, brother of the future Dean, was captured in Spain, and
detained at Verdun till January 1814,[244] when Jenner obtained his
release. Edward Boyse, midshipman of the _Phœbe_, was captured
in July 1803 in a boat off Toulon, and conducted first to Verdun and
then to Valenciennes; but with two comrades he escaped from the latter
fortress.[245]
Clandestine visitors were naturally suspected of being spies.[246] Thus
the son of Dickinson, the artist, ex-secretary to the Ottoman Embassy
in London, entered France under the name of Lambert in 1805, apparently
in order to join his father in Paris; but he had given up painting and
had been in the employ of the British Government. He proved that he
had come to see a Madame Gourbillon, of whom he had been enamoured in
London, but the authorities suspected that he might occupy his leisure
in sending reports to England, and he was consequently despatched to
Verdun,[247] albeit his sister was companion to Madame Talleyrand. But
he must have been liberated, for we hear of another visit in 1810.
Thomas Graham, arrested at Pepignan in 1810, had entered France from
Spain, but having a mission to General Clarke and Arthur O’Connor he
was released. William Hayne, lace-maker of Nottingham, and having an
extensive continental trade, was arrested in Paris in 1807, having a
stock of lace in his possession. What was done with this venturesome
trader is not stated. Nathaniel Parker Forth, a diplomatic emissary,
the satellite of the Duke of Orleans who procured Pamela for Madame
de Genlis, was reported to be in Paris in 1805, and was ordered to
be watched;[248] but if such ‘a consummate intriguer’ had really
been there he would certainly have been arrested and expelled. James
Mathews, another diplomatic interloper, who had been arrested in Paris
in 1793, landed at Havre without a passport in 1807 and vainly tried
to pass for an American. The notorious swindler, Lisle Semple, was
also reported to have been seen in Paris in 1805, yet this too is
unconfirmed. He had been expelled as a spy in 1802.
There was even a report in Paris in 1805 that six English officers had
come over to witness the coronation, but this seems highly improbable.
Napoleon’s long arm reached not only to Hamburg but to Italy. In 1806
all Englishmen found there were ordered to be arrested, and Graham,
consequently apprehended at Venice, was sent to Valenciennes. Edward
Dodwell, living at Rome, had to apply for leave to visit England in
order to publish a work on Greece. John Wilson, a native of Liverpool,
residing in Italy, was authorised in 1810, on account of his health,
to live at Geneva. He afterwards asked permission to become partner in
a firm at Bordeaux.[249] The Earl of Bristol, Bishop of Derry, would
probably have been arrested, as he had been in 1798, had he not died at
Albano on the 8th July 1803, before Napoleon had had time to look so
far afield for his prey.
Sir George Rumbold, British Minister at Hamburg and son of Warren
Hastings’ opponent at Calcutta, was seized by order of Napoleon in
1804. It is believed by the Rumbold family that this was instigated
by the famous Pamela, Lady Edward Fitzgerald, who was then at Hamburg
and in league with the Irish exiles there, to whom Rumbold’s vigilant
observation was very irksome.[250] If so, she was guilty of treachery,
for she had been very intimate with him.
Rumbold lived in a neighbouring village, going twice a week into
Hamburg on mail days. A hundred soldiers under Major Maison landed at
night on the coast, and ten or twelve of them drove in two carriages to
the spot to surround the house and prevent any alarm. A sentinel was
placed in front of every door and window. On the arrival of the rest
of the detachment, a German civilian knocked at the door and stated
that he had brought despatches. A servant bade him deliver them at the
window, but the door was forced open and Rumbold was arrested in his
bed. He expected nothing less than to be shot, as the Duc d’Enghien had
been six months before, but Maison assured him that his life was safe.
All his papers were seized, and these were expected to implicate the
British Government in plots to assassinate Napoleon, an expectation,
however, which was not realised. The Prince Regent, moreover, according
to a police bulletin of 1805, referring to such plots, had said, ‘Let
us meet Bonaparte like men, not like assassins.’[251] Rumbold, on being
taken to Paris, was induced on the promise of the restitution of his
papers to sign an engagement never to approach on non-British territory
within a hundred miles of any post occupied by French troops. In Paris,
if we may credit a police report, his terror revived. He asked for time
to pray and to write to his family, adding that for eighteen months he
had been disgusted with politics, and but for his children’s interests
would have thrown up his appointment. He passed ten days in the Temple,
and here is the description given of him:--
‘5 ft. 11 in. Hair brownish grey. Eyebrows dark grey. Forehead
ordinary. Eyes greyish brown. Nose short, slim above and rather
thick below. Mouth medium. Lips thick. Chin round. Face oval and
full. A small mark on the left cheek.’
The King of Prussia had remonstrated against such a violation of German
territory, and had ordered his Ambassador to Paris to demand his
passports unless Rumbold were released. Accordingly the preposterous
intention of trying him for conspiracy, if ever entertained, was
abandoned, and he was escorted to Cherbourg, where, not without
renewed apprehensions of being shot, he was handed over to a British
frigate. He had already repented of signing the engagement, an act
of cowardice, he said, tantamount to resignation. The gendarme major
told him he might keep the matter secret, but Rumbold replied that he
should be bound to inform his Government. He also expressed regret at
his family affairs being pried into in his papers.[252] Rumbold, if
the French reports are to be trusted, certainly showed pusillanimity,
but the recent fate of the Duc d’Enghien was in his mind. The promise
of restoring his papers was not fulfilled, and being censured by the
English Government for the engagement entered into by him, he offered
to go back to France and revoke that engagement. This, of course, was
not allowed. In the following spring he repaired to Berlin to thank
the King of Prussia for his intervention, and he followed the royal
family in their retreat to Memel. There, tended by Prince Augustus when
attacked with fever, he expired in December 1807. His widow in 1810
married Sir Sidney Smith, who likewise had had experience of the Temple
prison. Both she and Sir Sidney ended their days in Paris.
In 1876 Sir Horace Rumbold obtained permission to inspect his
grandfather’s confiscated papers in the French Archives, but found
the family matters in them very meagre, while he suspected that the
political portions had been withheld from him.[253]
Talleyrand, in a diplomatic circular justifying such high-handed
acts, charged England with prostituting the functions of ambassadors
by making them instigate the assassination of the Emperor; but Lord
Hawkesbury in reply, while indignantly denying the charge, insisted
that a belligerent was entitled to have dealings with malcontents,
and he twitted France with incitement of Irish rebellions. Napoleon’s
evident maxim, however, was that all was fair on his own side, and it
must be confessed that, whereas no Irishman proposed to assassinate
George III., French malcontents looked for no success unless
through Napoleon being kidnapped or murdered.
A Colonel Butler was also arrested at Hamburg in November 1806. In
the French Dragoons until the Revolution, he had for eleven or twelve
years, along with Dutheil, been an agent for the Bourbons and had paid
secret visits to Paris. Two of his many children were there and were
rich with their mother’s property. What became of him is not stated.
Possibly he escaped.
James Smithson, natural son of the Duke of Northumberland, born in
France in 1765, and future founder of the Smithsonian Institute at
Washington, was likewise arrested at Hamburg in 1809, but at the
solicitation of Banks received a passport for England. He had visited
Paris in 1791, when he wrote--‘The office of king is not yet abolished,
but they daily feel the inability or rather the great inconvenience
of continuing it. May other nations at the time of their reforms
be wise enough to cast off at first the contemptible incumbrance!’
Smithson, who must by this time have been sadly disillusioned with the
Revolution, died at Genoa in 1829, having mostly spent his later years
in Paris.
George Sinclair, eldest son of Sir John, the great agriculturist, in
1806, at the age of sixteen, was arrested by the French as a spy,
having been found between the French and German lines just before the
battle of Jena. Sinclair, who became a general and lived till 1868,
published in 1826 in the _Representative_ an interesting account
of his interview at Auma with Napoleon, before whom he was taken,
together with his companion, a German named Rigel, by Count Frohberg.
He found Napoleon in a dressing-gown and white night-cap, and he was
required not only to show that he had been on purely private business,
but to trace all his movements on a map and to answer questions as
to the German troops through which he had passed. ‘All Napoleon’s
questions,’ he says, ‘were remarkable by their perfect clearness. He
omitted nothing that was necessary; he asked nothing superfluous.’
‘What guarantee can I have,’ said Napoleon, ‘of the truth of your
story? Englishmen do not usually travel on foot and without a servant
and in such a dress.’ Sinclair was wearing a coarse brown overcoat. ‘It
is true, sire,’ he replied, ‘that my conduct may seem a little odd, but
imperative circumstances and the impossibility of procuring a horse
forced me to do all that I have done.’ He produced some family letters,
which Napoleon asked Frohberg to skim, and one of them was from Sir
John Sinclair, commending his study of Greek and Latin and exhorting
him to master German and French. Thereupon Napoleon, softening his
tone, said, ‘So you have learned Latin and Greek. What authors have you
read?’ Surprised at such a question, Sinclair named Homer, Thucydides,
Cicero, and Horace. It was well he could not or did not name Tacitus,
the object of Napoleon’s aversion. ‘Very good, very good,’ he rejoined,
and turning to General Berthier, he said, ‘I do not think this young
man is a spy, but the other is probably less innocent, and they must be
kept together to avoid suspicion.’ A nod indicated that the interview
was over, and Sinclair, bowing, withdrew. ‘When taken before him,’ he
writes, ‘I had the strongest prejudice against him. I considered him
the enemy of my country and the oppressor of the rest of Europe. On
quitting him, the grace and fascination of his smile and that superior
intelligence which illumined his face had entirely subjugated me.’
