II THE VISITORS

No Thoroughfare—Occasional Visitors—Negotiations—Fox—M. P.’s—Ex-and Prospective M. P.’s—Peers and their Families—Baronets—Soldiers—Sailors—Functionaries—Lawyers—Doctors—Clergymen—Savants—Artists—Actors—Inventors—Claimants and Men of Business—Writers on France—Other Authors—Residents—Ancestors—Fugitives—Emigrés.

The Peace of Amiens reopened France, and not merely France but central and southern Europe, to British travellers. Since the outbreak of hostilities in 1793 the ‘grand tour’ had been suspended. Maritime ascendency, indeed, had always ensured our communications with North Germany and Italy, but the risk of capture by privateers such as befell Richard (afterwards the Marquis) Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington’s elder brother, on his return from Lisbon in 1794, coupled with intermittent campaigns and conquests by France, had virtually put a stop to foreign travel. Young noblemen in charge of tutors or ‘bear-wards’ had ceased to traverse the Continent, and French schools had ceased to receive British students. The schools, moreover, had mostly been closed by the Revolution. An Arthur Wellesley, even if inclined, could not have studied horsemanship at Angers, nor could a Gilbert Elliot have been the comrade of a Mirabeau at Fontainebleau. So also as to girls. Pentemont Abbey in Paris, where daughters of such aristocratic families as Annesley, Hobart, De Ros and De Bathe had been educated between 1780 and 1789, was shut, preparatory to conversion into a barrack,[3] while the English Austin convent, where for 150 years Towneleys, Dormers, and Fermors had been pupils, sometimes when adults returning as nuns, though still in the possession of the community, had not yet been reopened as a school. London newspapers complacently calculated the money thus prevented from leaving the country.

It it true that a few of the Englishmen arrested as hostages for Toulon in the autumn of 1793, though released after the Terror, had been unable or unwilling to quit France. Christopher Potter, ex-M.P. for Colchester, in 1796 offered Lord Malmesbury, on behalf of Barras, to secure peace for a bribe of half a million. Captain Henry Swinburne, commissioner for exchanging prisoners, a collateral ancestor of the poet, likewise found in Paris about that date Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliott, ex-mistress of ‘Egalité’ Orleans, who remained till 1801, Admiral Rodney’s Portuguese wife and her two daughters, Richard Chenevix, grand-nephew of a Bishop of Waterford, Walter Smythe, brother of the famous Mrs. Fitzherbert, two sons of the Whitehall preacher Charles Este, and George Hamilton, a Jamaica planter whose wife, a daughter of Lord Leven, was afterwards, as we shall see, the companion of Sir Herbert Croft; but of course there had been scarcely any fresh arrivals. Indeed it was illegal for British subjects, unless with special permission, to cross over to France.[4] They were liable at home to punishment for the attempt, just as they were liable if they reached the French shore to being prevented from landing or to incarceration as spies. Lord Camelford, Pitt’s eccentric cousin, who threatened if Horne Tooke was refused admission as a clergyman to the seat for Old Sarum,[5] to nominate in his place his negro servant—a black man in lieu of a black coat—was arrested in February 1799 when on the point of crossing the Channel; but as his object was to examine the Mediterranean ports he was liberated, being, however, deprived of his naval post. We shall hear of him again. Boyd and Ker, bankers of whom too we shall hear again, made their way back to Paris in 1797 in the hope of recovering confiscated property, but were promptly packed off. A London newspaper of that year mentions that two men who had paid a Prussian captain eighty guineas for a passage from Dover to Calais were also unceremoniously expelled. Braham, however, and Miss Storace got to Paris and gave concerts in 1797. Thomas Hardy, the radical shoemaker, managed to send Thomas Paine a pair of shoes so good that Paine lent them as a model to a Parisian craftsman, but Hardy would not have found it easy to carry them over himself. Fishermen and smugglers, it is true, kept up intermittent communications, conveying newspapers or merchandise, but they seldom ran the risk of taking passengers. Even fishing-boats, moreover, which on both sides had been unmolested, were in January 1801 declared by the British Government liable to capture; but Bonaparte’s threat of recalling Otto, the commissioner of exchanges, from a country where the laws and usages of war were disregarded and violated,[6] coincidentally with the resignation of Pitt on account of George III.’s objection to Catholic emancipation, led to this order being rescinded. Indeed the explanations given on this point by the new Addington Administration paved the way for peace negotiations.

There had been, it is true, isolated opportunities for Englishmen of forming or communicating impressions of France. Malmesbury[7] had not only been at Paris in 1796, but at Lille in 1797, on both occasions receiving an offer from Barras through a Bostonian named Melville—probably the son of Major Thomas Melville, one of the Boston tea-party, the last American to wear a cocked hat—to conclude peace for £450,000.[8] Malmesbury[9] and his staff on their return assuredly found much avidity for information on the France transformed by the Revolution. That staff consisted at Paris of George Ellis, of the Anti-Jacobin, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, of whom we shall hear again, and James Talbot, afterwards Secretary of Legation in Switzerland.[10] To avoid being mobbed they were obliged to wear the republican cockade whenever they appeared in the street. At Lille Malmesbury was accompanied not only by Ellis and Talbot, but by Henry Wellesley, afterwards Earl Cowley, and by Lord Morpeth, afterwards Earl of Carlisle. Not merely Swinburne but Captain James Cotes and General Knox were also sent to Paris between 1796 and 1799 to effect an exchange of prisoners. They must have been eagerly questioned on their return. The notorious Governor Wall, who, living in the south of France, had been refused service in the French army,[11] went back to England in 1797, but clandestinely, and it would have been better for him had he remained on the Continent. He had to conceal his identity and his experiences.[12] But Sir Sidney Smith had escaped from the Temple in 1798 after two years’ incarceration, and Napoleon in the following year released some English prisoners, sending them home with professions of a desire for peace. Sir Robert Barclay, a diplomatist captured at sea, was also, after half an hour’s conversation, liberated by him. Lord Carysfort, whose mutinous crew had taken him to Brest, was likewise permitted, in November 1800, after nine months’ detention, to visit his family on parole. Masquerier managed, moreover, in that year to visit Paris and to sketch Napoleon’s portrait for exhibition in London. Tallien, on the other hand, captured by the English on his way back from Egypt, had been allowed in March 1800 to return to France, where he could give a glowing account of the attentions paid him by the Opposition leaders, and of his presence, the observed of all observers, at parliamentary debates. On re-entering Paris he found that his handsome wife, Thérése Cabarrus, had become the mistress of the army contractor Ouvrard, and she never rejoined him.

But, broadly speaking, Englishmen and Frenchmen had for nearly a decade been perfect strangers, so that a British cartoon entitled ‘The First Kiss this Ten Years’ depicted Monsieur François stooping to kiss Britannia with the words, ‘Madam, permit me to pay my profound esteem to your engaging person and to seal on your divine lips my everlasting attachment.’ To which Britannia replies, ‘Monsieur, you are truly a well-bred gentleman, and though you make me blush, yet you kiss so delicately that I could not refuse you, though I was sure that you would deceive me again.’

The peace preliminaries were signed on the 1st October 1801. England, without waiting for the ratifications, released her 14,000 French prisoners,[13] and on the 23rd October Boulogne, for the first time for nearly nine years, saw the arrival of an English vessel bringing 160 of these captives.

It is not my purpose to enter into the details of the negotiations, nor need I dwell on the rejoicings for the peace. Cobbett in London had his windows smashed for refusing to illuminate, and the jury recommended to mercy three of the delinquents, but Cobbett, though invited by the judge to join in this recommendation, declined, stating that he expected justice. The London mob took the horses out of Otto’s carriage and drew it, while Lauriston, grand-nephew of the famous speculator Law,[14] on coming over with the ratifications received ovations. On the 1st November Lord Cornwallis, ex-Governor of India, accompanied by his son, Lord Brome (afterwards the second and last marquis), by his illegitimate son, Colonel (eventually General Sir Miles) Nightingale,[15] his son-in-law, Captain Singleton, Colonel Littlehales (afterwards Sir E. Littlehales Baker), and Francis (brother of Sir John) Moore, started for Paris.[16]

Amiens had been chosen for the negotiations, but Napoleon, evidently wishing Lord Cornwallis to see how firmly the Consulate was established, had invited him to come round by Paris on the plea of showing him the illuminations of the 9th November in celebration of the peace with Austria. The road from Calais to Paris, which had since 1793 been almost deserted, was hastily put in repair for him, and was soon to be dotted with mail-coaches and post-chaises. Cornwallis arrived on the 7th November; he alighted at the Hotel Grange Batelière, the finest in Paris, it being an old mansion with spacious grounds, and he was received by Napoleon on the 10th. Napoleon suggested to him a reciprocal expulsion of foreign conspirators, the Bourbon princes to be packed off by England, and the United Irishmen by France; but Cornwallis naturally evaded so delicate a question. Napoleon did not invite him to dinner, and did not rise to receive Lord Brome in his box at the Opera, an incivility much commented upon. Cornwallis gave a dinner on the 16th to Lord Minto, who was on his way home from the Vienna Embassy, and five other fellow-countrymen.

‘After dinner,’ says the Times, ‘the company went to the Opera, where the performance was the Mysteries of Isis. Every part of the house was so crowded that numbers were unable to procure places. Some couplets were sung in celebration of the union of the two nations, which excited an enthusiasm that displayed itself by universal and repeated bursts of applause.

‘Lord Cornwallis was so extremely affected by the scene, that he shed tears! On his rising to go away, the audience recommenced their testimonies of applause. His Lordship showed how much he was flattered by the reception he had met with, by bowing to them in the most affecting manner. The following may be given as a specimen of the verses sung upon this occasion:—

Cornwallis also dined with Talleyrand, and Francis James Jackson, writing to Speaker Abbot (afterwards Lord Colchester), says:—

‘What do you think of Lord Cornwallis, with all his dignity of decorum, dining the other day at a table of thirty covers with the kept mistresses, and being obliged to hand out the ugliest and frailest of them, because she was in keeping of the minister for Foreign Affairs?’

