Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/257

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AFTER THE TERROR.
237

years of the century may here be mentioned. Sir Robert Barclay was captured in a merchant vessel early in 1799, with despatches from Lord Grenville in his possession. He had been officially employed on the Continent. He was closely confined in the Temple, and was interrogated by a military commission respecting a supposed mission to the Hague. He is said to have been acquitted, though of what charge is not clear, but was nevertheless detained till November, when, after an interview with Bonaparte, he was released. He appears to have claimed kinship with Sheridan, which may have conduced to his liberation, and his wife was Elizabeth Tickell, granddaughter of Addison's friend and Queen Anne's Under-Secretary of State. Barclay was elected M.P. for Newton, Hants, in 1802, and died in 1839, at the age of eighty-three.

Mrs. Dayrell, the widow of an English officer, probably one of the Oxfordshire Dayrells, a handsome woman of twenty-eight, settled with her little girl at the beginning of the Revolution at La Chaussée, near Blois. She there married Courtin de Clenard, who in February 1792 sold the Clenard estate, which he had just inherited, to Edmund Dayrell, his wife's brother-in-law. Courtin having emigrated, the sale was declared collusive, and in 1793 the property was confiscated. Madame Dayrell-Courtin subsequently went to Paris and obtained an order that the estate should be restored if she could prove