IV Captivity
The Rupture—Detentions—Flights and Narrow Escapes—Life at Verdun—Extortion—Napoleon’s Rigour—M.P.’s—The Argus—Escapes and Recaptures—Diplomatists—Liberations—Indulgences—Women and Children—Captures in War—Rumbold—Foreign Visitors—British Travellers—Deaths—The Last Stage—French Leave—Unpaid Debts.
It is not my purpose to discuss the causes of the renewal of the war. M. Martin Phippson, in the Revue Historique, March to June 1901, contends that though England, owing to Addington’s incapacity, was seemingly the aggressor, Napoleon was really so, albeit desirous at the last moment of postponing the rupture till his armaments were completed. Of all the explanations of the rupture the strangest, yet the most recent, is that of M. Albert Sorel, who, quoting some anonymous English writer, represents the renewal of the war as necessary to the English ruling classes in order to avert the establishment of a government like the French.160 The truth is that all reflecting Englishmen perceived Napoleon to be a tyrant, and Paine, as we have seen, regarded Frenchmen as worse off than the slaves of Constantinople.
The treaty of Amiens, moreover, had never been more than a truce. Whitworth had never appeared to instal himself for a permanency, and English visitors consequently complained of his want of hospitality. On the 13th March 1803 Napoleon rudely apostrophised him at Joséphine’s reception. Whitworth’s own account of this has been published by Mr. Oscar Browning, but Napoleon’s version addressed to Andréossi, which seems to have been overlooked in England, is to be found in his correspondence. It reads thus:—
‘The First Consul being at the presentation of foreigners which took place to-day at Madame Bonaparte’s, and finding Lord Whitworth and M. de Markoff side by side, said to them, “We have been fighting fifteen years (sic). It seems that a storm is brewing at London, and that they want to fight another fifteen years. The King of England says in his message that France is preparing offensive armaments. He has been misled. There is no considerable armament in the French ports, all having started for St. Domingo. He says that differences exist between the two Cabinets; I know of none. It is true that England should evacuate Malta. His Majesty is pledged to this by treaty. The French nation may be destroyed but not intimidated.”
‘Going round and finding himself alone with M. de Markoff, he said in a low tone that the discussion related to Malta, that the British Ministry wanted to keep it seven years, and that you should not sign treaties when you would not execute them. At the end of the circle, the English minister being near the door, he said to him: “Madame Dorset has spent the bad season at Paris; I ardently hope that she may spend the fine one; but if it is true that we are to have war, the entire responsibility in the eyes of God and man will be on those who repudiate their own signature and refuse to execute treaties.”’
This storm blew over, and on the 30th March the young Duke of Dorset, the Harrow schoolboy, set off to spend Easter with his mother, his two little sisters, and his step-father at Paris. It was also stated that the Embassy was about to be newly furnished. But in April matters again looked threatening. Madame de Rémusat tells us that people collected outside the British Embassy, to judge by the preparations for departure whether there was to be peace or war. Whitworth161 left Paris on the 12th May and landed at Dover on the 20th. His staff met with some obstacles. Talbot, on his way to Calais, was stopped at St. Denis because his passport had expired. He acknowledged that he ought to have renewed it, but the Prefect of Police, on being consulted, said he was exempt from the decree, and after a few hours’ delay Talbot, who admitted that he had been courteously treated, proceeded on his journey.162 Mandeville not being allowed, probably for the same informality, to embark at Calais, returned temporarily to Paris. Hodgson, the chaplain, and Maclaurin, the physician to the Embassy, also encountered difficulties. On the 6th May it had been announced in the House of Commons that Andréossi had asked for his passports. On the 17th messages to both Houses and a notification in the London Gazette dated the 16th announced an embargo on all French and Dutch vessels in British ports, together with the issue of letters of marque. On the 19th two French vessels laden with timber and salt were captured off Brest. On the 23rd a decree was communicated to the French Chambers providing that all Englishmen enrolled in the militia or holding commissions in the army or navy should be detained as reprisals for this embargo and capture prior to the declaration of war on the 18th. The decree was even extended by being made applicable to all persons between eighteen and sixty, even if, like clergymen and others, not enrolled in the militia. Talbot before leaving wrote a letter of remonstrance to Talleyrand, who stated that Talbot having no longer any official status he could not reply.
