Englishmen in the French Revolution/Chapter VI

by John Goldworth Alger

VI.

Immigrants and Emigrants.

⁠"All your kings and all the kings of the earth put together have
never given such an example of monstrous despotism as you have
been giving for three years."—Lavater to Hérault to Séchelles, Nov.
21, 1793.

VI.

IMMIGRANTS AND EMIGRANTS.

Palmerston—Insults and Ovations—Clarkson—Wordsworth—
⁠Fugitives—Cobbett—Edgeworth.

Until they were shocked and alarmed by the massacre of September 1792, Paris was still resorted to by people of fashion or leisure as a necessary part of a polite education. The future Duke of Devonshire was born there in 1790, and the future Lord Cholmondeley in January 1792. The Duchess of Devonshire was at Marseilles and Aix at the latter date. The Revolution, indeed, was too unprecedented to allow of forecasts. The curiosity, enthusiasm, or abhorrence with which it inspired British visitors, as also the honours or molestations experienced by some of them, typify the various phases of the Revolution.

The future Lord Palmerston, then a boy of eight, had a glimpse of the upheaval, and it would have been interesting to know what impression it made upon him, but his biographer is as silent upon it as Lord Liverpool's in similar circumstances. Palmerston's father, indeed, was or had been a friend of Wilkes; he was walking with the demagogue in Paris, apparently about 1763, when Forbes, a Scotchman in the French army, challenged Wilkes to a duel as having insulted his country in the North Briton; but Forbes could not find seconds, his fellow Scots disapproving the challenge. In January 1791, moreover, Richard Burke wrote to his father from Coblenz, "Only think of Lord Palmerston being a convert" (to the Revolution), but Palmerston's diary of his visit to Paris in July 1791 is not that of a convert. It is true that he shows no sympathy for the royal family, then virtual prisoners in the Tuileries, but he was disgusted at the plaudits with which the Jacobin Club greeted Brissot's arguments for putting the king on his trial, and he predicts the dispersion of the Assembly by the mob, followed by anarchy and an eventual despotism. This forecast approximates so closely to the reality that, meagre though the diary is, it is a pity Palmerston's father kept, or preserved, no diary in 1792. We consequently know only from his mother's letter to Lady Elliot of the scene at the barrier. The gates and walls erected in 1786 by the farmers of the revenue to prevent evasion of tolls—"le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant"—proved a potent weapon for the Terrorists, for when the gates were shut the "aristocrats" were caught as in a trap; and those who fancy that some slight circumstance may change the whole current of events may like to speculate on what would have happened had exit from Paris been unobstructed. The influence, indeed, of the Faubourg St. Antoine on the Revolution has been exaggerated, but the principal outlet from Paris was certainly in one of the most unruly quarters of the city. Lord and Lady Palmerston's carriage was not molested, but the children's carriage which followed was stopped, probably because piled with luggage, by the mob. Carriage and occupants were taken to the "section" or district committee, but after an hour and a half's delay, the crowd having dispersed, were escorted by eight mounted National Guards out of the city. The anxiety meanwhile of the parents, who had been dissuaded from returning, may be imagined.^[1]

The departure might. Lady Palmerston thought, have been effected in a quieter way, but travellers were at the mercy of mob caprice. Now they might be hugged, now again threatened with hanging, and sometimes the hugging had a menacing air. Even before the tiger had tasted blood its caresses were terrifying. Mrs. Damer, writing to Miss Berry in October 1791, describes a kind of blackmail then practised by Paris fishwives. They brought her a bouquet, and she gave them six francs, but they required double the sum. When one of them proposed to kiss her she did not think it safe to decline, and was only thankful that the other half-dozen, to say nothing of the crowd waiting in the court, did not follow suit. Porters and servants were afraid of refusing admission to these intruders. Lady Rivers at Lyons found matters even worse, for she was told it was prudent to wait on the fishwives, who had just shown their power by making the Comtesse d'Artois turn back to Paris. She was graciously received, and dismissed with a "Nous nous reverrons." Mrs. Swinburne, returning to London in December 1789, was stopped by the fishwives of Boulogne, who took her for one of Orleans's mistresses about to rejoin him in England. She had to argue with them that she was neither young nor pretty, and that the Duke could not have such bad taste. Happily, the landlady of an English hotel, Mrs. Knowles, came up and pacified the viragoes. Mrs. Swinburne in the previous October had had information from her shoemaker of the intended march on Versailles. She went thither and gave warning to the wife of Marshal de Beauvau, but it was unheeded.

William Hunter, a barrister, landing at Boulogne in February 1792, was unmolested till he reached Montreuil. His landing, by the way, was somewhat singular. Women actually carried the voyagers on their backs a quarter of a mile from the packet to the shore. One of these waders, unequal to the weight of a stout traveller who had been reserved till the last, dropped him midway. This curious scene took place at night, dimly illuminated by lanterns. At Montreuil Hunter's carriage was surrounded by half-a-dozen drunken soldiers (National Guards?), who shouted "Voilà des aristocrates," but on being assured that the travellers were English and good patriots, they wished them a pleasant journey. Hunter, whom the Assembly reminded of an English pothouse, everybody talking and nobody listening, went on to Marseilles and Turkey.

