of the family, are unwilling or unable to supply any information—oftener, perhaps, unable than unwilling, for the probability is that these emigrants mostly broke off all intercourse with their kinsmen, especially as after a certain date war rendered communication very uncertain and difficult. There are, indeed, sources of information in France, contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, local and national archives, but even these are incomplete, and as regards manuscripts rarely catalogued. The Commune of 1871, moreover, created an irreparable gap, for in the burning of the Palais de Justice and Hôtel de Ville the municipal records, the registers of deaths, and many of the prison lists were consumed. We have, however, in researches on the principal Englishmen who figured in the Revolution, profited by every still available source of information. We have skimmed a multitude of journals and tracts, rummaged musty documents, made inquiries of relatives which have not always proved fruitless, and, although such researches would a generation ago have doubtless been more productive, we have collected data which from the fading away of traditions and from material or political accidents might not at a future period have been obtainable. ants, regarding them as the black sheep | estate in 1770, at the age of thirty-four. The very day of his father's death, he and the disinherited son of Sir William Codrington, at Newmarket, "ran their fathers' lives one against the other" for five hundred guineas. The elder Pigott having already been dead a few hours at Chetwynd, though neither party knew of it, Pigott maintained that the bet was off; but Lord Mansfield gave judgment for Codrington, holding that the impossibility of a contingency did not debar its being the subject of a wager, if both parties were at the time unaware of that impossibility. Pigott had soon to serve, as his grandfather had done before him, as high sheriff of the county; but he held eccentric views. He shared the belief of croakers. that England's fall was imminent; sold all his estates (said, including the manor of Chesterton, Hunts, to be worth 9,000l. a year), and went to live at Geneva. We know nothing, however, of how long he stayed or what acquaintances he made; Voltaire must have been of the number. We next hear of him in London, where Brissot was introduced to him. Pigott had become a vegetarian, or, as it was then called, a Pythagorean. To this he had probably been converted by a Dr. Graham, brother to the well-known Mrs. Macaulay's young second husband, the Although Paine, as a member of the notorious charlatan with whose mud baths Convention, might seem entitled to pre- and electric beds the future Lady Hamil cedence, we prefer to begin with men of ton was associated. Brissot, when calling higher status and wider culture, who, even on Pigott, frequently found Graham with if eventually brought into political asso- him. Pigott was thus evidently just the ciation with him, must have loathed his man to be kindled into enthusiasm by the vulgarity and coarseness. Robert Pigott, Revolution. He had, moreover, an anfor instance, who, as Clootz's biographer, tipathy to cocked or other hats, as the M. Avenel, has ascertained, represented invention of priests and despots, and wore England in the deputation of June 19, a cap which at the Feast of Pikes made 1790, had been an opulent country gentle- him the observed of all observers. When man. The Pigotts claimed descent from royalist deputies, suspecting the genuinea Norman family named Picot, and had ness of Clootz's deputation, sent an usher for eleven generations owned an estate at who spoke English - probably Rose, a Chetwynd, Shropshire. They had been man of Scotch extraction-to test the strongly attached to the Stuarts, and two English representative, he was answered heirlooms are still preserved in the family by Pigott in "good Miltonic English," - a ring, one of four presented by Charles and retired in confusion. We may imI. on the eve of his execution; and a por-agine Pigott receiving from Clootz a certrait on ivory of the Pretender presented tificate of his presence at the Feast of by himself to Robert Pigott's father at Pikes, couched, with a simple alteration Rome in 1720. Robert succeeded to the of name and nationality, in these terms, and entitling the bearer to a federal rib- | publicanism that the president pocketed bon and diploma : his cap, all present following suit, it cannot be supposed that they went home bareheaded. These red caps must have been confined to indoor use. Pigott, however, was clearly the introducer of the bonnet Capital of the globe, February 5, year 2. I certify and make known to all the free men of the earth that Joseph Cajadaer Chammas, member of the oppressed sovereign [the people] of Mesopotamia, had the honor of attend-rouge, for the Château-Vieux mutineers, ing the Federation of July 14, by virtue of a decree emanating from the august French Senate, June 19, year 1. ANACHARSIS CLOOTZ, orator of the human race in the French Na tional Assembly.