The only precedents for this detention were the arrest in 1746, without any apparent reason, of all the English in Paris on the return of the Young Pretender, and that of all Englishmen in France in 1793 as hostages for Toulon. Thomas Moore heard Lord Holland in 1819 justify Napoleon, but Mackintosh maintained that the seizure of vessels was warranted by international law, and a French jurist, Miot de Mélito, describes the detention as a ‘violent measure unusual even in the bitterest wars,’ while Henri Martin, the French historian, charges both Governments with having violated international law. The truth is that Napoleon acted in a passion, and as in the case of the Duc d’Enghien was too proud ever to acknowledge a mistake. As to an embargo, he himself as early as the 13th May had despatched orders for the seizure of British vessels in Holland, Genoa, and Tuscany. If, moreover, we are to believe Madame Junot, Napoleon’s decree was due to his having been informed that Colonel James Green had in a café threatened in his cups to assassinate him, and though Junot, being acquainted with Green, vouched for his having left Paris prior to the date of the alleged threat, Napoleon refused to cancel the decree. So swiftly was it enforced that the Prince of Wales packet and the cutter Nancy, which had made their usual passage from Dover to Calais, were seized and their crews detained. When a few weeks afterwards Napoleon visited Calais, Captain Sutton, of the Prince of Wales, petitioned him for release, but he met with a peremptory refusal, and Napoleon, on the two vessels being pointed out to him in the harbour, said, ‘You have plenty of mud there; let them lie and rot.’
The aggregate number of the British captives, represented by the French as seven thousand five hundred, was really only seven hundred, four hundred of them, according to Sturt, being small tradesmen. Napoleon, according to Maclean, was much disappointed at the smallness of the haul. Everything indeed had been done to induce the visitors to stay. The Argus had on the 10th May remonstrated against any fear of detention as in 1793, France, it said, being no longer under a Robespierre, and provincial authorities had given assurances that expulsion with reasonable notice was the worst that could befall. It was unfair, however, to accuse Napoleon of having ‘enticed’ the English to remain. His assurances of safety were probably sincere at the time, but his moral sense did not impress upon him the sacredness of such a virtual pledge. He had no scruples as to suddenly changing his mind to the detriment of persons who had trusted him. Most of the visitors, however, had deemed it prudent to return home while the issue was still uncertain. As late indeed as May arrivals in Paris had continued. From May 10th to 19th there were 48, and from the 20th to the 29th there were 38, but in the next ten days the number fell to 17 and in the following ten days to 6. Most of these visitors, moreover, must have come up from the provinces on their way home, while others came to fetch relatives. There were some narrow escapes. Sir William Call was just in time to leave Geneva, and Miss Berry and Mrs. Damer, warned by Lord John Campbell, hurried away from that city, forgetting or possibly not thinking it safe to pass on the warning to others. The Duke of Bedford, the Duchess of Gordon and her daughter, and Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh left Paris four days after Whitworth. The son of Sir G. Burrell and a companion escaped by making their valet pass for an American and themselves for his servants. Young Edgeworth, on the other hand, received his father’s letter of warning just too late, and was detained till 1814, though his companions, Roget as a Swiss and the Philips boys as below the age, obtained exemption. Yet not only had men been detained when over sixty, but some youths of ten or twelve, and therefore well under the limit of sixteen, had been stopped on the plea of their producing no certificates of birth. Augustine Sayer, aged thirteen, whom his parents had apparently placed in a school, was not allowed to return home, but was forced to maintain himself by tuition. He was eventually physician to the Duke of Kent and to the Lock Hospital, dying in 1861. He may have been one of the English boys sent to Dubufe’s school, for Dubufe, a member of the London Society of Arts, contradicting a statement that Protestants were refused admission to French schools, mentioned that he had received such pupils. John Charles Tarver, the future educationist and teacher of French at Eton, might surely, however, have been sent to his parents in London between 1794 and 1802, even if this was impossible after 1803. Farel, the engineer, in whose care he had been left by them on their release from captivity at Dieppe after the Terror, had virtually adopted him. Born at Dieppe in 1790, he had practically been naturalised, and Farel in 1805 got him into the French civil service. He remained in it till March 1814, when, obtaining leave of absence, he went to London and found his mother, brothers, and sisters still living; but he returned to France during the Hundred Days, intending apparently to resume his official post. Disappointed in this hope, he recrossed the Channel and found a more distinguished career open to him.
