Englishmen in the French Revolution/Chapter IV
IV.
Enthusiasts.
"They come with hot unutterabilities in their heart, as pigrims |
IV.
ENTHUSIASTS.
Stone—Helen Williams—Mary Wollstonecraft—Oswald—Christie.
The motto from Carlyle aptly describes one, and that the most to be respected, class of the motley flock of foreigners attracted to Paris by the great upheaval. Among them was John Hurford Stone, whom a family tradition represents as assisting at the capture of the Bastille, but who cannot be positively traced in Paris till three years later. He was born at Tiverton in 1763, lost his father in childhood, and was sent up to London with his brother William to assist in the business of their uncle, William Hurford, the son of a Tiverton serge-maker, who had become a coal merchant. Stone, according to information furnished me by a kinsman, was very clever and cultured, and had advanced far beyond the Unitarian doctrines of his family. He was one of Dr. Price's congregation in London. He induced his uncle to embark in speculations which ultimately proved ruinous. In October 1790 he presided at a dinner given by the Society of Friends of the Revolution (of 1688) to a deputation from Nantes. They wrote home that he was thoroughly acquainted with all the European languages and literatures, and that on dining at his house they met the leading men of letters. The poet Rogers may have been one of the number, for he knew Stone well, and twelve months later, dining with him, met Fox, Sheridan, Talleyrand, Madame de Genlis, and Pamela, "quite radiant with beauty."
In September 1792, Stone, as we learn from a letter from Bland Burges to Lord Auckland, was in Paris, whence in the following November he wrote to dissuade Sheridan from accepting French citizenship, which the Convention intended conferring on him and Fox. "Obscure and vulgar men and scoundrels"—does he include Paine?—having already received the distinction, he had persuaded Brissot to defer the proposal, especially as it would be made a handle of by the Tories. In the same month he presided at a dinner of British residents in Paris to celebrate French victories. Paine was present, as also Lord Edward Fitzgerald, whom Stone introduced to his future wife, Pamela. Stone was well acquainted with Madame de Genlis, Pamela's adoptive mother, and on having to quit Paris, she intrusted her manuscripts to him. He handed them over to Helen Maria Williams, who on the eve of a threatened domiciliary visit burnt them. The "scribbling trollop," as Walpole styles De Genlis, never forgave him for this holocaust; yet he advanced 12,000 francs with a view to procuring her husband's escape from prison.
In February 1793, Stone and about forty fellow-countrymen arrived at Dover, though without the passports then necessary under the Traitorous Correspondence Act. The captain pleaded that they had embarked at Calais during his absence on shore, and, spite of his objection to receiving them, had forced him to sail. This pretended compulsion was probably a prearranged comedy. Some of the party were "kept rolling about the vessel" for three days off Dover before they were permitted to land. Stone must have speedily returned to Paris, for he gave evidence in May 1793 in favour of General Miranda, suspected of royalism. He had heard Miranda argue in favour of a republic at Turnbull's dinner-table in London when Talleyrand was present, and he knew that his London friends included Fox, Sheridan, Priestley, and Pigott. Stone also seems to have been present at Charlotte Corday's trial, his open admiration for her rendering him in danger of arrest. As it was, he was not exempted from the wholesale arrest of British subjects in October 1793, as hostages for Toulon. After seventeen days at the Luxembourg, he was, however, released. He was again arrested, together with his wife, in April 1794, but liberated next day on condition of leaving France. He could not safely return to England, for his brother was in Newgate on a charge of treason, and he himself was described in the indictment as the principal. He went to Switzerland, probably joining Helen Williams there, but he must have been back in June, for he then obtained a divorce from his wife, Rachel Coope. This is the presumptive date of his liaison or secret marriage with Miss Williams.
