Chapter VIII: Appendix: A. Members of Parliament, 316 (6)

The only precedents for this detention were the arrest in 1746, without any apparent reason, of all the English in Paris on the return of the Young Pretender, and that of all Englishmen in France in 1793 as hostages for Toulon. Thomas Moore heard Lord Holland in 1819 justify Napoleon, but Mackintosh maintained that the seizure of vessels was warranted by international law, and a French jurist, Miot de Mélito, describes the detention as a ‘violent measure unusual even in the bitterest wars,’ while Henri Martin, the French historian, charges both Governments with having violated international law. The truth is that Napoleon acted in a passion, and as in the case of the Duc d’Enghien was too proud ever to acknowledge a mistake. As to an embargo, he himself as early as the 13th May had despatched orders for the seizure of British vessels in Holland, Genoa, and Tuscany. If, moreover, we are to believe Madame Junot, Napoleon’s decree was due to his having been informed that Colonel James Green had in a café threatened in his cups to assassinate him, and though Junot, being acquainted with Green, vouched for his having left Paris prior to the date of the alleged threat, Napoleon refused to cancel the decree. So swiftly was it enforced that the _Prince of Wales_ packet and the cutter _Nancy_, which had made their usual passage from Dover to Calais, were seized and their crews detained. When a few weeks afterwards Napoleon visited Calais, Captain Sutton, of the _Prince of Wales_, petitioned him for release, but he met with a peremptory refusal, and Napoleon, on the two vessels being pointed out to him in the harbour, said, ‘You have plenty of mud there; let them lie and rot.’

The aggregate number of the British captives, represented by the French as seven thousand five hundred, was really only seven hundred, four hundred of them, according to Sturt, being small tradesmen. Napoleon, according to Maclean, was much disappointed at the smallness of the haul. Everything indeed had been done to induce the visitors to stay. The _Argus_ had on the 10th May remonstrated against any fear of detention as in 1793, France, it said, being no longer under a Robespierre, and provincial authorities had given assurances that expulsion with reasonable notice was the worst that could befall. It was unfair, however, to accuse Napoleon of having ‘enticed’ the English to remain. His assurances of safety were probably sincere at the time, but his moral sense did not impress upon him the sacredness of such a virtual pledge. He had no scruples as to suddenly changing his mind to the detriment of persons who had trusted him. Most of the visitors, however, had deemed it prudent to return home while the issue was still uncertain. As late indeed as May arrivals in Paris had continued. From May 10th to 19th there were 48, and from the 20th to the 29th there were 38, but in the next ten days the number fell to 17 and in the following ten days to 6. Most of these visitors, moreover, must have come up from the provinces on their way home, while others came to fetch relatives. There were some narrow escapes. Sir William Call was just in time to leave Geneva, and Miss Berry and Mrs. Damer, warned by Lord John Campbell, hurried away from that city, forgetting or possibly not thinking it safe to pass on the warning to others. The Duke of Bedford, the Duchess of Gordon and her daughter, and Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh left Paris four days after Whitworth. The son of Sir G. Burrell and a companion escaped by making their valet pass for an American and themselves for his servants. Young Edgeworth, on the other hand, received his father’s letter of warning just too late, and was detained till 1814, though his companions, Roget as a Swiss and the Philips boys as below the age, obtained exemption. Yet not only had men been detained when over sixty, but some youths of ten or twelve, and therefore well under the limit of sixteen, had been stopped on the plea of their producing no certificates of birth. Augustine Sayer, aged thirteen, whom his parents had apparently placed in a school, was not allowed to return home, but was forced to maintain himself by tuition. He was eventually physician to the Duke of Kent and to the Lock Hospital, dying in 1861. He may have been one of the English boys sent to Dubufe’s school, for Dubufe, a member of the London Society of Arts, contradicting a statement that Protestants were refused admission to French schools, mentioned that he had received such pupils. John Charles Tarver, the future educationist and teacher of French at Eton, might surely, however, have been sent to his parents in London between 1794 and 1802, even if this was impossible after 1803. Farel, the engineer, in whose care he had been left by them on their release from captivity at Dieppe after the Terror, had virtually adopted him. Born at Dieppe in 1790, he had practically been naturalised, and Farel in 1805 got him into the French civil service. He remained in it till March 1814, when, obtaining leave of absence, he went to London and found his mother, brothers, and sisters still living; but he returned to France during the Hundred Days, intending apparently to resume his official post. Disappointed in this hope, he recrossed the Channel and found a more distinguished career open to him.

Before entering into details respecting the captives, I should speak of the unusual bitterness given to the war by Napoleon. Anglophobia, indeed, had been displayed by him even during the peace. The publishers of the _Almanach National_ were sharply rebuked for proposing to insert ‘Angleterre’ with its royal family at the head of the alphabetical list of foreign powers. They had to relegate it lower down as ‘Grande Bretagne,’ and curiously enough British representatives at international Congresses are to the present day seated according to this nomenclature. Napoleon, moreover, during his tour in Normandy scolded his minister Chaptal for speaking of ‘_jardins anglais_.’ ‘Why,’ he vehemently exclaimed, ‘do you call them English gardens? Do you not know that this style of gardening came to us from China, that it was brought to perfection in France, and that no good Frenchman can credit England with it? Bear in mind that “French gardens” is the only proper term for them, and never again grate on my ears with “English gardens.”’[163]