On the 28th Cornwallis left for Amiens. There Joseph Bonaparte conducted the negotiations, and he speaks highly of Cornwallis’s straightforwardness. Cornwallis carried back with him to England cotton-velvet goods, to show his countrymen the superiority of Amiens looms, and the Calais municipality gave him a banquet before he embarked.[17]

Anthony Merry, who had been Consul in Spain, had been sent to Paris in July 1801, succeeding Cotes as Commissioner of Exchanges, but he assisted Cornwallis at Amiens, and during his absence from Paris Francis James Jackson, who had been Secretary of Legation first at Madrid, then at Berlin, and afterwards at St. Petersburg, and had been secretary to Pitt, acted as chargé d’affaires. Jackson was accompanied by his brother George, to whom Parisian sights were a novelty, and by Dawson Warren[18] and Hill as attachés. Jackson, in reporting his arrival in November, stated that he had been loaded with attentions such as ‘the most refined system of civility could suggest.’ On the 4th January 1802 he presented his credentials to Napoleon, who said, ‘I am very glad to see an English minister here; it is essential to the civilisation of the world.’[19] Merry returning from Amiens, Jackson left on the 18th April 1802,[20] and Merry remained at the head of the embassy till December 1802. He was reproached with giving no dinner on George III.’s birthday on the 4th of June, but he was expecting to be superseded by Lord Whitworth, and his stipend probably did not allow of much display. The embassy was installed, as before the Revolution, in the Caraman mansion, faubourg du Roule.

Whitworth, formerly at St. Petersburg, had been appointed ambassador as early as April 1802, but on account of the delay in the nomination of the French Envoy to London his instructions were not drawn up till the 10th September, and he did not start till the 10th November. He went by Southampton and Havre, and was accompanied by his newly-married wife, the Duchess of Dorset, widow of the Ambassador to Paris of 1789, and by her two daughters. Her son, the young Duke of Dorset, remained at Harrow, where he was the schoolfellow and friend of Byron, but as we shall see he went over to Paris for the Easter holidays.[21] Whitworth’s staff consisted of his brother, Colonel Whitworth, James Talbot, James Henry Mandeville,[22] Captain Edward Pierrepont,[23] and Benjafield, with the Rev. Thomas Hodgson as chaplain, and Dr. Maclaurin as physician. The Duchess of Dorset’s retention of her first husband’s title greatly puzzled the Parisians, many of whom actually believed that she was not married to Whitworth. According to Maria Edgeworth, the latter had at Paris the same house, the same wife, and the same horses as the Duke of Dorset had had in 1789, but the line should doubtless be drawn at the horses. He took with him six carriages, one of which had been the admiration of Londoners, though it was less imposing than that taken over by a Dr. Brodum, whose object was to promote the sale of his syrup for ensuring longevity. He presented his credentials on the 6th December 1802, and remained as we shall see till the 12th May 1803.[24]

The Dover and Calais mail packets did not recommence running till the 18th November 1801, but English visitors had begun to arrive as early as September or October, and Savary tells us that these pioneers facilitated the conclusion of peace, for they returned with assurances of the stability of the consular government. Napoleon on the 14th October instructed Fouché freely to admit English visitors, taking care, however, that they had Foreign Office passports, and were not French émigrés. One of them unfortunately lost his life. Charles John Clarke, of Hitchin Priory, had gone over with his wife. Their only child had died two years before, and they sought relief for their sorrow, intending to go on to Italy. Clarke was on a stand witnessing the fireworks of the 9th November in the Tuileries gardens when it gave way, and its eighty occupants were injured, Clarke so seriously, his spine being fractured, that after lingering nearly a month he expired. Napoleon sent his surgeon to make inquiries and offer his services, stating that he should himself call as soon as the patient was well enough to receive visitors. Clarke, who had been six years married, was only thirty-one years of age. His widow, several years his junior, carried his remains home.

Never before had there been such an influx of English visitors as during these eighteen months. ‘All the idle captives of the land of fogs,’ says M. Sorel, ‘shook their damp wings and prepared to take their flight towards the regions of pleasure and brightness.’ Even the influenza or grippe, which prevailed in January and February 1803, did not deter them, and they mostly escaped the malady, an escape attributed to their being habituated to humidity. ‘Ours,’ says Samuel Rogers, who was one of the visitors, ‘is a nation of travellers, and no wonder, when the elements, air, water, and fire attend at our bidding to transport us from shore to shore, when the ship rushes into the deep, her track the foam as of some mighty torrent, and in three hours or less we stand gazing and gazed at among a foreign people. None want an excuse. If rich, they go to enjoy; if poor, to retrench; if sick, to recover; if studious, to learn; if learned, to relax from their studies.’[25] This, though written in 1839, is, with the exception of the reference to steam, applicable to the influx of 1801–1803. A few went for health, taking Paris as a stage to Montpellier, then still in repute, Nice, or Italy, others to recover property or for business, a few for study, most for pleasure. The current steadily swelled all the winter, spring, and summer. One of the earliest packets brought sixty-three ladies, and the Calais hotels were packed, seven hundred and ninety-eight passengers landing in ten days. In the last decade of Prairial (June 1802) there were ninety-one arrivals, in the last decade of Thermidor (August) ninety-seven, in the last decade of Fructidor (September) one hundred and fifty-six.[26] This last average of fifteen a day seems small to us, but was surprising for that time. Merry states that there were once as many as five thousand English in Paris, and that when he left in December there were one thousand nine hundred. In the autumn he sent home long lists of persons to whom he had given return passports, and he had complained in May that he was so busy in issuing them as to have no time to attend properly to diplomatic business.

The cost of a trip to Paris was what in those days seemed moderate. For £4, 13s. you could get a through ticket by Dover and Calais, starting either from the City at 4.30 A.M. by the old and now revived line of coaches connected with the rue Notre Dame des Victoires establishment in Paris, or morning and night by a new line from Charing Cross.[27] Probably a still cheaper route, though there were no through tickets, was by Brighton and Dieppe, the crossing taking 10 or 15 hours. By Calais it seldom took more than 8 hours, but passengers were advised to carry light refreshments with them. The diligence from Calais to Paris, going only four miles an hour, took 54 hours for the journey, but a handsome carriage drawn by three horses, in a style somewhat similar to the English post-chaise, could be hired by four or five fellow-travellers, and this made six miles an hour. £30 would cover the expense of a seven weeks’ visit, including hotels, sight-seeing, and restaurants.[28] As for fashionable people, even if they went by coach to Dover, they posted from Calais to Paris, especially if they formed a family party and took servants with them. Some, like Lord Guilford, even shipped their own carriages, but he had to hire four sorry steeds at Calais, for horses were not allowed to land.[29]

Lord Elgin had four servants, Lord Yarmouth, with his wife and two children, had eight, Thomas Hope three, and Lady Maynard two. The journey occupied four days, if we may judge by the French General Hardy, who, captured in Ireland in 1798, had been exchanged—there being no English prisoner of equal rank—for four officers, four non-commissioned officers, and ten privates. It took him a day to get from London to Dover, another day for the crossing, and two days for the journey from Calais to Paris.

Passengers by Boulogne if arriving at low tide were landed in a singular fashion. Thomas Manning, of whom we shall hear presently, in a letter to his father communicated to me by his grand-nephew, Mr. E. B. Harris, says:—

‘The tide having ebbed, we were obliged to land without entering the inner harbour of Boulogne. It was night before the sluggish boat that the Boulogne mariners sent off could land us all, and a strange landing it seemed to me. The boat rowed towards the nearest shore till it ran aground, which happened in the midst of the breakers. In an instant the boathead was surrounded by a throng of women up to their middles and over, who were there to carry us on shore. Not being aware of this manœuvre, we did not throw ourselves into the arms of these sea-nymphs so instantly as we ought, whereby those who sat at the stern of the boat were deluged with sea spray. For myself I was in front, and very quickly understood the clamour of the mermaids. I flung myself upon the backs of two of them without reserve, and was safely and dryly borne on shore, but one poor gentleman slipped through their fingers and fell over head and ears into the sea.’

This primitive mode of landing had been noted in 1792 by William Hunter, who states that one of the ‘mermaids,’ unequal to the weight of a stout Englishman who had been reserved to the last, dropped him midway. Lanterns dimly lit up this curious scene.[30]

The return voyage had to be made on French bottoms, in order that the mercantile marine might be encouraged, and this regulation had its inconvenience, not to say dangers. The Times of 12th January, 1803, says:—

‘A navy Officer, who recently returned from Calais, where he had spent a few days, was actually under the necessity of giving directions, and afterwards exerting himself with alacrity, to preserve his own life and that of the other passengers. The master of the vessel, who was very much afraid of the violence of the wind, sat half-way down to the cabin, with his head under the companion, and covered with a huge night-cap, to prevent its reaching him, as he was (he said) grievously afflicted with the rheumatism; and to the repeated demands of the passengers, why he did not come upon deck and give orders for the safety of the vessel, he answered, deliberately, taking the pipe out of his mouth, that there was no immediate danger, and if any should arise, he had a good sea-boat, which would carry him and all his crew safe to land.’

Let us now see who were the visitors, beginning not with the earliest but by far the most eminent of them, Fox. He had not seen France since 1788, when he passed through with Mrs. Armistead on his way to Switzerland and Italy. Waiting, like many other M.P.’s, till his election was over, he started at Dover on the 31st July 1802, again accompanied by the so-called Mrs. Armistead (only now for the first time publicly figuring as his wife, though they had been privately married some years previously), by St. Andrew (afterwards Lord) St. John, M.P., and by John Bernard Trotter, his secretary.[31] His nephew Lord Holland had engaged rooms for him in the faubourg St. Germain, but he seems to have removed to the hotel Grange Batelière and eventually to the hotel Richelieu, the mansion erected and formerly occupied by the notorious roué, Marshal (grand-nephew of Cardinal) Richelieu, who had entertained him in 1788. Fox’s chief object was to consult French records for his life of James II., his ancestor, and he daily frequented the National Archives for that purpose, in company with St. John, Robert (afterwards Sir Robert) Adair, and Trotter. Talleyrand, after his return to England, sent him a complete copy of Barillon’s despatches, which Fox had declared to be worth their weight in gold.

Many people in England fancied, however, that he was mainly bent on seeing Napoleon, and the caricaturists did not neglect so tempting a subject. Gillray, in a cartoon entitled ‘Introduction of Citizen Volpone and his suite at Paris,’ represented Bonaparte as seated on a chair surrounded by Mamelukes, while Fox and his wife,[32] both extremely corpulent, are bowing and curtseying, Erskine, in legal costume with his hand on his heart, and Lord and Lady Holland making up the group. Another caricaturist depicted the reception by the First Consul of Fox, Erskine, and Combe. To Fox he says, ‘Fox, ha! How old are you?’ To Combe, ‘A brewer, Lord Mayor, ha! great pomp,’ and to Erskine, ‘Mr. Brief, ha! a great lawyer; can talk well. There, you may go.’[33] Trotter tells us what really occurred:—

‘Bonaparte, of a small and by no means commanding figure, dressed plainly though richly in the embroidered consular coat, without powder in his hair, looked like a private gentleman, indifferent as to dress, and devoid of all haughtiness in his air. The English ambassador, after the presentation of some English noblemen, announced to him Mr. Fox. He was a good deal flurried, and after indicating considerable emotion said—“Ah, Mr. Fox; I have heard with pleasure of your arrival, I have desired much to see you. I have long admired in you the orator and friend of his country, who, in constantly raising his voice for peace, consulted that country’s best interests, those of Europe, and of the human race. The two great nations of Europe require peace. They have nothing to fear [from each other]. They ought to understand and value [esteem] one another. In you, Mr. Fox, I see with much satisfaction that great statesman who recommended peace because there was no just object of war, who saw Europe desolated to no purpose and who struggled for its relief.”’

Trotter adds that Fox, averse to compliments, neither replied to nor reciprocated them, and that a few questions and answers respecting his tour terminated the interview.

Napoleon afterwards invited Fox to a dinner of two hundred guests, to which he went unpowdered. John King, of whom we shall presently hear, thought it inconsistent of Fox to accept such attentions, which acceptance he attributes to a desire to please his wife; but Fox obviously could not decline an invitation from the ruler of the land whose hospitality he was enjoying, though he felt perfectly free to refuse to lunch with the brewer Santerre, notorious for his part in the execution of Louis XVI. According to the Rev. Stephen Weston, Napoleon complimented Fox as the greatest man of a great nation. Fox, as was to be expected, combated Napoleon’s accusations against Pitt, and especially against Windham, of complicity in the infernal-machine plot of 1800. Thiers gives an account of Fox being taken by Napoleon to the Industrial Exhibition at the Louvre, when a courtier sarcastically pointed on a globe to the small space occupied by England, whereupon Fox, spreading his arms round the globe, said, ‘Yes, but though we all spring from there we grasp the whole world.’ The truth is that though Napoleon and Fox happened to be simultaneously at the Exhibition they did not come across each other.[34] It was Chaptal who conducted Fox over the Exhibition, and he tells us that Fox admired the specimens, but thought them too dear for common use, upon which Chaptal took him to the cutlery department, where Fox filled his pockets with cheap knives, and then to a watch stall, where he bought half a dozen watches at 13 f. a piece.[35] He frequented the theatres. Not only, however, was his French very imperfect, but he committed a great breach of decorum by not calling on the two minor consuls, Cambacérès and Lebrun. He had to apologise through Merry. Lebrun overlooked the blunder and received Fox on his reparatory visit, but Cambacérès was ruffled, and insisted that Fox should make an unceremonious call as though he had been before.

We learn this from a secret agent of the Bourbons,[36] who also tells us that Fox, after his conversation with Napoleon, said, ‘It’s all up with liberty.’ He could scarcely, however, have needed that conversation to form this judgment, for Napoleon on the 2nd August had been elected consul for life. Fox must have felt much more at home with Lafayette, with whom he spent a fortnight at La Grange, planting ivy round the newly-erected towers as a memento. He dined in Paris with Talleyrand and Junot, and went shooting with General Berthier. Madame Junot thought he looked with his dark grey coat like a Devonshire farmer, but when talking his countenance was radiant with intelligence, sagacity, and eloquence.[37] On the 16th September he attended a sitting of the Tribunat, when the captain on guard, Boyer, thanked him for having in 1795 obtained the unfettering, and all but the liberation, of two hundred French officers at Porchester, a benefit which they would never forget. ‘Our chains were broken,’ said Boyer: ‘we were almost free.’[38] At Versailles, on entering a room which he was told had long been shut up, he found his own bust, along with those of Algernon Sidney, Hampden, Chatham, and Washington.[39] But was this a stratagem of Napoleon to flatter him? Curiously enough, Napoleon on his dressing-table at the Tuileries had, as the Edgeworths noticed, the bust not only of Fox but of Nelson, for whom he also entertained great admiration. He asked Mrs. Damer for a second bust of Fox, a commission which the lady could not execute till 1815.

Fox was criticised in England for taking tea with Helen Maria Williams, for it had been erroneously imagined, by Boswell among others, that she had marched exultantly over the bodies of the Swiss massacred in 1792. He was also twitted with meeting Arthur O’Connor, the United Irish exile. The fact was that he and Erskine went to dine with Madame Tallien without knowing that O’Connor would be there. Fox with great tact made the best of what he considered an unlucky incident by treating O’Connor exactly like the other guests, but Erskine was more embarrassed, for as counsel on his trial at Maidstone in 1798 he had vouched for O’Connor’s loyalty, whereas the latter had since made a confession of conspiracy.

Fox remained till the 11th November. ‘I have certainly,’ he wrote, ‘seldom spent a time pleasanter than at Paris, but I never in my life felt such delight in returning home.’ In 1806 he reciprocated the civilities shown him by sending word to Talleyrand that a Frenchman called Guillet had called on him and offered to kidnap Napoleon. Guillet was consequently arrested in Paris, and consigned, not to prison, but to Bicêtre lunatic asylum, where he died twelve months afterwards. Canning was guilty of the bad taste, not to say ignominy, of censuring Fox in Parliament for giving this warning, the generosity of which was warmly appreciated by Napoleon, as he told Lord Ebrington at Elba in 1814.

The general election had come rather inopportunely for visits to Paris, Parliament being dissolved on the 29th June, and the new House meeting on the 16th November. Elections, moreover, were much less expeditiously despatched than nowadays. Nevertheless about eighty M.P.’s, mostly Foxites, as Liberals were then called, but some Pittites or Ministerialists, went over either before or after the elections. Some of these M.P.’s are entitled to notice.[40]

Acheson, who in 1807 became Lord Gosford, revisited Paris in 1814, and became Governor of Canada. Adair, as we have seen, was the friend of Fox, and indeed was destined to be his last surviving friend. When visiting St. Petersburg in 1791 his letters home were in cipher, but forwarded through Whitworth, the ambassador, and he was absurdly suspected of having been sent thither by Fox to thwart Pitt’s policy.[41] Barclay, as already mentioned, was a diplomatist, and had been a prisoner in France. He had just married a German lady at Hamburg. Baring was the famous banker, and though deaf from his youth sat and voted in Parliament. Benfield and Boyd not only come together alphabetically, but had been partners in a London bank which was wound up in 1799. Paul Benfield went out to India in the Company’s service, and there made a fortune, partly by trade, partly by fortification contracts and by loans. He advanced money to the Nawab of the Carnatic, on conditions for which Burke afterwards, with his customary vehemence, branded him as ‘a criminal who ought long since to have fattened the kites with his offal.’ In 1777 he was ordered to quit India, but he was subsequently reinstated in his post, and returned to Madras. In 1780 he became M.P. for Cricklade, and in 1796 he exchanged that seat for Shaftesbury, another of his five pocket-boroughs. He was also recorder for Shaftesbury, such appointments being sometimes conferred on or sold by corporations to men not even lawyers. In 1796 he assigned the second seat to Walter Boyd, whose sleeping partner he had become in 1793. Boyd had had a bank in Paris, and had been an agent for the French Revolutionary Government in paying for corn from England; but threatened with arrest in October 1792 he had fled, with his partner Walter Ker. It was alleged in December 1794 that he had sold to the French Treasury drafts for ten million francs on London, boasting that they would be dishonoured; but the Finance Committee, on investigation, declared the charge unfounded. In 1795 Boyd contracted for an English loan, but in 1797 his bank fell into difficulties. Boyd had entered into imprudent speculations, and when he went to Paris, calculating on the restitution of his property, the change of government there frustrated his hopes, and he was expelled. In 1799 Pitt, apparently in order to extricate him from his embarrassments, concluded a second loan with him without inviting tenders from any other firm, on the plea that this had been promised him in 1793. A select committee of inquiry severely condemned this transaction, but an obsequious House of Commons condoned it. It did not, however, avert Boyd’s bankruptcy. The two partners were now among the earliest visitors to Paris. They went at the close of 1801, Boyd still hoping to recover property. They were on the point of losing their seats for Shaftesbury, Benfield having sold that borough for £40,000 to a Colonel Wood. We shall see by and by how they sped in France.

Best, who became successively Serjeant Best, Sir Thomas Best, and Lord Wynford, reached the judicial bench in 1818, and in 1824 was made Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas. Originally a Whig, he ended as a violent Tory. Brodrick was Secretary to the (India) Board of Control. Burdett speaks for himself, as when, on being greeted at Calais as the friend of Fox, he exclaimed, ‘No, the friend of liberty.’ In the summer of 1793 he had attended the clubs and the Convention. Father of Lady Burdett-Coutts, he began as a demagogue and ended as a reactionary. He boasted of his election for Middlesex having cost him £100,000. He, with his friend Bosville, called on Thomas Paine, giving him £240 to clear off his debts and return to America. He also called, with his old tutor Lechevalier, on La Réveillère Lepaux, the theophilanthropist, on whom he made no favourable impression.[42] Burdett, who had witnessed the early stage of the Revolution with more curiosity than sympathy, told Arthur Young, who had likewise seen something of that upheaval, that the Consulate was the completest military despotism that had ever existed.[43]

Lord George Cavendish became in 1831 Earl of Burlington, and succeeded his brother as Duke of Devonshire. Alderman Combe had been Sheriff of London in 1792 and Lord Mayor in 1799. Fox and Sheridan were godfathers to the son born to him during his mayoralty. Napoleon, according to Weston, said to him, ‘You were Lord Mayor in a year of dearth. I know what it is to have to keep people quiet when bread is dear.’ Unsuccessful at a by-election for the City in 1795, he had been elected in 1796. In 1800 he had convened a common hall to petition for peace. In 1805 he gave a dinner in his brewery to the Duke and Duchess of York, the Duke of Cambridge, Lady Anne Fitzroy, and other aristocratic guests. He ultimately resigned his aldermanic gown and seat in Parliament and confined himself to his business. He died in 1818.

Cowper was the son of Earl Cowper. Dallas, on returning home from the service of the East India Company, was the champion of Warren Hastings, and in 1793 and 1799 had written pamphlets against the French Government. The Marquis of Douglas, son of the Duke of Hamilton, was sent in 1807 as Ambassador to St. Petersburg. Ellis was afterwards Lord Seaford, taking his title from the little Sussex town for which he and his brother sat. Erskine, of whom we have already heard, became Lord Chancellor in the thirteen months’ Administration of ‘All the Talents.’ His son David, who accompanied him, succeeded him in the peerage.

Fitzpatrick, the intimate friend of Fox and the uncle of Lord Holland, was, like Fox, fond both of the classics and of gambling. He was an amateur actor and a wit. He had made an impressive speech in 1796 in favour of Lafayette, then a prisoner in Austria, and now visited him at La Grange. In 1806 he became Secretary for War. John Leslie Foster became an Irish Judge and lived till 1842. Philip Francis, the Indian councillor commonly regarded as the author of the Letters of Junius, escorted three of his children, Philip, Elizabeth, and Harriet, who went on to Nice for the benefit of Harriet’s health. We have no letters from Francis himself, but young Philip tells us that Bonaparte renewed (?) acquaintance with his father and was very civil. He likewise tells us that at Madame Bonaparte’s reception he saw Bonaparte, after watching her play for some time from behind her chair, drop a purse into her lap as he moved away. Francis, with his daughter Catherine, was again in Paris in January 1803, apparently from alarm at the miscarriage of letters from Nice, and while there heard of Harriet’s death. The Miss Berrys had been very kind to her. Francis had twice visited Paris in 1791, and his son had learned French at Rouen in the summer of 1792.[44] Lord Granville Leveson-Gower became the first Earl Granville and Ambassador to France. His son we all remember as Foreign Secretary. Graham, the Ripon Graham, was the father of Sir James Graham the statesman. Hare, who sat from 1781 to 1804 for the Duke of Devonshire’s borough of Knaresborough, was a wit and a classical scholar who broke down in his maiden speech and thenceforth remained silent. He went to Paris for his health or fell ill when there, and Fox called on the invalid, who died shortly after his return. Jekyll, too, who had visited France in 1775, was a famous wit and a great diner-out. He also sat for a pocket-borough from 1787 to 1816, but his wit did not come out in his frequent speeches. The Prince Regent, fond of good talkers, made him in 1805 his Solicitor-General, and procured for him a commissionership in lunacy and a mastership in Chancery.

Johnston had been British Resident at Lucknow, and was an authority on India. Kinnaird, who in 1803 succeeded to the peerage, being intimately connected with the Bonapartists, had information in 1817 of Cantillon’s intended attack on the Duke of Wellington, and sent him an anonymous warning. He and his wife afterwards went to Paris to give information on the subject, and the latter was arrested as an accomplice. Kinnaird naturally complained of this as a violation of a virtual safe-conduct. He had been expelled from France in the previous year as a political intriguer. He eventually lived in Italy on an allowance from his creditors.[45] Long, afterwards Lord Farnborough, had been Secretary to the Treasury, became a Commissioner of the Treasury in 1804, and in 1806 was made Secretary for Ireland. He had written pamphlets on the French Revolution in 1795. Eventually he was known as an art connoisseur, and George iv. sought his advice on architecture. His father-in-law, Sir Abraham Hume, accompanied him.

Lord Lovaine in 1830 succeeded his father as Earl of Beverley, and eventually in 1865, two years before his death, became Duke of Northumberland. He was the father of the Duke who adopted Irvingism and married Henry Drummond’s daughter. He went on to Naples with his newly married wife, Louisa Wortley, and his father, and on their return they found themselves, as we shall see, prisoners. Macpherson had in 1785 been Governor-General of India. Sir C. Morgan became Judge-Advocate. Lord Morpeth became Earl of Carlisle and father of the distinguished statesman. Nicholl, a frequent speaker and a strenuous opponent of the war with France, had visited that country in 1788–1789 and had made the acquaintance of the Abbé Raynal and other economists. Paget, afterwards Sir Edward Paget, son of the Earl of Uxbridge, was destined, as we shall find, to pay a second and involuntary visit. He had already served in Flanders, Minorca, and Egypt. He had been one of the hostages given to the French at Cairo till they embarked in July 1801. He afterwards served in Sicily and the Peninsula and was Governor of Ceylon. Parnell was the great-uncle of the Home Rule leader. He became Secretary for War, Paymaster-General, and Treasurer of the Navy, and in 1841 was created Lord Congleton. Lord Henry Petty, Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-five, and Pitt’s successor in the representation of Cambridge University (where he defeated Lord Palmerston), became on his brother’s death in 1809 Marquis of Lansdowne. After filling various high offices he survived till 1863 to the age of eighty, the Nestor of the House of Lords. Pollen, the accomplished son of a Surrey clergyman, had by one vote defeated the Duke of Norfolk’s nominee at Leominster. He afterwards raised a corps of Fencibles, whom he accompanied to Nova Scotia. On his way home in 1808, after several years’ travel in Russia and other countries, he was wrecked and drowned off Memel at the age of thirty-two. His wife applied for permission to return home through France, but the favourable answer being delayed, she embarked at Königsberg for England.[46] St. John, as we have seen, was the companion of Fox, and afterwards succeeded to a peerage. Scott was the elder son of Lord Chancellor Eldon, but predeceased his father, leaving a son to succeed to the title.

John Spencer Smith, page in his youth to Queen Charlotte, was a diplomatist. He was asked by Napoleon whether he was not Sidney Smith’s brother, and Napoleon, on being answered in the affirmative, rejoined, ‘He is a good fellow and a good officer.’ Spencer Smith had been chargé d’affaires at Constantinople from 1796 to 1799, and there was a legend of his having married a rich Turkish widow. The truth is, his wife was daughter of the Austrian Baron Ratzbael. While staying at Venice for her health with her two sons in 1806, she was arrested as an alleged spy, and was to have been sent on to Valenciennes, but at Brescia, through the Marquis di Salvo, a friendly Sicilian, she escaped by a ladder from the window and made her way first to Austria and Russia, and ultimately to England.[47] Napoleon had at the same time tried to arrest her husband, then Ambassador at Würtemberg, but burning his papers he fled in time. Occupying himself with archæology, Smith ultimately settled at Caen, where he died.

William Smith interests us as the grandfather of Miss Florence Nightingale, and also of George Eliot’s friend, Barbara Smith, Madame Bodichon, whose husband introduced the eucalyptus into Algeria. He is said to have been the only English Nonconformist in the Parliament of 1802, and his name was given to an Act of 1819, which relieved Unitarians from speaking of the Trinity in the marriage-service responses. Lord Hardwicke’s Act of 1752, while repressing irregular marriages, had inflicted a grievance on Dissenters by requiring all marriages except those of Quakers and Jews to be solemnised in churches. Smith, in 1822, tried to follow up his success of 1819 by introducing civil marriage, but his bill, though passing through the Commons, was shelved in the Lords, so that it was not till 1836 that Lord John Russell revived and carried it. A London merchant, Smith had sat for Sudbury and Camelford. On his standing in 1802 for Norwich, where Dissenters were and still are numerous, Thomas Grenville, foreseeing that he would oust Windham, directed his brother the Duke of Buckingham to return Windham for St. Mawes. ‘Smith,’ said Grenville, ‘was cooping up voters in barns and houses, where they are kept drunk till the day of poll; and in short, trying all the means of mischief that his fertile talents can supply in the mysteries of electioneering.’[48] Smith, who was much respected, sat for Norwich till his death in 1835, and was succeeded by his son, Benjamin Smith.

Sturt, member for Bridport since 1784, was bred to the sea, but came unexpectedly into possession of the family estate in Dorsetshire. He retained, however, his liking for the water, had a narrow escape in a cutter race, and in 1800 was awarded the Humane Society’s medal for rescuing a man from drowning. He now went to stay at Havre. In 1801 he had obtained £100 damages from the Marquis of Blandford, son of the Duke of Marlborough, for the seduction of his wife, Lady Mary Anne Ashley, daughter of the Earl of Shaftesbury, whom he had married in 1788. The damages were small because Sturt himself had had an intrigue with Madame Krumholz, a famous harpist. Sturt’s sister, and he himself doubtless, had known Madame Dubarry on her visit to London in search of her stolen jewels. His nephew and namesake was an eminent Australian explorer. His grandson was in 1876 created Lord Alington.

The brothers Thellusson were sons of the Swiss merchant Pierre Thellusson, who settled in England, married in 1761 Anne Woodford of Southampton, and died in 1797, leaving a strange will, by which two-thirds of his property was to accumulate until the death of his nine then living descendants for the benefit of the eldest male descendant of his three sons. The sons disputed the will, but it was pronounced valid, though an Act of 1800 prevented any similar eccentricities. The testator’s object, moreover, deservedly failed, for the litigation of 1856–1859 on the construction of the will devoured a large portion of the inheritance, which meanwhile had not inordinately increased. In visiting Paris the Thellussons may have hoped to recover money due to their father, for he had been French Consul in London, and was denounced by John Oswald at the Jacobin Club on the 30th September 1792, on the authority of Paine and Frost, as a vilifier of the Revolution and a friend of Pitt. Thellusson, Oswald alleged, had refused to forward consignments of arms to France. If we are to believe a scurrilous pamphlet by Rutledge, Necker, who was originally clerk to Thellusson’s brother George in Paris, made the acquaintance of his future wife, Suzanne Curchod, through her being governess to the children of the Thellussons’ sister, Madame de Vermeron. Fournier[49] suggests that the testator’s object was not for the money to accumulate, but to meet the possible claims of descendants of guillotined Frenchmen who had intrusted funds to him; but this is obviously far-fetched. The eldest son, who did not visit Paris, was in 1806 created Lord Rendlesham.

Thompson, if, as seems probable, the same man as the M.P. for Midhurst 1807–1818, was the father of General Thomas Perronet Thompson, M.P., the free-trade orator. Tierney spent the summer and autumn of 1802 at Boulogne, but did not go on to Paris. One would have expected him, however, to search there for traces of his father, who died during the Revolution after thirty years’ residence in that capital. Tyrrwhitt was secretary to the Prince of Wales, and was afterwards Usher of the Black Rod. He was knighted in 1814. Villiers, eventually third Earl of Clarendon, was famous for telling long-winded stories. He was Envoy to Portugal from 1808 to 1810, and was uncle to the diplomatist of our own time. On his honeymoon in 1791, on his way to Rome, he saw the French king and queen dine in public at the Tuileries. Coulson Walhope, son of the Earl of Portsmouth, was on his honeymoon trip, from which, as we shall see, he never returned. Sir Thomas Wallace had previously visited Italy. He subsequently held various public posts, and in 1828 became Lord Wallace. Wyndham was brother of Lord Egremont; his other brother William, ambassador at Florence, had visited Paris in 1791. Lord Yarmouth, son and successor of the Marquis of Hertford, was destined to be depicted in Vanity Fair as Lord Steyne and in Coningsby as Lord Monmouth. He had in 1798 married Maria Fagniani, putative daughter of John Baptist Fagniani. Her paternity was claimed both by George Selwyn and the Marquis of Queensberry, commonly known as ‘Old Q.’ The latter bequeathed his property to Lord and Lady Yarmouth, a codicil which reduced the amount to £250,000 being declared invalid.

Eight of these M.P.’s, Erskine, Fitzpatrick, Francis, Jekyll, St. John, William Smith, Lord R. Spencer, and Thompson had voted with Fox in 1794 for peace with France.

Several ex-M.P.’s may be here mentioned. Passing over Beckford, of whom we shall speak hereafter, there was Philip Champion de Crespigny, King’s Proctor, who sat for Sudbury in 1796. Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh had sat in two Parliaments for Portsmouth. Sir Abraham Hume, an F.R.S., had represented Petersfield from 1774 to 1780. He collected old paintings, fossils, and minerals, and ultimately published a biography of Titian. Sir Elijah Impey, ex-Chief-Justice of Bengal, had sat for New Romney in 1790. He was solicitous of recovering money invested in the French funds, and Madame Grand is said to have welcomed his arrival as likely to facilitate proof of the divorce required for her marriage to Talleyrand, for Impey had tried Grand’s suit against her. Sir John Ingilby was elected for East Retford in 1781. Temple Luttrell, who sat for Melbourne Port from 1774 to 1780, was son of Lord Irnham and brother to the Earl of Carhampton. His sister Anne, widow of Christopher Horton, had married the Duke of Cumberland, so that when Luttrell was arrested at Boulogne in 1793 he was styled George III.’s brother-in-law. In 1789, as a member of the Jamaica Council, he drew up a remonstrance to Parliament against the suppression of the slave-trade. He had shown more enlightenment in the House of Commons in advocating conciliation to the American colonies and in predicting their indomitable resistance. Matthew Montagu, nephew and heir of the great society leader Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson), to whose gatherings the term blue-stocking was first applied, had sat in Parliament from 1786 to 1790 and was destined to re-enter it in 1806. In 1820 he succeeded his brother as Lord Rokeby. Richard Oliver had in 1790 represented the County Limerick, for which his son now sat; we shall hear of him again. William Maule Ramsay, younger son of the Earl of Dalhousie, regained his seat in Parliament in 1805. In 1831 he was created Lord Panmure, and afterwards succeeded his cousin in the title of Lord Dalhousie. We shall hear of him, too, again. Henry Seymour, a kinsman of the Duke of Somerset, had been the penultimate lover of Madame Dubarry.[50] He arrived with his daughter Georgina, widow of Comte de Durfort, as early as the 1st November 1801, but did not think it necessary or feasible, it seems, to claim the restitution of his private papers, confiscated on his flight in 1792. Even if he had claimed them he would have missed a bundle of Madame Dubarry’s love-letters, which had somehow been abstracted, and was discovered many years afterwards in a Paris bookstall. Possibly having been registered as an émigré, as though a foreigner could logically be so treated, he feared that to claim his papers might have entailed a denial of his right to revisit France. His French wife, whom he had dismissed on good grounds, was probably the ‘Lady’ Seymour who in 1806 was living on a handsome income at Cleves. Sir Robert Smyth, who had been unseated at Cardigan in 1775, but had sat for Colchester in 1785–1790, had, like Luttrell, suffered imprisonment in Paris during the Revolution, but through Paine, with whom his wife corresponded while he was in prison, had in 1796 obtained a passport for Hamburg. He now returned to Paris to open a bank, but making a journey back to London he suddenly died there in April 1802.

Prospective M.P.’s may here be mentioned. There was Lord Althorp, who, just of age, was sent by his father Earl Spencer, the great bibliophile, to France and Italy in order to cease running into debt and to acquire polish; but he refused to go into Continental society, was bored by pictures, and came home as unmannerly as ever, without having even learned French. He nevertheless developed into a prominent Whig statesman, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Grey Cabinet. His accession to the Upper House in 1835 gave William IV. a pretext for dismissing the ministry. He then retired into private life. Alexander Baring, son of Sir Francis and afterwards Lord Ashburton, sat in the House of Commons from 1806 to 1835, was President of the Board of Trade in 1834, and in 1842 negotiated the Maine Boundary Treaty with America. A Mr. Benyon was probably Benjamin Benyon, M.P. for Stafford in 1819. Lord Blayney, who in 1806 was returned for Old Sarum, was shortly destined to revisit France against his will. Sir Charles Burrell, another visitor, was elected in the same year for Shoreham. Arthur Harrington Champernowne, elected for Saltash in 1806, was a friend of Samuel Rogers. Cæsar Colclough, who, imprisoned in 1793–1794,[51] had apparently remained in France, became in 1818 M.P. for Wexford. William Congreve, the inventor of the rocket bearing his name, became in 1812 member for Gatton, and in 1814 succeeded to his father’s baronetcy. Sir Arthur Chichester sat for Carrickfergus in 1812. General Sir Charles Grogan Craufurd, son of Sir Alexander and nephew of Quintin Craufurd, translated Tieck’s History of the Seven Years’ War, and in 1800 had married the Dowager-Duchess of Newcastle. Sent as Commissioner to the Austrian army, he was wounded, and resigned his post in favour of his brother Robert, M.P. for East Retford in 1806. He died in 1821.

Lord Duncannon, who in 1844 succeeded his father as Earl of Bessborough, but in 1802 was only just of age, supported Catholic Emancipation, introduced O’Connell to the House of Commons when he refused to take the oath, and helped to frame the Reform Bill. In 1831 he was Commissioner of Woods and Forests; in 1834 he was called up to the Lords, and from 1846 till his death in 1848 he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Robert Ferguson of Raith was a Scottish member in 1806–1807 and again in 1831–1841. Of him we shall hear, not to his credit. Hudson Gurney, a Norwich banker, of a famous Quaker family, had an uncle Bartlett Gurney, F.S.A., who in 1796 all but defeated Windham at Norwich. Bartlett had turned Unitarian, but in 1803 was buried with the Quakers. Hudson also renounced Quakerism, or rather Quakerism renounced him, on account of his contributing to the war patriotic fund of 1804, yet friendly relations were afterwards revived. He sat in six parliaments, and died in 1864 at the age of eighty-nine. I remember seeing him as a corpulent old man, who had to be lifted in and out of his carriage.

William Haldimand, son of a Swiss merchant settled in London, was so precocious a financier that at twenty-five years of age—seven years after his Paris visit—he became a director of the Bank of England. His brother, who accompanied him, apparently died young. William represented Ipswich from 1820 to 1826. He was munificent in his gifts to charities and to the Greek war of liberation. In 1828 he retired to Lausanne, and on his death in 1862 bequeathed most of his property to a blind asylum there. His sister was Mrs. Marcet, the friend of Sydney Smith, and well known as a populariser of science and political economy. Hugh Hamersley, M.P. for Helston in 1812, will come under another category. Richard Heber, elder brother of the bishop, and a great book-collector, was member for Oxford University from 1821 to 1826. Sir Thomas Liddell, elected for Durham in 1806, became Lord Ravensworth and father of a Dean of Christchurch. James Mackintosh, who in 1813, on his return from Bombay, where he had been recorder, was elected for Nairn, and retained the seat till his death in 1832, was the author of the famous answer to Burke. Napoleon, unaware that he had since ‘abhorred, abjured, and for ever renounced the French Revolution, the greatest scourge of the world, and the chief stain upon human annals,’ complimented Mackintosh on his pamphlet,—or rather intended to have done so—for the order of presentations having been altered he addressed the compliment to some other Englishman. Shortly after his return Mackintosh defended Peltier, prosecuted for libelling Napoleon. Viscount Maitland, afterwards Earl of Lauderdale, was returned for Camelford in 1806. William (afterwards Sir William) Oglander sat for Bodmin. Viscount Ossulston sat for Berwick in 1820. Samuel Romilly, who in 1806 became Solicitor-General and M.P. for Queensborough, was the great advocate of the mitigation of the penal code, so as to limit capital punishment to cases of murder. He had seen Paris in August 1789. Sir William Rowley represented Suffolk in 1812, Sir Thomas Turton, Southwark in 1810–1820, and Sir Walter Stirling, St. Ives in 1807. William Young, whose father wrote a history of Athens, sat for St. Mawes and became Governor of Tobago.

There was a perfect swarm of peers and peers’ sons;[52] the elderly or middle-aged anxious to see how Paris looked after the Revolution, the younger eager to make acquaintance with it. Some, moreover, were on their way to Italy, for Lemaitre found at Naples, in February 1803, Lords Aberdeen, Mount Cashell, Grantham, Althorp, Brooke, and Beverley, besides Sir Charles Douglas, Sir Thomas Tancred, and the Cheshire Egertons, with Lady Hester Stanhope in their charge. The Dowager-Duchess of Cumberland, whose marriage led to the Royal Marriage Act, a widow since 1790, was also on her way to Nice, but stayed a month in Paris for medical advice. According to the Times she paid a hundred guineas a month for second-rate apartments, and not having been presented at the Court of St. James’s was not received by Madame Bonaparte, although previously to the Revolution she had been treated at Metz as a royal personage.

The Duke of Bedford interests us chiefly as the father of Lord John Russell, then a boy of eleven, who was left behind with his two brothers at school. The Duke was not a stranger to France. In March 1788 he and his wife, the latter on the verge of her confinement, were staying at Montpellier and waiting for that event. Her father, Viscount Torrington, who was apparently living in Paris, wrote to Louis XVI.’s Minister of the Household to ask what should be done to certify the expected birth. This was of some importance, for the traveller’s elder brother was unlikely to marry. The Minister advised him to call in two local notaries, adding that it might be well to get a certificate also from the British Embassy at Paris.[53] The child was born on the 13th May, and became heir to the Duke of Bedford, for his father had in March 1802 succeeded his brother, who bequeathed £5000 to Fox. He had learned French when a youth at Orleans, together with the Duke of Cleveland, and the Duke of Dorset then took them both to Versailles, where Marie Antoinette played billiards with them. Both went on to Rome where they went to Cardinal York’s weekly receptions. Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh was now his travelling companion. The Duke’s arrival on the 20th April 1803 was considered a sign of the duration of peace, but he apparently went over to fetch the Duchess of Gordon and her daughter Lady Georgina, whom he, a widower since October 1801, took for his second wife five weeks after his return. Georgina had been engaged to his deceased brother, who left her a lock of his hair, and her mother made her go into mourning for him, saying, ‘It is a feather in a girl’s cap to have been intended for the Duke of Bedford.’[54] The Duchess was reported to have said that she hoped to see Napoleon breakfast in Ireland, dine in London, and sup at Gordon Castle, but this is a manifest invention. There may be more truth in the story that she obtained recruits in 1794 for her son’s Highland regiment (now the 2nd Gordon Highlanders) by placing a shilling between her lips to be kissed by them, yet this seems a variation of the Duchess of Devonshire’s kiss to a Westminster elector. She died in 1812. As for her daughter Georgina, who had an illness in Paris, she was a great dancer, and frequently danced, as Napoleon told Lord Ebrington at Elba in 1814, with his step-son Eugène Beauharnais. The Times, indeed, insinuated that she set her cap at the step-father himself. ‘It is certain,’ said that journal on the 12th January 1803,

‘that some of our travelling Nudes of Fashion intended to conquer the Conqueror of the Continent. What glory would it have brought to this Country, if it could have boasted of giving a Mistress, or a Wife, to the First Consul. How pretty would sound Lady G—— (we mean Lady Godiva) Bonaparte?’