William Stone was tried at the Old Bailey, after nearly two years' incarceration, on January 28 and 29, 1796, for "treacherously conspiring with his brother, John Hurford Stone, now in France, to destroy the life of the King and to raise a rebellion in his realms." The truth was, however, that he had urged his brother, "that seditious and wicked traitor," as Sir John Scott (afterwards Lord Eldon) styled him, to dissuade the French from invading England, inasmuch as they would find none of the sympathy they expected, but were doomed to failure. Scott argued, indeed, that by warning the French against a hopeless enterprise William Stone had acted as their friend and as the King's enemy; but Erskine and Adair, his counsel, urged that if promoting an invasion was treason, warding it off must be the reverse. It must, however, be acknowledged that the collecting of opinions on the chances of a French invasion, however openly done, and however adverse those opinions, was sailing very near the wind of treason. The prisoner, too, had sheltered his brother's emissary, the Irish Presbyterian minister Jackson; had corresponded with Jackson in Ireland, signing his name backwards way (Enots), and had forwarded to the Government garbled extracts from his brother's letters; but Lord Lauderdale, Sheridan, and William Smith, M.P., testified that he was merely a weak enthusiast, anxious to give himself airs, yet sincerely desirous of a peace with France. Rogers, called as a witness for the prosecution, and asked as to the prisoner's loyalty to the King and regard for his country, evasively answered that he had always thought him a well-meaning man, and he was not pressed to say more. The prisoner was acquitted, and, after a fortnight's detention for debt, retired to France, where he became steward to an Englishman named Parker, at Villeneuve St. George.
J. H. Stone would scarcely have been acquitted, for in a document read at the trial he spoke through- out of the French as "we," and of the English as "you," thus identifying himself, as Chief Justice Kenyon remarked, with France. In a published letter to Dr. Priestley, he made some caustic comments on the prosecution, incidentally extolled the Girondins, and declared his dissent from Paine's religious views and his belief in an enlightened Christianity. In November 1796 he confirmed a report that Dr. Priestley intended to settle in France. Priestley, he said, would have made France his home in 1794 but for the Terror, and Stone was keeping his books for him. While still an ardent politician, and in the confidence, if not in the pay, of the Directory, Stone had by this time started afresh in business, and became one of the chief printers in Paris.[1] In 1805 he brought out an edition of the Geneva Bible; he published several English reprints, and he undertook a costly edition of "Humboldt's Travels." This work, which must have made him acquainted with Humboldt, ruined him, and in 1813 he had to hand it over to Smith, likewise apparently an Englishman. He had been even reduced, in 1811 , to applying to Madame de Genlis for repayment of the 12,000 francs advanced for her husband's escape. Madame de Genlis professed ignorance of the loan, and inability to repay it, but assured Stone of her esteem and gratitude; yet in her memoirs the treacherous woman represents him as having wronged her. He is described by Charles Coquerel, his quasi-nephew, as of abrupt and eccentric manners, enthusiastic, ever ready to render a service. He published, under the name of Photinus, a letter to Du Fossé in defence of Unitarianism. He was naturalised in 1817, simultaneously with Helen Williams, and died in the following year. His tombstone in Père Lachaise, "the last tribute of a long friendship," describes him as an enlightened champion of religion and liberty. A now fallen stone beside it seemingly marks the spot where Helen Williams was interred nine years later.
It is now time to speak of the lady who shared his struggles and poverty, and who may have been secretly married to him by their friend Bishop Grégoire, though it is not easy to understand why they were not legally and publicly united. Helen Maria Williams, whose date and place of birth have puzzled biographers, but are cleared up by her letters of naturalisation, was born in London in 1769, and was consequently just of age when she went over with her mother and sisters to witness the Federation of 1790, "perhaps the finest spectacle the world had ever witnessed." A precocious girl, she had published a story in verse at twelve years of age, and an Ode on the Peace at thirteen, and she had been introduced to and flattered by Dr. Johnson. Enraptured with the Revolution, the Williams's settled in Paris in 1791, and Madame Roland, one of Helen's earliest acquaintances, used to take her to the Jacobin Club at the time when Brissot and Vergniaud harangued there. Madame Roland would fain have seen her married to her own admirer. Deputy Bancal, nineteen years Helen's senior; but she pleaded the recent death of her father, a retired officer, and evidently did not reciprocate his attachment. Yet Madame Roland wrote to Bancal:—
"Either I understand nothing whatever of the human heart, or you are destined to be the husband of Mademoiselle ——,[2] if you manage properly, and if she remains here three months. Constancy and generosity can do anything with an honest and tender heart which is unpledged."
