Mrs. Sands says that, in examining the register in the Record Office, she and her late husband found that a large number of those buried came from Protestant provinces of France.
The Depot being in Yaxley parish, it is probable that during its occupation the vicar would be asked to bury the Protestants and possibly to minister to the sick and others in the prison. But that no entry of any such burial is found in the parish registers, nor any note by an incumbent of duty performed either in the prison or cemetery, points to the fact that the prison was considered extra-parochial. The present vicar, the Rev. E. H. Brown, who is keenly interested in the subject of this narrative, has ascertained from a relative of the Rev. T. Hinde that, to her certain knowledge, that clergyman, a former curate of Yaxley, was “Protestant chaplain to Norman Cross Barracks.” Mr. Brown adds that Mr. Hinde was apparently curate from September 1813 to January 1816; this would cover the last eight months only of the prison occupation.
This statement, from a member of Mr. Hinde’s family, leaves room to hope that the Vicar of Yaxley or his curate actually officiated as Protestant minister for those prisoners who were his co-religionists during their enforced sojourn within the boundaries of his cure.
But it must be borne in mind that those days were not as ours, and that there was little probability that Britain’s prisoners would be better treated than her soldiers and sailors. A writer in Notes and Queries quotes, respecting the treatment of the latter:
“Gleig—‘The Subaltern’ of 1813–14, who subsequently took holy orders and wrote a Life of Wellington—assures us that a hundred years ago Tommy Atkins was ‘spaded under’ without benefit of clergy, and it is highly improbable that any existing memorial marks, nay, that any memorial ever marked, the grave of even one of the thousands of British privates who lie among the Spanish hills and valleys. All that the tourist can hope to find in these distant and lonely spots is the occasional tomb of a British officer, or (quite exceptionally) of a favourite ‘non-com.’” [177]
That priests did frequent the prison in the earlier years of the war, 1797–1802, before the Peace of Amiens, we know from the correspondence of the Transport Commissioners with the agents. The prisoners themselves petitioned to have priests sent to them, and at length two priests were permitted to reside in the prison. That these gentlemen did not strictly confine themselves to the spiritual duties of their office we have reason to believe from an instruction given to Captain Pressland, the agent appointed when the prison was reopened in 1803. He was told that, “profiting by experience gained during the previous war,” the Board had decided that “no priests were to be admitted, except in extreme cases, and then under carefully arranged restrictions, as they had abused the privileges allowed them,” and that “a turnkey or clerk was to be present during the whole time they were in the hospital.” This memorandum evidently implies that at this time there was no regular provision for the spiritual needs of the general body of prisoners, no chaplain appointed by the authorities, and that no regular visitation except to the sick and dying was to be permitted.
The Government was not without evidence that many of these priests had supplemented the spiritual aid by acting as go-betweens and secretly conveying correspondence to and from the prisoners. Any collusion between the prisoners and possible foreign agents outside was provided against by the regulation that all letters should pass through the agent’s hands.
The continual recurrence throughout the war of plots for a general rising, originating with the French Government; the frequent attempts either of single prisoners or a combined body of them to escape, were probably, at the period with which we are dealing, felt to be sufficient reason for an order which in the present day would hardly be tolerated by the British public. A year later, in 1804, the commissioners, while affirming that they had no power to prevent French priests living in Stilton, were most decided in declining to allow them to live in the Depot, saying that at such a critical time they could not possibly grant such a privilege to foreigners “of that equivocal description”!
The Transport Board must have seen reason to relax the orders, for three years after this direction was given we find the Bishop of Moulins not resident in the Depot, but living at Stilton a mile from it, on an allowance received from the British Government, and earning a high character for his work among the prisoners. He was also officiating outside the prison, for in the register kept by the neighbouring priest, the Rev. W. Hayes of King’s Cliffe, in whose mission Stilton was, are, among others, the following three entries of baptisms to which allusion has already been made in Chap. IV, p. 59:
1st. “1807.—John Stephen Felix Delapoux, son of John Andrew Delapoux and of Sarah Mason (his lawful wife), of Norman Cross, Yaxley, Huntingdonshire, was born July 22 and baptised August 2nd, 1807, following, by Charles Lewis de Salmon du Chattelier, formerly Vicar General of the Diocese of Mans, and Canon of the Cathedral Church. Sponsor, the Rt. Rev. Stephen John Baptist Lewis de Galois de la Tour, residing at Stilton in the said county, which I, the undersigned, hereby certify from the original.