II THE VISITORS (continued 2)

Alexander Cockburn, consul at Hamburg, took the opportunity of visiting Paris with his Creole wife, Yolande de Vignier, and his son, the future Lord Chief-Justice, was born in France during this visit. Cockburn was in 1825 appointed Minister to the Central American Republics. Sir John Craufurd, another nephew of Quintin Craufurd, was Minister to Lower Saxony from 1795 to 1803. He had visited Paris in 1791, and he now repeated his visit. We shall see that he stayed longer than he liked and took French leave. Charles Richard Vaughan, afterwards knighted, made a tour in France and Germany, and then accompanied Sir Charles Stuart (ultimately Lord Stuart de Rothesay) to Spain, where he wrote an account of the siege of Saragossa. He rejoined Stuart as Secretary at the Paris Embassy at the Restoration, and was eventually Envoy to Washington. Arthur Paget, son of Lord Uxbridge, was one of the earliest visitors, being allowed a passport through France in September 1801 on his way to succeed Minto at Vienna. He reported to Lord Hawkesbury that he found the roads much better than he expected and the land well cultivated, but the towns manufacturing silk and velvet complained of bad trade, and peace with England was universally desired. Bonaparte, he said, was generally liked, for people dreaded a revolution, yet Sieyès, he was told at Vienna, had declared that the Consulate would not last through the winter.[75] George Stuart, his chief subordinate at Vienna, also visited Paris. Sir Robert Liston, originally tutor to Gilbert and Hugh Elliot at Paris, and afterwards secretary to the latter, was Ambassador in America from 1796 to 1802, was afterwards sent to Holland and Turkey, and lived to the age of ninety-three. Colonel Neil was Consul at Lisbon. We may also mention a future diplomatist, Charles (afterwards Sir Charles) Oakley, son of the ex-Governor of Madras, who, when at the Washington legation, offered to marry Madame Patterson, and she was not then disinclined to accept a suitable successor to Jerome Bonaparte. Those who were or had been in other departments of the public service included Thomas Steele, Paymaster-General, John King, Under-Secretary at the Home Office, Henry William Bentinck, Governor of St. Vincent, Perkins Magra, Consul at Malta and naturally interested in the fate of that island, Donkin, secretary to George III., and Brook, head of the London detective force, who was sent to report on the Paris system, while Napoleon sent a French detective to see what was done in London. There were also Sir Charles Warre Malet, ex-acting Governor of Bombay, and Sir Robert Chambers, late Chief-Justice of Calcutta, who before going out to India had been intimate with Dr. Johnson. This, as we shall see, proved to be his last journey.

Law, physic, and divinity were not numerously represented. Besides Erskine and other barristers sitting or destined to sit in the House of Commons, there was John Campbell, a future Lord Chief-Justice and Lord Chancellor, and the biographer of his class. He saw the ‘little Corsican,’ and visited Tallien. Thomas Wilde, afterwards Lord Chancellor Truro, was registered, doubtless in joke by himself or his companions, as M.P., though he was as yet only twenty years of age. Curran, who had been before in 1787, dined with Fox. Deploring the failure of the Revolution, he disliked Napoleon. He little foresaw that he was about meanly to disown his daughter Sarah on account of her attachment to Emmet.[76] Stewart Kyd, a friend of Horne Tooke, prosecuted with other Radicals in 1794, had passed four months in the Tower, but had now sobered down and become a legal writer. The French police suspected him of being a spy. He had, in 1796, assisted Erskine in defending Thomas Williams, the publisher of Paine’s Age of Reason. A native of Arbroath, he died in London in 1811. William Duppa is best known as brother of the artist and as the biographer of Michael Angelo. Charles Henry Okey ultimately settled in Paris.

The physicians included Charles Maclean, who had been with Lord Elgin at Constantinople, and had also been in the East India Company’s service, but had been sent home by Wellesley on account of his quarrelsome disposition. Landing at Hamburg in 1801, he proceeded through Holland to Paris, in order to advocate the establishment at Constantinople of an international institute for the study of the plague. He was anxious for information on French suicides, and Holcroft had recommended him to apply not to a specialist but to Fauriel, the Sanscrit scholar. He denied the contagiousness of epidemics, and his medical crotchets, coupled with his controversial temper, prevented his being employed by the Government, wherefore he considered himself an ill-used man. George Birkbeck, the future founder of mechanics’ institutes, must be reckoned among the doctors: he accompanied Curran. Peter Mark Roget, a nephew of Romilly and a friend of Bentham, as yet Swiss rather than English, went as travelling tutor to the two sons of John Philips, a Manchester merchant, Edgeworth’s son accompanying them. His Treasury of English Synonyms is well known. William Woodville, the disciple of Jenner, and physician to the Smallpox Hospital, had been with Nowel to Boulogne in the summer of 1801, at the solicitation of Dr. Antoine Ambert, to introduce vaccination during a smallpox epidemic. He was an accomplished botanist. Dr. Wickham, another visitor, was likewise a friend of Jenner. On the other hand there were two strong opponents of vaccination. William Rowley, physician to the Marylebone Infirmary and an accoucheur of repute, and Benjamin Moseley, of Chelsea Hospital, who had been trained in Paris, and who had a strange theory that the changes of the moon influenced hemorrhage of the lungs. Tuthill (afterwards Sir George Tuthill) took over his handsome wife, of whom we shall hear again. James Carrick Moore, brother of Sir John, became director of Jenner’s vaccine institute. Benjamin Travers, as yet articled pupil to Sir Paston Cooper, was the first hospital surgeon to make of ophthalmia a special study. Thomas Young was inspector-general of hospitals. Of his distinguished homonym, although also a doctor, we shall speak among scientists. Of John Bunnell Davis and Farrell Mulvey we shall hear later on. James Carmichael Smyth, physician to George III., was destined to be the step-grandfather of Thackeray, for his son Major Henry Carmichael Smyth married Thackeray’s mother in India, and ‘sat’ for the character of Colonel Newcome. The physician received £5000 from Parliament for curing a jail distemper at Winchester in 1796 by nitrous acid; albeit a Dr. Johnston and a Frenchman also claimed the discovery. James Chichester Maclaurin, physician to the Paris Embassy 1790–1792, returned in the same capacity in 1802. He died in 1804 at the age of thirty-nine. His predecessor Macdonnal also revisited Paris. Michael O’Ryan had practised at Lyons, where Louis Badger, a silk-spinner of English descent, one of the victims of the Revolution—mistaken for his brother Pierre, he refused to undeceive his executioners, but Pierre was shot a week later—had married his wife’s sister. Fleeing from the Revolution back to Ireland, O’Ryan now went and settled in Paris. He was a great advocate of quinine.

Cardinal Charles Erskine, by virtue of his rank, claims priority among the clerical visitors. His father, Colin Erskine, son of Sir Charles, a Fifeshire baronet, was an artist at Rome, where he married a Roman lady. A letter to the French Government of 1808 giving an account of the College of Cardinals says:—

‘Erskine, 65 years of age, affects the greatest indifference to the present state of things (Napoleon’s rule), speaking of the Emperor with apparent moderation, but a dangerous man, perhaps the most dangerous of all; educated at the English college.’[77]

He was on his way back to Rome, after having been a kind of legate in England, where in 1801 he had had the invidious task of requiring the resignations of the French émigré bishops on account of the Concordat. Fourteen, however, out of the eighteen, headed by Arthur Dillon, Archbishop of Narbonne, refused to comply, and seven colleagues on the Continent followed their example. A good scholar, excellent company, and a loyal Briton, Erskine died in 1811 in Paris, having been interned there by Napoleon, and was buried in the Pantheon.[78] Dr. Gregory Stapleton, Bishop of the English midland district, went to St. Omer to try and recover the property of the English college of which he had been the head until the Revolution, but he died there, without having continued his journey to Paris, on the 5th April 1802. A fellow prelate was Dr. Troy, President of Maynooth, and ultimately Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, who was anxious to obtain fuller restitution of the confiscated property of the Irish colleges in France and to re-open them, for Maynooth with its two hundred seminarists was insufficient. He went to Lord Cornwallis, who, however, was unable to help him. A staunch loyalist, he had assisted in carrying the Union, and was consequently in receipt of a State pension. William Walsh until the Revolution had been the head of the Irish college in Paris. Driven away by that event, he eventually recovered his post. Father Peter Flood, who had narrowly escaped the massacre of September 1792,[79] was sent over by the Irish Catholic bishops to effect the fusion of all the Franco-Irish colleges. Tuite, who till the Revolution had been head of the English college at Paris, found that building converted to secular uses. John Chetwode Eustace, formerly chaplain to the Jerninghams, a Maynooth professor and a very liberal Catholic, had visited Paris in 1790, and was destined to pay a third visit in company with Lord Brownlow, Robert Rushbrooke, and Philip Roche.

