Englishmen in the French Revolution/Chapter V

by John Goldworth Alger

V.

Outlaws and Conspirators.

⁠"Intrigued and discontented foreigners, who have come here
because they were at war with their own Governments, and most
of them with all Governments."— Washington to Patrick Henry, on
Genet's recall.

V.

OUTLAWS AND CONSPIRATORS.

Paine—Vaughan—Muir—Perry—British Club.

The French Revolution, like a new religion, effaced the feeling of nationality, and led men, partly from a sense of duty to the world, partly from inordinate vanity, to expatriate themselves, or even to plot their country's downfall. Prominent among these was Thomas Paine—in France he spelt his name Payne—who was the only foreigner besides Cloots who sat in the Convention, and who, more fortunate than Cloots, suffered nothing worse than imprisonment. He had twice visited Paris prior to the Revolution, but his previous career need not be related. He paid a third visit in 1790, and a fourth in 1791, when four Frenchmen joined him in constituting themselves a "Republican Society." On the king's flight to Varennes, Paine drew up a Republican manifesto, which Achille Duchatelet, though his English wife, Charlotte Comyn, was a court pensioner, translated, signed, and placarded on the doors of the Assembly. Still clinging to royalty, that body was much scandalised, and threatened a prosecution. Paine likewise challenged Sieyes to a written controversy on republicanism. He returned to London in company with Lord Daer, son of the Earl of Selkirk, a young Scotchman enraptured with the Revolution, destined to die of consumption at Madeira in 1794, and with Étienne Dumont, Mirabeau's secretary. The latter was thoroughly disgusted by Paine's claiming the chief credit for American independence, and by his avowed desire to burn every book in existence and start society afresh with his "Rights of Man."

Almost the last act of the Constituent Assembly was to confer French citizenship on eighteen foreigners,^[1] that they might help to "settle the destinies of France, and perhaps of mankind." Paine was elected by Girondin influence in four departments, one of them styling him "Penne." Madame Roland, repelled doubtless by his vulgarity, regretted that her friends had not nominated David Williams in his stead. To avoid being mobbed Paine had to make a detour by Sandwich and Deal to Dover, where the Custom-house is said to have rummaged all his effects, and even opened his letters; but at Calais he was greeted with military honours, cheered by the crowd, and harangued by the mayor. Paine, unable even to the last to open his mouth in French, could reply only by putting his hand to his heart. His portrait found its way even into village inns, and an English lady archly wrote home:

"At the very moment you are sentencing him to instalment in the pillory we may be awarding him a triumph. Perhaps we are both right. He deserves the pillory from you for having endeavoured to destroy a good constitution; and the French may with equal reason grant him a triumph, as their constitution is likely to be so bad that even Mr. Thomas Paine's writings may make it better."^[2]

Captain Monro, with more seriousness and severity, exclaimed in a despatch to the English Foreign Office, "What must a nation come to that has so little discernment in the election of their representatives as to elect such a fellow?" Safely out of reach, Paine sent a defiant letter to the English Government, thanking them for extending the popularity of his book by prosecuting it, and sneering at "Mr. Guelph and his debauchee sons" as "incapable of governing a nation." When this letter was read at the trial, Erskine, reprobating its tone, could only suggest that it might be a forgery, and urge that in any case it was irrelevant.

When the king's trial came on Paine voted for his detention during the war, this to be followed by banishment. His reasons, a French translation of which was read by Bancal while he stood mute at the tribune, evinced humanity and sagacity. He contrasted the success of the English 1688 with the failure of 1649, excused Louis as the victim of bad training, and warned France of the impolicy of losing her sole ally, America, where universal grief would be caused by the death of a king regarded as its best friend. In a sentence, which goes far to redeem Paine's errors, he said:

"I know that the public mind in France has been heated and irritated by the dangers to which the country has been exposed; but if we look beyond, to the time when these dangers and the irritation produced by them shall have been forgotten, we shall see that what now appears to us an act of justice will then appear only an act of vengeance."

Marat twice interrupted, first alleging that Paine was a Quaker, and as an objector to capital punishment disentitled to vote, and then pretending that his speech had been mistranslated.