* What a contrast between the high sheriff of Salop paying the honors to the judges of assize and the cap-headed man at the bar of the National Assembly! Pigott is described in one place as a journalist, but perhaps merely because he had sent an address to the Assembly on Sieyes's press bill of 1790. He spoke in this address of loving France as warmly as if he had been native, and of his having hastened over with a multitude of foreigners to enjoy the rights of man in all their purity. He dissuaded the Assembly from taking English legislation as a model, for the shameful war with America had shown how people could be misled by a press which the government could oppress or coerce. England, he said, was not really free, but had only a semblance of a freedom. to whom it is usually attributed, did not enter Paris till three months after caps had come in and gone out. The cap of liberty had been a symbol, indeed, employed from the outset of the Revolution, but it was Pigott who made it an article of dress. He had apparently quitted Paris by the summer, when it was revived, and this time undoubtedly worn outdoors, sometimes placed on the back of the head, like that of a Zouave of the present day, sometimes covering the top of the head, with the end slightly lapping over in front. Pigott's next two years are a blank for us. He must have left Paris before November, 1792, or he would have figured in the British Club which then made itself conspicuous. We thought, indeed, at one time to have traced him under the guise of Picotte or Pigatte in the Paris prison. rolls, in which case he might have met his old friend Codrington as a fellow-prisoner, but the dates do not agree. He died at Toulouse on July 7, 1794, three weeks before Robespierre's fall, leaving a widow, Antoinette Bontan, possibly the Mrs. Pigott who was living at Geneva in 1807-9. He is said also to have had a son who predeceased him. At the beginning of 1792, Pigott, in a pamphlet which we have been unable to find, but passages from which appeared in Brissot's paper, the Patriote Français, advocated the use of caps, as allowing the face to be well seen, and as susceptible James Watt, junior, son of the great by various shapes and colors of all sorts inventor, represented his country, like of embellishments. He condemned the Pigott, in a cosmopolitan procession. He hat as gloomy and morose, denounced the had become intimate at Manchester with uncovering of the head as a servile and an ardent politician, Thomas Cooper,* a ridiculous salutation, and appealed to chemist; and the Constitutional Society Greek, Roman, and Gaulish usage, as also of that town deputed both of them, toto the example of Voltaire and Rousseau. wards the end of 1791, to carry an address The effect of the appeal was electrical. of congratulation to the Jacobin Club. For a few weeks caps were the rage, Young Watt was in all probability the though it is not clear how far the republi- anonymous "constitutional Whig "who cans, any more than Voltaire and Rous- figured in the "moral-sublime scene seau, wore them outdoors. When on quoted by Carlyle in his essays. The poet March 19, 1792, Pétion wrote to the Wordsworth arrived in Paris a little later, Jacobin Club so strong and sensible a made Watt's acquaintance, likewise atremonstrance against external signs of re-tended the assembly of the Jacobins, and • Lettre du Prussien Clootz au Prussien Hertzberg. Paris: 1791. * Cooper eventually emigrated to America, and died in 1829. on continuing his journey to Orleans took | ever, left unmolested, went back after a away a fragment of the Bastille as a relic. time to Birmingham, succeeded to his Watt may have introduced the future father's business, and in 1817 was the laureate, then a heated democrat, ulti- first to cross the Channel and ascend the mately an extreme Tory, to Robespierre Rhine to Coblentz by steam. He lived and Danton, for he knew them well, was till June, 1848, thus hearing of the proclaDanton's second when they had quar-mation of the second republic, after havrelled, and on the ground effected a recon- ing witnessed the virtual establishment of ciliation by urging the loss to the cause of the first. liberty if either of them fell. When, on April 15, 1792, the forty mutinous soldiers of the Château-Vieux regiment, released from the galleys of Brest, had a triumphal. procession through Paris, Cooper and Watt were in it, bearing the British flag, with the bust of Algernon Sydney. Burke, in the House of Commons nearly a year afterwards, vehemently denounced them as having thus applauded mutiny and murder, and as having exchanged embraces with Marat. Watt's biographer, Muirhead, speaks of him as horrified by the storming of the Tuileries and the September massacres, but he was so far from reprobating