In 1804 a letter from France addressed to a prisoner on parole at Tiverton was intercepted. It was found to contain a blank printed certificate, sealed and signed by the Danish vice-consul at Plymouth. Orders were at once issued that no more certificates from him were to be honoured, and he was accused of the act. He protested innocence, and requested that the matter should be examined, the results being that the documents were found to be forgeries.
Of course, the parole agents, that is to say, the men chosen to guard and minister to the wants of the prisoners in the parole towns, occupied important and responsible positions. At first the only qualifications required were that they should not be shopkeepers, but men fitted by their position and their personality to deal with prisoners who were officers, and therefore ipso facto, gentlemen. But during the later years of the great wars they were chosen exclusively from naval lieutenants of not less than ten years’ standing, a change brought about by complaints from many towns and from many prisoners that the agents were palpably underbred and tactless, and particularly perhaps by the representation of Captain Moriarty, the agent at Valleyfield near Edinburgh, and later at Perth, that ‘the men chosen were attorneys and shopkeepers for whom the French officers have no respect, so that the latter do just what they like’, urging that only Service men should occupy these posts.
The duties of the parole agent were to see that the prisoners under his charge fulfilled all the obligations of their parole, to muster them twice a week, to minister to their wants, to pay them their allowances, to act as their financial agents, to hear and adjust their complaints, to be, in fact, quite as much their guide, philosopher, and friend as their custodian. He had to keep a strict account of all receipts and payments, which he forwarded once a month to the Transport Office: he had to keep a constant watch on the correspondence of the prisoners, not merely seeing that they held and received none clandestinely, but that every letter was to pass the examination of the Transport Office; and his own correspondence was voluminous, for in the smallest parole places there were at least eighty prisoners, whilst in the larger, the numbers were close upon four hundred.
For all this the remuneration was 5 per cent. upon all disbursements for the subsistence of the prisoners with allowances for stationery and affidavits, and it may be very naturally asked how men could be found willing to do all this, in addition to their own callings, for such pay. The only answer is that men were not only willing but anxious to become parole agents because of the ‘pickings’ derivable from the office, especially in connexion with the collection and payment of remittances to prisoners. That these ‘pickings’ were considerable there can be no doubt, particularly as they were available from so many sources, and as the temptations were so many and so strong to accept presents for services rendered, or, what was more frequent, for duty left undone.
On the whole, and making allowance for the character of the age and the numberless temptations to which they were exposed, the agents of the parole towns seem to have done their hard and delicate work very fairly. No doubt in the process of gathering in their ‘pickings’ there was some sharp practice by them, and a few instances are recorded of criminal transactions, but a comparison between the treatment of French prisoners on parole in England and the English détenus in France certainly is not to our discredit.
The Transport Office seems to have been unremitting in its watchfulness on its agents, if we are to judge by the mass of correspondence which passed between the one and the others, and which deals so largely with minutiae and details that its consideration must have been by no means the least heavy of the duties expected from these gentlemen.
Mr. Tribe, Parole Agent at Hambledon, seems to have irritated his superiors much by the character of his letters, for in 1804 he is told:
‘As the person who writes your letters does not seem to know how to write English you must therefore in future write your own letters or employ another to write them who can write intelligibly.’
And again:
‘If you cannot really write more intelligibly you must employ a person to manage your correspondence in future, but you are not to suppose that he will be paid by us for his trouble.’