Generals Rochambeau and Boyer were paroled prisoners who seem to have studied how to give the authorities as much trouble and annoyance as possible. The Transport Board, weary of granting them indulgences which they abused, and of making them offers which they contemptuously rejected, clapped them into Norman Cross in September 1804. They were placed in the wards of the military hospital, a sentinel at their doors, and no communication allowed between them, or their servants, and the rest of the prisoners. They were not allowed newspapers, no special allowance was made them of coals, candles, and wood, they were not permitted to go beyond the hospital airing ground, and Captain Pressland, the then agent of the prison, was warned to be strictly on his guard, and to watch them closely, despite his favourable remarks upon their deportment. It was at about this time that the alarm was widespread that the prisoners of war in Britain were to co-operate with an invasion by their countrymen from without. General Boyer, at Tiverton in 1803, ‘whilst attentive to the ladies, did not omit to curse, even to _them_, his fate in being deprived of his arms, and without hope of being useful to his countrymen when they arrive in England’. Rochambeau at Norman Cross was even more ridiculous, for when he heard that Bonaparte’s invasion was actually about to come off, he appeared for two days in the airing ground in full uniform, booted and spurred. Later news sent him into retirement. Extracts from contemporary newspapers show that the alarm was very general. Said _The Times_: ‘The French prisoners on the prospect of an invasion of this country begin to assume their Republican _fierté_; they tell their guards—“It is your turn to guard us now, but before the winter is over it will be our turn to guard you.” ‘The prisoners already in our hands, and those who may be added, will occasion infinite perplexity. The known licentiousness of their principles, the utter contempt of all laws of honour which is so generally prevalent among the French Republicans, and the audacity of exertions which may arise from a desire of co-operating with an invading force, may render them extremely dangerous, especially if left in the country, where the thinness of the population prevents perpetual inspection and where alarm flies so rapidly as to double any mischief.’ A suggestion was made that the prisoners should be concentrated in the prisons of London and neighbourhood, and some newspapers even echoed Robespierre’s truculent advice: ‘Make no prisoners.’ In 1804, in reply to another application that priests might reside within the prison boundaries, the authorities said: ‘As to the French priests and the procurement of lodgings at Stilton, we have nothing to do with them, but with respect to the proposal of their inhabitation in our Dépôts, we cannot possibly allow of such a measure at this critical time to _Foreigners of that equivocal description_.’