Edward Stanley, the future Bishop of Norwich, and father of Dean Stanley, represented the Church of England, for he had just been ordained. He was on his way to Switzerland, and was disappointed at not seeing Napoleon. He was over again in 1816, when he heard drunken English soldiers singing on the boulevards:

And the French royalists imagined the song to be complimentary.[80]

Anglicanism was also represented by Stephen Weston, grandson of a bishop, who had been to Paris in 1791, and published rather flippant accounts of both trips. Then there was John Glasse, rector of Hanwell, a good classical scholar, whose sermon in 1793 on behalf of the French émigré priests made light of the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. Hanwell is associated with lunacy, and Glasse in 1810, in a fit of mental derangement, hung himself at the Bull and Mouth Inn, London. John Sanford was a witness of the scene between Napoleon and Lord Whitworth on the 13th March 1803, and in Notes and Queries of the 3rd April 1852, as the only surviving witness—for the Duchess of Gordon, her daughters, and Mrs. Greatheed were then dead—he gave an account of it. W. Hughes, landing at Dieppe in June 1802, visited Rouen, Caen, Blois, and other provincial towns before proceeding to Paris. Of John Maude, fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, we shall hear hereafter, as also of Churchill.

The Church of Scotland may be credited with John Paterson, for he was probably the future missionary to Russia and Scandinavia. Alexander and Joseph Paterson may have been his brothers.

Nonconformity was represented by William Shepherd of Gatacre, Lancashire, an intimate friend of Brougham, author of a life of Poggio, and also of a history of the American Revolution. The latter work Lord John Russell read in manuscript before publication. Shepherd had educated one of Roscoe’s sons, and was now escorting members of the Roscoe family. He took with him a letter of introduction to Miss Williams, at whose house he met Carnot and Kosciusko, spending a most agreeable evening. On repeating his visit in 1814, however, he apparently, judging by the silence of his Paris in 1802 and 1814, neglected to renew the lady’s acquaintance.

Turning to philosophers, scholars, and scientists, priority is due to Jeremy Bentham and Malthus. Bentham exercised the French citizenship conferred on him in 1792 by voting for Bonaparte’s life-consulate, an act not very consistent with his radical doctrines.[81] His father had taken him over to France in 1764. Malthus, who, though a clergyman, should be classed as a philosopher or economist, little imagined how Frenchmen, mostly without having heard of him, would practise his principle. He revisited the Continent in 1825. Richard Chenevix, the mineralogist, who had witnessed and been imprisoned during the Revolution, had taken Brussels and Jena on his way to Paris.

The Institute had in December 1801 elected as foreign associates Banks, Priestley, Herschel, Neville Maskelyne, James Rennell, the geographer, and Henry Cavendish in the class of physics and mathematics; Fox in that of history and classics, and Sir Benjamin West in that of art. There had apparently been an idea of also electing Arthur Young, Horne Tooke, Sheridan, Watt, and Sir John Sinclair. Herschel, Fox, and West were the only three of the eight nominees who acknowledged the compliment in person. Herschel had the more reason for doing so as he had in 1790 been elected an associate of the old Academy of Sciences before it was swept away by the Revolution. Sir Charles Blagden, Secretary of the Royal Society, whose name is attached to the law of congelation, was presented to Napoleon, who told him that Banks was much esteemed in France, and indeed Banks had repeatedly obtained the restitution of consignments to the Jardin des Plantes captured at sea by the English.[82] Blagden seems, though a scientist, to have had a mission from the English Government, for Andreossi, the French Ambassador at London, writing to Regnier on the 8th April 1803, reported a statement of General Miranda, who was intimate with Blagden: ‘He is in the pay of the Government; they were not at first satisfied with his reports, but he has changed his tone, and they are now better pleased.’ Andreossi added: ‘I am certain that he has spread it about here (in London) that I was in treaty on behalf of the Minister of the Interior for the purchase of a machine for “dividing” mathematical instruments, an object of great advantage to French industry, and requiring some precautions in order to be carried out.’ Blagden doubtless renewed his acquaintance with Desgenettes, the army doctor, who since his visit as a young man to London in 1784 had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, and was destined to accompany him to Moscow. Blagden, pronounced by Dr. Johnson ‘a delightful fellow,’ was also acquainted with Count Rumford, for whose daughter’s hand he was an unsuccessful suitor.[83] After Waterloo he spent half the year in France and died there. Bonnycastle, Professor of Mathematics at Woolwich Academy, described by Leigh Hunt as rather vain of his acquirements, but a good fellow, fond of quoting Shakespeare and of telling stories, was another visitor, probably in the company of his friend Fuseli. Dr. John Fleming, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen, published in 1842 a History of British Animals. Osborn, an F.R.S., was living in 1806 at Weimar, where he explained to Goethe the battle of Trafalgar. Edward Pigott, the discoverer of the variable star in Sobieski’s belt or sword, had observed the transit of Venus at Caen in 1769, and that of Mercury at Louvain in 1786. He dated an astronomical paper from Fontainebleau in 1803, and in 1807 he observed the great comet, but the date and place of his death are uncertain.[84]

Perhaps the most eminent man of this category, scarcely less eminent than Herschel (though the latter discovered the planet now named after him, but originally styled by him the Georgium Sidus and by Frenchmen, Napoleon), was Thomas Young. He was the author of the undulatory theory of light, ridiculed at the time in the Edinburgh Review by that shallow scientist Brougham, yet now almost universally accepted, and he was the first to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. His uncle, Richard Brocklesby, the physician and friend of Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and Wilkes, bequeathed him £10,000, besides his house, library, and pictures. In 1801 Young, originally tutor to Hudson Gurney—both being then Quakers, but both destined to renounce Quakerism—and a medical practitioner, had found his true vocation as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution and editor of the Nautical Almanac. He has a nephew, a rent-collector at Bristol, who, however tells me that he was not born till after his illustrious uncle’s death.

It is difficult to draw an exact line between scholars, connoisseurs, and savants. Charles Towneley was famous, like Elgin, for his marbles, the fruits of his Italian travels from 1765 to 1772, and purchased after his death in 1805 by the British Museum. Turberville Needham, the scientist, had been his tutor in Paris in 1752, when his uncle John, translator of Hudibras into French verse, seems to have looked after him. Sir Abraham Hume, who has been already mentioned, was a famous collector of minerals and precious stones, and had purchased pictures by the old masters at Vienna and Bologna. He was one of the founders of the Geological Society, and lived to be at eighty-eight the senior F.R.S. Joseph Ritson, the antiquary, had been in Paris in 1791, when he was enthusiastic for the Revolution, and he actually adopted the Jacobin calendar. A strict vegetarian and an avowed materialist, he was latterly insane. Stephen Martin-Leake, herald and numismatist, sent over three of his sons, William, Stephen, and John, the two last likewise heralds. William Taylor, the friend of Southey, son of a Norwich manufacturer, and educated by Mrs. Barbauld, at Palgrave, Suffolk, had been sent on the Continent by his father in 1779, went again in 1788, and now repeated his visit. He was one of the first to introduce German literature to English readers. He met Paine at a dinner given by Holcroft, and had an introduction to Lafayette from his uncle Dyson, a Norfolk man whose son had taught Lafayette farming.[85] Taylor went back an anti-Bonapartist. Paine had probably opened his eyes to Napoleon’s tyranny. Alexander Hamilton, a future F.R.S., had been in the East India Company’s service in Bengal, and on returning to England, after accompanying Lord Elgin to Constantinople, had continued his Sanscrit studies. He took with him his Creole wife and a promising son. Few as were then the students of Sanscrit, fewer still were the students of Chinese. Thomas Manning was one of them. Son of the rector of Diss, Norfolk, in whose church Wesley preached a few weeks before his death, though all other church pulpits had long been closed to him, Manning was also at Holcroft’s dinner, and we may imagine his being questioned about Diss by Paine, who had been a journeyman staymaker there. In his letters to his father—all beginning ‘Honoured sir,’ and subscribed ‘your dutiful son’—he mentions the Abbé Sicard, the teacher of the deaf and dumb, Carnot, Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand, and Laharpe. Manning, who suggested to Charles Lamb his roast pig essay, and was also intimate with Coleridge, is buried, like Malthus, in Bath Abbey.