Napoleon directed Frohberg to tell the young man he was much pleased
with the frankness of his answers. Rigel in like manner exonerated
himself, and both, subjected to a few days’ honourable detention, were
liberated after the battle of Jena, a place which Sinclair had passed
on his route and had pointed out to Napoleon on the map.
Should we reckon among the British--she was at any rate among the
notable--involuntary visitors the Countess of Albany, widow of the
Young Pretender, quasi-widow of the poet Alfieri, and quasi-wife of
Fabre of Montpellier? She started from Florence for Paris in 1806, with
the view of publishing Alfieri’s works, but turned back at Turin on
finding that François Xavier Fabre, as an _émigré_, would not be
allowed to re-enter France. In the autumn of 1809, however, Napoleon
required her to come to Paris to exculpate herself from a charge of
intrigues with England. All that she had really done had been to refuse
to receive Clarke when French Minister at Florence, and to apply to
the English Government for an annuity to compensate the one lost by
the death of her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, the titular Henry
IX. She had accordingly been granted £1000 a year. She easily
cleared herself, and Napoleon seems to have been a little ashamed of
disturbing so inoffensive a woman. He jestingly told her that her
influence on Florentine society hampered the fusion desired by him
between Tuscans and French. This, he said, was why he had summoned
her to live in Paris, where she would have more ample opportunity of
gratifying her artistic tastes. The interview lasted only a quarter of
an hour, Napoleon gave her his box at the theatre one night that she
might see Talma. It was not till the end of 1810 that she was permitted
to return to Florence.[254] A letter addressed to her in 1814
piquantly contrasted her husband’s expulsion from France in 1748 with
her own enforced residence there, adding, ‘You have left many regrets
in the great Babylon.’
Such of the English as were allowed to inhabit Paris, the permits for
which, however, were, as we have seen, grudgingly granted and liable to
be cancelled by wholesale, had the slender consolation of reflecting
that they were in the ‘hub’ of the universe, for Paris in the height
of Napoleon’s rule was more the centre of fashion and business than
it has ever been since. It swarmed with Jews--bankers, jewellers, and
merchants--to whom the war afforded many opportunities of enriching
themselves. It also swarmed with adventurers of all nationalities, so
that in February 1803 the regulations as to visitors, whether French
or foreign, were made almost as stringent as those issued during the
Revolution. A list of the inmates had not indeed, as then, to be
placarded outside every house, but every householder was required to
notify the police of the arrival of any visitor or lodger and to send
in the passport. This had to be applied for within three days by such
guest or lodger, to whom a permit to stay in or quit Paris was then
granted. A foreigner’s permit was conditional on the certificate of
his ambassador, or, in default of an ambassador, by a banker or two
well-known citizens.[255]
On the other hand there was no lack of celebrities or of men who
interest us on account of distinguished descendants. Let us begin with
Pius VII., the first Pope who had touched French soil since
the return to Rome from Avignon in 1408. Like the Doge of Genoa at
Versailles, he must have thought himself the most surprising object
in Paris. Manzoni, the Italian poet and novelist, Oersted, the Danish
scientist, and Francis Arago, the future astronomer, whose family
had sought at Perpignan a refuge from Spanish commotions, may next
be noted. Spurzheim, the phrenologist, comes considerably lower down
in eminence. The statesmen include Baron Hardenberg, destined to
regenerate Prussia, and Count Nesselrode, the future author of the Holy
Alliance and the Crimean War. The Poles include Prince Constantine
Czartoryski, who, though a member of a great patriotic family, served
in the Russian army, Count John Wielopolski, and Stanislas Wolowski,
probably a collateral ancestor of the economist who sat in the French
National Assembly of 1871. Marquis Emanuel del Campo, Spanish Minister
of Foreign Affairs, ex-ambassador at London and in 1795 at Paris, was
the natural son of a Spanish grandee, an envoy also to London, by an
Englishwoman named Field, a name which he had turned into Campo. He
commenced life in an orphanage. James and Julius Beccaria were probably
kinsmen of the Milanese philosopher. Count Tolstoi, the Russian
ambassador, and Andrew Tolstoi, apparently his son, may have been
ancestors of the great novelist. Ferdinand de Hérédia was probably the
father of the French Minister of Public Works in 1887, and grandfather
of the academician and poet. Dias and Emanuel Oliveira, the former a
merchant at Oporto, the latter a doctor, were probably ancestors of
the Benjamin Oliveira who in the House of Commons anticipated Cobden by
advocating reduced tariffs on foreign wines. Joseph Samuda, a Barcelona
merchant, was probably uncle of the great East London shipbuilder and
M.P. Philip Gavazzi, an Italian merchant, may have been the father of
the anti-papal ecclesiastic who joined Garibaldi in Naples and died in
1889.
Englishmen domiciled, if not naturalised, abroad were not subject to
detention, which indeed was not prospective in the decree, but was
limited to persons then on French soil. The Berlin decree of 1807
ordered, it is true, the capture of all British subjects irrespective
of sex or age found in territories occupied by French or allied
troops; but this does not seem to have been enforced. Hence the
police registers[256] show visits to Paris between 1806 and 1813 by
Englishmen settled on the Continent, but it is not always easy to
distinguish these from men of English names, descendants of Jacobites
or other emigrants, born abroad. In any case the registers are evidence
that British subjects or men of British descent were sprinkled all
over Europe, some as soldiers of fortune, others as manufacturers or
artisans, and a few as land-owners. Thus the register of Spaniards
gives us Colonel Peter Aylmer, Patrick MacMahon, a merchant at San
Sebastian, Thomas Moore, a landowner born in Spain, William Mulvey, a
native of Cadiz, O’Farrill, Ambassador to Berlin, William Stirling, a
merchant born at Barcelona, Charles Willcox, a landowner also born
there, and Colonel Charles Augustus Joseph Walsh de Serrant, one of
whose family conveyed the Young Pretender to Scotland in 1745. The
so-called Portuguese included Henry Gallwey and Joseph O’Moran, latter
a commercial traveller.
The Dutchmen comprise General O’Connor, a native of Holland, Benjamin
John Hopkinson, a domiciled landowner, and Robert Twiss, a merchant,
apparently the father of Francis and Richard Twiss, and the grandfather
of Horace Twiss. The Belgians were considered Frenchmen, or we should
have heard of William Cockerill, one of the three sons of the man who
founded the famous ironworks at Seraing. The Prussians and Poles, who
are classed together, comprise William Flint and Augustus and John
Simpson, merchants, Catherine and Richard Fitzgerald, land-owners,
natives of Dublin, Samuel Turner, ‘president of canton,’ whatever that
may mean, also from Dublin, and Baron Butler, a major captured in the
field. Among Danes are Edmund de Bourke, Ambassador to Spain, and
David Turnbull, a manufacturer at Altona. The Russians include Baron
John Richard Bourke, Reuben Beasley, a merchant, Dr. William Birt, and
William Lind, surgeon, both natives of St. Petersburg.
Among Swiss are John Archer and Walter and David Johnston, two sons
of a wine merchant at Bordeaux who had not yet been naturalised
in France, but was unmolested and allowed in 1812 to visit Paris.
Last but not least is William Kirkpatrick, a son of the Scottish
(Closeburn) baronet, who was a winemerchant at Malaga, and had married
Françoise de Grévignée, daughter of a Walloon, also settled at Malaga.
Kirkpatrick, who had been appointed Consul at Hamburg by the Grand Duke
of Oldenburg, was in Paris in 1808 and was anxious to return to Malaga,
but the French police suspected him of relations with England and had
arrested his partner Turnbull. His daughter Maria Emanuele, born in
1796, was destined to be the mother of the Empress Eugénie, while her
mother’s sister, wife of Mathieu de Lesseps, was destined to be the
mother of Ferdinand de Lesseps.
There were of course in eleven years deaths, and even tragical deaths,
among the captives. The Marquis and Marchioness of Tweeddale were
allowed to visit Paris in November 1803, but were soon relegated to
Verdun, and the gendarme who escorted them thither insisted, Lawrence
tells us, on riding inside the carriage and even on dining with them.
Lady Tweeddale, sister of Lord Lauderdale, died at Verdun in 1804, and
her husband, while awaiting permission to have her buried in England,
was also taken ill, and died two months afterwards.[257] Napoleon’s
offer, ‘as a mark of respect for Fox,’ of twelve months’ leave, came
too late. James Parry, ex-editor of the _Courier_, had been
imprisoned in 1799 for six months for an article animadverting on the
Tsar, whom the British Government then wished to court; he had sold
his newspaper to Daniel Stuart, proprietor of the _Morning Post_,
and in 1802 had settled at Arles. Though for three years a paralytic
he was mercilessly ordered to Verdun and died there. His young son was
adopted by Ginguené, the eminent literary critic.