Charles Wollaston, a naval lieutenant, son of the eminent scientist, and his stepbrother, James Frampton, at the last stage before reaching Paris in October 1791, had their carriage surrounded and opened by fishwives, who hailed them as friends, shook hands with them, and had to be got rid of by a five-franc note—attentions which they by no means reciprocated, for Frampton, Wollaston wrote, was in love with the queen, and vowed he would go every day to see her pass on her way to mass;^[2] yet in August 1790 he had carried off a fragment of the Bastille.

Lingard, the future historian, driven from Douai by the revolutionary ferment, yet anxious to see something of Paris before re crossing the Channel, was betrayed by his seminarist air, and was chased with cries of "Le calotin à la lanterne!"

"The oysterwomen locked their fish up,
And trudged away to cry, 'No bishop!'"^[3]

or rather "No priest;" but seeing a marketwoman at the head of the troop, he dashed down a narrow alley with posts in the middle inconvenient for the passage of petticoats, and thus baffled his pursuers. This is a French version of Lingard's experiences, but his biographer Tierney gives an altogether different account, more entitled to credence. In June 1790, according to Tierney, he was walking about Douai when the mob were dragging a man whom he knew, Derbaix, to execution. Stopping to ask the reason, his seminarist dress attracted notice, and there was a cry of "Le calotin à la lanterne!" This roused him to a sense of his danger, and he hastily took to flight, but remained at Douai till February 1793. Derbaix was a printer, and commanded the National Guard. He had rescued from the mob, and was taking to prison for security, a corn merchant, Nicolon, accused of exporting wheat, when a ringleader at the prison doors snatched Nicolon from him and gave him up to the mob. Derbaix, indignant, drew his sword on the ringleader, whereupon the mob fell on him, hung him to a lamp-post, and then dragged his body through the streets till ten at night. His widow, prematurely confined, died from the shock. Although Tierney gives a wrong date, June instead of March 1790, he cannot have been mistaken as to Lingard's attempt to rescue Derbaix. It is just possible, however, that Lingard did go to Paris on leaving Douai, and was mobbed there. He revisited Paris in 1802 to make researches for his History.

Young Henry Swinburne, son of the Mrs. Swinburne just mentioned, had no such escape. He was a page to Louis XVI., and was at the Vaudeville Theatre in 1792, when there was a play ridiculing the Jacobins. The Royalists expelled the interrupters, but were waylaid outside the theatre by a mob who pelted them with mud and snow, forced them to shout "Vive la nation!" and made them, ladies included, wade through the mire to their carriages. Swinburne was dragged in the gutter and severely injured in the head. His aunt, Anne Swinburne, was one of thirty-five nuns who, in the following autumn, had to quit Montargis and seek refuge in England; yet the Montargis municipality, about that time, in token of international amity, burnt the flag taken from the English in 1427, and destroyed the cross commemorating the battle, such memorials being "a leaven of hatred and discord between two generous peoples." Henry was lost at sea in 1801, at twenty-nine years of age, on his way to Jamaica, where his father, a well-known traveller, had settled. Mr. Algernon Swinburne is of the same family.

There is a singular contrast between the treatment of two young men destined to be admirals. Christopher Nesham, a youth of eighteen, was living at Vernon, in Normandy, in October 1789, when a furious mob fell on Planter, a corn merchant who had been charitable to the poor, but who, having sent flour to Paris, was accused of wishing to starve Vernon. The town-hall, where he had taken refuge, was stormed, and Planter was dragged down the stairs towards the lamp-post at the corner of the building. Attempts were made to fasten the rope round his neck. Renoult, a barrister who had vainly tried to defend Planter inside the hall, pressed forward, along with the octogenarian priest Courotte and young Nesham. The latter placed himself in front of Planter, snatched a pistol from one of the mob, and with it warded off the blows aimed at himself. Knocked down, he sprang up again and vigorously resisted the mob. Planter was at last got away from the lamp-post into an adjoining street, and a door being thrown open for the priest, he was pushed in and saved. One of the first acts of the municipality, on the restoration of order, was to confer citizenship on Nesham (November 17th, 1789). The Paris municipality in the following January presented him with a civic wreath and sword. The president bade him tell his countrymen that he had found on the banks of the Seine a brave, susceptible, and generous people, formerly frivolous, but now enjoying liberty, especially as it gave them opportunities of rewarding virtue. Nesham must have reflected that if he had received the first civic wreath ever awarded in France, he would scarcely in any other country have had to defend an innocent man against a bloodthirsty mob.^[4] He may have worn the sword at Camperdown.