Artists flocked to Paris to see the spoils from Italy collected at the Louvre. There was West (not yet Sir Benjamin West), with his son Raphael, who was expected to prove himself worthy of his Christian name, but failed to do so. It was this visit, perhaps, which left West no time to send a new picture to the Royal Academy exhibition in 1803; but he should not have attempted to palm off as new a ‘Hagar and Ishmael’ which he had exhibited in 1776. President though he was, the Academy insisted on its withdrawal. Opie was there with his wife, Amelia Alderson, who years afterwards gave an account of her visit in Tait’s Magazine. Seated on the boulevards, the future Quakeress sang ‘Fall, tyrants, fall,’ a pæan on the Revolution singularly out of place under the iron rule of Napoleon; but she had not yet discovered him to be a tyrant. Opie was so dazzled the first day by the white glare of Paris houses that he talked of leaving at once to avoid blindness, but the alarm soon passed off. Bertie Greatheed, the dramatist, was accompanied by his son, who copied assiduously at the Louvre, besides sketching a capital likeness of Napoleon. His copies were said to be so good that Napoleon refused at first to let them leave France, but relented on the young man’s death.[86] Erskine also induced Napoleon to sit for his portrait to Philips, R.A., who finished it through the courtesy of Josephine while her husband was at supper. The portrait was sold at Erskine’s death and was apparently purchased by Lord Howden. Howden, who latterly lived at Bayonne, bequeathed it to the sub-prefecture of that town, where it still hangs, but not in a prominent place, so that it escaped notice till 1895, when, in a controversy on the colour of Napoleon’s eyes, attention was called to it.[87] Richard Cosway, the miniaturist, and his wife, the musician and historical painter, repeated their visit of 1786, when Richard was trying to sell to Louis XVI. some Raphael cartoons which he had bought of Bonfield. André Chénier, the poet destined to the guillotine, was then passionately in love with Mrs. Cosway. He addressed verses to her, some in her name in full, others inscribed ‘d. r.,’ a contraction for d’Arno, on the banks of which river she was born. A Polish poet, Niemcewics, likewise enamoured of her, went to see her in London in 1787. She now studied at the Louvre, next went to Lyons, and then to Lodi.[88] She subsequently started a school in Paris, which did not succeed, went again to Lyons, and eventually became head of a convent near that city. Daughter of an English hotelkeeper at Leghorn, she thus played many parts. Another female artist, Mrs. Damer, had been captured by a French privateer in 1779, but gallantly allowed to proceed to Jersey, where her father, Field-Marshal Conway, was governor. Josephine, whom she had known before her marriage, introduced her to Napoleon, who, as previously stated, bespoke a bust of Fox. Strawberry Hill House had been bequeathed to her by Horace Walpole. John Claude Nattes, one of the earliest of water-colourists and a topographical draftsman, took views of Paris, Versailles, and St. Denis. For unaccountably exhibiting drawings not his own, he was in 1807 expelled from the Water Colour Society, but he then resumed sending to the Royal Academy. Masquerier, of whom we have already heard, was again in Paris. Let it suffice to name Sir Martin Shee, President of the Royal Academy; Fuseli; Flaxman, who with his wife accompanied West; Duppa, who had witnessed French spoliation at Rome in 1798; Farrington, who accompanied Rogers; Bowyer, the fashionable portrait painter and illustrator of Hume’s History; Edward Hayes, the miniaturist, and his father, the more distinguished painter, Michael Angelo Hayes; George Bryant, engaged by the sportsman Thornton; William Dickinson, with his son, of whom we shall hear later on; Boddington; Hoppner, the naturalised German;[89] Thomas Daniell; William Turner; Andrew Wilson; John Wright; Robert Flin; William Sherlock, who forty years before had studied in Paris, the illustrator of Smollett’s History, B. D. Wyatt, the architect; Abraham Raimbach, the engraver; Charles and James Heath and Jervis, also engravers; and Thomas Richard Underwood. Likewise an artist in her way was Mary Linwood, who in 1798 had opened an exhibition of art needlework, viz. copies of a hundred pictures of old masters and modern painters, and who went on working till the age of seventy-five, when eyesight failed her. Her Napoleon in woolwork is now in the South Kensington Museum.

But few actors had time—they can scarcely have lacked inclination—to visit Paris. John Philip Kemble, however, described in the register as rentier, went to see his old college at Douai, which he found so dilapidated that he had not the heart to inspect his old room. Arriving in Paris in July 1802, he made the acquaintance of Talma, who showed him, with his companions Lords Hollands and Cloncurry, over the Louvre. He then proceeded to Madrid to study Spanish acting. His brother Charles likewise went to Paris on his way to Vienna and St. Petersburg, not reappearing in London till September 1803. Their father Roger, a less accomplished actor, who never played but once in London, and then for the benefit of his son Stephen, is said to have spent from May 1799 to October 1802 in Italy and France; but this seems unlikely at his age, for at his death in December 1802 he was over eighty. Edmond John Eyre, the son of a clergyman, had left Cambridge without a degree in order to take to the stage. He was, however, an indifferent actor at Bath and Bristol. He published his Observations made at Paris.

We may couple with the Kembles and Eyre Mrs. Charlotte Atkyns, though she had long left Drury Lane where she was known as ‘the pretty Miss Walpole.’ She married in 1779, at the age of twenty-five, Edward Atkyns of Ketteringham Hall, Norfolk, who died in 1794. She was in Paris during the Revolution, and was one of those who endeavoured to effect the escape of Marie Antoinette. In 1809 she celebrated George III.’s Jubilee by a feast to the villagers of Ketteringham, at which she herself proposed the loyal toasts. The death of her only son in 1804 had then left her sole mistress of Ketteringham, but she seems ultimately to have lost her property. She was an ardent believer in the sham Dauphin Bruneau, but was nevertheless pensioned after 1815 by Louis XVIII. and died in Paris about 1829.

Let us turn to inventors. Congreve has been already named. James Watt had not seen France since 1786, when his advice was called for on the Marly aqueduct. This time he does not appear to have had any professional purpose, albeit that aqueduct was again out of repair. Thomas Wedgwood, one of the three sons of the great potter, was the future inventor of photography. An invalid in search of health, he required change of scene. He deserves mention for settling an annuity on Coleridge, and as the friend of Sydney Smith. He first went to Brussels, joined Poole in Paris, went on with him to Switzerland, and returned home in August 1803. Greathead, another inventor, doubtless wished to introduce his lifeboat. Robert Salmon, steward to the Duke of Norfolk and clerk of the works at the rebuilding of Carlton House, had invented a chaff-cutting machine, and probably wished to make it known in France, while William Story took out a patent for a blue dye.

