Englishmen in the French Revolution/Chapter X

by John Goldworth Alger

X.

In the Provinces.

⁠"Alas, poor country;
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave; where nothing
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile."
⁠—Macbeth.

X.

IN THE PROVINCES.

Smith—Badger—Warburton—O'Sullvan—Bulkeley—Jane Grey
⁠—Elizabeth Phuikett—Mrs. Thicknesse—Baron de Bode—
⁠Colleges and Nunneries—Manufacturers.

The list of persons executed in Paris is complete, so that English names can be easily extracted, but of many who perished in the provinces there is no known record. Documents have been lost, destroyed, or abstracted by men ashamed of their revolutionary antecedents or by their descendants. Louis Blanc imagined that only eleven or twelve provincial tribunals existed, whereas Berryat St. Prix has shown that there were no less than 149. If the list of victims is very defective, still more so is the list of prisoners. Departmental and municipal archives are believed, indeed, to contain many documents on this subject, but the process of cataloguing has scarcely been begun. The last official report mentions only nineteen departments in which there is as yet any possibility of knowing what documents exist subsequent to 1790. Histories of the Revolution in particular departments or regions are now, it is true, being written, and two monthly magazines, taking opposite sides, are throwing much light on what happened in the provinces, ignored by Louis Blanc and Michelet; but scarcely more than a beginning has been made. It may, however, be conjectured that as many Englishmen suffered imprisonment or death outside Paris as within it.

When Lyons was recaptured by the Jacobins in October 1793, four persons of British nationality or descent perished in the wholesale fusillades perpetrated by the victors. The most prominent of these was Joseph Smith, a civil engineer born in Paris, who happened to be at Lyons, and rendered great service by casting cannon. He bore the rank of lieutenant-colonel of artillery. According to Balleydier, he solved an important engineering problem the very day he was shot, and carried the secret to the grave. Précy, one of the few leaders who escaped, gives a minute account of the last desperate sortie. On entering the village of Bagnols he heard that two fugitives had been arrested there. He demanded their release. The municipality hesitated, but he threatened, and at last the two men were brought. One of them was Smith, who urged Précy to leave his troop and try to escape alone. Smith gave him his cloak and his provision of chocolate. Précy with great difficulty got to Switzerland. Smith with the rest of the troop was captured, and two days afterwards (October 14th) was shot. He was at least saved the long suspense which befell his fellow-countrymen.

Two of these were silk-weavers, Louis Badger, aged thirty-five, and Pierre Badger, twenty-seven, natives of Lyons, and apparently sons of John Badger, who in 1789 was receiving a pension of 2300 francs for having introduced spinning-machines and for selling English tin-ware. He was seventy-seven, and had lived nearly forty years at Lyons. According to Beaulieu, Pierre Badger, when the town surrendered, was laid up with a wound received in the rising of the previous May, was arrested by mistake for his brother, might have saved himself by a word, but went cheerfully to execution. If this statement is correct, the sacrifice was unavailing. Pierre was shot on the 28th November, and Louis on the 5th December. The latter was one of 208 prisoners who were pinioned by the wrist to a long rope, the two ends of which were fastened to willow trees. Soldiers were stationed four paces behind, and fired on the signal being given, but not nearly all were killed. The survivors uttered fearful cries; the cavalry charged them with their sabres; it was a long and horrible butchery.

On the following Christmas Eve, Samuel Warburton, a retired English officer, fifty-eight years of age, and described as a Londoner, was shot with another batch of victims. One of them was a woman who in male dress had acted as a gunner during the siege. When asked how she could fight against her country, she replied that she was defending the country. Strange destiny for an English officer to pass unscathed while fighting under his own flag, and to perish in a stand for Moderate Liberalism, as we should now call it, in France!