Danton had a friendly feeling for Paine, with whom he was able to converse in English, and dissuaded him from attending the Convention on the 2nd June 1793, telling him that, being a friend of Brissot, he might share his fate. Paine said it was painful (the pun must have been unconscious) to witness such things, to which Danton replied, "Revolutions are not made with rose-water." His warning was well-timed, for in Amar's report of October 3, which ordered the prosecution of the Girondins, Paine was mentioned as having been elected by them, and as having disgraced himself by deprecating the execution of Louis XVI. He had had the effrontery, said Amar, to depict the United States, France's natural ally, as full of admiration and gratitude for the tyrant of France.

On the triumph of the Jacobins, Paine discontinued attending the Convention, quietly awaited the impending arrest, and amused himself in the garden and poultry-yard of his house with marbles, battledore, and hopscotch. On Christmas Day, 1793, he was expelled from the Convention as a foreigner; and on New Year's eve was arrested simultaneously with Cloots. An American deputation vainly pleaded for his release, and on his asking for the good offices of the Cordeliers' Club, its only reply was to send him a copy of his speech against the king's execution. Gouverneur Morris, then American ambassador, advised him as the safest course to remain quiet, and Paine appears to have acted on the advice. Morris, however, was mistaken in thinking that he would thus have nothing to fear. Not that there is any truth in Carlyle's story of Paine's cell door flying open, of the turnkey making the fatal chalk mark on the inside, of the door swinging back with the mark inside, and of another turnkey omitting Paine in the batch of victims. Even at the height of the Terror men were not executed without trial, nor without an indictment having been drawn up by Fouquier Tinville, and served upon them at least overnight, which the prisoners jestingly styled "the evening newspaper." Removal to the Conciergerie, which adjoined the tribunal, was likewise in almost all cases the first indication of an approaching trial. Not one of these preliminaries had been accomplished in Paine's case. Carlyle, contrary to his practice, cites no authority for the story, but a variation of it appeared in the newspapers in 1823, in a biography of Sampson Perry, likewise a prisoner at the Luxembourg, who may have been accustomed to tell this traveller's tale. Numbers of survivors of the Terror pretended indeed to have been ordered for execution and saved by Robespierre's fall; whereas the tribunal took a holiday on Décadi, the Jacobin Sabbath, and of the fifteen cases prepared for trial on the 11th Thermidor, there was not one of any note. Paine's death-warrant was really signed, but it consisted in this memorandum, found in Robespierre's notebook:—"Demander que Thomas Payne soit décrété d'accusation, pour les intérêts de l'Amérique autant que de la France."

This animosity can be explained. When Marat was prosecuted in April 1793, Paine gave information to the Jacobin Club that, addressing him once in English in the lobby of the Convention, Marat 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 of Grafton in 1769 for having offered him £5000 to procure one of his sons the reversion to the post of Clerk of the Crown in Jamaica. The proceedings seem to have been dropped on Grafton's resignation of the premiership in January 1770, and the Letters of Junius, which had at first sharply attacked Vaughan, afterwards pronounced him "honest but mistaken." He took a warm interest in the Corsican rising, and helped to raise a subscription for Paoli's adherents.

Benjamin was born in Jamaica in 1751, and was educated at Hackney, Warrington, and Cambridge, but being a Unitarian, could not graduate. The Vaughans were related to Horne Tooke, and he may have been named Benjamin after Tooke's eldest brother, a great horticulturist at Brentford.^[3] Lord Shelburne, also fond of horticulture, presented Benjamin Horne with some fine strawberry plants from Saratoga, the first known in England, and he frequently stayed a night with him. This may account for Benjamin Vaughan becoming private secretary to Shelburne. Both of them sided with the American colonists. In 1777 Jonathan Loring Austin, the American envoy, went with Vaughan and Dr. Priestley to the House of Lords to hear a debate on America, but admission was refused. In March 1778 Vaughan sent Franklin an outline of Shelburne's speech. But politics did not wholly absorb him. He fell in love with Miss Sarah Manning, but her father withheld his consent to the marriage on the ground that Vaughan had no profession. Thereupon Vaughan went and studied medicine at Edinburgh, married on his return in 1781, and became partner with Manning & Son, merchants, in Billiter Square. He acted as confidential messenger and unpaid mediator in negotiations with America, and in 1782 was four times sent to Paris by Shelburne, then Prime Minister, to confer with Franklin. His brother-in-law Manning docked him of a year's profits of the business, on the plea of his having wasted seven months in diplomatic missions.

