Fraser Frisell, who, except for a brief visit to his native Scotland in 1802, had lived in France since 1792, was likewise allowed full liberty.
Americans, it may be mentioned, were liable to be arrested as English, for the latter sometimes attempted to pass themselves off as Americans. George Matthew Paterson, a cousin of Madame Paterson-Bonaparte’s father, was detained as a British subject. He had, indeed, been born in Ireland. He was sent to Valenciennes, and then to Lille, whence he wrote letters to Madame Paterson-Bonaparte complimenting her on her marriage with Jerome and desiring to make her acquaintance.[175] William Russell was at least half American. He had got up the Bastille dinner at Birmingham in 1790, whereupon his house was burnt down by the mob. He had gone to America in 1795, but in 1802, being in France on his way to England, he was detained till 1814.
Junot, who as Governor of Paris had to carry out the order of detention, was, according to his wife’s memoirs, very reluctant to do so, and consented only under great pressure. He seems, indeed, by all accounts to have been inclined to leniency, and Forbes tells us that he suggested his obtaining exemption by pretending to be a sexagenarian. For a time some captives were allowed to remain in Paris, but this did not last long. Napoleon, in this as in other cases, interested himself in the smallest details. On the 3rd July he ordered a hundred of the English in Paris to be sent off. They were allowed to choose between Melun, Meaux, Fontainebleau, Nancy, and Geneva, only twenty-five, mostly Irishmen, being permitted to remain in Paris. He complained too of having found English at Boulogne and Calais. Accordingly forty-eight hours’ notice was given them—that is to those not of the age to be prisoners—to embark for England or to remove into the interior. On the 7th July Napoleon gave orders that the English officers should be sent to Fontainebleau or some other town: only forty were to remain in Paris; ‘the presence of so great a number of English in Paris cannot but cause and does cause great mischief.’[176] On the 23rd November he ordered that officers, old men, and men with wives and children should be interned at Verdun. The prisoners at Fontainebleau, Phalsbourg, and Marsal were accordingly transferred thither. Persons giving cause of complaint were to be confined at Bitche,[177] Sedan, or Sarrelouis, while privates and sailors were to be imprisoned at Charlemont and Valenciennes.
Verdun was obviously chosen because its distance from the sea rendered escape difficult. It was a town of ten thousand inhabitants, and the influx of English, mostly in affluent or at least easy circumstances, was a windfall for it. A French newspaper compared them in fact to sheep enclosed in a fold to manure the soil, and it suggested that other towns should share the advantage. The mayor of Metz, indeed, applied on behalf of that city, but ineffectually. Verdun retained a kind of monopoly, a regulated monopoly, for Napoleon in one of his letters (Nov. 24, 1804) warned the municipality that unless it kept down the price of lodgings, which had risen from 36 to 300 francs a month, the English would be sent elsewhere. Some of the army or navy officers and captains of merchantmen captured during the war were, of course, without means, and they had the option of gratuitous accommodation in the barracks. Another reason for the choice of Verdun may have been the absence of any upper class with whom the captives could mix, whereas at Nancy, the former capital of Lorraine and still a kind of provincial Paris, they had much more congenial surroundings. Austrian and Russian prisoners there joined them in 1804 in celebrating Carnival. The number of captives at Verdun from 1803 to 1814 varied from six to eleven hundred, but the highest number included captives made at sea or on battlefields. They procured remittances from England through Perregaux, the Paris banker, and some obtained permission for their families to join them. They had to give their parole not to escape as a condition of being allowed to hire their own lodgings, a breach of parole entailing incarceration. They had to answer to the roll-call morning and night. They beguiled their captivity as best they could. There were amateur theatricals, cock-fights, and horse-races. The prisoners were described by the Argus in January 1804 as ‘playing, dancing, singing, and drinking all day long.’
