Englishmen in the French Revolution

Front matter

ENGLISHMEN

in the

FRENCH REVOLUTION.

Preface

PREFACE.

The history of the French Revolution has been written with greater fullness and from a greater variety of standpoints than any other event on the globe, yet this book takes up untrodden ground. It is well known, indeed, that the Revolution attracted to Paris men from all parts of the world, and of almost all categories—enthusiasts, adventurers, sensation-hunters; some of the best specimens of humanity and some of the worst; some of the most generous minds and some of the most selfish; some of the busiest brains and some of the idlest. Not a few of these moths perished in the flame which they had imprudently approached; others escaped with a singeing of their wings; others, again, were fortunate enough to pass unscathed. Some died in their beds just before the Terror ended, but without any assurance of its ending; others only just saw the end.

The foreigners, like the natives, who fairly survived the Revolution, had very various fortunes. Some were thoroughly disillusioned, became vehement reactionaries, or abjured politics and were transformed into sober or enterprising men of business. Others crossed or recrossed the Atlantic, and lived to a green and honoured old age, or gave way to degrading vices. Some, remaining in France, hailed the rising star of Napoleon, and lived long enough to be disenchanted, but perhaps not long enough to see the restoration of the Bourbons.

The characters of these men are an interesting chapter in psychology. The honest among them had left house and parents and brethren, if not wife and children, for the sake of what they believed to be in its way a kingdom of heaven. They appeal to our sympathies more than the cold observers, if indeed there were any such, who foresaw the lamentable collapse of all these highly-wrought expectations. No doubt some of these immigrants were restless agitators, empty demagogues, pretentious egotists; but even these are not undeserving of study. There was much base metal, but there was also genuine gold. If of some who underwent imprisonment or death we can hardly avoid thinking that they deserved their fate, there are others whom we must sincerely pity, men to whom the Revolution was a religion overriding all claims of country and kindred.

French historians have not taken, and could not be expected to take, much notice of aliens, even of those more or less actors in the Revolution. In their eyes they are but imperceptible specks in the great eddy. Their attention is absorbed by their own countrymen; they have none to spare for interlopers, none of whom appreciably influenced the course of events. If they devote a few lines to Cloots, who had to wait till 1876 for a biographer, or to Paine, whom they often describe as an American, they consider they have done quite enough.

French readers, moreover, while anxious for the minutest details on , or Madame Roland, or Danton, and while familiar at least with the names of the principal Girondins and Montagnards, do not care to hear about a foreigner who here and there sat in the Assemblies, commanded on battlefields, or fell a victim to the guillotine. Yet for us, surely, our fellow-countrymen have an especial interest. We would fain single them out on the crowded stage of the Revolution. They are more to us, not than the actors of the first rank, but than secondary characters like Brissot or Vergniaud. Here, however, English writers will not help us. If they have not surveyed the field with French eyes, they have at least used French spectacles. French artists have painted the panorama; English connoisseurs give us their opinion of the panorama, but not of the actual scene which it represents. To vary the metaphor, or rather to state a fact, they work up the materials collected by French authors; they do not go in search of materials for themselves. Not a single English book on the Revolution tells us who represented our own country in Cloots's deputation of the human race, explains who was the hero of the Jacobin Club in December 1791, gives an accurate account of Paine's experiences, or states the number, much less the names, of the British victims to the guillotine.

