Napoleon's British visitors and captives, 1801-1815

by John Goldworth Alger

Then there were also sons of baronets: William Abdy, who succeeded to the title in July 1803, Ashby Apreece, who predeceased his father in 1807, Alexander Don, Charles Jerningham, Raymond Pelly, John Wombwell, formerly a merchant at Alicante, Ralph Woodford, afterwards Governor of Bermuda, John Broughton, and William Oglander, who, already mentioned, succeeded to the title in 1806, while there were two future baronets, Thomas Hare and Charles Cockerell.

Next to legislators and aristocrats, military men were the most numerous class of visitors. Some passed through Paris on their way home from Egypt, which had just been evacuated, and others were actuated not so much by curiosity or love of dissipation as by professional duty, for they did not know how soon they might not have to encounter Bonaparte’s legions. Of this swarm of visitors I can only mention a few. There were the two sons of Sir Ralph Abercromby, who had been killed at Alexandria. The elder was General George already mentioned, who, eventually succeeding his mother in the peerage, became Lord Abercromby. The younger, Colonel Sir John, served with distinction, but died at forty-four years of age without reaching the highest grade. Sir Charles Ashworth became a general. Captain Benjamin Bathurst, son of the Bishop of Norwich, then eighteen years of age, was the diplomatist who in 1809 mysteriously disappeared on returning from a mission to Vienna. Napoleon was accused of having him murdered, but the probability is that he was killed for the sake of his valuables by the ostler of a German inn who was afterwards unaccountably affluent. His daughter Rose, at the age of seventeen, was drowned at Rome in 1824 by her horse slipping backwards into the Tiber, and his brother in a race at Rome was killed by a fall from his horse. Three disasters in one family.

William Bosville, commonly styled Colonel, though he had only been a lieutenant in the Guards, must be ranked with soldiers for want of any other suitable category, though he was more wit than soldier. He had, however, served in the American War. He dined every Sunday with Horne Tooke, and, as we have seen, accompanied Sir F. Burdett, whose election he had zealously promoted. He dressed like a courtier of George II.’s time. He visited Cobbett in prison and presented him with £1000. Paine, on reaching the United States, sent a message to ‘my good friend Bosville.’ Francis Burke, who had been in the Franco-Irish brigade, became a British general.

General James Callender had served in the Seven Years’ War and had been Secretary to the Paris Embassy under the Duke of Dorset, who, on his recall in October 1789, deputed him to wind up his accounts. He had more recently been Inspector-General at Naples, and had been sent by Nelson to the Ionian Islands, where he remained till the peace. While in Paris he made the acquaintance of a Madame Sassen, a German, and on being detained he sent her to Scotland with a power of attorney, styling her his beloved wife, to see after his affairs. When released, however, he denied having married her, and the Court of Session declared the marriage not proven, but awarded the lady £300 damages. This latter decision was annulled by the House of Lords, and the lady passed the rest of her life in fruitless litigation. Callender, who married three times, died in 1832 at the age of eighty-seven. The French Police Register describes him, the reason why is not obvious, as a swindler. On succeeding in 1810 to the estates of his cousin, Sir Alexander Campbell, he assumed the baronetcy also, but without right to it.[65] General John Francis Cradock had served in India and in Egypt, was destined to serve in Spain, and in 1819 became Lord Howden. He altered the spelling of his name to Caradoc. His son, aide-de-camp to Wellington in Paris in 1814, and afterwards military attaché at the Paris Embassy, there married in 1830 the widow of the Russian General Bagration, an ex-mistress of Metternich. In July 1830 he was deputed by the Duke of Orleans to follow the fugitive Charles X. and ask him to confide to him his grandson that he might be proclaimed king. Charles was inclined to consent, but the child’s mother, the Duchess of Berri, dissuaded him, not thinking that her boy would be in safe keeping. On Caradoc reporting his failure Louis Philippe accepted the crown.