There were also men of business and men who went over on business. Sir Elijah Impey, who has been named among the ex-M.P’s, had been chosen as delegate by a meeting in London of claimants for compensation for confiscated property, an article in the treaty having stipulated that such claims should be promptly settled by the tribunals. The article was nominally applicable to both countries, but England, of course, had had no revolution and had confiscated little, if any, French property. No such claims were settled before the renewal of hostilities, for Whitworth, reporting a conversation with Napoleon on the 23rd February 1803, says:—

‘I alleged as a cause of mistrust and jealousy the impossibility of obtaining justice or any kind of redress for any of His Majesty’s subjects. He asked me in what respect. I told him that since the signing of the treaty not one British claimant had been satisfied, though every Frenchman of that description had been so within one month after that period.’

The claims, as we shall see, were revived in 1815, when France gave a lump sum of sixty millions, leaving the English authorities to adjudicate on the separate claims. The claims certainly presented difficulties, for Merry, on the 12th May 1802, speaks of ‘clamorous demands,’ and on the 23rd June of ‘incessant and sometimes intemperate applications’; while on taking his departure in December he expressed mortification at having the claims unredressed.[90] Even private papers were not restored, perhaps because being mostly tradesmen’s bills they were not thought worth reclaiming, but possibly because troublesome formalities were necessary. Merry had been directed to back the claim of the Duke of Richmond to the Aubigny estates conferred by Louis XIV. on his ancestress, Charles II.’s mistress, but in January 1803 Napoleon decreed that no British subject could possess landed property in France, and in 1807 Aubigny was definitely confiscated.

Among the business men, bankers may be allowed precedence. I do not reckon Rogers among them, for his visit had no more to do with banking than that of his brother-in-law Sutton Sharpe with brewing. But there were Boyd and Benfield, of whom I have already spoken. I have also mentioned Sir Francis Baring and his son Alexander. Hugh Hamersley, son of an Oxfordshire clergyman, and named Hugh on account of descent from Sir Hugh Hamersley, Lord Mayor of London in 1627, was one of the earliest lovers of Théroigne de Méricourt. According to her confessions or interrogatories when a prisoner in Austria, he promised her marriage, and she remained with him till 1785; but on coming into possession of his patrimony he took her to Paris, there indulged in dissipation, and returned without her, but settled 200,000 f. on her. Such a statement of course requires verification, but the tradition at her birthplace is that she eloped with an Englishman in the hope of becoming a public singer in London, for she had a fine voice. (Œlsner states, however, that after bearing a son to Persan de Doublet, who dismissed her with an annuity of 12,000 f., she went to London and lived with the Italian singer Carducci, a eunuch whom she induced to take with him to Italy, but they quarrelled and parted at Genoa.[91] Œlsner is likely to have ascertained the true version of her antecedents. Did Hamersley inquire for the poor lunatic in 1802?[92] He had been agent for the French Government in the maintenance of French prisoners in England until it changed its system and left England to support them. Madame Dubarry, on recovering her stolen jewels in London, deposited them with Hamersley. He subscribed £315 to the patriotic fund of 1803, and in 1812 was M.P. for Helston. On his death in 1840 his bank was wound up and yielded only 10s. in the pound. He had married in 1810 Margaret, daughter of John Bevan, a Quaker banker, and I remember his nephew or cousin as Chairman of Oxfordshire Quarter Sessions. Herries, brother of Sir Charles Herries, probably went to fetch his wife, who had been an eyewitness of the Revolution. Thornton and Power, English bankers at Hamburg and other Continental towns, opened a branch at Paris in 1802, and in 1805 John Power applied for French citizenship; but the police reported unfavourably on the application, alleging that the Hamburg bank acted for the English Government and that the Paris branch had furnished money to the conspirator Georges, though pleading ignorance of his criminal purpose. Thornton, they added, was an illegitimate son of the well-known M.P. and writer on finance.[93] Thornton and Power seem to have amalgamated with Perregaux, who had dealings with London banks. Kensington was another London banker. William Dawes, assistant secretary to the Bank of England, was probably commissioned to report on the newly established Bank of France, and Mollien relates how Napoleon, on being shown an intercepted letter from a Paris to an English banker advising him to subscribe for its shares, exclaimed, ‘Such are merchants! Disputes between governments do not disturb their alliances.’

Speaking of merchants, William Ewart was the eminent Liverpool merchant after whom Gladstone was named on account of his father’s intimacy with him, while Judah, Henry, and Abraham Salomons were doubtless the uncles of Sir David Salomons, the first Jew returned to Parliament. There were also Joseph,[94] Leon, and Moses Montefiore, of Bologna origin, the first of them already the father of Sir Moses Montefiore the philanthropist, then a youth of eighteen. This Moses Montefiore was on his way to Leghorn. James and Thomas Payne, eminent booksellers of the second generation, were doubtless bent on picking up rare volumes. James, succeeding to the business of Elmsley, had already profited by the dispersion of such treasures in the Revolution—the Lamoignon collection for instance. He had secured many prizes for Lord Spencer to enrich the famous Althorp collection, which in 1899 was purchased by Mrs. Rylands and presented to Manchester. He also had dealings with the British Museum and the Bodleian; and had supplied some rare English books to the Paris National Library, and helped in its catalogue.

William Hayes was another bookselling tourist, and there was John Nichols, the printer and publisher, the biographer of Hogarth and for nearly half a century editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine. He had just retired from business, and with his two daughters went to the south of France. Then there was Thomas Poole, the friend of Paine, the friend also of Coleridge and Sir Humphry Davy. He went to hear the Abbé Sicard lecture to the deaf and dumb.

From books to horses is a long jump. Edward Tattersall had been sent over in 1775 on an invitation from M. de Mezières, equerry to Louis XVI., and had much enjoyed himself. His father Richard, who supplied horses for the French royal stud, told the French host not to spoil the boy, but to make him keep his place, as he would have to earn his own livelihood.[95] The mention of Tattersall naturally suggests Philip Astley, who hoped to recover ten years’ rent for his old circus, which had been converted into barracks; but while engaged in securing this, his London circus, in which he had introduced French performances, was burnt down. William Boffin Kennedy was a well-known florist who had Josephine as a customer, for in 1801, in a letter to Otto at London, she sent a list of flowers to be ordered of him. Lastly there was Dorant, proprietor of the York Hotel, Albemarle Street, London, who went over to cash £2000 in assignats, but found them worth just 12 f. He acted as cicerone, familiar as he was with Paris, to young George Jackson of the Embassy.

We now come to authors, whom we have reserved till nearly the last, not because they were the least important, rather the reverse, but because they are the most numerous. They may be conveniently divided into writers on Paris—chiels taking notes—and writers on other subjects. As to the former, it must be confessed that few of these accounts of Paris possess much merit or interest. There are, however, some notable exceptions. Thomas Holcroft, as ‘dogmatic, virulent, and splenetic as ever’ says King, had been prosecuted in 1794; but on the acquittal of Horne Tooke and others the case against him was abandoned. He had been to Paris in 1783, and again in 1785 to fetch his son back from school, when along with Bonneville, Paine’s future host, he wrote down Beaumarchais’s Figaro from hearing it at the theatre, being unable otherwise to procure a copy in order to have it performed in London. He had paid a third visit in 1799–1801, and he was now accompanied by his second wife Louise Mercier, who was born in France but brought up in England.[96] He also took his daughter Fanny, the future novelist and translator, who married first Dr. Badams and secondly Danton’s nephew Merget. Holcroft in his Travels from Hamburg to Paris (1804) gives a good picture of Parisian society. J. G. Lemaistre, who went to claim a legacy, was one of the earliest visitors, for he started in October or November 1801, remaining till May 1802. In the latter year he published a Rough Sketch of Paris. He went on to Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, and in his Travels after the Peace of Amiens (1806) he gave a curious account of his dining with Cardinal York, then already getting into his dotage. Lemaistre was the son of an Indian judge, was described by Erskine as ‘a most agreeable, good-natured, sensible man,’ and was obviously of French or Channel Isle descent. Sir John Carr, a Rugby scholar, wrote numerous books of travel, his Stranger in France (1803) being his first attempt. In 1898 it was translated into French by M. Albert Babeau. No other visitor of 1802 has had a similar honour, but Paris as it was and as it is by Francis William Blagdon, a teacher of languages, was translated at the time into German.