Bancal, destined to become a Catholic mystic, proposed on Christmas Eve 1791 the prohibition of all public religious ceremonies, as also of all reference in schools to a future state. Helen persuaded him to vote for saving the King's life; and his was no fleeting fancy, for in 1796, on his release from Austrian dungeons, he got Bishop Grégoire to repeat his offer of marriage; but by that time Helen had found her elective affinity in John Hurford Stone.
The Williams's Sunday-evening receptions were attended by the leading Girondins. Vergniaud there rehearsed his parliamentary speeches, and Barère shed tears—probably sincere at the time—over dissensions and excesses which made him sigh for his provincial quietude. Their upper story in the Rue de Bac gave them a partial view of the attack on the Tuileries, and they with difficulty persuaded their porter to admit a wounded Swiss, who implored a glass of water, drank it, and expired. An idle story that Helen callously walked among the bodies of the victims gained currency in England, and induced Boswell to expunge in the second edition of his "Johnson" the adjective "amiable," which he had originally applied to her. Amiable, strictly speaking, she may not have been—she was too dogmatic for that; but, far from being callous, she was horrified at finding corpses in the Tuileries gardens, whither she had ventured on the assurance of everything being quiet, and hastily retreated. She wrote against the Jacobins in letters to English journals, twice visited Madame Roland in prison, and was intrusted by her with papers which the fear of domiciliary visits compelled her to destroy, together with documents of her own. In October 1793, the author of "Paul and Virginia" was drinking tea with the Williams's, and describing his projected paradise at Essonne—he had married, or was about to marry, Félicité, daughter of Didot, the great printer and typefounder, who had a paper-mill in that village—when a friend rushed in with tidings that all the English were to be arrested as hostages for Toulon. The next day was one of painful suspense. By evening they had heard of the apprehension of most of their English acquaintances, but still hoped their sex might exempt them. At 2 a.m., however, commissaries arrived, hurried them out of bed and to the guardhouse—a sort of lock-up—where they passed the rest of the night. Thence they were conveyed to the Luxembourg, where the porter, a Swiss Protestant, who remembered having seen them at church, was kind to them.
The prisoners, mostly English, took turns in making the fire and sweeping the rooms, and those who could not afford to send out for dinner cooked their own. The Williams's had family prayers at night in which Lasource, the eloquent Protestant pastor, and Madame de Genlis's husband, both destined to the guillotine, joined. They had also joined in composing "a little hymn set to a sweet solemn air," which formed part of these devotions. Many, however—of the French prisoners, at least—were less serious, and were addicted to cards, music, and even love-making. Indeed, a scandal in which an outsider and a female prisoner were concerned occasioned an order for the separation of the sexes, and, while the men remained at the Luxembourg, forty Englishwomen were sent to the English Conceptionist Convent. The Blue Nuns, themselves prisoners in their own house, and compelled to convert their flowing robes into gowns and their veils into bonnets, were very kind to their distressed countrywomen, and Sister Thérèse struck Helen as the nearest approach to angelic purity she had ever seen. Exercise in the garden was allowed, and friends could speak to them through the grating, whereas at the Luxembourg they could not stir beyond the threshold, and could be seen by friends only at the common-room window.
