Englishmen in the French Revolution/Chapter I

by John Goldworth Alger

I.

Deliverance to Captives.

"Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts,
Ye dungeons, and ye cages of despair . . !
There's not an English heart that would not leap
To know that ye were fallen at last."
⁠—COWPER'S Task, 1784

I.

DELIVERANCE TO CAPTIVES.

Lord Massareene—Capt. Whyte—Playfair—Blackwell—H.
⁠Priestley—Lord Liverpool—Rigby—Macdonagh—Rutledge.

The Revolution, which ended by imprisoning several hundred Englishmen in Paris alone, began by liberating two, if not three, who had grown grey in captivity. The Earl of Massareene, with thoroughly British obstinacy, had remained a prisoner for at least nineteen years rather than yield to extortionate creditors. One version of his incarceration is that, arriving in Paris, a young man of twenty-three, he was deluded by a Syrian with a scheme for importing salt from Asia Minor, and signed bills to a large amount. Rutledge, however, a fellow-prisoner, who describes Massareene as the senior inmate, doing the honours of the place to newcomers, dispelling their melancholy, inviting them to supper, and encouraging them to narrate their adventures by giving his own, makes him speak thus:—

"Women, wine, gambling, rascally lawyers and doctors, lastly my own follies—behold what led to my being immured here; but the malicious people who have plunged me here will be out of their reckoning. Thanks to my philosophy, I am quite comfortable, and hope to teach them patience,"

^[1]

According to the "Souvenirs" of Nicolas Berryer, father of the Legitimist orator, Massareene had been cheated at cards, and had signed bills for the amount, spent £4000 a year in prison, kept open table, and had a carriage and boxes at the theatre for his mistresses. He had attempted to escape, it is said, in woman's dress; but the turnkey, who had taken a bribe of 200 louis, betrayed him. His chief creditor was a man of considerable influence with the Parliament of Paris. Resigned thenceforth to his fate, remittances from his Irish steward enabled him to live luxuriously. Sir John Lambert, a Paris banker, himself destined to imprisonment in the Reign of Terror, writing to Lord Kerry on August 16, 1770, says:—

"My Lord Massareene's affairs are always [sic] in the same situation. You know he has miscarried in the scheme of escaping from the Fort l'Evêque, where he is still detained for want of fighting [endeavouring?] to sell his Monaghan estates, or to borrow £15,000 or £20,000, which are necessary to extract him from his present troubles.

^[2]

On the closing of Fort l'Evêque in 1780 Massareene had been transferred to La Force, magniloquently styled by Louis Blanc the "Bastille of usury." In May 1789, Richard-Lenoir, the future reviver of the cotton industry in France, became, at the age of twenty-four, his fellow-prisoner, and his memoirs, allowing for the lapse of nearly half a century and for possible embellishments by Herbinot de Mauchamps, to whom, being himself no scribe, he apparently dictated them, may be accepted as substantially accurate. I quote the passage in full from this long-forgotten book:—