For thirty years the friend and correspondent of Franklin, Vaughan edited a London edition of his works (1779), and assisted long afterwards from America in the new edition of 1806. He also wrote a treatise on international trade, which was translated into French in 1789. In 1790 he was in Paris, and in a letter to Shelburne (now Marquis of Lansdowne) described France as in a fever of enthusiasm. He went on to Nantes, where on the 24th November he made a speech at a meeting where Nantes delegates described the honours which had been rendered them in London. It was probably during this absence that Colonel Barré, owing to a quarrel with Lansdowne, resigned his seat for Calne, one Morris temporarily succeeding to it; for in February 1792 Morris made way for Vaughan. Jeremy Bentham, who fancied he had been promised the seat, wrote an angry letter of sixty pages to Lansdowne, but was mollified by his reply.^[4] Between July 1792 and June 1793, Vaughan wrote a series of unsigned letters in the Morning Chronicle on the partition of Poland and the threatened dismemberment of France. (These were reprinted as a pamphlet in 1795.) In February 1794 Vaughan made a speech advocating precautions against negro risings in the West Indies, on account of the emancipation of slaves in the French colonies. On the 8th May following, in common with Lord Lauderdale, Sheridan, Major Maitland, and William Smith, he was summoned to a conference with the Cabinet at the Home Office, Vaughan remaining till six in the evening. He was doubtless questioned respecting a letter from him found on Wm. Stone, seemingly addressed to or intended for J. H. Stone, and dissuading the French from an invasion of England. It dwelt on the verdicts of juries in state trials, the readiness to enlist in the army, the little opposition offered to impressment for the navy, the approval of the war by Parliament, and the temper of the nation, as proofs of the expediency of France making peace on fair terms.

Vaughan was so alarmed at the discovery of this letter that he took refuge in France. To avoid arrest as an Englishman, he assumed the name of Jean Martin, and lived in retirement at Passy, his identity being known to only five or six persons. One of these was Bishop Grégoire, who states that the English Government supposed him to have gone to America, or would otherwise have outlawed him. Another was Robespierre, to whom he paid secret visits. A third was Archibald Hamilton Rowan, who, lying ill at the Palais Royal, was not a little surprised by a call from Vaughan, his fellow student at Warrington and Cambridge. Vaughan told him that Jackson, the Irish conspirator, had been introduced to him in London, and that though quite ignorant of the plot, he had thought it safest to absent himself.^[5] In June the Committee of Public Safety detected his incognito and arrested him, but after a month's detention at the Carmelite monastery he was banished. According to Garat he was mobbed in the street as one of Pitt's spies, and narrowly escaped immediate trial and execution; but even if his apprehension really took place in this way the danger could not have been so imminent as Garat represents.

Vaughan repaired to Geneva, and had no sooner arrived than he dispatched a long letter to Robespierre, written in a tone bespeaking intimacy and an intention of keeping up a correspondence. He advised Robespierre to contract France to her former limits, and to convert her conquests into a fringe of free and allied States. By the irony of fate this letter, written as if to an autocrat, reached Paris on the night of the 9th Thermidor, when Robespierre, arrested but released, was making his last throw for life and power at the Hotel de Ville. It was opened by the Committee of Public Safety, perhaps at the very moment when the fallen tribune was writhing in agony, and Billaud Varennes made it the basis of an audacious or rather mendacious statement at the Jacobin Club the day after Robespierre's execution. He insinuated that Vaughan was an emissary of Pitt's, and had written a letter advocating a triumvirate—Couthon to reign in the south, Saint Just in the north, and Robespierre in the centre. Vaughan, he said, was brought to Paris after the seizure of this letter, and Robespierre wished him to be executed at once, but a hearing was claimed for him, when he told a rambling story, ended by asking for a passport for Switzerland or America, and on reaching Switzerland wrote to Robespierre, advising him to "ménager" the privileged classes, and not to put sans-culottes on a level with aristocrats.^[6]