Before entering into details respecting the captives, I should speak of the unusual bitterness given to the war by Napoleon. Anglophobia, indeed, had been displayed by him even during the peace. The publishers of the Almanach National were sharply rebuked for proposing to insert ‘Angleterre’ with its royal family at the head of the alphabetical list of foreign powers. They had to relegate it lower down as ‘Grande Bretagne,’ and curiously enough British representatives at international Congresses are to the present day seated according to this nomenclature. Napoleon, moreover, during his tour in Normandy scolded his minister Chaptal for speaking of ‘jardins anglais.’ ‘Why,’ he vehemently exclaimed, ‘do you call them English gardens? Do you not know that this style of gardening came to us from China, that it was brought to perfection in France, and that no good Frenchman can credit England with it? Bear in mind that “French gardens” is the only proper term for them, and never again grate on my ears with “English gardens.”’163
His animosity was naturally intensified on the resumption of hostilities. The theatres were forbidden to perform pieces containing allusions complimentary to England, while plays of an opposite character were ordered to be performed not only in Paris but at Boulogne, Bruges, and other ports where troops were being collected for the invasion. A corps of Irish interpreters was formed, and Chaptal was directed to get some invasion songs written and set to music. Pamphlets demonstrating the facility of the invasion or vilifying the English were likewise published. One of them was entitled, ‘The English people, swollen with pride, beer, and tea, tried by the tribunal of reason.’ This was a reprint of Montlosier’s articles, but issued without his consent. Caricatures were also multiplied. One of them represented George III. as dragged on the ground by his hair by a French soldier. His crown tumbles off, and the soldier, striking him with his fist, says, ‘Look to thy crown and defend thy coasts.’164 The Bayeux tapestry was brought over to Paris to suggest the practicability or imminency of a landing in England, and the Joan of Arc celebration at Orleans, suspended since the Revolution, was revived. Even indeed in February, three months before the rupture, Napoleon had emphatically approved, if not suggested, the erection by the Orleans municipality of a statue of the heroine. This gave the Times a text for commenting on the anomaly of the glorification by a usurper of the maiden who restored the French crown to its rightful owner. Napoleon might, however, have rejoined that he had not usurped the crown, but had picked it out of the gutter of the Revolution. The teaching of English in schools, too, as Lamartine testifies, was forbidden. Yet it is but fair to say that French was discouraged, as Lord Malmesbury tells us, in English schools, and that the Times of January 4, 1803, contained the following curious article:—
The political ill-consequences of the spread of the French language throughout Europe are admitted; and we do not conceive that its bad effects upon the morals and character of other countries will be disputed. We have no hesitation to add, that a nation which adopts the language of a superior is prepared to admit its yoke. There is no better or quicker road to dominion, than by imposing the necessity, or compassing the mode, of making a language general. In this word are comprised the ideas, character, and love of the people whose idiom you prefer to your own.
We never heard it alleged as unwise in the Government of China, to intercept all communication between its subjects and foreigners.
Except as a first step and beginning of mischief, all apprehensions from the representation of a French Comedy are ridiculous. It is as the mali labes, the first spot and eruption, that we are induced to contend against anything so contemptible as the pic-nickery and nick-nackery—the pert affectation, and subaltern vanity of rehearsing to an audience that cannot understand, in a language one cannot pronounce!
Does any one advantage result to the community of Great Britain, from the practice of teaching French indiscriminately to every girl whose parents can send her to a boarding-school?
Does any advantage result from its being taught to shopkeepers’ sons, at a day-school, for fear foreigners should not pawn or buy, for want of understanding them?
Are not the great part of the female sex, and of the uninformed part of ours, exposed, by this practice, to the moral and political corruptions of another country? Is not the business of French Emissaries facilitated by the half-understanding of low and ignorant Englishmen?
Ought a girl to be able to read any book that her father cannot? Ought she to converse in a gibberish, which her mother cannot detect?
Ought the mass of a virtuous and happy people to be educated to form ideas different from the manners, habits, and institutions of their own country? Ought it to be in the power of an enemy to poison their minds, corrupt their principles, and seduce them from their allegiance and religion?