John King, the author of Letters from France, reprinted I think from the True Briton, had a singular career. He was the son of poor Jewish parents, was apparently named (not of course christened) Isaac, and was brought up at a Jewish charity school. Thomas Paine, with whom he was afterwards to break lances, knew him young, penniless, and friendless, a flaming Radical. Clerk in a Jewish counting-house, he made use of his good abilities and started as a money-lender and bill-discounter, advancing money on post-obits to spendthrift heirs. He was also a frequent speaker at a debating club in Carlisle Street. In 1783 he published, dedicating it to Fox, Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses in which the Peace of 1783 has involved the People of England. He lived in style, and is described as a banker at Egham, but seems to have been simply a broker. As such, nicknamed ‘Jew King’ or ‘King of the Jews,’ he became notorious for litigation, figuring frequently in the courts as plaintiff, defendant, or witness, and he was roughly handled by cross-examining counsel. He was, moreover, twice imprisoned for debt. He had previously visited France, and in December 1792 he had denounced the Revolution. Twitted by Paine with his change of opinions, he replied that the Revolution, not he himself, had changed. At Paris he was accompanied or joined by his wife the Dowager-Countess of Lanesborough, a widow since 1779, and is said to have procured her son a rich wife.[97] In any case he himself had obtained a potentially rich wife, for the Countess in 1814 came into possession for life of the estates of her brother, the Earl of Belvedere. A police note by Desmarest of the 2nd October 1802 gives no flattering account of King:—

‘This Englishman, a branded swindler, has just incurred another disgrace. His daughter, daughter of Lady Lanesborough his wife, last night quitted King’s house to rejoin her husband M. de Marescote (Marquis Luigi Marescotti) of Bologna. King for nine years had detained this young woman from her husband, and had always refused to give her up. He required Marescote to fetch her in England, because he would then have presented heavy bills, which he would have forced him to pay even by litigation. Madame M. took advantage of her stay in Paris to rejoin her husband. All this happened under the eyes and with the approval of the Italian Minister, Marescalchi, who beforehand informed the Minister of Justice. Mr. King has confined himself to preferring a charge of robbery against Miss Oliver, Madame M.’s lady’s-maid. King pretends to have had promises from two ministers for starting a rival English paper in Paris. He wrote some days ago to General Moreau, Santerre, Tallien, and a fourth person to invite them to dine with him, which they refused. It is presumed that his object was simply to obtain answers from them which he hoped to produce in London and thus make fresh dupes. He is always careful to write his letters in his own name and that of Lady Lanesborough, the latter name procuring him deference and answers. Senator Perregaux (a banker) who has been consulted respecting this foreigner, regards him as a swindler and as a dangerous man.’

This report must be a mixture of fact and fiction, for even if King, on Lady Lanesborough’s departure from Paris in October 1802, was left in charge of her daughter, he could not have been sequestrating her for nine years. Marescotti, moreover, when arrested at Cassel in 1807 and incarcerated at Bouillon, is described in another police report as a needy adventurer employed by the English Government. A German translation of Goldsmith’s book on Napoleon was in his possession, and he was charged with circulating pamphlets of the same kind. He was released in the following year, on the understanding that his brother at Bologna would keep him out of mischief.[98] No mention is made of his wife, who had probably quitted him. Thomas Moore met her at Bologna in 1819 (her mother also he saw in Paris in 1821), and she lived till 1840. King’s banking partner Lathrop Murray, who pretended to be a baronet, became bankrupt in the summer of 1802, pleading in excuse that he had fallen a prey in Paris to King’s wiles, backed by French wines and by Lady Lanesborough’s attractions. Returning to England, King was arrested for debt in 1802, but published his book in 1803, and in the following year he issued a pamphlet entitled Oppressions deemed no Injustice toward Some Individuals. This was a protest against his rough handling in the Law Courts. He also published a Universal System of Arithmetic, but after his wife’s accession to her brother’s property, he lived abroad with her in good style. He died at Florence in 1823, and his wife, aged eighty-seven, in 1828.[99] His Letters from France are not without interest. He mentions that Santerre, when lunching with him, justified his beating the drums at Louis XVI.’s execution, his object being to prevent royalist cries which would have led to bloodshed.

King naturally brings us to his fellow Hebrew, Lewis Goldsmith. Born at Richmond, Surrey, about 1773, he seems to have been in 1792 at Frankfort and in 1794 in Poland, whence he wrote to Lord Stanhope, urging him to bring the Polish cause before Parliament. Stanhope, however, though sympathising with Kosciusko, stated that the Anglo-Prussian alliance debarred him from doing so. In 1795 Goldsmith, as a friend of Joel Barlow, wrote a preface to the second part of Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders, an exhortation to kings and aristocrats to renounce their doomed prerogatives. According to Lord Campbell, Goldsmith had been an emissary of all the great European powers, yet in 1801 he published a pamphlet entitled The Crimes of Cabinets, in which he denounced the British and Continental Governments as bent on dismembering France. It was to escape prosecution for this tirade that he went to Paris, his wife Rebecca with their daughter joining him. He alleges, but it is difficult to believe him, that he was taken to Dieppe in order to be given up to England as a conspirator in exchange for Peltier, and that no such exchange being feasible he was sent back to Paris. There, it is clear, he offered his services to Napoleon, who conceived the idea of starting an English newspaper in Paris to circulate his ideas in England and its colonies. Curiously enough Napoleon was an unconscious plagiary of the Commonwealth, which in 1650 founded or supported a French weekly newspaper, Nouvelles Ordinaires de Londres, for circulation on the Continent.[100] That newspaper lasted only eight years, and the Paris Argus lasted about as long. There must have been a staff of English compositors to bring it out. It gave copious extracts from the London journals, but was violently anti-English or at least anti-ministerial in its tone. Goldsmith afterwards disclaimed responsibility for its diatribes, insisting that he simply inserted the articles sent him. In November 1802 Napoleon ordered five hundred copies to be regularly sent to the French West Indies in order thence to reach the neighbouring British colonies. The paper was described by Merry as a ‘despicable publication.’ But in February 1803 Goldsmith was dismissed, which Whitworth notified as a sign of peace, the paper having changed its tone. His successor was Thomas Hutton, ex-editor of the Dramatic Censor, who soon incurred disgrace and imprisonment. Goldsmith, pleading penury, asked for 7000 f. compensation. He had, he said, been promised the proprietorship, and had been put to great expense by his wife bringing over her furniture from England. He had also paid in advance for his daughter’s schooling,[101] and being threatened with assassination by the English in Paris he was anxious to leave.[102] He remained, however, for in 1804–1805 he published with Barère the Memorial Anti-Britannique. He also translated Blackstone into French, and he advertised in the Petites Affiches in 1805–1806 as a pupil of Scott and Schabracq, London notaries, and as a sworn interpreter ready to undertake translations and other business.

Returning in 1809 to England with a passport from Dunkirk for America, he was imprisoned for a short time in Tuthill Fields, but on his release began to write violently against Napoleon. Goldsmith published in 1811 the Secret History of the Cabinet of Bonaparte, and he proposed in 1815 that a price should be set on Bonaparte’s head. In spite of these provocative, not to say scurrilous, publications, he after Waterloo settled down quietly in Paris till his death in 1846 as solicitor to the British Embassy. One of his duties was to hand over the letters or parcels which in those days of dear postage and carriage were franked by the Foreign Office, and a friend of mine, sent as a young man to Paris to get a French polish, remembers how Goldsmith used to quiz or banter him on the supposed feminine source of such consignments. But the most romantic event in Goldsmith’s career, a kind of parallel to King’s marriage, was the marriage in 1837 of his handsome daughter Georgiana, born in Paris in 1807, to Lord Lyndhurst, ex-Lord Chancellor. ‘I lived in Paris,’ she told Augustus Hare in 1881, ‘with my father, and I was nobody. I never expected to marry. Why should I? I had no fortune and no attractions.’ Lyndhurst first saw her when visiting Paris with his first wife. He went over again, a widower, in 1837 and made her an offer. Hare speaks of her ‘clever vivacity acquired by her early life in France.’ ‘I had,’ she told him, ‘twenty-six years of the most perfect happiness ever allotted to woman.’ Both husband and wife were curious links with the past, for the former, son of the artist Copley, was born at Boston, U.S., in 1772, four years before the Declaration of Independence, while the widow survived till 1891.