The other future admiral, Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Blackwood, whose mother became Lady Dufferin, had gone to Angoulême, when just of age, at the end of 1791, in order to learn French. In December 1792 he went to Paris, and agreed to take a bag, which he was assured contained no letters, but merely domestic articles for an émigré at Brussels. At Paris, however, the bag was searched, and letters were found in it. Blackwood was taken before the municipality; but as the letters did not touch on politics, he was released on bail, a Paris merchant with whom he stayed being surety for him. On January 13th, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety reported to the Convention that the letters had been entrusted to him by aristocratic ladies, and that he had earned 300 or 400 louis by journeys to and from émigrés (Blackwood, however, insisted that most of the money was the result of a bet with a fellow-Englishman, that he would get from Brussels to Angoulême in forty-four hours.) They held that he had dealings with the enemies of the Revolution, but "to set Europe an example of the virtue of hospitality," they recommended the Convention to release him, which was accordingly done. Though authorised to remain and travel in France, we may be sure the young midshipman lost no time in returning home.

He was more fortunate than Eraser Frisell, who, taught at Glasgow University to admire the ancient republics, went over to France at sixteen, in 1792, to live under a modern one. He spent fifteen months in prison at Dijon, and there formed some lifelong friendships. He became, indeed, so attached to France, that save a short visit to Scotland in 1802, he spent the rest of his life there. At the rupture of the peace of Amiens he was again arrested, but in consideration of his literary pursuits and his previous imprisonment, was released, with permission to remain in Paris or to travel about France, for travelling, coupled with shooting and Greek, was his passion. Chateaubriand styled him the "Greco-Anglais," and while in prison in 1832 for supposed complicity with the Duchesse de Berri, wrote an elegy on his daughter Louisa, who died at the age of seventeen. Joubert was another of Frisell's friends. Frisell published an essay on the English constitution, to correct French misconceptions. He married a Frenchwoman, a daughter by whom is still living, and expired in 1846, at the age of seventy.

Lord Sheffield, on his way to Lausanne in the summer of 1791, was horrified at the Revolution, and he found his friend Gibbon so reactionary as actually to deprecate the abolition of the Spanish Inquisition. Clarkson, on the other hand, thought, or rather Wilberforce thought for him, that the revolutionary zeal for the suppression of abuses might be directed against the slave trade. Clarkson accordingly went over in August 1789, and remained six months. Lafayette, as we might have expected, was ardent, and Clarkson was agreeably surprised to meet at his dinner-table two Dominican mulattoes in the uniform of National Guards. Necker was friendly, and Mirabeau not only showed him the outline of a speech he intended to deliver, but asked for further data. Clarkson accordingly, for more than a month, sent him every other day a letter of sixteen or twenty pages, but the speech was never delivered. The Abbé Sieyes and Brissot warmly supported him, and the leading members of the Assembly listened to him with respect; but the Creoles in Paris denounced him as a spy, and addressed him threatening letters. Recalled to England to prepare evidence for a parliamentary committee, he enjoined moderation and prudence on the coloured deputation which had arrived from St. Domingo. He was disappointed with his want of success, due partly to the political turmoil, partly to the counter efforts of the colonists, who saw no inconsistency in excluding negroes from the rights of man. Neither, indeed, did some English sympathisers with the Revolution, as for example Colonel (afterwards Sir) Banastre Tarleton, M.P. for Liverpool, who was in Paris in 1791. He was a zealous defender of the slave trade, though he regretted having fought against American independence.

A closer view of the Revolution sobered or saddened some who from this side of the Channel had been enchanted with it. Mr. (afterwards Sir) John Stanley of Alderley, after a month at Paris in 1790, when he accompanied Huskisson, Windham, and Pelham (afterwards Lord Chichester) to the Jacobins, informed Lord Auckland that his enthusiasm had been dispelled; but he had not turned round the other way, for the violence, unfairness, and ignorance of both sides equally disgusted him. David Williams, the Unitarian minister, whose creed was ironically said to be, "I believe in God: amen," had been invited over to assist in framing the constitution. This was done at the suggestion of Brissot, who had translated his "Letters on Political Liberty," and he spent the winter of 1792 in Paris, but was glad to get back to England. He is said to have warned the Girondins that unless they put down the Jacobins, whose club had denounced him as a Royalist because he excused Louis XVI., they would be destroyed by them. Aghast at the confusion in the Convention and the uproar in the galleries, he told Madame Roland he expected little good from deputies unable to listen. "You French no longer study that external propriety which stands for so much in Assemblies; heedlessness and coarseness are no recommendations for a Legislature." The clamour in the Assembly shocked, indeed, all English observers, who by 1791 were getting disillusionised; yet even then there were deceptive lulls. George Hammond, afterwards Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, writing to Bland Burges in March 1791, expresses surprise at the tranquillity which prevailed." Except a greater number of men in military uniforms parading the streets, all the common occupations of life proceed as smoothly and regularly as if no event of consequence had occurred, and the public amusements are followed with as much avidity as in the most quiet and flourishing periods of the monarchy." Lafayette, however, about this time bowed, but said nothing when congratulated on the calm by Samuel Rogers, who had fancied on landing at Calais that France might soon prove even to Englishmen a welcome asylum, but who found the best judges in Paris full of misgivings.^[5] Rogers conversed, indeed, with the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Condorcet, and other leading men, but obtained no knowledge of the real state of the country.