In 1796, probably before his return to Paris, Vaughan published at Strasburg a pamphlet entitled "De l'état politique et économique de la France sous sa Constitution de l'an 3." It professed to be a translation from the German, made by a foreigner who craved excuse for inaccuracies of idiom. It is an unqualified panegyric of the Directory, a system of government to be envied, according to Vaughan, even by America, much more by England, Switzerland, and Holland. There is an incidental reference to the Reign of Terror as a political inquisition whose rigour equalled that of the Spanish tribunal, and there is a very just remark attributing the atrocities of the Revolution in part to the despotism and superstition under which its leaders had been trained. Vaughan likewise observes that the mob generally respected private property, frequently yielded to the voice of reason, and were rarely intoxicated, "which"—an evident fling at the London and Birmingham rioters—"cannot be said of mobs everywhere." It is surprising, however, to find him not merely extolling the cumbrous and corrupt system of the Directory, but confidently predicting its durability and an era of peace and prosperity. He was manifestly wanting in political foresight. He was also smitten with the craze of the Revolution being a fulfilment of the Book of Daniel, and wrote a treatise on the subject, but had the good sense to suppress it, the printer saving one copy for Grégoire. A Unitarian should have escaped the prophecy interpretation mania, but the Revolution upheaval turned merchants into fanatics and rationalists into mystics.

Stone's acquittal ought to have rendered Vaughan's return to England perfectly safe, and his brother-in-law, William Manning, M.P. for Plymton and a staunch Tory, was assured by Pitt that he might resume his parliamentary duties; but Vaughan suspected a snare. This was of course absurd, but it shows the atmosphere of distrust which then prevailed. After living a year with Skipwith, the American consul in Paris, he joined his family and his brother Charles at Hallowell, where his descendants still live. He had two other brothers at Philadelphia. One of these, John, a friend of Washington and Humboldt, and secretary to the American Philosophical Society, was a bit of an oddity. Generous in other matters, he had a dislike to the non-return of borrowed umbrellas, and he printed in large letters on his own, "This umbrella was stolen from John Vaughan." A friend once took this, all unconscious of the inscription, until Vaughan's Portuguese errand-boy perceived it and claimed the article.^[7] A fourth brother William^[8] was a merchant in London, where Benjamin's third son, Petty, became his partner, and lived till 1854. A fifth brother, Samuel, settled in Jamaica. As for Benjamin, he was a Conservative in American politics; he doctored his neighbours gratuitously, was honoured and respected, and died a year after his wife, in 1835, bequeathing parts of a fine library to Harvard University and Bowdoin College. Of all the English exiles in Paris he seems to have had the peacefullest old age, but not recalling his French experiences with pleasure, was not accustomed to speak of them. "The happiest man I ever saw," says one who knew him well.

Thomas Muir, a Scotch advocate, had the prospect of a prosecution for treason when he went to France in 1793, for he had been one of the leaders of the Edinburgh Convention, which, except that its sittings were opened with prayer, imitated the forms of the Paris Assembly. He boldly returned, however, denied that he had fled from prosecution, and conducted his own defence. He was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation, but escaped from Botany Bay in an American vessel in February 1796, and made his way to Paris, where he died three years afterwards.

Sampson Perry's departure for France was confessedly a flight from a press prosecution. He had been fined £100 for alleging in his scurrilous Argus that the ministers had published false news for stock-jobbing purposes. In face of a conviction for libel on the House of Commons, for denying that it represented the nation, he went, in January 1793, to Paris, which he reached in time to join the British Revolutionary Club, where he must have found congenial associates. The club originated in a dinner held on November 18th, 1792, to celebrate French victories. Stone presided, Lord Edward Fitzgerald was present, and the toasts included "The speedy abolition of hereditary titles and feudal distinctions in England," "The coming Convention of Great Britain and Ireland," "The lady defenders of the Revolution, particularly Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Miss Williams, and Mrs. Barbauld;" "Paine and the new way of making good books known by a royal proclamation and King's Bench prosecution;" "The English patriots, Priestley, Fox, Sheridan, Christie, Cooper, Tooke, and Mackintosh." On the 28th the address adopted at this dinner was presented to the Convention. It stated that notwithstanding the sudden departure of the Ambassador, the British residents had uniformly experienced the utmost cordiality and friendship from the French people. A weekly gathering commenced on the 16th December, when the president of the section delivered an address in French. The "party of conspirators here," wrote Monro on December 17th, "have formed themselves into a society," prepared for the most desperate measures against their native country. They included Sir Robert Smith, a banker at Paris, Paine, Frost, Rayment, Sayer, Joyce, Henry Redhead Yorke, and Robert Merry, husband of the actress Miss Brunton. Dissensions soon broke out. Frost and Paine quarrelled, the latter being intolerably arrogant, and on December 31st, Monro reported:—