If we turn from actors in the Revolution to mere spectators of it, their name is legion. There were old residents in Paris who stayed till it was too late to flee, either because they sympathised with the movement or because they took it for a mere passing storm. There were travellers, attracted by curiosity or going through France on their way to Italy. There were youths sent by their families to learn French, and suddenly immersed in the whirlpool. There were pamphleteers and insolvent debtors, fleeing English prisons only to fall into French ones. On the other hand, there were prisoners in France whom the Revolution set at liberty. There were soldiers of fortune who offered their services to the Republic. There were "bluestockings" who employed their pens or their purses in its defence; nuns who underwent captivity and privations; and ex-mistresses of royal personages. There were diplomatists astounded at the collapse of the oldest dynasty in Europe. There were two future prime ministers, one a mere child, the other a young man, destined to the longest premierships of this century. There was a future poet laureate, enraptured with the Revolution, but eventually to become an ultra-Conservative. There were versifiers who chanted the triumphs of the Revolution, philosophers who early discerned the clouds on its horizon, materialists who were stupefied at the results of their theories, inventors who counted on prompt appreciation of their merits, clubbists whose congratulations to the Convention did not avert imprisonment. There were persons of all stations, peers and grooms, baronets and tradesmen, authors and artisans, fine ladies and seamstresses, the antipodes of society being sometimes hustled together into one cell. Some had narrow escapes from detention, others spent long months of anxious suspense in the numberless improvised prisons necessitated by the improvident demolition of the spacious and nearly empty Bastille.

It may seem strange that so many British subjects, or at least those in no danger of molestation at home, should have remained in France during the Terror, but it is easy to be wise after the event. The Revolution was like a day in early spring. It commences with brilliant sunshine, light showers then pass over, black clouds next begin to collect, but there are still occasional gleams of sunshine; presently the hail pelts, the wind howls, there is a rumbling of distant thunder, yet there seems still a chance that the sky will clear, till at last the clouds lower, the horizon narrows, the thunder peals, the lightning flashes, the rain falls in sheets, and the day ends in blackness and darkness and tempest.

The capture of the Bastille was the brilliant dawn, arousing an enthusiasm in which even the English ambassador, the Duke of Dorset, shared. Before the first anniversary arrived, clouds had chequered the sky, but till the September massacres hope predominated; even after Louis XVI.'s execution it appeared still probable that the Revolution would be appeased by the blood of its foes; and there were alternations of hope and fear till the Terror commenced. We see all along what the end was to be, but these English enthusiasts were literally ignorant of the morrow, and did not easily renounce their illusions. Not till they were fairly in the toils did they recognise the gravity of their position. Flight, moreover, became increasingly difficult. Passports were refused or granted grudgingly; to depart without them was perilous in the extreme, and even with them there was constant liability to detention as French aristocrats in disguise. After the occupation of Toulon by the English, all British subjects were actual prisoners of war; and although about February 1795 there was a general liberation, Lord Malmesbury in 1797 found countrymen in Paris anxious, but still unable, to return home. It is easy to say they should never have gone to Paris during the Revolution, or should have left before the Terror commenced, but how natural was it that those whose sympathy had drawn them thither, like numbers who watched the Revolution from this side the Channel, should hope and believe that every atrocity was the last, and that these excesses were the inevitable transition to the triumph of liberty. The wonder indeed is, not that they remained till it was too late to flee, but that they suffered nothing beyond imprisonment, coupled, however, with constant apprehension of another fearful gaol delivery like that of September 1792. It must be presumed that many of them altered their opinion of their own country's stability and institutions, and learned to prefer even an unreformed Parliament to the French Convention. They cannot at any rate have failed to contrast the revolutionary tribunal with a British jury, and the guillotine with the heaviest English penalties for sedition.

The experiences of these countrymen of ours are more interesting to us than the monotonously stormy debates of the assemblies. It is true that many of them are commonplace people, justifying the remark that eye-witnesses of the greatest events, like con beholders of the finest scenery, are the least capable of appreciation. Yet in other cases the spectators are more to us than the spectacle. Whereas, however, a multitude of French memoirs, authentic or spurious, are in existence, scarcely any English observers committed their recollections to writing. Only here and there have we an opportunity of seeing through English eyes what went on. Even the few who ventured into print mostly give us reflections in lieu of facts, and the researches of the Historical Manuscripts Commission have in this field yielded but a meagre harvest. Some who printed and even wrote nothing, yet whose character interests us, left no issue, and their collateral descendants, regarding them as the black sheep of the family, are unwilling or unable to supply any information—oftener, perhaps, unable than unwilling, for the probability is that these emigrants mostly broke off all intercourse with their kinsmen, especially as after a certain date war rendered communication very uncertain and difficult. There are, indeed, sources of information in France, contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, local and national archives, but even these are incomplete, and as regards manuscripts, rarely catalogued. The Commune of 1871, moreover, created an irreparable gap, for in the burning of the Palais de Justice and Hotel de Ville the municipal records, the registers of deaths, and many of the prison lists were consumed. I have, however, profited by every still available source of information. I have skimmed a multitude of journals and tracts, rummaged musty documents, made inquiries of relatives which have not always proved fruitless, and collected materials which afford some idea of the enthusiasms and terrors, the festivities and privations, the honours and insults, the thrills of exultation and anguish, of the Englishmen who were voluntary or involuntary eye-witnesses of the Revolution.