Two clubs were formed, one English at Concannon’s house,[178] the other Irish at Carron’s, but the latter was broken up on account of Hibernian quarrels in 1807. Lady Cadogan gave entertainments, and on the Prince of Wales’s birthday in 1804 Mrs. Concannon issued a hundred and twenty invitations to a ball and supper, when the costly toilettes of Mrs. Clive, wife of Colonel Robert Clive, and those of Mrs. Annesley, were much remarked. In 1807 the townspeople were invited by four captives to a masquerade ball.[179]
‘Young Englishmen,’ wrote George Call in his diary, after passing through Verdun in 1810, ‘are much the same whether prisoners or at home, playing, driving, and shooting each other (sic) ... One might fancy oneself in London.’ The richer prisoners gave monthly subscriptions for their poorer brethren or for schools, and the Birmingham Quakers in 1807 opened a subscription for them, an example followed in 1811 by London. The English Government, moreover, at the instance of Robson, sent £2000. Dr. Davis gave gratuitous medical services to the poorer prisoners. Maude and Jordan held Church of England services in the college hall, and solemnised marriages the validity of which was afterwards disputed. When fellow of Queen’s College, where he died in 1852, Maude used to relate his experiences.[180] Captivity reveals character, and there was not unbroken harmony or unalloyed respectability. Some speedily got into debt, and the authorities had to consider whether imprisonment for debt could be resorted to. This seems to have been at first settled in the negative. Lord Barrington, in June 1804, gave a Frenchman a draft on London which was dishonoured. The holder thereupon sued him and obtained judgment, but on appeal this was reversed, on the ground that being detained Barrington could not have arranged for an extension of time. Ultimately, however, we find arrests for debt made, and in 1807 Napoleon ordered that such judgments should be enforced. Waring Knox was in a debtors’ prison at Saargemünd when, on the intercession of the Grand Duke of Berg, he received permission to live at Melun, provided his creditors agreed to his exit. While in prison for debt at Valenciennes in 1811, he asked for 200 louis and a passport that he might go to England, where, having been brought up with the Prince Regent, he could procure a confidential post and could discover and reveal the secret projects of the British Government. General Clarke, whose Irish extraction and knowledge of England, where he had found his first wife,[181] made him a good judge of such applications, believed, however, that he simply wanted to escape from his numerous French creditors. Whether the offer was sincere or not it was almost equally contemptible. Yet we ultimately hear of his giving his poorer countrymen a daily meal at Valenciennes, where he died in a debtors’ prison in December 1813, just before release would have come. It is significantly stated that Sir William Cooper and Lady Cadogan, on being allowed to quit Verdun for Nancy, left no debts behind them, whereas half a dozen others had left half a million francs unpaid. Police reports of 1804–1805 mention one Wilson as behaving indecently with his French mistress at the theatre, and striking the officer who reprimanded him. He was deservedly sent to Bitche. Wilbraham was charged with forgery and with swindling his fellow-countrymen. We hear, too, of a duel between ‘Gold’ (Valentine Goold, or Francis Goold, a surgeon?) and Balbi, the keeper of the gaming-tables, in which the latter was wounded. ‘Gold’ was consequently confined in the fortress, but Napoleon (this proves that he looked into everything) ordered his liberation. ‘A prisoner of war,’ he said, ‘may fight a duel.’ One of the brothers Mellish, interned at Orleans, actually challenged the prefect to an encounter. A duel in 1806 between Captain Walpole and Lieutenant Miles, both of the navy, in which the latter was killed, probably arose out of a gaming quarrel. In the gaming-room figured the notice, ‘This bank is kept for the English; the French are forbidden to play at it.’[182]
The gaming-tables, Lord Blayney was told, cost the English prisoners £50,000 a year, but they were eventually closed. A Captain Cory, in one of his drunken fits, assaulted a French soldier. Colonel William Whaley, probably the brother of ‘Jerusalem’ Whaley, who indulged in quarrelling, duelling, and betting, was in 1808 sent to Moulins. He is described as ‘notorious for immorality and extravagant conduct, and capable of the most desperate enterprises.’ The English Government had refused him a passport for France, but he had managed to get there, and after six months’ incarceration in the Temple at Paris, where he excited a mutiny among the prisoners, had been sent to Verdun. There in 1811, to revenge himself for a refusal to receive him, he denounced Blayney as having clandestinely procured plans of French fortresses. The charge was investigated and declared unfounded. There were other men base enough falsely to denounce fellow-captives. Morshead and Estwicke in 1808 were fined 20,000 francs for calumny and swindling. Sir Thomas Wallace was denounced out of revenge by MacCarthy as being deep in debt and meditating escape or suicide.[183] In August 1813 there was a scuffle between prisoners and townsmen, which gendarmes had to repress. Hutchinson, a teacher of languages, was sent to Bitche for insulting a French officer. A Captain Hawker and a man named Raineford, who entered a jeweller’s shop on pretence of paying a bill, and seriously assaulted him, were sentenced in 1808 to twelve and six months’ imprisonment respectively. ‘Restless spirits,’ says Call, ‘do their best to compel the French to treat the prisoners harshly.’
