Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/120

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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

the king's fate, coupled with the excesses he had witnessed at St. Omer and Douai, rendered him a violent Tory.[1] 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

  1. 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.