Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/109

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OUTLAWS AND CONSPIRATORS.
89

expressed his desire for a dictatorship, and though the letter was prudently suppressed, Robespierre was probably cognisant of it. In May 1793, moreover, Paine wrote a letter to Danton (found among Danton's papers and still preserved), advocating the removal of the Convention from Paris, in order that provincial deputies might be free from mob insults.

Paine was released in November, 1794, and Gouverneur Morris gave him hospitality for some months, though his dirty and drunken habits necessitated his exclusion from the family table. On December 8 the Convention rescinded his expulsion, and ordered payment of the arrears of parliamentary stipend; but he did not resume his seat till the next July, when he pleaded a malignant fever contracted in prison as his excuse for absence. On his journalistic and pamphleteering activity, his refusal of one of the proposed rewards to literary men, his subscription of 500 francs towards the invasion of England, which Bonaparte intended him to accompany, and his return to America in 1802, it is needless to dwell.

The prosecution of William Stone caused the flight of Benjamin Vaughan, M.P. for Calne, and uncle by marriage of Cardinal Manning. His father, Samuel Vaughan, had been a West India merchant and planter, his wife being the daughter of a Boston merchant. Samuel Vaughan, who had settled in business in London, was prosecuted by the Duke