How, indeed, could young men just of age be expected to foresee the total eclipse of law and order? Wordsworth, who made the acquaintance of Watt in Paris in November 1791, accompanied him to the Assembly and the Jacobin Club—

"In both her clamorous halls,
The National Synod and the Jacobins,
I saw the revolutionary power
Tossed like a ship at anchor rocked by storms,"

and took away with him a fragment of the Bastille as a relic.

"The senselessness of joy was then sublime."

When, however, he returned to Paris from Orleans and Blois, just after the September massacres, he was horrified on visiting the scenes of carnage, and for years, it is said, would dream that he was pleading for his own life or that of friends before the infamous Maillard. Yet he returned home reluctantly, was still for a time a Republican, and expected Robespierre's fall to usher in a second dawn of liberty.

The Englishmen who left before the Terror set in must have been numerous, but there are few traces of them. As early as the winter of 1789 a London newspaper, remembering the adage of the ill wind, commented with real insular egotism on the benefit to England of the Revolution. Not only had many rich Frenchmen sought refuge here, but many British residents had returned home. Reckoning, too, the English visitors to Paris as 5000 a year, and their expenditure as £100 a head, England, it said, would save half a million per annum. Now, as for visitors, possibly as many were for a time drawn over by the Revolution as kept away by it, but residents were certainly frightened off. Lord and Lady Kerry—she was Anastasia, only child of Peter Daly, of the county Galway, and had been divorced by her first husband, a cousin Daly—had lived mostly on the Continent since their marriage in 1768, and had paid several visits to Paris. In 1792 they occupied the mansion of M. de Caze in the Rue des Champs Elysées, when the storming of the Tuileries and the recall of Lord Gower showed them the necessity of leaving Paris. This, however, was not so easy. On the 1st September, Kerry, in a letter to Lindsay at the Embassy, stated that he had vainly applied for a passport for himself, his wife, and such servants as were not French, but had been told, "I must prove that we and our servants are foreigners." He had given up the idea of taking French servants, and thought of applying for a passport for the provinces, of going to Calais with it, and of there waiting a chance of departure; but he feared his property would be seized and confiscated. He must have gone away very hurriedly, for he left not only considerable property—his heirs were in 1820 awarded £145,000 from the indemnity fund—but a large bundle of papers, likewise confiscated, revolutionary logic declaring an Irish peer an émigré. These documents, comprising some hundreds of bills and letters, extend from 1768 to 1790, and the correspondence with the Irish steward shows that the collection of rents was almost as difficult then as now. A patriotic gift of 117 francs to the Assembly in November 1789, from "eleven servants of an English lord," must have been approved, if not inspired, by Kerry, yet Nicolas, probably one of the eleven, was guillotined in May 1794 for dealings with the enemy; and Louise Blaizeau, wife to the man-cook Biquet whom Lord Gower had taken back with him to England, suffered the same fate, partly for endeavouring to get the seals removed from Kerry's property. Kerry was in Belgium about the end of 1792, for Fersen, the Swedish count associated with the King's escape to Varennes, met him there. Lady Kerry died in 1799, and her husband in 1818, both being buried in Westminster Abbey, and the title and estates passing to his cousin, Lord Lansdowne.

One of Fersen's confederates also quitted France in time—Quintin Craufurd, the nabob from Manilla, whose maxim was, "Make your fortune where you like, but enjoy it at Paris." A confidant of Marie Antoinette, he provided, or at least housed, the famous carriage which the royal family overtook and entered at Bondy, it having already started when Fersen drove them to Craufurd's. Craufurd himself had gone to London and Brussels, perhaps to avoid suspicion, leaving his valet, Tom Sayer, to make all the arrangements. When the fugitives were brought back, one of his coachmen in the crowd incautiously exclaimed that he knew the carriage, but a fellow-servant curtly told him he was mistaken; the mob would otherwise have stormed Craufurd's house. Not discouraged by the failure, he busied himself in trying to get foreign Powers to interfere. On leaving in November 1792, he, too, was classed as an émigré and his furniture, pictures, and statues were sold. Stormy times these for an inveterate cardplayer, who in 1787 was fetched home at nine in the morning from the British Embassy by his Italian mistress and eventual wife Mrs. Sullivan, alleged ex-wife of the future King of Wurtemburg,^[6] and grandmother that was to be of Comte d'Orsay! When the Terror had passed over, Craufurd returned. Under the Empire he had whist parties with Talleyrand, and formed a collection of historical portraits which was one of the sights of Paris till his death in 1819. The Duke of Wellington was returning from a call on Craufurd when shot at by Cantillon in 1818, and he was at Mrs. Craufurd's when the intelligence of Napoleon's death arrived. Talleyrand was also there, and when some exclaimed "What an event," he replied, "Non, ce n'est qu'une nouvelle." Benjamin Constant secreted himself for a few days in Craufurd's house on Napoleon's return from Elba, Madame de Stael having probably made them acquainted with each other. Though so devoted to Marie Antoinette, Craufurd, in a memorandum to the English Government, spoke of Fersen as "generally supposed to be the father of the present Dauphin."^[7]

