5. The fifth marriage of the Dutch prisoners was that of Berthold Johannas Justin Wyeth to Sarah Wotton. These marriages were all by licence and not by banns. In this case the entry is “Licence with consent of Parents,” but this by no means implies that the other marriages took place without such consent; the addition of these words depended upon the habit of the officiating minister. The witness was B. Pletsz. Mr. Wyeth was 2nd Lieutenant of the Furie, and was received on parole on 19th November 1798. He was not exchanged under the Alkmaar Cartel, but remained a prisoner until the 16th October 1801. [208]
As regards the absence of any evidence of the marriage of the French prisoners and British women, it must be remembered that the vast majority of the French were Roman Catholics, and that mixed marriages of members of that Church with Protestants were discouraged by the authorities of both Churches alike. There existed also throughout these years a fierce animosity between the French and the English, and when it is added that the French Government did not acknowledge the legality of such marriages, so that in many instances the unfortunate wives when they returned with their husbands at the close of the war were not allowed to land, we can understand that almost irresistible pressure would be exercised to prevent these unions, and that intimacies and flirtations which might ripen into love would very probably be strongly discouraged.
One instance of an attachment between a French prisoner confined at Norman Cross and an English girl, and their subsequent marriage, was that of Jean Marie Philippe Habart to Elizabeth Snow, of Stilton. In the prison register we find Jean Habart entered as a sailor, captured off Calais, 20th June 1803, in L’Abondance, a small vessel of ten tons. He was put on board L’Immortalité, and from her transferred to the prison ship Sandwich; was sent thence to Norman Cross, being received 27th August 1803. He acted as baker to Mr. Lindsay, the contractor, and was discharged on 20th June 1811. This official statement differs from the family tradition in two points only: the register says (probably incorrectly) that he was a sailor, the family that he was only temporarily on the boat fishing; the register says that he was freed on 20th June 1811, his granddaughter believed that he was freed on the emptying of the prison in 1814 (the register in this case is doubtless correct). His granddaughter’s account is, that M. Jean M. P. Habart was the son of a gunsmith in a good position in a town on the north coast of France, and that he was captured while fishing off the coast, and was imprisoned at Norman Cross. There, as we learn from the register, not being a combatant, but a civilian prisoner of war, he was employed as baker to the contractor.
His future wife, the daughter of a farmer in Stilton, was in the habit of bringing up the milk bought for the prisoners’ use, and she would probably have frequent interviews with the contractor’s assistant, and as her granddaughter says, “she fell in love with him.” The attachment was mutual, and when after his release he returned to France, he left his heart behind him. During his imprisonment his father had died, leaving property for his children, [210a] and Jean, when he had realised his share, returned to England, married Miss Snow, and settled in business, as a baker and corn merchant, in Stilton. The years of his imprisonment had been sweetened by love, but his end was a tragic one. On 24th January 1840, forty-three years after he passed through the prison gates and first saw the hated caserns and fenced courts of Norman Cross, he was killed within sight of the fields on which they stood.
He was returning from a round, which he had been making to collect money from his customers, and it is supposed that at an inn in Peterborough he had shown his well-filled purse, and was followed on the Norman Cross Road to the spot about three miles from Peterborough, where he was found with his head battered in and his pockets rifled, his empty purse being found some time after in an adjacent field. [210b]
Such histories as have been here given from the writer’s long and intimate knowledge of the locality might doubtless be collected in the neighbourhood of other prisons, but the danger of assuming that the mere occurrence of French names in the neighbourhood of a depot “still speak of the old war time” has already been dealt with in Chap. IV, p. 59, footnote.
The parole-breakers who managed to escape, varied from the humblest and poorest of the non-combatants, who had to pass through many hardships and trying adventures before securing their freedom, to men in the position and affluence of General Lefebre, who, in May 1812, accompanied by his wife, escaped from Cheltenham. He personated a German count; his wife, in boy’s clothes, passed for his son, and his aide-de-camp acted as valet. They put up at an hotel in Jermyn Street, got a passport, and reached Dover in style, whence they were conveyed to the French coast. From France he wrote an insolent letter to the English Government in justification of his breach of parole.
A slightly different version was that he reached London as a Russian General Officer, with two aides-de-camp, one of whom was his wife dressed in military costume; all conversed in German.
The conduct of the officers on parole both as regards the breaking of their parole and their general orderly behaviour, varied greatly in different districts, as also did the attitude of the surrounding population towards the prisoners when they attempted to escape. A population which for centuries had been accustomed to receive the benefits of, and to ignore or assist in, the trade of smuggling, would view the attempt to escape in a different light to that in which the quiet agricultural population of the Midlands and East Anglia would regard it.
The father of the writer, who had seen and heard much of the prisoners of war during his boyhood in Perth, said that while the British prisoners in France contrasted unfavourably with the French in England, because they showed none of the skill and industry which enabled the French to produce work, by the sale of which they raised large sums of money, the French displayed a moral inferiority by the frequency with which they broke their parole, that is, disregarded the pledge given on their word of honour. The following return shows that in the three years included in the table, about one in every ten of the officers of the army and navy who were on parole broke their pledge. The proportion cannot be calculated in the case of other persons of promiscuous occupations, as the table does not give the total number of the prisoners of this class, but only the actual number, 218, who broke their parole.