Englishmen in the French Revolution/Chapter VIII
VII.
The Guillotined.
"France had shown a light to all men, preached a gospel, all men's |
VIII.
THE GUILLOTINED.
Dillon—Ward—O'Moran—Newton—Delany—Chambly—
Macdonald——O'Brennan—The Cemetery.
Although about a dozen men of British birth and as many more of British extraction fell victims to the guillotine, it must not be supposed that they were executed as English subjects. Little respect as the Revolution showed for international rights, it did not wantonly massacre foreigners. A fear of reprisals would alone have sufficed to deter it from this. Even Paine, had Robespierre lived long enough to behead him, would have been beheaded as a naturalised Frenchman and ex-deputy. The British victims were mostly men—alas, that we should have to add, and women—who by birth or long residence, or by service in the army, were really French citizens, and with one exception were not of high position.
The exception was General Arthur Dillon, son of the eleventh and brother of the twelfth Viscount Dillon. The Dillons had for nearly a century and a half been an amphibious family, so to speak, and their career in France would of itself fill a chapter, but I have already given a summary of this in the "Dictionary of National Biography." It is enough here to say that General Dillon's uncle, Archbishop of Narbonne and virtual viceroy of Languedoc, a man of much ability and of liberal views, who in June 1789 became bankrupt for two million francs,[1] was an émigré, and died in London in 1806. Arthur Dillon was born in Berkshire in 1750, entered the Franco-Irish regiment which bore the name of his family, and in 1767 became its colonel. After service in the West Indies, and acting as Governor of St. Kitt's, he was nominated brigadier-general in 1784, with a pension of 1000 francs. He was for three years Governor of Tobago. Martinique elected him as its deputy to the National Assembly, and he made numerous speeches on colonial subjects. When the Assembly, in May 1791, conferred the franchise on freeborn negroes, Dillon with the other colonial deputies ceased to attend, and the colonies were not represented in the Convention. He was appointed in June 1792 to the command of the army of the Ardennes. On hearing of the storming of the Tuileries, he issued a general order pledging himself and his troops to uphold the monarchy. He ordered Dumouriez, his subordinate, to issue a similar order, but Dumouriez refused. On the arrival of commissioners from Paris a few days afterwards, Dillon made profuse apologies for his manifesto, as being due to misinformation, and accepted the Republic. The command-in-chief was, however, transferred to Dumouriez, Dillon serving under him. He claimed a large share of the credit for the successes in the Argonnes passes, but according to General Money, who was with him, he was careless and indolent, lying in bed till noon. A letter written by him to the Landgrave of Hesse, offering him an unmolested retreat, was disapproved by the Convention, which declared that he had lost its confidence, and he was imprisoned for six weeks at St. Pélagie. The Convention, however, rescinded its declaration, and he was released. He attended the British dinner mentioned in a previous chapter, and gave a toast—"The people of Ireland, and may Government profit by the example of France, and Reform prevent Revolution."
Camille Desmoulins about this time formed a friendship with Dillon, who seems to have been a fascinating talker, and to have given luxurious dinners. Desmoulins fancied him to be a great strategist, and the only man who could repel the invader. Attacked in the Convention by Bréard, who taunted him with his intimacy with an aristocrat like Dillon, Desmoulins replied that six months previously Dillon had predicted to him the military reverses which had just happened, and which had his advice been taken would have been prevented. "Dillon," he added, "is neither royalist, nor aristocrat, nor republican," and he had drawn out a plan of campaign which filled generals with admiration. The very next day (July 11th, 1793), Dillon was rearrested, charged with a plot for liberating the Dauphin and proclaiming him king. Desmoulins in the Convention denounced this as a ridiculous fable, but was refused a hearing. Dillon was kept in solitary confinement at the Madelonnettes, and repeatedly interrogated. He vainly asked to see his friends or to be confronted with his accusers. In a letter to Desmoulins he protested his innocence, and complained of incarceration in a heated cell without air. Desmoulins replied in a letter, which he published as a pamphlet of thirty-eight pages, sharply attacking the Committee of Public Safety. It was pretended that the note-book of an English spy had been picked up at Lille, and Dillon was mentioned in it as in Pitt's pay. Dillon denounced it as a forgery, which it evidently was. Desmoulins, on admission into the Jacobin Club in November 1793, had, however, to repudiate Dillon, and to confess he had been mistaken in him, as in Mirabeau. Robespierre warned him to be more cautious thenceforth in his friendships.
Dillon, meanwhile, had been transferred to the Luxembourg, where he had comparative liberty. Indeed, he had too much society, for Amans, a mouton, as prison spies were called, reported his real or alleged conversations to Robespierre. He is said to have drunk too freely, and to have amused himself with backgammon. When Danton, Desmoulins, and others, were arrested, a prison plot was invented as a pretext for cutting short their sham trial. The sole foundation for this was that prisoners, Dillon among them, had resolved, in the event of another September massacre, to sell their lives dearly. Dillon had also written to Desmoulins' wife, enclosing 3000 francs, as was alleged, to be used in exertions for her husband's release, but the turnkey, on second thoughts, detained the letter. (He was guillotined for not having divulged the fact.) After eight months' confinement, Dillon, with Lucile Desmoulins, and nineteen other persons, was tried for this prison plot, his name heading the list. They were all guillotined on the 14th April, 1794.
