I went up to Haytor rocks on 25 April 1922, having noticed in my father’s diary that we were there on 25 April 1862, and that I “climbed up both the rocks with great agility.” I climbed up both the rocks again, but cannot say I did it with agility—the sixty years had told. A fortnight later I was out near there again, beating the parish bounds: a solemnity performed each year on the Monday after Roodmas. It was a long procession at the start, but quite short at the finish five hours later on; and as we went along, I heard men saying things in French and others replying with a word or two of Japanese.
My thoughts again went back to sixty years ago. Saying things in French would have been quite as heinous then as saying things in German now. After being our ally in the Crimean war, the new Napoleon was threatening us with invasion, just as his uncle had threatened our progenitors sixty years before: volunteers were being raised again, as in the old Napoleon’s time, to fight against the French invaders; and the old hereditary hatred was blazing out afresh. It was the Saxon hatred of the Norman, kept alive by endless wars with France. In 1690 the French burned Teignmouth and anchored in Torbay, and all the West was roused by beacon fires from Haytor to the other heights; and the French seemed bent upon another trial. Buonaparte in Britain is the sort of book that people used to read, “a catalogue of French cruelties, and a short appeal to mothers, widows, wives, sisters and daughters upon the brutality of the French armies.” It is full of the same charges that were made against the Germans in the war of 1914. And in 1814 there was the same wild joy when victory came at last.
They had a festival at Moreton, 26 July 1814, with a dinner and a procession like a Lord Mayor’s Show. The programme has been preserved. ‘Smiths at work in a cart, beating weapons of war into implements of husbandry.’ ‘The four corporals late of the Moreton volunteers.’ Blaze led the woolcombers and Crispin led the cordwainers, but the true patron saint was ‘Bacchus on a tun, dressed in character, with a bottle, glass, &c., drawn on a car.’ And at the dinner there was a cask of cider at the foot of every table.
My grandfather got Camden’s History of Napoleon Bonaparte when it first came out, and I have the volumes here. The first volume came out in 1814 with a title-page and preface saying that the history would be continued to the restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty in the present year. But the second volume has a different title-page, recognizing the fresh start the author had to make at what would otherwise have been the end. “We had fondly imagined that a total end was put to the war.... But, alas! Napoleon no sooner perceived a fit opportunity,” etc. etc.
My grandfather always seemed much satisfied at having seen Napoleon on the Bellerophon, safely under guard. He had no scruples about Saint Helena, but my father had—he was not born till 1818, and Napoleon was no bogey-man to him, but a colossus in the history of the world. He thought Napoleon had been harshly used at Saint Helena, and took O’Meara’s view, in spite of all he heard from an old soldier who had been in garrison there. “He wasn’t badly treated, I assure you, sir, he fared a great deal better than I did.” This old soldier—I can just remember him—said he often saw Napoleon walking up and down the garden, thinking of something and looking at nothing, until he came to some turn where he caught sight of the sentry’s bayonet, and then he would stop angrily and go indoors.
In looking through some notes my father made in 1835, I happened upon this—“France, altho’ vanquished, has materially lost less than England. The finances of France are again the most prosperous in Europe. England bends under the weight of its debt; and the European continent supplies itself with most of the products that England once supplied.” Napoleon had stopped the English exports to the Continent by his Berlin Decree, 1806, and trade is not easily regained when once it has been lost; and this was felt acutely here, as there had hitherto been large exports of woollens from this part of Devon.
In the latter years of that long war there were more than fifty thousand French prisoners-of-war in England, and half of them were sailors. Some three thousand of them were on parole and the remainder in confinement, and six or seven thousand were confined in Dartmoor prison. All prisoners-of-war were under the Commissioners for conducting His Majesty’s Transport Service, and the Commissioners selected various little towns for prisoners on parole, and appointed an Agent in each town to censor the prisoners’ letters and see they did not misbehave. One of the towns was Moreton, and Ashburton was another; and the Agent at Ashburton was an uncle of my grandfather’s. And this, I presume, was how my grandfather got acquainted with so many of these prisoners-of-war.
Another great-great-uncle of mine (on my mother’s side) was a prisoner-of-war in France, and he married a French lady. I remember his son, a country parson down in Wales, and I must have heard the story many times, but cannot now recall much more than the main facts. His ship was captured in the war of 1795, and he was sent to Verdun as a prisoner-of-war. Instead of coming back to England at the Peace of Amiens in 1802, he stayed loitering about, and was still in France when hostilities broke out again and all English were interned. He was interned near Dijon, and thus met his future wife; and he found life so pleasant there that he did not come back to England until 1817, not long before his death.—These mixed marriages were fairly frequent then. One of my great-uncles finished up the Waterloo campaign by marrying a Belgian lady he had met in Brussels.
I can just remember the widow of a French naval officer who had been a prisoner-of-war in England and had made her acquaintance then. It was not quite a happy match, as she was very English; but the family doctor wrote to my father, 15 December 1851, after paying them a visit at their place in France, “Looking at all she endures from himself and his family, one of the most tormenting things (to her) is want of punctuality at meal times.” He died before I was born, but I heard stories of him: for instance, when asked about his health, he always said, “I am much better, but I am not good.” He had received the Légion d’Honneur from the Emperor and the Saint Louis from the King; and when he came to England, visiting, unmannerly young men would sing The Vicar of Bray. And he would fret and fume and finally bounce up from his chair, vociferating that he served no Emperor and no King: he only served La France.
When on parole at Ashburton and Moreton and other little towns, the prisoners-of-war were obliged to live in houses which the Agent had approved: they were not allowed out before six in the morning or after six or seven or eight at night according to the season of the year: they might not go further than a mile from the end of the town; and they had to keep to the main roads—if they went further or into cross-roads, fields or woods, it was the Agent’s duty to send them into prison again. However, Agents and others sometimes had blind eyes; and now and then there were escapes. In fact, there were escapes from Dartmoor prison itself—a good-looking sailor-boy once got a country-lass to let him take her clothes, and thus escaped.