Another man who boxed the political compass was James Redhead Yorke. Visiting Paris in 1792, full of enthusiasm for the Revolution,[103] and imprisoned for sedition at Dorchester, he not only fell in love with his jailer’s daughter, whom he married on his release, but turned anti-Gallican. He nevertheless in 1802 renewed acquaintance with Paine, who said to him, ‘Do you call this a republic? Why, they are worse off than the slaves in Constantinople.’ Yet Paine had originally, like many intelligent Frenchmen, admired Napoleon. Yorke’s Letters from France were reprinted, like King’s, from a newspaper.

A fourth erratic journalist was William Playfair, brother of the Edinburgh geologist. He had helped to capture the Bastille, but was so disillusioned with the Revolution that on returning to London in 1792 he advocated flooding France with forged assignats as the surest means of overturning the Republic. For this Louis Blanc has pilloried him, but reprehensible as the scheme was, Playfair—what an irony in his name!—was not even entitled to originality, for forged Congressional notes had been circulated during the American War of Independence. Although the English Government did not act on Playfair’s suggestion the royalist émigrés did so, and Napoleon, as we shall see, followed the evil example by counterfeiting English, Austrian, and Russian notes. Playfair on this second visit to Paris had no literary purpose, but in 1820 he published a criticism on Lady Morgan’s book on France. His editorship of Galignani’s Messenger, his inventions, never lucrative, and his pecuniary troubles need not be detailed. Like King and Goldsmith he must be pronounced an adventurer and a weathercock.

Another journalist, James Parry, had just disposed of the Courier, and settled in France. If, as Lord Malmesbury and Goldsmith allege, he had been in the pay of the Directory he deserved, if contempt, forbearance, yet as we shall find he did not obtain any.

Colonel Thomas Thornton had visited France before the Revolution, and had shown hospitality in England to émigrés. He was the only visitor whose object was sport, and he took fourteen hounds with him, albeit game was scarce, as for twelve years the peasants had had it all their own way. Wolves, however, still existed. He published in 1806 A Sporting Tour through France, and going again after Waterloo he purchased Pont-sur-Seine. The mansion, indeed, had been destroyed by the Cossacks, but the outbuildings were capable of habitation. He sold the property, however, in 1821 to Casimir Périer, the grandfather of the future President of the Republic, and died in Paris seven years later, leaving a will in favour of an illegitimate daughter which was annulled by the English tribunals.

We now come to two lady writers. One was Frances Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Francis Bernard, Governor of Massachusetts, and wife of the Rev. Richard King, a Cambridgeshire clergyman. She was intimate with Hannah More, and founded district visiting societies and schools. She published a Tour in France in which she mentions that Boulogne was full of English who had remained there during the Revolution, and that you could scarcely enter a shop there without being addressed in English. She spent seven months in Paris. The other was Anne Plumptree, novelist and translator, daughter of a Huntingdonshire clergyman, and granddaughter of a Cambridge don. She accompanied the Opies. Though a democrat, she admired Napoleon and actually wished him to invade England. Her Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France (1810) relates chiefly to provincial life, which is an agreeable change after so many books on Paris. I have already mentioned Francis William Blagdon, a prolific author, who, having previously visited France in 1784, published Paris as it was and as it is. I may also mention William Thomas Williams, author in 1807 of The State of France; David Morrice, a schoolmaster, with his View of Modern France and Practical Guide from London to Paris; Stewarton who wrote anonymously or otherwise against Napoleon and Talleyrand; and Israel Worsley, with his State of France (1806). Worsley went back to Dunkirk after Waterloo to re-open a school. In 1828 he undertook to prove the descent of the American Indians from the lost tribes. George Tappen, who was interested in painting and architecture, published a Tour through France and Italy.

John Dean Paul, a banker and future baronet, went over in August 1802 as one of a party of five, accompanied by two servants and a courier. He tells us in his anonymous book, Journal of a Party of Pleasure to Paris, that a young friend of his in the uniform of the Wiltshire Militia was tapped on the shoulder in the Louvre and asked to what regiment he belonged. The inquirer was Bonaparte, who frequently thus accosted British officers. Paul’s son and heir, then an infant, became unpleasantly notorious fifty years later. His daughter married in 1827 Edward Fox Fitzgerald, son of Lord Edward. She lived till 1891. William Beckford, the author of Vathek, had paid several visits to Paris. In October 1782 he passed through it on his way home from Naples. ‘A little impertinent, purse-proud puppy,’ Samuel Meek styled him in his diary, for though staying at the same hotel he had refused to answer an inquiry respecting a nephew of Meek at Naples. He was again in Paris from April 1791 to June 1792, when he ordered a tapestry for his London house, and went on to Lausanne, where he purchased Gibbon’s library. He paid a third visit in February 1793, and left in May with a passport from the municipality viséd by Lebrun, the Foreign Minister; but the Calais authorities detained him until the Convention had been consulted. He left behind him his two riding-horses, which were seized for military baggage trains. The General Safety Committee, declaring them unfit for such work, ordered them to be restored,[104] on the ground that Beckford had offered to present two cart-horses which would be much more serviceable, and that from love of liberty he had lived much in France. We hear no particulars of his visit of May 1802.

As for authors on non-French subjects, their name is legion. Let us begin with poets. Wordsworth, it is true, did not go further than Calais, but I have already named Rogers, who had also seen Paris during the Revolution, and now paid it a second visit. He described Napoleon as having a very strong profile, a sallow but not disagreeable complexion, light grey eyes, and scarcely perceptible eyebrows. Fox commissioned Rogers to buy andirons for him in the Palais Royal Arcades. Then there was Walter Savage Landor, who started with admiration for Napoleon, but found ‘not an atom of liberty left.’ He witnessed the festival in the Tuileries gardens in honour of the life-consulate, and he wrote to his brother: ‘I expected that the sky would have been rent with acclamations. On the contrary, he (Bonaparte) experienced such a reception as was given to Richard III. He was sensibly mortified. All bowed, but he waved to and fro, and often wiped his face with his handkerchief. He retired in about ten minutes.’ On returning home and reprinting his Gebir, Landor appended a qualifying note to his line:

He called on Paine, and in his Imaginary Conversations (fifth series, XI.) introduced a minute description of him. He represents him as uncombed, unshaven, and unwashed, and as solacing his misfortunes by brandy, yet he makes him foresee Napoleon’s inordinate ambition and fall. Landor revisited Paris in 1814 and 1840. Paine, by the way, was escorted to Havre at the end of August 1802 on his way to America by Thomas, or ‘Clio,’ Rickman, a versifier if not exactly a poet, who named his six sons Paine, Washington, Franklin, Rousseau, Petrarch, and Volney. They were surely to be pitied. Another versifier was William Parsons, who in 1785 had published a magazine at Florence and had associated there with Madame Piozzi, Robert Merry, and Bertie Greatheed. Greatheed, as we have seen, was also now in Paris.

Amongst other writers of works of imagination were Thomas Hope, the author of Anastasia, art connoisseur, and father of Beresford Hope;[105] William Combe, who had married Mrs. Cosway’s sister, author of Dr. Syntax, a book widely read in its day; and Edgeworth, who was arrested and but for Whitworth’s remonstrance would have been expelled. He fancied that he had been taken for a brother of the Abbé Edgeworth, Louis XVI.’s confessor, a distant kinsman whom he had never even seen; but the police register[106] states that he had indulged in ‘indiscreet talk.’ His eldest son Lovell, as we shall find, did not come off so lightly. Edgeworth was accompanied by his fourth wife, his distinguished daughter Maria, and her younger half-sister Charlotte. He had intended to stay two years, but happily left in time. Maria revisited Paris in 1820.

