Louis Hettet, a prisoner on parole at Bishop’s Castle, Montgomeryshire, in 1814, married Mary Morgan. The baptism of a son, Louis, is recorded in the Bishop’s Castle register, March 6, 1815. The father left for France after the Peace of 1814; Mrs. Hettet declined to go, and died at Bishop’s Castle not many years ago. The boy was sent for and went to France.
Mrs. Lucy Louisa Morris, who died at Oswestry in 1908, aged 83, was the second daughter of Lieutenant Paris, of the French Navy, a prisoner on parole at Oswestry.
In 1886 Thomas Benchin, descendant of a French prisoner at Oswestry, died at Clun, in Shropshire, where his son is, or was lately, living. Benchin was famed for his skill in making toys and chip-wood ornaments.
Robinot, a prisoner on parole at Montgomery, married, in June 1807, a Miss Andrews, of Buckingham.
At Wantage, in 1817, General de Gaja, formerly a prisoner on parole, married a grand-daughter of the first Duke of Leicester, and his daughter married, in 1868, the Rev. Mr. Atkinson, vicar of East Hendred.
At Thame, François Robert Boudin married Miss Bone, by banns, in 1813; in the same year Jacques Ferrier married Mary Green by banns; Prévost de la Croix married Elizabeth Hill by licence; and in 1816 Louis-Amédée Comte married Mary Simmons, also by licence. All the bridegrooms were or had been prisoners on parole.
In the register of Leek I find that J. B. B. Delisle, Commandant of the port of Caen, married Harriet Sheldon; François Néan married Mary Lees, daughter of the landlord of the Duke of York; Sergeant Paymaster Pierre Magnier married Frances Smith, who died in 1874, aged 84; Joseph Vattel, cook to General Brunet, married Sarah Pilsbury. Captains Toufflet and Chouquet left sons who were living in Leek in 1880 and 1870 respectively, and Jean Mien, servant to General Brunet, was in Leek in 1870.
Notices of other marriages—at Wincanton, for instance—will be found elsewhere.
Against those who married English girls and honourably kept to them, must, however, be placed a long list of Frenchmen who, knowing well that in France such marriages were held invalid, married English women, and basely deserted them on their own return to France, generally leaving them with children and utterly destitute. The correspondence of the Transport Office is full of warnings to girls who have meditated marriage with prisoners, but who have asked advice first. As to the subsistence of wives and children of prisoners, the law was that if the latter were not British subjects, their subsistence was paid by the British Government, otherwise they must seek Parish relief. In one of the replies the Transport Office quotes the case of Madame Berton, an Englishwoman who had married Colonel Berton, a prisoner on parole at Chesterfield, and was permitted to follow her husband after his release and departure for France, but who, with a son of nineteen months old, on arrival there, was driven back in great want and distress by the French Government.
In contrast with the practice of the British Government in paying for the subsistence of the French wives and children of prisoners of war, is that of the French Government as described in the reply of the Transport Office in 1813 to a Mrs. Cumming with a seven-year-old child, who applied to be allowed a passage to Morlaix in order to join her husband, a prisoner on parole at Longwy: