Englishmen in the French Revolution/Chapter VII
VII.
Prisoners.
"Rousseau is to this Revolution what the germ is to the tree. |
VII.
PRISONERS.
Anglophobia—Ex-royal mistresses—Luttrell—Pitt's kinsmen—
Pamphleteers—Kilmaine—Nunneries and Colleges.
At the beginning of the Revolution the English were regarded as freemen to be imitated, at the end as slaves to be liberated or as enemies to be subjugated. The stage eagerly adopted the latter view. In October 1793 a play by Sylvain Maréchal, Le Dernier Jugement des Rois, represented all the monarchs of Europe on a volcanic island, George III. being dragged in chains by an English sans-culotte. Charged with ruining his people and fomenting civil war in France, he pleads madness in excuse. This piece was ordered to be performed at all the Paris theatres on the anniversary of Louis XVI.'s execution. A little later, Lebrun Tossa brought out his Folie de George. In this play the recapture of Toulon has brought on a relapse of insanity, and the King, in dressing gown, bestrides the stage, whip in hand, imagining that he is hunting. Pitt is anxious to prevent his opening Parliament in this condition, but the Prince of Wales threatens to reveal everything to the public. The fit passes over, and George in royal robes goes to open Parliament, but the Prince, by his side, endeavours, by whispering to him of a plot, to cause a relapse. He succeeds but too well, and in his delirium George apostrophises the Whig leaders, flings his robes on the table, and in boxing attitude challenges Sheridan. Pitt with great difficulty leads him away. The debate then begins, and the Opposition are demanding a regency when a French landing is announced. Grey proposes to go and welcome the French; a republic is proclaimed, the heads of the Prince of Wales and Pitt are cut off and paraded through the streets. George, shut up in a carriage, is drawn to Bedlam by Burke, Grenville, and Chesterfield. Fox and Sheridan in red caps insult him, and the curtain falls on Fox's exclamation that if the King recovered his reason he would be the first to demand his death.
Desnoireterres[1] finds something Shakesperean in this sorry burlesque, the author of which afterwards fawned on Napoleon. The proceedings of the Convention were almost as grotesque. On the 1st February 1793 it issued an address to the English people, Paine being one of the framers, though a small minority objected to it as useless, as all England was for war. In the following
- August, Simon complained of the multitude of Englishmen in Paris. They insulted the French, he said, by their anti-revolutionary redingotes, paraded their luxury at the very moment when spying on and betraying their hosts, and ridiculed Frenchmen who did not adopt their manners or dress. Every day, too, they were at the Bourse, "bearing" the market. On the 7th September a deputation pressed for the extension to the English of the confiscation already applied to Spaniards. Gaston, in supporting this, denounced the English as perfidious monsters who were employing the most atrocious means to destroy French liberty. "As to the objection that the English might retaliate by repudiating debts to Frenchmen, there was not a single honest Frenchman in London, all were traitors, and the worse the English served them the better." The Convention annulled debts to Englishmen, but the finance committee overruled this, whereupon a second deputation urged the prohibition of all British goods. "The Romans," exclaimed Germain, "were not a commercial people, yet they conquered Carthage; and London is our Carthage." The Convention, moreover, subsidised David and other artists to caricature George III.