James Ferrier, brother of Susan the novelist, had figured in the siege of Seringapatam, and was questioned about it by Napoleon, always interested in India, which he thought he should have conquered but for Sir Sidney Smith and Acre. ‘When he speaks,’ Ferrier wrote home to his sister, ‘he has one of the finest expressions possible.’ General Dalrymple had visited Paris in 1791. General Henry Edward Fox was a brother of the great statesman. He was on his way home from Egypt, where he had refused to allow Lord Cavan to ship Cleopatra’s needle.[66] Cavan had dug it out of the sand of centuries and set it upright, but Fox seems to have thought Cavan’s love of antiquities an absurd craze, and the needle consequently had to wait seventy years for transport to England. Afterwards Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, Ambassador at Palermo, and Governor of Portsmouth, Fox was accompanied by his son Stephen, also destined for diplomacy. General George Higginson, who married in 1825 a daughter of Lord Kilmorey, lived till 1866, and his widow reached the age of ninety-eight, surviving till 1890. General Baron Charles Hompesch was a Hanoverian in the English service. Very shortsighted, in 1806 he brushed against a man named Richardson and two ladies in a London street, and a duel ensued, in which his antagonist was wounded. On his death in 1822, at the age of sixty-six, he could boast of having taken part in three sieges, seven pitched battles, and thirteen minor engagements. Robert Lovelace, probably a son of Robert Lovelace of Clapham, was reminded by Napoleon that he bore the name of Richardson’s hero. Napoleon at eighteen had devoured Clarissa Harlowe, but at St. Helena he found it unreadable.

General John Money served in America under Burgoyne, and not finding employment at home had fought for the Belgian insurgents in 1788, had joined the French army in 1792, and had witnessed the capture of the Tuileries. The German Œlsner, who met him at Verdun in October 1792, describes him as a thoroughly English Hotspur (degenkopf).[67] In 1761, aide-de-camp to General Townshend, he was famed for standing on a horse’s back without a saddle and then leaping with it at full speed over a five-barred gate. Hyde Park was the scene of his feats of horsemanship. He had a perilous balloon ascent in 1785, being nearly drowned in the North Sea. George Monro, probably a son of Sir Harry Monro, M.P., was apparently the Captain George Monro who was sent to Paris in September 1792 to send reports after the suspension of diplomatic relations.[68] He had to pretend to fraternise with the British Jacobins in Paris, but he became suspected and left in January 1793. In 1796 he complained that though promised a handsome provision no fresh post had been conferred on him.[69] General George Morgan, who went on to Nice, had been Commander-in-Chief in India, Sir Hildebrand Oakes, afterwards Governor of Malta, had served in America and Egypt. Captain Charles John O’Hara was doubtless one of the illegitimate sons of the general who should have married Mary Berry, and who was captured by the French at Toulon in 1793. Captain Samuel Owens was an equerry to George III. Major William Norman Ramsay had served in Egypt, was afterwards in the Peninsula, and was killed at Waterloo. Colonel John Rowley, of the Engineers, was an F.R.S. and inspector-general of fortifications. He became a general in 1821, and died in 1824. General Sir Charles Shipley, a distinguished military engineer, became in 1813 Governor of Granada. Colonel Edward Stack, a native of Kerry, had served in the Franco-Irish brigade before the Revolution, had been aide-de-camp to Louis XV., and had accompanied Lafayette to America. He was on board Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard when it captured the Serapis. He belonged to the orders of St. Louis and Cincinnatus. He joined the émigrés at Coblentz, but afterwards entered the English army, in which he rose during his detention in France to be major-general. He was arrested as a spy in May 1803, but was liberated on parole. If his age is correctly registered as forty-five in 1802, he was seventy-six at his death at Calais in 1833.

Captain Francis Tulloch, of the Artillery, had in singular circumstances made the acquaintance of Chateaubriand. Converted to Catholicism in London in 1790 by the Abbé Nagot, he had been induced to resign his commission and to sail with Nagot and three other priests from St. Malo for Baltimore, in order to become a priest and settle in America. Chateaubriand, a fellow-passenger, remonstrated with him, urging that, however ardent a Catholic, he ought not to abandon his family and his profession. The young man seemed to listen to him, but the priests recovered their ascendency, and on reaching port he left with them, not even bidding Chateaubriand farewell. He must, nevertheless, have changed his purpose, for in 1802 he was still in the army, and he eventually married and had seven children, two of whom wedded French noblemen. In 1822 Tulloch renewed acquaintance with Chateaubriand, then Ambassador at London. In 1827 there were family differences among his children, which gave rise to recriminatory pamphlets. Lastly, there was John Alexander Woodford, son of Sir Ralph Woodford (afterwards Governor of Trinidad, Envoy to the Hanse towns, and to Denmark). He was apparently the Colonel Woodford who in 1815 began digging up the bones of the killed at the battle of Agincourt, exciting such a commotion in the district that the French Government asked the Duke of Wellington to stop him.