This book is not written to point a moral, though it may induce moralising. It passes no judgment on the Revolution, albeit an Englishman can happily do so with as perfect impartiality as if it had taken place in a distant planet, whereas every Frenchman is more or less biassed. The Revolution is the touchstone of French politicians, not so much that their view of the Revolution governs their opinion on questions of the day, as that the latter governs their opinion of the Revolution. More deliberate falsehood, too, has been written on the Revolution than on any other historical event. Happily this ocean of falsehood but very slightly affects that side of it delineated in this book. The well of English testimony is comparatively unpolluted. We may leave Louis Blanc to credit the ridiculous story of English emissaries in the September massacres, and Michelet to regard these phantoms as eccentric Britons in search of a sensation. I have neither to justify nor impeach the conduct of the English Government towards the Revolution. International controversies have no place here. I have simply to deal with individual experiences.

Chapter I. Deliverance to Captives

I.

Deliverance to Captives.

"Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts, Ye dungeons, and ye cages of despair . . ! There's not an English heart that would not leap To know that ye were fallen at last." —COWPER'S Task, 1784

I.

DELIVERANCE TO CAPTIVES.

Lord Massareene—Capt. Whyte—Playfair—Blackwell—H. Priestley—Lord Liverpool—Rigby—Macdonagh—Rutledge.

The Revolution, which ended by imprisoning several hundred Englishmen in Paris alone, began by liberating two, if not three, who had grown grey in captivity. The Earl of Massareene, with thoroughly British obstinacy, had remained a prisoner for at least nineteen years rather than yield to extortionate creditors. One version of his incarceration is that, arriving in Paris, a young man of twenty-three, he was deluded by a Syrian with a scheme for importing salt from Asia Minor, and signed bills to a large amount. Rutledge, however, a fellow-prisoner, who describes Massareene as the senior inmate, doing the honours of the place to newcomers, dispelling their melancholy, inviting them to supper, and encouraging them to narrate their adventures by giving his own, makes him speak thus:—

"Women, wine, gambling, rascally lawyers and doctors, lastly my own follies—behold what led to my being immured here; but the malicious people who have plunged me here will be out of their reckoning. Thanks to my philosophy, I am quite comfortable, and hope to teach them patience,"

According to the "Souvenirs" of Nicolas Berryer, father of the Legitimist orator, Massareene had been cheated at cards, and had signed bills for the amount, spent £4000 a year in prison, kept open table, and had a carriage and boxes at the theatre for his mistresses. He had attempted to escape, it is said, in woman's dress; but the turnkey, who had taken a bribe of 200 louis, betrayed him. His chief creditor was a man of considerable influence with the Parliament of Paris. Resigned thenceforth to his fate, remittances from his Irish steward enabled him to live luxuriously. Sir John Lambert, a Paris banker, himself destined to imprisonment in the Reign of Terror, writing to Lord Kerry on August 16, 1770, says:—

"My Lord Massareene's affairs are always [sic] in the same situation. You know he has miscarried in the scheme of escaping from the Fort l'Evêque, where he is still detained for want of fighting [endeavouring?] to sell his Monaghan estates, or to borrow £15,000 or £20,000, which are necessary to extract him from his present troubles.