"We had for companion in misfortune an English lord, Mazaren, eighteen years a prisoner. He had married in prison the sister of another prisoner, who had since recovered his liberty. Every morning his wife and brother-in-law arrived as soon as the gates were opened, and did not leave till evening. There was something touching in the felicity of this strange household. Through them we knew of everything that was going on in Paris, and could follow, step by step, the Revolution which was beginning. Lord Mazaren especially, who had no hope except in a general overturn, was quite absorbed by it, and almost electrified us for liberty, which, indeed, for us poor prisoners, was only natural. We were not ignorant of what had happened at Réveillon's, when, on July 13, 1789, just as we were about to assemble after the opening of the doors in a kind of garden or gravelled court. Lord Mazaren suggested to us the forcing of our way out. Whether he was beforehand certain of the impassiveness of the jailors and soldiers, or whether he counted much on our daring, he assured us that nothing was easier, and that a resolute will was sufficient for success. We promptly decided. Arms had to be procured. Lord Mazaren pointed out the staircase railings, the bars of which could serve as pikes. We immediately set to work; the railings yielded to our efforts, and all of us were soon armed. The commandant, however, was speedily informed of the revolt; but fear was then gradually gaining on officials, and instead of taking strong measures, he contented himself with ordering us to carry the outbreak no further, otherwise he warned us he should be obliged to use force against us. 'So much the better,' we exclaimed on all sides. 'Kill us, and then you will have to pay our creditors.' This reply frightening him, we took advantage of his perplexity to attack the first gate, and passed through without much trouble. There were still three others to force. All the turnkeys had joined the soldiers, but several officers and privates seemed to fight with reluctance. One of them on ordering fire had tears in his eyes. However, we seized on the three gates, part of the outer wall was demolished, and we at last issued, victors, from La Force. "Once in the street, every one thought of seeking an asylum. Lord Mazaren suggested to several of us that he should conduct us to the English Embassy. Always thoughtful and saving, I wished to re-enter the prison to fetch my things and carry them to a secure place. I was laughed at, and did not venture to insist; yet it was all that remained of my former prosperity. I therefore found myself on the streets of Paris with a more than untidy costume and twelve sous in my pocket; but I remembered my father's twelve livres, and courage did not abandon me. We were well received at the Embassy, Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, where refreshments were offered us, and we were taken in the Embassy coaches to the precincts of the Temple, then a place of asylum for debtors. Lord Mazaren offered us a capital dinner, and while this little feast was being prepared I went to La Force to fetch my things; but alas! it was too late. The turnkeys assured me that after our departure the mob had invaded the prison. I was about to exclaim and threaten, but was answered, 'You broke open the gates, and the mob came in by the way you came out. You do not find your things? So much the worse; you should have taken them away. Good evening.' It was an impudent lie, but I had to put up with this reply."

^[3]

The Duke of Dorset in a despatch of July 16 says:—

"His Lordship, with twenty-four others in the Hôtel de la Force, forced their way out of prison last Monday morning without the loss of a single life. His Lordship, who has always expressed a great sense of gratitude for the small services I have occasionally rendered him since I first came to Paris in my present character, came directly to my hotel with six or seven of his companions, the rest having gone their different ways. I, however, soon prevailed upon Lord Massareene and the others to go to the Temple, which is a privileged place, and where he may therefore be able to treat with his creditors to some advantage. His Lordship told me that it was his intention to go thither, but that he thought it right to pay me the first visit."

Massareene found no obstacle to his leaving France, and on reaching Dover he jumped out of the boat, fell on his knees, and kissed the ground, exclaiming, "God bless this land of liberty!" The spectators thought him mad till they learnt who he was. He was present in August 1789, with "a French lady and her son," at Astley's representation of the capture of the Bastille. He was formally remarried to Marie Anne Barcier, on whose death in 1800 he made a second marriage, and he died in 1805, aged sixty-three, leaving no issue. His two brothers, who are said never to have written to him in captivity, succeeded him in turn, and on the decease of the second in 1826 the earldom became extinct, the viscounty passing to a daughter. Let us hope that if the steward had, as alleged, kept back half his £8000 a year, Massareene brought him to book.^[4]

The day after this liberation another veteran prisoner recovered his liberty, but not, alas! his reason. Whyte, or Whyte de Malleville, one of the seven captives in the Bastille,^[5] is described by some as a Scotchman, by others as an Irishman,^[6] but there is no proof that he was ever on this side of the Channel. He may have been the son of a Captain Whyte of Clare's Irish-French Regiment, whose two daughters were on the pension list. He entered the Bastille in 1784, but had previously, probably for a quarter of a century, been at Vincennes, and at the time of this transfer was insane. In August 1788 he had refused to listen to two lawyers who called on him with papers to sign, and in the following February the governor, to whom papers in his writing had been handed, interrogated him and found him still insane. He is said when released to have styled himself "majeur de l'immensité," and to have inquired for Louis XV. The Duke of Dorset styles him Major Whyte, adding that he had been confined for more than thirty years, and that when released he was questioned by some English gentlemen who happened to be near, but the unhappy man seemed to have nearly lost the use of his intellect, and could express himself but very ill:—

