In 1788 Jones entered the service of the empress Catherine of Russia, avowing his intention, however, “to preserve the condition of an American citizen and officer.” As a rear-admiral he took part in the naval campaign in the Liman (an arm of the Black Sea, into which flow the Bug and Dnieper rivers) against the Turks, but the jealous intrigues of Russian officers caused him to be recalled to St Petersburg for the pretended purpose of being transferred to a command in the North Sea. Here he was compelled to remain in idleness, while rival officers plotted against him and even maliciously assailed his private character. In August 1789 he left St Petersburg a bitterly disappointed man. In May 1790 he arrived in Paris, where he remained in retirement during the rest of his life, although he made several efforts to re-enter the Russian service.
Undue exertion and exposure had wasted his strength before he reached the prime of life, and after an illness, in which he was attended by the queen’s physician, he died on the 18th of July 1792. His body was interred in the St Louis cemetery for foreign Protestants, the funeral expenses being paid from the private purse of Pierrot François Simmoneau, the king’s commissary. In the confusion during the following years the burial place of Paul Jones was forgotten; but in June 1899 General Horace Porter, American ambassador to France, began a systematic search for the body, and after excavations on the site of the old Protestant cemetery, now covered with houses, a leaden coffin was discovered, which contained the body in a remarkable state of preservation. In July 1905 a fleet of American war-ships carried the body to Annapolis, where it now rests in one of the buildings of the naval academy.
Jones was a seaman of great bravery and technical ability, but over-jealous of his reputation and inclined to be querulous and boastful. The charges by the English that he was a pirate were particularly galling to him. Although of unprepossessing appearance, 5 ft. 7 in. in height and slightly round-shouldered, he was noted for his pleasant manners and was welcomed into the most brilliant courts of Europe.
Romance has played with the memory of Paul Jones to such an extent that few accounts of his life are correct. Of the early biographies the best are Sherburne’s (London, 1825), chiefly a collection of Jones’s correspondence; the Janette-Taylor Collection (New York, 1830), containing numerous extracts from his letters and journals; and the life by A. S. MacKenzie (2 vols., New York, 1846). In recent years a number of new biographies have appeared, including A. C. Buell’s (2 vols., 1900), the trustworthiness of which has been discredited, and Hutchins Hapgood’s in the Riverside Biographical Series (1901). The life by Cyrus Townsend Brady in the “Great Commanders Series” (1900) is perhaps the best.
JONES, MICHAEL (d. 1649), British soldier. His father was bishop of Killaloe in Ireland. At the outbreak of the English Civil War he was studying law, but he soon took service in the army of the king in Ireland. He was present with Ormonde’s army in many of the expeditions and combats of the devastating Irish War, but upon the conclusion of the “Irish Cessation” (see [Ormonde, James Butler, Duke of]) he resolved to leave the king’s service for that of the parliament, in which he soon distinguished himself by his activity and skill. In the Welsh War, and especially at the last great victory at Rowton Heath, Jones’s cavalry was always far superior to that of the Royalists, and in reward for his services he was made governor of Chester when that city fell into the hands of the parliament. Soon afterwards Jones was sent again to the Irish War, in the capacity of commander-in-chief. He began his work by reorganizing the army in the neighbourhood of Dublin, and for some time he carried on a desultory war of posts, necessarily more concerned for his supplies than for a victory. But at Dungan Hill he obtained a complete success over the army of General Preston, and though the war was by no means ended, Jones was able to hold a large tract of country for the parliament. But on the execution of Charles I., the war entered upon a new phase, and garrison after garrison fell to Ormonde’s Royalists. Soon Jones was shut up in Dublin, and then followed a siege which was regarded both in England and Ireland with the most intense interest. On the 2nd of August 1649 the Dublin garrison relieved itself by the brilliant action of Rathmines, in which the royal army was practically destroyed. A fortnight later Cromwell landed with heavy reinforcements from England. Jones, his lieutenant-general, took the field; but on the 19th of December 1649 he died, worn out by the fatigues of the campaign.
JONES, OWEN (1741-1814), Welsh antiquary, was born on the 3rd of September 1741 at Llanvihangel Glyn y Myvyr in Denbighshire. In 1760 he entered the service of a London firm of furriers, to whose business he ultimately succeeded. He had from boyhood studied Welsh literature, and later devoted time and money to its collection. Assisted by Edward William of Glamorgan (Iolo Morganwg) and Dr. Owen Pughe, he published, at a cost of more than £1000, the well-known Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (1801-1807), a collection of pieces dating from the 6th to the 14th century. The manuscripts which he had brought together are deposited in the British Museum; the material not utilized in the Myvyrian Archaiology amounts to 100 volumes, containing 16,000 pages of verse and 15,300 pages of prose. Jones was the founder of the Gwyneddigion Society (1772) in London for the encouragement of Welsh studies and literature; and he began in 1805 a miscellany—the Greal—of which only one volume appeared. An edition of the poems of Davydd ab Gwilym was also issued at his expense. He died on the 26th of December 1814 at his business premises in Upper Thames Street, London.
JONES, OWEN (1809-1874), British architect and art decorator, son of Owen Jones, a Welsh antiquary, was born in London. After an apprenticeship of six years in an architect’s office, he travelled for four years in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt and Spain, making a special study of the Alhambra. On his return to England in 1836 he busied himself in his professional work. His forte was interior decoration, for which his formula was: “Form without colour is like a body without a soul.” He was one of the superintendents of works for the Exhibition of 1851 and was responsible for the general decoration of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Along with Digby Wyatt, Jones collected the casts of works of art with which the palace was filled. He died in London on the 19th of April 1874.