Naval officers had less inducement to visit Paris, yet a number of them figure on the register. One of them, moreover, was a claimant to a French dukedom. Philippe d’Auvergne, a Jersey man, son of a navy lieutenant, had been adopted in 1788 by the last Duc de Bouillon, a descendant of Turenne, as a remote kinsman and heir (his only son being an idiot), in preference to nearer relations whom he disliked.[70] The fascinating young sailor, whose elder brother had declined the heirship, lived with the old duke till the Revolution, when he rejoined the English navy, and from his station at Montorgueil in Jersey superintended the despatch of men and money to assist the Chouans. The duke having died in 1802, d’Auvergne now went over to try and recover his confiscated estates, but the French Government arrested him in September 1802 on the ground of his co-operation in the civil war. If a French duke he was of course liable to punishment, but if still or again a British subject he could not be prosecuted for the performance of professional duties. Merry, his letter to whom was at first suppressed, claimed him as a British subject, and he was released after about a week from the Temple but expelled. Major Dumaresq, a fellow Jersey man, had been arrested with him. D’Auvergne rose to be an admiral, but the Congress of Vienna rejected his pretensions to the dukedom. His romantic career ended in 1816 at the age of seventy-one. Admiral Tollemache (afterwards Lord Huntingtower) had an adventure at Paris. He was playing billiards when a French bully nudged his arm and spoilt his stroke. On the man doing this a second time Tollemache pitched him out of the window and then, warned by the landlord, ran for his life.[71] Other actual or prospective admirals included Sir Eliab Harvey, who fought at Trafalgar, Francis Ommaney, William Hoste, Robert Dudley Oliver, John (afterwards Sir John) Talbot, John Temple, Sir John West, Sir James Hawkins Whitshed, and Sir Edward Berry. Nelson, on being condoled with by George III. on the loss of his right arm, presented Berry as his right hand, and it was Berry who caught him in his arms when wounded at the battle of the Nile.

But the most interesting and tragic naval visitor was Captain John Wesley Wright, an Irishman and secretary to Sir Sidney Smith. He had in 1796 been captured and imprisoned with Smith, and had escaped with him by means of a forged order. He was sent in March 1803 as an attaché to the Paris Embassy, albeit Whitworth pointed out to his Government that this was a very injudicious selection. Whether he remained at the embassy till Whitworth’s departure is not clear, but in May 1804 he was again captured off the coast, where he had been landing royalist insurgents. He was consequently regarded as an accomplice of Georges in the conspiracy to assassinate Napoleon, and was again confined in the Temple. Gravina, the Spanish Ambassador, interceded for his being treated as a prisoner of war, but Napoleon replied that as a criminal he could not be exchanged for an honest French officer, though he might be given up to the British Government to be dealt with as it chose, he being convinced that Lord Hawkesbury (afterwards Lord Liverpool) was alone responsible for having thrice landed conspirators against his life. This overture, if indeed it was an overture, came to nothing, and at Georges’ trial Wright was brought up as a witness. He was threatened with sentence of death by court-martial if he refused to give testimony, but he insisted on the status of a prisoner of war, responsible solely to his own Government for his acts. In October 1805 he attempted to escape, whereupon Napoleon ordered the ‘wretched assassin’ to be immured in a cell in lieu of having the run of the building. On the 25th October he was found dead in his cell. He seems to have been a religious man, and a few days before, on his mathematical instruments being taken from him, he had emphatically repudiated resort to suicide. Moreover he had on the previous day ordered three shirts and a French conversation book. The French Government, however, maintained that he had killed himself on hearing of the defeat and surrender of the Austrian army at Ulm. Sidney Smith, on revisiting France after Waterloo, made minute inquiries, and all the documents were shown him, but he could come to no positive result. Lewis Goldsmith says he was told by Réal and Desmarets that Wright had been tortured like Pichegru in order to extract evidence from him, and consequently could not have been released without this infamy committed by Fouché being exposed; but he was certainly not tortured prior to Georges’ trial, and why should he have been tortured afterwards, or, if tortured, why should he have been allowed to live till October 1805? Sidney Smith erected a monument over his tomb in Père Lachaise. It had a long Latin inscription which, without directly accusing the Napoleonic authorities, insinuated foul play, for it described Smith as ‘confined in the Temple, a prison infamous for its midnight murders.’ Strange to say this monument is now undiscoverable, and the cemetery keepers deny that Wright is on their registers, yet the record of his interment was found and duly copied in 1814.[72] Mystery is thus added to mystery.

William Sidney Smith, nephew of Sir Sidney, was captured along with Wright and was sent to Verdun. His knowledge of French proved useful in 1814, when on board the vessel which conveyed Napoleon to Elba.