Lady Elgin was not the only faithless wife, for in 1808 Scott, formerly vice-consul at Naples, declined to take back his wife, who had been arrested while cohabiting with an Englishman at Saarlibre, and he recommended her being sent to England, as he had long disowned her and she was penniless.[211] Lady Webb, letting herself down from a window in Paris, is said, moreover, to have eloped with Fursy-Guesdon, a novelist, and grandson of the actor Préville.[212] She knew Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand.
Lord Beverley and Lord Lovaine, the eldest of his fourteen children, found more indulgence. Though not released, they were permitted in 1805 to reside at Moulins, which Lovaine liked so well that he remained with his young family after 1814, though no longer a captive. He was fond of hunting, lived in style, and was very charitable. At the age of eighty-seven he became Duke of Northumberland, but enjoyed the honour only two years. Just after the capitulation of Paris in 1814 he and two of his sons lunched with Josephine, who told him that the English were the only people generous enough to speak respectfully of the fallen Napoleon. In order to have done with peers, let me here note that Lord Duncannon must have been released before November 1805, when he married in England, and that the Duke of Newcastle, who came just within the age of Napoleon’s terrible decree, was released with his mother in 1807. The mother had pleaded ill-health and family affairs, had offered a profusion of compliments to Napoleon, and had adduced her succour to French prisoners previously to the peace. She had been allowed in 1804 to go to the Pyrenees and in 1806 to settle at Tours.
Some scientists, scholars, and physicians owed their release to Banks and Jenner on the one hand, and Carnot, Cuvier, and French doctors on the other. Lord Shaftesbury appears to have been liberated as an F.R.S., but possibly as a friend of Fox. James Forbes, another F.R.S., who with his wife and daughter arrived in Paris from Brussels the very day after the decree was issued, was liberated in June 1804 through Carnot. He had previously been allowed to visit at Tours his brother Major Charles Forbes, with his wife and five children.[213] Pinkerton, the geographer, was likewise released in 1805. Dr. Carmichael Smyth, having in early life travelled in France and kept up a correspondence with French physicians, profited by their intervention.[214] Dr. Maclean urged that he had not been in England for ten years, and this plea availed him. Jenner sent a letter to Napoleon in behalf of William Thomas Williams, which Napoleon at first cast aside, but Josephine picking it up told him it was from Jenner. ‘Ah,’ he then exclaimed, ‘I can refuse nothing to so great a man.’ Williams, who on watching Napoleon for a full hour at the Paris Opera had noticed that he never once smiled, thought his countenance, on seeing him again at Nancy in 1805, mild, though haughty. Jenner, a correspondent of the Institute in 1808 and a foreign associate of it on the death of Maskelyne in 1811, also secured the release of Dr. Wickham,[215] and through Corvisart, the Emperor’s physician, that of Nathaniel Garland and Valentine Goold. Corvisart likewise intervened for Dr. Burrell Davis, who after graduating in medicine at Montpellier had been relegated to Verdun, and who published a striking pamphlet against premature burial. This he forwarded to Corvisart, along with a petition to Napoleon. Doctors indeed, as was but right, were less harshly treated. They were permitted to make journeys to English patients, and in 1810 nine were granted passports for England. Alexander Hamilton, though not yet an F.R.S., doubtless owed his release to having catalogued the Sanscrit manuscripts in the Paris Library. Colclough became a member of a literary society at Nîmes, in order to procure release as a scholar, but whether this availed him is doubtful, for we do not hear of him as a resident Irish landlord till after Napoleon’s fall.
John Spencer Stanhope, of Cannon Hall, Yorkshire, treacherously delivered up in 1810 by a Gibraltar privateer, was liberated in March 1813, at the intercession of the Institute, in order to make an archæological visit to Greece: but literary or artistic accomplishments did not always secure release. Joseph Forsyth discovered this to his cost. An Elgin man, his father intimate with Isaac Watts, he had eagerly embraced the opportunity of visiting Italy. Starting as early as October 1801, he reached Nice on Christmas Day and spent seventeen months in Italy, but on re-entering France in May 1803 he found himself a prisoner and was confined at Nîmes. Attempting in the winter to escape, he was relegated to Bitche, where for two years he was in close confinement. He was then allowed to go on parole to Verdun. There he prepared and published in London an account of his artistic tour, and had copies sent to France in the hope that it would serve him a good turn. But from want of interest, perhaps too on account of his unlucky attempt to escape, he could obtain no greater favour than permission to live in Paris, and even this after four months was revoked. He had to repair to Valenciennes and wait till 1814. He died in the following year. Curiously enough, he regretted the publication of his book, albeit it possessed considerable merit.
Monroe, author of the famous ‘doctrine,’ then American Ambassador at London, was applied to by prisoners’ friends to solicit their liberty through his Paris colleague Livingston, whose dispatches to Washington were sent by flag of truce through Morlaix. Ferguson, Lady Elgin’s paramour, seems to have been thus released, and a Colonel Johnston was thus allowed to go to France to see a kinsman named Oliphant.
