Clandestine visitors were naturally suspected of being spies.[246] Thus the son of Dickinson, the artist, ex-secretary to the Ottoman Embassy in London, entered France under the name of Lambert in 1805, apparently in order to join his father in Paris; but he had given up painting and had been in the employ of the British Government. He proved that he had come to see a Madame Gourbillon, of whom he had been enamoured in London, but the authorities suspected that he might occupy his leisure in sending reports to England, and he was consequently despatched to Verdun,[247] albeit his sister was companion to Madame Talleyrand. But he must have been liberated, for we hear of another visit in 1810.
Thomas Graham, arrested at Pepignan in 1810, had entered France from Spain, but having a mission to General Clarke and Arthur O’Connor he was released. William Hayne, lace-maker of Nottingham, and having an extensive continental trade, was arrested in Paris in 1807, having a stock of lace in his possession. What was done with this venturesome trader is not stated. Nathaniel Parker Forth, a diplomatic emissary, the satellite of the Duke of Orleans who procured Pamela for Madame de Genlis, was reported to be in Paris in 1805, and was ordered to be watched;[248] but if such ‘a consummate intriguer’ had really been there he would certainly have been arrested and expelled. James Mathews, another diplomatic interloper, who had been arrested in Paris in 1793, landed at Havre without a passport in 1807 and vainly tried to pass for an American. The notorious swindler, Lisle Semple, was also reported to have been seen in Paris in 1805, yet this too is unconfirmed. He had been expelled as a spy in 1802.
There was even a report in Paris in 1805 that six English officers had come over to witness the coronation, but this seems highly improbable.
Napoleon’s long arm reached not only to Hamburg but to Italy. In 1806 all Englishmen found there were ordered to be arrested, and Graham, consequently apprehended at Venice, was sent to Valenciennes. Edward Dodwell, living at Rome, had to apply for leave to visit England in order to publish a work on Greece. John Wilson, a native of Liverpool, residing in Italy, was authorised in 1810, on account of his health, to live at Geneva. He afterwards asked permission to become partner in a firm at Bordeaux.[249] The Earl of Bristol, Bishop of Derry, would probably have been arrested, as he had been in 1798, had he not died at Albano on the 8th July 1803, before Napoleon had had time to look so far afield for his prey.
Sir George Rumbold, British Minister at Hamburg and son of Warren Hastings’ opponent at Calcutta, was seized by order of Napoleon in 1804. It is believed by the Rumbold family that this was instigated by the famous Pamela, Lady Edward Fitzgerald, who was then at Hamburg and in league with the Irish exiles there, to whom Rumbold’s vigilant observation was very irksome.[250] If so, she was guilty of treachery, for she had been very intimate with him.
Rumbold lived in a neighbouring village, going twice a week into Hamburg on mail days. A hundred soldiers under Major Maison landed at night on the coast, and ten or twelve of them drove in two carriages to the spot to surround the house and prevent any alarm. A sentinel was placed in front of every door and window. On the arrival of the rest of the detachment, a German civilian knocked at the door and stated that he had brought despatches. A servant bade him deliver them at the window, but the door was forced open and Rumbold was arrested in his bed. He expected nothing less than to be shot, as the Duc d’Enghien had been six months before, but Maison assured him that his life was safe. All his papers were seized, and these were expected to implicate the British Government in plots to assassinate Napoleon, an expectation, however, which was not realised. The Prince Regent, moreover, according to a police bulletin of 1805, referring to such plots, had said, ‘Let us meet Bonaparte like men, not like assassins.’[251] Rumbold, on being taken to Paris, was induced on the promise of the restitution of his papers to sign an engagement never to approach on non-British territory within a hundred miles of any post occupied by French troops. In Paris, if we may credit a police report, his terror revived. He asked for time to pray and to write to his family, adding that for eighteen months he had been disgusted with politics, and but for his children’s interests would have thrown up his appointment. He passed ten days in the Temple, and here is the description given of him:—
‘5 ft. 11 in. Hair brownish grey. Eyebrows dark grey. Forehead ordinary. Eyes greyish brown. Nose short, slim above and rather thick below. Mouth medium. Lips thick. Chin round. Face oval and full. A small mark on the left cheek.’
The King of Prussia had remonstrated against such a violation of German territory, and had ordered his Ambassador to Paris to demand his passports unless Rumbold were released. Accordingly the preposterous intention of trying him for conspiracy, if ever entertained, was abandoned, and he was escorted to Cherbourg, where, not without renewed apprehensions of being shot, he was handed over to a British frigate. He had already repented of signing the engagement, an act of cowardice, he said, tantamount to resignation. The gendarme major told him he might keep the matter secret, but Rumbold replied that he should be bound to inform his Government. He also expressed regret at his family affairs being pried into in his papers.[252] Rumbold, if the French reports are to be trusted, certainly showed pusillanimity, but the recent fate of the Duc d’Enghien was in his mind. The promise of restoring his papers was not fulfilled, and being censured by the English Government for the engagement entered into by him, he offered to go back to France and revoke that engagement. This, of course, was not allowed. In the following spring he repaired to Berlin to thank the King of Prussia for his intervention, and he followed the royal family in their retreat to Memel. There, tended by Prince Augustus when attacked with fever, he expired in December 1807. His widow in 1810 married Sir Sidney Smith, who likewise had had experience of the Temple prison. Both she and Sir Sidney ended their days in Paris.
In 1876 Sir Horace Rumbold obtained permission to inspect his grandfather’s confiscated papers in the French Archives, but found the family matters in them very meagre, while he suspected that the political portions had been withheld from him.[253]
Talleyrand, in a diplomatic circular justifying such high-handed acts, charged England with prostituting the functions of ambassadors by making them instigate the assassination of the Emperor; but Lord Hawkesbury in reply, while indignantly denying the charge, insisted that a belligerent was entitled to have dealings with malcontents, and he twitted France with incitement of Irish rebellions. Napoleon’s evident maxim, however, was that all was fair on his own side, and it must be confessed that, whereas no Irishman proposed to assassinate George III., French malcontents looked for no success unless through Napoleon being kidnapped or murdered.