"His beard was at least a yard long. What is very extraordinary, he did not know that the Bastille was the place of his confinement, but thought he had been shut up at St. Lazare; nor did he appear to be sensible of his good fortune in being released. He expressed, however, a strong desire of being taken to a lawyer."

What became of him is uncertain. One account is that a benevolent person sheltered him, but that on his beginning a few days afterwards to plunder the house, he was forced to send him to Charenton lunatic asylum. Dorset, however, could not ascertain his fate.^[7]

The capture of the Bastille, or the procession which followed it, was witnessed by several Englishmen. Some were active participants, others simple spectators. Among the former was William Playfair, whose opinions, like his fortunes, underwent singular vicissitudes. A brother of John Playfair, the Edinburgh mathematician and geologist, he was a civil engineer, and had settled in Paris. He had patented a new rolling-machine, and in 1789 joined Joel Barlow in launching the Scioto Company, which in two months disposed of 50,000 acres in Ohio to two convoys of French emigrants. When Barlow was called back to America, Playfair acted as sole agent. He must have assisted in the capture of the Bastille, for he was one of the eleven or twelve hundred inhabitants of the St. Antoine quarter who on the previous day had formed themselves into a militia, and who, with the exception of a few detained by patrol duty, headed the attack on the fortress. It is significant, but scarcely excusable, that in his "History of Jacobinism" he makes light of the capture of the Bastille, and does not hint that he was concerned in it. Indeed, the only reference to his having been in Paris at all is the remark, "I do not consider virtue to consist in the simple manners and republican phrases of a Brissot, and I have told him so to his face." A French pamphlet of 1790 on paper-money is attributed to him. It was he (not Pétion, as Carlyle represents) who courageously rescued D'Espréménil, an old acquaintance, when half killed by a mob in the Palais Royal gardens in February 1791. Pétion simply called on and condoled with the poor man after the rescue, in which Playfair was assisted by a brave National Guardsman, a horse-dealer, who afterwards pawned his uniform to give Playfair a dinner, and was with difficulty persuaded to accept a few louis.^[8]

Playfair speaking out too plainly on the excesses of the Revolution, Barère is said to have procured an order for his arrest, but he escaped to Holland, and thence to England.

By 1793 he was back in London, publishing pamphlets. One of these recommended that France, with the Bourbons restored, should be made permanently harmless by Savoy being given to Geneva, Dauphiny and Provence to Sardinia, a long strip drawn from Belfort to Abbeville to Austria and Prussia, and another strip from Bordeaux to Narbonne to Spain, England taking the colonies. A second pamphlet advocated a wholesale manufacture of forged assignats, as the surest and most merciful method of crushing the Revolution. He urged that this would save many lives; that American notes were forged in General Howe's camp without its being deemed dishonourable; and that there could be no fear of retaliation, seeing that Bank of England notes were payable at sight. Names, says the old song, go by contraries. Only on the lucus à non principle can we explain the sanguinary temper of a Rossignol, a Saint-Just, or a Lebon, and the forged assignat proposal of a Playfair. Unfortunately his suggestion did not fall on deaf ears. The British Government is alleged to have connived at the manufacture by the émigrés of forged assignats at Howden, near Newcastle. The local tradition is that this paper-mill on the Tyne never prospered afterwards. Some of the exiled bishops and clergy reprobated the act, but the Bourbon princes apparently reconciled themselves to it on the casuistical plea that the counterfeit notes had a secret mark by which, in the event of the restoration of the monarchy, they could be distinguished and cashed.

