‘A mortal man above all mortal praise.’
‘A mortal man above all mortal praise.’
‘A mortal man above all mortal praise.’
‘A mortal man above all mortal praise.’
He called on Paine, and in hisImaginary Conversations(fifth series,XI.) introduced a minute description of him. He represents him as uncombed, unshaven, and unwashed, and as solacing his misfortunes by brandy, yet he makes him foresee Napoleon’s inordinateambition and fall. Landor revisited Paris in 1814 and 1840. Paine, by the way, was escorted to Havre at the end of August 1802 on his way to America by Thomas, or ‘Clio,’ Rickman, a versifier if not exactly a poet, who named his six sons Paine, Washington, Franklin, Rousseau, Petrarch, and Volney. They were surely to be pitied. Another versifier was William Parsons, who in 1785 had published a magazine at Florence and had associated there with Madame Piozzi, Robert Merry, and Bertie Greatheed. Greatheed, as we have seen, was also now in Paris.
Amongst other writers of works of imagination were Thomas Hope, the author ofAnastasia, art connoisseur, and father of Beresford Hope;[105]William Combe, who had married Mrs. Cosway’s sister, author ofDr. Syntax, a book widely read in its day; and Edgeworth, who was arrested and but for Whitworth’s remonstrance would have been expelled. He fancied that he had been taken for a brother of the Abbé Edgeworth, LouisXVI.’s confessor, a distant kinsman whom he had never even seen; but the police register[106]states that he had indulged in ‘indiscreet talk.’ His eldest son Lovell, as we shall find, did not come off so lightly. Edgeworth was accompanied by his fourth wife, his distinguished daughter Maria, and her younger half-sister Charlotte. He had intended to stay two years, but happily left in time. Maria revisited Paris in 1820.
More matter-of-fact writers included Anthony Aufrere, an art connoisseur, a contributor to theGentleman’s Magazine, a translator from the German and Italian, and editor ofLockhart’s Letters. Hazlitt, the critic and essayist, who was introduced to Prosper Merimée’s father, the artist, copied at the Louvre, and paid a second visit in 1824. Filon fancifully suggests that the unborn Prosper was influenced by his mother’s impression of Hazlitt. There was also John Allen, the Edinburgh Reviewer, a ‘man of vast information and great conversational powers,’ says Macaulay, but who, living with Lord Holland from 1801 till his death in 1843, wrote little. John Gifford, the Tory pamphleteer, editor of theAnti-Jacobin Review, a continuation of the famousAnti-Jacobin, had been the author, concocter, or arranger ofLetters from France in 1792. His visits to France did not lessen his insular prejudices. In contrast to him there was David Williams, Nonconformist minister and schoolmaster, but now best known as founder and secretary of the Royal Literary Fund. He had been in Paris in the winter of 1792, but seemingly did not attend the British dinner at which an address to the Convention was adopted. Madame Roland regretted that he had not been elected a member of that body in lieu of Paine, but he had reason to congratulate himself on this. Lebrun, Minister of Foreign Affairs, entrusted him with a letter to Grenville regretting the imminence of hostilities and suggesting that, as in the previous war, a few packets might continue to ply between Dover and Calais;[107]but the letter received no answer. James Anderson, whose extensive view ranged from chimneys to cattle-breeding and political economy, had corresponded with Washington on ‘moral philosophy and agricultural topics.’ Last, but far from least, was Henry Hallam, as yet a young man of twenty-five.
We now come to four men who made France their home. Quintin Craufurd, a nabob from Manila, acting on his maxim, ‘Make your fortune where you like, but enjoy it at Paris,’ settled there in 1780. He provided the carriage in which the royal family in 1791 attempted to escape. He himself had gone to Brussels, perhaps expecting to meet them, and not venturing to return, his furniture was confiscated. He was now able to resume life in Paris, and frequently played whist with Talleyrand, for cards were his passion. Herbert Croft, nominally a clergyman as well as a baronet, though he had little of the reverend about him, and was dependent on a Government pension of £200, had been the friend of Johnson, whom he furnished with a life of Chatterton. He, like Boswell, was duped by the Ireland forgeries. Just too late to succour Chatterton, he was also just too late to succour a French poet, Grainville, a cousin of Bernardin de St. Pierre; but he happily did not foresee a more direct connection with a third suicide, that of his brother and successor in the title, Princess Charlotte’s surgeon. He wrote in theArgusin 1805 in favour of peace. Becoming the companion of Lady Mary Hamilton, daughter of Lord Leven, another state pensioner (but only to the amount of £80), Croft in1809 engaged Charles Nodier as his secretary, and Nodier for two years turned into French his and the lady’s productions. Both these amateur authors died in 1816.