His animosity was naturally intensified on the resumption of hostilities. The theatres were forbidden to perform pieces containing allusions complimentary to England, while plays of an opposite character were ordered to be performed not only in Paris but at Boulogne, Bruges, and other ports where troops were being collected for the invasion. A corps of Irish interpreters was formed, and Chaptal was directed to get some invasion songs written and set to music. Pamphlets demonstrating the facility of the invasion or vilifying the English were likewise published. One of them was entitled, ‘The English people, swollen with pride, beer, and tea, tried by the tribunal of reason.’ This was a reprint of Montlosier’s articles, but issued without his consent. Caricatures were also multiplied. One of them represented George III. as dragged on the ground by his hair by a French soldier. His crown tumbles off, and the soldier, striking him with his fist, says, ‘Look to thy crown and defend thy coasts.’[164] The Bayeux tapestry was brought over to Paris to suggest the practicability or imminency of a landing in England, and the Joan of Arc celebration at Orleans, suspended since the Revolution, was revived. Even indeed in February, three months before the rupture, Napoleon had emphatically approved, if not suggested, the erection by the Orleans municipality of a statue of the heroine. This gave the _Times_ a text for commenting on the anomaly of the glorification by a usurper of the maiden who restored the French crown to its rightful owner. Napoleon might, however, have rejoined that he had not usurped the crown, but had picked it out of the gutter of the Revolution. The teaching of English in schools, too, as Lamartine testifies, was forbidden. Yet it is but fair to say that French was discouraged, as Lord Malmesbury tells us, in English schools, and that the _Times_ of January 4, 1803, contained the following curious article:--

The political ill-consequences of the spread of the French
language throughout Europe are admitted; and we do not conceive
that its bad effects upon the morals and character of other
countries will be disputed. We have no hesitation to add, that
a nation which adopts the language of a superior is prepared to
admit its yoke. There is no better or quicker road to dominion,
than by imposing the necessity, or compassing the mode, of
making a language general. In this word are comprised the
ideas, character, and love of the people whose idiom you prefer
to your own.

We never heard it alleged as _unwise_ in the Government
of _China_, to intercept all communication between its
subjects and foreigners.

Except as a _first step_ and beginning of mischief, all
apprehensions from the representation of a French Comedy are
ridiculous. It is as the _mali labes_, the first spot
and eruption, that we are induced to contend against anything
so contemptible as the pic-nickery and nick-nackery--the pert
affectation, and subaltern vanity of rehearsing to an audience
that cannot understand, in a language one cannot pronounce!

Does any one advantage result to the community of Great Britain,
from the practice of teaching French indiscriminately to every
girl whose parents can send her to a boarding-school?

Does any advantage result from its being taught to shopkeepers’
sons, at a day-school, for fear foreigners should not pawn or
buy, for want of understanding them?

Are not the great part of the female sex, and of the uninformed
part of ours, exposed, by this practice, to the moral and
political corruptions of another country? Is not the business of
French Emissaries facilitated by the half-understanding of low
and ignorant Englishmen?

Ought a girl to be able to read any book that her father cannot?
Ought she to converse in a gibberish, which her mother cannot
detect?

Ought the mass of a virtuous and happy people to be educated to
form ideas different from the manners, habits, and institutions
of their own country? Ought it to be in the power of an enemy to
poison their minds, corrupt their principles, and seduce them
from their allegiance and religion?

Napoleon’s letters show how jealously he watched over the detention of the English, and over everything relating to England. Thus in 1806 he ordered all Englishmen to be expelled from the Papal States, and this order perhaps accounts for Coleridge’s belief that he had a narrow escape from being seized on account of his articles in the _Morning Post_. It is extremely unlikely, however, that Napoleon ever heard of Coleridge. He likewise decreed that English civilians found in any country occupied by his troops should be prisoners, and all English property or merchandise confiscated. Even any neutral vessel which had entered an English port was also to be forfeited. Lord Oxford, Lord Mount Cashell, and General Morgan would have been arrested at Florence but for the refusal of the Queen Regent to act as Napoleon’s policeman. Again in 1806 Napoleon writes, ‘I do not know why English prisoners have been placed at Arras; no doubt to be near home so that they may escape.’ He writes eight months later from Posen: ‘Issue a circular and take measures that throughout the Empire all letters coming from England or written in English and by Englishmen shall be destroyed. All this is very important, for England must be completely isolated.’ In 1807 he complains that English prisoners still received letters. Two years later, on a report that the English at Arras and Valenciennes were meditating escape, he ordered their removal further inland. This measure was extended in 1811 to the prisoners at Brussels. The daily police report, which constantly spoke of the English prisoners, was evidently scanned by him, even when absent from Paris, with great attention; and seemingly anxious that no other eye should see these documents, he directed that during his absence in Russia they should be destroyed. There is consequently a gap of four months in 1812. Even to the last the prisoners were never forgotten by him, for on the 6th January 1814 he ordered their removal from Verdun to Orleans, manifestly to prevent their release by the allied armies. Only in one instance do I find his severity relenting. On the 12th November 1812 at Givet he remarked English prisoners (captured soldiers or sailors, of course, not _détenus_) who had been set to repair a swivel bridge. Eight or ten of them jumped with alacrity into a boat to help to make the mechanism work. He directed that these men should be picked out, presented with 100 francs each, and sent back to England. An English clergyman at Givet who had petitioned for a three months’ visit home was to escort them. A petition from another Englishman there was also to be favourably considered. It is pleasant to find Napoleon for once good-humoured and generous.[165] When, in 1812, he directed that the smuggling of coffee and sugar into Corsica by English vessels should be winked at, and that sugar and coffee seized in British bottoms should not, like British manufactured goods, be burnt, he was obviously inspired by more selfish considerations. French fishing-boats were forbidden to pass the night out at sea, lest they should smuggle English goods, yet they were authorised to smuggle (the French had adopted the word _smogler_) spirits into England. Fishing-boats on both sides were unmolested, unless indeed they had clandestine passengers on board; and the _Times_, running a light cutter in the Channel, procured from them Paris newspapers. Letters were probably conveyed occasionally in the same way. England had not retaliated against French products, for in 1807 the _Monthly Review_ appealed to British patriots not to continue spending a million and a half a year on French brandies and other goods. But Cancale must have been unable to continue sending its oysters, one hundred and nineteen millions of which had been forwarded in the twenty months of peace. The export of oysters from Granville and St. Malo was, however, permitted by Napoleon in 1810.

