Nettled by this veiled suggestion of treachery, Barthélemy received his visitor in a manner which served to confirm this impression. Producing a letter from the Baron de Breteuil he informed Cagliostro that he was authorized to give him permission to return to France. But Cagliostro, having taken no steps to obtain this permission was naturally suspicious of the source from which it emanated.
“How is it possible,” he asked, “that a simple letter of the Baron de Breteuil should be able to revoke the lettre de cachet signed by the King himself, by which I was exiled? I tell you, sir, I can recognize neither M. de Breteuil nor his orders.”
He then begged Barthélemy to let him have the letter or a copy of it. The ambassador, however, for some inexplicable reason saw fit to refuse the request, whereupon the interview ended.
There was certainly nothing unreasonable in the request.
“Without having some proof of my permission to return to France,” says Cagliostro in the letter he subsequently wrote to the Public Advertiser, “how could I have answered the Governor of Boulogne or Calais when I was asked by what authority I returned? I should at once have been made a prisoner.”
The next day Lord George Gordon publicly constituted himself the champion of Cagliostro in a letter to the Public Advertiser, in which he made an outrageous and utterly unjustifiable attack on Marie Antoinette. No better illustration could be given of the spirit in which the established authorities sought to crush the revolutionary tendency of the times, which had begun to manifest itself, than the price that Lord George was made to pay for his libel. Exasperated by the insults and calumnies that were now continually directed against his unpopular consort, Louis XVI ordered his ambassador in London to bring an action against Gordon.
Under ordinary circumstances Gordon, relying on the resentment that England cherished against France for the part she had taken in the American War of Independence, would have had nothing to fear. But he was a rabid demagogue with a bad record. A few years before he had accepted the presidency of the Protestant Association formed to secure the repeal of the act by which the Catholic disabilities imposed in the time of William and Mary had been removed. It was this association which had fomented the famous Gordon riots, as they were called, when London had been on the point of being pillaged. Gordon, it is true, had disclaimed all responsibility for the conduct of the mob, which, however, acknowledged him as its leader, and though tried for high treason had been acquitted. But this experience had not sobered his fanaticism. He was the soul of sedition in his own country, and one of the most notorious and violent revolutionists in Europe at this period. The British Government was only too glad of the opportunity afforded it by the French to reduce him to silence.
Gordon, accordingly, fled to Holland, but learning that the Dutch Government was preparing to send him back, he returned secretly to England. Soon afterwards he was betrayed by a Jew, whose religion he had adopted and with whom he had taken shelter. The action of the French Government having in the meantime been decided against him, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment and to pay a heavy fine. This was the end of Lord George Gordon. For at the expiration of his term of confinement, being unable to pay the fine, he remained a prisoner, and eventually died in Newgate.
LORD GEORGE GORDON