The third Anglo-Frenchman was John Fraser Frisell, a Glasgow student who in 1792, at the age of sixteen, went to France to complete his education. Enthusiastic for the Revolution, he was imprisoned for fifteen months at Dijon during the Terror. That imprisonment, however, procured him the lifelong friendship of fellow-captives, Guitant and his wife, who offered him a home from 1794 to 1802, and he thus became intimate with Chateaubriand and Joubert. Chateaubriand styled him the Greek Englishman. Marrying a Frenchwoman, he indulged his passion for Greek authors, for the chase, and for travelling. On the death of a daughter in 1832, Chateaubriand, then himself a political prisoner, wrote an elegy on her. Frisell published in French a treatise on the British constitution, and presented a copy of it to Louis Napoleon in Switzerland, who promised him in return his own sketch of a French constitution. Frisell also contributed to theJournal des Débats.[108]He turned Catholic just before his death, which took place at Torquay in 1846.
The fourth Anglo-Frenchman was Henry Grey MacNab, a scion of a Scotch-Irish family who had studied under Reid at Glasgow University. When detained in 1803 he went to Montpellier for eleven years, there studying medicine, political economy, and pedagogy. Before quitting England he had publisheda pamphlet against a proposed tax on coal, and in Paris in 1808 he wrote on education, on Robert Owen, of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer, and on the state of the world at the beginning of the 19th century. He was honorary physician to the Duke of Kent, to whom he dedicated his book on Owen and whose portrait he prefixed to the French translation. He died in Paris in 1823, leaving an unfinished work on premature burial.
Some visitors deserve notice on account of kinsmen or friends. There are Mary and Agnes Berry, for instance, the ‘sister-wives’ of Horace Walpole, one of whom, born in 1743, survived till 1852. They accompanied their father. Mrs. Damer introduced them to Napoleon, his mother, Josephine, and Madame de Staël. This last lady thought Mary by far the cleverest Englishwoman she had met. The Berrys had seen Paris in 1791. They must have been pleased with their visit in the spring of 1802, for they went again in October with Mrs. Damer on their way to Nice and Geneva, passing through Germany and embarking at Hamburg for England in May. We may dispose more summarily of Francis (brother of Sir John) Moore; William Monsell, whose son, successively Paymaster-General, Postmaster-General, and Vice-President of the Board of Trade, became Lord Emly; and Sir Herbert Pakington, grandfather of the Secretary for War of 1867–1868. Henry Bickersteth, surgeon, was the father of the hymnologist and of Lord Langdale, Master of the Rolls, while Sir Henry Tichborne and his brother James were respectively great-uncle and grandfather of the RogerTichborne personated by Arthur Orton. Henry Herbert Southey, a youth of nineteen studying medicine at Norwich, had there made the acquaintance of William Taylor, whom he now accompanied. His brother, the poet, had, on a visit to Norwich in 1798, formed a friendship with Taylor, in spite of their political and religious differences. Young Southey became physician to George iv. and Queen Adelaide.[109]Timothy Priestley must have been the son of Timothy, brother of the famous Priestley. The two brothers, both Nonconformist ministers, differed in doctrine. James Wollstonecraft was probably one of the three brothers of Mary. He was a London merchant, and in 1798 had been expelled from Paris, apparently as a suspected spy. A Mr. Adderley was probably Charles Bowyer Adderley, great-uncle of the present Lord Norton, but he may have been Thomas Adderley, an Irish M.P. in 1790. Mrs. Peploe of Herefordshire, who accompanied her husband, was the aunt of Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Anthony Storer, Secretary of the Paris Embassy in 1783, was apparently the nephew and heir of Anthony Morris Storer of Purley, a man of fashion and a bibliophile, an M.P. in 1772. General Scott was probably the father-in-law of Canning and of the Duke of Portland; he was reputed to have made money at previous visits by gambling, and Canning’s wife had a bequest of £100,000. Shuckburgh Ashby Apreece had a fascinating wife, the widow of a John Kerr. Her literary receptions at Edinburgh were famous, andpeople fancied she was the original of Madame de Staël’sCorinne. Again a widow, she married in 1812 Sir Humphry Davy. A Mr. Tilt was probably the father of John Tilt, a Brighton physician who introduced into England the speculum, with which he had become acquainted through Récamier. Denis Disney Ffytche was doubtless the nephew of Dr. John Disney, a Lincolnshire vicar related I think to the Tennysons, who became a noted Unitarian minister in London, and also of Lewis Disney of Swinderby, who added his wife’s name of Ffytche. If so, he must have been bent on recovering his uncle’s property at Chambourcy, near Paris, for Lewis Disney, leaving for Switzerland with his two daughters and their governess in March 1793, had been classed as anémigréand had vainly pleaded for restitution. James Forbes, a nabob of whom we shall hear again, was the grandfather of Montalembert, the French historian. Of Richard Trench, a barrister, father of Archbishop Trench, we shall also hear later on. John Sympson Jessopp, a landowner and barrister, was destined to be the father of Dr. Augustus Jessopp. He was accompanied by his younger brother, and we shall hear of them too again.