The Irish refugees, whom Napoleon, as we have seen, had offered Cornwallis to expel, now became his cats-paws. In July 1803, while declining to see Arthur O’Connor, he deputed General Truguet to treat with him and Berthier to advance him small sums of money. He promised to send 25,000 troops to Ireland, and if 20,000 Irishmen would join them he pledged himself to make Irish independence a condition of peace. But he found that the Irish refugees or emissaries were split into two parties, not always on speaking terms, O’Connor accepting, the Emmets rejecting, the idea of a French protectorate. In July 1804, having read a memoir by the Emmets, Lewins, and other exiles, he decreed that all Irishmen accompanying the projected expedition should be considered Frenchmen, and if not treated when captured as prisoners of war reprisals would be exercised.[166] Robert Emmet had had an audience of Napoleon previously to the peace, and an Irish legion was formed in November 1803. MacSheehy organised it at Brest, and on the Emperor’s coronation it was presented, like the French regiments, with an eagle and colours. Irish dissensions, however, are proverbial, and a duel between MacSheehy and O’Mealy led to the former being transferred to a French regiment and to the latter resigning and apparently returning to Baltimore. In 1806 the legion was ordered to Landau and had to pass through Verdun.

The governor [says Myles Byrne] took upon himself to lodge
the Irish legion in a suburb, lest its presence might not be
agreeable to the British prisoners. At daybreak he had the
drawbridge let down and the gates opened to let the legion march
through before the English prisoners could have light to see
and contemplate our green flag and its beatific inscription, so
obnoxious to them, ‘the independence of Ireland.’ Our march,
however, through the town at that early hour attracted great
notice. As our band played up our national air of Patrick’s Day
in the Morning we could see many windows opened and gentlemen in
their shirts inquiring across the street in good English what
was meant by this music at such an early hour.

Some months later the legion was ordered to Boulogne, to be ready for the invasion of England, and at Arras ‘the governor,’ says Byrne, ‘had the good sense to make the English sleep one night in the citadel until we marched out in the morning.’ The legion was eventually sent to Spain. The experiment of inviting English prisoners to join it did not succeed, and in 1810 Napoleon stopped it. ‘I do not want any English soldiers,’ he wrote; ‘I prefer their being prisoners to answer for my prisoners in England; moreover the majority desert.’ This had apparently happened in Spain. In 1811 Napoleon directed Clarke to send for O’Connor and his fellow-exiles in Paris and try to revive an insurrection. He was ready to send 30,000 troops if sure of a rising and if England continued to send forces to Portugal. O’Connor accordingly sent Napoleon a preliminary memoir, whereupon in September he commissioned Clarke to despatch agents to Ireland.

In spite of his ostentatious preparations Napoleon told Metternich in 1810 that he had never been mad enough to think of invading England unless in the wake of an insurrection, the Boulogne army being all along aimed at Austria. The latest and fullest French writer on the subject, Colonel Desbrières, from an examination of the confused orders and counterorders, so unlike the rest of Napoleon’s plans, comes to the same conclusion.[167] All that Napoleon could have intended was to disquiet England, and thus prevent her from despatching troops to the Continent. This was legitimate strategy, and he was obviously, moreover, as much entitled to use the Irish as pawns as England had been to use the Vendeans, but his manufacture of counterfeit notes is less excusable. A manufactory of forged notes in Paris, enshrouded in mystery, was superintended by Lale, a clerk in the engraving department of the War Office, Fouché, Savary, and Desmarest being the only confidants of the secret. A Hamburg Jew named Malchus and two Frenchmen, Blanc and Bernard, were sent to buy merchandise with the notes. They were instructed to go to Scotland and Ireland, so as to disappear before the fraud was discovered. They were ostensibly told to destroy what they bought, but they naturally preferred smuggling it into France, and this was winked at, so that they made large profits. The fraud was, however, soon discovered. Malchus was hanged. His confederates escaped in an English smuggling boat which was captured by a French revenue vessel. They were at first imprisoned at Boulogne, but Savary promptly ordered their release, together with funds to return to Paris for further employment. Napoleon, at a later date, practised the same trick on Russia and Austria. On the restoration of peace with the latter in 1810, he offered an excuse or rather defence of the act to Metternich. He had at that time just ordered Fouché to resume the forgery of English notes.[168]

Napoleon, it may be remarked, attributed the rupture of 1803 to his refusal to conclude a commercial treaty ‘which would necessarily have been detrimental to the manufactures and industry of his subjects,’[169] and he never relaxed stringency in excluding British merchandise. As late as 1810 such goods were seized and burned at Roscoff, Bâle, and Strasburg, though the prefect of Strasburg suggested that textiles should be utilised in hospitals and ambulances. The war thus gave a stimulus to French manufactures, except to those hampered by want of raw materials. The ports, however, suffered severely through the English blockade, especially Nantes and other towns which had had a large trade with the West Indies. During the short peace Nantes had sent out merchantmen, and sixty of these, unable to get back, were captured. Marseilles also suffered, but the blockade could not entirely stop its trade.

