Chapter III: Appendix: A. Members of Parliament, 316 (1)

_B._ PEERS AND THEIR FAMILIES, 317

_C._ LORD J. RUSSELL AT ELBA (_narrative now first
published_), 319

INDEX OF NAMES, AND LIST OF OTHER VISITORS, 325

I

INTRODUCTORY

The French Revolution, of which--philosophers regarding it as still unfinished--this book is really a chapter, produced a greater dislocation of individuals and classes than had been known in modern times. It scattered thousands of Frenchmen over Europe, some in fact as far as America and India, while, on the other hand, it attracted men of all nationalities to France. It was mainly a centrifugal, but it was partly a centripetal force, especially during the Empire; never before or since was France so much as then the focus of political and social life. Men of all ranks shared in both these movements. If princes and nobles were driven from France there were some who were attracted thither even in the early stages of the Revolution, while Napoleon later on drew around him a galaxy of foreign satellites.

To begin with the centrifugal action, history furnishes no parallel to such an overturn of thrones and flight of monarchs. With the exception of England, protected by the sea, Scandinavia and Russia by distance, and Turkey by Oriental lethargy, every dynasty of Europe was shaken or shattered by the volcano. The Bourbons became wanderers on the face of the earth. Louis XVI.’s two brothers went hither and thither before finding a secure resting-place on British soil. The elder, ‘Monsieur,’ Comte de Provence (afterwards Louis XVIII.), fled from Paris simultaneously with his crowned brother, but, more fortunate than poor Louis, safely reached Belgium. The younger, Comte d’Artois (afterwards Charles X.), had preceded him by nine months. Both re-entered France in 1792 with the German and Royalist invaders, but had soon to retreat with them. Monsieur betook himself first to Ham in Westphalia, and next to Verona, but the Doge of Venice, fearful of displeasing revolutionary France, ‘invited’ him to withdraw. Russian hospitality likewise proved ephemeral, but in England, first at Gosfield, then at Wanstead, and lastly at Hartwell, he was able quietly to await the downfall of the Corsican usurper. D’Artois found halting-places at Venice, Mantua, Brussels, and St. Petersburg, and for a few days he was a second time on French soil in the island of Yeu; but the failure of the expedition to western France soon obliged him to recross the Channel, where Holyrood and eventually London afforded him a refuge. Of the jealousies of these two exiled princes, and of the mortifications and dissensions of their retinues, it is needless to speak. The Duke of Orleans (the future Louis Philippe), deserting the Republican army along with Dumouriez, after teaching in a school in Switzerland, and after a visit to America, where he spent a night in an Indian wigwam, also repaired to England. There he was doomed to long years of inactivity, though he would fain have joined the English forces in Spain, in which case, as having fought against France, he could scarcely have grasped the French crown. The Duc de Bourbon likewise settled in England, and it would have been well had his unfortunate son, the Duc d’Enghien, followed his example. The king’s two aunts, one of them the reputed mother of the Comte de Narbonne, himself escorting them and destined to ten years of exile, found their way to Rome, but driven thence by the French, after many buffetings they ended their wanderings and their lives at Trieste.

These banished French princes had the doubtful consolation of seeing other regal or princely personages equally storm-tost. The Statthalter of Holland had to pass many years of banishment in England, and even stooped to soliciting a pecuniary indemnity from Napoleon. The Austrian and Prussian monarchs, though not actually driven out of their dominions, saw their capitals occupied by French armies, and had to bow to the stern dictates of the Conqueror. The rulers of German principalities were swept away by the hurricane. The Spanish royal family were consigned to the custody of Talleyrand at Valençay. The Portuguese princes took refuge in Brazil. Italian monarchs fared no better. The sovereigns of Piedmont had to retire to the island of Sardinia, the only possession remaining to them. The King of Naples was likewise driven from his continental dominions, British protection ensuring him a footing in Sicily. Italian dukes were rudely supplanted by Napoleon’s relatives or other puppets. Ferdinand III. of Tuscany was driven to Vienna, though subsequently assigned a duchy in Germany. Even the Papacy, which had long been unscathed by war or revolution, was overwhelmed by the current. Forced away from Rome, one Pope died in the French fortress of Valence, while another became a prisoner at Savona.

