After the treaty of peace with France and the colonies, the island, under the terms of the treaty, was yielded back to Great Britain. Shortly afterward Dillon paid a visit to London in the train of the French embassy.
He was presented at the court and, having paid his respects to the king, George III., the lord chancellor, Loughborough, who was in attendance, crossed over to Dillon and said to him, after some preliminary compliments: “I must thank you for the equity and fairness of your decisions given whilst you were acting as governor of the island. My court has had occasion to pass on some of the cases you decided and we found no occasion to dissent from your judgments.”
Sad to say, this gallant soldier met his death on the scaffold, at the hands of the ruffians who were in the ascendance during the French revolution, as did so many thousands of the noblest and best of French men and women.
At the last moment, as he stood at the foot of the fatal guillotine, a lady who preceded him and who, like Dillon, was to meet her doom by the order of the same furies, turned to the count, saying: “Would you not oblige me by going first?”
“Certainly, madam,” was the answer of the chivalric Irishman, and ascending before the lady, in a moment the horrible instrument had ended the career of the heroic Count Arthur Dillon.
A namesake, Colonel Theobald Dillon, who had been with Rochambeau at Yorktown, was another of the victims of the French Revolution, under circumstances even more revolting. But I must stay my pen on this subject.
The erection of the monument or statue of Lafayette in Paris a few years back, as a token and testimony of America’s gratitude to France, has since then been supplemented by the installation of a fine statue of Rochambeau in Washington—a like tribute to the value and importance of the aid given by France in the critical period of the Revolutionary War.
The inauguration of the Rochambeau statue, which is one of the finest and most impressive in the nation’s capital, was made the occasion of ceremonies and exercises of the highest dignity and importance. Of course, these were reported with great fullness at the time, and I have no need to dwell on the details now.