If at Lyons one brother sacrificed his life to save the other, at Angers there were two brothers of Irish extraction, one of whom betrayed the other. One was executed by the Jacobins, while the other was put on trial, after Robespierre's fall, as a Terrorist. How long the O'Sullivans had been in France I cannot ascertain. A Daniel O'Sullivan, who taught fencing, and in 1766 published a treatise on it, may have been the grandfather of the two men of whom I am about to speak. He, too, may have been the O'Sullivan who was quarter-master with the Young Pretender in 1745, and, according to "Ascanius, or the Young Adventurer" (London, 1812), was very chicken-hearted in embarking on a French cutter and leaving the Prince to his fate. O'Hanlon, however, speaks highly of O'Sullivan's bravery and ability, and says Charles Edward passed at one time for his son.

Charles O'Sullivan, collector of stamp duties at St. Georges sur Loire, took part in the Vendée rising, and terrible to say, was given up by his brother, John Baptist, for the latter, when himself on trial at Paris, said: "As for my brother, he was with the rebels. He murdered patriots, and wanted to murder me. When he found there was no other hope for him, he came and threw himself into my arms; but he was my country's enemy, I performed a republican's duty and denounced him, and justice pronounced his fate."^[1] Charles was guillotined at Angers, December 31st, 1793. He was twenty-eighty ears of age.

Jean Baptist O'Sullivan was a fencing master like his presumptive grandfather. In 1791 he was sub-lieutenant in a company of volunteers at Nantes. At the end of 1793 the infamous Carrier made him adjutant of Nantes, and he took part in Carrier's atrocities. According to Madame de la Rochejaquelein, John owed his life to his brother, four years his junior, being saved by him when captured by the Vendeans. She adds that after Charles's death he was a prey to remorse, fancied himself pursued by his brother's ghost, and stupefied himself by committing fresh crimes. His wife, a handsome and virtuous woman, reproached him with his baseness. Summoned to Paris as a witness against Carrier, he was himself placed in the dock. It was alleged that, dining with a party of men in a garden, he had boasted that when superintending the "noyades" he would distract a prisoner's attention by bidding him look at something on the shore, and when the man turned his head stuck a knife into his throat. This he denied, but he admitted that he might have said in a moment of indignation that if the "brigands" (royalists) were in his hands he would knife them. In a conversation on muscular strength he was alleged to have said that his brother was stronger than himself, so that the guillotine had to strike twice before his head fell. It was also said that he had boasted of having slaughtered men like sheep with his pocket-knife. Yet he is described as a handsome man, adored by women, and wonderfully dexterous with his sword. One of the forty survivors of a gallant band of 400 men who in June 1792 frustrated a night attack on Nantes, he was acquitted at Paris, like twenty-seven others, as not having acted with counter-revolutionary designs. They were not, however, released, were threatened with a second trial, and were transferred to Angers prison, but were ultimately liberated. O'Sullivan settled as schoolmaster at Buchesne, was highly esteemed there, was a republican to the last, and survived till 1841. A letter from him, but without his signature, appears in Guépin's "Histoire de Nantes." He left two daughters, one of whom, a widow, kept a china shop at Nantes, retired on a competency, and died in 1875, at the age of ninety-one. Her father spent his latter years with her.^[2]

Before quitting Vendée I should mention William Bulkeley, lieutenant in Walsh's regiment, who married a widow possessing an estate near La Roche sur Yon, and in 1793 placed himself at the head of his peasants. He was one of the tallest and handsomest of the Vendean officers, and his wife, still young and handsome, fought with him under Charette. His descent from an old Irish family is spoken of. He was guillotined at Angers in January 1794. He is the last victim mentioned by Angers in a letter to the Paris Commune—"Our holy Mother Guillotine is busy. In the last three days she has shaved (sic) eleven priests, one ci-devant (noble), one ci-devant nun, one general, and a splendid (superbe) Englishman of six feet, whose head was de trop; it is now in the sack." M. Dugast Matifex, the Vendean historian, possesses several of Bulkeley's letters, which show him to have been well educated, though devoid of military ability.