Even some Englishmen long resident in France were declared prisoners and had to plead for exemption. Chalmers, a Bordeaux merchant, Scottish on the father’s side, French on the mother’s; James Macculloch, who had been in Brittany for thirty-five years; James Smith, Stone’s successor as printer; and James Milne, who taught cotton-spinning at the Arts et Métiers, were in this position. Chalmers found naturalisation the only resource. Smith and Milne, perhaps also Macculloch, were struck off the list of captives. As a rule rich residents as well as manufacturers and artisans were unmolested, for Napoleon was not insensible of the advantage thus accruing to Parisian tradesmen. Thus Francis Henry Egerton, brother and eventual successor of the Earl of Bridgewater, an eccentric clergyman or ex-clergyman of whom we shall hear anon, was not disquieted. According to a French writer he had created a scandal which necessitated expatriation, but this assertion I have not been able to verify. His chess parties in 1807 excited much notice. In 1813 he visited Italy. Quintin Craufurd was also unmolested, along with his _quasi_-wife Mrs. Sullivan, who, according to a French police register, was originally an Italian ballet-dancer, married John O’Sullivan, Under-Secretary for War and the Colonies, and eloped with Craufurd. Another version, however, states that she had been the mistress or morganatic wife of the King of Würtemberg, on whose legitimate marriage she withdrew with her daughter to Paris, subsequently marrying Sullivan. What is certain is that she had cohabited with Craufurd in Paris as long ago as 1787, for in that year she had had to fetch him home at 9 A.M. from the British Embassy after a whole night at the card-table. Nothing worse now befell Craufurd than a robbery. Madame de Genlis writes on the 23rd March 1811 to her adopted son, Casimir Becker:--

That poor Mr. Craufurd was robbed yesterday while he was playing
whist at Madame de Talleyrand’s. All his superb jewels, caskets,
rings, gold medals, 300 louis d’or, etc. The window was opened
by means of a hole cut in the shutter, and the desk was forced.
But it is believed from several indications that what was done
to the window was merely a feint and that the thief belonged to
the house.[170]

Even Craufurd, however, being uncle, as we have seen, of two British diplomatists, incurred the suspicions of Fouché’s spies, for their report of the 22nd May 1804 says:--

It may be supposed that this old man, now _blasé_, has
no longer the activity which formerly rendered his house at
Frankfort a centre of political movements very hostile to
France, but he is still under the influence of Madame Sullivan,
that foreigner of easy virtue who facilitated the departure of
Louis XVI. and started the same day for Brussels.[171]

Talleyrand’s protection nevertheless ensured him against molestation, and he was even permitted to procure books from England. In 1816 he obtained the restitution of his papers,[172] seized, like his other effects, in 1793, and he claimed 2,230,000 francs compensation for his losses. A smaller sum was probably awarded him. He continued living in Paris till his death in November 1819. A painful episode disturbed his last months. Sir James Craufurd went over, and as far as can be judged endeavoured to extort from the sick uncle a will or a bequest of £48,000 in his favour. Though forbidden entrance, he flourished pistols in the faces of two servants and forced his way in. He next prosecuted Mrs. Craufurd and several of her fashionable friends for spreading reports of his conduct, and in court he indulged in such personalities that he had to be expelled. He also charged the servants with assaulting him, but this, like the other accusations, was dismissed, and he was eventually twice sentenced by default to six months’ imprisonment for libellous pamphlets, in one of which he accused Mrs Craufurd of bigamy.[173] Quintin Craufurd was very charitable to the poor of Paris. Though primarily a man of fashion, he ranks as an author by works on India, Mary Stuart, and Marie Antoinette, some of them in French. His widow, retaining to the age of eighty-four her vivacity and charm, died in Paris about 1832. Her daughter[174] married Count Albert d’Orsay, one of Napoleon’s generals, and thus became the mother of Count Alfred d’Orsay, the handsome fop, spendthrift, and amateur painter, who in 1827 married Lady Harriet Gardner, step-daughter of the famous Lady Blessington. Sir James (latterly Sir James Grogan) Craufurd died in 1839.

Fraser Frisell, who, except for a brief visit to his native Scotland in 1802, had lived in France since 1792, was likewise allowed full liberty.

Americans, it may be mentioned, were liable to be arrested as English, for the latter sometimes attempted to pass themselves off as Americans. George Matthew Paterson, a cousin of Madame Paterson-Bonaparte’s father, was detained as a British subject. He had, indeed, been born in Ireland. He was sent to Valenciennes, and then to Lille, whence he wrote letters to Madame Paterson-Bonaparte complimenting her on her marriage with Jerome and desiring to make her acquaintance.[175] William Russell was at least half American. He had got up the Bastille dinner at Birmingham in 1790, whereupon his house was burnt down by the mob. He had gone to America in 1795, but in 1802, being in France on his way to England, he was detained till 1814.