Dillon was twice married, and had two daughters. One of them, Fanny, married General Bertrand,[2] and was with Napoleon at Elba and St. Helena. He was not, as is sometimes stated, the brother of General Theobald Dillon, who was murdered by his soldiers at Lille in 1792. Theobald was born at Dublin in 1745, entered Dillon's regiment in 1761, was at the attack on Grenada and the siege of Savannah in 1779, won the cross of St. Louis, and was a member of the Order of Cincinnatus. Brigadier-General under Dumouriez in Flanders, he was ordered to make a feigned attack on Tournay, to prevent it from assisting Mons, which was to be simultaneously attacked by Biron. According to Lord Gower's information, Dillon ventured too near the enemy, and was attacked while his horses were grazing. He ordered a retreat as prearranged, but the retreat became a headlong flight, and the soldiers, thinking Dillon had betrayed them, cut him to pieces in a barn where he had taken refuge, threw the body on a fire in Lille marketplace, and danced savagely round it. The Convention conferred a pension on Josephine Viefville, with whom Dillon had cohabited for nine years, but, as he said in a will made the previous day, had not had time to marry, as also on their three children.
Brigadier-General Thomas Ward, born at Dublin in 1748, had a similar fate to Arthur Dillon. He lodged at the same hotel as Paine, and related to Paine a conversation he had had with Marat. The latter said, Frenchmen were mad to allow foreigners to live among them. They should cut off their ears, let them bleed a few days, and then cut off their heads. "But you yourself are a foreigner," remarked Ward. Paine, in May 1793, informed the Convention committee of this episode, and suggested that they should question Ward upon it. Though a general in the French army, Ward was arrested in October 1793, with all the British subjects, as a hostage for Toulon. Robert Plumer Ward, the author of "Tremaine," relates a singular story of his being arrested by mistake for General Ward. Plumer Ward had gone to Barèges for rheumatism, and had been visiting at various country houses. He was arrested, he says, "for having the same name and the same coloured waistcoat as another Ward, guilty of treason, was ordered without trial to Paris to be guillotined, and only escaped by their catching the real traitor. I was, however, banished the Republic merely for my name's sake." It is not easy to reconcile this story with the fact that Thomas was at least twenty years older than Robert, and that Englishmen were not banished but detained. Ward was condemned for the pretended prison plot at the Carmelites, and was executed on the 23rd July 1794. His servant, John Malone, born at Limerick in 1765, shared his fate. Five days more, and Robespierre's fall would have saved them.
General James Ferdinand O'Moran had been guillotined four months previously. He was a native of Elphin, Ireland, and was fifty-six years of age. He was arrested in his camp at Cassel in Flanders, on a charge of designing to betray the army to the enemy. It was alleged that he had refused to advance on Furnes, pleading that the Austrians were in superior force, whereas he knew the contrary, and that when forced into marching he laid a mine on the road, intending to blow up his own men. His real offence seems to have been a refusal to drink to Marat's health. Custine superseded him. O'Moran was at first screened by Carnot, who, however, said, "He has a prudence which makes me desperate, and which I should call pusillanimity if I did not respect his talents." Released from St. Lazare, he was rearrested, tried for "manœuvres tending to favour the enemy," and executed on the 6th March 1794. His aide-de-camp, Etienne de Jouy, charged with complicity, fled from Cassel and took refuge in the house of Robert Hamilton, a Jamaica planter claiming kinship with the Dukes of Hamilton. Hamilton had married a daughter of Lord Leven and Melville, widow of a Dr. James Walker. They had two daughters, one of whom fell in love with the refugee, a modern d'Artagnan, who had lost two fingers in battle, and who had probably many tales to tell of his adventures in America and the East. Jouy fled for greater security first to Paris, where he saw O'Moran pass on his way to execution, and then to Switzerland. Returning after the Terror, he married Miss Hamilton, but this alliance, soon followed by a separation, exposed him to imputations of intrigues with England. He threw up his commission in the army out of disgust with these repeated vexations, and became a prolific dramatist. Of his mother-in-law, Lady Mary Hamilton, we shall hear again.
William Newton, born in England in 1762, had been a captain in the dragoons, and had also been in the Russian army. In 1792 he twice pressed his services on the Convention. He was made a cavalry colonel, and was the contractor for a new kind of military waggon. He was arrested along with the other English in Paris. He appears to have been denounced by a prison spy for having remarked, after reading Barère's indictment against England, "Has Barère ever been in England? What crimes can the English Government have committed?" He was also in the habit of comparing Robespierre to an Eastern despot. He was executed June 6th, 1794. On the scaffold he exclaimed to the mob, "I am happier than your tyrants, for they tremble, whereas I am quite composed."
