He with two fellow-prisoner officers went out one hot morning with the intention of breakfasting at a farm about a mile along the high road. Intending to save a long bit they cut across by a field path. Garneray stumbled and hurt his foot and so got behind his companions. Suddenly, hearing a cry, he saw a countryman attack his friends with a bill-hook, wound one of them on the arm, and kill the other, who had begun to expostulate with him, with two terrible cuts on the head. Garneray, seizing a stick, rushed up, and the peasant ran off, leaving him with the two poor fellows, one dead and the other badly wounded. He then saw the man returning at the head of a crowd of countrymen, armed with pitchforks and guns, and made up his mind that his turn had come. However, he explained the situation, and had the satisfaction of seeing that the crowd sided with him against their brutal compatriot. They improvised a litter and carried the two victims back to the cantonment, whilst the murderer quietly returned to his work.
When the extraordinary brutality of the attack and its unprovoked nature became known, such indignation was felt among the French officers in the cantonment that they drew up a remonstrance to the British Government, with the translation of which into English Garneray was entrusted. Whilst engaged in this a rough-mannered stranger called on him and warned him that he had best have nothing to do with the remonstrance.
He took the translated document to his brother officers, and on his way back a little English girl of twelve years quietly and mysteriously signed to him to follow her. He did so to a wretched cottage, wherein lived the grandmother of the child. Garneray had been kind to the poor old woman and had painted the child’s portrait for nothing, and in return she warned him that the constables were going to arrest him. Garneray determined to escape.
He got away from Bishop’s Waltham and was fortunate enough to get an inside place in a night coach, the other places being occupied by an English clergyman, his wife, and daughter. Miss Flora soon recognized him as an escaped prisoner and came to his rescue when, at a halting place, the coach was searched for a runaway from Bishop’s Waltham. Eventually he reached Portsmouth, where he found a good English friend of his prison-ship days, and with him he stayed in hiding for nearly a year, until April 1813.
Longing to return to France, he joined with three recently-escaped French officers in an arrangement with smugglers—the usual intermediaries in these escapes—to take them there. To cut short a long story of adventure and misadventure, such as we shall have in plenty when we come to that part of this section which deals with the escapes of paroled prisoners, Garneray and his companions at last embarked with the smugglers at an agreed price of £10 each.
The smugglers turned out to be rascals; and a dispute with them about extra charges ended in a mid-Channel fight, during which one of the smugglers was killed. Within sight of the French coast the British ship Victory captured them, and once more Garneray found himself in the cachot of the Portsmouth prison-ship Vengeance.
Garneray was liberated by the Treaty of Paris in 1814, after nine years’ captivity. He was then appointed Court Marine Painter to Louis XVIII, and received the medal of the Legion of Honour.
The Marquis d’Hautpol was taken prisoner at Arapiles, badly wounded, in July 1812, and with some four hundred other prisoners was landed at Portsmouth on December 12, and thence sent on parole to ‘Brigsnorth, petite ville de la Principauté de Galles’, clearly meant for Bridgnorth in Shropshire. Here, he says, were from eight to nine hundred other prisoners, some of whom had been there eight or nine years, but certainly he must have been mistaken, for at no parole place were ever more than four hundred prisoners. The usual rules obtained here, and the allowance was the equivalent of one franc fifty centimes a day.
Wishing to employ his time profitably he engaged a fellow-prisoner to teach him English, to whom he promised a salary as soon as he should receive his remittances. A letter from his brother-in-law told him that his sisters, believing him dead, as they had received no news from him, had gone into mourning, and enclosed a draft for 4,000 francs, which came through the bankers Perregaux of Paris and ‘Coutz’ of London. He complains bitterly of the sharp practices of the local Agent, who paid him his 4,000 francs, but in paper money, which was at the time at a discount of twenty-five per cent, and who, upon his claiming the difference, ‘me répondit fort insolemment que le papier anglais valait autant que l’or français, et que si je me permettais d’attaquer encore le crédit de la banque, il me ferait conduire aux pontons’. So he had to accept the situation.
The Marquis, as we shall see, was not the man to invent such an accusation, so it may be believed that the complaints so often made about the unfair practice of the British Government, in the matter of moneys due to prisoners, were not without foundation. The threat of the Agent to send the Marquis to the hulks if he persisted in claiming his dues, may have been but a threat, but it sounds as if these gentlemen were invested with very great powers. The Marquis and a fellow prisoner, Dechevrières, adjutant of the 59th, messed together, modestly, but better than the other poorer men, who clubbed together and bought an ox head, with which they made soup and ate with potatoes.