Wraxall’s story that the Duchess wanted to wed her daughter to Eugène is confirmed by Maurice Dupin, George Sand’s father, who met them at a dinner-party, and wrote to his mother that they were in love with each other, but that Napoleon would not listen to the match. Georgina, he added, was reputed a beauty, but like Eugène lacked a good mouth and teeth.[55]

The Duke of Newcastle, afterwards famous for justifying the eviction at Newark of forty tenants who refused to vote for his nominee by saying, ‘May I not do what I will with my own?’ was destined to give Gladstone his first seat in the House of Commons; which Gladstone, however, resigned in 1846 on joining Peel in free-trade. The Duke was yet only a youth of seventeen, in charge of his step-father Sir Charles Craufurd, who has been already mentioned. The Duke of Somerset deserves notice only as the father of the Duke of our time, who was first Lord of the Admiralty and an agnostic writer.

The Marchioness of Donegal was accompanied by her sisters Mary and Philippa Godfrey, friends of Thomas Moore. The Marquis and Marchioness of Tweeddale (she was daughter of Lord Lauderdale) took with them their young son, Lord James Hay.

Of the Earls, Aberdeen—Byron’s ‘travelled thane, Athenian Aberdeen’—was the future Prime Minister of 1852. His six weeks in Paris were said to have cost him £3000. Lady Bessborough had been at school at Versailles before the Revolution, and had been noticed by Marie Antoinette. Beverley, a son of the Duke of Northumberland, had been created a peer in 1790. He had distinguished himself by his courage during the riots of 1780, and we have already heard of his son. Cadogan had divorced his wife in 1796, so that she travelled by herself. Camelford had refused to illuminate for the peace, and his house had consequently been sacked. He pretended in 1801 to be an American named Rushworth, but was arrested, and after some days expelled. In March 1803 he again landed at Calais, but was discovered and apprehended, for he was said to have boasted in London that he would kill Bonaparte. He wrote, however, from the Temple prison an abject letter to Napoleon, pleading that his mother would die if she heard of his arrest. He also threw out of the window a letter to Lord Grenville, which the picker-up was requested to forward, but it was intercepted. He was sent to Boulogne and shipped to England.[56] Jackson was afraid of his committing suicide, so that he must have shown symptoms of the mental derangement which led in 1804 to a fatal duel with Captain Best. He was reputed to be the best shot in England. Carhampton had in 1796 been commander-in-chief in Ireland. It was reported that incensed at having, in company with other English, to wait three hours in an anteroom without chairs, before being received by Talleyrand, he went next day to the Tuileries in colonel’s uniform without epaulettes. Bonaparte asked him therefore whether he was a militia officer. ‘No,’ he proudly replied. ‘Then what is your rank in the army?’ ‘I was Commander-in-Chief when the French army under General Hoche endeavoured to land in Ireland.’[57] It was scarcely fair of Carhampton thus to retaliate on Napoleon for Talleyrand’s discourtesy.

Cavan had just returned from Egypt, where he had commanded a division under Abercromby. The Cholmondeleys had been in Paris in 1791, their son and heir being born there. We shall hear presently of their equipages. The Countess (afterwards Marchioness) Conyngham is notorious for her liaison with George IV. Egremont was long a prominent figure in London society, but is more deserving of notice as one of the earliest patrons of Turner the artist. Elgin, of marble fame, was on his way home from the Constantinople embassy. We shall have to speak hereafter of his wife and her paramour Ferguson. Fife, afterwards a distinguished general in the Peninsular War, wounded at Talavera and Cadiz, was great-uncle of the present Duke of Fife. Fitzwilliam had in 1794 been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, where his three months’ rule was looked back to with regret. Lady Granard, sister of the Earl of Moira, on her honeymoon in 1780 had seen Cardinal York, and had also witnessed a review by Frederic II. Guilford was the son of the Lord North who lost us our American colonies. He stayed seven months, and would have remained longer but for the rupture.

Lady Kenmare (Mary, daughter of Michael Aylmer) was known for her Sunday evening receptions in London, and for a romantic story of her husband’s attachment to her before his first wife’s death, or even before his first marriage. A Gerald Aylmer, who also visited Paris, was probably her kinsman. The Countess of Kingston, who must not be confused with the Duchess of Kingston, the notorious bigamist, was accompanied by two unmarried daughters, probably also by her other daughter, Lady Mount Cashell. One of these daughters had in 1798 been the occasion of a duel in which her brother shot his adversary. Lady Lanesborough, daughter of the Earl of Belvedere, had, as we shall see, found a second and plebeian husband. Lauderdale had witnessed and sympathised with the Revolution, Dr. (father of Sir John) Moore then accompanying him as physician. His Whig opinions had made him lose his seat as a Scottish representative peer in the House of Lords, and his anxiety for the maintenance of peace made Whitworth shut his door to him as one of ‘our rascally countrymen.’[58] His son, moreover, a youth of eighteen, styled himself ‘citizen’ Maitland.[59] Minto, the Gilbert Elliot who, ward of David Hume, was at school with Mirabeau, and was consequently sent over in 1790 to bribe him into keeping France neutral in our threatened quarrel with Spain over Nootka Sound, had been Governor of Corsica. He was one of the earliest visitors, was on his way home from the Vienna Embassy, and was destined to be Viceroy of India. Mount Edgecumbe was an amateur actor and musical composer. His wife,[60] with their young daughter Emma Sophia, afterwards Countess Brownlow and writer of Reminiscences of a Septuagenarian, had previously been to Spa, where she met the Duchess of Gordon, the Conynghams, the Bradfords, Charles and Lady Charlotte Greville, and Dudley and Lady Susan Ryder. She had a serious illness in Paris. Lord Oxford had a great admiration for Napoleon and also for Murat. His wife, who required change of climate, was very handsome, though not rivalling Madame Tallien. Pembroke was the father of Sidney Herbert, the statesman of our time, and in 1806 was Ambassador at Vienna. He stayed three months, and being an excellent observer and a patient listener, his account of Paris was eagerly sought for. Shaftesbury, uncle of the philanthropist of our day, took his wife, a daughter of Sir John Webb, and their daughter. Winchilsea was the father of the fanatical Orangeman who in 1829 fought a duel, on account of Catholic Emancipation, with Wellington, but happily without bloodshed. Viscount Falkland, less fortunate, was killed in a duel in 1809. Viscountess Maynard was the notorious Nancy Parsons whom Lord Maynard had married in 1766, in spite of her antecedents. She had been a widow since 1775, and had been the mistress of the late Duke of Bedford, who, by his will, continued his annuity to her of £2000. Lord Monck, who took over his wife and two daughters, was the grandfather of the Viceroy of Canada. He died shortly after his return, in June 1802. Viscount Strangford was afterwards Ambassador at Lisbon, Stockholm, Constantinople, and St. Petersburg, and translated Camoëns’ Lusiad. Moore, Rogers, and Croker were among his friends.

We now come to the lowest grade of the peerage. Barrington, leaving a wife behind, but taking a mistress with him, probably went, from what we afterwards hear, to escape his English creditors; but we shall find that he got into debt in France. Blayney has been already mentioned among prospective M.P.’s, for, being an Irish peer like Palmerston, he was eligible for the Lower House. Cahir, who crossed over as early as June 1801, was afterwards created Earl of Glengall; he remained till April 1802. Invitations to Madame Bonaparte’s receptions were commonly obtained through his wife’s good offices. Lady Carington was the wife of one of Pitt’s banker peers. There was a rumour that Pitt intended to marry her eldest daughter. It was her grandson who, in 1872, having horsewhipped Grenville Murray on the steps of the Reform Club on account of a scurrilous article on his family in Broad Arrow, was convicted of assault at Clerkenwell sessions, but was simply bound over to keep the peace. Murray shortly afterwards became an outlaw. Cloncurry in 1859 published his reminiscences. He was accompanied by his three sisters, of whom more anon. He dined with Napoleon, and made acquaintance with Kosciusko, Helen Williams, and Madame Récamier. He invited the two Emmets to dinner the day before Robert’s return to Ireland, from which he could not be dissuaded. Cloncurry in the winter of 1802 proceeded to Italy, where he presented a telescope to Cardinal York, who gave him one of his medals, and he returned home after the rupture by way of Germany.[61] Lady Crofton, widow of Sir Thomas Crofton, was a baroness in her own right. Her daughter Frances accompanied her. Grantham, who was on his way to Italy, in 1833 succeeded his aunt in the De Grey earldom. He was first Lord of the Admiralty in 1834–1835, and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1841–1844, was a collector of sculptures, was President of the Institution of British Architects, and published Characteristics of the Duke of Wellington. He was uncle of the present Marquis of Ripon, ex-Viceroy of India. Holland, who had seen Paris in 1791, protested in 1815 against Napoleon’s captivity at St. Helena, and Lady Holland, the divorced wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, forwarded the prisoner books, in gratitude for which kindness Napoleon sent her an antique diamond presented to him by the Pope. Lady Holland’s receptions were afterwards famous. Hutchinson had succeeded Sir Ralph Abercromby in Egypt. On his brother’s death he became Earl of Donoughmore. In the autumn of 1789 he had applied at Paris for an escort to go and rejoin his family near Amiens, disturbances having broken out there, but was told that order had been restored. He was Lafayette’s aide-de-camp from 1789 to 1792. Northwick was an art connoisseur. Stawell was Surveyor of Customs for the Port of London.

Of the eldest sons or other successors of peers, Eardley deserves notice on account of the history of his family. Sampson Gideon, a Portuguese Jew, made a fortune in London, and as a reward for financial services obtained a baronetcy, not for himself, for a Jew was then deemed ineligible, but for his son, then at Eton, at the age of fifteen. That son, Sampson the second, was brought up a Christian by his English mother, and was nicknamed ‘Mr. Pitt’s Jew.’ In 1789 he was made an Irish peer as Lord Eardley, a title explained by his having married, in 1766, Maria, the daughter of Sir John Eardley Wilmot, Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas. He was elected first for Coventry and afterwards for Wallingford, but retired in 1802. He had two sons, Sampson and William; the former was the visitor to Paris, but both died before their father, with whom the peerage expired in 1824. His three daughters married Lord Say and Sele, Sir Culling Smith, M.P., and Colonel Childers. Childers, the well-known member of the Gladstone Cabinet, was doubly descended from Pitt’s Jew, for his father was an Eardley Childers, and his mother a Culling Smith. Colonel Molesworth was drowned with his wife on his way to the Cape in 1815.

