John Goldworth Alger

“ Liberty or no liberty, religion or no religion, morality or no morality, was all immaterial to him. Liberty and equality remain, and now nobody opens his mouth or strikes another.’ I may here remark that the comparison of Bonaparte to Cromwell, obvious as it now appears to us, was not made by any English observer, though it did not escape German visitors. Jacobi also went to see St. Martin, the disciple of Boehme and Swedenborg, who had known William Law in England in 1787, and regarded the French Revolution as a precursor of the Day of Judgment. ”

“ It was a scramble among all classes to give them the best reception. It was the height of fashion to dine and amuse them and give them balls; the women especially were enamoured of the English and had a rage for their fashions. In short France seemed to eclipse itself before a few thousands of these proud and unprofitable foreigners, towards whom the attentions of hospitality were carried to a ridiculous excess. ”

“ Jomini, a Swiss, after serving Napoleon in high rank, offered his sword to Russia, though Napoleon was compelled to acquit him of having treacherously revealed his military secrets. And Talleyrand, while accepting Napoleon’s pay, intrigued with his foes, doubtless salving his conscience, if indeed he had a conscience, with the notion that he was thus promoting the interests of France. Few men were so scrupulous as the Duc de Richelieu, a future French statesman, in stipulating that Russia should not send him to fight against his countrymen. ”

“ Does any advantage result from its being taught to shopkeepers’ sons, at a day-school, for fear foreigners should not pawn or buy, for want of understanding them?
Are not the great part of the female sex, and of the uninformed part of ours, exposed, by this practice, to the moral and political corruptions of another country? Is not the business of French Emissaries facilitated by the half-understanding of low and ignorant Englishmen?
Ought a girl to be able to read any book that her father cannot? ”

“ Hence it is not surprising to find that at Verdun there were indignant creditors. We do not hear of complaints in any other town, but at Bitche and other fortresses the captives were lodged and victualled by the French Government, and though clothes must have worn out, the shopkeepers were probably chary of giving credit, while the captives on parole in Paris, Orleans, and other towns were men of means and doubtless of a high sense of honour. The eight or eleven hundred prisoners at Verdun, on the other hand, were of all sorts and conditions. Some could not, others would not, pay. ”

“ I know of no republic in the world except America, which is the only country for such men as you and I. It is my intention to get away from this place as soon as possible, and I hope to be off in autumn. You are a young man, and may see better times, but I have done with Europe and its slavish politics.’
Paine, it may be feared, experienced another disillusion on recrossing the Atlantic. ”

“ Sturt, Forbes, Pinkerton, Lawrence, and Blayney necessarily give individual experiences rather than a general history of the detentions. Not one of these writers, moreover, ventured on keeping a journal, which would have been obviously unsafe, and some of them, publishing their recollections while comrades were still in captivity, naturally omitted details which might have lessened the pity felt in England by revealing the failings of a small minority, or which might have goaded the jailers to increased rigour. ”

“ In the autumn of 1809, however, Napoleon required her to come to Paris to exculpate herself from a charge of intrigues with England. All that she had really done had been to refuse to receive Clarke when French Minister at Florence, and to apply to the English Government for an annuity to compensate the one lost by the death of her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, the titular Henry IX. She had accordingly been granted £1000 a year. She easily cleared herself, and Napoleon seems to have been a little ashamed of disturbing so inoffensive a woman. ”

“ Francis Jackson, moreover, writing to Abbot, described Paris life as an uninterrupted picture of vulgarity and profligacy, and the Times of the 23rd September says:—
‘Paris, under the Regent of Orleans, was not so profligate and corrupt as it appears to our best travellers at present. Gambling, debauchery, intemperance, and the insatiable desire after public spectacles, with all the vices in the train of indolence and licentiousness, form the monotonous indiscriminable character of the Citizens.’ ”

“ John Scott, however, in the diligence between Dieppe and Paris, heard an officer with Napoleon’s portrait on his snuff-box say, in reply to English expressions of satisfaction at the peace, ‘All very well, this tranquillity of Europe is a fine thing, but will it not keep me always a captain?’ Another officer, though originally forced away from the study of [291] medicine into the army, spoke with enthusiasm of Napoleon, and the mass of the people, while admitting Napoleon’s faults, were in Scott’s judgment in his favour. ‘Ah but he was a great man!’ was the common phrase. ”

“ Ferdinand III. of Tuscany was driven to Vienna, though subsequently assigned a duchy in Germany. Even the Papacy, which had long been unscathed by war or revolution, was overwhelmed by the current. Forced away from Rome, one Pope died in the French fortress of Valence, while another became a prisoner at Savona.
In France not merely the princes, but almost the entire nobility, were fugitives. England, Germany, Switzerland, and Russia were inundated with aristocrats, who at first, counting on a speedy and triumphant return, formed little colonies, in one of which Fanny Burney found a husband ”

