Napoleon's British visitors and captives, 1801-1815

by John Goldworth Alger

One of the most singular cases of lenity is the permission given in 1808, on the recommendation of a Paris professor, to the two brothers Lambert to leave Givet and exhibit themselves all over France. For several generations their family had had a scaly or horny epidermis.[220]

There is a solitary case of refusal to accept release. Richard Oliver, ex-M.P. for the county of Limerick, though in ill-health and anxious to leave with his mother and sister, declined without consulting them on learning that the passport had been granted at the instance of Arthur O’Connor, whom he had formerly known. He disdained to be under obligation to a conspirator.

It would have been strange if money as well as influence had not sometimes secured release. The Rev. W. H. Churchill, of Colliton, Devon, was on his way to Lyons in May 1803 when he was stopped and ordered to return to Paris. There he was dismayed to learn that all the English had been consigned to Verdun. He pleaded for leave to escort an invalid brother home, but was told by Junot that unless he repaired to Verdun he would be sent to the Temple prison. He nevertheless resolved to wait and see what would happen. A gendarme duly appeared with an order to take him to the Temple, but the name was misspelt, and the gendarme for a consideration withdrew, promising to say that he had not found the man. Churchill then feigned illness, and a French doctor prescribed for an ulcerated throat. In January 1804 Churchill, through bribery, as is believed, was permitted to escort his invalid brother.[221]

Next to freedom the greatest favour was leave to visit or reside where the prisoners chose. Ill-health was naturally one of the commonest grounds for such applications, and naturally these were viewed with some scepticism. Lawrence states that Dr. Madan at Verdun made money by giving certificates of indisposition for exemption from morning roll-call. Two ex-M.P.’s, Nicholl and Waller, obtained permission to repair respectively to Lyons and Nîmes. Nicholl’s son was also allowed to go to a neighbouring town to marry a Miss Mount.[222] He was ultimately released. The bookseller Payne was authorised to go to Plombières and Barèges. We thus see that watering-places profited, as well as Verdun, by the detentions.

Sir Thomas and Lady Webb were in 1809 allowed to go to Savoy. Lady Webb, a convert to Catholicism, adopted in 1813 a little English girl seemingly lost by her parents and found among a troop of jugglers at Lyons.[223] The waif, after being educated and apprenticed, became a nun. Macnab was permitted to study medicine at Montpellier. James Heath, the engraver, was allowed in 1810 two months at Paris to copy architectural designs. In that year also visits to the capital were permitted to two clergymen, Maude and Lancelot Lee, as well as to Lord Shaftesbury, Captain Lovelace, Colonel de Blaquiere, and the brothers Tichborne, Henry being in ill-health. In June 1810, however, all or nearly all permissions for Paris were revoked. But in 1813 Halpin was allowed to return to Paris to complete his art studies. Colonel Phillips, who had accompanied Cook round the world, was permitted to visit England in the summer of 1804, and General Scott was allowed to visit his family at Versailles; but on refusing to name a man who had extorted money from him by pretending to have obtained such permission he was ordered back to Verdun.[224] Sir Thomas Clavering, whose father had been one of Warren Hastings’ opponents at Calcutta, had married a Frenchwoman, the daughter of an Angers dressmaker, and was consequently allowed to remain at Orleans. There he drove his own carriage and had fine English horses. He was friendly with his neighbour, the actress Raucourt, and once took young Bonneval (afterwards Marquis and General) to her house, where there was much card-playing and the youth lost all his pocket-money. In 1808 he was permitted to live at St. Germain. In 1810 he sent his wife to England to try and effect an exchange. Meanwhile he was at Paris, living with a Vaudeville actress, Arsène. She treacherously sent the police an anonymous letter warning them that he talked against Napoleon and intended to escape. Cuthbert Sharpe, through Regnier, Minister of Justice, was in 1804 struck off the list of captives, allowed to live in Paris, and ultimately liberated. Cramer, a man of a good Irish Protestant family, though originally detained at Verdun, had leave, on its being known that he was against the war, to travel freely about France. Settling at Tours, he married a Mademoiselle Fereau and made the acquaintance of Courier, the future pamphleteer. He died at Florence in 1827. Edward Dillon, a naval cadet, being related to General Clarke, was permitted to complete his education in Paris. Sir John Morshead had permission to go to Versailles to undergo an operation, and was ultimately released. As near the end of the war as January 1814, Colonel William Cox, ex-governor of Almeida, solicited permission to visit Paris.

