William Lawless, a distinguished Dublin surgeon, and a relative of Lord Cloncurry’s, was a close friend of Lord Edward’s, and like the Sheareses, whose neighbour and intimate he was, became very active in the Cause after the arrest of the leaders at Bond’s on March 12th. On the Saturday on which Lord Edward was arrested (May 19) Surgeon Lawless received information at the College of Surgeons from his colleague, Surgeon Dease, that he was about to be taken up. He accordingly made arrangements to escape to France. He is said to have made his way on board a vessel in the disguise of a butcher’s man carrying a side of beef, and in this capacity met Major Sirr himself on the quays! Arrived in France, he entered the Army and made a great career for himself in the Napoleonic campaigns. Miles Byrne makes frequent mention of him, and it is to Byrne we owe our knowledge of the pretty romance of his marriage. Among the Irish exiles then resident in Paris the family of Hampden Evans[103] was very prominent. As Mr. Evans had a large fortune, and was hospitality itself, he loved to gather his fellow-countrymen around him; and among those who visited his house frequently was William Lawless. With him Mary Evans fell in love; but so well did she keep her secret that neither he nor any of her family suspected it, and he marched away with his regiment without a word of affection on either side. Shortly after came the news of the siege of Flushing by the English, with the destruction of the Irish battalion defending it, and the death of its Commander, William Lawless. “Mary Evans fell ill, and for more than six weeks her life was despaired of.... Mrs. Tone being in the habit of going to Mr. Hampden Evans’s house, and being on the most intimate terms with his daughters, might have suspected something of Miss Evans’s secret, but this secret was only divulged when she heard the man she loved was no more. She then told her mother, saying life to her now was not worth preserving, and wondering how Mrs. Tone could have survived the death of her heroic husband....” Footnote 103: Hampden Evans was an exile of ’98. But Commandant Lawless was not dead; and one day the gallant tale of how he had saved, at Walcheren, the French colours and the Eagle entrusted by the Emperor to the Irish Brigade, reached Paris. He had wrapped the flag round his body, plunged into the waves, and swam to an open boat a considerable distance from the shore; “then proudly exhibiting the standard of France amid a shower of bullets from the beach he bore it off in triumph.” For this exploit Lawless was named by the Emperor, knight of the Legion of Honour, and Lieutenant-Colonel of the Irish regiment, and the year after, full Colonel of it.