James Payne, the bookseller, died in Paris in 1809 at the age of
forty-three, leaving a young widow who went back to England in 1811.
She was escorted by the Widmers, nephews of the calico-printer
Oberkampf, who thus returned the long compulsory stay with their uncle
of Robert Hendry. Hendry was a Glasgow dyer, whom Napoleon on a visit
to Oberkampf’s calico-factory allowed to return home, nominally for a
visit; but this was doubtless an euphemism for release. John Leatham,
formerly of Madras, died at Nantes in 1811. Peter Colombine, of London,
died in Paris in 1813. He was probably the brother of the Norwich
alderman known to Mrs. Opie, who in 1802 was defrauded of his property
and reduced to accepting an annuity of £100 from the Corporation of
that city.
The Rev. J. Bentinck, an Oxonian who is said to have been promised a
bishopric, died at Paris in June 1804. The Rev. John Dring, rector
of Heathfield, Sussex, died at Orleans in 1806. Coulson Walhope,
ex-M.P., was subjected to special surveillance, apparently on account
of a report, doubtless calumnious, that he had visited France just
after Napoleon’s return from Egypt with the design of shooting him.
Walhope likewise ended his days at Verdun in 1807, shortly after
giving a dinner-party. A doctor captured at sea committed suicide in
1805, leaving a bottle inscribed, ‘No more medicine after this.’ A
third clergyman, White of Lancaster, died at Verdun in 1806, and a
fourth, Annesley, at Geneva in 1807, his widow being then allowed a
passport for England. He was probably a kinsman of the colonel already
mentioned, but I cannot trace him in the Annesley pedigree. Thomas
Talbot, aged twenty-eight, suffocated himself by charcoal at Paris in
1806, leaving a letter to his mother with a list of his debts (probably
at cards) which he begged her to discharge.[258] Dr. Walter Kirby also
died at Paris. A man named Burgh or Burke, on account of gambling
debts, shot himself at Paris in August 1813.
A considerable number of incurable prisoners had been sent back by
England, and in 1810 there were negotiations for an exchange. Colin
Alexander Mackenzie[259] was sent to Morlaix for that purpose, with
William Dickinson as his secretary. He went on to Paris, to witness
Napoleon’s marriage festivities. France proposed an exchange _en
masse_, with payment of a sum of money to cover the difference
in numbers. On this being declined, she suggested an exchange, man
for man, grade for grade, and offered to throw 20,000 Spaniards into
the bargain. She wished 3000 Frenchmen to be exchanged for 1000
English and 2000 Spaniards. England offered to give 3000 French for
17,000 Hanoverians, but France insisted on 6000 of the former. As
for the _détenus_, the British Government, reluctantly waiving
the legality of their arrest, proposed that Lord Lovaine should be
exchanged for a general, sons of peers or privy councillors for
colonels or navy captains, baronets and knights for officers, untitled
gentlemen for captains of the line or naval lieutenants, tradesmen
for subalterns, servants and mechanics for privates or seamen. There
was a difficulty, however, as to Hanoverians and Spaniards, and no
agreement was arrived at. Mackenzie, who had arrived on the 24th April,
accordingly left on the 6th November. During his stay at Morlaix his
movements had been closely watched, and objection was taken to his
wolf-hunting expeditions, as though these might screen confabulations
with royalists or observations on privateers. There had been, however,
and continued to be, individual liberations. England continued to send
back prisoners incurably ill, and on the other hand a sailor who had
become blind was released in 1809 by France. He took with him a book
in which a number of Verdun captives had written messages to friends.
Powell, vicar of Abergavenny, having shown much kindness to French
prisoners there, Clarke recommended, let us hope successfully, the
exchange of an English sailor in whom the vicar was interested.[260]
Admiral Villeneuve in 1806 was exchanged at Morlaix, but unwilling to
face Napoleon after his defeat, he committed suicide at Rennes on the
way to Paris. There was also an offer to exchange Admiral Jurien de
la Gravière for two colonels, but this was not accepted. The balance
of prisoners was always largely against France, while the balance of
escapes was--shall we say in favour?--of France. Thus in 1812 the
British Government published a list of 270 escapes and 590 attempted
escapes by French officers, whereupon the _Moniteur_ gave a
list of 355 English escapes, which it was urged was a much greater
proportionate number. Sir James Craufurd figured at the head of the
list. But the great majority of these English fugitives were officers
or sailors of merchant vessels captured at sea after the resumption of
hostilities. Some of the French escapes were effected through a noted
English smuggler named Robinson; we do not hear of his assisting any of
his own countrymen, as this would obviously have stopped his favourable
reception in France.
Applications for release or for permission to visit England latterly
became numerous. Release was besought in many instances on the plea of
age and infirmity (and we may suppose that doctors were complaisant
in granting such certificates) or for having rescued French citizens
from fire or shipwreck. Two sailors who in a rescue from the waves had
actually been captured had irresistible claims not so much to clemency
as to gratitude. Poor Colonel Cope’s botanical studies, moreover, had
not apparently warded off insanity, on which ground his sister in 1813
petitioned for his release. William Story, the chemist, had reached
the age of sixty-three, and Napoleon’s decree had fixed sixty as the
limit of detention. He applied for six months’ leave of absence to
take possession of property bequeathed to him. Viscountess Kirkwall
urged that unless her brother, whose father’s death had made him Lord
De Blaquiere, was allowed to settle affairs in person, the family
would be ruined. Lord Lovaine, with his sons Algernon and Percy, born
in France, likewise petitioned for a business visit.[261] Sir Michael
Cromie in 1811, pleading that he had been a friend of Fox, and had
purchased property in France, asked leave to go to England to his
daughter’s wedding.[262] Samuel Hayes, who in 1802 had come over with
his children that they might learn French, was allowed in 1813, having
become nearly blind, to return home. As late as the 18th March 1814,
sixteen released prisoners embarked at Morlaix.
Curiously enough, an escaped prisoner was sent back by the English
Government on the very eve of the termination of the war. It is the
only case on record. A Lieutenant Sheehy, aged twenty-seven, of the
89th Infantry, had escaped from Verdun in October 1813, but the Prince
Regent and the Commander-in-Chief, rebuking him for breach of parole,
despatched him by flag of truce to Morlaix, where he arrived on the
5th March 1814. The Morlaix commissary reported that he denounced the
Prince Regent as a sot, and that if he had talked like this in England
it might account for his being returned, but that such talk might be a
blind for some secret mission. Pending instructions from Paris, Sheehy
was kept in custody, and we hear no more of him.[263]
The failure of the Mackenzie negotiations must have been a terrible
disappointment for captives who had already waited nine years and a
half. As late as 1812 there was so little prospect of deliverance
that a prisoner at Briançon amused himself by scratching a sun-dial
on a slate, appending to the motto ‘Rule Britannia’ imprecations
against Napoleon.[264] In April 1813, twenty-five chests of Bibles and
Testaments had been sent by a flag of truce, apparently by the Bible
Society, to Morlaix for distribution among the captives. They were
detained at the custom-house pending a decision, and we do not hear
the result,[265] but in any case the books could scarcely have reached
their intended recipients.
Yet although nobody foresaw the end of the war, Napoleon seems to have
shown a little more leniency, while England in 1813 sent back 8000
invalided prisoners, and agreed, moreover, to occasional exchanges
even of soldiers for civilians. Thus in 1812 she offered to exchange
a French captain for the banker Boyd, but this offer must have been
declined, for in 1814 Boyd pleaded the loss of the sight of one eye as
ground for repeating it.[266] Release must soon have ensued without
the necessity of an exchange. In December 1813, fourteen English
doctors were exchanged for French prisoners, and we may hope that these
included Moir, Armstrong, Watt, Campbell, Hogarth, and Jones, whose
volunteer services to the French wounded had been notified to Napoleon
by General Clarke, as a hint for their release.[267]
The allies having entered France on the north-east and Wellington on
the south, the Verdun, Arras, and other captives were removed further
inland. Napoleon, writing on the 11th January 1814 to Clarke, said,
‘I suppose you have removed the English from Verdun’; but it was not
till the following day that the first detachment started for Blois.
Prisoners with means provided their own vehicles or horses, but others,
mostly captains and officers of merchantmen, seem to have been marched
on foot. Most of them, Lord Blayney[268] says, were accompanied by
French mistresses who had acquired a surprising mastery of English
sailors’ oaths. A second detachment set out next day. This sudden
removal had caused consternation, for though many had been captured
during the war, many others had been at Verdun ever since 1803, and
had got to feel at home there. Those, moreover, just under sixty when
originally detained, were getting into years and disinclined to stir.
