Prisoners of War in Britain 1756 to 1815: A record of their lives, their romance and their sufferingsAbell, Francis
History
Prisoners of War in Britain 1756 to 1815: A record of their lives, their romance and their sufferings
Abell, Francis
Military prisons -- Great Britain; Prisoners of war -- Great Britain; Prisons -- Great Britain
With another naval officer, Colles, he got away successfully by the aid
of the smugglers and their agents, and reached Rye in Sussex. Between
them they paid the smugglers one hundred and fifty guineas. At Rye they
found another escaped prisoner in hiding, the Captain of the _Diomède_,
and he added another fifty guineas. The latter was almost off his head,
and nearly got them caught through his extraordinary behaviour. However,
on November 28, 1809, they reached Boulogne after a bad passage.
Robinson with his two hundred guineas bought contraband goods in France
and ran them over to England. Stevenson was not so lucky, for a little
later he was caught at Deal with an escaped prisoner, was fined five
hundred guineas, and in default of payment was sent to Botany Bay.
General d’Henin was one of the French generals who were taken at San
Domingo in 1803. He was sent on parole to Chesterfield in Derbyshire,
and, unlike several other officers who shared his fate, was most popular
with the inhabitants through his pleasing address and manner. He married
whilst in Chesterfield a Scots lady of fortune, and for some years
resided with her at Spital Lodge, the house of the Agent, Mr. Bower. He
and Madame d’Henin returned to Paris in 1814, and he fought at Waterloo,
where his leg was torn off by a cannon shot.
His residence in England seems to have made him somewhat of an
Anglophile, for in Horne’s _History of Napoleon_ he is accused of
favouring the British at Waterloo, and it was actually reported to
Napoleon by a dragoon that he ‘harangued the men to go over to the
enemy’. This, it was stated, was just before the cannon shot struck him.
From Chesterfield, d’Henin wrote to his friend General Boyer at
Montgomery, under date October 30, 1804. After a long semi-religious
soliloquy, in which he laments his position but supposes it to be as
Pangloss says, that ‘all is for the best in this best of worlds’, he
speaks of his bad health, of his too short stay at ‘Harrowgate’ (from
which health resort, by the way, he had been sent, for carrying on
correspondence under a false name), of his religious conversion, and of
his abstemious habits, and finishes:
‘Rien de nouveau. Toujours la même vie, triste, maussade, ennuyeuse,
déplaisante et sans fin, quand finira-t-elle? Il fait ici un temps
superbe, de la pluie, depuis le matin jusqu’au soir, et toujours de la
pluie, et du brouillard pour changer. Vie de soldat! Vie de chien!’
All the same, it is consoling to learn from the following letters
written by French officers on parole to their friends, that compulsory
exile in England was not always the intolerable punishment which so many
authors of reminiscences would have us believe. Here is one, for
instance, written from a prisoner on parole at Sevenoaks to a friend at
Tenterden, in 1757:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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