Llanfyllin
About 120 French and Germans were quartered here during the years 1812 and 1813. Many of them lived together in a large house, formerly the Griffith residence, which stood where is now Bachie Place. Others were at the ‘Council House’ in High Street. In a first-floor room of this latter may still be seen thirteen frescoes in crayon executed by the prisoners, representing imaginary mountain scenery. Formerly there were similar frescoes in a neighbouring house, once the Rampant Lion Inn, now a tailor’s shop, but these have been papered over, and according to the correspondent who supplies the information, ‘utterly destroyed’. These prisoners were liberally supplied with money, which they spent freely. An attachment sprang up between a prisoner, Captain Angerau, and the Rector’s daughter, which resulted in their marriage after the Peace of 1814. It is interesting to note that in 1908 a grandson of Captain Angerau visited Llanfyllin.
The following pleasing testimony I take from Bygones, October 30, 1878:
‘The German soldiers from Hessia, so well received by the inhabitants of Llanfyllin during their captivity, have requested the undersigned to state that the kindness and the favour shewn them by the esteemed inhabitants of Llanfyllin will ever remain in their thankful remembrance.
‘C. W. Wedikind.
‘Newtown, June 17, 1817.’
Montgomery
A correspondent of the Gentleman’s Magazine contributed a notice of the death at Montgomery of an old gentleman named Chatuing who had been nearly four years a prisoner in that town, and who had preferred to remain there after the Peace of 1814.
Occasionally we come across evidence that there were men among the prisoners on parole who were not above acting as Government spies among their fellows. One Beauvernet at Montgomery was evidently one of these, for a Transport Office letter to the Agent in that town in 1806 says:
‘Mr. Beauvernet may rest perfectly satisfied that any information communicated by him will not in any way be used to his detriment or disadvantage.’
Allen, the Montgomery Agent, is directed to advance Beauvernet £10, as part of what ultimately would be given him. One Muller was the object of suspicion, and he was probably an escape agent, as in later letters Beauvernet is to be allowed to choose where he will ‘work’, and eventually, on the news that Muller has gone to London, is given a passport thither, and another £10. Of course it does not follow from this that Beauvernet was actually a prisoner of war, and he may have been one of the foreign agents employed by Government at good pay to watch the prisoners more unostentatiously than could a regular prisoner agent, but the opening sentence of the official letter seems to point to the fact that he was a prisoner.
A French officer on parole at Montgomery, named Dumont, was imprisoned for refusing to support an illegitimate child, so that it came upon the rates. He wrote, however, to Lady Pechell, declaring that he was the victim ‘of a sworn lie of an abandoned creature’, complaining that he was shut up with the local riff-raff, half starved, and penniless, and imploring her to influence the Transport Board to give him the subsistence money which had been taken from him since his committal to prison to pay for the child. What the Transport Board replied does not appear, but from the frequency of these complaints on the part of prisoners, there seems no doubt that, although local records show that illicit amours were largely indulged in by French and other officers on parole, in our country towns, much advantage of the sinning of a few was taken by unprincipled people to blackmail others.