On the closing of Fort l'Evêque in 1780 Massareene had been transferred to La Force, magniloquently styled by Louis Blanc the "Bastille of usury." In May 1789, Richard-Lenoir, the future reviver of the cotton industry in France, became, at the age of twenty-four, his fellow-prisoner, and his memoirs, allowing for the lapse of nearly half a century and for possible embellishments by Herbinot de Mauchamps, to whom, being himself no scribe, he apparently dictated them, may be accepted as substantially accurate. I quote the passage in full from this long-forgotten book:—

"We had for companion in misfortune an English lord, Mazaren, eighteen years a prisoner. He had married in prison the sister of another prisoner, who had since recovered his liberty. Every morning his wife and brother-in-law arrived as soon as the gates were opened, and did not leave till evening. There was something touching in the felicity of this strange household. Through them we knew of everything that was going on in Paris, and could follow, step by step, the Revolution which was beginning. Lord Mazaren especially, who had no hope except in a general overturn, was quite absorbed by it, and almost electrified us for liberty, which, indeed, for us poor prisoners, was only natural. We were not ignorant of what had happened at Réveillon's, when, on July 13, 1789, just as we were about to assemble after the opening of the doors in a kind of garden or gravelled court. Lord Mazaren suggested to us the forcing of our way out. Whether he was beforehand certain of the impassiveness of the jailors and soldiers, or whether he counted much on our daring, he assured us that nothing was easier, and that a resolute will was sufficient for success. We promptly decided. Arms had to be procured. Lord Mazaren pointed out the staircase railings, the bars of which could serve as pikes. We immediately set to work; the railings yielded to our efforts, and all of us were soon armed. The commandant, however, was speedily informed of the revolt; but fear was then gradually gaining on officials, and instead of taking strong measures, he contented himself with ordering us to carry the outbreak no further, otherwise he warned us he should be obliged to use force against us. 'So much the better,' we exclaimed on all sides. 'Kill us, and then you will have to pay our creditors.' This reply frightening him, we took advantage of his perplexity to attack the first gate, and passed through without much trouble. There were still three others to force. All the turnkeys had joined the soldiers, but several officers and privates seemed to fight with reluctance. One of them on ordering fire had tears in his eyes. However, we seized on the three gates, part of the outer wall was demolished, and we at last issued, victors, from La Force.

"Once in the street, every one thought of seeking an asylum. Lord Mazaren suggested to several of us that he should conduct us to the English Embassy. Always thoughtful and saving, I wished to re-enter the prison to fetch my things and carry them to a secure place. I was laughed at, and did not venture to insist; yet it was all that remained of my former prosperity. I therefore found myself on the streets of Paris with a more than untidy costume and twelve sous in my pocket; but I remembered my father's twelve livres, and courage did not abandon me. We were well received at the Embassy, Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, where refreshments were offered us, and we were taken in the Embassy coaches to the precincts of the Temple, then a place of asylum for debtors. Lord Mazaren offered us a capital dinner, and while this little feast was being prepared I went to La Force to fetch my things; but alas! it was too late. The turnkeys assured me that after our departure the mob had invaded the prison. I was about to exclaim and threaten, but was answered, 'You broke open the gates, and the mob came in by the way you came out. You do not find your things? So much the worse; you should have taken them away. Good evening.' It was an impudent lie, but I had to put up with this reply."

The Duke of Dorset in a despatch of July 16 says:—

"His Lordship, with twenty-four others in the Hôtel de la Force, forced their way out of prison last Monday morning without the loss of a single life. His Lordship, who has always expressed a great sense of gratitude for the small services I have occasionally rendered him since I first came to Paris in my present character, came directly to my hotel with six or seven of his companions, the rest having gone their different ways. I, however, soon prevailed upon Lord Massareene and the others to go to the Temple, which is a privileged place, and where he may therefore be able to treat with his creditors to some advantage. His Lordship told me that it was his intention to go thither, but that he thought it right to pay me the first visit."

