Napoleon's British visitors and captives, 1801-1815

by John Goldworth Alger

‘Who would have thought that we should meet [again after the lapse of ten years] at Paris?... They (the French) have shed blood enough for liberty, and now they have it in perfection! This is not a country for an honest man to live in. They do not understand anything at all of the principles of free government, and the best way (for foreigners) is to leave them to themselves. You see they have conquered all Europe only to make it more miserable than it was before....

‘Republic! Do you call this a republic? Why they are worse off than the slaves at Constantinople, for they are ever expecting to be bashaws in Heaven by submitting to be slaves below; but here they believe neither in Heaven nor Hell, and yet are slaves by choice. I know of no republic in the world except America, which is the only country for such men as you and I. It is my intention to get away from this place as soon as possible, and I hope to be off in autumn. You are a young man, and may see better times, but I have done with Europe and its slavish politics.’

Paine, it may be feared, experienced another disillusion on recrossing the Atlantic. Yorke does not seem to have told him of his own change of politics.

Next to Paine in celebrity comes Helen Maria Williams, an eyewitness of the Revolution, whose reminiscences of Madame Roland must have been interesting. She was visited by Sharpe, Rogers, Lord Holland, Kemble, Poole, and Mrs. Cosway, though some English held aloof or even sneered at her. Her attire and manners were certainly open to ridicule,[126] and her cohabitation with John Hurford Stone, the refugee printer, even assuming a secret marriage, exposed her to misconstruction. Stone’s brother William, ruined by twenty-one months’ imprisonment and arrested for debt on his acquittal for treason, had also gone to France, where he became overseer of a paper-hanging factory. We shall hear of him again. There was the widow of Sir Robert Smyth, who remained in Paris after her husband’s death. She and her young children had been painted by Reynolds, and one of those children now married Lambton Este, a son of Charles Este, by turns actor, clergyman, and journalist. Smyth’s old partner, James Millingen, son of a Dutch merchant settled in London, had remained in Paris after the Revolution, though his brother John Gideon had become an English naval official. He was afterwards an eminent archæologist, and his son Michael, archæologist and physician, attended Byron on his deathbed. Anastasia Howard, Baroness Stafford, an ex-nun, had likewise stayed in Paris after her release at the end of the Terror,[127] though her fellow-nuns had in 1800 found a retreat in England. She died in 1807 at the age of eighty-four. Her nephew Charles Jerningham called on her, but though in good health, senility scarcely allowed her to recognise him. This reminds us of her co-religionists at the Austin convent. They, too, had survived the Revolution, and the Superior, Frances Lancaster, must have had much to tell Sir John Carr of how the nunnery was turned into a crowded political prison. Arabella Williams, daughter of David Mallet, author of Northern Antiquities, had had more recent troubles. She had spent most of her life in Paris, but visits to London to obtain her share of her mother, Lucy Estob’s, property brought on her the suspicion of the police and she was arrested. The banker Perregaux and others had to exonerate her from the charge of espionage.[128] Another but more recent resident, representing the demi-monde, though that term had not yet been invented, was Mrs. Lindsay, the Ellenore of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, that romance of the Werther and Corinne school, in which the heroine, depicted as a Pole who deserts her old paramour and her children by him, clings to a man anxious to discard her. We do not even know her Christian name, unless she was the ‘Lady Florence Lindsay’ whom Lady Morgan met at Florence in 1819. She is said to have been Irish on the father’s and French on the mother’s side; handsome and sprightly, she had been brought up in good society. She had lived in Paris from 1786 to 1792, and her confiscated tradesmen’s bills, still in the Archives,[129] indicate that she was then the mistress of Comte de Melfort, a man of Scottish Jacobite ancestry. Another of her lovers was Vicomte Chrétien de Lamoignon, who, the last of his family, was wounded at Quiberon, and after the Restoration was created a peer. She left France in 1792, and in 1795 Chateaubriand made her acquaintance in London, where she was on visiting terms with the French aristocratic exiles. He styles her la dernière des Ninon. On his going to France in disguise in 1800 she, having meanwhile returned to Paris, met him at Calais, escorted him, and hired temporary lodgings for him near her own house. She paid half the rent and another friend the remainder. Constant met her in 1804, and after passing an agreeable evening with her, received a letter in which she said that they strikingly resembled each other, but ‘this is perhaps one reason the less against our suiting each other. It is because men resemble each other that Heaven created women, who do not resemble them.’[130] Constant would have married her, however, but for her age and for her two illegitimate children. Charles Constant, Benjamin’s cousin, describes her as intelligent but devoid of culture. In 1801 she translated into French Cornelia Knight’s Life of the Romans. It is commonly stated that she died at Angoulême in 1820; but if so it was under an assumed name, for I have ascertained that there is no Lindsay on the register. Then there was Mrs. Harvey, née Elizabeth Hill, naturalised in Tuscany, who in 1805 was arrested on an unfounded charge of complicity in Georges’ plot. Her daughter Henrietta, a miniature painter, petitioned for her release and the restitution of her papers, the petition being backed by Denon, curator of the Louvre. Scipio du Roure, son of the Marquis de Grisac and grandson of the Countess of Catherlough, Bolingbroke’s sister, may almost be regarded as an Englishman, for he had been educated at Oxford. He eloped with a Mrs. Sandon, who fired at her pursuing husband, whereupon du Roure was prosecuted as the delinquent. A flaw in the indictment secured his acquittal, but he had to take refuge in France. He arrived in the middle of the Revolution and was a member of the Paris Jacobin Commune, but was imprisoned in the Terror. He was now studying jurisprudence and translating Cobbett’s Grammar. He went back to London to claim his mother’s property and that of a half-brother named Knight, and died there in 1822.