Junot, who as Governor of Paris had to carry out the order of detention, was, according to his wife’s memoirs, very reluctant to do so, and consented only under great pressure. He seems, indeed, by all accounts to have been inclined to leniency, and Forbes tells us that he suggested his obtaining exemption by pretending to be a sexagenarian. For a time some captives were allowed to remain in Paris, but this did not last long. Napoleon, in this as in other cases, interested himself in the smallest details. On the 3rd July he ordered a hundred of the English in Paris to be sent off. They were allowed to choose between Melun, Meaux, Fontainebleau, Nancy, and Geneva, only twenty-five, mostly Irishmen, being permitted to remain in Paris. He complained too of having found English at Boulogne and Calais. Accordingly forty-eight hours’ notice was given them--that is to those not of the age to be prisoners--to embark for England or to remove into the interior. On the 7th July Napoleon gave orders that the English officers should be sent to Fontainebleau or some other town: only forty were to remain in Paris; ‘the presence of so great a number of English in Paris cannot but cause and does cause great mischief.’[176] On the 23rd November he ordered that officers, old men, and men with wives and children should be interned at Verdun. The prisoners at Fontainebleau, Phalsbourg, and Marsal were accordingly transferred thither. Persons giving cause of complaint were to be confined at Bitche,[177] Sedan, or Sarrelouis, while privates and sailors were to be imprisoned at Charlemont and Valenciennes.

Verdun was obviously chosen because its distance from the sea rendered escape difficult. It was a town of ten thousand inhabitants, and the influx of English, mostly in affluent or at least easy circumstances, was a windfall for it. A French newspaper compared them in fact to sheep enclosed in a fold to manure the soil, and it suggested that other towns should share the advantage. The mayor of Metz, indeed, applied on behalf of that city, but ineffectually. Verdun retained a kind of monopoly, a regulated monopoly, for Napoleon in one of his letters (Nov. 24, 1804) warned the municipality that unless it kept down the price of lodgings, which had risen from 36 to 300 francs a month, the English would be sent elsewhere. Some of the army or navy officers and captains of merchantmen captured during the war were, of course, without means, and they had the option of gratuitous accommodation in the barracks. Another reason for the choice of Verdun may have been the absence of any upper class with whom the captives could mix, whereas at Nancy, the former capital of Lorraine and still a kind of provincial Paris, they had much more congenial surroundings. Austrian and Russian prisoners there joined them in 1804 in celebrating Carnival. The number of captives at Verdun from 1803 to 1814 varied from six to eleven hundred, but the highest number included captives made at sea or on battlefields. They procured remittances from England through Perregaux, the Paris banker, and some obtained permission for their families to join them. They had to give their parole not to escape as a condition of being allowed to hire their own lodgings, a breach of parole entailing incarceration. They had to answer to the roll-call morning and night. They beguiled their captivity as best they could. There were amateur theatricals, cock-fights, and horse-races. The prisoners were described by the _Argus_ in January 1804 as ‘playing, dancing, singing, and drinking all day long.’

Two clubs were formed, one English at Concannon’s house,[178] the other Irish at Carron’s, but the latter was broken up on account of Hibernian quarrels in 1807. Lady Cadogan gave entertainments, and on the Prince of Wales’s birthday in 1804 Mrs. Concannon issued a hundred and twenty invitations to a ball and supper, when the costly toilettes of Mrs. Clive, wife of Colonel Robert Clive, and those of Mrs. Annesley, were much remarked. In 1807 the townspeople were invited by four captives to a masquerade ball.[179]

‘Young Englishmen,’ wrote George Call in his diary, after passing through Verdun in 1810, ‘are much the same whether prisoners or at home, playing, driving, and shooting each other (_sic_) ... One might fancy oneself in London.’ The richer prisoners gave monthly subscriptions for their poorer brethren or for schools, and the Birmingham Quakers in 1807 opened a subscription for them, an example followed in 1811 by London. The English Government, moreover, at the instance of Robson, sent £2000. Dr. Davis gave gratuitous medical services to the poorer prisoners. Maude and Jordan held Church of England services in the college hall, and solemnised marriages the validity of which was afterwards disputed. When fellow of Queen’s College, where he died in 1852, Maude used to relate his experiences.[180] Captivity reveals character, and there was not unbroken harmony or unalloyed respectability. Some speedily got into debt, and the authorities had to consider whether imprisonment for debt could be resorted to. This seems to have been at first settled in the negative. Lord Barrington, in June 1804, gave a Frenchman a draft on London which was dishonoured. The holder thereupon sued him and obtained judgment, but on appeal this was reversed, on the ground that being detained Barrington could not have arranged for an extension of time. Ultimately, however, we find arrests for debt made, and in 1807 Napoleon ordered that such judgments should be enforced. Waring Knox was in a debtors’ prison at Saargemünd when, on the intercession of the Grand Duke of Berg, he received permission to live at Melun, provided his creditors agreed to his exit. While in prison for debt at Valenciennes in 1811, he asked for 200 louis and a passport that he might go to England, where, having been brought up with the Prince Regent, he could procure a confidential post and could discover and reveal the secret projects of the British Government. General Clarke, whose Irish extraction and knowledge of England, where he had found his first wife,[181] made him a good judge of such applications, believed, however, that he simply wanted to escape from his numerous French creditors. Whether the offer was sincere or not it was almost equally contemptible. Yet we ultimately hear of his giving his poorer countrymen a daily meal at Valenciennes, where he died in a debtors’ prison in December 1813, just before release would have come. It is significantly stated that Sir William Cooper and Lady Cadogan, on being allowed to quit Verdun for Nancy, left no debts behind them, whereas half a dozen others had left half a million francs unpaid. Police reports of 1804–1805 mention one Wilson as behaving indecently with his French mistress at the theatre, and striking the officer who reprimanded him. He was deservedly sent to Bitche. Wilbraham was charged with forgery and with swindling his fellow-countrymen. We hear, too, of a duel between ‘Gold’ (Valentine Goold, or Francis Goold, a surgeon?) and Balbi, the keeper of the gaming-tables, in which the latter was wounded. ‘Gold’ was consequently confined in the fortress, but Napoleon (this proves that he looked into everything) ordered his liberation. ‘A prisoner of war,’ he said, ‘may fight a duel.’ One of the brothers Mellish, interned at Orleans, actually challenged the prefect to an encounter. A duel in 1806 between Captain Walpole and Lieutenant Miles, both of the navy, in which the latter was killed, probably arose out of a gaming quarrel. In the gaming-room figured the notice, ‘This bank is kept for the English; the French are forbidden to play at it.’[182]