Massareene found no obstacle to his leaving France, and on reaching Dover he jumped out of the boat, fell on his knees, and kissed the ground, exclaiming, "God bless this land of liberty!" The spectators thought him mad till they learnt who he was. He was present in August 1789, with "a French lady and her son," at Astley's representation of the capture of the Bastille. He was formally remarried to Marie Anne Barcier, on whose death in 1800 he made a second marriage, and he died in 1805, aged sixty-three, leaving no issue. His two brothers, who are said never to have written to him in captivity, succeeded him in turn, and on the decease of the second in 1826 the earldom became extinct, the viscounty passing to a daughter. Let us hope that if the steward had, as alleged, kept back half his £8000 a year, Massareene brought him to book.

The day after this liberation another veteran prisoner recovered his liberty, but not, alas! his reason. Whyte, or Whyte de Malleville, one of the seven captives in the Bastille, is described by some as a Scotchman, by others as an Irishman, but there is no proof that he was ever on this side of the Channel. He may have been the son of a Captain Whyte of Clare's Irish-French Regiment, whose two daughters were on the pension list. He entered the Bastille in 1784, but had previously, probably for a quarter of a century, been at Vincennes, and at the time of this transfer was insane. In August 1788 he had refused to listen to two lawyers who called on him with papers to sign, and in the following February the governor, to whom papers in his writing had been handed, interrogated him and found him still insane. He is said when released to have styled himself "majeur de l'immensité," and to have inquired for Louis XV. The Duke of Dorset styles him Major Whyte, adding that he had been confined for more than thirty years, and that when released he was questioned by some English gentlemen who happened to be near, but the unhappy man seemed to have nearly lost the use of his intellect, and could express himself but very ill:—

"His beard was at least a yard long. What is very extraordinary, he did not know that the Bastille was the place of his confinement, but thought he had been shut up at St. Lazare; nor did he appear to be sensible of his good fortune in being released. He expressed, however, a strong desire of being taken to a lawyer."

What became of him is uncertain. One account is that a benevolent person sheltered him, but that on his beginning a few days afterwards to plunder the house, he was forced to send him to Charenton lunatic asylum. Dorset, however, could not ascertain his fate.

The capture of the Bastille, or the procession which followed it, was witnessed by several Englishmen. Some were active participants, others simple spectators. Among the former was William Playfair, whose opinions, like his fortunes, underwent singular vicissitudes. A brother of John Playfair, the Edinburgh mathematician and geologist, he was a civil engineer, and had settled in Paris. He had patented a new rolling-machine, and in 1789 joined Joel Barlow in launching the Scioto Company, which in two months disposed of 50,000 acres in Ohio to two convoys of French emigrants. When Barlow was called back to America, Playfair acted as sole agent. He must have assisted in the capture of the Bastille, for he was one of the eleven or twelve hundred inhabitants of the St. Antoine quarter who on the previous day had formed themselves into a militia, and who, with the exception of a few detained by patrol duty, headed the attack on the fortress. It is significant, but scarcely excusable, that in his "History of Jacobinism" he makes light of the capture of the Bastille, and does not hint that he was concerned in it. Indeed, the only reference to his having been in Paris at all is the remark, "I do not consider virtue to consist in the simple manners and republican phrases of a Brissot, and I have told him so to his face." A French pamphlet of 1790 on paper-money is attributed to him. It was he (not Pétion, as Carlyle represents) who courageously rescued D'Espréménil, an old acquaintance, when half killed by a mob in the Palais Royal gardens in February 1791. Pétion simply called on and condoled with the poor man after the rescue, in which Playfair was assisted by a brave National Guardsman, a horse-dealer, who afterwards pawned his uniform to give Playfair a dinner, and was with difficulty persuaded to accept a few louis.

Playfair speaking out too plainly on the excesses of the Revolution, Barère is said to have procured an order for his arrest, but he escaped to Holland, and thence to England.

