Diplomatists and other public functionaries took the opportunity of making acquaintance with France or French statesmen. Francis Drake, bearing the name of the Elizabethan hero, but claiming descent from an older family, had been at the Copenhagen legation, and was in 1794 Minister at Genoa, whence he sent Grenville letters from Paris furnished to him by the royalist agent d’Antraigues, who was then at Venice, and at first in the service of Spain; but the agency was transferred to ‘Monsieur’ (afterwards Louis XVIII.), who was living at Verona.[73] D’Antraigues employed correspondents or spies in Paris who, whether from credulity or knavery, sent him the most fabulous stories written in sympathetic ink or in cipher. The letters of which Drake thus received copies were published in the second volume of the Dropmore Papers of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, where they were heralded with a flourish, but their worthlessness has been exposed by M. Aulard, the most competent French critic. This royalist agency in Paris was discovered in 1797, and on Napoleon’s advance into Italy Drake fled to Udine. Temporarily unemployed by the Foreign Office, Drake in 1802 seems to have visited not only France but Italy. In 1803 he was Minister at Munich, and was enticed by Napoleon into dealings with Méhée de la Touche, a spy who sold himself to all parties and betrayed all. Méhée was for a time a secretary to the Paris Commune and had a long career of trickery. Napoleon, always anxious to bring British diplomacy into ridicule, gave orders that a suitable man should be found to entrap Drake, and Méhée answered his purpose admirably. He pretended to give information of political feeling in France and to concert a royalist rising for the overthrow, if not for the kidnapping (a euphemism for assassination), of Napoleon. Drake advanced money to this pretended spy, who took all the letters to Paris, where they were forthwith published, bringing odium and derision on the English Foreign Office. An attempt was also made to capture Drake, as well as Spencer Smith, who was slightly implicated; but he fled precipitately, and the Elector of Bavaria at the instance of Napoleon refused any longer to recognise him as envoy. He had obviously broken the eleventh commandment, so vital in diplomacy, ‘thou shalt not be found out,’ and neither he nor Spencer Smith was again sent abroad. Wickham, however, who had equally committed himself, became in 1802 Chief Secretary for Ireland, and would have been sent as Envoy to Austria and Prussia, but that those powers, afraid of offending Napoleon, declined to receive him. He consequently retired on a pension of £1800. English diplomacy was no match for Napoleon with his flagrant violation of traditions and courtesies. Retiring to his Somerset home, Drake was highly esteemed by his neighbours; for his tombstone at St. Cuthbert’s, Wells, speaks of his integrity and firmness as a magistrate and as recorder of that city.[74] He married a daughter of Sir Herbert Mackworth, an ancestor of the poet Mackworth Praed.
Alexander Cockburn, consul at Hamburg, took the opportunity of visiting Paris with his Creole wife, Yolande de Vignier, and his son, the future Lord Chief-Justice, was born in France during this visit. Cockburn was in 1825 appointed Minister to the Central American Republics. Sir John Craufurd, another nephew of Quintin Craufurd, was Minister to Lower Saxony from 1795 to 1803. He had visited Paris in 1791, and he now repeated his visit. We shall see that he stayed longer than he liked and took French leave. Charles Richard Vaughan, afterwards knighted, made a tour in France and Germany, and then accompanied Sir Charles Stuart (ultimately Lord Stuart de Rothesay) to Spain, where he wrote an account of the siege of Saragossa. He rejoined Stuart as Secretary at the Paris Embassy at the Restoration, and was eventually Envoy to Washington. Arthur Paget, son of Lord Uxbridge, was one of the earliest visitors, being allowed a passport through France in September 1801 on his way to succeed Minto at Vienna. He reported to Lord Hawkesbury that he found the roads much better than he expected and the land well cultivated, but the towns manufacturing silk and velvet complained of bad trade, and peace with England was universally desired. Bonaparte, he said, was generally liked, for people dreaded a revolution, yet Sieyès, he was told at Vienna, had declared that the Consulate would not last through the winter.