the former that on August 14 he waited on the Assembly, together with Gamble and RaymontDidot, the paper-maker, had married a Miss Gamble, and this was probably her brother to present thirteen hundred and fifteen francs for the families of the combatants. The September massacres, however, certainly horrified Watt, and so little did he make a secret of it that Robespierre denounced the two Manchester delegates to the Jacobins as Pitt's emissaries. Watt, whom three years' schooling at Geneva had made fluent in French, was equal to the occasion. Springing on the platform, he pushed Robespierre aside, and in a short but vehement speech "completely silenced his formidable antagonist, carrying with him the feelings of the rest of the audience, who expressed their sense of his honest British spirit in a loud burst of applause." On going back to his lodgings, however, Watt had a warning that his life was not safe, and we know that the incorruptible Robespierre was also the unforgiving Robespierre. He immediately left Paris without a passport, and with some difficulty made his way to Italy. On his return to England in 1794 his father had serious apprehensions lest he should be prosecuted, and contemplated shipping him to northern Europe or America; for though young Watt (by this time twenty-five years of age) had broken off correspondence with France he was still a Radical, and deemed it an honor to dine with two of the "acquitted felons" of the 1794 trials. He was, how- fair, 1819. William Playfair, more actively engaged in the Revolution than Watt, had also to flee for his life, but unlike Watt he ended by cursing what he originally blessed. Brother of John Playfair, the Edinburgh mathematician and geologist, he was a civil engineer, and had settled in Paris. He had patented a new rolling machine, and in 1789 joined Joel Barlow in launching the Scioto Company, which in two months disposed of fifty thousand acres in Ohio to two convoys of French emigrants. When Barlow was called back to America, Playfair acted as sole agent. He assisted, in all probability, in the capture of the Bastille, for he was one of the eleven or twelve hundred inhabitants of the St. Antoine quarter who on the previous day had formed themselves into a militia, and who, with the exception of a few detained by patrol duty, headed the attack on the fortress. It is significant, but scarcely excusable, that in his "History of Jacobinism" he makes light of the capture of the Bastille, and does not hint that he was concerned in it. Indeed, the only reference to his having been in Paris at all is the remark, "I do not consider virtue to consist in the simple manners and republican phrases of a Brissot, and I have told him so to his face." French pamphlet of 1790 on paper money is attributed to him. It was he (not Pé tion, as Carlyle represents) who courageously rescued D'Espréménil, an old acquaintance, when half killed by a mob in the Palais Royal in February, 1791. Pétion simply visited and condoled with the poor man after the rescue, in which Play. fair was assisted by a brave National Guardsman, a horse-dealer, who afterwards pawned his uniform to give Playfair a dinner, and was with difficulty persuaded to accept a few louis.* On Playfair speaking out too plainly on the excesses of the Revolution, Barrère is said to have procured an order for his arrest, but he escaped to Holland and thence to England. A By 1793 he was back in London, publishing pamphlets which advocated a France as it Is, not Lady Morgan's, by W. Play wholesale manufacture of forged assignats | London. He induced his uncle to embark as the surest and most merciful method of in speculations which ultimately proved crushing the Revolution. He urged that ruinous. There is a tradition in the fam this would save many lives, that American ily that he assisted at the capture of the notes were forged in General Howe's Bastille, but there is no positive evidence camp without its being deemed dishonor- of his being in Paris till three years later. able, and that there could be no fear of In October, 1790, he presided at a dinner retaliation, seeing that Bank of England given by the Society of Friends of the notes were payable at sight. Names, says Revolution (of 1688) to a deputation from the old song, go by contraries. Only on Nantes. They wrote home that he was the lucus a non principle can we explain thoroughly acquainted with all the Eurothe sanguinary temper of a Rossignol or pean languages and literatures, and that a Saint Just and the forged assignat pro- on dining at his house they met the leadposal of a Playfair. Unfortunately his ing men of letters. Samuel Rogers may suggestion did not fall on deaf ears. The have been one of the number, for he knew British government is alleged to have Stone well, and twelve months later, dinconnived at the manufacture by the émi-ing with him, met Fox, Sheridan, Talleygrés of forged assignats at Howden, near rand, Madame de Genlis, and Pamela, Hexham. The local tradition is that this "quite radiant with beauty.' 