By 1793 he was back in London, publishing pamphlets. One of these recommended that France, with the Bourbons restored, should be made permanently harmless by Savoy being given to Geneva, Dauphiny and Provence to Sardinia, a long strip drawn from Belfort to Abbeville to Austria and Prussia, and another strip from Bordeaux to Narbonne to Spain, England taking the colonies. A second pamphlet advocated a wholesale manufacture of forged assignats, as the surest and most merciful method of crushing the Revolution. He urged that this would save many lives; that American notes were forged in General Howe's camp without its being deemed dishonourable; and that there could be no fear of retaliation, seeing that Bank of England notes were payable at sight. Names, says the old song, go by contraries. Only on the lucus à non principle can we explain the sanguinary temper of a Rossignol, a Saint-Just, or a Lebon, and the forged assignat proposal of a Playfair. Unfortunately his suggestion did not fall on deaf ears. The British Government is alleged to have connived at the manufacture by the émigrés of forged assignats at Howden, near Newcastle. The local tradition is that this paper-mill on the Tyne never prospered afterwards. Some of the exiled bishops and clergy reprobated the act, but the Bourbon princes apparently reconciled themselves to it on the casuistical plea that the counterfeit notes had a secret mark by which, in the event of the restoration of the monarchy, they could be distinguished and cashed.

The Committee of Public Safety set a better example by imprisoning an English refugee named Hathway, who proposed an issue of forged Bank of England notes.

One ill deed begets another, and though the royalist issue had long ceased, Napoleon in 1803 organised a forgery of English, Austrian, and Russian notes, the plates of which were claimed by and given up to the respective ambassadors on his fall.

Playfair, who is more honourably known as an editor of Adam Smith's works, was constantly unsuccessful, despite his inventive genius. He returned to Paris after Waterloo to edit Galignani's Messenger; but in 1818 an article on a duel brought on him a sentence of three months' imprisonment, to escape which he fled to London, where he died five years afterwards, at the age of sixty-four. His brother, the professor, remained a staunch Whig; and a Dundee minister, James Playfair, D.D., historiographer to the Prince of Wales, who in 1790 signed an address of congratulation to the French Assembly, was probably a cousin.

Thomas Blackwell, who had been educated at the Irish College, and was studying medicine at Paris, joined in the attack on the Bastille, and was intimate with Danton. He was naturalised in France, served in the army, and in 1798 accompanied Napper Tandy to Donegal. Both escaped; but being sent on a mission to Norway, on returning to France they were given up at Hamburg to the British consul. Blackwell was imprisoned till 1801, and then went back to France.

Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, in her interesting auto , speaks of Harry Priestley, a lad of sixteen, bursting into her parents' drawing-room at Manchester and exclaiming, "France is free! the Bastille is taken! William was there, and helping. I have just got a letter from him. He has put up a pictorial of the Bastille and two stones from its ruins for you." Two years later William found mob-law a two-edged weapon, for he witnessed—had he been recognised he would have been in peril—the sacking of his father's house and chapel.

Dr. Priestley, who himself had the good sense to decline a seat in the Convention, offered him by two departments, bade his son William, in June 1792, "go and live among that brave and hospitable people, and learn from them to detest tyranny and love liberty." He accordingly waited on the Assembly to apply for naturalisation, and was received with plaudits. His voice being weak, his speech, which declared French citizenship a higher honour than the crown of any arbitrary state, was read for him by the President, François of Nantes. The reply of the latter compared Burke's attacks on Dr. Priestley to those of Aristophanes on Socrates, and suggested that the Birmingham rioters were the descendants of Danish pirates. The youth's gravity must have been sorely tried by this burlesque oration; but did not M. de Lesseps, in the French Academy of Sciences, once gravely hint that the English promoters of a rival Suez Canal were the descendants of Carthaginian traders? The sky soon darkened, and Dr. Priestley, his father, wrote after the September massacres to Roland, urging that unless such outrages on justice and humanity were stopped, and order and obedience to law enforced, liberty both in France and throughout Europe must be despaired of. William intended to be a merchant in France, but the war with England frustrating this purpose, he went to America, where his two brothers joined him. They contemplated buying half a million acres near the head of the Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania, to found an English colony; and their father also went over, settling at the nearest town, Northumberland, till the scheme was realised. It fell through, but Priestley remained at Northumberland, declining, however, to be naturalised. Harry died young, but William married, and had a large farm.