The younger sons of peers comprised Arthur Annesley (son of Viscount Annesley), Lord William Bentinck, afterwards Viceroy of India (Duke of Portland), William Brodrick (Viscount Midleton), Lord John Campbell (Duke of Argyll), Lord George Cavendish (Duke of Devonshire), Robert Clifford (Lord Clifford), Colonel Robert Clive (Lord Clive), Edward Spencer Cowper (Earl Cowper), Keppel Craven (Lord Craven), Francis Cust (Earl Brownlow), Henry Dillon (Viscount Dillon), Lord Robert Stephen Fitzgerald (Duke of Leinster), Lord Archibald Hamilton (Duke of Hamilton), William Hill (Lord Berwick), John King (Lord King), George Knox (Lord Northland), Lord Frederic Montagu (Duke of Manchester), Augustus John Francis Moreton (Earl of Ducie), Arthur Paget (Lord Uxbridge), Henry Pierrepont (Viscount Newark), Lord Arthur Somerset (Duke of Beaufort), John Talbot (Baroness Talbot de Malahide), and John Trevor (Viscount Hampden). Charles James Fox, Edward Paget, General Fitzpatrick, Lord Robert Spencer, and Charles Wyndham, have been already mentioned as M.P.’s.

There were also several daughters of peers. Lady Elizabeth Foster, widow of John Thomas Foster, M.P., was daughter of the Earl of Bristol, and there were strange stories of her relations with the Duke of Devonshire. According to the generally accepted version[62] the Duchess, famous in election annals, was forced by her parents, at sixteen years of age, to marry the Duke, though she was in love with the Duke of Hamilton, who killed himself in despair. She refused, however, to allow him the rights of a husband, and Lady Elizabeth Foster, living harmoniously with them, had several children by the Duke, who were brought up under an assumed name. In 1789, however, the Duchess losing £100,000 at play at Spa, the Duke went over and paid her debts on condition of consummating the marriage. The result was the birth of a son and heir at Paris in January 1790. The Duchess died in 1806, and three years afterwards Lady Elizabeth agreed to marry the widower. Gainsborough painted her as Lady Foster in the picture mysteriously stolen in London in 1875 and recovered in America in 1900. She was now accompanied to Paris by her legitimate son, Augustus John Foster, who was just of age. In 1811 he was sent as Envoy to Washington, in 1814 to Copenhagen, and in 1824 to Turin. In 1831 he received a baronetcy. Lady Isabel Style, daughter of Lord Powerscourt, and widow since 1774 of Sir Charles Style, had been a prisoner in France in 1793, and now revisited France. Lady Anne Saltmarsh was daughter of the Earl of Fingall. Lady Hester Stanhope, daughter of Earl Stanhope, who was not yet her uncle Pitt’s housekeeper, was, to avoid a stepmother, travelling with the Egertons, probably Sir Peter Warburton Egerton.

There was also Lady Mary Whaley, née Lawless, the widow since 1800 of an Irish M.P., nicknamed Jerusalem Whaley, for, having said in joke that he was going to Jerusalem, he won a bet (of £15,000 it is said) that he would really go thither. At sixteen years of age this Thomas Whaley, inheriting £15,000 from his father, was sent to Paris with a ‘bear-leader’ to learn French. He there bought a town and country house, kept a pack of hounds, entertained company, and gambled, losing £14,000 at a sitting. He returned to Ireland, compounded with his creditors, and squandered the Jerusalem bet money. He revisited Paris in 1791, and witnessed the King’s return from Varennes. He became a cripple for life by jumping from a drawing-room window on to the roof of a passing hackney-coach, or, as we should now say, cab.[63] He gambled at Newmarket, Brighton, and London, and eventually settled in the Isle of Man, where he brought up an illegitimate family.[64] He married, in January 1800, Lady Mary Catherine Lawless, daughter of Lord Cloncurry, but died in the following November. His widow lived till 1831. She was accompanied by her sister, Lady Valentia Lawless, who afterwards married Sir Francis Burton, Lord Conyngham’s half-brother, and by Lady Charlotte, who became Lady Dunsany. There was likewise a Lady Giffard, probably Lady Charlotte Courtenay, daughter of the Earl of Devon, who in 1788 had married Thomas Giffard of Chillington, Staffordshire. Lady Charlotte Greville, née Charlotte Bentinck, daughter of the Duke of Portland, was there with her husband Charles Greville, father of the diarist. Miss Caroline Vernon, maid of honour to the Queen, was a daughter of Lord Vernon and died in 1815. Lady Catherine Beauclerk was daughter of the Duke of St Albans.

The baronets included, besides several already mentioned, William Call, John Chichester, Simon Clark, John Coghill, William Cooper, James Craufurd, Herbert Croft, Thomas Clavering, Michael Cromie, George Dallas, James De Bathe, Beaumont Dixie, N. Dukinfield, Alexander Grant, John Honywood, John Hope, John Ingilby, William James, Richard Jodrell, Thomas Lavie, John Morshead, George Prescott, George Shipley, Charles Talbot, Thomas Tancred, Grenville Temple, Henry Tichborne, Thomas Webb, Robert John Wilmot, and Charles Wolseley.

Some of these will be mentioned hereafter. At present we need speak only of Sir Charles Wolseley, who, like Sir Francis Burdett, boxed the political compass. He witnessed, and apparently took part in, the capture of the Bastille. In 1819 the Birmingham Radicals nominated him their so-called ‘legislatorial attorney,’ and in the following year he was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for a seditious speech at Stockport. He ultimately gave up political life, embraced Catholicism in 1837, and died in 1846.

Then there were also sons of baronets: William Abdy, who succeeded to the title in July 1803, Ashby Apreece, who predeceased his father in 1807, Alexander Don, Charles Jerningham, Raymond Pelly, John Wombwell, formerly a merchant at Alicante, Ralph Woodford, afterwards Governor of Bermuda, John Broughton, and William Oglander, who, already mentioned, succeeded to the title in 1806, while there were two future baronets, Thomas Hare and Charles Cockerell.

Next to legislators and aristocrats, military men were the most numerous class of visitors. Some passed through Paris on their way home from Egypt, which had just been evacuated, and others were actuated not so much by curiosity or love of dissipation as by professional duty, for they did not know how soon they might not have to encounter Bonaparte’s legions. Of this swarm of visitors I can only mention a few. There were the two sons of Sir Ralph Abercromby, who had been killed at Alexandria. The elder was General George already mentioned, who, eventually succeeding his mother in the peerage, became Lord Abercromby. The younger, Colonel Sir John, served with distinction, but died at forty-four years of age without reaching the highest grade. Sir Charles Ashworth became a general. Captain Benjamin Bathurst, son of the Bishop of Norwich, then eighteen years of age, was the diplomatist who in 1809 mysteriously disappeared on returning from a mission to Vienna. Napoleon was accused of having him murdered, but the probability is that he was killed for the sake of his valuables by the ostler of a German inn who was afterwards unaccountably affluent. His daughter Rose, at the age of seventeen, was drowned at Rome in 1824 by her horse slipping backwards into the Tiber, and his brother in a race at Rome was killed by a fall from his horse. Three disasters in one family.

William Bosville, commonly styled Colonel, though he had only been a lieutenant in the Guards, must be ranked with soldiers for want of any other suitable category, though he was more wit than soldier. He had, however, served in the American War. He dined every Sunday with Horne Tooke, and, as we have seen, accompanied Sir F. Burdett, whose election he had zealously promoted. He dressed like a courtier of George II.’s time. He visited Cobbett in prison and presented him with £1000. Paine, on reaching the United States, sent a message to ‘my good friend Bosville.’ Francis Burke, who had been in the Franco-Irish brigade, became a British general.

General James Callender had served in the Seven Years’ War and had been Secretary to the Paris Embassy under the Duke of Dorset, who, on his recall in October 1789, deputed him to wind up his accounts. He had more recently been Inspector-General at Naples, and had been sent by Nelson to the Ionian Islands, where he remained till the peace. While in Paris he made the acquaintance of a Madame Sassen, a German, and on being detained he sent her to Scotland with a power of attorney, styling her his beloved wife, to see after his affairs. When released, however, he denied having married her, and the Court of Session declared the marriage not proven, but awarded the lady £300 damages. This latter decision was annulled by the House of Lords, and the lady passed the rest of her life in fruitless litigation. Callender, who married three times, died in 1832 at the age of eighty-seven. The French Police Register describes him, the reason why is not obvious, as a swindler. On succeeding in 1810 to the estates of his cousin, Sir Alexander Campbell, he assumed the baronetcy also, but without right to it.[65] General John Francis Cradock had served in India and in Egypt, was destined to serve in Spain, and in 1819 became Lord Howden. He altered the spelling of his name to Caradoc. His son, aide-de-camp to Wellington in Paris in 1814, and afterwards military attaché at the Paris Embassy, there married in 1830 the widow of the Russian General Bagration, an ex-mistress of Metternich. In July 1830 he was deputed by the Duke of Orleans to follow the fugitive Charles X. and ask him to confide to him his grandson that he might be proclaimed king. Charles was inclined to consent, but the child’s mother, the Duchess of Berri, dissuaded him, not thinking that her boy would be in safe keeping. On Caradoc reporting his failure Louis Philippe accepted the crown.

James Ferrier, brother of Susan the novelist, had figured in the siege of Seringapatam, and was questioned about it by Napoleon, always interested in India, which he thought he should have conquered but for Sir Sidney Smith and Acre. ‘When he speaks,’ Ferrier wrote home to his sister, ‘he has one of the finest expressions possible.’ General Dalrymple had visited Paris in 1791. General Henry Edward Fox was a brother of the great statesman. He was on his way home from Egypt, where he had refused to allow Lord Cavan to ship Cleopatra’s needle.[66] Cavan had dug it out of the sand of centuries and set it upright, but Fox seems to have thought Cavan’s love of antiquities an absurd craze, and the needle consequently had to wait seventy years for transport to England. Afterwards Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, Ambassador at Palermo, and Governor of Portsmouth, Fox was accompanied by his son Stephen, also destined for diplomacy. General George Higginson, who married in 1825 a daughter of Lord Kilmorey, lived till 1866, and his widow reached the age of ninety-eight, surviving till 1890. General Baron Charles Hompesch was a Hanoverian in the English service. Very shortsighted, in 1806 he brushed against a man named Richardson and two ladies in a London street, and a duel ensued, in which his antagonist was wounded. On his death in 1822, at the age of sixty-six, he could boast of having taken part in three sieges, seven pitched battles, and thirteen minor engagements. Robert Lovelace, probably a son of Robert Lovelace of Clapham, was reminded by Napoleon that he bore the name of Richardson’s hero. Napoleon at eighteen had devoured Clarissa Harlowe, but at St. Helena he found it unreadable.