The Committee of Public Safety set a better example by imprisoning an English refugee named Hathway, who proposed an issue of forged Bank of England notes.

One ill deed begets another, and though the royalist issue had long ceased, Napoleon in 1803 organised a forgery of English, Austrian, and Russian notes, the plates of which were claimed by and given up to the respective ambassadors on his fall.

Playfair, who is more honourably known as an editor of Adam Smith's works, was constantly unsuccessful, despite his inventive genius. He returned to Paris after Waterloo to edit Galignani's Messenger; but in 1818 an article on a duel brought on him a sentence of three months' imprisonment, to escape which he fled to London, where he died five years afterwards, at the age of sixty-four. His brother, the professor, remained a staunch Whig; and a Dundee minister, James Playfair, D.D., historiographer to the Prince of Wales, who in 1790 signed an address of congratulation to the French Assembly, was probably a cousin.

Thomas Blackwell, who had been educated at the Irish College, and was studying medicine at Paris, joined in the attack on the Bastille, and was intimate with Danton. He was naturalised in France, served in the army, and in 1798 accompanied Napper Tandy to Donegal. Both escaped; but being sent on a mission to Norway, on returning to France they were given up at Hamburg to the British consul. Blackwell was imprisoned till 1801, and then went back to France.

Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, in her interesting autobiography, speaks of Harry Priestley, a lad of sixteen, bursting into her parents' drawing-room at Manchester and exclaiming, "France is free! the Bastille is taken! William was there, and helping. I have just got a letter from him. He has put up a pictorial of the Bastille and two stones from its ruins for you." Two years later William found mob-law a two-edged weapon, for he witnessed—had he been recognised he would have been in peril—the sacking of his father's house and chapel.

Dr. Priestley, who himself had the good sense to decline a seat in the Convention, offered him by two departments, bade his son William, in June 1792, "go and live among that brave and hospitable people, and learn from them to detest tyranny and love liberty." He accordingly waited on the Assembly to apply for naturalisation, and was received with plaudits. His voice being weak, his speech, which declared French citizenship a higher honour than the crown of any arbitrary state, was read for him by the President, François of Nantes. The reply of the latter compared Burke's attacks on Dr. Priestley to those of Aristophanes on Socrates, and suggested that the Birmingham rioters were the descendants of Danish pirates. The youth's gravity must have been sorely tried by this burlesque oration; but did not M. de Lesseps, in the French Academy of Sciences, once gravely hint that the English promoters of a rival Suez Canal were the descendants of Carthaginian traders? The sky soon darkened, and Dr. Priestley, his father, wrote after the September massacres to Roland, urging that unless such outrages on justice and humanity were stopped, and order and obedience to law enforced, liberty both in France and throughout Europe must be despaired of. William intended to be a merchant in France, but the war with England frustrating this purpose, he went to America, where his two brothers joined him. They contemplated buying half a million acres near the head of the Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania, to found an English colony; and their father also went over, settling at the nearest town, Northumberland, till the scheme was realised. It fell through, but Priestley remained at Northumberland, declining, however, to be naturalised. Harry died young, but William married, and had a large farm.

A young man of about the same age, the future Earl of Liverpool, then Mr. Jenkinson, also witnessed the fall of the Bastille, but merely as a looker-on.

"The whole sight has been such," he wrote, "that nothing would have tempted me to miss it;" but he either gave no description of it, or his father, in forwarding a copy of the letter to the Foreign Office, omitted a portion of it. We merely learn that "the consternation that has prevailed in Paris for the last two days is beyond all power of description. Few people have gone out of their doors, and all public amusements for the first time have been stopped." When Lord Lansdowne in 1819 argued that the Peterloo meeting was peaceable, it being attended by women and children, Liverpool replied that he saw many women busily employed in the attack on the Bastille. Young Jenkinson, even at nineteen, was able to discuss Necker's financial schemes, and he seems to have frequently attended the Assembly.

