Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/140

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
120
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

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