One of his fellow-victims was Thomas Delany, a youth of seventeen. His history is told by Yorke, apparently on the authority of Paine, whom he visited at Paris in 1802. Yorke states that a youth, whose name he withholds, was sent by his mother to acquire French polish. He was incautious and vehement, and openly denounced the Revolution. Thrown into prison, he retained his high spirits, and made the walls ring with "Rule Britannia" and "God save the King." Put on trial along with Newton, he did not utter a syllable, and had not the slightest notion that he was being tried. Only when placed in the cart did he awake to a consciousness of his fate, and lament that he should see his mother no more. He was heir to a considerable fortune. This evidently relates to Delany, but it is, to say the least, highly embellished. Delany—sometimes called Lainy or Laing, perhaps because he had renounced the first syllable of his name, lest it should be mistaken for the aristocratic particle—was accused of being a spy. So far from not understanding that he was on his trial, he energetically denied the charge, and in confirmation of his denial asserted that he had taken the first opportunity of offering to join the French army. As, moreover, three fellow-countrymen were tried with him, Newton, Roden, and Murdoch, they would manifestly have enlightened him as to his danger, had he been unconscious of it. Other parts of the story may, however, be authentic, and in any case the execution of a lad of seventeen was a barbarity which, except in the sanguinary annals of the Revolution, would bear a special mark of infamy.
Charles Francis Chambly, a native of Louisburg, Canada, was guillotined in the same batch as Ward. Patrick Roden, a deserter from the English army, was executed in the same batch as Newton. Charles Edward Frederick Henry Macdonald (he is styled Count in the pension list, where he figures for 1800 francs), born at Dublin in 1750, had served in Ogilvie's Franco-Scotch regiment, had retired on account of ill health, and had travelled in Italy and England. He returned to France in 1791, and was perhaps the Macdonald who in December 1792 wrote for the Morning Post, was a speaker at the British Revolutionary Club, and left with the two Sheares. "All three men," the English Government was warned, "are men of desperate designs, capable of setting fire to the dockyards." There may, however, have been two Macdonalds, which is the more likely, inasmuch as Charles was condemned on account of a letter addressed "Donald Macdonald." It contained only some trivial news, but the poor man was executed as a spy of Pitt's. Charles Harrop, a Londoner of twenty-two, was sent in January 1793 to buy military stores in the German ports. With or without reason he was afterwards arrested, and perished as one of the Carmelite conspirators. He is said to have talked against the Revolution in a Café, and as M. Wallon remarks of Newton, "had not stipulated for retaining his native country's liberty of speech." James Murdoch, an Edinburgh wigmaker of twenty-nine, had deserted from an English regiment at Gibraltar, came to France in 1782, and was a servant to Prince Poniatowski and to a Polish count. Apparently pressed to join the army, he offered to serve against the Austrians, but objected to fight the English, because if captured they would hang him. He would have done better to run the risk, for he was guillotined on the 6th June 1794.
Pierre O'Brennan, a priest manifestly of Irish extraction, was executed on the 23rd July 1794, for having spoken against the authorities and concealed some old title-deeds; and the last batch of Terrorist victims included two Moncriefs, father and son, of remote Scotch extraction. There is no foundation for the story of the St. Antoine mob stopping the tumbrels on the way to the scaffold, and of Henriot forcing the drivers to proceed. The batch of the 9th Thermidor had been sacrificed before tidings of Robespierre's overthrow could have reached the Faubourg St. Antoine.
Most of these English victims were interred in a garden adjoining Pare Monceau, which for the last six weeks of the Terror was the political cemetery. Robespierre himself found a resting-place there, if indeed it could be called a resting-place, for the bodies were stripped, thrown into a trench, and covered with quicklime. The garden belonged to a house called the "Maison du Christ," and it was styled the "Enclos du Christ," because a Calvary had formerly stood close by. After Waterloo the garden was offered for sale to the Crown, for Princess Elizabeth had been buried in it; but Louis XVIII., who was sceptical even as to the remains of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, found in the Madeleine Cemetery, declined the offer, and the ground was partly built upon. Michelet, in an unpublished chapter of his " History of the Revolution,"[3] describes it in 1852 as the site of a cheap dancing saloon. He found a Sunday ball going on. People were literally dancing over the bodies of Princess Elizabeth, Danton, and Robespierre—of Dillon and Arthur. So quickly does Paris forget its horrors! In 1863, when the Rue de Miromesnil was extended, some of the bones were found, and others were discovered a little later in laying down a sewer or gas pipe, but nobody reflected how they came to be there.
- ↑ Every one acquainted with his mode of living, and his general character for irregularity in his payments, is only surprised that this event did not take place long ago."—Duke of Dorset's despatch, June 25, 1789.
- ↑ "Altogether English, and adores her husband," says Stendhal's diary of her in 1809.
- ↑ Given in the Revue Bleue, June 2nd, 1888.