The butchery in French Flanders, under the auspices of an ex-priest named with cruel irony Lebon, included two Englishwomen. Jane Grey, widow of one Griffiths—"Milord Griphèse," says a letter by the Jacobin Leroulx—"was thirty-five years of age, and so far from being in the peerage, was a working woman at Hallines. She was a native of London, and was charged with making voyages to England to carry money from Madame Fournier of St. Omer to her son." She was executed at Arras, and Leroulx, who speaks of her as a fine tall woman of thirty-six, says—"She did not show the slightest concern at the sentence, but on her way in the cart was laughing like a diablesse." Elizabeth Plunkett, one of twenty-nine victims furnished by the small town of Aire, was executed at Cambray, June 13th, 1794. She was born at Montreuil in 1758, but her name bespeaks Irish extraction. Imprisoned for nearly two years as a royalist, she was acquitted, but the very next day, when she had scarcely rejoined her mother, was rearrested, for it had been discovered that in 1791 she had carried round for signature an address thanking Louis XVI. for vetoing the bill against recusant priests, and asking that one of the churches might be assigned them. She had prepared a written defence, still preserved, in which she argued that the act was not at the time criminal, and could not be retrospectively so, but she was not allowed a hearing. When Lebon was brought to justice, one of the documents against him was a letter addressed to him by a juror, who, speaking of five executions, said—"The first of the five is a scélérate whose anti-revolutionary sentiments it would be impossible to describe. Suffice it to say, that since I have been on the revolutionary tribunal I have never known effrontery approaching hers. Her anti-revolutionary principles were shown not merely in her answers but in her line of defence. The wretch’s name was Elizabeth Plunkett, of Aire.”

I can only mention, for I have no particulars of them, André François Buckle, guillotined at Rochefort, March 14th, 1793; John Baptist Carr, executed, with sixteen other recusant priests, at Poitiers, March 18th, 1793; Charles Eliot, at Rennes, October 28th, 1793; Martin Glynn, Irish recusant priest, at Bordeaux, July 19th, 1794; John Joseph Goff, a deserter from the army, at Auxonne, June 15th, 1794; and Margaret Rose Gordon, born in France 1733, executed with six other nuns at Orange, July 15th, 1794.

Several persons bearing English names were acquitted by the tribunals or subjected to non-capital sentences. Joseph Joachim and Joseph Martin, sailors and prisoners of war, were condemned at St. Brieux to fifteen years' imprisonment for forging assignats. Captain John Bayer, John Fleet, Richard Westerman of Southampton, and eight other sailors from Jersey, wrecked in the cutter Felix, off Blainville, had a quantity of forged assignats in their possession, but were acquitted of intending to pass them. They were, however, ordered to be detained till exchanged. Marie Lesueur, of Jersey, who on business visits to France received money for refugee priests, was arrested at Flamainville (Manche) with 1700 francs of such money. She was convicted at Cherbourg May 11th, 1795, of exporting coin, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, then to be detained as English. Charlotte Thomson, wife of François Laisin, who was interrogated and had her property sequestrated, April 6th, 1794, was apparently of British extraction, though born at Vienne.

As for the hostages in the provinces, they were most numerous in the north of France, for Boulogne even before the Revolution had a considerable English colony, retrenchment or fear of creditors attracting some of them.^[3] Richard Warburton Lytton, Bulwer's grandfather, was one of those who fled in time, leaving his house to be confiscated. Englishwomen married to American Quakers at Dunkirk—the Quakers had been invited over to introduce whale-fishing—were, on the appeal of one of the husbands to the Convention, October 26th, 1793, declared exempt from arrest, unless "suspects" or married to suspects. Others were less fortunate. Mrs. Thicknesse, second wife of Governor Thicknesse—her stepson became Lord Audley—had started with her husband for Italy in 1792, when on the very day of leaving Boulogne he expired in the carriage. She returned to Boulogne for the funeral, and was erecting a costly monument over his remains when she was arrested, and, with other Englishwomen, confined in the Ursuline convent. The prisoners were at first treated indulgently, but when Lebon became proconsul rigour set in. Mrs. Thicknesse fancied that but for her obtaining a few hours' delay in the execution of an order for their transfer to the Annunciata convent—news of Robespierre's fall arrived in the interim,—they would have been stripped of their money and jewels and then massacred; but these hairbreadth escapes at Robespierre's overthrow must be distrusted. Shortly afterwards came an order that all who could earn their livelihood should be liberated, whereupon Mrs. Thicknesse sent the local authorities specimens of drawing and music-copying. There was some demur to allowing a lord's stepmother to profit by a decree in favour of working women, but Dumont effected her release, and she returned to England. A lively old lady, with well-preserved teeth and unbleached hair, she was seventy-nine at her death in 1826.

