Napoleon's British visitors and captives, 1801-1815

by John Goldworth Alger

We now come to authors, whom we have reserved till nearly the last, not because they were the least important, rather the reverse, but because they are the most numerous. They may be conveniently divided into writers on Paris—chiels taking notes—and writers on other subjects. As to the former, it must be confessed that few of these accounts of Paris possess much merit or interest. There are, however, some notable exceptions. Thomas Holcroft, as ‘dogmatic, virulent, and splenetic as ever’ says King, had been prosecuted in 1794; but on the acquittal of Horne Tooke and others the case against him was abandoned. He had been to Paris in 1783, and again in 1785 to fetch his son back from school, when along with Bonneville, Paine’s future host, he wrote down Beaumarchais’s Figaro from hearing it at the theatre, being unable otherwise to procure a copy in order to have it performed in London. He had paid a third visit in 1799–1801, and he was now accompanied by his second wife Louise Mercier, who was born in France but brought up in England.[96] He also took his daughter Fanny, the future novelist and translator, who married first Dr. Badams and secondly Danton’s nephew Merget. Holcroft in his Travels from Hamburg to Paris (1804) gives a good picture of Parisian society. J. G. Lemaistre, who went to claim a legacy, was one of the earliest visitors, for he started in October or November 1801, remaining till May 1802. In the latter year he published a Rough Sketch of Paris. He went on to Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, and in his Travels after the Peace of Amiens (1806) he gave a curious account of his dining with Cardinal York, then already getting into his dotage. Lemaistre was the son of an Indian judge, was described by Erskine as ‘a most agreeable, good-natured, sensible man,’ and was obviously of French or Channel Isle descent. Sir John Carr, a Rugby scholar, wrote numerous books of travel, his Stranger in France (1803) being his first attempt. In 1898 it was translated into French by M. Albert Babeau. No other visitor of 1802 has had a similar honour, but Paris as it was and as it is by Francis William Blagdon, a teacher of languages, was translated at the time into German.

John King, the author of Letters from France, reprinted I think from the True Briton, had a singular career. He was the son of poor Jewish parents, was apparently named (not of course christened) Isaac, and was brought up at a Jewish charity school. Thomas Paine, with whom he was afterwards to break lances, knew him young, penniless, and friendless, a flaming Radical. Clerk in a Jewish counting-house, he made use of his good abilities and started as a money-lender and bill-discounter, advancing money on post-obits to spendthrift heirs. He was also a frequent speaker at a debating club in Carlisle Street. In 1783 he published, dedicating it to Fox, Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses in which the Peace of 1783 has involved the People of England. He lived in style, and is described as a banker at Egham, but seems to have been simply a broker. As such, nicknamed ‘Jew King’ or ‘King of the Jews,’ he became notorious for litigation, figuring frequently in the courts as plaintiff, defendant, or witness, and he was roughly handled by cross-examining counsel. He was, moreover, twice imprisoned for debt. He had previously visited France, and in December 1792 he had denounced the Revolution. Twitted by Paine with his change of opinions, he replied that the Revolution, not he himself, had changed. At Paris he was accompanied or joined by his wife the Dowager-Countess of Lanesborough, a widow since 1779, and is said to have procured her son a rich wife.[97] In any case he himself had obtained a potentially rich wife, for the Countess in 1814 came into possession for life of the estates of her brother, the Earl of Belvedere. A police note by Desmarest of the 2nd October 1802 gives no flattering account of King:—

‘This Englishman, a branded swindler, has just incurred another disgrace. His daughter, daughter of Lady Lanesborough his wife, last night quitted King’s house to rejoin her husband M. de Marescote (Marquis Luigi Marescotti) of Bologna. King for nine years had detained this young woman from her husband, and had always refused to give her up. He required Marescote to fetch her in England, because he would then have presented heavy bills, which he would have forced him to pay even by litigation. Madame M. took advantage of her stay in Paris to rejoin her husband. All this happened under the eyes and with the approval of the Italian Minister, Marescalchi, who beforehand informed the Minister of Justice. Mr. King has confined himself to preferring a charge of robbery against Miss Oliver, Madame M.’s lady’s-maid. King pretends to have had promises from two ministers for starting a rival English paper in Paris. He wrote some days ago to General Moreau, Santerre, Tallien, and a fourth person to invite them to dine with him, which they refused. It is presumed that his object was simply to obtain answers from them which he hoped to produce in London and thus make fresh dupes. He is always careful to write his letters in his own name and that of Lady Lanesborough, the latter name procuring him deference and answers. Senator Perregaux (a banker) who has been consulted respecting this foreigner, regards him as a swindler and as a dangerous man.’

