Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/131

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IMMIGRANTS AND EMIGRANTS.
111

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