Henry Seymour, nephew of the first Duke of Somerset, left in June 1792, and like Kerry and Craufurd, was declared an émigré, which implied confiscation of property. A widower, he was the neighbour and penultimate lover of Madame Dubarry, and eight of her letters to him were sold at Paris in 1837 and afterwards published by Goncourt. "And what a romantic passion!" says a contemporary gossip in December 1778,^[8] what sensibility, what warmth, what transports! It was a real love drama, with elegies, pastorals, and eclogues enough to satisfy the least sentimental-man in the world." The passion soon cooled down, but Seymour was not supplanted by Brissac, perhaps not unwillingly, till about 1782, when he went to London to see a daughter married. In June 1792, three months before poor Brissac perished in the Versailles massacre, Seymour returned to his seat at Northbrook, Devon. His granddaughter Harriette Felicité married Sir James Tichborne. She was mother of the young Sir Roger personated by "the Claimant," and her identification of the latter, as also her death in 1868 before the trial came on, will be remembered. Danby and Alfred Seymour, M.P.s for Poole and Totnes, were Henry's grandsons.

Charles Jerningham, of Cossey, Norfolk, brother of Edward, the poet, was another fugitive. He was a colonel in the French army, and had invested his patrimony in France. In 1796, when Swinburne found his property all sold and irrecoverable, he was "dying to return to Paris," but he had to wait till 1802. Returning to Cossey, he died there in 1814.

Disney Ffytche, elder brother of Dr. John Disney, (a Lincolnshire vicar who became the Unitarian minister at Essex Street chapel), apparently beat a hurried retreat, for in February 1794 his furniture was sold as that of an émigré Sir Robert Gerard, a young Lancashire baronet, with his schoolfellow, hereafter to be known as the informer Reynolds, "ran up" from Liège to see the men who were revolutionising France, but after seeing the King's return from Varennes they were advised by Lord Gower to hurry off. They were stopped eight or ten times on the way, and their papers scrutinised, lest they should be émigrés.

Cobbett may be numbered among the fugitives, for tidings of the King's dethronement and the massacre of the Swiss made him turn back at Abbeville on his way to Paris and embark at Havre for America. He had spent his honeymoon in France in the previous year. Back in London, he charged officers of his old regiment with peculation, but when a court-martial met, he failed to put in an appearance, either because he had taken hush-money or because he knew he could not substantiate his charges. He fell into further odium by allegations in support of an agitation for increasing soldiers' pay, and England being too hot for him he went in March 1792 to St. Omer, where he spent, he says, the six happiest months of his life. He found the French very hospitable, and intended passing the winter in Paris to perfect his knowledge of the language. It would have been interesting to know what he saw and did, but unfortunately he tells us nothing. We only know that in America he sharply attacked the sympathisers with the Revolution.

Two Englishwomen who left before the Terror figured long afterwards as partisans of the sham dauphins, Bruneau and Naundorff. Mrs. Atkyns—probably Charlotte Walpole, wife of Edward Atkyns of Ketteringham, or possibly the wife of his brother John, M.P. for Oxford, for she is described as the widow of an M.P—had been presented to Marie Antoinette before the Revolution, and on the Queen becoming a prisoner resolved to save her. A municipal commissary promised her admission to the Temple in the disguise of a National Guard, on condition of nothing secret being said or given to the Queen. Mrs. Atkyns offered the latter a bouquet, and her emotion made her drop the note accompanying it. The commissary was about to seize the document when Mrs. Atykns snatched it up and swallowed it, whereupon the man angrily drove her out. She procured a second and this time a private interview, when she expounded a plan of escape, but the Queen refused to abandon her children, professed resignation to her fate, and begged Mrs. Atkyns to devote all her efforts to the deliverance of the Dauphin. This deliverance she arranged for with Madame de Beauharnais and the Comte de Frotté, and then left for England. The Dauphin's escape is said to have been effected, but he was not brought to her by Frotté and she did not see him till 1818, when he (the alleged Bruneau) was in prison as an impostor, she herself then living in Paris on a small pension allowed her by Louis XVIII. She is said to have died in Paris shortly before 1830. All this has the air of a romance, more especially as Mrs. Atkyns is dubbed Duchess of Ketteringham—Ketteringham, Norfolk, had been in the Atkyns family since its purchase by the son of Chief Baron Sir Robert Atkyns—but absurd as the Bruneau legend is, it seems clear that a Mrs. Atkyns really endeavoured to effect Marie Antoinette's escape.