The delivery of Toulon to the English exasperated the Convention, especially as it was led to believe that they had hung Deputy Beauvais. On the 18th October 1793 it decreed that all English, Scotch, Irish, and Hanoverians of both sexes and all ages should be arrested, their papers seized, and their effects confiscated. Factory operatives and children under twelve in French schools were alone excepted.[2] On a motion to rescind this decree, or else to extend it to all foreigners. Saint Just said, "Make your children swear eternal hatred to that Carthage, the Court of London,[3] not to the English people." He proposed the arrest of all subjects of powers at war with France. Robespierre in seconding it said, a few philosophers and friends of humanity might suffer, but they would be generous enough not to resent it. Barère carried a proviso exempting Englishwomen with French husbands, such as Madame Calas, married to the eldest son of the Toulouse victim. All British merchandise in stock was to be given up, an indemnity being promised, and ultimately even English placards and shop-signs were forbidden. A teacher of languages had even to announce lessons in American.[4]
There was a sort of precedent for this wholesale arrest of peaceable English residents or travellers. In 1746 it was ordered that they should be apprehended as hostages for the Young Pretender, and after his escape the arrests were continued or maintained against persons not acknowledged by him as Jacobites. The object then, however, was to get rid of spies and cavillers, and most of the English were released on condition of quitting France. Lord Morton with his family was incarcerated in the Bastille because, being related to a man in high office in London, he would not apply to the Pretender for protection. There is no complete list of the English so-called hostages for the Toulon patriots. A number of the prison lists were consumed in 1871, when the Communists burnt down the Palace of Justice. The late M. Labat, archivist to the Prefecture of Police, compiled from the remaining lists, and from such warrants of arrest as have been preserved, a catalogue of the prisoners during the Revolution. These two bulky folios in manuscript I have carefully examined, and am indebted to them for most of the names of British prisoners given in the Appendix, but there are probably many omissions. The prison statistics tend to show that about 250 British subjects were arrested between the 10th and 14th October 1793, and the list in the Appendix contains over 200 names, several of which are, however, of doubtful nationality.
Very few of these prisoners have left any account of their experiences. There appeared, indeed, in 1859 a small book entitled, "Journal of my Life during the French Revolution," by Grace Dalrymple Elliott, daughter of Hew Dalrymple, a barrister engaged in the Douglas case, divorced wife of Dr. (afterwards Sir) John Elliott, successively the mistress of Lord Valentia, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Orleans. Had the work been trustworthy it would have been the best narrative of a British eye-witness of the Revolution. Unfortunately, though accepted by Sainte Beuve, who wrote a preface to the French translation, it has been shown by Vatel, Madame Dubarry's biographer, and other critics, to be a mixture in unknown quantities of reality and fiction. Mrs. Elliott professes to have been in four Paris prisons, but her name is not in the list of any. She describes a heartrending parting at the Carmelite monastery between Custine and his wife, whereas Custine was never at the Carmelites', and his wife was not arrested till two months after his execution. She describes the embarrassing meeting of Josephine and her husband as fellow-prisoners after years of separation, whereas the reconciliation had taken place long previously, and Josephine for weeks visited him in prison till herself arrested. She speaks of Harrop, eventually guillotined, as eighteen years of age and as a student at the Irish College, whereas he was twenty- two and in business. She describes Santerre as released before Robespierre's fall, whereas he was released immediately after it. After this it is needless to discuss the cutting off of Mrs. Elliott's hair preparatory to execution, her offer of marriage from Bonaparte, and other marvels. All that is certain is, that she was in France from about 1786 to 1801, that she was Gem's fellow-prisoner at Versailles, and that she knew a Mrs. Myler or Miglia, widow of an Italian, who was really a prisoner in Paris, and whose experiences she has apparently appropriated and embellished. She was watched, as a suspected political intriguer, after the Terror was over; she returned to England in 1801, went back to France about 1816, and died there in 1823. Had Mrs. Elliott really been imprisoned at St. Pélagie, she might have made acquaintance with an Irishwoman, Maria Louisa Murphy, who, if not like herself the mistress of two princes, had been openly lodged at Versailles, and had borne a son to Louis XV. The daughter of an ex-soldier turned shoemaker, whose widow dealt in old clothes, she had, by Madame de Pompadour's contrivance, posed for a picture of the Virgin in the Queen's oratory, so that the King might send for her. She was divorced by her third husband, Dupont, a member of the Convention, in 1798.[5]
Failing Mrs. Elliott, Sir William Codrington gives us a vivid picture of prison life. Codrington is the man who made the strange bet with Pigott in 1770. A boon companion of the Prince of Wales, he was disinherited by his father (M.P. for Tewkesbury in 1769), who twice paid heavy debts for him, the second time on condition of his renouncing all claim to the estates.[6] These went to a cousin, who fancied he inherited the baronetcy also. Codrington retired to Brittany, and his father's death in 1792 made him Sir William. I give in the Appendix the interesting letter received from him by friends in London in February 1795, and privately printed by his grandson, to whom I am indebted for a copy. Written just after his release, it is entitled to entire confidence. All that need be added is that he continued to reside in France, married Eleanor Kirke, and died in 1816. His son received £23,000 compensation after the peace, and his grandson still inhabits Brittany.