[75] George Stuart, his chief subordinate at Vienna, also visited Paris. Sir Robert Liston, originally tutor to Gilbert and Hugh Elliot at Paris, and afterwards secretary to the latter, was Ambassador in America from 1796 to 1802, was afterwards sent to Holland and Turkey, and lived to the age of ninety-three. Colonel Neil was Consul at Lisbon. We may also mention a future diplomatist, Charles (afterwards Sir Charles) Oakley, son of the ex-Governor of Madras, who, when at the Washington legation, offered to marry Madame Patterson, and she was not then disinclined to accept a suitable successor to Jerome Bonaparte. Those who were or had been in other departments of the public service included Thomas Steele, Paymaster-General, John King, Under-Secretary at the Home Office, Henry William Bentinck, Governor of St. Vincent, Perkins Magra, Consul at Malta and naturally interested in the fate of that island, Donkin, secretary to George III., and Brook, head of the London detective force, who was sent to report on the Paris system, while Napoleon sent a French detective to see what was done in London. There were also Sir Charles Warre Malet, ex-acting Governor of Bombay, and Sir Robert Chambers, late Chief-Justice of Calcutta, who before going out to India had been intimate with Dr. Johnson. This, as we shall see, proved to be his last journey.
Law, physic, and divinity were not numerously represented. Besides Erskine and other barristers sitting or destined to sit in the House of Commons, there was John Campbell, a future Lord Chief-Justice and Lord Chancellor, and the biographer of his class. He saw the ‘little Corsican,’ and visited Tallien. Thomas Wilde, afterwards Lord Chancellor Truro, was registered, doubtless in joke by himself or his companions, as M.P., though he was as yet only twenty years of age. Curran, who had been before in 1787, dined with Fox. Deploring the failure of the Revolution, he disliked Napoleon. He little foresaw that he was about meanly to disown his daughter Sarah on account of her attachment to Emmet.[76] Stewart Kyd, a friend of Horne Tooke, prosecuted with other Radicals in 1794, had passed four months in the Tower, but had now sobered down and become a legal writer. The French police suspected him of being a spy. He had, in 1796, assisted Erskine in defending Thomas Williams, the publisher of Paine’s Age of Reason. A native of Arbroath, he died in London in 1811. William Duppa is best known as brother of the artist and as the biographer of Michael Angelo. Charles Henry Okey ultimately settled in Paris.
The physicians included Charles Maclean, who had been with Lord Elgin at Constantinople, and had also been in the East India Company’s service, but had been sent home by Wellesley on account of his quarrelsome disposition. Landing at Hamburg in 1801, he proceeded through Holland to Paris, in order to advocate the establishment at Constantinople of an international institute for the study of the plague. He was anxious for information on French suicides, and Holcroft had recommended him to apply not to a specialist but to Fauriel, the Sanscrit scholar. He denied the contagiousness of epidemics, and his medical crotchets, coupled with his controversial temper, prevented his being employed by the Government, wherefore he considered himself an ill-used man. George Birkbeck, the future founder of mechanics’ institutes, must be reckoned among the doctors: he accompanied Curran. Peter Mark Roget, a nephew of Romilly and a friend of Bentham, as yet Swiss rather than English, went as travelling tutor to the two sons of John Philips, a Manchester merchant, Edgeworth’s son accompanying them. His Treasury of English Synonyms is well known. William Woodville, the disciple of Jenner, and physician to the Smallpox Hospital, had been with Nowel to Boulogne in the summer of 1801, at the solicitation of Dr. Antoine Ambert, to introduce vaccination during a smallpox epidemic. He was an accomplished botanist. Dr. Wickham, another visitor, was likewise a friend of Jenner. On the other hand there were two strong opponents of vaccination. William Rowley, physician to the Marylebone Infirmary and an accoucheur of repute, and Benjamin Moseley, of Chelsea Hospital, who had been trained in Paris, and who had a strange theory that the changes of the moon influenced hemorrhage of the lungs. Tuthill (afterwards