Logically, of course, they should have been released on reaching that
age, but logic was not to be looked for from Napoleon. Tradesmen and
house-owners, moreover, had given numerous prisoners credit, yet the
latter, if out of funds, had perforce to leave their creditors in the
lurch. They could not wait for remittances, the order for departure in
three days being imperative. Some, indeed, borrowed money of friends,
but when the Verdun shopkeepers collected at the gate to make a last
demand for their dues, some of the prisoners who could have paid coolly
showed their purses to their creditors and then returned them to their
pockets, sarcastically remarking that the Cossacks would discharge the
debt. Five Arras captives made their way to the coast in lieu of going
south, but finding no boat gave themselves up. Two others succeeded in
their purpose. On the way to Blois, the younger child of Tuckey fell
ill and died. On reaching their supposed destination, the prisoners
were ordered on to Guéret. That town on the 11th of March 1814 had
no less than 1064 English prisoners. Tidings of Wellington’s advance
naturally created restlessness among them. Sixty-four escaped from
the convent at Périgueux, to which they had been consigned, although
the officers had some days before, lest they should head a rising,
been transferred to Cahors. A hundred and one escaped in a body from
Angoulême, and as many more, under a negro named Louis, conspired
to follow suit, but were detected in time. The gendarmerie captain
recommended their removal to spots more out of reach of the English
army.[269] There had, moreover, been escapes on the way south. In
February seven men, ordered from Arras to Tours, gave their convoy the
slip, but were arrested in a barn near St. Valéry. Five other fugitives
were apprehended near Montreuil. A Frenchman at Dunkirk was arrested
for offering to facilitate escapes.
News soon arrived of Napoleon’s abdication. The Bitche prisoners, who
had been sent to Chatellerault, would but for that event have been sent
on to Rennes. A few of the English in Paris had obtained permission to
remain, and were there witnesses of the short siege and the entrance
of the allies. One of these was James Richard Underwood, for whom
the dethroned Josephine had interceded. He published in the _London
Magazine_ an account of the siege and capitulation.
Article 3 of the treaty of peace of 1814 stipulated ‘that the
respective prisoners of war shall be bound to pay before their
departure from the place of their detention any private debts which
they may have contracted there, or at least to give satisfactory
security.’ This doubtless took effect in England, where prisoners could
not leave without the knowledge or sanction of the authorities, but in
France, occupied by foreign armies, there were obviously no means of
enforcing it. Hence it is not surprising to find that at Verdun there
were indignant creditors. We do not hear of complaints in any other
town, but at Bitche and other fortresses the captives were lodged and
victualled by the French Government, and though clothes must have
worn out, the shopkeepers were probably chary of giving credit, while
the captives on parole in Paris, Orleans, and other towns were men of
means and doubtless of a high sense of honour. The eight or eleven
hundred prisoners at Verdun, on the other hand, were of all sorts and
conditions. Some could not, others would not, pay. When, therefore,
Verdun learned that the sixty millions paid by France to England to
satisfy claims for compensation for confiscation had left a balance of
nine millions, it perceived an opportunity for sending in its bill.
What could be more legitimately paid out of this balance than the three
and a half million debts of the prisoners? Negotiations were carried
on from 1837, and in October 1839, doubtless by the advice of the
French Government, Routhier, a barrister, empowered to represent the
creditors, went over to London. On a second visit he was accompanied by
four townsmen, themselves apparently creditors. The memorial drawn up
by them said:--
‘During twelve years’ residence in a town in which they were
debarred the opportunity of procuring aid from their families
and their country,[270] the English prisoners could not but
contract debts and obligations, and they will doubtless
acknowledge that the kindness and generosity of the inhabitants
may have helped them to forget the disasters and misfortunes
of war.... At the moment of the invasion the majority of the
prisoners waited neither for official orders to depart nor
for the conclusion of treaties. They quitted the country with
all the facilities which circumstances naturally afforded. By
depriving the creditors of their pledge, by sending the general
officers, some to India, others to China, in the service of
His Britannic Majesty, and thus rendering it impossible for
the inhabitants of Verdun to sue their debtors, the English
Government made itself responsible for the payment of the debts.
The inhabitants put forward their claim from the outset, and
from the outset notes on the subject were exchanged between
the different Ministers.... If in that list there should prove
to be a single usurious debt, one that cannot be verified by
proper vouchers, let it be immediately rejected.... The number
of prisoners always exceeded 1200, and frequently amounted to
2000.’[271]
The memorial asked for an instalment of 5000 francs ‘to relieve the
most urgent cases of distress’ pending examination of the claims by a
mixed commission.
The _Times_ of October 18, 1839, says:--
‘A deputation from the inhabitants of Verdun in France has just
arrived in London to claim the payment of £140,000, the amount
of private debts incurred by English prisoners detained in that
city during the war. The deputation, composed of MM. Routhier,
Quentin, Leorat, Massé, and Trebout has, we are assured, been
most kindly received by Lord Palmerston, who seems to have
impressed the members of the deputation with the belief that no
time will be lost in submitting the demand of the inhabitants of
Verdun to a mixed commission charged with the liquidation of the
debts. Marshal Soult,[272] we understand, has written personally
to Lord Palmerston to suggest that a part of the nine million
francs (the unappropriated balance of a sum of sixty millions
paid by France in 1815 in liquidation of the claims of British
subjects) ought to be applied in payment to the inhabitants of
Verdun.’
But nothing came of this mission, and we hear of no further attempt
by Verdun to obtain satisfaction. Thus ends the history of these
involuntary guests.
V
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.
While the fall of Napoleon thus enabled numbers of Englishmen to return
home, it allowed and tempted a smaller but yet considerable number to
make or renew acquaintance with France. According to Wansey, there were
four or five hundred of these,[273] scarcely any, however, staying
more than a fortnight or three weeks. The through fare from London was
now £5. The visitors had the interesting spectacle of the restoration
of the Bourbons, while the very few who made a more lengthened stay
witnessed also the Hundred Days’ reign of Napoleon, and his second
and final fall. Never surely in Europe in modern times were more
startling vicissitudes crowded into so brief a period. Even Spain
with its _pronunciamientos_ was not destined to present such a
kaleidoscope. For a parallel we must go forward to the Central American
republics or backward to the time when the pretorians made and unmade
Roman emperors.
These visitors, like those who hurried over in 1802, included all sorts
and conditions of men. There were statesmen like Castlereagh, anxious
to weigh the chances of stability of the reinstated dynasty. He paid
two visits, the first in August 1814 on his way to the Vienna Congress,
the second in February 1815. It was probably on the first visit that
Ney, dining with him and with officers of the allied armies, had the
bad taste or want of tact to argue that an invasion of England, which
he said he had strenuously urged on Napoleon, would certainly have
succeeded. There were subordinate officials like Wellesley Pole, Master
of the Mint and brother to Wellington, and Croker who, as we learn from
the police bulletins, preferred a complaint that American privateers
were still being sheltered at Bordeaux. It was not at this visit but
at a subsequent one in July 1815 that Croker inspected the memorable
scenes of the Revolution, discovered in the possession of Marat’s old
printer Colin a large collection of pamphlets, and was introduced
by him to Marat’s sister, whom he found as repulsive-looking as her
brother. ‘Colin,’ said Croker, ‘had in some small dark rooms up two or
three flights of stairs an immense quantity of brochures of the earlier
days of the Revolution. What he had least of were the works of Marat,
even those which he himself printed, which he accounted for naturally
enough by saying that there were times in which it might be somewhat
hazardous to possess them.’ Croker induced the British Museum in 1817
to purchase the collection, and he afterwards formed a collection
of his own which ultimately had the same destination. There were
politicians like Grey, F. J. Robinson, Fazakerley, Grattan, Whitbread,
and Brougham. Brougham attended the sittings of the Institute, of
which he was afterwards to be an associate, saw Laplace, and had a
long conversation with Carnot. This was his first visit to France, for
his step-grandson Sir Edward Malet is mistaken in stating that he once
heard Mirabeau speak. ‘I never,’ says Brougham, ‘spent any time by half
so delightful. My fortnight passed like a day.’ Are we to attribute to
this visit the birth of an infant afterwards known as Madame Blaze de
Bury, who died in 1894 at the age of eighty, and who in spite of her
alleged birth as a Stewart in Scotland was believed to be Brougham’s
daughter by a French mother? She strongly resembled him both physically
and mentally. Her husband had an English mother named Bury; her
daughter, like herself a writer, died in December 1902.
There was Thelwall, the acquitted Radical of 1794, who had temporarily
renounced politics and taken to the cure of stammering. There was
Arthur Thistlewood, who, it is said, had visited Paris in 1794, and
who soon entered into conspiracies, the last of which, named from
Cato Street, resulted in his conviction and execution in 1820. He was
decidedly an exception among the visitors, yet the Paris air may have
helped to lead him astray, for it was an atmosphere of conspiracy.
There were philosophers and historians such as Sir James Mackintosh,
who was anxious to explore the French archives, taking ten copyists
with him; but these formidable preparations not unnaturally
occasioned obstruction from a suspicious curator, Hauterive,[274]
so that Wellington had to urge that no mischief could result from
the disclosure of political secrets half a century old. Mackintosh’s
son-in-law, Claudius James Rich, the traveller, accompanied him, and
the transcripts then made are now in the British Museum. They are
limited to the times of the Stuarts.
Archibald Alison, the future historian, accompanied by a fellow Scot
and fellow historian, Patrick Fraser Tytler, also went in May 1814,
returning by Flanders. It is not clear from their joint narrative
whether both or Tytler alone went in the autumn to Aix, staying till
the eve of Napoleon’s return.