Some captives, indeed, brought punishments on themselves. Thomas Devenish, having inveighed against Napoleon, was sent to Doullens fortress, but after a time was allowed to return, and Brodie, who had taught English at Blois, audaciously sent General Wirion, the commandant at Verdun, a letter of diatribes against Napoleon, for which he was relegated to Bitche. A surgeon named Simpson, who at the theatre hissed a bust of Napoleon and next day boasted of the act, pleaded inebriation, but was consigned to the fortress. On the other hand Neilson, captain of a merchantman, obviously tried to curry favour by naming his infant Napoleon, and Felix Ellice, a prisoner at Thionville, composed four sonnets and an ode on the birth of the King of Rome. Williams, imprisoned at Bitche, who had been employed by the Admiralty till 1799, but had apparently been dismissed, offered in 1804 and again in 1808 to detect the spies acting for England, but his overtures were refused, it being believed that the spies had been changed. Two navy lieutenants were imprisoned for fourteen days in 1805 for striking a French officer. A Captain Bannatyne and two officers got up theatricals on the plea of intending to pay debts, but in reality, it was said, to swindle their countrymen. Captain Nanney was sent to Arras for seducing a townsman’s wife, but escaped in August 1809. Gentlemen’s servants are not always of exemplary behaviour, and we hear of ten valets being packed off from Verdun.
These black sheep were of course exceptions, and we hear on the other hand of Colonel Reilly Cope indulging in botanising, of Forbes having his daughter taught to dance, and of Captain Molyneux Shuldham constructing a carriage propelled by sails at seven or eight miles an hour. Horses, however, being frightened by this monster, and a cart being overturned by it, it was hissed and stoned by the peasantry. Shuldham also invented a boat which, placed on a kind of skates, slid over the ice.[184] He and others likewise amused themselves with rowing, but anglers complained that they frightened away the fish, and the pastime was consequently forbidden.
General Wirion, the commandant of Verdun, had clearly no enviable position. Not only had he to keep the captives in order and prevent escapes, but he had to deal with a swarm of French adventurers of both sexes who sought to make money by facilitating escapes. It was accordingly ordered in July 1805 that all suspicious women should be expelled, and that no passports should be allowed to Verdun unless good reasons were shown. Frenchmen, like foreigners, could not then go freely from one town to another.[185] Women who had caused quarrels among the captives were expelled, but some of them then settled in the neighbouring villages. An honourable commandant would have found his post unpleasant and irksome, and Wirion, the son of a pork butcher, was not even an honourable man. He recognised Lord Barrington’s mistress, Madame St. Amand, who was at first passed off as his wife, by calling on her, and he took money for winking at illicit amours. He is said to have recommended housekeepers or mistresses who were his spies, and in one case an Englishman who had foolishly told his mistress his plans of escape was betrayed by her. Wirion may have thought this a legitimate stratagem, but he likewise unblushingly levied blackmail, and his subordinates followed suit. He would invite himself or be invited to dinner with the wealthier captives, and they would allow him to win from them at cards, in order to obtain small favours or to avoid being sent to Bitche, to which they were liable at his mere caprice. He inflicted a fine of 3 francs on men failing to present themselves at the roll-call morning and night, but not finding many able to pay 6 francs a day for late rising and an evening promenade he commuted this for 6 francs or 12 francs a month. In the winter of 1804, however, he made one roll-call a day suffice, and allowed exceptionally good prisoners to appear only every fifth day.[186] He received, according to Sturt, 600 francs or 1000 francs a month from the gaming-tables as the price of his protection, and he is said to have extorted no less than 136,000 francs from a prisoner named Garland.