CAPTAIN WRIGHT.

239

landed Pichegru and some of his companions, was becalmed on the morning of the 8th of May on the coast of France, and was carried by the ebb-tide close upon the rocks. Whilst his crew were sweeping with all their strength to get clear of the coast, seventeen armed vessels were rowed out from the shore, consisting of six brigs, six luggers, and five smaller gun-vessels. Wright's craft was only an eighteen-gun brig-sloop, and his crew consisted of fifty-one effective men and twenty-four boys; yet he gallantly fought the whole French flotilla for nearly two hours, and did not strike his colours until his ship was a mere wreck-until twelve of his men were wounded and two killed, and he himself wounded in the groin.

The First Consul was informed that Wright's vessel had been recognized as the same which had landed Pichegru; and that Wright had been a lieutenant on board Sir Sidney Smith's ship the Tigre, and had distinguished himself under Sir Sidney in the defence of Acre. The latter fact alone would assuredly have led to some harsher treatment than is reserved for prisoners of war; and it is believed that if Bonaparte could only have caught Sir Sidney himself (even though not engaged in landing Royalists), Sir Sidney would at least have run a close risk of making his exit from this world in the Temple-of which, before this time, he had been long an inmate. Orders were immediately transmitted to the coast, to interrogate the captured English crew separately, that is, secretly, and by the police; and when nothing could be got from the English sailors to throw any light upon the Pichegru conspiracy, Captain Wright was brought up to Paris, thrown into the Temple, not as a prisoner of war, but as a State prisoner, and there confined au secret. What followed could be precisely known only to those familiars who possessed the secrets of that prison-house. Even the date of the unhappy man's final catastrophe is not known; for Bonaparte himself declared his death had been concealed for some considerable time; the motive of that concealment no doubt being an anxiety to avoid a too close juxtaposition with the death of Pichegru in the same accursed place. Bonaparte also allowed that, to extort confessions, the surgeon of Wright's ship was threatened with immediate death; and this is nothing less than a species of torture. He also declared

that his grand object was to secure the principals, and to extract a full disclosure of all he suspected Wright to know. These avowals have tended to confirm the belief, which was very generally entertained at the time, and which indeed seems unavoidable, that Wright was barbarously treated in his close confinement—perhaps that his body as well as mind had been subjected to actual torture; and that, to get rid of the evidence his maimed or injured frame would present, recourse was had to another midnight assassination.

Captain Wright was once, and only once, seen in public, after his arrival at the Temple. He was brought into court on the 2nd of June, as a witness on Georges' trial, being called the hundred and thirty-fourth witness in support of the prosecution. He, however, refused to answer any interrogatories, declaring that, as a prisoner of war, as a British officer, he considered himself amenable only to his own Government. The Attorney-General requested the President to order that the examination of Captain Wright, which had been taken on the 31st of May and on a later day, should be read over to him in court; and this being done, Wright replied that it was omitted to be stated that, on the occasions when those secret examinations had been taken, the questions put to him had been accompanied with the threat of turning him over to a military tribunal to be shot, if he did not betray the secrets of his country. We know not how long after this Wright lived, but it was a considerable time ere it was announced in the Moniteur that he had been found one morning in his cell with his throat cut from ear to ear, and that this was another clear case of suicide. But, again, a great majority of the world, not certainly excepting Paris, concluded it was another clear case of assassination. And, in fact, the probabilities of Wright's having destroyed himself were still less than the probabilities in Pichegru's case. The French general, whose character was blemished, and whose fortunes were utterly ruined, had a great deal to depress his spirits; but the English captain had only good and cheering prospects before him, if he could only but be released from his irregular confinement; he had done his duty, he had executed the orders of his Government in various cases under circumstances of the greatest difficulty, he had

MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF CAPTAIN WRIGHT. 241

displayed a rare ability, as well as an extraordinary courage; the battle he fought before surrendering was as gallant an affair as any that had occurred since the commencement of the war.