The Temple Luttrell, an ex-M.P., mentioned by Codrington as a fellow-captive, was a son of the Earl of Carhampton, whose daughter married the Duke of Cumberland. Luttrell's arrest was triumphantly announced as that of the King of England's brother, because his sister was the King's sister-in-law. The Colonel Luttrell seated for Middlesex in opposition to Wilkes was his brother, and Henry Luttrell, a noted wit and man of society, was an illegitimate brother. Temple Luttrell, arrested at Boulogne 18th September 1793, was liberated on the 14th February 1795. Liberty was his valentine.[7] Three days previously Colonel Richard Grenville had been discharged. He was a son of James Grenville, brother of Lord Glastonbury, and nephew of the George Grenville who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1763. He was the "dear little captain " of seventeen spoken of in the Grenville correspondence. While quietly living in a mansion at Cominet, near Dinan, in September 1793, he was pounced upon by Carrier, who exultantly announced the arrest of a "nephew of Pitt." He was really a cousin of the younger Pitt, and this unlucky relationship involved his detention at the Luxembourg till February 1795. He rose to be a general, was M.P. for Buckingham, and died in 1823.
If supposed kinship with Pitt had disagreeable consequences, imagine the result of bearing the same name! On the 4th October 1793, Deputy Dumont wrote to the Convention from Abbeville to announce the arrest of a relative of the infamous Pitt. "This shrew, named Elizabeth Joanna Pitt, had prudently conceived the idea of absconding, but she was in a town whose inhabitants are no longer ruled by moderantism and aristocracy. She met on the road Republicans who patriotically pressed her to remain. All her effects are seized. . . . As she is an additional hostage, I am going to send her to Paris." At Paris accordingly the poor woman arrived, and I presume she is "la nièce Pitt" who was liberated in June 1795. According to the letters published by Gifford, she had been a nun at Abbeville, and was of impaired intellect. Benjamin Pitt, an elderly tradesman, and his wife Elizabeth Atlay, were also sent to Paris, and detained till February 1795. The announcement of their arrest by Barère, "the licensed liar of the Convention," as Michelet styles him, created unbounded delight.
Sampson Perry, militia surgeon, quack medicine vendor, and journalist, has given in his "History of the Revolution" some particulars of his own captivity. On his first visit to Paris, Paine took him to dine at the Hotel de Ville with Pétion, the guests including Dumouriez, Santerre, Condorcet, Danton, and Brissot. Prosecuted for asserting in his Argus that the King and Pitt had kept back information for stockjobbing purposes, he fled to France in January 1793. He was a witness at the mock trial of Marat, but merely gave evidence as to a young man named Johnson, who, his mind unhinged by fears for Paine's safety, had attempted suicide, after making a will in Paine's favour. He states that, for want of room where, the English were kept in a guardhouse, men and women having to sleep as well as eat in one room. A baronet and a groom, a fashionable young lady and a cook, were thus companions for many weeks before they were drafted off into prisons. A secret police report, indeed, describes the English of the Section du Roule as lying, men and women, on straw, straw itself being scarce, and as lacking even water to drink. The Comtesse de Bohm, too, saw forty Englishwomen brought to Plessis, cooped at night in a room so small that their beds touched, and spending the day on the stairs, utterly impassive and torpid. Perry was at first sent to Madelonnettes, where the keeper was a humane man, and on a relaxation of rigour was transferred to the Luxembourg. Many English without means might, he says, have obtained release, but preferred remaining prisoners. Teachers, grooms, and domestic servants must obviously have been deprived of their livelihood by the exodus of the rich. Perry believed himself to be in imminent peril when, on the trial of the Dantonists, Hérault de Séchelles proposed calling him as a witness to the innocency of his negotiations with English Whigs; but the defence, as we know, was suppressed, and Perry after fifteen months' detention was released. He bore no grudge against his gaolers,—he wrote in his "Appeal," dated "the felons' side of Newgate, March 25th, 1795,"— 1795,"—for many innocent natives and foreigners had inevitably to suffer, and Frenchmen, lamenting that Englishmen had had to sustain so long a captivity, did everything in their power to make them forget their past sufferings. Released from Newgate on a change of ministry, he subsequently edited the Statesman, had cross suits for libel with Lewis Goldsmith, the jury giving him a farthing damages, and died in 1823, on the eve of discharge by the Insolvent Debtors' Court. A contemporary sketch of him,[8] apparently copied from a newspaper, is the sole authority I have been able to find for the fable of Paine (and Perry also) having escaped the guillotine by the cell door swinging open and being chalked on the inner side.
