There was a sort of precedent for this wholesale arrest of peaceable English residents or travellers. In 1746 it was ordered that they should be apprehended as hostages for the Young Pretender, and after his escape the arrests were continued or maintained against persons not acknowledged by him as Jacobites. The object then, however, was to get rid of spies and cavillers, and most of the English were released on condition of quitting France. Lord Morton with his family was incarcerated in the Bastille because, being related to a man in high office in London, he would not apply to the Pretender for protection. There is no complete list of the English so-called hostages for the Toulon patriots. A number of the prison lists were consumed in 1871, when the Communists burnt down the Palace of Justice. The late M. Labat, archivist to the Prefecture of Police, compiled from the remaining lists, and from such warrants of arrest as have been preserved, a catalogue of the prisoners during the Revolution. These two bulky folios in manuscript I have carefully examined, and am indebted to them for most of the names of British prisoners given in the Appendix, but there are probably many omissions. The prison statistics tend to show that about 250 British subjects were arrested between the 10th and 14th October 1793, and the list in the Appendix contains over 200 names, several of which are, however, of doubtful nationality.