Among the détenus permitted to visit or reside in Paris between 1806 and 1811[225] were Colonel Arthur Annesley, Charles Jerningham, Lovell Edgeworth, Charlotte, Elizabeth, and Henry (sisters and son of Sir William) Wolseley, John Daniel, ex-president of Douai College, Thomas William Atkinson, Theobald, Henry, and William Dillon, the Rev. Robert Bland, Count Daniel O’Connell, and George Woodyatt, a student from Westphalia, afterwards a doctor at Worcester, and grandfather of George Woodyatt Hastings, president of the Social Science Association, the M.P. who misappropriated his ward’s money, making the usual plea that he intended to refund it. They also included General Lord John Murray, General Sir Edward Paget, Sir Herbert Croft, Archdall Cope and his brother, students in Paris since their childhood, Blount, another student, Atkinson, a medical student, John Jervis, the engraver, Terence M’Mahon, Christopher Potter, Smith, an engraver, Laurence Stoddart, a paralytic Scotsman, Edward Hayes, the miniature painter, and his father, Sir John Coghill, and Benfield, the banker.

Although women and children were not included in the decree they could not always leave without difficulty. In July 1803 some girls, who had been imprudently sent to school at Rouen, had got to Calais on their way home when an order came to detain them as hostages for a young nephew and niece of Madame Bonaparte who had apparently been captured on their voyage from Martinique. There may have been some delay in the passage to France of this ‘Master and Miss la Pagerie,’ as the Times styled them; but assuredly England had no thought of detaining children, and it may be presumed that the exchange was promptly effected. As for women, Anne Plumptre, as free in her movements as at home, easily procured a passport in 1805; but her Francomania was in her favour. The divorced wife of Comte de Melfort (she was sister of the Earl of Barrymore, and her husband a descendant of the Scottish Drummonds) was allowed in 1810 to go to England with her two daughters to look after property, leaving behind her two sons, one page to the Emperor, and the other at St. Cyr military college. She is said to have had a liaison with the Prince Regent, and Melfort alleged that his marriage at the British Embassy had been invalid on account of the difference of religion; but he was himself a debauchee. Arrested in London for debt, he found a titled lady to pay the amount and elope with him to France. Lady Donegal[226] and her sisters, Mary and Philippa Godfrey, got back to England as early as October 1803. Lady Maynard and Lady Ancram also obtained passports. A woman named Thompson, ninety-two years of age, captured in 1809 on board a merchantman which stranded off Calais, was at once, in consideration of her age, sent back to England.