This report must be a mixture of fact and fiction, for even if King, on Lady Lanesborough’s departure from Paris in October 1802, was left in charge of her daughter, he could not have been sequestrating her for nine years. Marescotti, moreover, when arrested at Cassel in 1807 and incarcerated at Bouillon, is described in another police report as a needy adventurer employed by the English Government. A German translation of Goldsmith’s book on Napoleon was in his possession, and he was charged with circulating pamphlets of the same kind. He was released in the following year, on the understanding that his brother at Bologna would keep him out of mischief.[98] No mention is made of his wife, who had probably quitted him. Thomas Moore met her at Bologna in 1819 (her mother also he saw in Paris in 1821), and she lived till 1840. King’s banking partner Lathrop Murray, who pretended to be a baronet, became bankrupt in the summer of 1802, pleading in excuse that he had fallen a prey in Paris to King’s wiles, backed by French wines and by Lady Lanesborough’s attractions. Returning to England, King was arrested for debt in 1802, but published his book in 1803, and in the following year he issued a pamphlet entitled Oppressions deemed no Injustice toward Some Individuals. This was a protest against his rough handling in the Law Courts. He also published a Universal System of Arithmetic, but after his wife’s accession to her brother’s property, he lived abroad with her in good style. He died at Florence in 1823, and his wife, aged eighty-seven, in 1828.[99] His Letters from France are not without interest. He mentions that Santerre, when lunching with him, justified his beating the drums at Louis XVI.’s execution, his object being to prevent royalist cries which would have led to bloodshed.

King naturally brings us to his fellow Hebrew, Lewis Goldsmith. Born at Richmond, Surrey, about 1773, he seems to have been in 1792 at Frankfort and in 1794 in Poland, whence he wrote to Lord Stanhope, urging him to bring the Polish cause before Parliament. Stanhope, however, though sympathising with Kosciusko, stated that the Anglo-Prussian alliance debarred him from doing so. In 1795 Goldsmith, as a friend of Joel Barlow, wrote a preface to the second part of Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders, an exhortation to kings and aristocrats to renounce their doomed prerogatives. According to Lord Campbell, Goldsmith had been an emissary of all the great European powers, yet in 1801 he published a pamphlet entitled The Crimes of Cabinets, in which he denounced the British and Continental Governments as bent on dismembering France. It was to escape prosecution for this tirade that he went to Paris, his wife Rebecca with their daughter joining him. He alleges, but it is difficult to believe him, that he was taken to Dieppe in order to be given up to England as a conspirator in exchange for Peltier, and that no such exchange being feasible he was sent back to Paris. There, it is clear, he offered his services to Napoleon, who conceived the idea of starting an English newspaper in Paris to circulate his ideas in England and its colonies. Curiously enough Napoleon was an unconscious plagiary of the Commonwealth, which in 1650 founded or supported a French weekly newspaper, Nouvelles Ordinaires de Londres, for circulation on the Continent.[100] That newspaper lasted only eight years, and the Paris Argus lasted about as long. There must have been a staff of English compositors to bring it out. It gave copious extracts from the London journals, but was violently anti-English or at least anti-ministerial in its tone. Goldsmith afterwards disclaimed responsibility for its diatribes, insisting that he simply inserted the articles sent him. In November 1802 Napoleon ordered five hundred copies to be regularly sent to the French West Indies in order thence to reach the neighbouring British colonies. The paper was described by Merry as a ‘despicable publication.’ But in February 1803 Goldsmith was dismissed, which Whitworth notified as a sign of peace, the paper having changed its tone. His successor was Thomas Hutton, ex-editor of the Dramatic Censor, who soon incurred disgrace and imprisonment. Goldsmith, pleading penury, asked for 7000 f. compensation. He had, he said, been promised the proprietorship, and had been put to great expense by his wife bringing over her furniture from England. He had also paid in advance for his daughter’s schooling,[101] and being threatened with assassination by the English in Paris he was anxious to leave.[102] He remained, however, for in 1804–1805 he published with Barère the Memorial Anti-Britannique. He also translated Blackstone into French, and he advertised in the Petites Affiches in 1805–1806 as a pupil of Scott and Schabracq, London notaries, and as a sworn interpreter ready to undertake translations and other business.