19 In Novempaper-mill on the Tyne never prospered ber, 1792, Stone was in Paris, and wrote afterwards. Some of the exiled bishops and clergy reprobated the act, but the Bourbon princes apparently reconciled themselves to it on the casuistical plea that the counterfeit notes had a secret mark by which, in the event of the restoration of the monarchy, they could be distinguished and cashed. One ill deed begets another, and though the royalist issue had long ceased, Napoleon in 1803 organized a forgery of English, Austrian, and Russian notes, the plates of which were claimed by and given up to the respective ambassadors on his fall. Playfair, who is more honorably known as an editor of Adam Smith's works, was constantly unsuccessful, despite his inventive genius. He returned to Paris after WaterToo to edit Galignani's Messenger, but in 1818 an account of a duel brought on him a sentence of three months' imprisonment, to escape which he fled to London, where he died five years afterwards, at the age of sixty-four. His brother, the professor, remained a staunch Whig; and a Dundee minister, James Playfair, who in 1790 signed an address of congratulation to the French Assembly, was probably a cousin. John Hurford Stone resembled Playfair only in enterprise and eventual poverty. He was born at Tiverton in 1763, lost his father in childhood, and was sent up to London with his brother William to assist in the business of their uncle William Hurford, the son of a Tiverton sergemaker, who had become a coal merchant. Stone, according to information furnished us by a kinsman, was very clever and cultured, and had completely thrown off the Unitarian docrines of his family. He was one of Dr. Price's congregation in to dissuade Sheridan from accepting French citizenship, which the Convention intended conferring on him and Fox. "Obscure and vulgar men, and scoundrels"- does he include Paine?-having already received the distinction, he had persuaded Brissot to defer the proposal, especially as it would be made a handle of by the Tories. In the same month he presided at a dinner of British residents in Paris to celebrate French victories. Paine was present, as also Lord Edward Fitzgerald, whom Stone introduced to the fascinating Pamela. Stone was well acquainted with Madame de Genlis, Pamela's adoptive (or real) mother, and on having to quit Paris she entrusted her manuscripts to him. He handed them over to Helen Maria Williams, who, on the eve of a threatened domiciliary visit, burnt them. The "scribbling trollop," as Horace Walpole styles her, never forgave him for this holocaust, yet he is said to have advanced fifteen thousand francs with a view to procuring her husband's escape from prison. Sympathy with the Revolution ensured no immunity from the wholesale arrest of British subjects as hostages for Toulon. Stone was apprehended and consigned to the Luxembourg on October 13, 1793, but released on the 30th. He was again arrested, together with his wife, in April, 1794, but liberated next day on condition of leaving_France. He could not safely return to England, for his brother was in Newgate on a charge of treason, and he himself was described in the indictment as the principal. He went to Switzerland, probably joining Helen Williams there, but he must have been back in June, for he then obtained a divorce from his wife 66 Rachel Coope. This is the presumptive | which must have made him acquainted little sympathy with the Jacobins, a letter from him found on Wm. Stone, seemingly addressed to or intended for J. H. Stone, and dissuading the French from an invasion, led him to take refuge in France. To avoid arrest as an Englishman, he assumed the name of Jean Martin, and lived in retirement at Passy, his identity being J. H. Stone, in a published letter to Dr. Priestley, made some caustic comments on this prosecution, and incidentally expressed admiration of Charlotte Corday, though her act had done more harm than good. He also extolled the Girondins, and declared his dissent from Paine's religious views and his belief in an en-known to only five or six persons. One lightened Christianity. He had by this time started afresh in business, and while still an ardent politician, and in the confidence of the Directory, became one of the chief printers in Paris. In 1805 he brought out an edition of the Geneva Bible. He published several English reprints, and he undertook a costly edition of "Humboldt's Travels." This work, of these was Bishop Grégoire, who states that the English government supposed him to have gone to America, or would otherwise have outlawed him. Another was Robespierre, to whom he paid secret visits. In June the Committee of Public Safety detected his incognito and arrested him, but after a month's detention at the Carmelite monastery he was banished. |