In a few cases the want of nobler feeling has been redeemed by an unselfish devotion, which asked for no private gain, and shrunk at no sacrifices. Habitually, the loyalist in exile has either calculated that he was on the side which would win ultimately, or has been so completely demoralised by life outside of his countrymen, as to have lost every trace of disinterested public feeling when he returned in triumph. Of the Cavaliers who lived to see the Restoration, and of the émigrés who returned to France, it may be said pretty generally that they acted as if they had not intended to serve the lost cause for nothing. The Cavaliers, indeed, though they asked for a great deal, got comparatively little, because many of their estates had been sold in the open market, and because the Presbyterians enjoyed the credit of having brought the King back.[1] The French émigrés, whose offence against their country had been more serious, came back to find their debts and encumbrances sponged out,[2] to get a compensation of £40,000,000, and to have something like a monopoly of office and promotion for fifteen years. It can scarcely be matter of regret that a feeling which so constantly
- ↑ Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, p. 117. Clarendon gives an instance where Lord Lovelace, having sold an estate below its value to Bulstrode Whitelocke, refused to complete the title unless he was paid an additional sum; but even in this strong case, Lord Lovelace seems to have prevailed only through legal technicalities (Clarendon's Life, s. 281). Mrs. Hutchinson says that her husband saved the estates of many gentlemen of his county by getting himself appointed sequestrator.—Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, pp. 326, 327.
- ↑ "The emigration and the laws of 1793 by depriving them" (the grand seigneurs) "of their estates, set them free from their creditors" (Madame de Remusat's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 414). "The whole mass of confiscated land, not now in possession of the families to whom it belonged in 1793, or of those to whom those families have sold it, would not amount to the value of property lost by confiscation in Ireland by the single family of Fitzgerald."—Lord Holland's Foreign Reminiscences, p. 281, published in 1850.
