‘In 1805, Colonel de Bercy, on parole at Thame, was “in difficulty” about a girl being with child by him. The Office declined to interfere, but said that if the Colonel could not give sufficient security that mother and child should not be a burden upon the rates, he must be imprisoned until he did.’ By a rule of the French Government, Englishwomen who had already lived in France with their husbands there as prisoners of war could not return to France if once they left it. This was brought about by some English officers’ wives taking letters with them on their return from England, and, although as a matter of policy it could not be termed tyrannical, it was the cause naturally of much distress and even of calamity. The next account of parole life in England is by Louis Garneray, the marine painter, whose description of life on the hulks may be remembered as being the most vivid and exact of any I have given. After describing his rapture at release from the hulk at Portsmouth and his joyous anticipation of comparative liberty ashore, Garneray says: ‘When I arrived in 1811 under escort at the little village (Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire) which had been assigned to me as a place of residence, I saw with some disillusion that more than 1,200 [_sic_] French of all ranks [_sic_] had for their accommodation nothing but some wretched, tumble-down houses which the English let to them at such an exorbitant price that a year’s rent meant the price of the house itself. As for me, I managed to get for ten shillings a week, not a room, but the right to place my bed in a hut where already five officers were.’ The poor fellow was up at five and dressed the next morning: ‘What are you going to do?’ asked one of my room mates. ‘I’m going to breathe the morning air and have a run in the fields,’ I replied. ‘Look out, or you’ll be arrested.’ ‘Arrested! Why?’ ‘Because we are not allowed to leave the house before six o’clock.’ Garneray soon learned about the hours of going out and coming in, about the one-mile limit along the high road, that a native finding a prisoner beyond the limit or off the main road had not only the right to knock him down but to receive a guinea for doing so. He complained that the only recreations were walking, painting, and reading, for the Government had discovered that concerts, theatricals, and any performances which brought the prisoners and the natives together encouraged familiarity between the two peoples and corrupted morals, and so forbade them. Garneray then described how he came to break his parole and to escape from Bishop’s Waltham.