General John Money served in America under Burgoyne, and not finding employment at home had fought for the Belgian insurgents in 1788, had joined the French army in 1792, and had witnessed the capture of the Tuileries. The German Œlsner, who met him at Verdun in October 1792, describes him as a thoroughly English Hotspur (degenkopf).[67] In 1761, aide-de-camp to General Townshend, he was famed for standing on a horse’s back without a saddle and then leaping with it at full speed over a five-barred gate. Hyde Park was the scene of his feats of horsemanship. He had a perilous balloon ascent in 1785, being nearly drowned in the North Sea. George Monro, probably a son of Sir Harry Monro, M.P., was apparently the Captain George Monro who was sent to Paris in September 1792 to send reports after the suspension of diplomatic relations.[68] He had to pretend to fraternise with the British Jacobins in Paris, but he became suspected and left in January 1793. In 1796 he complained that though promised a handsome provision no fresh post had been conferred on him.[69] General George Morgan, who went on to Nice, had been Commander-in-Chief in India, Sir Hildebrand Oakes, afterwards Governor of Malta, had served in America and Egypt. Captain Charles John O’Hara was doubtless one of the illegitimate sons of the general who should have married Mary Berry, and who was captured by the French at Toulon in 1793. Captain Samuel Owens was an equerry to George III. Major William Norman Ramsay had served in Egypt, was afterwards in the Peninsula, and was killed at Waterloo. Colonel John Rowley, of the Engineers, was an F.R.S. and inspector-general of fortifications. He became a general in 1821, and died in 1824. General Sir Charles Shipley, a distinguished military engineer, became in 1813 Governor of Granada. Colonel Edward Stack, a native of Kerry, had served in the Franco-Irish brigade before the Revolution, had been aide-de-camp to Louis XV., and had accompanied Lafayette to America. He was on board Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard when it captured the Serapis. He belonged to the orders of St. Louis and Cincinnatus. He joined the émigrés at Coblentz, but afterwards entered the English army, in which he rose during his detention in France to be major-general. He was arrested as a spy in May 1803, but was liberated on parole. If his age is correctly registered as forty-five in 1802, he was seventy-six at his death at Calais in 1833.

Captain Francis Tulloch, of the Artillery, had in singular circumstances made the acquaintance of Chateaubriand. Converted to Catholicism in London in 1790 by the Abbé Nagot, he had been induced to resign his commission and to sail with Nagot and three other priests from St. Malo for Baltimore, in order to become a priest and settle in America. Chateaubriand, a fellow-passenger, remonstrated with him, urging that, however ardent a Catholic, he ought not to abandon his family and his profession. The young man seemed to listen to him, but the priests recovered their ascendency, and on reaching port he left with them, not even bidding Chateaubriand farewell. He must, nevertheless, have changed his purpose, for in 1802 he was still in the army, and he eventually married and had seven children, two of whom wedded French noblemen. In 1822 Tulloch renewed acquaintance with Chateaubriand, then Ambassador at London. In 1827 there were family differences among his children, which gave rise to recriminatory pamphlets. Lastly, there was John Alexander Woodford, son of Sir Ralph Woodford (afterwards Governor of Trinidad, Envoy to the Hanse towns, and to Denmark). He was apparently the Colonel Woodford who in 1815 began digging up the bones of the killed at the battle of Agincourt, exciting such a commotion in the district that the French Government asked the Duke of Wellington to stop him.

Naval officers had less inducement to visit Paris, yet a number of them figure on the register. One of them, moreover, was a claimant to a French dukedom. Philippe d’Auvergne, a Jersey man, son of a navy lieutenant, had been adopted in 1788 by the last Duc de Bouillon, a descendant of Turenne, as a remote kinsman and heir (his only son being an idiot), in preference to nearer relations whom he disliked.[70] The fascinating young sailor, whose elder brother had declined the heirship, lived with the old duke till the Revolution, when he rejoined the English navy, and from his station at Montorgueil in Jersey superintended the despatch of men and money to assist the Chouans. The duke having died in 1802, d’Auvergne now went over to try and recover his confiscated estates, but the French Government arrested him in September 1802 on the ground of his co-operation in the civil war. If a French duke he was of course liable to punishment, but if still or again a British subject he could not be prosecuted for the performance of professional duties. Merry, his letter to whom was at first suppressed, claimed him as a British subject, and he was released after about a week from the Temple but expelled. Major Dumaresq, a fellow Jersey man, had been arrested with him. D’Auvergne rose to be an admiral, but the Congress of Vienna rejected his pretensions to the dukedom. His romantic career ended in 1816 at the age of seventy-one. Admiral Tollemache (afterwards Lord Huntingtower) had an adventure at Paris. He was playing billiards when a French bully nudged his arm and spoilt his stroke. On the man doing this a second time Tollemache pitched him out of the window and then, warned by the landlord, ran for his life.[71] Other actual or prospective admirals included Sir Eliab Harvey, who fought at Trafalgar, Francis Ommaney, William Hoste, Robert Dudley Oliver, John (afterwards Sir John) Talbot, John Temple, Sir John West, Sir James Hawkins Whitshed, and Sir Edward Berry. Nelson, on being condoled with by George III. on the loss of his right arm, presented Berry as his right hand, and it was Berry who caught him in his arms when wounded at the battle of the Nile.

But the most interesting and tragic naval visitor was Captain John Wesley Wright, an Irishman and secretary to Sir Sidney Smith. He had in 1796 been captured and imprisoned with Smith, and had escaped with him by means of a forged order. He was sent in March 1803 as an attaché to the Paris Embassy, albeit Whitworth pointed out to his Government that this was a very injudicious selection. Whether he remained at the embassy till Whitworth’s departure is not clear, but in May 1804 he was again captured off the coast, where he had been landing royalist insurgents. He was consequently regarded as an accomplice of Georges in the conspiracy to assassinate Napoleon, and was again confined in the Temple. Gravina, the Spanish Ambassador, interceded for his being treated as a prisoner of war, but Napoleon replied that as a criminal he could not be exchanged for an honest French officer, though he might be given up to the British Government to be dealt with as it chose, he being convinced that Lord Hawkesbury (afterwards Lord Liverpool) was alone responsible for having thrice landed conspirators against his life. This overture, if indeed it was an overture, came to nothing, and at Georges’ trial Wright was brought up as a witness. He was threatened with sentence of death by court-martial if he refused to give testimony, but he insisted on the status of a prisoner of war, responsible solely to his own Government for his acts. In October 1805 he attempted to escape, whereupon Napoleon ordered the ‘wretched assassin’ to be immured in a cell in lieu of having the run of the building. On the 25th October he was found dead in his cell. He seems to have been a religious man, and a few days before, on his mathematical instruments being taken from him, he had emphatically repudiated resort to suicide. Moreover he had on the previous day ordered three shirts and a French conversation book. The French Government, however, maintained that he had killed himself on hearing of the defeat and surrender of the Austrian army at Ulm. Sidney Smith, on revisiting France after Waterloo, made minute inquiries, and all the documents were shown him, but he could come to no positive result. Lewis Goldsmith says he was told by Réal and Desmarets that Wright had been tortured like Pichegru in order to extract evidence from him, and consequently could not have been released without this infamy committed by Fouché being exposed; but he was certainly not tortured prior to Georges’ trial, and why should he have been tortured afterwards, or, if tortured, why should he have been allowed to live till October 1805? Sidney Smith erected a monument over his tomb in Père Lachaise. It had a long Latin inscription which, without directly accusing the Napoleonic authorities, insinuated foul play, for it described Smith as ‘confined in the Temple, a prison infamous for its midnight murders.’ Strange to say this monument is now undiscoverable, and the cemetery keepers deny that Wright is on their registers, yet the record of his interment was found and duly copied in 1814.[72] Mystery is thus added to mystery.

William Sidney Smith, nephew of Sir Sidney, was captured along with Wright and was sent to Verdun. His knowledge of French proved useful in 1814, when on board the vessel which conveyed Napoleon to Elba.

Diplomatists and other public functionaries took the opportunity of making acquaintance with France or French statesmen. Francis Drake, bearing the name of the Elizabethan hero, but claiming descent from an older family, had been at the Copenhagen legation, and was in 1794 Minister at Genoa, whence he sent Grenville letters from Paris furnished to him by the royalist agent d’Antraigues, who was then at Venice, and at first in the service of Spain; but the agency was transferred to ‘Monsieur’ (afterwards Louis XVIII.), who was living at Verona.[73] D’Antraigues employed correspondents or spies in Paris who, whether from credulity or knavery, sent him the most fabulous stories written in sympathetic ink or in cipher. The letters of which Drake thus received copies were published in the second volume of the Dropmore Papers of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, where they were heralded with a flourish, but their worthlessness has been exposed by M. Aulard, the most competent French critic. This royalist agency in Paris was discovered in 1797, and on Napoleon’s advance into Italy Drake fled to Udine. Temporarily unemployed by the Foreign Office, Drake in 1802 seems to have visited not only France but Italy. In 1803 he was Minister at Munich, and was enticed by Napoleon into dealings with Méhée de la Touche, a spy who sold himself to all parties and betrayed all. Méhée was for a time a secretary to the Paris Commune and had a long career of trickery. Napoleon, always anxious to bring British diplomacy into ridicule, gave orders that a suitable man should be found to entrap Drake, and Méhée answered his purpose admirably. He pretended to give information of political feeling in France and to concert a royalist rising for the overthrow, if not for the kidnapping (a euphemism for assassination), of Napoleon. Drake advanced money to this pretended spy, who took all the letters to Paris, where they were forthwith published, bringing odium and derision on the English Foreign Office. An attempt was also made to capture Drake, as well as Spencer Smith, who was slightly implicated; but he fled precipitately, and the Elector of Bavaria at the instance of Napoleon refused any longer to recognise him as envoy. He had obviously broken the eleventh commandment, so vital in diplomacy, ‘thou shalt not be found out,’ and neither he nor Spencer Smith was again sent abroad. Wickham, however, who had equally committed himself, became in 1802 Chief Secretary for Ireland, and would have been sent as Envoy to Austria and Prussia, but that those powers, afraid of offending Napoleon, declined to receive him. He consequently retired on a pension of £1800. English diplomacy was no match for Napoleon with his flagrant violation of traditions and courtesies. Retiring to his Somerset home, Drake was highly esteemed by his neighbours; for his tombstone at St. Cuthbert’s, Wells, speaks of his integrity and firmness as a magistrate and as recorder of that city.[74] He married a daughter of Sir Herbert Mackworth, an ancestor of the poet Mackworth Praed.