The war, putting a stop to British imports, had given a stimulus to French manufactures, several of which were carried on by Englishmen. These were mostly in the provinces, and English tradesmen had scarcely yet reappeared in Paris. Henry Sykes, for instance, unable to continue selling Wedgwood’s pottery in the rue St. Honoré, had in 1792 started cotton-spinning at St. Rémy, though he had originally applied for and obtained the use of the unfinished Madeleine as a factory. The Convention, on the 29th April 1795, granted him a site for the erection of cotton mills at La Magdelaine, near Verneuil (Eure). He was joined in 1802 by his future son-in-law, William Waddington, of Walkeringham, Notts, a descendant of Charles II.’s Pendrells. Waddington, the grandfather of the French statesman of our day, apparently had a visit from his brother Samuel, a hop merchant at Tunbridge, who had published an answer to Burke’s famous pamphlet, and in 1801 had been sentenced to £500 fine and a month’s imprisonment for ‘forestalling.’ His fellow hop-merchants gave him an ovation on his release. Then there was Christopher Potter, who had been an army victualler and whose election for Colchester in 1784 led to the Act disqualifying Government contractors from sitting in Parliament. His successful opponent was Sir Robert Smyth, and the two rivals may have met in Paris. He reopened during the Revolution the porcelain factory at Chantilly formerly carried on by the Condé princes, thus justifying his name—nomen omen—but he had now removed to Montereau. A police report of the 8th March 1796 thus denounced him:—

‘The Anglo-Pitts purchase nearly all the national property which is sold in the department of the Oise. Their chief broker is a man named Poter (sic), owner of the porcelaine factory at Chantilly, a man who was deep in debt two years ago, but who has now paid up and is worth more than two millions. He was twice arrested under the revolutionary government. This man was twice M.P. in England, and belonged to the Court party. There is no doubt that he is in France the secret agent of Pitt, with whom he has been closely connected since the Revolution. He made many visits to England in 1792 and 1793. Since that time he has remained at Paris or Chantilly, where he daily makes purchases.’[131]

This report was made by an ‘observer’ named Martin, whose chief, Marné, sent it in as usual to the Directory. That body, or probably Barras, who seems to have examined these daily reports, instructed Marné to inquire whether Potter really visited England in 1792–1793, whether there was any proof of his connection with the court party, whether there was any probability of his being Pitt’s agent, and what purchases he had made. Martin replied to this veiled rebuke on the 13th March:—

‘I have learned nothing further on Poter. My object was not to denounce him. I do not know him intimately. I have merely had to do my duty as observer, and to call attention to him, according to notices which have been transmitted to me by persons whom I believe to have no interest in calumniating him. My guarantee of all the facts is therefore solely for the purpose of my mission. It is then for the Government to watch any particular person. Here, however, is my reply to the various questions which have been submitted to me by citizen Marné, and which I subjoin.

‘1. Poter paid visits to England in 1792 and 1793, without this implying that he was betraying our cause, for our relations with England were not suspended till the middle of 1793 if I remember rightly.

‘2. The real fact, and which Poter cannot contradict, is that he was twice M.P., and that the kind of popularity which he had gained induced the Court to place him on the list of candidates in 1783 or 1784 for making him a Minister. Pitt was the successful man. After that he fought a duel with the latter.[132] Was it because he was not a Minister?