Henry Stevens, described like Perry as a man of letters, was imprisoned at the Abbaye, the Carmelites, and the Luxembourg from October 1793 to the end of January 1795. He also was a friend of Paine, and had written a book, which I have been unable to find, entitled "Les Crimes des Bois d'Angleterre." He called on Lord Malmesbury at Paris in 1796.
General Kilmaine should not be passed over, though he had in thirty years become to all intents and purposes a Frenchman. His real name was Charles Jennings, and he was born at Dublin in 1751, but was apparently related to the Jennings family of Kilmaine, Mayo. When eleven years old he accompanied his father to France, was brought up a soldier, and made a good cavalry officer. He served under Lafayette in America, and afterwards in Senegal. He was enraptured with the Revolution, and distinguished himself at Jemappes. In June 1793 he was at the head of the vanguard in Flanders, and was anxious for a command in chief, but the Convention commissaries, while acknowledging that he was brave and dashing, deemed it imprudent to give him a higher post. "He is a foreigner; he is Irish; republicanism does not easily penetrate such skulls." Dubois-Dubay, however, recommended him for the command in Vendée, as the only general on whose ability and energy he could rely. But instead of promotion came eighteen months' imprisonment for falling back before the enemy, his wife Susan being also incarcerated till July 1795. Kilmaine afterwards served in Italy, commanded the "armée de l'Angleterre," which should have invaded us in 1798, and died in 1800, having not long previously been divorced. His rapacity was notorious.
Denis de Vitré, an Englishman by birth, Canadian on the paternal and English on the maternal side, was a prisoner for at least some hours, though I have not found the conclusion of his history. His father was the Denis de Vitré who was believed to have piloted the English fleet up the St. Lawrence in 1759. He had just been captured at sea, and was coerced by threats of hanging into thus betraying his native Quebec, but coercion is a poor excuse for treason. He petitioned Pitt, moreover, for compensation or reward, and it is said with success. The son went to France about 1777, managed a manufactory for Philippe Egalité apparently at Montargis, joined the revolutionary clubs there, next went to Rouen, and then to Paris, where he stayed at the Hotel de Philadelphie, the resort of English and Americans, and sedulously attended the Jacobin Club. On the 16th December 1793 he was denounced at the Club as an agent of Pitt, and if his father's career was known this is not surprising. He was sharply interrogated, and sent to the Committee of Public Safety. As the Club usually sat till ten, Vitré doubtless passed that night in confinement, but the Committee probably discharged him. Anyhow, he is not on the guillotine list.
The British Catholic communities in France, twenty-eight in number, with about 1000 inmates and £15,000 revenue, were nearly all despoiled and broken up by the Revolution. The Embassy for a time, indeed, obtained their exemption from the law-suppressing monasteries, on the ground that their property was derived from British benefactions, and that to confiscate it, after the invitations and assurances given by French sovereigns to the founders, would be like the hanging out of false lights by wreckers. There should at least be permission to sell out and withdraw to England. But the respite was very short, and there came a series of tribulations. The nuns in Paris might have given us interesting accounts of their own experiences; but domiciliary visits rendered it unsafe to keep diaries, and only one convent out of three subsequently drew up a record of its sufferings. We know from the minutes of Jacobin commissaries that, unlike some of their French sisters, the English nuns unanimously declined to re-enter the world, and they felt the full force of the revolutionary hurricane. Their lives, indeed, were never in danger, except from a possible repetition of the September massacres, but they suffered great privations.