The gaming-tables, Lord Blayney was told, cost the English prisoners £50,000 a year, but they were eventually closed. A Captain Cory, in one of his drunken fits, assaulted a French soldier. Colonel William Whaley, probably the brother of ‘Jerusalem’ Whaley, who indulged in quarrelling, duelling, and betting, was in 1808 sent to Moulins. He is described as ‘notorious for immorality and extravagant conduct, and capable of the most desperate enterprises.’ The English Government had refused him a passport for France, but he had managed to get there, and after six months’ incarceration in the Temple at Paris, where he excited a mutiny among the prisoners, had been sent to Verdun. There in 1811, to revenge himself for a refusal to receive him, he denounced Blayney as having clandestinely procured plans of French fortresses. The charge was investigated and declared unfounded. There were other men base enough falsely to denounce fellow-captives. Morshead and Estwicke in 1808 were fined 20,000 francs for calumny and swindling. Sir Thomas Wallace was denounced out of revenge by MacCarthy as being deep in debt and meditating escape or suicide.[183] In August 1813 there was a scuffle between prisoners and townsmen, which gendarmes had to repress. Hutchinson, a teacher of languages, was sent to Bitche for insulting a French officer. A Captain Hawker and a man named Raineford, who entered a jeweller’s shop on pretence of paying a bill, and seriously assaulted him, were sentenced in 1808 to twelve and six months’ imprisonment respectively. ‘Restless spirits,’ says Call, ‘do their best to compel the French to treat the prisoners harshly.’

Some captives, indeed, brought punishments on themselves. Thomas Devenish, having inveighed against Napoleon, was sent to Doullens fortress, but after a time was allowed to return, and Brodie, who had taught English at Blois, audaciously sent General Wirion, the commandant at Verdun, a letter of diatribes against Napoleon, for which he was relegated to Bitche. A surgeon named Simpson, who at the theatre hissed a bust of Napoleon and next day boasted of the act, pleaded inebriation, but was consigned to the fortress. On the other hand Neilson, captain of a merchantman, obviously tried to curry favour by naming his infant Napoleon, and Felix Ellice, a prisoner at Thionville, composed four sonnets and an ode on the birth of the King of Rome. Williams, imprisoned at Bitche, who had been employed by the Admiralty till 1799, but had apparently been dismissed, offered in 1804 and again in 1808 to detect the spies acting for England, but his overtures were refused, it being believed that the spies had been changed. Two navy lieutenants were imprisoned for fourteen days in 1805 for striking a French officer. A Captain Bannatyne and two officers got up theatricals on the plea of intending to pay debts, but in reality, it was said, to swindle their countrymen. Captain Nanney was sent to Arras for seducing a townsman’s wife, but escaped in August 1809. Gentlemen’s servants are not always of exemplary behaviour, and we hear of ten valets being packed off from Verdun.

These black sheep were of course exceptions, and we hear on the other hand of Colonel Reilly Cope indulging in botanising, of Forbes having his daughter taught to dance, and of Captain Molyneux Shuldham constructing a carriage propelled by sails at seven or eight miles an hour. Horses, however, being frightened by this monster, and a cart being overturned by it, it was hissed and stoned by the peasantry. Shuldham also invented a boat which, placed on a kind of skates, slid over the ice.[184] He and others likewise amused themselves with rowing, but anglers complained that they frightened away the fish, and the pastime was consequently forbidden.

General Wirion, the commandant of Verdun, had clearly no enviable position. Not only had he to keep the captives in order and prevent escapes, but he had to deal with a swarm of French adventurers of both sexes who sought to make money by facilitating escapes. It was accordingly ordered in July 1805 that all suspicious women should be expelled, and that no passports should be allowed to Verdun unless good reasons were shown. Frenchmen, like foreigners, could not then go freely from one town to another.[185] Women who had caused quarrels among the captives were expelled, but some of them then settled in the neighbouring villages. An honourable commandant would have found his post unpleasant and irksome, and Wirion, the son of a pork butcher, was not even an honourable man. He recognised Lord Barrington’s mistress, Madame St. Amand, who was at first passed off as his wife, by calling on her, and he took money for winking at illicit amours. He is said to have recommended housekeepers or mistresses who were his spies, and in one case an Englishman who had foolishly told his mistress his plans of escape was betrayed by her. Wirion may have thought this a legitimate stratagem, but he likewise unblushingly levied blackmail, and his subordinates followed suit. He would invite himself or be invited to dinner with the wealthier captives, and they would allow him to win from them at cards, in order to obtain small favours or to avoid being sent to Bitche, to which they were liable at his mere caprice. He inflicted a fine of 3 francs on men failing to present themselves at the roll-call morning and night, but not finding many able to pay 6 francs a day for late rising and an evening promenade he commuted this for 6 francs or 12 francs a month. In the winter of 1804, however, he made one roll-call a day suffice, and allowed exceptionally good prisoners to appear only every fifth day.[186] He received, according to Sturt, 600 francs or 1000 francs a month from the gaming-tables as the price of his protection, and he is said to have extorted no less than 136,000 francs from a prisoner named Garland.