There were three poets, Rogers, Moore, and Campbell, the last stopping
at Rouen to see his brother Daniel, from whom he had parted at Hamburg
in 1800. Mrs. Siddons took over her daughter Cecily, who did not
continue her mother’s fame, but married a Scottish lawyer, George
Combe. Kemble escorted her, with Mrs. Twiss, whose brother-in-law
Richard had seen Paris in 1792. There was Mrs. Damer, the artist, of
whom we have already heard and shall hear again. There was the more
eminent sculptor Chantrey, who made the acquaintance of Canova. There
was Curran, who had just resigned his judgeship, and Serjeant Best,
not yet a judge. The Duke of Sussex had given Curran an introduction
to the future Charles X. Everything he heard intensified
his hatred of Napoleon.[275] There were military men like General
Ramsay, Bruce, destined to assist in the escape of Lavalette, and
Lord Cathcart, who had taken part in the expedition to Copenhagen and
was subsequently Ambassador to St. Petersburg. Madame Junot, in whose
house Cathcart was quartered, and who speaks highly of his courtesy,
had also to receive Lord and Lady Cole, who sent for Eliza Bathurst.
She was the handsome daughter of the diplomatist who so mysteriously
disappeared. Another military visitor was Colonel William Carmichael
Smyth, who had accompanied his father in 1802; but Count Nugent, though
born in Ireland, was an Austrian officer. The Navy was represented by
Sir Sidney Smith, who was bound for the Congress of Vienna to plead for
the reinstatement of Gustavus IV. on the throne of Sweden. He
also advocated an international expedition against the piratical Dey
of Algiers, of which he would himself have taken the command. Nothing
came of either scheme, but he got up a subscription dinner, attended
by royal and other celebrities, the proceeds of which were devoted to
the redemption of prisoners in Algiers. Science was represented by a
Scottish professor, John (afterwards Sir John) Leslie, an Edinburgh
Reviewer and eminent mathematician, who formed the habit of paying
yearly visits to the Continent. There were philanthropists like
Clarkson, who, as on his visit in 1789, was eager to obtain the consent
of the new French Government to the abolition of the slave-trade,
while Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay, the historian’s father, were
interesting themselves at home in the same cause, the latter sending
over, or taking advantage of the presence of, his brother General
Macaulay. Clarkson found sympathy from Lafayette, Bishop Grégoire, and
Madame de Staël. The antiquary and connoisseur, James Millingen, passed
through Paris on his way to or from Florence, as also William Stewart
Rose, translator of Ariosto, friend of Ugo Foscolo, Walter Scott, and
the Countess of Albany. He was destined to find a wife at Venice. There
were painters like Stothard, Wilkie, and Haydon, to the last of whom we
are indebted for the liveliest account of Paris, though this, like the
rest of his journal, was not published till after his tragical death.
He represents Wilkie as constantly exclaiming, ‘What a fool Napoleon
was to lose such a country! dear, dear!’ Both Wilkie and Haydon sang
‘God save the King’ in the streets of Rouen, to the amazement or
amusement of the townsmen, one of whom said they were English milords.
In Paris Wilkie tried to sell his prints, and had frequent disputes at
restaurants about change. Another note-taker was Thomas Raikes, brother
of the founder of Sunday-schools, but unfortunately his diary does not
begin till 1832. A third diarist was Henry Crabb Robinson, to whom
street urchins at Dieppe shouted ‘Be off!’ and who in a Rouen theatre
heard a line against England applauded. He spent five weeks in Paris
without a moment’s _ennui_, yet left it without a moment’s regret,
travelling to Boulogne in company with Copleston, ‘a very sensible,
well-informed clergyman,’ just elected Provost of Oriel at Oxford, and
destined to be Bishop of Llandaff. Stephen Weston and William Shepherd
went doubtless with the intention of again reporting their adventures.
William D. Fellowes found material for one of his books, and on another
visit in 1817 he visited the old monastery of La Trappe. There were
agriculturists like Morris Birkbeck of Wanborough. There were doctors
like Hume, chief physician to the army, and Williams the oculist.
Among the aristocratic visitors were Viscount Ponsonby, afterwards
Ambassador to Constantinople and Vienna, and the Duke and Duchess of
Rutland, parents of the present Duke of Rutland, the Duke publishing
his fortnight’s journal and receiving many attentions from Count
Dillon. There were also the Earl of Charlemont, the Earl of Bradford,
Lord Forbes, Lord Lucan, the Earl of Oxford, Lord Kinnaird, Lady
Aldborough (who remained till after Waterloo), the Marquis and
Marchioness of Lansdowne, the Marquis of Downshire, Lord Ilchester,
Lord Hill, the Marquis and Marchioness of Bath, the Earl and Countess
of Hardwicke, Lord and Lady Coventry, the Duke and Duchess of Richmond,
Lord Binning (afterwards Earl of Haddington), Lord Compton, the Marquis
of Exeter, Lord and Lady Ranelagh, the Duke of Portland, Lord Gosford,
Lord Trimleston, the Earl and Countess Darnley, the Duke of Devonshire,
his stepmother, Lord and Lady Morpeth, Lord Geo. Leveson-Gower, Sir
John Sebright, M.P. for Hertfordshire, Lord Sunderland, grandson of
the Duke of Marlborough, Sir John and Lady Stepney, Lady Augusta
Cotton, Lord and Lady Holland, the Earl of Clare, Lord Carington, Lord
Brownlow, Lady Bentinck, the notorious Lady Hamilton, the aged Duchess
of Melfort with her son, the Marquis of Aylesbury, Lord Miltown,
who, paralysed in his legs from childhood, went about in a chair,
William Henry (afterwards Lord) Lyttelton, Lord Burghersh (as Earl of
Westmorland he became a diplomatist), Lord Apsley, son and heir of
Earl Bathurst, the Earl of Essex,[276] Sir John and Lady Knatchbull,
Sir W. Clayton, Bagot (afterwards Sir Charles), and the Marquis of
Clanricarde, who married Canning’s daughter, was famous for gymnastic
feats, and was afterwards Ambassador to Russia, Postmaster-General,
and Lord Privy Seal. Edward John Littleton, M.P. for Staffordshire,
a classical scholar, was accompanied by his handsome wife, Hyacinth
Mary, natural daughter of the Marquis Wellesley, but recognised by the
Wellesley family. Lady Priscilla Wellesley, daughter of the Earl of
Mornington, another but legitimate niece of Wellington, just of age
and destined to be Lady Burghersh and Countess of Westmorland, was in
time to see d’Artois enter Paris. She survived till 1879.[277] Lord
Fitzroy Somerset, son of the Duke of Beaufort, in 1852 became Lord
Raglan and was destined to die before Sebastapol. He married in August
1814 Wellington’s other favourite niece, Lady Emily Wellesley. The Earl
of Harrowby was accompanied by Wellesley Pole and Gerald Wellesley,
son of Sir Henry and afterwards Prebendary of Durham. Lord Aberdeen,
Ambassador at Vienna, who had accompanied the Austrian army in its
march into France, was one of the English diplomatists who signed the
Treaty of Paris of May 1814. John William Ward, afterwards Viscount
and Earl of Dudley, a contributor to the _Quarterly_ and M.P. for
Ilchester, was also in Paris on his way to Italy. He rated Napoleon
above Alexander and Cæsar. Ward’s travelling companion from Calais was
General Montagu Mathew, M.P. for Tipperary, brother of the Earl of
Landaff and a strenuous advocate of Catholic Emancipation. Thompson,
M.P. for Midhurst--it is not clear whether he was the ex-M.P. for
Evesham, a captive in 1803--was second on the 9th February 1815 in a
bloodless duel between Colonels Quentin and Palmer, the latter firing
in the air after his antagonist had fired and missed.
We should not omit among the visitors Anne Perry, the wife of James
Perry of the _Morning Chronicle_. Perry himself had spent a year
in Paris in 1792, sending of course letters to his paper, and he may be
regarded as the earliest of Paris correspondents. He had, moreover, for
the previous twelve months obtained the services of a French barrister
named Sanchamau, the translator of several English works. Sanchamau
at first found a seat on sufferance in the Assembly, in the gallery
allotted to the _suppléants_, that is to say, the men destined
to fill up vacancies from death or other causes; but he applied on
the 22nd January 1792 for a permanent seat in the new journalists’
gallery.[278] To return to Perry’s wife, she was captured by Algerian
pirates on her way home from Lisbon, and although soon released,
captivity and seventeen weeks of a boisterous sea aggravated her
already precarious health. She expired at Bordeaux in February 1815, at
the age of thirty-eight. We do not hear whether her husband attended
her deathbed.
Even London shopkeepers went over for a week. John Scott, editor of
the _Champion_, encountered one full of anti-French prejudices,
ignorant of the language, unprovided even with a passport, and equipped
only with Bank of England notes.[279]
To accommodate the visitors, an Anglican service was held in a chapel
of the Protestant Oratoire, probably the upper room which was hired
from about 1860 to 1885 by the Church of Scotland, and _Galignani’s
Messenger_ was started, an edition of which, after Waterloo and
during the stay of the British garrison, was published at Cambrai.