The Austin nuns, since 1634, had carried on a school, to which leading Catholic families, Pastons, Towneleys, Fermors,and Blounts, sent their daughters. Dr. Johnson and the Thrales called on them in 1775, when the sub-prior Frances Fermor, niece of Arabella, the heroine of the "Rape of the Lock," described Pope as a disagreeable man, the poem as rather an insult than an honour to the family, and her aunt as rendered troublesome and conceited by it. Mrs. Thrale (then Madame Piozzi) paid the nunnery a second visit in 1784, when she made in her diary some sarcastic comments on the easy, care-free lives of the inmates. The flippant lady little foresaw the ordeal in store for them, yet they were comparatively fortunate in remaining at their convent. They would have been buffeted about like others but for the overcrowding of the prisons and the spaciousness of their heterogeneous buildings, so graphically described by George Sand, afterwards a boarder there. Their journal, which the present chaplain, the Abbé Cédoz, has allowed me to inspect, has a gap of several years, followed by a brief statement of the cause.
A motley throng of prisoners, good and bad, rich and poor, occupied the convent. They included several actresses; Malesherbes's daughter, Madame de Rosanbo, guillotined with eleven other inmates; George Sand's grandmother, Madame Dupin; and the birdseller's daughter, Victoire Delaborde. Curiously enough, these two did not then make each other's acquaintance, and Maurice Dupin, then a boy living at Auteuil, who agreed with his mother that at a certain hour in the day both should fix their eyes on the dome of the Pantheon, had no presentiment that his destined wife, Victoire, might also be gazing at it. Disparity of station kept the two women apart.
A number of British subjects were detained there, among them the Abbé Edgeworth's sister, Betty, who was "dragged from prison to prison." His mother, too, was probably there also, for she was arrested while he was still in concealment in Paris, and soon succumbed to grief. Another inmate, arrested not as an Englishwoman but as the widow of an aristocrat, was the Marquise de Châtellux. Mary Bridget Josephine Charlotte Plunket was lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Orleans, the wife of Egalité. Her father, Thomas Plunket, a kinsman of Lord Dunsany, was an Austrian field-marshal, had distinguished himself in the Seven Years' War, and had died governor of Antwerp in 1770. Mary, born at Louvain in 1759, was educated at the Austin convent, her future prison. A husband was found for her by a singular stratagem. The Marquis de Châtellux, a member of the Academy, and the first adult Frenchman who underwent inoculation, had published an account of his travels in America. It was contrived that he should be sent to Spa, and should steal unawares on Miss Plunket while absorbed in his book. He fell in love with her on the spot, and marriage speedily followed; the bridegroom was fifty-three, the bride twenty-three. Washington sent him a bantering letter of congratulation—"Married, my dear Marquis? You, too, caught! I have a great mind to laugh." Captain Swinburne, who saw the happy pair in 1787—by a slip of the pen he says Carondelet instead of Châtellux—writes: "He is the most passionate lover ever seen, and cannot bear to be absent from her for a moment, and even sits by her at table." Madame de Genlis was jealous of the Marchioness, whom she accuses of supplanting her in the favour of the Duchess of Orleans. Possibly she opened the Duchess's eyes to the relations between Egalité and his children's governess. The bride was in twelve months a widow, but gave birth to a son, Alfred, who was petted by the Duchess, his godmother. Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador, was very friendly with Madame de Châtellux, who introduced him to the Duchess, and whom he describes as "an amiable woman, not the less lovely for the tears she sheds to her husband's memory." Morris was so fond of discussing financial and political programmes that Madame de Châtellux used to tell him that her patriotic gift—patriotic gifts were then in vogue—would be to present him to Louis XVI. as one of his ministers.[9] Her English coachman Archley was among the captors of the Bastille, yet she was regarded as one of the instigators of the departure of the King's aunts, who, poor ladies, thus escaped revolutionary horrors. Perhaps on this account she was a prisoner from November 1793 to November 1794 at the Austin nunnery, where she had been at school just twenty years before.