More matter-of-fact writers included Anthony Aufrere, an art connoisseur, a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine, a translator from the German and Italian, and editor of Lockhart’s Letters. Hazlitt, the critic and essayist, who was introduced to Prosper Merimée’s father, the artist, copied at the Louvre, and paid a second visit in 1824. Filon fancifully suggests that the unborn Prosper was influenced by his mother’s impression of Hazlitt. There was also John Allen, the Edinburgh Reviewer, a ‘man of vast information and great conversational powers,’ says Macaulay, but who, living with Lord Holland from 1801 till his death in 1843, wrote little. John Gifford, the Tory pamphleteer, editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review, a continuation of the famous Anti-Jacobin, had been the author, concocter, or arranger of Letters from France in 1792. His visits to France did not lessen his insular prejudices. In contrast to him there was David Williams, Nonconformist minister and schoolmaster, but now best known as founder and secretary of the Royal Literary Fund. He had been in Paris in the winter of 1792, but seemingly did not attend the British dinner at which an address to the Convention was adopted. Madame Roland regretted that he had not been elected a member of that body in lieu of Paine, but he had reason to congratulate himself on this. Lebrun, Minister of Foreign Affairs, entrusted him with a letter to Grenville regretting the imminence of hostilities and suggesting that, as in the previous war, a few packets might continue to ply between Dover and Calais;[107] but the letter received no answer. James Anderson, whose extensive view ranged from chimneys to cattle-breeding and political economy, had corresponded with Washington on ‘moral philosophy and agricultural topics.’ Last, but far from least, was Henry Hallam, as yet a young man of twenty-five.

We now come to four men who made France their home. Quintin Craufurd, a nabob from Manila, acting on his maxim, ‘Make your fortune where you like, but enjoy it at Paris,’ settled there in 1780. He provided the carriage in which the royal family in 1791 attempted to escape. He himself had gone to Brussels, perhaps expecting to meet them, and not venturing to return, his furniture was confiscated. He was now able to resume life in Paris, and frequently played whist with Talleyrand, for cards were his passion. Herbert Croft, nominally a clergyman as well as a baronet, though he had little of the reverend about him, and was dependent on a Government pension of £200, had been the friend of Johnson, whom he furnished with a life of Chatterton. He, like Boswell, was duped by the Ireland forgeries. Just too late to succour Chatterton, he was also just too late to succour a French poet, Grainville, a cousin of Bernardin de St. Pierre; but he happily did not foresee a more direct connection with a third suicide, that of his brother and successor in the title, Princess Charlotte’s surgeon. He wrote in the Argus in 1805 in favour of peace. Becoming the companion of Lady Mary Hamilton, daughter of Lord Leven, another state pensioner (but only to the amount of £80), Croft in 1809 engaged Charles Nodier as his secretary, and Nodier for two years turned into French his and the lady’s productions. Both these amateur authors died in 1816.

The third Anglo-Frenchman was John Fraser Frisell, a Glasgow student who in 1792, at the age of sixteen, went to France to complete his education. Enthusiastic for the Revolution, he was imprisoned for fifteen months at Dijon during the Terror. That imprisonment, however, procured him the lifelong friendship of fellow-captives, Guitant and his wife, who offered him a home from 1794 to 1802, and he thus became intimate with Chateaubriand and Joubert. Chateaubriand styled him the Greek Englishman. Marrying a Frenchwoman, he indulged his passion for Greek authors, for the chase, and for travelling. On the death of a daughter in 1832, Chateaubriand, then himself a political prisoner, wrote an elegy on her. Frisell published in French a treatise on the British constitution, and presented a copy of it to Louis Napoleon in Switzerland, who promised him in return his own sketch of a French constitution. Frisell also contributed to the Journal des Débats.[108] He turned Catholic just before his death, which took place at Torquay in 1846.

The fourth Anglo-Frenchman was Henry Grey MacNab, a scion of a Scotch-Irish family who had studied under Reid at Glasgow University. When detained in 1803 he went to Montpellier for eleven years, there studying medicine, political economy, and pedagogy. Before quitting England he had published a pamphlet against a proposed tax on coal, and in Paris in 1808 he wrote on education, on Robert Owen, of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer, and on the state of the world at the beginning of the 19th century. He was honorary physician to the Duke of Kent, to whom he dedicated his book on Owen and whose portrait he prefixed to the French translation. He died in Paris in 1823, leaving an unfinished work on premature burial.

Some visitors deserve notice on account of kinsmen or friends. There are Mary and Agnes Berry, for instance, the ‘sister-wives’ of Horace Walpole, one of whom, born in 1743, survived till 1852. They accompanied their father. Mrs. Damer introduced them to Napoleon, his mother, Josephine, and Madame de Staël. This last lady thought Mary by far the cleverest Englishwoman she had met. The Berrys had seen Paris in 1791. They must have been pleased with their visit in the spring of 1802, for they went again in October with Mrs. Damer on their way to Nice and Geneva, passing through Germany and embarking at Hamburg for England in May. We may dispose more summarily of Francis (brother of Sir John) Moore; William Monsell, whose son, successively Paymaster-General, Postmaster-General, and Vice-President of the Board of Trade, became Lord Emly; and Sir Herbert Pakington, grandfather of the Secretary for War of 1867–1868. Henry Bickersteth, surgeon, was the father of the hymnologist and of Lord Langdale, Master of the Rolls, while Sir Henry Tichborne and his brother James were respectively great-uncle and grandfather of the Roger Tichborne personated by Arthur Orton. Henry Herbert Southey, a youth of nineteen studying medicine at Norwich, had there made the acquaintance of William Taylor, whom he now accompanied. His brother, the poet, had, on a visit to Norwich in 1798, formed a friendship with Taylor, in spite of their political and religious differences. Young Southey became physician to George iv. and Queen Adelaide.[109] Timothy Priestley must have been the son of Timothy, brother of the famous Priestley. The two brothers, both Nonconformist ministers, differed in doctrine. James Wollstonecraft was probably one of the three brothers of Mary. He was a London merchant, and in 1798 had been expelled from Paris, apparently as a suspected spy. A Mr. Adderley was probably Charles Bowyer Adderley, great-uncle of the present Lord Norton, but he may have been Thomas Adderley, an Irish M.P. in 1790. Mrs. Peploe of Herefordshire, who accompanied her husband, was the aunt of Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Anthony Storer, Secretary of the Paris Embassy in 1783, was apparently the nephew and heir of Anthony Morris Storer of Purley, a man of fashion and a bibliophile, an M.P. in 1772. General Scott was probably the father-in-law of Canning and of the Duke of Portland; he was reputed to have made money at previous visits by gambling, and Canning’s wife had a bequest of £100,000. Shuckburgh Ashby Apreece had a fascinating wife, the widow of a John Kerr. Her literary receptions at Edinburgh were famous, and people fancied she was the original of Madame de Staël’s Corinne. Again a widow, she married in 1812 Sir Humphry Davy. A Mr. Tilt was probably the father of John Tilt, a Brighton physician who introduced into England the speculum, with which he had become acquainted through Récamier. Denis Disney Ffytche was doubtless the nephew of Dr. John Disney, a Lincolnshire vicar related I think to the Tennysons, who became a noted Unitarian minister in London, and also of Lewis Disney of Swinderby, who added his wife’s name of Ffytche. If so, he must have been bent on recovering his uncle’s property at Chambourcy, near Paris, for Lewis Disney, leaving for Switzerland with his two daughters and their governess in March 1793, had been classed as an émigré and had vainly pleaded for restitution. James Forbes, a nabob of whom we shall hear again, was the grandfather of Montalembert, the French historian. Of Richard Trench, a barrister, father of Archbishop Trench, we shall also hear later on. John Sympson Jessopp, a landowner and barrister, was destined to be the father of Dr. Augustus Jessopp. He was accompanied by his younger brother, and we shall hear of them too again.

