Odiham
General Simon was at Odiham. We have had to do with him before, and he seems to have been thoroughly bad. He had been concerned with Bernadotte and Pinoteau in the Conspiracy of Rennes against Bonaparte’s Consular Government, had been arrested, and exiled to the Isle of Rhé for six years. When Bonaparte became emperor he liberated Simon and gave him a command. At the battle of Busaco, September 27, 1810, Simon’s brigade led the division of Loison in its attack on the British position, and Simon was first man over the entrenchments. ‘We took some prisoners,’ says George Napier, ‘and among them General Simon. He was horribly wounded in the face, his jaw being broken and almost hanging on his chest. Just as myself and another officer came to him a soldier was going to put his bayonet into him, which we prevented, and sent him up as prisoner to the General.’
Simon reached England in October 1810, and was sent on parole to Odiham. The prisoners lived in houses in Bury Square, opposite the stocks and the church, and some old redbrick cottages on the brink of the chalk-pit at the entrance to the town, all of which are now standing. They naturally made the fine old George Inn their social centre, and to this day the tree which marked their mile limit along the London road is known as ‘Frenchman’s Oak’. Simon absconded from Odiham, and the advertisement for him ran:
‘One hundred pounds is offered for the capture of the French general Simon, styled a baron and a chevalier of the Empire, who lately broke his parole and absconded from Odiham.’
The Times of Jan. 20, 1812, details his smart capture by the Bow Street officers. They went first to Richmond, hearing that two foreigners of suspicious appearance were there. The information led to nothing, so they went on to Hounslow, thinking to intercept the fugitives on their way from Odiham to the Kent Coast, and here they heard that two Frenchmen had hired a post-chaise to London. This they traced to Dover Street, Piccadilly, but the clue was lost. They remembered that there was a French doctor in Dover Street, but an interview with him revealed nothing. On they went to the house of a Madame Glion, in Pulteney Street, late owner of a Paris diligence, and, although their particular quarry was not there, they ‘ran in’ three other French ‘broke-paroles’. Information led them to Pratt Street, Camden Town. A female servant appeared in the area of No. 4 in reply to their knocks, denied that there was any one in the house, and refused them admittance. The officers, now reinforced, surrounded the house, and some men were seen sitting in a back-parlour by candle-light. Suddenly the candles were put out. Lavender, the senior officer, went again to the front door and knocked. The servant resisted his pretext of having a letter for a lady in the house, and he threatened to shoot her if she still refused admission. She defied him. Other officers had in the meanwhile climbed over the back garden wall and found Simon and another officer, Surgeon Boiron, in the kitchen in darkness.
The mistress and servant of the house were both Frenchwomen, and they were carried off with Simon and Boiron: altogether a capital haul, as the women were found upon examination to be ‘deep in the business’ of aiding and abetting in the escape of prisoners. With Simon’s subsequent career I have dealt in the chapter upon Escapes and Escape Agents.