Mirabeau's mother was also at the Austin convent. The Marquis de Mirabeau, the self-styled "friend of man," but not the friend of his own household, describes his life with her as "twenty years of nephretic colic," but the fault was certainly not all on her side. On her going to visit her sick mother in 1763, her husband forbade her return home, and procured a lettre de cachet for her detention in a Limoges convent. The Marquis died the day before the capture of the Bastille. The widow lived in poverty in Paris; her son refused to see her, and when he was dying she vainly waited six hours outside for permission to see him, for her daughter, doubtless by Mirabeau's orders, refused her admission. She threatened to dispute his will, which left her nothing, but as he died in debt his legacies were nugatory. The poor woman, poor in two senses, was a captive about a year, and died shortly after her release, 18th November 1794, at the age of sixty-nine.
No prisoner at the convent has left any narrative. The nuns were required to assume secular dress, and were not allowed religious services, but they were permitted to remain in their cells and to walk in the vineyard. The tombs were profaned for the sake of the lead, and church plate and ornaments were plundered. The velvet draperies, bearing the royal arms embroidered in gold, from the royal pew in Whitehall chapel, presented to the convent on James II.'s death, had disappeared. In March 1795 the gaoler and guards were withdrawn, and the school was reopened, but in 1799 the sale of all the British establishments was ordered. The nuns were on the point of quitting France, and had sent off their luggage to Calais, when Consul Lebrun's sympathy, and his good offices with Bonaparte, enabled them to remain. Removing in 1860 to Neuilly, just outside Paris, they celebrated in 1884 their fifth jubilee.
The Benedictine convent was likewise converted into a prison, with a brutal gaoler who delighted to threaten his captives with death—no empty threat, for the Princess of Monaco, Madame Sainte Amaranthe, and others, left the nunnery for the Conciergerie, and the latter for the guillotine. The nuns not only witnessed distressing partings, but anticipated a like fate. Stonyhurst College possesses a manuscript, which, evidently written after their return to England, depicts in an artless way the alarms, insults, and privations undergone by them.[10]After several domiciliary visits they were declared prisoners in October 1793. Their street was called the Rue de Alouette, from the ground having been formerly frequented by larks. They were now themselves caged birds, if indeed they had the heart to sing. Commissaries next came to fit up the convent as a prison, but to tranquillise the nuns promised that the captives should be only Englishwomen, a promise which was not long kept.
The prison became so full—Foignet found eighty inmates, two-thirds of them men—that in the workroom were placed as many beds as could stand, which were removed during the day. Refectory, cloisters, and outhouses were also crowded with beds. The cemetery was turned into a promenade for the prisoners, the tombstones being laid flat or carried away. All their rents being stopped, the nuns for the last three months of 1793 had to live on the small sum in hand, barely sufficient to keep them alive. Their papers were catalogued in a sarcastic style by a revolutionary commissary. One of the nuns had been in the habit of complaining to the chaplain, Naylor, of real or imaginary unkindness from the abbess or sisters, and these letters were inventoried as "squabbles of conventual life," "mystical extravagances," &c. The poor nuns must have shivered at the thought that all their documents, from religious correspondence down to recipes for making snuff, were overhauled by scoffing sans-culottes. Their library of a thousand volumes was dispersed. The Girondin deputies, indeed, after being huddled with criminals at the Madelonnettes, found the nunnery clean, spacious, and airy, with an agreeable prospect and a delicious promenade, the only drawback being that the female prisoners had had to be crowded to make room for them, yet according to Foignet, study was impossible and even conversation dangerous, it being construed as conspiracy.
In July 1794, the nuns were removed by night to the castle of Vincennes, where they were cooped up in narrow cells, with windows too high to see out of. Four months later they were carted back to Paris, to the Austin nunnery. On their liberation they managed, by the sale of their linen and furniture, to leave for England, where they found a new home, first in Dorsetshire and ultimately in Staffordshire.