Sir George Tuthill) took over his handsome wife, of whom we shall hear again. James Carrick Moore, brother of Sir John, became director of Jenner’s vaccine institute. Benjamin Travers, as yet articled pupil to Sir Paston Cooper, was the first hospital surgeon to make of ophthalmia a special study. Thomas Young was inspector-general of hospitals. Of his distinguished homonym, although also a doctor, we shall speak among scientists. Of John Bunnell Davis and Farrell Mulvey we shall hear later on. James Carmichael Smyth, physician to George III., was destined to be the step-grandfather of Thackeray, for his son Major Henry Carmichael Smyth married Thackeray’s mother in India, and ‘sat’ for the character of Colonel Newcome. The physician received £5000 from Parliament for curing a jail distemper at Winchester in 1796 by nitrous acid; albeit a Dr. Johnston and a Frenchman also claimed the discovery. James Chichester Maclaurin, physician to the Paris Embassy 1790–1792, returned in the same capacity in 1802. He died in 1804 at the age of thirty-nine. His predecessor Macdonnal also revisited Paris. Michael O’Ryan had practised at Lyons, where Louis Badger, a silk-spinner of English descent, one of the victims of the Revolution—mistaken for his brother Pierre, he refused to undeceive his executioners, but Pierre was shot a week later—had married his wife’s sister. Fleeing from the Revolution back to Ireland, O’Ryan now went and settled in Paris. He was a great advocate of quinine.
Cardinal Charles Erskine, by virtue of his rank, claims priority among the clerical visitors. His father, Colin Erskine, son of Sir Charles, a Fifeshire baronet, was an artist at Rome, where he married a Roman lady. A letter to the French Government of 1808 giving an account of the College of Cardinals says:—
‘Erskine, 65 years of age, affects the greatest indifference to the present state of things (Napoleon’s rule), speaking of the Emperor with apparent moderation, but a dangerous man, perhaps the most dangerous of all; educated at the English college.’[77]
He was on his way back to Rome, after having been a kind of legate in England, where in 1801 he had had the invidious task of requiring the resignations of the French émigré bishops on account of the Concordat. Fourteen, however, out of the eighteen, headed by Arthur Dillon, Archbishop of Narbonne, refused to comply, and seven colleagues on the Continent followed their example. A good scholar, excellent company, and a loyal Briton, Erskine died in 1811 in Paris, having been interned there by Napoleon, and was buried in the Pantheon.[78] Dr. Gregory Stapleton, Bishop of the English midland district, went to St. Omer to try and recover the property of the English college of which he had been the head until the Revolution, but he died there, without having continued his journey to Paris, on the 5th April 1802. A fellow prelate was Dr. Troy, President of Maynooth, and ultimately Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, who was anxious to obtain fuller restitution of the confiscated property of the Irish colleges in France and to re-open them, for Maynooth with its two hundred seminarists was insufficient. He went to Lord Cornwallis, who, however, was unable to help him. A staunch loyalist, he had assisted in carrying the Union, and was consequently in receipt of a State pension. William Walsh until the Revolution had been the head of the Irish college in Paris. Driven away by that event, he eventually recovered his post. Father Peter Flood, who had narrowly escaped the massacre of September 1792,[79] was sent over by the Irish Catholic bishops to effect the fusion of all the Franco-Irish colleges. Tuite, who till the Revolution had been head of the English college at Paris, found that building converted to secular uses. John Chetwode Eustace, formerly chaplain to the Jerninghams, a Maynooth professor and a very liberal Catholic, had visited Paris in 1790, and was destined to pay a third visit in company with Lord Brownlow, Robert Rushbrooke, and Philip Roche.
Edward Stanley, the future Bishop of Norwich, and father of Dean Stanley, represented the Church of England, for he had just been ordained. He was on his way to Switzerland, and was disappointed at not seeing Napoleon. He was over again in 1816, when he heard drunken English soldiers singing on the boulevards:
‘Louis Dix-huit, Louis Dix-huit,
We’ve licked all your armies