Sophia Kingdom, the future Lady Brunel, was among the captives at Rouen. The youngest of the sixteen children (nine surviving) of a deceased naval contractor at Plymouth, she had in 1792 accompanied West India friends, the Longuemars, to Rouen, as a good opportunity of learning French. Illness prevented her returning home when the Longuemars, uneasy at the political prospect, went back, and she was left in charge of the American Consul, Charpentier, whose wife was an Englishwoman. There young Brunel, a kinsman of Charpentier, made her acquaintance. Common sympathy with the royalists and common danger helped to make them attached to each other. Brunel started for America in July 1793, thus escaping imprisonment. Sophia was afterwards arrested, and in a convent found scanty accommodation and fare, but the kind nuns taught her artificial flower-making, a conventual accomplishment. She was released in 1794, and rejecting more brilliant offers on her return to England, waited till 1799 for Brunel's arrival from America. "To you, my dearest Sophia," he wrote after forty-six years of wedlock, "I am indebted for all my success."

Near the eastern frontier of France, at Soult-sous-Forêt in Alsace, the Baron de Bode with his wife and son had to flee for their lives, and his large estate was confiscated. A Franconian nobleman in the French army, he made the acquaintance at Dunkirk in 1775 of Miss Kynnersley, who was yachting with her friend Lady Ferrars, and followed her to Loxley Hall, Staffordshire, where the marriage and the birth of a son took place. His son and grandson—the latter died near Moscow in 1887, aged eighty-one—devoted much time and money to a fruitless attempt to obtain compensation out of the lump sum paid over by Louis XVIII. to England to indemnify the losses of her subjects.

The British convents in the provinces experienced greater brutality than those in Paris, doubtless because provincial manners were rougher, and because there was at Paris, even at the height of the Terror, a public opinion which prevented wanton ill-treatment of prisoners.

The English college at St. Omer had enjoyed a pension of 2000 crowns, originally given by the Spanish, and continued by the French kings. In May 1790 it made a patriotic gift of 600 francs to the Assembly. In 1793 its sixty-four inmates were sent as prisoners to Arras. Gregory Stapleton, who in 1773 had succeeded Allan Butler as superior, obtained a considerable remittance from friends, which he forwarded to his old fellow-collegians of Douai, who were suffering great privations in the citadel of Doullens. In May 1794 Stapleton and his comrades were also sent to Doullens, but in the following October they were permitted to return to St. Omer, though as prisoners in the French college. At the beginning of 1795 Stapleton was allowed to go to Paris to plead for the release of the British communities of St. Omer and Douai. By dint of persuasion and money he eventually succeeded, and they landed at Dover in March 1795—viz., thirty-two from Douai, and sixty-two from St. Omer. One of the St. Omer professors, Richard Brettergh, had succumbed under the hardships of imprisonment. Stapleton himself died at St. Omer in May 1802, having gone thither to try and recover the property.