Athanase Coquerel, a native of Rouen, settled in business at Paris, and already engaged to Helen's sister Cecilia, after two months' untiring and perilous exertions procured the release of the Williams's, which seems to have been so clandestinely effected that there is no entry of it. They risked their lives by sheltering Rabaut St. Etienne, and after a time went to Switzerland, leaving behind Cecilia, now Madame Coquerel. Helen, who had gone to France as to a land of liberty, hailed the Swiss frontier as an escape from Inferno. Perhaps after all, Barère, whom she suspected of betraying her drawing-room conversations, committed one good action in his life, and facilitated her liberation and departure. She returned after Robespierre's fall; and in July 1796, Wolfe Tone, half displeased at thus losing his incognito, met "my old friend Stone of Hackney" walking in the Tuileries gardens with Miss Williams. He dined with them "very pleasantly." Stone "was very hearty, but H. M. Williams is Miss Jane Bull completely. I was quite gentle and agreeable." This probably means that Tone had to avoid interlarding his conversation with oaths, more suo. After Cecilia's death in 1798 Helen was like a mother to her two boys, one of them the future pastor, Athanase Coquerel père. She admired the Bonaparte of Brumaire, but loathed Bonaparte the despot, and was punished by him with a domiciliary visit and a night's captivity for ignoring him in her Ode on the Peace of 1802. Fox spent an evening with her in that year. The notorious Lewis Goldsmith tells an absurd story of Bonaparte having ordered her to invite Fox, in order to worm out his opinions, and of Stone having furnished the police with a full report of the conversation. Helen and Stone, he alleges, spoke strongly against Bonaparte's tyranny for the purpose of drawing Fox out, but the latter was very reserved. All this is certainly a fabrication. Helen laid by her pen till Napoleon's fall, and she welcomed the Restoration, with the English visitors which followed in its train. Lady Morgan, in 1816, found numerous guests at her Sunday-evening reception, but Stone's increasing embarrassments affected her, and she had to write, no longer for pleasure, but to eke out her resources. Athanase Coquerel, as Pastor Marron told Lady Morgan in 1829, was for a time in ignorance of her straitened circumstances. On learning them, he fetched her to Amsterdam; but separation from friends and Dutch habits brought on confirmed melancholy. He had to take her back to Paris, and settled a small annuity on her, but she died soon after her return, in 1827. An eye-witness of the greater part of the Revolution, acquainted with the leading actors, and a ready writer, she might have given us the best contemporary account of it; but her habit of moralising spoilt her as an annalist, so that of her numerous works not one has escaped oblivion, and even the few persons who may occasionally sing her hymn—
"While Thee I seek, protecting Power,"
are probably unaware by what "Williams" it was written.
"Affected but kind-hearted" was the verdict passed on her by Mary Wollstonecraft, who, disappointed of joining Fuseli's proposed party to Paris, went thither alone in December 1792 for the purpose of learning French and of finding a situation as teacher for her sister. Walpole styles Mary a "hyæna in petticoats," because she attacked Marie Antoinette even after death; yet tears fell from her eyes when she saw Louis pass on his way to trial, displaying more dignity than she had expected. She unluckily met Imlay, heedlessly acted upon her theory of free-love, joined him at Havre in 1794, gave birth to a child there, and on business calling Imlay to London, returned with her infant to Paris. Hamilton Rowan, the Irish agitator, arriving shortly before Robespierre's fall, heard at some festival a lady talking English to a nursemaid carrying an infant,[3] and made acquaintance with this by courtesy Mrs. Imlay. She remained in France till the following year, having, however, previously sent off her manuscripts, for had these been found, her life would not have been worth much; but her book on the Revolution, mostly written in a gardener's solitary cottage at Neuilly, did not advance beyond a first volume, and this contains nothing that would be otherwise unknown. She does not relate her own experiences, and, writing for contemporaries more or less familiar with the facts, she moralises rather than narrates.
