French voices also were raised in his behalf. One of the earliest and most courageous was that of Lally Tollendal, who as member of the French Assembly had quarreled with Lafayette for being so much [Pg 228]of a monarchist. But later he changed his mind and acted as go-between in the negotiations for Lafayette's final plan to remove the royal family to Compiègne. From his exile in London Lally Tollendal now addressed a memorial to Frederick William II, telling him the plain truth, that it was unjust to keep Lafayette in jail as an enemy of the French king, because it was an effort to save Louis which had proved his ruin. "Those who regard M. de Lafayette as the cause, or even one of the causes, of the French Revolution are entirely wrong," this friend asserted. "He has played a great role, but he was not the author of the piece.... He has not taken part in a single one of its evils which would not have happened without him, while the good he did was done by him alone." Then Lally Tollendal went on to tell how on the Sunday after Louis was arrested and brought back from Varennes Lafayette by one single emphatic statement had put an end, in a committee of the Assembly, to an ugly discussion about executing the king and proclaiming a republic. "I warn you," he had said, "that the day after you kill the king the National Guard and I will proclaim the prince royal." Lally Tollendal expatiated upon how evenly Lafayette had tried to deal out justice to royalists and revolutionists alike; how in the last days of his liberty he had said in so many words that the Jacobins must be destroyed; and that he had with difficulty been restrained from raising a flag bearing the words, "No Jacobins, no Coblenz," as a banner around which friends of the king and conservative republicans might rally. But the strict [Pg 229]impartiality this disclosed had little charm for a king of Prussia and the appeal bore no fruit.