‘Certain measures have been regarded as expedient in consequence of the very frequent desertions of late of French officers, not even excepting those of the highest rank, so that their Parole of Honour has become of little Dependence for their Security as Prisoners of War. Particularly do we select General Lefebvre-Desnouettes, an officer of the Legion of Honour, a General of Division, Colonel commanding the Chasseurs à cheval de la Garde. He was allowed unusually great privileges on parole—to reside at Cheltenham, to go thence to Malvern and back to Cheltenham as often as he liked; his wife was allowed to reside with him, and he was allowed to have two Imperial Guardsmen as servants. Yet he absconded, May 1, 1812, with his servants and naval lieutenant Armand le Duc, who had been allowed as a special favour to live with him at Cheltenham.’ Lord Wellington requested that certain French officers should be given their parole, but in reply the Transport Office declined to consent, and as a reason sent him a list of 310 French officers who had broken their parole during the current year, 1812. The _Moniteur_ of August 9, 1812, attempted to justify these breaches of parole, saying that Frenchmen only surrendered on the condition of retaining their arms, and that we had broken that condition. At the Exeter Assizes, in the summer of 1812, Richard Tapper of Moreton-Hampstead, carrier, Thomas and William Vinnacombe of Cheriton Bishop, smugglers, were convicted and sentenced to transportation for life for aiding in the attempted escape of two merchant captains, a second captain of a privateer, and a midshipman from Moreton-Hampstead, from whom they had received £25 down and a promise of £150. They went under Tapper’s guidance on horseback from Moreton to Topsham, where they found the Vinnacombes waiting with a large boat. They started, but grounded on the bar at Exmouth, and were captured. In the same year, acting upon information, the Government officers slipped quietly down to Deal, Folkestone, and Sandgate, and seized a number of galleys built specially for the cross-Channel traffic of escaped prisoners. They were beautifully constructed, forty feet long, eight-oared, and painted so as to be almost invisible. It was said that in calm weather they could be rowed across in _two hours_! The pillory was an additional punishment for escape-aiders. Russel, in his _History of Maidstone_, says that ‘the last persons who are remembered to have stood in the pillory were two men, who in the first decade of the present (nineteenth) century, had assisted French prisoners of War to escape while on Parole’.