INDEX

[1]. Vol. iii. (1790 ed.), pp. 66–7.

[2]. Quarterly Review, vol. xxvi, No. 51, Art. I (December 1821).

[3]. ‘Prepare to tack!’

[4]. See Lavengro, chap. iv.

[5]. Historical Sketch of the old Dépôt or Prison for French Prisoners of War at Perth. By William Sievwright. Perth: 1894.

[6]. This is not the only instance of a church being used as a dormitory for prisoners on the march. When the officers at Wincanton were marched to Gosport en route for Scotland in 1812 they slept in the church at Mere, Wiltshire, and the prisoners taken at Fishguard in 1797 were lodged in the church at Haverfordwest.

[7]. In addition to other sources of information, the foregoing notes on the war-prisoners in Liverpool are taken from Picton’s Memorials of Liverpool; the Histories of Muir and Barnes; Stonehouse’s Recollections of Old Liverpool; Gomer Williams’s Liverpool Privateers; and Richard Brooke’s Liverpool from 1775 to 1800.

[8]. I quote this between inverted commas, as I cannot help questioning its accuracy.

[9]. In Glencorse churchyard is a cross upon which is engraved: ‘Ici repose Charles Cotier de Dunquerque, mort 8 Janv., 1807.’

[10]. Other authorities give the height of the outer wall as eight feet, which was raised in 1812 to twelve feet, and of the inner wall as twelve feet.

[11]. A recent visit to Kergilliack revealed nothing more than a large field behind Kergilliack upper farm, bounded by an unusually massive wall, and said to have been the prison exercising ground, and outside it a tumulus locally reputed to mark the prison burial-place, and held to be haunted.

An elaborately moulded plaster ceiling at Meudon Farm in Mawnan, five miles from Kergilliack, is said to have been the work of foreign prisoners of war.

[12]. To account for this extraordinary, and apparently quite unnecessary journey, during which Vanhille seems always to have had plenty of money, M. Pariset thinks it possible that he was really an emissary of the committee which was at this time earnestly considering the plan of a general rising of all the prisoners of war in England.

[13]. I give this as in M. Pariset’s original. I have not been able to find that Moore ever was thus employed. He made the offer at his trial, but the Government declined it.

[14]. For much pertaining to Kelso, as for other matters associated with prisoners of war on parole in Scotland, I have to thank Mr. J. John Vernon, Hon. Secretary of the Hawick Archaeological Society.

[15]. The above, and other Masonic notes which follow, are from the History of Freemasonry in the Province of Roxburgh, Peebles, and Selkirkshire, by Mr. W. Fred Vernon.

[16]. The rank of garde-marine in the French Navy corresponded with that of sub-lieutenant in the British Navy; there was no rank actually equivalent to our midshipmen.

The British midshipmen were sources of continued anxiety and annoyance to their custodians in their French prisons. They defied all rules and regulations, they refused to give their parole, and were ceaseless in their attempts to escape. ‘I wish to goodness’, said a French officer at Bitche one evening at dinner, ‘I knew what to do to keep those English middies within bounds!’

‘There is only one way, Sir,’ said a lady at the table.

‘What is that?’ asked the officer eagerly.

‘Put them on their honour,’ replied the lady.

General Courcelles, at Verdun, shut up 140 middies in the monastery at St. Vannes, and made them pay for maintenance.

[17]. I failed to find a single grave-stone of a French prisoner of war at Wincanton.

[18]. For a letter from a former Leicester prisoner of this date, the reader may be referred to p. [306].