In France not merely the princes, but almost the entire nobility, were fugitives. England, Germany, Switzerland, and Russia were inundated with aristocrats, who at first, counting on a speedy and triumphant return, formed little colonies, in one of which Fanny Burney found a husband; but the exhaustion of their resources soon scattered them hither and thither. Some were descendants of Jacobite refugees, who found shelter in the very country whence their ancestors had fled. Adversity, in this as in other cases, brought out the best qualities of some and the worst of others. Frivolity and gravity, self-denial and selfishness, heroism and poltroonery, intrigue and probity, honour and unscrupulousness, existed side by side. Some formed royalist corps subsidised by foreign governments, or actually joined foreign armies, persuading themselves that they were thus fighting not against France but against a usurpation. The few who went to America, whether from choice, like the epicure Brillat Savarin, or from compulsion like Talleyrand, were spared this sad necessity of accepting foreign alms or serving foreign states. The Comte d’Estaing took office under an Indian rajah. Reduced to penury, those who remained in the Old World resorted to every conceivable expedient. The women were naturally the greatest sufferers. Delicate fingers which had never done a stroke of work had to busy themselves in dressing dolls, in embroidery, in flower or portrait painting, in nursing the sick, and even in milking cows and making butter for sale. Men brought up in luxury deemed themselves fortunate if they could earn a livelihood as journalists, translators, or teachers. More frequently they had to become book-keepers or tailors, to keep wine shops, to sing at music-halls, to act as prompters at theatres, and even to be water-carriers. Some, alas! with the connivance at least for a time of their princes, forged assignats. Welcomed in some quarters, mobbed or even expelled as vagabonds in others, they had to exchange palaces for cottages, sumptuous diet for the roughest fare, jewels and finery for rags. No wonder that humiliation and anguish drove some to suicide, and the lives of many others must have been shortened by privations. Yet many, with the traditional light-heartedness of Frenchmen,

‘Laughed the sense of misery away.’

Besides the _noblesse_, which included the episcopate, there were thousands of priests and hundreds of nuns, who, fleeing from relentless persecution, found succour from Protestant governments and Protestant philanthropy. There were also ex-deputies and publicists, whom the dungeon, and probably the guillotine, would otherwise have claimed. Lally Tollendal, the younger Mirabeau, Mounier, and Montlosier, had sat in the National or Constituent Assembly. Mallet du Pan, Etienne Dumont, Antraigues, driven to suicide, Lafayette, consigned to an Austrian fortress, and Dumouriez, offering military counsels to the English, may also be mentioned. It need hardly be said that wealthy foreigners like Quintin Craufurd, who had become numerous in Paris before the Revolution, were frightened away, leaving their property to be confiscated, for the Jacobins did not even recognise their right to quit France, which had become not merely inhospitable but dangerous. Not until the Consulate and the Empire did France again attract wealthy foreigners, or recover a portion of its then much impoverished nobility.

As for the immigration, though far less important in numbers and quality, it was not inconsiderable. Men of all nationalities hurried to Paris between 1789 and 1792 to see or serve the Revolution. There were English men and women like Paine (or shall we reckon him an American?), George Grieve, General Money, Thomas Christie, John Oswald, Helen Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft. There were Americans like Barlow, Eustace, Paul Jones, and Joshua Barney; Germans like Cloots, Trenck, and George Forster; Belgians and Dutchmen like de Kock, father of the novelist, and Proly, a natural son of the Austrian statesman Kaunitz; Poles like Wittinghoff; Russians like Strogonoff; Italians like Rotondo, Cerutti, and Buonarotti; Spaniards like Olavide and Miranda. Most of these men embraced the cause of the Revolution as a religion, and were quite ready to fight in its behalf, in defence as they imagined of liberty and enlightenment, even against their native countries. Some of them paid the penalty of their enthusiasm by the dungeon or the guillotine. It is true that when Napoleon seized the reins such illusions could scarcely have remained, but even then there were numerous foreigners eager to serve him for the sake of lucre or adventure, not to speak of Irish refugees and Poles, whom he lured by the expectation of achieving their independence. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, little foreseeing his marriage with our Princess Charlotte or his elevation to the crown of Belgium, was anxious to become one of his aides-de-camp. Some men fought by turns for and against him. The Revolution indeed, though it ended by making Europe nationalist, made it for a time cosmopolitan. Napoleon did much, moreover, to eradicate patriotism, especially in the military class. Hence Bernadotte was not the only soldier who changed sides from personal pique or according to the prospects of victory, and he did not even imagine that by his appearance as an invader he would disqualify himself for supplanting Napoleon on the French throne. Jomini, a Swiss, after serving Napoleon in high rank, offered his sword to Russia, though Napoleon was compelled to acquit him of having treacherously revealed his military secrets. And Talleyrand, while accepting Napoleon’s pay, intrigued with his foes, doubtless salving his conscience, if indeed he had a conscience, with the notion that he was thus promoting the interests of France. Few men were so scrupulous as the Duc de Richelieu, a future French statesman, in stipulating that Russia should not send him to fight against his countrymen. As to the rank and file, they had of course no choice. Belgians, Dutchmen, Germans, Poles, Italians, had to join or combat French armies according to the political exigencies of the moment or the periphery of French rule. Napoleon’s armies were thus a medley of nationalities, and the only wonder is that defections so rarely occurred.