‘The English at that time,’ says Madame de Chastenay, ‘almost did us
the honours of Paris’; that is to say, they seemed hosts rather than
guests, and after the first ball both sexes discarded their eccentric
costumes. Yet they did not find themselves altogether welcome. The
middle classes feared an English monopoly of trade, returned prisoners
told stories of ill-treatment in England, and the populace resented the
arrogance of conquerors. Miss Anne Carter must have been strangely
mistaken in writing to her sister, ‘It is impossible to describe the
enthusiasm with which we are everywhere received as English.’[280]
Thomas Campbell, on the other hand, had been hooted at Dieppe, which
he found incensed against the English, yet he does not speak of any
incivility in Paris, where he danced attendance for nearly two months
on Mrs. Siddons.[281]
A confidential police bulletin of the 17th October 1814 says:--
‘The attention of the police has been called to the multitude
of English who inundate Paris, and whose obscure station
occasions uneasiness as to their destination and intentions.
It is remembered on this point that after the Treaty of Amiens
the French Government made an official complaint that the
London police had vomited (_sic_) six or seven hundred
persons, the scum of England, who secretly influenced trade,
public opinion, and police. We see collected here a number
of disreputable people who appear to be without means of
subsistence, and whose arrival from England seems an enigma.’
Again on the 4th November:--
‘It is positively stated that on Saturday last Lord Wellington
complained to the King of the mortification and ill-treatment
which various Englishmen have experienced and are daily
experiencing in Paris, as well as of the lack of supervision
shown by the French authorities in putting an end to these
dangerous aggressions. It is a fact that at the Café Tortoni,
the Opera, the restaurants, and in other public places,
Englishmen are constantly affronted. These disorders are
attributed to a troop of half-pay officers or to some turbulent
men discharged from the Guard of Honour. It seems certain,
moreover, that Lord Wellington has expressly enjoined the
English who are in Paris to behave very circumspectly, and not
to notice provocations which might disturb the harmony necessary
between the two nations.’
And on 19th December:--
‘Every day there are fresh occasions of remarking the hatred of
the Parisians for the English. Yesterday at the Salon the most
violent language was used respecting them, and that to their
faces.’
In flat contradiction, however, to the police bulletins, Wansey
describes the Parisians as glad to see English visitors once more
amongst them.[282] The British milord was good-naturedly burlesqued,
as Weston tells us, in a farce called _La Route de Paris_. A
provincial innkeeper welcomes milord and miladi. His bad French and her
veil excite amusement. The lord asks for beefsteak for dinner. The lady
is enchanted with everything. The lord cries ‘God dem, vive la paix,’
while the lady remarks that French and English have always been near
enough to shake hands. The landlord rejoices that the lily after twenty
years’ preservation in an English conservatory is as flourishing as
ever. Birkbeck, moreover, testifies to the welcome given to Englishmen
at Montpellier, which he attributed to the kindness shown to French
prisoners in England. Yet Haydon relates that on the performance of
Ducis’ _Hamlet_ at the Comédie Française, the whole pit rose and
applauded a line against England, shouting ‘Bravo, à bas les Anglais,’
and pointing to the English present.
If the French authorities looked askance on English visitors, it is but
fair to say that some of the latter sympathised with Napoleon. Lord and
Lady Holland were doubtless among them, for Lord Holland subsequently
protested against the transportation to St. Helena, and Lady Holland,
as already stated, forwarded books thither to the captive. They were
not likely, when in Paris, to parade their anti-Bourbon sentiments,
but Hervey Montmorency Morris was less scrupulous. He, on the 19th
April 1814, presented his newly born infant at the mairie of the tenth
arrondissement, and gave its name as Napoleon.[283] A young Irishman
named Charles Honoré Lyster, describing himself as a student, a few
months later landed at Toulon from Elba, and the authorities very
naturally ordered him to be watched. Lord Oxford’s papers, moreover,
were seized, and Wellington acknowledged that this was justified by
his conduct and conversation, and by the Bonapartist correspondence of
which he had taken charge.
I have spoken of Wellington, but it should be stated that the Embassy
was at first filled by Sir Charles Stuart, afterwards Lord Stuart de
Rothesay. He presented his credentials to Louis XVIII. on the
22nd June, but was soon transferred to The Hague. Wellington arrived
with his troops from Spain on the 7th May, but went back to Madrid to
see the Spanish dynasty restored, returned to England to take his seat
in the Lords as Duke, and was then appointed ambassador. He presented
his credentials on the 24th August, but with much greater pomp than
Stuart. Three royal carriages, each drawn by eight horses, escorted
from the Embassy his three carriages, each drawn by six horses. He was
accompanied by Major Fremantle and Major Percy. On reaching the foot
of the throne he made a profound reverence, whereupon the King rose,
then sat down again, putting on his hat and motioning to Wellington and
the princes of the blood to cover also. The crowd murmured at these
honours, though they were also accorded to all the other ambassadors,
while the ultra-royalists professed indignation at the Duke’s fixing
a ball in honour of Queen Charlotte’s birthday for the 18th January
1814, as being a date too close to the 21st, the anniversary of Louis
XVI.’s execution. They were also suspicious of his intimacy
with the Duke of Orleans. He paid a visit to the Abbé Sicard’s deaf
and dumb boys, who were not, however, dumb, for they articulated
‘Vive notre bon roi Louis XVIII.!’ The Duchess of Wellington
was presented by the King with a Sèvres dinner-service. The British
Government was very uneasy lest Wellington should be ‘kidnapped’--an
euphemism for being murdered--in some military rising. Anxious,
therefore, for him to leave, its first idea was to send him to America
to command in the short war with the United States. He himself,
however, wished to remain in Paris, thinking that his departure
would weaken Louis XVIII. A mission to the Vienna Congress
he considered a poor pretext, but the Government persisted, though
allowing him to choose his own time for departure. General Macaulay
meanwhile went back to London with alarming reports. Wellington,
writing to Lord Liverpool on the 23rd October, said:--
‘It appears to me that Macaulay considers the danger of a revolt
more certain and more likely to occur than I do, that is to say,
he believes it certainly will occur within a very short period
of time. I think it may occur any night, but I know of no fact
to induce me to believe it is near, excepting the general one
of great discontent and almost desperation among a very daring
class of men.’
Macaulay feared that the royal family would be massacred and Wellington
‘detained.’ Wellington stayed, however, till the 22nd January.
Meanwhile he was besieged with all sorts of applications. Hervey
Montmorency Morris asked permission to return to Ireland, promising
to be a loyal subject. Wellington demurred, suggesting that in spite
of his good intentions he would fall back into the company of his old
associates through the disinclination of loyalists to associate with
him. Morris accordingly remained in the French army, was naturalised in
November 1816, and remained in France till his death in 1839.
A man designating himself representative of De Beaune, who in 1790
negotiated a loan for the three English royal dukes, also called on
Wellington. He stated that the bondholders were pressing him for
payment of the principal and of the twenty years’ arrears of interest.
Wellington forwarded his documents to London, but nothing more is
heard of the affair. Impey was there again on the same errand as in
1802, and Long, ex-president of the Irish College, went over to seek
restitution; but these claims all stood over till after the Hundred
Days. The Scottish College, however, was restored to its owners, and on
the 13th December Robertson, bishop-coadjutor of Dublin and inventor
of a process of embossing books for the blind, solemnised a _Te
Deum_ there in the presence of numerous British ecclesiastics.
Quintin Craufurd likewise sent in a statement of British claims to
compensation, and he obtained the restitution of eighty pictures,
engravings, and sculptures confiscated in 1792.
Wellington received directions to prevent Princess Caroline from
repairing from Strasburg to Paris, though his own opinion was that she
might safely have been permitted to amuse herself. Louis XVIII., out of
consideration for the Prince Regent, had resolved not to receive her.
She nevertheless in October paid an incognito visit.
But few of the English visitors could have been in time to see the
Tsar, with his sons Constantine and Nicholas, the Emperor of Austria,
and the King of Prussia, with his two sons, one of them the future
William I., destined to re-enter Paris as a conqueror in 1871,
for their stay was very short. The Russian and Prussian sovereigns
went on to England in June, while the Austrian Emperor pleaded Italian
affairs as preventing him from also going. The brilliant uniforms
of their officers, however, continued to enliven the streets of the
capital. Louis had pressed the Prince Regent to come over, telling
him that the three monarchs seconded the invitation, but the Prince,
‘fat, fair, and forty,’ or rather, as Leigh Hunt had been imprisoned
for describing him, ‘an Adonis of fifty,’ probably shrank from the
fatigue of the journey, or possibly he was not too confident of the
stability of the restored dynasty. He made the excuse that a Regency
Act would be necessary if he left his realm, yet his ancestors had paid
visits to Hanover. His subjects were of course eager to be presented at
Court. Shepherd speaks of Louis as ‘uncomfortably corpulent and seemed
very infirm in his feet, but his countenance is extremely pleasing,
and if any reliance is to be placed on physiognomy, he is a man of a
very benevolent disposition.’[284] Shepherd went in clerical costume,
fancying that this would be sufficient, but Stuart telling him the
contrary, he had to hurry off to a tailor to get properly equipped.