The Conceptionists in the Rue Charenton, very near the Bastille, were removed to the Austin convent in November 1794, and shared its alarms and privations. On their release they petitioned the Convention, giving a lamentable picture of their condition. "While prisoners we were at least sure of food, but we are now reduced to starvation, subsisting only on the scanty alms of charitable persons acquainted with our situation. Our property is not restored; we are despoiled of everything. We have no family, and shall have no country if the Republic abandons us. You will not suffer despair to reduce us to regret having escaped the axe of assassins. Grant us temporary shelter and succour until you have decided whether our property shall be restored. We shall not cease to bless your justice, and to cry 'Vive la République Française, vive la Convention Rationale.'" This appeal seems to have secured them a temporary allowance of two francs per head daily, and in 1797 Captain Swinburne found them tolerably comfortable, their convent having been restored to them, though in a dilapidated state. They were living upon what they could earn, and he dissuaded them from returning to England. A fresh confiscation, however, befell them in 1799, and they sought refuge with the Jerninghams at Cossey, Norfolk, where the community died out.
The Benedictine monastery and the three British seminaries were closed or turned into prisons, but the priests and monks mostly escaped. The Irish college, which then had lay as well as clerical students, had stormy times. In December 1790, one of a party of its students, walking in the Champ de Mars and mounting the Federation altar, leaned against and accidentally knocked down a wooden pedestal. The sentry tried to arrest the delinquent, his comrades defended him, a mob collected, and had not Lafayette with 100 horsemen hurried up, six of the Irish youths would have been hanged on the spot for the supposed insult to the altar. As it was, they spent a fortnight in prison, and were then acquitted. Later on a mob attempted to break into the college; but Mac Canna, a student, pistol in hand, planted himself at the gate, threatened to shoot the first man who advanced, and improvised a speech on the position of Irish exiles confiding in French hospitality, whereupon the mob applauded and dispersed. In September 1791 the congregation at the college chapel, including French worshippers, were mobbed on leaving, a lady being shamefully flogged, but the authorities took measures against the recurrence of such outrages. After the Terror the ten remaining Irish students were allowed to return to their own country. James Coigley or Quigley, a priest destined to the gallows at Maidstone for treason in 1798, had left in 1789, having proved an unruly spirit, but he had witnessed the beginning of the Revolution, and mistaken for a royalist priest, had had a narrow escape from the lanterne. He was in Paris again in 1797, conspiring against England.
The Scotch college, adjoining the Austin convent, was made a prison, and St. Just was taken thither on the 9th Thermidor, but the gaoler refused to receive him. The gilt-bronze urn, containing in a leaden case the brain of James II., was wrenched off the monument to his memory, and the case was not discovered till four years ago, in laying a pipe under the chapel floor. James's manuscripts, sent for safety into the provinces, were ultimately destroyed. His coffin at the Benedictine monastery was opened, and the body made away with.
Of this "resurrection" we have two accounts. An anonymous correspondent of the Gentleman's Magazine in 1798, a prisoner at the Scotch college, was told by a Miss White, an eye-witness, that James's nose was very prominent, the end of it being long and "abundant," whereas the lower part of his long oval face was anything but prominent, for his cheeks were lantern-jawed. She gave the correspondent a piece of the black silk velvet which enveloped the body. In Notes and Queries for 1850 appeared a rather fuller account, taken down ten years previously at Toulouse from the lips of an octogenarian Irishman, Fitzsimons, doubtless the Gerard Luther Fitzsimons, born at Quilca, County Cavan, in 1765, who retired from the French army in 1821 on a pension of 2400 francs. He states that there was a wooden coffin, enclosed in lead, and this again in a wooden case. The lead was wanted for bullets, and the body lay exposed nearly a whole day. It was swaddled like a mummy, and tied with garters. When the Jacobins took it out of the coffin, there was a strong smell of vinegar and camphor. The corpse was quite perfect, and the hands and nails very fine. Fitzsimons moved and bent every finger. The teeth were the finest set he had ever seen. A young lady prisoner wishing for a tooth, he tried to pull one out for her, but they were too firmly fixed. The feet were very beautiful, and the face and cheeks as though alive. He rolled the eyes, and the eyeballs were quite firm under his finger. The French and English prisoners gave money to the Jacobins for permission to see the body. The Jacobins said James was a good sans-culotte, and they were going to put him into a hole in the churchyard, like other sans-culottes. The body was carried away, but where it was thrown he never heard.