Catherine Hyde's story is still less credible. In her "Memoirs respecting the French Royal Family during the Revolution"—professedly a translation from the English, but I can find no English original—she represents herself as the illicit offspring of the Duke of Norfolk and a Lady Mary Duncan. She says she was brought up in an Irish convent in Paris—no such convent existed—was long kept in ignorance of her parentage, learned to speak German and Italian, in addition to her English and French, was taught music by Sacchini, and was so accomplished a musician that the childless Princesse de Lamballe virtually adopted her. Marie Antoinette, by whom she was called "la petite Anglaise," entrusted her with secret missions abroad, and she accompanied the Princesse de Lamballe, in 1791 or 1792, to England. Just prior to the capture of the Tuileries the Princesse, to place her out of danger, sent her on a mission to Italy, and they never met again. Catherine married in Italy the Marquis Broglio-Solari, who was Venetian ambassador at Brussels in 1803. She there dined with Barras, and heard him say—in vino beritas—"He" (Bonaparte) "will not succeed in his ambitious projects, for Louis XVI.'s son is still living." In 1840 she made an affidavit in London that Naundorff, whom she had just seen, had given her proofs of his being the Dauphin. Now it is not easy to see how Venice, part of the Cisalpine Republic in 1803, could have had an ambassador at Brussels, then French territory. I can find no trace of a Lady Mary Duncan, and though this Catherine Hyde may have really served the unfortunate Princesse de Lamballe, her book, with its professed quotations from the Princess's diary, is a romance, possibly founded on fact.

The Countess of Albany, though no Englishwoman, may as titular Queen of England receive mention. The Young Pretender's widow, in company with Alfieri, was living in Paris from 1787 to 1792, after a visit to London, where she had been presented to the rival Queen, thus virtually acknowledging the Hanoverian dynasty. She and Alfieri left just after the attack on the Tuileries, but had almost to fight their way out at the gates. Their two carriages full of luggage and five servants attracted a mob, whom Alfieri harangued with his stentorian voice, while his wife (for she was by this time his wife) lay back frightened in the carriage. A presentiment is said to have made them start two days earlier than they originally intended. Two days afterwards the very section which had granted them passports ordered their arrest, and seized all their horses, furniture, and books. Alfieri, who had written a poem on the fall of the Bastille, never forgave the French this injustice, nor the loss of his own and the Countess's pension. For him they were "monkey-tigers," and he vented his wrath in verses entitled "Misogallo."

The Countess of Albany's—predecessor shall I say?—also witnessed the beginning of the Revolution. Clementine Walkingshaw bore a daughter to the Young Pretender at Liège in 1753. According to Dr. King, a non-juring clergyman, Gordon, gave the infant Protestant baptism. The parents then openly cohabited, but in 1760 Clementine secretly left the Prince, whose courtiers had vainly endeavoured to separate them.^[9] She went to Paris, and placed the child in a convent. Mother and child were afterwards in a convent at Meaux, and were ignored by Charles Edward until 1784, when, wifeless and lonely, he sent for the so-called Lady Charlotte Stuart to join him at Florence, acknowledged her as his daughter, and created her Duchess of Albany. She remained with him till his death in 1788, and died at Bologna the following year. Clementine—Countess of Albestroff she styled herself, having perhaps lived in the Lorraine village of that name—did not accompany her daughter to Italy. Walpole in 1784 believed her to be dead, but Lord Braye possesses two letters addressed by her from Paris in 1790 and 1791 to "His Majesty the King of England at Rome"—that is to say, to the Cardinal of York. When and where she died I cannot ascertain.

Walter Boyd, the banker, of whom we shall hear again, and to whom Egalité entrusted his diamonds, left in October 1792; his partner Ker soon followed him, and Kerly, a Scotchman, agent for the banker Herries, a regular frequenter of the Jacobin Club, but ultimately denounced as a spy, also fled. The Republic had evidently no more need of bankers than of savants. As for visitors, the great stampede was caused by the capture of the Tuileries. Richard Twiss (uncle of Horace) tells us that whereas there had been only thirty in Paris, above two thousand arrived in less than a week from all parts of France, all eager for passports to get away. Twiss waited on the Assembly with a petition, and, as nothing came of this, was getting up a collective remonstrance when the recalcitrant municipality gave way.^[10] This was, perhaps, due to a strong protest by Deputy Kersaint, who urged that England was the only really neutral country, and was very sensitive to violation of the laws of hospitality, yet that everything had been done by the Commune to irritate Englishmen by domiciliary visits or refusal of passports. These visits were sometimes disguised burglaries, for on the 18th September 1792 an Englishman complained to the Convention that about £20 had been thus taken from his house at Chaillot, and that the tribunals dared not arrest the malefactor. Yet in the previous month Courtenay, the joker of the House of Commons, who related his French and Italian tour in rhyme, shed tears of joy at the republican spirit of the Parisians and their determination to resist the invaders.