Should we reckon among Englishmen George Francis Grand, Madame Talleyrand’s first husband? He was a native of Lausanne, but entered the East India Company’s service, started an English factory, and married in India Catherine Noel Judde, daughter of Peter John Worle, a Dane, harbour-master of Chandernagor. He divorced her in India, and in 1798, having returned to Europe in straitened circumstances,obtained a French, divorce likewise. He now repaired to Paris, to solicit through his ex-wife’s influence a Government appointment; but he was unjustly suspected of seeking to extort money from Talleyrand. It was alleged, indeed, that he exacted 80,000 f. by a threat of disputing the validity of the divorce, and that on returning to London he demanded an additional £10,000. ‘Never did a husband,’ writes a Bourbon agent, ‘make so much profit out of his wife’s infidelity, and never did a man play so pitiful a role as M. de Talleyrand.’[110]What is certain is that Grand was assigned a post at the Cape under the so-called Batavian republic, really a French dependency. When England seized the Cape he remained there till his death in 1821.[111]He is said to have married again.
There were fugitives from law or justice, and other black sheep. William Ward, yeoman and land-agent of Benenden, Kent, who had been enthusiastic for the French Revolution, got into difficulties—‘through slovenly book-keeping’ says Mr. C. F. Hardy, editor of theBenenden Letters,—and took refuge in France, where he died in 1821, aged ninety-three. He had settled at Valenciennes, and under the Berlin decree of 1807 was for five years, in spite of his age, treated as a prisoner of war. His honesty seems unimpeachable, but as much cannot be said for another land-agent, Thomas Stone, who had acted for the Duke of Bedford and for Lord Digby. They had every apparent reason to trust him, for he was an Enclosure Commissioner and was employed by the Board of Agriculture in writingcounty reports. His love of style and conviviality, however, led him astray, and he now absconded to Paris with his wife and five children, leaving a large sum due to Lord Digby. He for a time lived in luxury, affected to be bent on improving French agriculture, and talked of buying and stocking a large farm. In reality he had no money, and in 1804 he was charged with forging a cheque, but was acquitted. He more than once applied for permission to visit Normandy to buy sheep, but was refused.[112]Latterly dependent on the earnings of his wife and daughter, he died in Paris in 1815, at the age of eighty-three. Speaking of land-agents reminds me that some small English land-owners, as the Marquis of Buckingham was informed, sold their property, invested part of the proceeds in the funds, so as to ensure the same income as before, and had settled in France on land purchased at ten and a half years’ rental. Such cases, however, must have been very rare, and Napoleon, as we have seen, debarred foreigners from holding real property; but Thomas Talbot, brother of an admiral, may have had the idea of colonisation in France, though he ultimately obtained a grant of 5000 acres on the shore of Lake Erie, where he founded Port Talbot. As for artisans who went over, enticed by reports of high wages and cheap living, they were speedily disillusioned and were glad to return.
We may include among the outlaws, though he was not of English birth, Bodini, who had been editor ofBell’s Messengerand had been expelled under the Alien Act. He joined the staff of theArgusin Paris. Anote of the French police describes him as a man of caustic speech, turning everything into ridicule, and consequently having no friends. He pretended, it says, to have made important revelations to Napoleon, for whom, according to another account, he dissected, so to speak, the London newspapers.