"Our countrymen here who have been endeavouring to ruin their country are now really beneath the notice of any one, struggling for consequence among themselves, jealous of one another, differing in opinion, and even insignificant in a body; they are, excepting a few, heartily tired of politics and addresses [to the Convention]. . . . They are now dwindling into nothing."

A second address, advocated by Paine and Merry, but opposed by Frost and Macdonald of the Morning Post, was near causing blows. The Convention, too, was tired of the nonsense of British addresses, perceiving the insignificance of the persons who presented them. Monro's despatches end in January 1793, for he had been denounced as a spy by Thompson, a bookseller, who recollected seeing him in London, and he deemed it prudent to quit Paris; but we learn from other sources that in February the club was dissolved, the majority, after a warm discussion, deciding to take no further part in politics. The two Sheares, "men of desperate designs, capable of setting fire to the dockyards," had previously gone back. Young Daniel O'Connell crossed over in the same packet, when their exultations over the king's fate, coupled with the excesses he had witnessed at St. Omer and Douai, rendered him a violent Tory.^[9] The Sheares were executed at Dublin in 1798. They had gone to France because Henry Sheare's motherless children were living there with their grandfather, Swete; had been intimate with Roland and Brissot, and had denounced Irish misrule at the clubs. John Sheare is said to have been enamoured of the republican heroine Théroigne de Mericourt, who, however, had given up Venus for Mars. Frost, a solicitor, was sentenced, on his return, to six months' imprisonment and an hour in the pillory, the latter punishment being remitted because he would have been applauded. Joyce was arrested in 1794 for sedition. "He was getting up in the morning," says Lady Hester Stanhope, "and was just blowing his nose, as people do the moment before they come down to breakfast, when a single knock came to the door, and in bolted two officers with a warrant, and took him off" without even my father's knowledge." Joyce, a Unitarian minister, had been acting as secretary and tutor in the Stanhope household. On the acquittal of Hardy he was discharged. Yorke, who underwent two years' imprisonment for conspiracy, changed his opinions, and in 1803 published "Letters from France," which were very anti-Gallic^[10] Sir Robert Smith was imprisoned more than a year in Paris, went back in November 1801, in quest of his property, returned to London, and died there in 1802. Merry went with his wife to America, and died at Baltimore in 1798. He had belonged at Florence to Madame Piozzi's literary circle, satirised by Gifford. In Paris he wrote odes on the Revolution, as also in 1793 a pamphlet in which he spoke of England as rushing towards an ignominious fall, while France was rapidly rising to a pinnacle of glory and splendour, unmatched even by Athens at the meridian of its greatness. One is reminded of Goethe's distich:—

"Seh' ich den Pilgrim, so kann ich mich nicht der Thrãnen
⁠enthalten;
Wie beseliget uns Menschen ein falscher Begriff."

Of Perry's imprisonment I shall speak presently.

1. The English "citizens" were Priestly, Paine, Bentham, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Mackintosh, and Williams.
2. "Residence in France," 1792–5, edited by John Gifford (who perhaps himself wrote these pretended letters).
3. But his grandfathers were Benjamin Vaughan and Benjamin Hallovvell, founder of Hallowell, Maine.
4. lord E. Fitzmaurice's "Life of Shelburne."
5. Rowan does not give his visitor's name. His editor gives it as Bingham, but Vaughan was evidently the man, and Robespierre had probably sent him.
6. "Journal de la Montagne," August 1794.
7. Atlantic Monthly, May 1888.
8. Doubtless the Wm. Vaughan who offered a temporary home to Priestley on his being driven from Birmingham. He was a high authority on docks.
9. Credence cannot be given to the statement of O'Connell's son, that John Sheare exultantly displayed a handkerchief steeped in Louis XVI.'s blood.
10. He found his old acquaintance Paine equally disenchanted. "Do you call this a republic?" said Paine. "Why, they are worse off than slaves at Constantinople."