“ A letter to the French Government of 1808 giving an account of the College of Cardinals says:—
‘Erskine, 65 years of age, affects the greatest indifference to the present state of things (Napoleon’s rule) , speaking of the Emperor with apparent moderation, but a dangerous man, perhaps the most dangerous of all; educated at the English college.’ [77]
He was on his way back to Rome, after having been a kind of legate in England, where in 1801 he had had the invidious task of requiring the resignations of the French émigré bishops on account of the Concordat. ”

“ It is difficult to draw an exact line between scholars, connoisseurs, and savants. Charles Towneley was famous, like Elgin, for his marbles, the fruits of his Italian travels from 1765 to 1772, and purchased after his death in 1805 by the British Museum. Turberville Needham, the scientist, had been his tutor in Paris in 1752, when his uncle John, translator of Hudibras into French verse, seems to have looked after him. Sir Abraham Hume, who has been already mentioned, was a famous collector of minerals and precious stones, and had purchased pictures by the old masters at Vienna and Bologna. ”

“ You really should keep these people at home. As for your swindlers, of whom there has been a nest here for some time, they are not near so troublesome, for there are swindlers in all countries and the police here is very good.’ [150]
There is evidently a little exaggeration here, but we have already seen that Lord Whitworth shut his doors against some of his countrymen whose inordinate admiration of Napoleon was not conducive to the maintenance of peace, since it must have given the impression that there was a strong French party in England, so that Napoleon might dictate his own terms. ”

“ The Irish refugees, whom Napoleon, as we have seen, had offered Cornwallis to expel, now became his cats-paws. In July 1803, while declining to see Arthur O’Connor, he deputed General Truguet to treat with him and Berthier to advance him small sums of money. He promised to send 25,000 troops to Ireland, and if 20,000 Irishmen would join them he pledged himself to make Irish independence a condition of peace. But he found that the Irish refugees or emissaries were split into two parties, not always on speaking terms, O’Connor accepting, the Emmets rejecting, the idea of a French protectorate. ”

“ Napoleon, always anxious to bring British diplomacy into ridicule, gave orders that a suitable man should be found to entrap Drake, and Méhée answered his purpose admirably. He pretended to give information of political feeling in France and to concert a royalist rising for the overthrow, if not for the kidnapping (a euphemism for assassination) , of Napoleon. Drake advanced money to this pretended spy, who took all the letters to Paris, where they were forthwith published, bringing odium and derision on the English Foreign Office. ”

“ Arthur Paget, son of Lord Uxbridge, was one of the earliest visitors, being allowed a passport through France in September 1801 on his way to succeed Minto at Vienna. He reported to Lord Hawkesbury that he found the roads much better than he expected and the land well cultivated, but the towns manufacturing silk and velvet complained of bad trade, and peace with England was universally desired. Bonaparte, he said, was generally liked, for people dreaded a revolution, yet Sieyès, he was told at Vienna, had declared that the Consulate would not last through the winter. ”

“ When a few weeks afterwards Napoleon visited Calais, Captain Sutton, of the Prince of Wales, petitioned him for release, but he met with a peremptory refusal, and Napoleon, on the two vessels being pointed out to him in the harbour, said, ‘You have plenty of mud there; let them lie and rot.’
The aggregate number of the British captives, represented by the French as seven thousand five hundred, was really only seven hundred, four hundred of them, according to Sturt, being small tradesmen. Napoleon, according to Maclean, was much disappointed at the smallness of the haul. ”

“ Again when a friend was lolling in a chair with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out, a French lady remarked to Mrs. Holcroft, ‘Look at that Englishman, he is anything but squeamish.’ Yet Holcroft saw Frenchmen in similar attitudes, not to speak of their spitting on the floor or pulling out white handkerchiefs bedaubed with snuff. The French were scandalised at the appearance at the Tuileries of an officer in Highland costume; but Holcroft observed women in male attire in the streets and also at the theatres, where they thus evaded the regulation excluding women from the pit. ”

“ Napoleon inquired for the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, Whitworth, Erskine, and Holland, and spoke especially of Fox. Informed that Fox felt much flattered at his reception in 1802, Napoleon said, ‘He had reason to be so. He was [299] everywhere received like a divinity because he was known to be in favour of peace.’ ‘Tell Lord Grenville,’ added Napoleon, ‘to come and see me. I wager that you in England thought me a devil, but now that you have seen me and France also you must be somewhat disabused.’ He justified the detentions of 1803. ”

“ Yet Phillips’s Practical Guide during a Journey from London to Paris, the first book of its kind, had said:—
‘We shall only express our wish that the great man who has done so much for France and mankind may moderate his ambition and make the illustrious Washington his political model.’
Englishmen anxious to see republican forms and manners were satirically recommended by the Times, December 1, 1802, to lose no time in visiting Paris, or the whole ancient system of the court, with all its formalities and regulations, would arrive before them. ”