We come lastly toémigréswho took the opportunity of returning to France, for several of them were Britons by birth, while others, having resided in England, possess some interest for us. There was Charles Jerningham, who had served in the French army, and now, reclaiming confiscated papers, pleaded that he had never in exile fought against France.[113]Lady Jerningham, his mother, however, was so patriotic an Englishwoman that on the renewal of the war she proposed to raise and head a body of six hundred men, who, in case of invasion, should drive all the cattle from the East Anglian coast into the interior of the country. Daniel Charles O’Connell, of Darrynane, styled in France Count O’Connell, uncle of the Liberator, was one of the earliest arrivals. Entering the French army in 1762 at the age of seventeen, he had taken part in the siege of Gibraltar in 1766, and in 1788 had drawn up articles of war by which the French army is still governed. On the fall of the monarchy he went to England, where in 1796 he married the Countess Bellevue, an exile like himself. In February 1802 he repaired to Paris with his wife and two stepdaughters, in the hope of recovering her property in St. Domingo. He calculated on returning in August,but he stayed, as we shall see, too long. He was naturalised in 1818, and was made a French peer; he died in 1835. Anotherémigréwas Arthur Dillon, a connection of the guillotined general of that name, who had with difficulty escaped from France during the Terror. Curiously enough Réné de Montalembert, though anémigré, visited Paris as an English officer, for in 1799 he had entered the British army, and had served in the West Indies and Egypt. He afterwards served in India and Spain, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, but after Waterloo returned to France and was appointed to an embassy at Stuttgart. He had married in 1808 James Forbes’s daughter, Eliza Rose, and their son, mostly brought up by Forbes, was the historian of whom Pasquier aptly said, ‘he is an Anglo-Saxon Frenchman.’ Fagan, ex-captain in Dillon’s regiment, who also re-entered France, was despatched in 1810 by Fouché, without Napoleon’s knowledge, to discuss peace with Lord Wellesley. This occasioned Fouché’s dismissal. Alexander d’Arblay preceded his English wife, the famous Fanny Burney. His friend Lauriston had arranged that, after serving a year in St. Domingo, he should retire from the French army on a pension; but on his writing an indiscreet letter to Napoleon to say that he could never bear arms against England he was struck off the roll. Hoping, however, that Napoleon’s irritation would evaporate, he sent for his wife and child in April 1802, and on war breaking out they were unable, being French subjects, to return to England till 1812, when, during the Emperor’s absence, d’Arblay managed to procure a passport forthem. He himself had meanwhile obtained a post in the Ministry of the Interior. Lally Tollendal, who went over to obtain restitution of his property, had also married an Englishwoman, Amelia Hardcastle, and in April 1802 she rejoined her husband and his daughter by his first wife.
The most prominent of the returning exiles was Calonne, LouisXVI.’s Minister of Finance. He was the man who, when asked by Marie Antoinette to do something which she acknowledged to be difficult, replied, ‘If it is merely difficult, madam, you may consider it already done: if it is impossible it shall be done.’ Shortly after his dismissal from office he had married Madame Haveley, widow of a rich Paris financier. She is described as English, but I am unable to ascertain her maiden name. Taking refuge in England in 1788, and there assisting Madame La Motte in her scurrilous pamphlet on the diamond necklace, Calonne was at first very bountiful to his fellow-exiles, but he soon quarrelled with them. He went to Paris in May 1802, but must have intended returning to England, for he had applied to Merry for a passport when he was taken ill, and expired on the 30th September. Another prominent politician was Montlosier, the member of the National Assembly who, in opposing the confiscation of the bishops’ revenues, exclaimed, ‘You deprive them of their gold crosses, but they will take the wooden cross which has saved the world.’ He had edited theCourrier de Londres, which was so favourable to Napoleon that he was allowed to return from exile and have his paper partlyprinted in Paris. It was, however, suppressed after a few weeks, and Montlosier was appointed editor of theBulletin de Paris, in which he requited British hospitality by vilifying the English. In all other respects his political career down to his death in 1838 was highly creditable. Cazalès, who before emigrating had deprecated violent measures in the National Assembly, also re-entered France, and was offered, but declined, office under the Consulate.
The Duke and Duchess de Fitz-James—he was a descendant of JamesII.with the bend sinister—wereémigrésof a different stamp, being staunch royalists. So also, I believe, was Colonel O’Mahony. Patrick Wall, who at eighteen had in 1745 been with the Young Pretender, had been wounded at Culloden, and had then entered the French army, in like manner returned to France. An uncle, also a Jacobite refugee, had bequeathed him a handsome property. He died at Chatillon-sur-Seine in 1809.
The returning exiles included a multitude of priests. Sir John Carr crossed over from Southampton to Havre with some of them, one being, he says, ninety-five years of age, who was scarcely expected to land alive. There were also wives and daughters of Toulon refugees. It is unpleasant to read in Henri Martin’s history that some of these clerical passengers afterwards repaid the hospitality they had enjoyed, by vilifying England in episcopal pastorals, in order to curry favour with Napoleon.