A decision of the Privy Council in 1825, for reasons more technical than equitable, excluded the monastic communities from any share in the indemnity fund. Sir John Leach, Master of the Rolls, delivered judgment to the effect that these communities being illegal by English law, they must be regarded as French establishments, and as such not entitled to share in the lump sum given by France to indemnify British subjects. Even as recently as 1874 the House of Commons was petitioned to reconsider the question.
A word as to the history of the Irish college, the only British institution besides the Austin nunnery which still exists in Paris. Macdermott and several of the remaining students took refuge at St. Germain, where Jerome Bonaparte was Macdermott' s pupil. The school was afterwards reinstated in the college, and altogether lost its religious character. The students were young men of fashion, more conversant with Voltaire and Rousseau than with the Bible. In 1801 the English and Scotch colleges in Paris, as also the provincial ones, were amalgamated with the Irish college; that is to say, the wreck of their property left by the Revolution was lumped together, and the scholars all congregrated in one building, an arrangement still in the main continued. In 1813 Walsh, the superior, was removed. According to Richard Ferris, who supplanted him, he had refused to render any accounts, and had sold to the butterman for 500 francs the 2700 volumes of the English Benedictines, including a unique edition of the Fathers. Ferris, displaced by Paul Long, whom Archbishop Murray sent over on the fall of the Empire to restore the College into a seminary, was reinstated during the Hundred Days, was then again superseded by Long, but in 1820 recovered his post. He had been quartermaster under Condé in 1792, now kept his carriage, and had so completely unfrocked himself that he had a wife (?) and children. He resigned after a time, and bought a mansion near Soissons, where he died in 1828. His collaterals in Ireland claimed his property, on the ground that his son was illegitimate, and that the grandchildren were consequently not heirs-at-law; but the distance and expense deterred them from proceeding with the suit, or a compromise may have been effected. Papers on this unedifying episode are still preserved at the College, which I believe has since been as harmoniously managed as for many years, both before and after the Revolution, it was the reverse. Ferris was unmistakably "a character," for though a priest, and with a right hand paralysed, he challenged Hély d'Oissel, his co-trustee, who had rebuked him for his quarrelsomeness. Reminded by Captain Myles Byrne, whom he asked to act as second, that his right hand was helpless, he replied—"No matter, I shall hold my pistol in my left hand, and my opponent will do the same." This left-handed duel did not, however, come off.
- ↑ La Comédie Satirique au XVIII. Siécle.
- ↑ Ferrières in February 1794 was expelled from the Jacobin Club for having liberated English children under twelve years of age, though he urged that not only did he thus rescue them from prison vices, but secured employment for sans-culotte teachers.
- ↑ This perhaps suggested Barère's impudent legend of Pitt having in boyhood been made by his father to swear eternal hatred to France.
- ↑ Yet Danton took Young's "Night Thoughts" to prison with him, and the poetaster Roncher translated Thomson's "Seasons" while awaiting the guillotine. He discussed a puzzling passage with three fellow-prisoners.
- ↑ The first inmate of the Pare aux Cerfs, she was succeeded by her sister, Mary Bridget. She was born at Rouen, had a pension of 12,000 francs till the Revolution, and died at Paris, 11th December 1814, aged seventy-seven.
- ↑ Codrington's wife, Mary, daughter of the Hon. William Ward, whom he married in 1776, had probably died, and without issue.
- ↑ He died at Paris, January 14th, 1803.
- ↑ Annual Biography, 1824.
- ↑ Scribner's Magazine, January 1887.
- ↑ See Appendix B.