Dr. Rigby of Norwich, an old pupil of Priestley's, and his three companions witnessed the procession of the Bastille victors, were recognised as Englishmen and were embraced as freemen, for they were told, "We are now free like yourselves; henceforth no longer enemies, we are brothers, and war shall never more divide us." "We caught," says Rigby, "the general enthusiasm; we joined in the joyful shouts of liberty; we shook hands cordially with freed Frenchmen."

Ghastly trophies—two heads on pikes—soon, however, chilled their enthusiasm, and next day a mob twice prevented their leaving Paris, escorting them with hisses and insults to the Hôtel de Ville as fugitive aristocrats. To avoid further molestation they waited till July 18, and, from the Palais Royal balcony of the jeweller Sykes, saw the King pass to the Hôtel de Ville. His cold reception they considered ominous; but Rigby, though he had "seen enough to frighten him pretty handsomely and make his heart ache," was glad, having escaped all danger, to have witnessed such memorable scenes.^[9] In 1813, when he was a grandfather and sixty-six years of age, his second wife gave birth to four infants, an event for which the Norwich Corporation voted him a piece of plate; but the whole quartette died within three months. Dr. Rigby survived them eight years.

It is a far cry from the Bastille to the Ile Ste. Marguérite; yet the 14th July echoed thither. Macdonagh, an Irish officer in the French service, had for twelve years occupied the cell of the Man with the Iron Mask. Born in Sligo in 1740, he had money left him by a great-uncle, a Jacobite refugee in France, was sent for by his guardian, and brought up in France, where he entered the army, and gained the Cross of St. Louis. In 1774, while sub-lieutenant in Dillon's regiment at Lille, he became acquainted with Rose Plunket, daughter of Lord Dunsany, and a boarder in a convent. Touched by her tale of family dissensions and her repugnance to returning to Ireland, he was secretly married to her by an Irish priest. Her brother shortly afterwards fetched her to Paris, Macdonagh going in the same coach without appearing to know her. The brother, on discovering the facts, confined her in Port Royal convent; but she appealed to the British Embassy, and there was diplomatic correspondence respecting her. "It is immaterial to us," wrote Vergennes to Guines, ambassador at London, "whether the demoiselle Plunket makes a good marriage or a bad one, or even whether she allows herself indulgences without contracting marriage at all. We do not claim to be the guardians of English virginities."

To cut a long story short, Rose proved faithless, and to prevent Macdonagh's opposition to a second and more brilliant marriage, she got him arrested in 1777 under a lettre de cachet. On the way to prison he jumped out of the carriage by night, and villagers knocked off his fetters; but others betrayed him, and he was recaptured. He was deprived of all communication with the outer world, a turnkey who forwarded a letter for him being dismissed. Rose meanwhile married a Belgian marquis named Carondelet. Macdonagh was probably released under the decree of March 1790, cancelling all lettres de cachet. In the following July he met Rutledge in the Tuileries gardens, and the latter published his story to the above effect, first in Camille Desmoulins' newspaper, and afterwards in more detail as a pamphlet.^[10] Carondelet replied to the newspaper letters by protesting that his wife had never had any acquaintance with Macdonagh beyond speaking to him once through the grating of Port Royal. According to Carondelet, her uncle, General Hussy, took her in 1771, then fifteen years of age, to Belgium, as Count O'Gara wished to make her and her brother his heirs. She, however, desired to be a nun, whereupon O'Gara, disapproving this, placed her in the Lille convent, and she never went outside the gate till fetched by her brother to Paris. This version was obviously dictated by Rose herself. Macdonagh retorted by showing Desmoulins letters in her writing addressed to him, one of them referring to their secret marriage. Carondelet made no rejoinder. "When Rutledge in 1791 took down the story in full, Macdonagh, apparently not wishing, on second thoughts, that it should be published, asked to borrow the manuscript, but Rutledge refused. In a letter to the Moniteur Macdonagh then announced that he was on his way to Hainaut to secure the punishment of Rose and her co-conspirator. He was probably the Colonel Macdonagh who, in 1804, wrote a long letter in the Paris Argus on English misrule in Ireland.