An account of the sufferings of the Douai, and incidentally of the St. Omer prisoners, was given in the Catholic Magazine for 1831 by Joseph Hodgson, vice-president, and William Poynter, a professor, ultimately Vicar Apostolic of the London district. (He laid the first stone of St. Mary's, Moorfields, and was buried there.) The serious troubles of the Douai college began in February 1793, when commissioners installed themselves in the building, sealed up much of the furniture, and forced the inmates to retire to their country house at Equerchim. In October they were brought back to Douai, and lodged in the Scotch college, but a week later were transferred to Doullens. Their pupils had, of course, mostly taken flight—Charles Kemble in 1792, Daniel O'Connell in January 1793, and Lingard a little later. Some, indeed, both of the professors and students, had not returned after the Christmas holidays of 1792. The forty-seven captives were hooted as they passed through Arras. At Doullens they were at first shut up in a casemate under the rampart, with no bed but straw, and even for this they had to pay. They were afterwards lodged in an attic, above the room of a sergeant whom, on account of his dictatorial airs, they nicknamed Cromwell.^[4] They managed three times clandestinely to say mass, a baker's basket serving as the altar, at an early hour in the morning, but had to be very quiet in their movements for fear of being overheard by "Cromwell." They were eventually transferred to the ground floor, and from their windows they witnessed the demolition of a Calvary. The cross on the summit of the citadel had given place to a red cap, and on this being carried away by a storm, Good Friday was chosen for placing a second cap. On the 24th November 1794, reduced to twenty-six by some escapes, they were taken back to Douai, were lodged in the Irish seminary, and after a while were allowed to walk about the town.

In 1802, John Philip Kerable passed through Douai. When sent there as a youth, his father intended him for the priesthood, but he returned to England before he was twenty, and took to the stage. He found his old college in indescribable desolation, and had not the heart to go up to the room occupied by him nearly thirty years before. In 1863 a search was made for church plate, vestments, and relics buried by the monks just before quitting it in 1793. Father Penswick, the only surviving witness (he died the following year, at the age of eighty-six), had given directions where to search, and the plate and vestments were found, but the relics, including Thomas à Becket's shirt and St. Charles Borromeo's barretta, could not be discovered. The portrait of Mary Stuart, given by Elizabeth Curie to the Scotch college at Douai, was more fortunate. Rolled up and concealed in a chimney recess, it was found intact in 1815, and is now at Blairs College, Aberdeen.

At Dieulouard, near Pont-à-Mousson, was an English Benedictine monastery founded in 1609. The monks introduced hop-growing into the district, and themselves made beer on a considerable scale, supplying the Lorraine court, as long as there was a court, and exporting some to Germany. In 1790 the Assembly allowed the monks to remain as secular priests, and to retain all the property proved to have been bought with English benefactions; but in October 1793, after passports had been granted to the younger inmates, a mob broke into the monastery, and plundered and destroyed everything. Two monks and two lay brothers were arrested. The other inmates, warned in time, had escaped. The prior, Richard Marsh, has given a full account of his adventures—how he waded across rivers, avoided towns, was sheltered by friendly tenants, parried embarrassing questions, and at length got through a strictly guarded frontier to Treves. After three days' rest he walked on to Liège, where he was received with open arms by the English college, which supplied him with the means of getting to Ostend and thence to England. In May 1802 Marsh went to see what had become of the monastery. He heard how the prisoners had been kept eighteen months on bread and water, and found one of the survivors, tutor and chaplain to a French viscount. The abbey was in ruins, and Marsh went back to England heart-broken. He became president-general of his order, and died in 1842 at the age of 80. In 1882 two monks from Ampleforth, where Marsh had established a priory, went over to Dieulouard to see whether the community could return to their old site, but the visit does not seem to have led to any result, beyond the publication of a French translation of Marsh's manuscript.

Of the sufferings of the Benedictine nuns of Cambray I give their own interesting account in the Appendix. Other provincial convents underwent equal hardships. The twenty-six Poor Clares of Rouen were arrested in October 1793. All religious monuments and symbols were removed or destroyed, and the house was converted into a prison for 320 inmates, while the poor nuns were cooped up in granaries and other outbuildings. In the spring they were sent to another prison, suffering much from crowding and scanty food. In January 1795 they were liberated, and eventually went to England. The twelve Poor Clares of Aire were also declared prisoners in their own house, and one night in June 1794 were turned out without money or passports. Kind townspeople sheltered them, and in September they left for England. The Benedictine nuns of Dunkirk had their chapel appropriated by a Jacobin Club, and in October 1793, at a few hours' notice, they were hurried off amid a line of soldiers to the Convent of the Poor Clares. Four days later both communities were crowded into a small boat, guarded by fifty soldiers, and were taken to the Poor Clares at Gravelines. But for charitable people they would have been starved. Two of the nuns died. The winter was severe, and the insufficiency of fuel obliged them to burn cupboards and wainscoting, and to cut down the trees in the garden. They all left for England in April 1795.