Dr. Williams presented the King with portraits of George III.
and the Prince Regent, ‘two princes to whom,’ Louis said, ‘he had vowed
the most faithful remembrance.’ Sir Herbert Croft presented to him
verses addressed to the Duchess of Angoulême. Galignani, who, though
an Italian ex-priest, may be considered an Englishman by marriage
and adoption, presented thirty volumes of his English reprints, his
_Paris Guide_, and his _Modern Spectator_. Street, editor and
part proprietor of the _Courier_, also had an audience, and was
complimented on his journal’s ten years’ advocacy of the cause of the
Bourbons.[285]
Those visitors who were not presented at Court had an opportunity
of seeing the King on his way to chapel. Haydon, who describes him
as ‘keen, fat, and eagle-eyed,’ joined in shouting ‘Vive le roi!’
He remarked that Napoleon’s initials still dotted the vestibule of
the chapel. The Duke of Rutland also remarked that the draperies of
the Tuileries were dotted with bees, and that ‘N’ or an eagle was
visible on all the furniture. This was a perpetual reminder to the
Bourbons of the dethroned ruler. But few of these emblems appear
to have been at first effaced in Paris, lest this should provoke
counter-demonstrations, though provincial authorities displayed more
zeal and less tact. Yet Stephen Weston speaks of thousands of workmen
being employed in removing them, and Birkbeck observed men busily
effacing Napoleon’s name and eagles from public buildings, which he
thought very pitiful, while Scott noticed ingenious attempts to turn
‘N’ into ‘L’ or ‘H’ in honour of Louis XVIII. or Henri IV. He also
speaks of a sign ‘Café de l’Empereur’ being converted into ‘Café des
Empereurs’ in honour of the Russian and Austrian monarchs.
On the 21st January, the anniversary of Louis XVI.’s execution, there
was an imposing procession on the transfer of his and his Queen’s
remains to St. Denis, and requiem masses were celebrated all over
France, the Protestant pastors Monod and Marron also holding services,
albeit the latter had flattered Napoleon. These masses were ordered
to be annual, but were never repeated. There were other spectacles.
There was the proclamation of peace by a herald on the 1st June with
all the revived formalities of the old Monarchy. The spoils of Italian
art, including the Venetian horses, still embellished Paris, though
destined to removal as a punishment for the Hundred Days. Sunday and
festival observance was enforced on shops and factories, by a decree
of the Prefect of Police on the 7th June. The host, for the first time
since the Revolution, was carried through the streets on Corpus Christi
day, all houses on the route having to be draped, and bystanders being
expected, if not required, to uncover as it passed. The streets, says
Haydon, were hung with tapestries, and altars were erected at various
points. It was the first Sunday since the Revolution that shops had
been shut, yet the gaming-tables were open as usual. Parisians did
not fail to remark that these measures were decreed by a notorious
sceptic, Beugnot. When Corpus Christi day came round again on the 25th
May 1815, Napoleon was once more on the throne. On the 29th August the
King paid a State visit to the Hotel de Ville, in honour of which Paris
illuminated. The fountains in the Champs Elysées poured forth wine for
all comers, and comestibles were also gratuitous.[286]
The London newspapers expressed distrust in the stability of the new
government, and doubtless on that account were prohibited admission to
France. English officials seem to have shared this sentiment, for in
July 1814 Admiral Mackenzie, who had brought over the Duc de Berri,
suddenly renounced his intended wintering in the south and recrossed
the Channel. Crabb Robinson remarked that when the King reviewed
the National Guard the cheers were very faint, and that there were
some cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Even the Rev. R. W. Wake, curate of
Maidstone, who, having only a week’s holiday, went no further than
Calais and Boulogne, was struck by the regret with which Napoleon’s
fall was spoken of.[287] Yet some of the visitors descried no troubles
ahead. Wansey, who was in Paris in June, going thither by Dieppe and
returning by Boulogne, says:--
‘That there are many dissatisfied with the new order of things,
particularly among the military, there is no doubt, and we may
expect to hear of partial insurrections and commotions among the
men returned from the wars.... But a Government that employs
men of such talents as those I have mentioned (Talleyrand,
Fouché, Louis, and Montesquiou) will not be easily overturned,
particularly as the leaders of the army are with the Court; and
as to the return of Napoleon, he ran the full length of his
tether. You will hear no more of his rule in France.’[288]
John Scott, however, in the diligence between Dieppe and Paris, heard
an officer with Napoleon’s portrait on his snuff-box say, in reply to
English expressions of satisfaction at the peace, ‘All very well, this
tranquillity of Europe is a fine thing, but will it not keep me always
a captain?’ Another officer, though originally forced away from the
study of medicine into the army, spoke with enthusiasm of Napoleon,
and the mass of the people, while admitting Napoleon’s faults, were in
Scott’s judgment in his favour. ‘Ah but he was a great man!’ was the
common phrase.
Richard Boyle Bernard, M.P., son of the Earl of Bandon, remarked that
Louis XVIII., passing on his way to mass, was repeatedly greeted
with cries of ‘Vive le roi!’ and he believed the most respectable
portion of the nation to be loyal; but the number of discontented
spirits would, he thought, necessitate prolonged vigilance. At Calais
theatre, moreover, on his way back in the autumn, Bernard heard a
passage expressing satisfaction with the peace hissed by the officers
present.[289] He was struck, too, by the dislike felt in France for the
English, which was in striking contrast to their cordial welcome in
Germany.
Ward, who saw Louis XVIII. enter Paris, remarked that the
applause was neither long nor vehement, and that the Bourbons were
received with cold acquiescence.[290]
Eustace, the Catholic priest, likewise gives no hint of another
overturn, yet his visits of 1790 and 1802 should have taught him the
instability of French politics. Moreover, a sentry told him that
the Emperor had in ten years done more to embellish Paris than the
Bourbons in a century, and that had he reigned ten years longer he
would have made it the finest city in the world. Jones, chaplain on
board the _Blenheim_ at anchor off Marseilles, was more excusable
in regarding the fall of Napoleon as definitive, yet the very parallel
which he drew in his 29th May sermon between the English and the French
Restoration might have reminded him that 1660 was reversed by 1688.
Weston, however, was struck not by any feeling in favour of Napoleon,
but by the sarcasms heaped on him; and Shepherd, though he doubted the
allegiance of the army, thought the mass of the people friendly to the
Bourbons. The smallest spark amid so much inflammable matter might,
he knew, produce an extensive conflagration. Some of the numerous
pamphlets on Napoleon which, pending the institution of a censorship,
were freely hawked in the streets, were the work of admirers, and the
Grand Duke Constantine heard Louis XVIII. gravely reply,
when the rest of the royal family had been disparaging Napoleon,
‘Napoleon has done wonders for the glory and welfare of France, and
if I can render her happy it will be by following the documents which
he has left. I should like to have as good a head as he whose chair
I am occupying and whose table is serving me to write at, for I feel
myself inferior to him.’[291] But even pessimists, while apprehending a
revolution, had no fear of Napoleon’s return.
Return however he did, and those Englishmen who had visited him at
Elba cannot have been among the most startled. As early as the 29th
July, less than three months after Napoleon’s arrival in his little
realm, General Spallannchi reported from Florence that some Englishmen
had gone out of curiosity to Elba but had returned in ill-humour, the
fallen monarch having barely allowed them to see him and that only in
his garden. It seems from the statement of Vice-Consul Innes that the
party numbered seven, including one lady, and that after being kept
a long time waiting for an answer the garden interview was assigned
them for the next day. A Warwickshire man who had passed through
Paris and whose letter, intercepted by the Leghorn police, was signed
‘Richard,’ evidently his Christian name, sailed from Leghorn with his
sister on the 24th November, but was told that Napoleon refused to
receive curiosity-mongers. Not easily to be foiled, however, he made a
second voyage and on alighting at an hotel at Porto Ferrajo on the 2nd
December found covers laid for thirty Corsican functionaries in honour
of the anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation in 1804. Such a celebration
did not argue renunciation of empire. On the following day he was
allowed an audience, but nothing having been said about his sister he
had to leave her outside. Napoleon, whom he found standing in a small
room, advanced with an affable air and asked, ‘Where do you come from?’
‘Warwickshire.’
‘I do not remember the name.’
‘It is in the very centre of England.’
‘What is your occupation?’
‘General commerce, but chiefly manufactures.’
‘Do you find much custom in Italy?’
‘Tolerable.’
‘None in France, eh?’
‘None at present, for want of a commercial treaty.’
‘A commercial treaty would suit you?’
‘Certainly, but I do not think we shall get it.’
‘I did your commerce much mischief.’
‘Not so much as was supposed. Our trade found outlets out of Europe
which were very profitable.’
‘The troubles in Spain will open up their colonies to you?’
‘Yes, but at first they will be jealously closed.’
‘Your licence system was bad. It was semi-robbery.’