No Englishman perished in the storming of the Tuileries or the September massacres, though two Irish priests, Flood and Corby, narrowly escaped the latter.^[11] The English had, however, to be on their guard, particularly on August 10th, for a foreigner might easily have been mistaken for a Swiss or an aristocrat. Dr. Moore, father of Sir John, was denounced as an aristocrat by the head of a troop of pikemen, but fortunately had a French valet with him, whose assurance that Moore was English was accepted. Next day, in the Assembly, he heard the fate of the royal family discussed in their presence. "The Queen," he noted, "has lost all her beauty, and no wonder."^[12] Nevertheless he felt no uneasiness when the arrests were going on. Shopkeepers told him the sanguinary feeling was confined to the people in the galleries and at the Jacobin Club. His landlord, boasting of a night of domiciliary visits and of the arrest of four priests, "could not have had a prouder air if he had quartered the Duke of Brunswick." Moore approached the Abbaye during the massacres, but turned back with horror. He found the noisiest sitting at Westminster a calm compared with the Assembly, where fifty deputies were shouting at a time, yet so sudden were the alternations of violence and quietude that on the 19th August the Champs Elysées had their usual shows and concerts. He left Paris without difficulty, but returned in October and remained till December. He was travelling as medical attendant with the Earl of Lauderdale, whose carriage was once stopped by a sentry because the hammercloth had coloured fringes. Such a distinction was contrary, said the sentry, to equality. The coachman, proud of the fringe, had disobeyed his master's orders to use only plain cloth. The new rulers, indeed, were as punctilious on costume as the old monarchy had been. Arthur Young, more interested in agriculture, even during the Revolution, than in politics, was stopped in the provinces in 1790 because he wore no cockade.

General John Money, who went to France in July 1792 to raise a foreign legion, was aroused near midnight by his aide-de-camp, and told that the Tuileries were about to be attacked. He put on his uniform, went to the palace, and asked for a musket. "Voilà un véritable Anglais!" was the welcome cry of a hundred officers mustered there. When informed that the King was going to the Assembly he vainly tried to get thither, then doffed his uniform and went back to his hotel. When again aroused a few hours later and told that the Marseillais were pointing cannon at the palace, he tied a white handkerchief to his gun, and would have gone to the Carrousel to try and stop the fighting, but his fellow-countrymen at the hotel would not allow him thus to rush to certain death. Going out to look a little later, he was insulted by a man among the mob, deemed it prudent to return, and passed an anxious week before he could obtain a passport for Valenciennes. He then served under Dillon and Dumouriez, and though ignored in their despatches, claims a considerable share in the success of the campaign. This plucky Norfolker, who had served in Germany and Belgium, had offered his services to the Brabant insurgents in 1790, and had gone to France owing to no prospect of employment at home rather than to sympathy with the Revolution, for while a Whig, he was no Jacobin. In January 1793 he made an offer to the English Government to go over to Paris and arrange with Dumouriez to save the King's life. He believed that £100,000 would have turned the majority in the Convention the other way; but his proposal was not accepted, and on the King's death he sorrowfully returned to England. He was a witness for the defence of Hardy in 1794, and his name appears in a list of guests at the George III. Jubilee dinner at Norwich in 1809. He died at Trowse Hall, near that city, in 1817, aged seventy-seven.

In 1785 he had a perilous balloon adventure. He went up alone in Zambeccari's balloon from Norwich, in the presence of 40,000 people, was carried out of sight in an hour, and was driven out to sea, the valve being too small to allow of his descending. After being buffeted about for two hours the car dropped into the sea, and the balloon being torn, and hanging merely like an umbrella over his head, he had great difficulty in keeping afloat. A Dutch crew, inhuman or frightened, passed in sight, but took no notice of him. A boat chased him for two hours till dusk, but then bore away. The car sank inch by inch, and Money, resigned to the fate of Pilate de Rozier, was up to his breast in the water, when, shortly before midnight, a revenue cutter rescued him, so weak that he had to be lifted on board. "Any man with less strength than myself," says Money,^[13] "must have perished."

Richard Twiss, who had visited Voltaire at Ferney, and had employed Rousseau in copying music, had also repaired to Paris in July 1792. He was a clever violinist and chess-player, and had lost much money in a scheme of making paper from straw. So little did he foresee the impending horrors that he intended spending several years in France. He expected indeed a counter-revolution. On the capture of the Tuileries he went out at three in the afternoon and found all quiet, but the gardens were strewn with corpses of Swiss, which were being stripped and mutilated by ruffians of both sexes.

I have left to the last the Abbe Edgeworth, and this for two reasons. His flight was latest in date, and he had virtually become a Frenchman, yet he cannot be omitted from a book on Englishmen in the French Revolution. It is, moreover, well to clear up misconceptions as to his relations with the French court. His father, Robert Edgeworth, great-grandson of Francis, who went over from England about 1582, and gave his name to Edgeworthstown, county Longford, resigned the rectory of that parish in 1749, on his conversion to Catholicism. The son, Henry Essex Edgeworth—Edgeworth de Firmont, as the family now styled itself, from an estate called Firmount, near Edgeworthstown—never saw Ireland again after thus leaving it at four years of age. Educated at Toulouse and Paris for the priesthood, he joined the seminary of foreign missions, but was dissuaded from his plan of becoming a missionary, and devoted himself to the poor, especially the poor Irish in Paris. He declined, when the Revolution assumed a threatening air, a pressing invitation to return to Ireland, his reasons being the long cessation of correspondence with his family (his elder brother Ussher had gone back to Ireland), his imperfect knowledge of English, and the spiritual needs of his flock. Princess Elizabeth, on her confessor accompanying the King's aunts to Italy in February 1791, appointed Edgeworth as his successor, and he frequently visited her at the Tuileries till August 1792, but was not introduced to the rest of the royal family.