Napoleon’s letters show how jealously he watched over the detention of the English, and over everything relating to England. Thus in 1806 he ordered all Englishmen to be expelled from the Papal States, and this order perhaps accounts for Coleridge’s belief that he had a narrow escape from being seized on account of his articles in the Morning Post. It is extremely unlikely, however, that Napoleon ever heard of Coleridge. He likewise decreed that English civilians found in any country occupied by his troops should be prisoners, and all English property or merchandise confiscated. Even any neutral vessel which had entered an English port was also to be forfeited. Lord Oxford, Lord Mount Cashell, and General Morgan would have been arrested at Florence but for the refusal of the Queen Regent to act as Napoleon’s policeman. Again in 1806 Napoleon writes, ‘I do not know why English prisoners have been placed at Arras; no doubt to be near home so that they may escape.’ He writes eight months later from Posen: ‘Issue a circular and take measures that throughout the Empire all letters coming from England or written in English and by Englishmen shall be destroyed. All this is very important, for England must be completely isolated.’ In 1807 he complains that English prisoners still received letters. Two years later, on a report that the English at Arras and Valenciennes were meditating escape, he ordered their removal further inland. This measure was extended in 1811 to the prisoners at Brussels. The daily police report, which constantly spoke of the English prisoners, was evidently scanned by him, even when absent from Paris, with great attention; and seemingly anxious that no other eye should see these documents, he directed that during his absence in Russia they should be destroyed. There is consequently a gap of four months in 1812. Even to the last the prisoners were never forgotten by him, for on the 6th January 1814 he ordered their removal from Verdun to Orleans, manifestly to prevent their release by the allied armies. Only in one instance do I find his severity relenting. On the 12th November 1812 at Givet he remarked English prisoners (captured soldiers or sailors, of course, not détenus) who had been set to repair a swivel bridge. Eight or ten of them jumped with alacrity into a boat to help to make the mechanism work. He directed that these men should be picked out, presented with 100 francs each, and sent back to England. An English clergyman at Givet who had petitioned for a three months’ visit home was to escort them. A petition from another Englishman there was also to be favourably considered. It is pleasant to find Napoleon for once good-humoured and generous.165 When, in 1812, he directed that the smuggling of coffee and sugar into Corsica by English vessels should be winked at, and that sugar and coffee seized in British bottoms should not, like British manufactured goods, be burnt, he was obviously inspired by more selfish considerations. French fishing-boats were forbidden to pass the night out at sea, lest they should smuggle English goods, yet they were authorised to smuggle (the French had adopted the word smogler) spirits into England. Fishing-boats on both sides were unmolested, unless indeed they had clandestine passengers on board; and the Times, running a light cutter in the Channel, procured from them Paris newspapers. Letters were probably conveyed occasionally in the same way. England had not retaliated against French products, for in 1807 the Monthly Review appealed to British patriots not to continue spending a million and a half a year on French brandies and other goods. But Cancale must have been unable to continue sending its oysters, one hundred and nineteen millions of which had been forwarded in the twenty months of peace. The export of oysters from Granville and St. Malo was, however, permitted by Napoleon in 1810.
The Irish refugees, whom Napoleon, as we have seen, had offered Cornwallis to expel, now became his cats-paws. In July 1803, while declining to see Arthur O’Connor, he deputed General Truguet to treat with him and Berthier to advance him small sums of money. He promised to send 25,000 troops to Ireland, and if 20,000 Irishmen would join them he pledged himself to make Irish independence a condition of peace. But he found that the Irish refugees or emissaries were split into two parties, not always on speaking terms, O’Connor accepting, the Emmets rejecting, the idea of a French protectorate. In July 1804, having read a memoir by the Emmets, Lewins, and other exiles, he decreed that all Irishmen accompanying the projected expedition should be considered Frenchmen, and if not treated when captured as prisoners of war reprisals would be exercised.166 Robert Emmet had had an audience of Napoleon previously to the peace, and an Irish legion was formed in November 1803. MacSheehy organised it at Brest, and on the Emperor’s coronation it was presented, like the French regiments, with an eagle and colours. Irish dissensions, however, are proverbial, and a duel between MacSheehy and O’Mealy led to the former being transferred to a French regiment and to the latter resigning and apparently returning to Baltimore. In 1806 the legion was ordered to Landau and had to pass through Verdun.
The governor [says Myles Byrne] took upon himself to lodge the Irish legion in a suburb, lest its presence might not be agreeable to the British prisoners. At daybreak he had the drawbridge let down and the gates opened to let the legion march through before the English prisoners could have light to see and contemplate our green flag and its beatific inscription, so obnoxious to them, ‘the independence of Ireland.’ Our march, however, through the town at that early hour attracted great notice. As our band played up our national air of Patrick’s Day in the Morning we could see many windows opened and gentlemen in their shirts inquiring across the street in good English what was meant by this music at such an early hour.