Rutledge, as a prisoner under the old régime and one of the first political prisoners after its fall, may here be spoken of. He was the son of Walter Rutledge, a Jacobite privateer at Dunkirk, who joined "Walsh of Nantes in lending vessels, arms, and money to Charles Edward in 1745. The Old Pretender repaid them the money, and conferred a baronetcy on Rutledge, whose son consequently styled himself the Chevalier (or Sir James) Rutledge. In 1770 the latter published in London an essay comparing French and English manners, while in Paris he issued "La Quinzaine Anglaise," an account of a young lord who in a fortnight runs through £12,000 and is lodged in a debtor's prison. Wealthy young Englishmen undoubtedly at that period fell an easy prey to the tempter at Paris, and Rutledge treated this theme in other works. He also wrote farces and satires, some considered witty, others failures. He assisted Letourneur in translating Shakspere, whom he defended against Voltaire's criticism. "Frenchmen," he exclaimed, "give up your tragedies; they are cold and tedious." In 1778 he started a magazine named, after the Tatler, "Le Babillard" but it was very shortlived. Having charged his notary with fradulently obtaining his inheritance at one-third of its value, he was cast in damages, and in default imprisoned at La Force, where he made acquaintance with Lord Massareene.

This restless pamphleteer, who had been a cavalry captain, had been expelled from Poland, and now called himself a banker, was in 1789 the spokesman of the Paris bakers. Subsidised by the municipality to supply the citizens with bread under cost price they were suspected of selling loaves to country people at a higher sum, and then of pretending that the millers had kept them without flour. Rutledge, on their behalf, covered the walls of Paris with diatribes against forestallers, and with scurrilous attacks on Necker. He is said to have declared that within four days his own head or Necker's should roll from the scaffold, and he promised the bakers a loan of two or three millions on easier terms than those offered by the municipality. A prosecution for lèse-nation in simulating a commission from the Assembly to treat with the bakers was instituted. Rutledge applied for protection from arrest to the Cordeliers district, which afterwards sheltered Marat, but in this case it declined to interfere. The prosecution was, however, dropped, and in February 1790 he was released. In 1792 or 1793, with the same mania of delation, he was one of the persecutors of the hapless assignat superintendent Delamarche, the nervous man whom Madame Roland showed how to die by changing places with him on the scaffold. Rutledge, like other assailants of Delamarche, had been employed in numbering the assignats, and revenged the abolition of this formality by charging him with malversation. He died in March 1794, at the supposed age of forty-four.

1. La Quinzaine Anglaise. London: 1786.
2. Lord Kerry's papers, National Archives, Paris.
3. Mémoires de François Richard-Lenoir, p. 101. Paris: 1837. It is probable that the mob really did not enter the prison, which would account for the incorrect version of the Paris papers that the prisoners were liberated by the mob.
4. James Swan, a Boston merchant, emulated Massareene by remaining twenty-two years in a Paris prison rather than pay what he considered an unjust claim. He was seventy-six when released in 1830 by the Revolution, and died three days afterwards. He had lived luxuriously, like Massareene, while at St. Pélagie.
5. It should be borne in mind that the Bastille was not captured in order to release the prisoners, but to remove the cannon commanding that quarter of Paris, and to prevent its occupation by a foreign regiment.
6. Charpentier's "Bastille Devoilée" gives this as a supposition, based on his speaking English well.
7. But see new facts in Appendix D.
8. Playfair's "France as it is, not Lady Morgan's," 1819.
9. Dr. Rigby's "Letters from France." By Lady Eastlake.
10. "Amusements du Despotisme." Paris: 1791.