When the King's trial was impending, Elizabeth recommended Edgeworth to her brother for the last spiritual ministrations, in the hope that his obscurity would save such a confessor from molestation.^[14] Edgeworth accepted the mission, and in a letter to a friend in England, dated 21st December 1792, explained that this was his reason for remaining in France. "I prepare myself," he added, "for death, for I am convinced that popular rage will not allow me to survive one hour after that tragic end." He fully expected, indeed, to be torn to pieces by the mob, and he made his will before leaving his mother and sister (the former ignorant of his danger) for the Temple. Rigidly searched at the gate, lest he should carry poison for the King, Edgeworth, bursting into tears, fell at Louis's feet. Louis read him his will, and Edgeworth, through a glass door, heard the piercing sobs at the King's parting with his family. He remained with the royal prisoner till ten at night, took some hours' rest in an ante-room, administered the sacrament at five next morning, dissuaded the King from another interview with his family, and rode with him to the scaffold. As two gendarmes seated opposite in the hackney coach made private conversation impossible, Edgeworth offered his breviary to the King, and recited with him alternate verses of suitable psalms. He had no recollection of exclaiming, as the axe fell, "Fils de St. Louis, montez au ciel," and Lacretelle half confesses to having invented this for a report in a Paris newspaper. Edgeworth did, however, say, when the King, averse to being pinioned, looked appealingly to him, "Sire, in this last insult I see only a last resemblance between your Majesty and the God who is about to be your recompense." When all was over, Edgeworth, rising from his knees, and bespattered by the King's blood as the executioner held up the head to the mob, looked to see where the crowd was least dense, and being in the lay dress then obligatory on the clergy, walked away unmolested.

He had promised Princess Elizabeth not to leave France till her death, and letters concealed in balls of silk occasionally passed between them. He had various disguises and several narrow escapes, his mother and sister being meanwhile prisoners, and the former dying in captivity. In 1796 he effected his escape to England, and conveyed to the Comte d'Artois (afterwards Charles X.) his sister's farewell message, the tenor of which is unknown. He was about to repair to Ireland when a mission to Louis XVIII. in Brunswick led to his becoming that prince's chaplain,^[15] and he died in that post at Mittau in 1807. On the loss, through the dishonesty of the borrower, of the £4000 produced by the sale of Firmount, he accepted in 1806 the pension from the English Government which he had previously declined. By a singular coincidence, while Edgeworth attended Louis XVI. to the scaffold, his kinsman, Admiral Sir Thomas Ussher—both were descendants of Archbishop Ussher—escorted Napoleon to exile. Napoleon at Elba, in December 1814, inquired of Lord Ebrington for "my good friend Ussher."

1. "Life of Sir Gilbert Elliot, first Earl of Minto." Palmerston did not see Paris again till September 1815.
2. Journal of Mary Frampton.
3. The Royalist satirists, in the "Actes des Apôtres," drew some of their inspiration from Hudibras, and the resemblance between certain phases of the Commonwealth and Jacobinism is obvious.
4. Carlyle, following a newspaper misprint, gave the name as Needham, and spoke of the sword as "long since rusted into nothingness," but in 1854 Admiral Nesham's son corrected the mistake, adding that the sword was still preserved by him. For an accurate account of the rescue see Boivin Champeaux, "Révolution dans l'Eure." Nesham died in 1837.
5. Lafayette had an English aide-de-camp, John Hely (afterwards Lord) Hutchinson, younger son of the Irish Secretary of State, whose rapacity made Lord North remark, "If he had England and Ireland given him, he would ask for the Isle of Man as a potato garden." Young Hutchinson was with Lafayette from 1789 till his flight in August 1792, succeeded Abercromby in Egypt, became Earl of Donoughmore in 1825, and died, aged seventy-five, in 1832.
6. Who married George III.'s eldest daughter.
7. Papers of Bland Burges.
8. "Nouvelles à la Main sur la Comtesse du Barry." Published by Cantrel in 1861.
9. Her sister being housekeeper to Frederick, Prince of Wales, they suspected her fidelity.
10. "Trip to Paris in July and August 1792." (Anonymous, but by Twiss.)
11. Flood was presented to the Assembly by two municipal officers who had saved him, and was declared to be under the safeguard of the nation.
12. "Journal during a Residence in France," 1793–94.
13. Copy of newspaper cutting (at back of an old picture of the balloon at sea, belonging to Mr. J, J. Colman, M.P.) furnished me by Mr. E. A. Tillett, of Norwich.
14. Hébert, king's confessor at the Tuileries, was guillotined in 1794.
15. When Louis was expelled from Russia in 1801, the Duchesse d'Angoulême supported him on one side and Edgeworth on the other at a spot where he had to alight from his carriage and force his way through the snow. At a village inn at Ilmagen where he stayed a night, only two bedrooms being available, Edgeworth and Comte d'Avaray shared Louis's apartment, while the Duchesse d'Angoulême and her attendants occupied the other.