Wirion’s gendarmes got up lotteries for articles which sometimes did not exist, and prisoners had to take tickets as the price of small favours. Complaints of his extortion were unavailing until the appointment as Minister of War of General Clarke. Wirion was thereupon summoned to Paris in 1810, and rather than face a court-martial he shot himself in the Bois de Boulogne. No French newspaper, indeed, records this, and though affirmed by Lord Blayney, who arrived at Verdun shortly afterwards, I should have felt doubts of its accuracy but for finding a passage in _Letters from the Cape_, a pamphlet dictated by Napoleon at St. Helena in 1817. It says:--

The English prisoners detained at Verdun were treated with great
attention (_sic_), and a French officer who commanded
that depôt having been guilty of some extortions upon them,
an inquiry was in consequence ordered by the Emperor, and the
culprit was so much afraid of his anger that he committed
suicide.

I have, moreover, discovered in the police bulletin of April 8, 1810, the following record:--

General Wirion went yesterday morning at ten o’clock in a
hackney coach to the Bois de Boulogne. Alighting a few steps
from the Porte Maillot, he blew out his brains. Upon him was
found a letter to his wife and another to the doctor, asking him
to attend to her in these sad circumstances. It appears that
impatience at the apparent tardiness of the commission deputed
to investigate the complaints against him was the reason of the
suicide.[187]

Wirion’s chief subordinate and successor, Colonel Courselles, though far from immaculate, was more cautious and moderate in his extortions. He confined himself to a monopoly of the wine supply, charging exorbitant rates, and to paying the allowance to the poorer prisoners in _livres tournois_ in lieu of francs, thus clearing a profit. Courselles, in his turn, was called to account, but he threw the blame on his subordinates, one of whom, Lieutenant Massin, shot himself through apprehension of a court-martial. He had simply by Courselles’ orders destroyed incriminating documents, but thus thrown over by his chief he left a note stating that though innocent he could not face threatened dishonour. It is satisfactory to learn that Courselles was likewise removed, that his successor was so upright a man that on his death in 1813 all the English attended the funeral, and that the next commandant was still more indulgent, allowing captives to live not merely in the outskirts of Verdun but in neighbouring towns.

The captives were popular at Verdun. Some of the inhabitants were suspected of allowing letters under cover to be directed to them in order to evade their being opened and read. It is true that a boy five years old, on being jocularly asked by Eyre whether he would go with him to England, replied, ‘No, all Englishmen are bad’; but when in 1805 a hundred and seventy of them were transferred to Valenciennes, Givet, and Sarrelouis, two hundred inhabitants collected to see them off. Women shook hands, even gave kisses, and exclaimed, ‘Poor young fellows!’ a proof, says Wirion, that the prisoners had gained great influence and that their removal was urgent.[188]

Three M.P.’s being among the captives, it will naturally be asked whether they retained their seats. They could not or did not resign, but in those days a constituency did not suffer much from going without a representative. The next general election did not take place till 1806. Lord Yarmouth was then re-elected for the Irish pocket borough of Lisburn, and continued--we can hardly say to sit--for it. In 1822 he was called to the Upper House. Lord Lovaine, in like manner, remained member for Beeralston, Devonshire. He was even nominated in 1804 a Lord of the Treasury, and in 1807 an India Commissioner. Thomas Brooke was likewise again re-elected for Newton in 1806, but he, as we shall see, had escaped from Valenciennes. Green, who is described in the police register as a man of letters, and Sturt were not re-elected. Tufton, who with his brother Charles was detained at Fontainebleau, and Thompson, who at Orleans inveighed against Napoleon, had ceased to be M.P.’s.

One of the privations of detention was not merely the censorship exercised over correspondence but the total deprivation of English newspapers. Even before the rupture, indeed, only one paltry Sunday paper in the pay of Napoleon[189] was allowed to pass through the post-office, though the Embassy of course could be subject to no such restriction, and other journals could be clandestinely perused. Napoleon in August 1802 rebuked Talleyrand for allowing English newspapers to reach ‘a large number of persons’ by being addressed under cover to the Foreign Office,[190] and Galignani’s newly opened reading-room must have undergone unforeseen restrictions. When the war broke out Napoleon repeated his order that reading-rooms should be allowed only one particular English paper, which was supplied them gratuitously. Madame de Rémusat says he had, however, largely subsidised English journalists and writers, apparently to little purpose, but this may be considered an exaggeration. Galignani’s _Monthly Repertory of English Literature_, started in 1807, did not compensate for the absence of newspapers. Even the _Morning Post_, though siding with France, was not admitted.

As long as the _Argus_ lasted the captives were fain to subscribe to it, for ‘infamous’ as Forbes styles it, it gave copious extracts from the London press, but in 1810 Napoleon suppressed it, and the prisoners became dependent on the meagre and carefully manipulated intelligence of the Paris papers. In 1804–1805 several prisoners had sent the _Argus_ letters and verses in favour of peace, hoping thus, perhaps, to procure release.

