Chapter V: Appendix: A. Members of Parliament, 316 (3)

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Louis Dix-huit, Louis Dix-huit,
We’ve licked all your armies
and sunk all your fleet.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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