5. The fifth marriage of the Dutch prisoners was that of Berthold Johannas Justin Wyeth to Sarah Wotton. These marriages were all by licence and not by banns. In this case the entry is “Licence with consent of Parents,” but this by no means implies that the other marriages took place without such consent; the addition of these words depended upon the habit of the officiating minister. The witness was B. Pletsz. Mr. Wyeth was 2nd Lieutenant of the _Furie_, and was received on parole on 19th November 1798. He was not exchanged under the Alkmaar Cartel, but remained a prisoner until the 16th October 1801. {208} As regards the absence of any evidence of the marriage of the French prisoners and British women, it must be remembered that the vast majority of the French were Roman Catholics, and that mixed marriages of members of that Church with Protestants were discouraged by the authorities of both Churches alike. There existed also throughout these years a fierce animosity between the French and the English, and when it is added that the French Government did not acknowledge the legality of such marriages, so that in many instances the unfortunate wives when they returned with their husbands at the close of the war were not allowed to land, we can understand that almost irresistible pressure would be exercised to prevent these unions, and that intimacies and flirtations which might ripen into love would very probably be strongly discouraged. One instance of an attachment between a French prisoner confined at Norman Cross and an English girl, and their subsequent marriage, was that of Jean Marie Philippe Habart to Elizabeth Snow, of Stilton. In the prison register we find Jean Habart entered as a sailor, captured off Calais, 20th June 1803, in _L’Abondance_, a small vessel of ten tons. He was put on board _L’Immortalité_, and from her transferred to the prison ship _Sandwich_; was sent thence to Norman Cross, being received 27th August 1803. He acted as baker to Mr. Lindsay, the contractor, and was discharged on 20th June 1811. This official statement differs from the family tradition in two points only: the register says (probably incorrectly) that he was a sailor, the family that he was only temporarily on the boat fishing; the register says that he was freed on 20th June 1811, his granddaughter believed that he was freed on the emptying of the prison in 1814 (the register in this case is doubtless correct). His granddaughter’s account is, that M. Jean M. P. Habart was the son of a gunsmith in a good position in a town on the north coast of France, and that he was captured while fishing off the coast, and was imprisoned at Norman Cross. There, as we learn from the register, not being a combatant, but a civilian prisoner of war, he was employed as baker to the contractor.