But while release came to some after a few months, it did not come to others till after long years. Robson, ex-M.P., confined at Nîmes, must have had influential friends to obtain permission to embark at Emden as early as November 1803. Sir Thomas Hare and young Augustus Foster were apparently indebted to friends in high quarters for release. A wife’s heroic efforts, which, however, are not particularised, also effected the liberation of General Sir Charles Shipley.
Chenevix, whose friendship with Berthollet stood him in good stead, in July 1803 read a paper before the Institute on ‘palladium,’ the metal discovered in platinum ore by Wollaston, and sent articles to a French chemical journal. He was one of the original contributors to the Edinburgh Review, in which, according to Thomas Moore, who met him at Paris in 1821, he wrote against France. He was able without hindrance to visit Germany and Spain, as well as the Black Sea. In 1812 he married a French countess, and remained in France until his death in 1830.
One of the likeliest ways of obtaining release was to petition Napoleon or Josephine in person. Mrs. Tuthill managed to present her petition to the Emperor while out hunting, and he could not deny a lady, especially a great beauty. Mrs. Cockburn obtained an introduction to her fellow-Creole Josephine, whereupon Napoleon[216] in July 1803 wrote, ‘Do what is proper for Coxburn’ (sic). It was not, however, till 1805 that he obtained permission to go to England for twelve months, doubtless a euphemism for release. Cockburn, like Yarmouth, had been allowed to go out hunting at Verdun. John Maunde, an old Bluecoat scholar, was released in 1807, whereupon he went to Oxford to study for the Church, became curate of Kenilworth, and formed an intimacy with Lucien Bonaparte, in his turn a captive, whose poem he was translating into English when he died in 1813.
Sir Grenville Temple was allowed in 1804 to go to Switzerland, and in 1810 to embark for America with his rich Bostonian wife and their four children. Sampson Eardley was released in March 1806. Captain Walter Stirling was liberated in time to testify at the Elgin trial to the conjugal harmony which had previously existed. Colonel Molesworth in 1804 had permission to visit England, which probably meant release. John Parry, more fortunate than his brother James, was struck off the list of captives. He alleged that he had been expelled from England for writing in favour of peace, and he solicited and obtained permission in 1809 to go and see after his brother’s property, intending to return and marry at Tours. Henry Seymour, the ex-M.P. and lover of Madame Dubarry, was allowed in 1809 to go to Switzerland. He had previously been permitted to reside at Melun and Paris. Richard Trench, who had been married at the British Embassy in March 1803 to Melesina, daughter of the Rev. Philip Chenevix and widow of Colonel St. George, was allowed in August 1803, on account of ill-health, to go to Orleans, his wife having managed through influence to save her husband from being sent to Verdun. From Orleans she made repeated visits to Paris to intercede for him. Her husband once in 1805 accompanied her, and in a secluded part of the Bois de Boulogne meeting the Emperor, told him which way the stag had gone. Napoleon, however, was angry at thus meeting alone a tall young Englishman who had come to Paris without leave, and after a night in prison Trench was ordered to Verdun. He was soon allowed to live in Paris, but it was not till 1807 that Mrs. Trench, by personally presenting her petition, secured her husband’s release.[217] Meanwhile she had given birth to Francis, a theological writer whom I remember as rector of Islip, but Richard, the archbishop, was not born till 1808, after her return to Dublin.
There is no record in the police bulletins of the release of Thomas Manning, who hastened to Paris from Angers on hearing of the rupture. The family tradition is that he owed his deliverance to Carnot and Talleyrand. Let us hope that he got back in time to be one of the Diss volunteers who in October 1803 received notice to be in readiness to march to London on the first notification of a French invasion—an invasion, however, which, argued a letter in the Times, should be welcomed as ensuring a grand haul of prisoners. In 1817, on his way back from Tibet, he stopped at St. Helena and presented the captive Emperor—their positions had been almost reversed—with tea, coffee, tobacco, two silk pocket-handkerchiefs, and two feather fans.[218] He had been strictly charged to address Napoleon as ‘general,’ but when asked by whom his passport in 1803 had been signed, he replied, ‘By yourself, by the Emperor.’ Napoleon’s face lit up at this recognition of his rank by an Englishman. Impey was released in July 1804, perhaps through Madame Talleyrand, whom he must have known at Calcutta. Sir James de Bathe is said to have procured the intercession of the Pope, to whom it was represented that his children in England might in his absence be made Protestants. His son and heir was then only a boy of ten. Sir James died in 1808. Greathead, the lifeboat inventor, was released in December 1804, quite cured of democracy, it was said, by his French treatment. Greatheed, with whom he must not be confused, was allowed with his son to go to Dresden and thence to Italy. The son died at Vicenza in 1804 at the age of twenty-three. Granby Sloper, who had settled at Paris in 1789 and had been imprisoned there in 1794, though struck off the list of captives in 1803 and allowed to live in Paris, had been arrested in 1806 as an accomplice of Wickham; but on proof that he had simply when at Berne asked the latter for a passport for England he was liberated.[219] William Stone, who, as already stated, had taken refuge in France after his acquittal of high treason in London in 1796, was unmolested, and became eventually steward to an Englishman named Parker at Villeneuve St. George.