Should we reckon among Englishmen George Francis Grand, Madame Talleyrand’s first husband? He was a native of Lausanne, but entered the East India Company’s service, started an English factory, and married in India Catherine Noel Judde, daughter of Peter John Worle, a Dane, harbour-master of Chandernagor. He divorced her in India, and in 1798, having returned to Europe in straitened circumstances, obtained a French, divorce likewise. He now repaired to Paris, to solicit through his ex-wife’s influence a Government appointment; but he was unjustly suspected of seeking to extort money from Talleyrand. It was alleged, indeed, that he exacted 80,000 f. by a threat of disputing the validity of the divorce, and that on returning to London he demanded an additional £10,000. ‘Never did a husband,’ writes a Bourbon agent, ‘make so much profit out of his wife’s infidelity, and never did a man play so pitiful a role as M. de Talleyrand.’[110] What is certain is that Grand was assigned a post at the Cape under the so-called Batavian republic, really a French dependency. When England seized the Cape he remained there till his death in 1821.[111] He is said to have married again.

There were fugitives from law or justice, and other black sheep. William Ward, yeoman and land-agent of Benenden, Kent, who had been enthusiastic for the French Revolution, got into difficulties—‘through slovenly book-keeping’ says Mr. C. F. Hardy, editor of the Benenden Letters,—and took refuge in France, where he died in 1821, aged ninety-three. He had settled at Valenciennes, and under the Berlin decree of 1807 was for five years, in spite of his age, treated as a prisoner of war. His honesty seems unimpeachable, but as much cannot be said for another land-agent, Thomas Stone, who had acted for the Duke of Bedford and for Lord Digby. They had every apparent reason to trust him, for he was an Enclosure Commissioner and was employed by the Board of Agriculture in writing county reports. His love of style and conviviality, however, led him astray, and he now absconded to Paris with his wife and five children, leaving a large sum due to Lord Digby. He for a time lived in luxury, affected to be bent on improving French agriculture, and talked of buying and stocking a large farm. In reality he had no money, and in 1804 he was charged with forging a cheque, but was acquitted. He more than once applied for permission to visit Normandy to buy sheep, but was refused.[112] Latterly dependent on the earnings of his wife and daughter, he died in Paris in 1815, at the age of eighty-three. Speaking of land-agents reminds me that some small English land-owners, as the Marquis of Buckingham was informed, sold their property, invested part of the proceeds in the funds, so as to ensure the same income as before, and had settled in France on land purchased at ten and a half years’ rental. Such cases, however, must have been very rare, and Napoleon, as we have seen, debarred foreigners from holding real property; but Thomas Talbot, brother of an admiral, may have had the idea of colonisation in France, though he ultimately obtained a grant of 5000 acres on the shore of Lake Erie, where he founded Port Talbot. As for artisans who went over, enticed by reports of high wages and cheap living, they were speedily disillusioned and were glad to return.

We may include among the outlaws, though he was not of English birth, Bodini, who had been editor of Bell’s Messenger and had been expelled under the Alien Act. He joined the staff of the Argus in Paris. A note of the French police describes him as a man of caustic speech, turning everything into ridicule, and consequently having no friends. He pretended, it says, to have made important revelations to Napoleon, for whom, according to another account, he dissected, so to speak, the London newspapers.

We come lastly to émigrés who took the opportunity of returning to France, for several of them were Britons by birth, while others, having resided in England, possess some interest for us. There was Charles Jerningham, who had served in the French army, and now, reclaiming confiscated papers, pleaded that he had never in exile fought against France.[113] Lady Jerningham, his mother, however, was so patriotic an Englishwoman that on the renewal of the war she proposed to raise and head a body of six hundred men, who, in case of invasion, should drive all the cattle from the East Anglian coast into the interior of the country. Daniel Charles O’Connell, of Darrynane, styled in France Count O’Connell, uncle of the Liberator, was one of the earliest arrivals. Entering the French army in 1762 at the age of seventeen, he had taken part in the siege of Gibraltar in 1766, and in 1788 had drawn up articles of war by which the French army is still governed. On the fall of the monarchy he went to England, where in 1796 he married the Countess Bellevue, an exile like himself. In February 1802 he repaired to Paris with his wife and two stepdaughters, in the hope of recovering her property in St. Domingo. He calculated on returning in August, but he stayed, as we shall see, too long. He was naturalised in 1818, and was made a French peer; he died in 1835. Another émigré was Arthur Dillon, a connection of the guillotined general of that name, who had with difficulty escaped from France during the Terror. Curiously enough Réné de Montalembert, though an émigré, visited Paris as an English officer, for in 1799 he had entered the British army, and had served in the West Indies and Egypt. He afterwards served in India and Spain, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, but after Waterloo returned to France and was appointed to an embassy at Stuttgart. He had married in 1808 James Forbes’s daughter, Eliza Rose, and their son, mostly brought up by Forbes, was the historian of whom Pasquier aptly said, ‘he is an Anglo-Saxon Frenchman.’ Fagan, ex-captain in Dillon’s regiment, who also re-entered France, was despatched in 1810 by Fouché, without Napoleon’s knowledge, to discuss peace with Lord Wellesley. This occasioned Fouché’s dismissal. Alexander d’Arblay preceded his English wife, the famous Fanny Burney. His friend Lauriston had arranged that, after serving a year in St. Domingo, he should retire from the French army on a pension; but on his writing an indiscreet letter to Napoleon to say that he could never bear arms against England he was struck off the roll. Hoping, however, that Napoleon’s irritation would evaporate, he sent for his wife and child in April 1802, and on war breaking out they were unable, being French subjects, to return to England till 1812, when, during the Emperor’s absence, d’Arblay managed to procure a passport for them. He himself had meanwhile obtained a post in the Ministry of the Interior. Lally Tollendal, who went over to obtain restitution of his property, had also married an Englishwoman, Amelia Hardcastle, and in April 1802 she rejoined her husband and his daughter by his first wife.

The most prominent of the returning exiles was Calonne, Louis XVI.’s Minister of Finance. He was the man who, when asked by Marie Antoinette to do something which she acknowledged to be difficult, replied, ‘If it is merely difficult, madam, you may consider it already done: if it is impossible it shall be done.’ Shortly after his dismissal from office he had married Madame Haveley, widow of a rich Paris financier. She is described as English, but I am unable to ascertain her maiden name. Taking refuge in England in 1788, and there assisting Madame La Motte in her scurrilous pamphlet on the diamond necklace, Calonne was at first very bountiful to his fellow-exiles, but he soon quarrelled with them. He went to Paris in May 1802, but must have intended returning to England, for he had applied to Merry for a passport when he was taken ill, and expired on the 30th September. Another prominent politician was Montlosier, the member of the National Assembly who, in opposing the confiscation of the bishops’ revenues, exclaimed, ‘You deprive them of their gold crosses, but they will take the wooden cross which has saved the world.’ He had edited the Courrier de Londres, which was so favourable to Napoleon that he was allowed to return from exile and have his paper partly printed in Paris. It was, however, suppressed after a few weeks, and Montlosier was appointed editor of the Bulletin de Paris, in which he requited British hospitality by vilifying the English. In all other respects his political career down to his death in 1838 was highly creditable. Cazalès, who before emigrating had deprecated violent measures in the National Assembly, also re-entered France, and was offered, but declined, office under the Consulate.

The Duke and Duchess de Fitz-James—he was a descendant of James II. with the bend sinister—were émigrés of a different stamp, being staunch royalists. So also, I believe, was Colonel O’Mahony. Patrick Wall, who at eighteen had in 1745 been with the Young Pretender, had been wounded at Culloden, and had then entered the French army, in like manner returned to France. An uncle, also a Jacobite refugee, had bequeathed him a handsome property. He died at Chatillon-sur-Seine in 1809.

The returning exiles included a multitude of priests. Sir John Carr crossed over from Southampton to Havre with some of them, one being, he says, ninety-five years of age, who was scarcely expected to land alive. There were also wives and daughters of Toulon refugees. It is unpleasant to read in Henri Martin’s history that some of these clerical passengers afterwards repaid the hospitality they had enjoyed, by vilifying England in episcopal pastorals, in order to curry favour with Napoleon.