John Oswald, as a fellow-vegetarian, was probably acquainted with Pigott, and, like him, did not see the end of the Revolution, but his end was more tragical. The son of an Edinburgh coffee-house keeper, he was apprenticed to a jeweller, but a legacy enabled him to buy a commission in the 43rd Foot, which he accompanied to India. He left the army, possibly on account of his political opinions, and in 1785 returned to England. He had become a vegetarian, thinking it cruel to take an innocent animal's life, and filthy to feed upon a corpse. He had a passion for travelling, had lived among the Kurds and Turcomans, and was acquainted with Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Despising fashion, he dispensed with cravat and wig, wearing his hair à la Titus. In 1787 he published a volume of poems under the name of Sylvester Otway, a farce called the "Humours of John Bull" being inserted in it. He also started a magazine called the British Mercury, and issued some Radical pamphlets. The Revolution drew him to Paris, a dislike of creditors, according to some, being an additional inducement. He joined the Jacobin Club, and Brissot in September 1792 suggested the conferring of French citizenship on him, but this was not acted upon. He translated Collot d'Herbois' "Spirit of the French Constitution," which he appended to an ode of his own on the Triumph of Freedom. He was one of the founders of the Chronique du Mois, a political magazine. Vegetarian though he was, he considered bloodshed necessary to the success of the Revolution.
In March 1792 he placarded the faubourg St. Antoine with bills advocating the abolition of standing armies, all able-bodied citizens to be armed with pikes. He was commissioned to organise a regiment of volunteers, but found them very refractory, and being a stern disciplinarian, he had "almost as many enemies as soldiers in his corps." He had left his wife and three children in England, but he sent for his two boys, and made them drummers in his regiment. He was dispatched against the Vendée insurgents, but in almost the first engagement he and his sons perished. It is believed that they were killed by their own men. Another Englishman who fell with them may have been Dr. Maxwell, who in December 1792 joined the French army, and is not again heard of. Three months previously Maxwell started a subscription in London for the French, citing the Corsica subscription as a precedent; but his house was mobbed on the day the promoters were to meet. Maxwell slipped away unobserved, and Horne Tooke took the arrivals to his own house, where a considerable sum was raised, and an order for arms sent to Birmingham.
Another Scotchman, Thomas Christie of Montrose, paid three visits to France. He was of a Unitarian family,[4] and was an old pupil of Dr. Price, who in the winter of 1789 gave him introductions to Mirabeau and Necker. Enraptured with the Revolution, he counted on the regeneration of mankind. As he remained six months, he probably joined Cloots's deputation. In May 1791 he went over again, became intimate with Danton, and on his return wrote an answer to Burke. In 1792 he was once more in Paris, and when the Assembly resolved on translating the Constitution into the eight principal European languages, Christie undertook the English version, which and the Italian were the only ones executed. He knew Mackintosh and Paine. He probably left just before the September massacres, for on the 9th of that month he married in London, and became a partner in his wife's grandfather's carpet-factory. In the spring of 1793 he was again in Paris, with his wife and unmarried sister. George Forster, the German naturalist who had accompanied Cook in his voyage round the world, received great kindness from them, and accompanied them to the opera and in excursions to Louveciennes. Miss Christie was in love with a young Frenchman, formerly adjutant to Lafayette, who had taken refuge in England. The engagement was disapproved of by the family, and the young lady, who was in weak health, excited Forster's sympathy. She, in turn, commiserated his troubles. He was sent on a mission to Arras in August 1793, and on his return in the following November, the Christies must have quitted Paris, for he does not again mention them. Whether because the carpet-factory did not flourish, or because of a restless disposition, Christie went out to Surinam, and died there in 1796, at the age of thirty-five.
- ↑ He printed the Government tax-papers.
- ↑ The name is left blank, or given as "M.W.," in the printed collection, "Lettres de Madame Roland à Bancal."
- ↑ Poor Fanny Godwin (so called), her cradle rocked by the Revolution; her girlhood passed with a needy, tyrannical stepfather, and a stepmother styled by Lamb "a very disgusting woman, wearing green spectacles;" her end a bottle of laudanum in a Bath hotel!
- ↑ His uncle, William Christie, founded the first Unitarian congregation in Scotland, joined Priestley in America, became a minister there, and, like Cooper, contributed to Priestley's memoirs.