English manufacturers, encouraged by the monarchy to settle in France, appear to have been in general unmolested. Potter at Chantilly, as we have seen, was no sooner arrested than liberated. Foxlowe, who had a cotton mill with 2000 hands at Orleans, the Duke of Orleans as sleeping partner finding six-sevenths of the capital, was allowed, after the Duke's death, to buy up his share from the State, under the right of pre-emption given by the deed of partnership. A cannon foundry managed by two Englishmen near Nantes, and a copper-sheathing factory for ships, near Louviers, also in English hands—both were visited by Arthur Young in 1789—were apparently undisturbed. Morgan and Massey, at Amiens, who in 1789 had a grant of 12,000 francs from the Government for inventing a jenny with 280 spindles; Lawrence Bennett, of Stockport, who had introduced spinning jennies at Les Andelys, in Normandy;^[5] and Milne, a machine maker pensioned by the monarchy, who died at Paris in 1804, not figure in the list of prisoners. O'Reilly, described as a Scotchman, probably the ex-Benedictine who, in January 1792, proposed grinding corn by compressed air, achieved a reputation in Paris for his engraving on glass. French and Johnston, wine-merchants at Bordeaux, seem likewise to have continued their business operations. But Didot's paper-mills at Essonnes, Corbeil, where assignats were made, was visited by Camille Desmoulins and district commissaries, in October 1793, for the purpose of arresting several English employed there. Jules Didot explained that his wife, Maria Gamble, was English; she had been governess to his children in his first wife's lifetime. She was perhaps the "citoyenne Didot mêre," to whom Bernardin de St. Pierre wrote in January 1800, saying that his son Paul was much grown, was anxious to embrace his dear Virginie (Didot) and would accompany his father to Essonnes next décadi. Sykes, optician and agent for Wedgwood's pottery, gave up the Palais Royal shop which commanded so good a view of revolutionary jubilations and horrors, and in 1792 erected a cotton mill at St. Rémy, not far from Dreux, his only child marrying William Waddington, a London merchant. One of their sons, William Pendrell Waddington—the Waddingtons were descendants of the sister of the Richard Pendrell who concealed Charles II.—died at Rome in 1821; another was the father of the present French diplomatist. Sykes, English, but born and bred in Holland, seems to have escaped the imprisonment which befell Thomas Collow, a Scotchman, who after living in Tobago, settled in 1785 as a merchant at Havre. In a time of scarcity he bought foreign corn for the municipality, charging no commission, and he gave the first tidings (received from Bryan Edwards) of the St. Domingo rising, instead of speculating on his priority of information; yet he was arrested as a hostage in 1793. He twice petitioned the Convention, urging that merchandise for America was spoiling in his warehouses during his detention, and the municipality endorsed his request for release; but he apparently had to await the fall of Jacobinism. He remained at Havre, and died there in 1803. Another Tobago man, Daniel King, who had been naturalised and had settled as a shipowner at Dunkirk, was also arrested as an Englishman, with his partner Peter Watson.

1. What a subject for a thrilling drama!
2. Information from M. Dugast Matifex.
3. Byron's father, Captain Byron, died at Valenciennes, out of reach of his creditors, in August 1791.
4. A recent French writer, Deramecourt, seriously gives this as the man's real name.
5. Gay, a Scotchman, secretary to the Jacobin Club in that town, a jovial but rapacious fellow, was probably his foreman. See Contemporary Review, 1867.