For a time the captives were buoyed up by the expectation of being exchanged for French soldiers and sailors, the balance of numbers being always largely against France; but the British Government refused to exchange combatants for civilians, as this would have been a recognition of the validity of the detention. In the autumn of 1805 the prisoners petitioned the Electress (afterwards Queen) of Würtemberg, Princess Royal of England, to intercede for them, but she did not venture to comply, sending word that the matter was one for the two Governments.[191] There was again a gleam of hope in 1806, when, as we shall presently see, Lord Yarmouth went to Paris to negotiate, but the sky was soon overcast. The temptation to escape became stronger as time elapsed and as it became clear that the fall of Napoleon would alone bring liberation. Some broke their parole. Others thought they satisfied honour by sending word just before starting that they withdrew their parole. Sir James Craufurd, who had been allowed to go for two months to Aix-la-Chapelle to take the waters, did not return, but got round to England by Sweden, justifying himself on the ground that his wife was ill and that a lucrative post had been given to another man in his absence. The police bulletin scouted his alleged anxiety for his wife (a daughter of General Gage), stating that he had scandalously treated her, that she had consequently gone home, and that he had been living with a mistress.[192] Lord Yarmouth was informed by a correspondent that the King turned his back on Craufurd at a levée, telling him that prisoners ought to keep their parole; the letter added that Craufurd was universally despised in England.[193] A later report, however, represented him as receiving £1000 a year from the Government, and the Duke of York was reported to have said that in such arbitrary detention the parole was not binding. Colombine de Jersey, allowed a month in England, also did not return. Lord Archibald Hamilton escaped in January 1804. Sir Beaumont Dixie disappeared from Verdun in September 1804, leaving his clothes on the river bank as though he had been drowned; but he had falsified a passport and had been assisted by neighbouring villagers in his flight.[194] He was, however, recaptured and sent to Bitche, for attempts to escape or other misdemeanours entailed removal to that or some other fortress. ‘There,’ says the late Mr. Childers, ‘the younger members of this unlucky colony appear to have amused themselves _more Britannico_ in cutting deeply their names and descriptions on the outer stone walls of the barrack which formed their prison, and I read more than one name belonging to well-known English, Scottish, or Irish families.’[195] Fox and Addison, doctors on board merchantmen, let themselves down by a rope from Verdun citadel, but being unable to get across the canal at the foot they had to give themselves up. Two other doctors, Thomas Clarke and Farrell Mulvey, were likewise recaptured and sent to the fortress of Metz, Mulvey, however, in 1806 being allowed to return on parole to Verdun. Three surgeons, Baird, Cameron, and Hawthorn, escaped. In 1807 a midshipman named Temple escaped by crouching at the extremity of a carriage, so as to be concealed by two women, his French mistress and her maidservant. The carriage got to Strasburg, where the mistress, being a native of the town, obtained a passport, and Temple was smuggled in the same manner to Austria, whence he wrote to Colonel Arthur Annesley expressing a hope that nobody had been molested as an accomplice. Unfortunately he was not equally solicitous or scrupulous with regard to his creditors, for he left so many debts behind him that some of the principal prisoners, revolted by his dishonesty, forwarded a memorial to the British Government, praying for his dismissal from the navy. Annesley himself, whose honeymoon had ended in captivity, got away in December 1811. A Dr. Alderson, married to a Frenchwoman, not obtaining an answer to an application for a visit to England to recover £400, took French leave, but his large farm near Lille was consequently confiscated. Leviscourt, a navy lieutenant, who after several years at large on parole had been confined in the fortress and was no longer on parole, endeavoured to escape, but being recaptured was dragged by gendarmes through Verdun, with a heavy cannon-ball fastened to his leg. Worsley, the schoolmaster, escaped from Mons to Holland. James Henry Lawrence, son of a Jamaica planter and himself a Knight of Malta, escaped in 1810 by pretending on the road to be a German. He had lived several years in Germany, and had published in German a Malabar story, which on his arrival in England he issued in English, as also a _Picture of Verdun_. He subsequently led a roving life, chiefly on the Continent, and died in 1840. His father remained a captive. Another foreign knight, of the Order of Maria Theresa, Baron Charles Blount, obtained permission to reside at Bonn, but went to Cleves and fled. He was, however, recaptured and sent to Coblentz fortress. From Valenciennes there were forty escapes, and Lawrence says, ‘Every morning those who came upon the promenade inquired who had decamped in the preceding night.’ Fortunately there was yet no electric telegraph to give the hue and cry. Colonel Hill, of the Shropshire militia, probably a brother of Lord Hill, escaped and rejoined his regiment. Brooke, M.P. for Newton, Lancashire, quitting a large dinner-party at Valenciennes in October 1804, audaciously drove through the town with his French valet, who had obtained a passport for two merchants, and safely reached Cologne. Francis and Thomas Jodrell waited in December 1803 on the commandant of Valenciennes, told him they withdrew their parole, and drove off. Colonel Smyth accompanied them. All three were recaptured in the duchy of Berg, albeit Bavarian soil, and Napoleon had ordered a court-martial, but they giving a sentry the slip got clear off. Francis was High Sheriff of Cheshire in 1813; Thomas was killed at Rosetta in 1807. Philip de Crespigny, who had been married at the Danish Embassy in 1809, escaped from St. Germain in 1811. Wright, a midshipman, brother of the unfortunate Captain John Wesley Wright, facilitated the escape of a friend by holding the rope with which he descended from the ramparts at Verdun, whereupon he was consigned to the fortress. So also was Knox, he having become surety for a Captain Brown, who escaped but was recaptured.