Sometimes women who had gone home on business did not find return an altogether easy matter. Thus Mrs. Clarke, who had obtained a passport for England viâ Holland in April 1807, was arrested by the English authorities on attempting to return, was sent in custody to London, and was interrogated on suspicion of being a spy in the French service. She easily cleared herself, but then waited to see her elder daughter Eleanor married to Frewen-Turner, M.P. for Athlone, and in 1808 she landed in France from Jersey. She was arrested, however, at St. Lô, and had to give an account of herself. She stated that in 1791 she visited Toulouse with her daughter and her mother, Mrs. Hay,[227] and that in 1801 she took her mother and a younger daughter Mary to Toulouse; that they removed to Paris two days before Whitworth’s departure, that her visit to England had been purely on business, and that had she not got a passage from Jersey she should have tried going round by America. She was allowed, on her story being verified, to rejoin her mother and daughter.[228] The latter as Madame Mohl, ultimately famous for her receptions in Paris, coquettishly concealed her age, not liking to confess to seniority to her German husband. At her death in 1883 she was ninety years of age. Miss Lemprière, probably sister of the author of the Classical Dictionary, was permitted to return. Mary Masquerier, a governess, sister, doubtless, of the artist already named, was allowed in 1812 to embark at Morlaix for London. A Mrs. Cornuel in the same year obtained permission to go to England to fetch her two daughters, one of whom had for ten years been in the charge of an uncle in London, and all three returned on board a smuggling vessel.[229] A girl named Warren, eleven years of age, on board a vessel captured by a privateer in 1805, was restored to her father, quartermaster at Malta. Three children named Crane, aged from ten to sixteen, who had been sent to school in Paris in 1802, but whose father could no longer afford to pay for their education, were permitted in 1805 to embark at Rotterdam.[230] Mrs. Story and her four little children, also captured by a privateer, were liberated in December 1813, as likewise ‘Madame Kirkpatrick’ with her four children and two nieces, who had all been residing in Paris. We shall hear presently of her husband. Catherine Russell, a young woman captured in 1812 by a privateer and landed at Amsterdam, showed such despair at being parted from her friends that she was allowed to return to England.[231] Mrs. Mary Bishop in 1813 had leave with her four daughters to pay a visit to England, ostensibly to obtain possession of property, but really, so she alleged after the Restoration when appealing to Louis XVIII. for recompense, on a mission from royalists. Lady Boyle had like permission in July 1813, but her husband, the future Earl of Glasgow, could merely obtain leave to visit Paris. Occasionally the English authorities objected to the landing of such passengers. Thus a Mrs. Borel, wife of a London merchant, was refused permission to land at Dartmouth in 1813 for want of a formal permit; she took passage on another vessel for Portsmouth in the hope of there finding less difficulty.[232] The English Government apparently suspected that some of these arrivals might be spies in French pay.

Englishwomen, sometimes accompanied by little children, having obtained leave from both Governments, mostly in order to rejoin captive husbands, continued to land at Morlaix up to 1813. Thus Mrs. Dorothy Silburn, who had liberally befriended French émigré priests in England, was authorised in 1807 to settle at Roscoff, where she spent the remainder of her life, her tomb being still prominent in the old churchyard. The Countess Bruce, separated wife of Puschkin—he made in 1810 curious experiments in galvanism, as it was then called—went from Venice to Paris in 1811 to solicit the pardon of a negro servant who had been condemned to death for the murder of a female servant, whereas the two domestics had agreed to die together because they could not legally marry. He accordingly shot her, and wounded, but failed to kill, himself. Among the arrivals was also the notorious Lady Craven, Margravine of Anspach. This fair but frail lady, who had sat to Reynolds and Romney, had visited the Austrian and Russian Courts, had immediately on becoming a widow married the Margrave, a nephew of Frederick II., and had lived with him at Hammersmith, but had been cold-shouldered by London society and even by her own daughters. She had paid a short visit to Paris in 1802, and she went again in 1807 to take possession of her second husband’s property. We hear little more of her till her death at Naples in 1828, where she had settled in 1805, being joined by one of her sons, Keppel Craven, of whom we have already heard.[233] Another restless woman, wife of Colonel Henry (brother of Viscount) Dillon, arrived in Paris in 1808, ostensibly to join her husband but really to bring over letters from royalist exiles, perhaps also to meet her lover, Latour du Pin. She was arrested, and her husband disowned her. In 1810 he notified the police that she had taken her children from Bordeaux and gone with them without his knowledge to England, where he feared she would divulge his offer to join the French army. Sir Robert Adair’s French wife in 1808 obtained leave to remove from Vienna to Rheims, in order to bring up her daughters by her former marriage.

The celebrated Pamela, widow of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, was allowed in 1810 to come to Paris, Napoleon directing Fouché to ‘pump’ her on English and Irish affairs,[234] as also probably on Count Stahremberg, Austrian Ambassador at London, her reputed lover, for she had quitted her second husband Pitcairn, American Consul at Hamburg. Her daughter by the latter, who survived till a few years ago, seems to have been left behind, either in Germany or in England.