Returning in 1809 to England with a passport from Dunkirk for America, he was imprisoned for a short time in Tuthill Fields, but on his release began to write violently against Napoleon. Goldsmith published in 1811 the Secret History of the Cabinet of Bonaparte, and he proposed in 1815 that a price should be set on Bonaparte’s head. In spite of these provocative, not to say scurrilous, publications, he after Waterloo settled down quietly in Paris till his death in 1846 as solicitor to the British Embassy. One of his duties was to hand over the letters or parcels which in those days of dear postage and carriage were franked by the Foreign Office, and a friend of mine, sent as a young man to Paris to get a French polish, remembers how Goldsmith used to quiz or banter him on the supposed feminine source of such consignments. But the most romantic event in Goldsmith’s career, a kind of parallel to King’s marriage, was the marriage in 1837 of his handsome daughter Georgiana, born in Paris in 1807, to Lord Lyndhurst, ex-Lord Chancellor. ‘I lived in Paris,’ she told Augustus Hare in 1881, ‘with my father, and I was nobody. I never expected to marry. Why should I? I had no fortune and no attractions.’ Lyndhurst first saw her when visiting Paris with his first wife. He went over again, a widower, in 1837 and made her an offer. Hare speaks of her ‘clever vivacity acquired by her early life in France.’ ‘I had,’ she told him, ‘twenty-six years of the most perfect happiness ever allotted to woman.’ Both husband and wife were curious links with the past, for the former, son of the artist Copley, was born at Boston, U.S., in 1772, four years before the Declaration of Independence, while the widow survived till 1891.

Another man who boxed the political compass was James Redhead Yorke. Visiting Paris in 1792, full of enthusiasm for the Revolution,[103] and imprisoned for sedition at Dorchester, he not only fell in love with his jailer’s daughter, whom he married on his release, but turned anti-Gallican. He nevertheless in 1802 renewed acquaintance with Paine, who said to him, ‘Do you call this a republic? Why, they are worse off than the slaves in Constantinople.’ Yet Paine had originally, like many intelligent Frenchmen, admired Napoleon. Yorke’s Letters from France were reprinted, like King’s, from a newspaper.

A fourth erratic journalist was William Playfair, brother of the Edinburgh geologist. He had helped to capture the Bastille, but was so disillusioned with the Revolution that on returning to London in 1792 he advocated flooding France with forged assignats as the surest means of overturning the Republic. For this Louis Blanc has pilloried him, but reprehensible as the scheme was, Playfair—what an irony in his name!—was not even entitled to originality, for forged Congressional notes had been circulated during the American War of Independence. Although the English Government did not act on Playfair’s suggestion the royalist émigrés did so, and Napoleon, as we shall see, followed the evil example by counterfeiting English, Austrian, and Russian notes. Playfair on this second visit to Paris had no literary purpose, but in 1820 he published a criticism on Lady Morgan’s book on France. His editorship of Galignani’s Messenger, his inventions, never lucrative, and his pecuniary troubles need not be detailed. Like King and Goldsmith he must be pronounced an adventurer and a weathercock.

Another journalist, James Parry, had just disposed of the Courier, and settled in France. If, as Lord Malmesbury and Goldsmith allege, he had been in the pay of the Directory he deserved, if contempt, forbearance, yet as we shall find he did not obtain any.

Colonel Thomas Thornton had visited France before the Revolution, and had shown hospitality in England to émigrés. He was the only visitor whose object was sport, and he took fourteen hounds with him, albeit game was scarce, as for twelve years the peasants had had it all their own way. Wolves, however, still existed. He published in 1806 A Sporting Tour through France, and going again after Waterloo he purchased Pont-sur-Seine. The mansion, indeed, had been destroyed by the Cossacks, but the outbuildings were capable of habitation. He sold the property, however, in 1821 to Casimir Périer, the grandfather of the future President of the Republic, and died in Paris seven years later, leaving a will in favour of an illegitimate daughter which was annulled by the English tribunals.