Some months later the legion was ordered to Boulogne, to be ready for the invasion of England, and at Arras ‘the governor,’ says Byrne, ‘had the good sense to make the English sleep one night in the citadel until we marched out in the morning.’ The legion was eventually sent to Spain. The experiment of inviting English prisoners to join it did not succeed, and in 1810 Napoleon stopped it. ‘I do not want any English soldiers,’ he wrote; ‘I prefer their being prisoners to answer for my prisoners in England; moreover the majority desert.’ This had apparently happened in Spain. In 1811 Napoleon directed Clarke to send for O’Connor and his fellow-exiles in Paris and try to revive an insurrection. He was ready to send 30,000 troops if sure of a rising and if England continued to send forces to Portugal. O’Connor accordingly sent Napoleon a preliminary memoir, whereupon in September he commissioned Clarke to despatch agents to Ireland.
In spite of his ostentatious preparations Napoleon told Metternich in 1810 that he had never been mad enough to think of invading England unless in the wake of an insurrection, the Boulogne army being all along aimed at Austria. The latest and fullest French writer on the subject, Colonel Desbrières, from an examination of the confused orders and counterorders, so unlike the rest of Napoleon’s plans, comes to the same conclusion.167 All that Napoleon could have intended was to disquiet England, and thus prevent her from despatching troops to the Continent. This was legitimate strategy, and he was obviously, moreover, as much entitled to use the Irish as pawns as England had been to use the Vendeans, but his manufacture of counterfeit notes is less excusable. A manufactory of forged notes in Paris, enshrouded in mystery, was superintended by Lale, a clerk in the engraving department of the War Office, Fouché, Savary, and Desmarest being the only confidants of the secret. A Hamburg Jew named Malchus and two Frenchmen, Blanc and Bernard, were sent to buy merchandise with the notes. They were instructed to go to Scotland and Ireland, so as to disappear before the fraud was discovered. They were ostensibly told to destroy what they bought, but they naturally preferred smuggling it into France, and this was winked at, so that they made large profits. The fraud was, however, soon discovered. Malchus was hanged. His confederates escaped in an English smuggling boat which was captured by a French revenue vessel. They were at first imprisoned at Boulogne, but Savary promptly ordered their release, together with funds to return to Paris for further employment. Napoleon, at a later date, practised the same trick on Russia and Austria. On the restoration of peace with the latter in 1810, he offered an excuse or rather defence of the act to Metternich. He had at that time just ordered Fouché to resume the forgery of English notes.168
Napoleon, it may be remarked, attributed the rupture of 1803 to his refusal to conclude a commercial treaty ‘which would necessarily have been detrimental to the manufactures and industry of his subjects,’169 and he never relaxed stringency in excluding British merchandise. As late as 1810 such goods were seized and burned at Roscoff, Bâle, and Strasburg, though the prefect of Strasburg suggested that textiles should be utilised in hospitals and ambulances. The war thus gave a stimulus to French manufactures, except to those hampered by want of raw materials. The ports, however, suffered severely through the English blockade, especially Nantes and other towns which had had a large trade with the West Indies. During the short peace Nantes had sent out merchantmen, and sixty of these, unable to get back, were captured. Marseilles also suffered, but the blockade could not entirely stop its trade.
Even some Englishmen long resident in France were declared prisoners and had to plead for exemption. Chalmers, a Bordeaux merchant, Scottish on the father’s side, French on the mother’s; James Macculloch, who had been in Brittany for thirty-five years; James Smith, Stone’s successor as printer; and James Milne, who taught cotton-spinning at the Arts et Métiers, were in this position. Chalmers found naturalisation the only resource. Smith and Milne, perhaps also Macculloch, were struck off the list of captives. As a rule rich residents as well as manufacturers and artisans were unmolested, for Napoleon was not insensible of the advantage thus accruing to Parisian tradesmen. Thus Francis Henry Egerton, brother and eventual successor of the Earl of Bridgewater, an eccentric clergyman or ex-clergyman of whom we shall hear anon, was not disquieted. According to a French writer he had created a scandal which necessitated expatriation, but this assertion I have not been able to verify. His chess parties in 1807 excited much notice. In 1813 he visited Italy. Quintin Craufurd was also unmolested, along with his quasi-wife Mrs. Sullivan, who, according to a French police register, was originally an Italian ballet-dancer, married John O’Sullivan, Under-Secretary for War and the Colonies, and eloped with Craufurd. Another version, however, states that she had been the mistress or morganatic wife of the King of Würtemberg, on whose legitimate marriage she withdrew with her daughter to Paris, subsequently marrying Sullivan. What is certain is that she had cohabited with Craufurd in Paris as long ago as 1787, for in that year she had had to fetch him home at 9 A.M. from the British Embassy after a whole night at the card-table. Nothing worse now befell Craufurd than a robbery. Madame de Genlis writes on the 23rd March 1811 to her adopted son, Casimir Becker:—