‘This kind of conversation’ (says Richard), ‘lasted about an
hour, and then turned on France.... He asked me whether I was
in Paris during the Peace of Amiens. “Yes.” “You found it now
much altered?” “Yes, much larger than in 1802.” “It is a fine
city,” he added.... I took the opportunity of reminding him of
my sister, but he took no notice. He then conversed for a few
minutes, making altogether half an hour. On getting up to leave
he asked me to introduce my sister, whom he received with the
greatest affability, keeping up a conversation with her till a
carriage was heard coming, when he bowed and we retired.... He
frequently put his fingers into a small snuff-box, but did not
seem to take much notice of its contents. He asked me whether
I thought the Bourbons were really popular in France. He told
me he had found the heat more trying in Russia in the month of
August than in any other part of Europe, and he explained the
reason. I remarked evident signs of interest and inquisitiveness
when speaking of the Bourbons. He twice asked me whether they
were popular in France and what was said of them, and was not
satisfied with a vague reply.’[292]
Frederick Douglas, M.P., son of Lord Glenbervie, on his way home from
Athens had a courteous reception, which did not however prevent him
from speaking and voting in 1815 for the renewal of the war.
‘Why have you come?’ asked Napoleon.
‘To see a great man.’
‘Rather to see a wild beast,’ rejoined Napoleon, who inquired whether
Douglas had seen Murat or the Pope. The latter, said Napoleon, ‘is an
obstinately resigned old man. I did not treat him properly. I did not
go the right way to work with him.’ As to the state of France, Douglas
reported that there was much enthusiasm for the Bourbons, though there
were a few malcontents. ‘Yes,’ remarked Napoleon, ‘people who belong
to whatever party pays them and make much stir in order to get money.’
Napoleon went on to complain of the treachery of his officers, of the
pamphleteers who styled him a usurper, of his brothers for not having
seconded him, and of the sovereigns who had abandoned him. Douglas
reported that he could no longer mount a horse, and that he had fallen
into profound apathy. Perhaps Napoleon intentionally gave him this
erroneous impression, knowing that he was on his way to Paris, which he
reached in January 1815.[293]
Lord William Bentinck, afterwards Viceroy of India, with a friend were
sumptuously regaled, but we have no record of the conversation, and an
English lady ‘of angelical beauty,’ whom Pons does not name, but who
may have been Lady Jersey, for he says she showed the Emperor continued
sympathy during the St. Helena captivity, was received with marked
favour. When, on her return to London, she saw the Russian and Prussian
sovereigns pass by, she said to the fashionable gathering round her,
‘Those men cannot seem imposing to persons who like me have had a close
view of the Emperor Napoleon.’ Another visitor in September 1814 was
John Barber Scott, of Bungay, Suffolk, ultimately a Fellow of Emmanuel
College, Cambridge, but then a graduate twenty-two years of age, who
was accompanied by Major (Patrick?) Maxwell, R.A., Colonel (afterwards
General) John Lemoine, R. A., Captain Smith, and Colonel Niel Douglas.
They encountered Napoleon as he was out riding, and on their saluting
him he stopped for a few minutes to question them. They thought he
looked more like a crafty priest than a hero. On being told that Scott
was a Cantab he said, ‘What, Cambridge, Cambridge? Oh yes, you are a
young man; you will be a lawyer. Eh, eh, you will be Lord Chancellor?’
Being told by Douglas that he belonged to a Highland regiment, Napoleon
asked whether they did not wear kilts (_jupes_). On Douglas
replying in the affirmative, Napoleon asked whether he had brought his
kilt with him, as he should like to see it, but Douglas was unable to
gratify his curiosity.[294]
Equally short, or even shorter, had been the interview of Sir Gilbert
Starling and a Mr. Campbell.[295]
One visitor said he was as pleased to have spent nine days at Elba
as if he had won £30,000. Napoleon, however, refused audiences to
Englishmen whom he suspected of simple curiosity or of exultation at
his fall.[296] When he went to Longone, the second town in the island,
there were numerous English visitors, and it was remarked to him that
they followed him wherever he went. He replied, ‘I am an object of
curiosity; let them satisfy themselves. They will go home and amuse the
gentlemans (_sic_) by describing my acts and gestures.’ He added
in a sad tone, ‘They have won the game; they hold the dice.’
Yet so far from showing him disrespect, Pons states that these sixty
visitors of all classes vied in extolling him. Pons also acknowledges
that Colonel Campbell, though deputed by his Government to watch
Napoleon, veiled his supervision so carefully that only the closest
observation could detect it.[297]
But the principal visitor, and the only one invited to dinner, was
Lord Ebrington, afterwards Earl of Fortescue and in 1839–1841 Viceroy
of Ireland. He first waited on the Emperor at 8 P.M. on the
6th December, and for three hours walked up and down the room with
him. ‘You come from France; tell me frankly,’ said Napoleon, ‘whether
the French are satisfied.’ ‘Only so-so,’ replied Ebrington. ‘It cannot
be otherwise,’ rejoined Napoleon; ‘they have been too much humiliated
by the peace. The appointment of the Duke of Wellington as Ambassador
must have seemed an insult to the army, as also the special attentions
shown him by the King. If Lord Wellington had come to Paris as a
visitor, I should have had pleasure in showing him the attentions due
to his great ability, but I should not have liked his being sent to me
as Ambassador.’
The justice of this remark is obvious. Napoleon extolled the House of
Lords as the bulwark of the English constitution. He denounced the
duplicity of the Emperor Alexander, expressed esteem for the Austrian
Emperor, and spoke slightingly of the King of Prussia. ‘How should I
be treated,’ he asked Ebrington, ‘if I went to England? Should I be
stoned?’ Ebrington replied that he would run no risk, and that the
irritation formerly existing against him was daily dying out. ‘I think,
however,’ rejoined Napoleon, ‘that there would be some danger from your
mob’--he used the English word--‘at London.’
‘The grace of his smile and the simplicity of his manner,’ says
Ebrington, ‘had put me quite at my ease. He himself appeared to wish
me to question him. He replied without the least hesitation, with a
promptitude and clearness which I have never seen equalled in any other
man.’
Next day, just as Ebrington was preparing to sail, came an invitation
to dinner, and this second interview lasted from seven till eleven.
Napoleon inquired for the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, Whitworth,
Erskine, and Holland, and spoke especially of Fox. Informed that Fox
felt much flattered at his reception in 1802, Napoleon said, ‘He had
reason to be so. He was everywhere received like a divinity because
he was known to be in favour of peace.’ ‘Tell Lord Grenville,’ added
Napoleon, ‘to come and see me. I wager that you in England thought me
a devil, but now that you have seen me and France also you must be
somewhat disabused.’ He justified the detentions of 1803. Ebrington,
however, maintained that the embargo on French shipping in British
ports prior to the formal declaration of war was in accordance with
precedent, on which Napoleon replied, ‘Yes, you considered it right
because it was to your advantage; other nations who lost by it thought
it wrong. I am sure that at heart you in England approved me for
showing force of character. Do you not see that I am a bit of a pirate
like yourselves?’
Napoleon half in earnest advocated polygamy, especially in the
colonies, where a planter might have a wife of each colour, so that the
two families might grow up together harmoniously. He inquired for ‘my
good friend Ussher’--Captain, afterwards Sir Thomas Ussher--who had
conveyed him to Elba.
On surprise being expressed by Ebrington at his calm endurance of
adversity, Napoleon said, ‘It is because everybody was more surprised
at it than myself. I have not too good an opinion of mankind, and
have always distrusted fortune. Moreover, I had little enjoyment. My
brothers were much more kings than I was. They tasted the sweets of
royalty, while I had only the worries and cares.’[298]
Lord John Russell, the future statesman, then twenty-three years of
age, being taken by his father to Florence in the autumn of 1814,
embraced the opportunity of visiting Elba. ‘When I saw Napoleon,’ he
says, ‘he was in evident anxiety respecting the state of France and his
chances of again seizing the crown which he had worn for ten years. I
was so struck with his restless inquiry that I expressed in a letter
to my brother in England my conviction that he would make some fresh
attempts to disturb France and govern Europe.’[299]
But by far the most curious incident of Napoleon’s reign at Elba was
his presence at an entertainment in honour of George III.’s
birthday, given on the 4th June 1814 by Captain Tower on board
the frigate _Undaunted_. Napoleon, on reaching Fréjus after
his abdication in April, had embarked in the _Undaunted_ in
preference to a French vessel assigned for his passage to Elba, and
had taken a fancy to the captain, Ussher. The _Undaunted_ went
to and from Elba and Leghorn, and it might have celebrated the royal
birthday at the latter port. Napoleon afterwards thought that Colonel
(ultimately Sir Neil) Campbell purposely planned the celebration at
Elba. When, however, Towers invited him to come on board, and sent
round invitations to the principal inhabitants of Porto Ferrajo, he
readily accepted the invitation, and directed his courtiers, if such a
phrase can be used, to do likewise. One of these, Pons de l’Hérault,
to whom we are indebted for the fullest account of the festival--not
published, however, till 1897[300]--was inclined indeed to regard the
invitation as an insult and the festival as a bravado; but his master
told him that it was the duty of British sailors to observe their
sovereign’s birthday wherever they might happen to be. A ‘throne,’
says Pons, had been prepared for the Emperor on the bridge; and he
continues:--