Once out of the Temple, Wright might have been exchanged by cartel; once restored to his country, he must have obtained honours and promotion. Those who knew him well spoke of him as a buoyant, light-hearted, jovial sailor-the least likely man in the world to be easily cast down, or driven to a cowardly despair. Whatever may have been the threats employed, it was not probable that he should readily believe they would be put into execution against him; and we know that, during a part of his captivity, he anticipated an ultimate release, and that he employed himself in drawing up a spirited narrative of the circumstances of the capture of his ship, in order to refute the mendacious accounts given of that affair in the Moniteur. There is, however, a case in which we may suppose Wright to have destroyed himself; but it is a case where the guilt of murder would fall as heavily on his enemies as it could do if it were fully proved that they had, with their own hands, used the razor or the knife. Wright may have been so tortured as to have been deprived of his reason; or, in the natural dread of a repetition of the torture, he may have raised his hand against his own life. It is possible, though scarcely probable, that Bonaparte, who always positively denied any knowledge of Wright's death, may have been as ignorant on the point as he pretended, but he must have known that infamous threats had been used against that officer; and, in confessing himself that the death was concealed for a considerable time, he does not attempt to explain the motive of that very suspicious concealment. His apologist, Savary, who also denies all knowledge of Wright's death, calls it a dark and mysterious subject; and then hints that Fouché, who before it happened was fully reinstated in the Ministry of Police and in Bonaparte's good graces, was at the bottom of it all.*

It was a terrible epoch, that which immediately preceded the Empire. To use another of Fouché's striking figures, "The air

C. MacFarlane. "Hist. French Revolution."

was full of daggers." And few men knew so well as this old Jacobin and plotter that assassinations were no rarities, and that there were real conspiracies as well as imaginary conspiracies. On every side people were looking for plots, or making fictitious ones. Men, not in the State secret, apprehended a speedy return of the executions and horrors of 1793, when Robespierre gave the law to Paris and all France. It was intended to frighten the nation into a demand for a stronger Government; the Napoleonic Empire was to be established in terror, as the Republic had been before it. With the majority of the French, liberty was now but an old song.

The Senate, in an address to the First Consul, called upon him to complete his own work; the Council of State, by twenty votes against seven, affirmed that the basis of the Government of France ought to be hereditary succession. The Senate, the Tribunate, the legislative body, were advised, confidentially, to hasten to declare themselves, or they would be forestalled by the army. In the Tribunate, one solitary member spoke against the proposed change : it was Carnot. The Senate passed the project with only three dissentient votes. The legislative body was equally subservient and ready for the change.

During these transactions," says Thibaudeau in his "Memoirs," "the First Consul held private councils, to which he summoned several members of the great bodies of the Government, each of whom stipulated for himself and his friends. The Tribunes wanted to lengthen the period of their functions to ten years instead of five, with a salary of 25,000 francs instead of 15,000; the members of the legislative body wished also an increase of salary as well as of the duration of their office. The Senators wished their dignity to be made hereditary in their families, and to have an absolute veto on the projects of law, and other privileges besides. The Council of State alone asked for nothing. Bonaparte, whilst listening to everybody, matured his own plans, fixed the extent of his own power, and granted as little as possible of it to others."

On the 18th of May, 1804, at St. Cloud, the Senate, in a body, presented to Napoleon the Senatus Consultum which proclaimed him Emperor of the French, and made the Imperial dignity heredi

NAPOLEON PROCLAIMED EMPEROR.

243

tary in his family. Without waiting for that farce which was called the "sanction of the people," he forthwith assumed the title of "Emperor by the grace of God and the Constitutions of the Republic." Soon, however, the word Republic (never pleasant to his ear) was suppressed, and he styled himself Emperor "by the Constitutions of the Empire." When this was done the people were appealed to, and three millions of them were said to approve of it all, by their free votes taken in the communal assemblies. Then followed a deluge of congratulatory addresses from all quarters, the clergy, army, judges, public functionaries, &c. The army, however, could not have been unanimous, as several officers of the republican stamp resigned their commissions.

Shortly after the assumption of the imperial dignity by Bonaparte, the trials of Georges, Moreau, and the others accused with them of conspiracy, began before a special court of twelve judges. The law established by the Republic was set aside, no jury being allowed. In other cases, and throughout the proceedings, law and justice were outraged. Four of the judges were for the capital conviction of Moreau; but we do not believe that the new Emperor ever really wished to take the life of his military rival. In the end, Moreau was found guilty only of a misdemeanour, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Napoleon arbitrarily changed this sentence into one of perpetual banishment, and Moreau soon sailed for the United States of America. Georges and about twenty others were condemned to death, but only twelve were executed. Georges died like a true enthusiast and hero of the Vendée. "That man," said the new Emperor, was as hard as iron and as brave as steel! If he would only have come round to me, I would have made him one of my aides-de-camp." But there were yet men in France not to be won by such promotion, or dazzled by all the splendour of what Paul Louis Courier called la Troupe Dorée.