Such was the France, such the Europe, to which this book relates. It is a chapter in the history both of England and of Napoleon. We first see Englishmen pouring over to Paris during the interlude or truce of Amiens, to make or renew acquaintance with it after ten years of hostilities, or to recover confiscated property. Peers, M.P.’s, soldiers and sailors, philosophers, scholars, merchants, were all eager to see the young Corsican who had already accomplished so much and was evidently marked out to accomplish much more. We next see hundreds of these non-combatants detained for eleven years on the paltry pretext of their being liable to militia service at home, and in defiance of all international courtesies. We see some of them not merely shifted from place to place, now permitted to reside in Paris, now relegated to provincial towns, but actually incarcerated in fortresses. We find the British Government standing on principle, and declining to exchange the thousands of French captives for these unfortunates, though there were not wanting men who urged on it the expediency of stooping to deal with Napoleon as with a mountain brigand or a barbarous chief, especially as he was arbitrarily imprisoning without trial Frenchmen whom he suspected or feared. We meet with cases of crying heartlessness among these detentions, relieved only by a very rare gleam of humanity or magnanimity. We then see the sudden collapse of this gigantic tyranny and the liberation, as from an immense aviary suddenly thrown open, of grey-headed and despondent captives. This flight of caged birds is quickly followed by, we might almost say is coincident with, an influx of fresh visitors, mostly so unmindful of the past as to take for granted the stability of the restored monarchy. We see a few tourists repairing to Elba to get a glimpse of the dethroned Emperor, one or two of them sagacious enough to forebode that reappearance on French soil which was to scare away nearly all their countrymen. The curtain falls on the Hundred Days, but it is just raised to show us Napoleon pathetically trying with little success at St. Helena to master the language of his jailers.

The centenary of the Peace of Amiens seemed a suitable occasion for writing, not a political history of that truce, for on this there is nothing new to be said, but an account of its social aspects, of the visits paid to Paris by Englishmen, which had never before been so numerous, of the impression made on each other by guests and hosts, and of the experiences of those who on the resumption of hostilities found themselves detained as prisoners. French writers have shown how Napoleon treated his own subjects; it completes the picture of him to see how he treated Englishmen, who never, except his guardians at St. Helena when jailer had become prisoner, came into such close relations with him. I may fairly claim to have broken new ground. It is true that I gave two brief chapters on this subject in 1889 in my _Englishmen in the French Revolution_, but I have since met in the French National Archives and elsewhere with a mass of additional materials which enable me to go into much greater detail. The starting-point of my researches was the discovery, for which and for other communications I am indebted to M. Léonce Grasilier, of a register of the principal foreign arrivals.[1] I have also been favoured with information from three correspondents in reply to questions respecting their ancestors, and the _Dictionary of National Biography_ has of course much assisted me, though in some instances the dates of birth given or left in doubt by it may be supplied or corrected by the register above mentioned, while visits to Paris have sometimes escaped the notice of its contributors. I have likewise consulted at the Record Office the despatches of Anthony Merry, the predecessor of Lord Whitworth at the Paris Embassy, though these, like the Whitworth series edited by Mr. Oscar Browning, seldom stoop from political to social incidents. But the most vivid picture of the life and treatment of the captives is gained from the police bulletin daily prepared for Napoleon and now preserved in the French Archives.[2] They also throw a flood of light on the character of Napoleon’s internal rule, yet, so far as I know, no French historian has as yet utilised them, and I have every reason to believe that I am the first English writer who has consulted them. They have furnished me with most of the data respecting the captives.

As for printed sources, the reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission have thus far brought to light but few letters written by visitors to their friends, yet many of these may still be in existence. The literature of the Verdun and other captives is disappointing. Sturt, Forbes, Pinkerton, Lawrence, and Blayney necessarily give individual experiences rather than a general history of the detentions. Not one of these writers, moreover, ventured on keeping a journal, which would have been obviously unsafe, and some of them, publishing their recollections while comrades were still in captivity, naturally omitted details which might have lessened the pity felt in England by revealing the failings of a small minority, or which might have goaded the jailers to increased rigour. The police bulletins, on the other hand, written for perusal by one man, a man whom it was dangerous to attempt to hoodwink, had no reason for reticence.

II

THE VISITORS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anglais, Français, restez unis,
Qu’à vos chants l’Univers réponde:
Quand de tels rivaux sont amis,
Qui peut troubler la paix du monde?”’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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