That poor Mr. Craufurd was robbed yesterday while he was playing whist at Madame de Talleyrand’s. All his superb jewels, caskets, rings, gold medals, 300 louis d’or, etc. The window was opened by means of a hole cut in the shutter, and the desk was forced. But it is believed from several indications that what was done to the window was merely a feint and that the thief belonged to the house.170
Even Craufurd, however, being uncle, as we have seen, of two British diplomatists, incurred the suspicions of Fouché’s spies, for their report of the 22nd May 1804 says:—
It may be supposed that this old man, now blasé, has no longer the activity which formerly rendered his house at Frankfort a centre of political movements very hostile to France, but he is still under the influence of Madame Sullivan, that foreigner of easy virtue who facilitated the departure of Louis XVI. and started the same day for Brussels.171
Talleyrand’s protection nevertheless ensured him against molestation, and he was even permitted to procure books from England. In 1816 he obtained the restitution of his papers,172 seized, like his other effects, in 1793, and he claimed 2,230,000 francs compensation for his losses. A smaller sum was probably awarded him. He continued living in Paris till his death in November 1819. A painful episode disturbed his last months. Sir James Craufurd went over, and as far as can be judged endeavoured to extort from the sick uncle a will or a bequest of £48,000 in his favour. Though forbidden entrance, he flourished pistols in the faces of two servants and forced his way in. He next prosecuted Mrs. Craufurd and several of her fashionable friends for spreading reports of his conduct, and in court he indulged in such personalities that he had to be expelled. He also charged the servants with assaulting him, but this, like the other accusations, was dismissed, and he was eventually twice sentenced by default to six months’ imprisonment for libellous pamphlets, in one of which he accused Mrs Craufurd of bigamy.173 Quintin Craufurd was very charitable to the poor of Paris. Though primarily a man of fashion, he ranks as an author by works on India, Mary Stuart, and Marie Antoinette, some of them in French. His widow, retaining to the age of eighty-four her vivacity and charm, died in Paris about 1832. Her daughter174 married Count Albert d’Orsay, one of Napoleon’s generals, and thus became the mother of Count Alfred d’Orsay, the handsome fop, spendthrift, and amateur painter, who in 1827 married Lady Harriet Gardner, step-daughter of the famous Lady Blessington. Sir James (latterly Sir James Grogan) Craufurd died in 1839.
Fraser Frisell, who, except for a brief visit to his native Scotland in 1802, had lived in France since 1792, was likewise allowed full liberty.
Americans, it may be mentioned, were liable to be arrested as English, for the latter sometimes attempted to pass themselves off as Americans. George Matthew Paterson, a cousin of Madame Paterson-Bonaparte’s father, was detained as a British subject. He had, indeed, been born in Ireland. He was sent to Valenciennes, and then to Lille, whence he wrote letters to Madame Paterson-Bonaparte complimenting her on her marriage with Jerome and desiring to make her acquaintance.175 William Russell was at least half American. He had got up the Bastille dinner at Birmingham in 1790, whereupon his house was burnt down by the mob. He had gone to America in 1795, but in 1802, being in France on his way to England, he was detained till 1814.
Junot, who as Governor of Paris had to carry out the order of detention, was, according to his wife’s memoirs, very reluctant to do so, and consented only under great pressure. He seems, indeed, by all accounts to have been inclined to leniency, and Forbes tells us that he suggested his obtaining exemption by pretending to be a sexagenarian. For a time some captives were allowed to remain in Paris, but this did not last long. Napoleon, in this as in other cases, interested himself in the smallest details. On the 3rd July he ordered a hundred of the English in Paris to be sent off. They were allowed to choose between Melun, Meaux, Fontainebleau, Nancy, and Geneva, only twenty-five, mostly Irishmen, being permitted to remain in Paris. He complained too of having found English at Boulogne and Calais. Accordingly forty-eight hours’ notice was given them—that is to those not of the age to be prisoners—to embark for England or to remove into the interior. On the 7th July Napoleon gave orders that the English officers should be sent to Fontainebleau or some other town: only forty were to remain in Paris; ‘the presence of so great a number of English in Paris cannot but cause and does cause great mischief.’176 On the 23rd November he ordered that officers, old men, and men with wives and children should be interned at Verdun. The prisoners at Fontainebleau, Phalsbourg, and Marsal were accordingly transferred thither. Persons giving cause of complaint were to be confined at Bitche,177 Sedan, or Sarrelouis, while privates and sailors were to be imprisoned at Charlemont and Valenciennes.
Verdun was obviously chosen because its distance from the sea rendered escape difficult. It was a town of ten thousand inhabitants, and the influx of English, mostly in affluent or at least easy circumstances, was a windfall for it. A French newspaper compared them in fact to sheep enclosed in a fold to manure the soil, and it suggested that other towns should share the advantage. The mayor of Metz, indeed, applied on behalf of that city, but ineffectually. Verdun retained a kind of monopoly, a regulated monopoly, for Napoleon in one of his letters (Nov. 24, 1804) warned the municipality that unless it kept down the price of lodgings, which had risen from 36 to 300 francs a month, the English would be sent elsewhere. Some of the army or navy officers and captains of merchantmen captured during the war were, of course, without means, and they had the option of gratuitous accommodation in the barracks. Another reason for the choice of Verdun may have been the absence of any upper class with whom the captives could mix, whereas at Nancy, the former capital of Lorraine and still a kind of provincial Paris, they had much more congenial surroundings. Austrian and Russian prisoners there joined them in 1804 in celebrating Carnival. The number of captives at Verdun from 1803 to 1814 varied from six to eleven hundred, but the highest number included captives made at sea or on battlefields. They procured remittances from England through Perregaux, the Paris banker, and some obtained permission for their families to join them. They had to give their parole not to escape as a condition of being allowed to hire their own lodgings, a breach of parole entailing incarceration. They had to answer to the roll-call morning and night. They beguiled their captivity as best they could. There were amateur theatricals, cock-fights, and horse-races. The prisoners were described by the Argus in January 1804 as ‘playing, dancing, singing, and drinking all day long.’
Two clubs were formed, one English at Concannon’s house,178 the other Irish at Carron’s, but the latter was broken up on account of Hibernian quarrels in 1807. Lady Cadogan gave entertainments, and on the Prince of Wales’s birthday in 1804 Mrs. Concannon issued a hundred and twenty invitations to a ball and supper, when the costly toilettes of Mrs. Clive, wife of Colonel Robert Clive, and those of Mrs. Annesley, were much remarked. In 1807 the townspeople were invited by four captives to a masquerade ball.179
‘Young Englishmen,’ wrote George Call in his diary, after passing through Verdun in 1810, ‘are much the same whether prisoners or at home, playing, driving, and shooting each other (sic)... One might fancy oneself in London.’ The richer prisoners gave monthly subscriptions for their poorer brethren or for schools, and the Birmingham Quakers in 1807 opened a subscription for them, an example followed in 1811 by London. The English Government, moreover, at the instance of Robson, sent £2000. Dr. Davis gave gratuitous medical services to the poorer prisoners. Maude and Jordan held Church of England services in the college hall, and solemnised marriages the validity of which was afterwards disputed. When fellow of Queen’s College, where he died in 1852, Maude used to relate his experiences.180 Captivity reveals character, and there was not unbroken harmony or unalloyed respectability. Some speedily got into debt, and the authorities had to consider whether imprisonment for debt could be resorted to. This seems to have been at first settled in the negative. Lord Barrington, in June 1804, gave a Frenchman a draft on London which was dishonoured. The holder thereupon sued him and obtained judgment, but on appeal this was reversed, on the ground that being detained Barrington could not have arranged for an extension of time. Ultimately, however, we find arrests for debt made, and in 1807 Napoleon ordered that such judgments should be enforced. Waring Knox was in a debtors’ prison at Saargemünd when, on the intercession of the Grand Duke of Berg, he received permission to live at Melun, provided his creditors agreed to his exit. While in prison for debt at Valenciennes in 1811, he asked for 200 louis and a passport that he might go to England, where, having been brought up with the Prince Regent, he could procure a confidential post and could discover and reveal the secret projects of the British Government. General Clarke, whose Irish extraction and knowledge of England, where he had found his first wife,181 made him a good judge of such applications, believed, however, that he simply wanted to escape from his numerous French creditors. Whether the offer was sincere or not it was almost equally contemptible. Yet we ultimately hear of his giving his poorer countrymen a daily meal at Valenciennes, where he died in a debtors’ prison in December 1813, just before release would have come. It is significantly stated that Sir William Cooper and Lady Cadogan, on being allowed to quit Verdun for Nancy, left no debts behind them, whereas half a dozen others had left half a million francs unpaid. Police reports of 1804–1805 mention one Wilson as behaving indecently with his French mistress at the theatre, and striking the officer who reprimanded him. He was deservedly sent to Bitche. Wilbraham was charged with forgery and with swindling his fellow-countrymen. We hear, too, of a duel between ‘Gold’ (Valentine Goold, or Francis Goold, a surgeon?) and Balbi, the keeper of the gaming-tables, in which the latter was wounded. ‘Gold’ was consequently confined in the fortress, but Napoleon (this proves that he looked into everything) ordered his liberation. ‘A prisoner of war,’ he said, ‘may fight a duel.’ One of the brothers Mellish, interned at Orleans, actually challenged the prefect to an encounter. A duel in 1806 between Captain Walpole and Lieutenant Miles, both of the navy, in which the latter was killed, probably arose out of a gaming quarrel. In the gaming-room figured the notice, ‘This bank is kept for the English; the French are forbidden to play at it.’182
The gaming-tables, Lord Blayney was told, cost the English prisoners £50,000 a year, but they were eventually closed. A Captain Cory, in one of his drunken fits, assaulted a French soldier. Colonel William Whaley, probably the brother of ‘Jerusalem’ Whaley, who indulged in quarrelling, duelling, and betting, was in 1808 sent to Moulins. He is described as ‘notorious for immorality and extravagant conduct, and capable of the most desperate enterprises.’ The English Government had refused him a passport for France, but he had managed to get there, and after six months’ incarceration in the Temple at Paris, where he excited a mutiny among the prisoners, had been sent to Verdun. There in 1811, to revenge himself for a refusal to receive him, he denounced Blayney as having clandestinely procured plans of French fortresses. The charge was investigated and declared unfounded. There were other men base enough falsely to denounce fellow-captives. Morshead and Estwicke in 1808 were fined 20,000 francs for calumny and swindling. Sir Thomas Wallace was denounced out of revenge by MacCarthy as being deep in debt and meditating escape or suicide.183 In August 1813 there was a scuffle between prisoners and townsmen, which gendarmes had to repress. Hutchinson, a teacher of languages, was sent to Bitche for insulting a French officer. A Captain Hawker and a man named Raineford, who entered a jeweller’s shop on pretence of paying a bill, and seriously assaulted him, were sentenced in 1808 to twelve and six months’ imprisonment respectively. ‘Restless spirits,’ says Call, ‘do their best to compel the French to treat the prisoners harshly.’
Some captives, indeed, brought punishments on themselves. Thomas Devenish, having inveighed against Napoleon, was sent to Doullens fortress, but after a time was allowed to return, and Brodie, who had taught English at Blois, audaciously sent General Wirion, the commandant at Verdun, a letter of diatribes against Napoleon, for which he was relegated to Bitche. A surgeon named Simpson, who at the theatre hissed a bust of Napoleon and next day boasted of the act, pleaded inebriation, but was consigned to the fortress. On the other hand Neilson, captain of a merchantman, obviously tried to curry favour by naming his infant Napoleon, and Felix Ellice, a prisoner at Thionville, composed four sonnets and an ode on the birth of the King of Rome. Williams, imprisoned at Bitche, who had been employed by the Admiralty till 1799, but had apparently been dismissed, offered in 1804 and again in 1808 to detect the spies acting for England, but his overtures were refused, it being believed that the spies had been changed. Two navy lieutenants were imprisoned for fourteen days in 1805 for striking a French officer. A Captain Bannatyne and two officers got up theatricals on the plea of intending to pay debts, but in reality, it was said, to swindle their countrymen. Captain Nanney was sent to Arras for seducing a townsman’s wife, but escaped in August 1809. Gentlemen’s servants are not always of exemplary behaviour, and we hear of ten valets being packed off from Verdun.
These black sheep were of course exceptions, and we hear on the other hand of Colonel Reilly Cope indulging in botanising, of Forbes having his daughter taught to dance, and of Captain Molyneux Shuldham constructing a carriage propelled by sails at seven or eight miles an hour. Horses, however, being frightened by this monster, and a cart being overturned by it, it was hissed and stoned by the peasantry. Shuldham also invented a boat which, placed on a kind of skates, slid over the ice.184 He and others likewise amused themselves with rowing, but anglers complained that they frightened away the fish, and the pastime was consequently forbidden.
General Wirion, the commandant of Verdun, had clearly no enviable 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 Napoleon189 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 name210—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 Napoleon216 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 1811225 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 Donegal226 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 husband238 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 registers256 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 Mackenzie259 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 Blayney268 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.