BOOKS.
MR. WICKHAM'S MEMOIRS.*
[FIRST NOTICE.]
-WHEN Frenchmen declare that the gold and the intrigues of Pitt were the cause of much of the misery, bloodshed, and civil rancour -which characterized the progress of their great Revolution, Englishmen shrug their shoulders, or yawn, or otherwise express a -scorn too deep for words. That any English statesman, but above all, that he, the austere, the impassable, the " Heaven-sent Minister," should play foul in the conduct of such gigantic issues, 'should bribe and suborn and sow strife, is a thing to be, if possible, +boldly discredited. Nothing in all his career has given English- men such a conception of the flagrant mendacity of the First Napoleon as his frequent vehement reiteration of this charge. -" That Pitt has a hand in it, the gold of Pitt : so much to all 'reasonable patriot men may seem clear," says Mr. Carlyle, with 'unaffected, serene scorn of the patriot men and their reasoning power. "But then through what agents of Pitt?" he asks ; and it was not certainly so easy to answer the question then as it is cow. For example, Mr. Wickham was one of the agents of Pitt. He had the reputation among his contemporaries of being a singularly high-minded man, whose word was the exact avoirdupois -of veracity, straight-forward in all his ways, and who in retiring from public life at an early age because his chief Lord Grenville tad done so, carried the point of honour to the pitch of senti- mentality. His portrait gives the impression of a countenance 'vigilant and commanding, and of a presence dignified and erect. 'This gentleman, nevertheless, seems to have been throughout the greater portion of his public life engaged in a series of transactions as vile as diplomatic hands have ever touched. He was one, the principal, be it hoped, of those agents of Pitt through whom the gold whereby the " patriot men of Paris " felt that the scales were so mysteriously weighted against them in their deadly fight for 'freedom was disbursed. It was among the duties of his mission to corrupt French Generals and Ministers, and all other Frenchmen whose heads or hands might be utilized to the detriment of their -country ; to stimulate and to supply the direction, armament, and provision for civil war in France ; to violate the neutrality of the friendly state to which he was accredited, Switzerland, by using its territory as a base of operations for conspiracy and rebellion, and by actually raising an armed force among its subjects for the purpose of invading the soil of its neighbour republic ; and to mid with counsel and money the allied despotic Powers to crush the French Commonwealth. He did all this with the same serene sense of unspotted rectitude as Mr. Hastings may have felt in screwing their last rupee out of the Begums of Oude under pressure of hunger, or Lord Castlereagh in buying an Irish Member who had just spoken against the Union with a peerage, when the division was -coming on, and one or two votes would suffice to turn the scale.
Mr. Wickham was descended from one of the Levitical families of the English Church. His pedigree runs for hundreds of years 'under cassocks and lawn sleeves, through a line of bishops, deans, archdeacons, prebendaries, and Court chaplains. But in Henry Wickham, the diplomatist's father, the long suppressed " old .Adam" in the blood broke forth flagrantly. He twice ran away from school to enlist as a private soldier,—the second time he served for years in a Swiss regiment, and would have been content to have so spent his days, had he not been recognized by accident while standing sentinel at the gates of Alexandria. He was at once brought home, had a commission bought for him, and became a Colonel in the Guards,—" the handsomest man in his three regi- ments of Guards," George III. thought. William Wickham, born in October, 1761, was the Colonel's eldest son. He was educated
* Correeponkace of the Right Hon. William Wickham, from the Year 179t Edited with Notes by his Grandson, William Wickham, M.A. London: Richard Bentley.
at Harrow and Oxford, where he had the good fortune to acquire the friendship of Lord Grenville, who afterwards placed him in diplomacy ; and of Abbot, afterwards Lord Colcheater, whom ho
succeeded as Irish Secretary. It 18 80 stated at least in both Abbot's and Wickham's memoirs, but the dates do not very well corre-
spond, for Abbot left Oxford in 1778, and Wickham only graduated B.A. in 1782. He then proceeded, as Abbot had done before him, to study civil law at Geneva ; and there, like the hero of Mr.
Canning's Gottingen ballad, he fell in love with his professor's daughter, Madlle. Eleonore Bertrand, whom six years afterwards he married. His long residence at Geneva and his marriage made for Mr. Wickham a sort of Swiss connection, which when he came there as British Minister was of no alight advantage to him. In October, 1794, Lord Grenville sent him on a special mission to Berne; and a few months afterwards, he was appointed to replace Lord Robert Fitzgerald as Minister Plenipotentary to the Swiss Cantons. He had never before been engaged in any ostensible diplomatic employment, and his sudden elevation was regarded with not unreasonable jealousy. But Lord Grenville evidently knew his man, and he had means of knowing him other than college acquaintance.
There is some mystery which his editor might, we cannot help thinking, have cleared up about the early period of Mr. Wickham's political employment. We learn from a memorandum of his own that he was first engaged by Lord Grenville on a secret political correspondence in the latter end of of the year 1793. There is no trace of this correspondence in the public offices. According to Mr. Wickham's memorandum, it was considered of such moment that it was passed through the Lord Chancellor's hands, so as to avoid its being observed by any of the ordinary officials at the Foreign Office. It is obvious that this correspondence had its origin in some past transactions of Mr. Wickham, dating from his residence at Geneva. To such transactions, a sentence in one of his despatches to Lord Grenville is the principal clue these volumes afford. In this letter, dated 15th June, 1795, while combating the plan of an invasion of France by way of Provence, he says, " This idea with respect to an invasion in Provence is not merely a fancy of my own ; it was the decided opinion of one of the best officers in France, the late General Conway, with whom I passed the whole summer of 1792 upon the frontier in the neighbourhood of Chamber), ; I had there repeated conversations with him upon the subject, and his constant observation was that the South of France could only be conquered from the North." It is otherwise obvious that if Mr. Wickham had not entered into, he had at all events made himself master of, all the lines of the Royalist con- spiracy of which Switzerland was then the focus ; and this gave him great weight with the English Government, which at the time firmly believed in an imminent Bourbon restoration. He was ap- pointed Superintendent of Aliens in 1794, in which capacity, he says, he was enabled to much extend his " foreign communica- tions and correspondence." The impression made by his abilities when he entered the public service was immediate and remarkable. He had not been more than two or three months at the Alien Office when he was sent to Switzerland ; and so strong was the desire of the Government to retain his services in a permanent place of importance, that the Duke of Portland kept the situation of Under-Secretary of the Home Department in waiting for him during the three years he was employed abroad. Lord Grenville at the same time offered to translate him to the American Embassy, whenever his special work in Switzerland was done, if he should prefer to continue in diplomacy.
When Mr. Wickham was first sent to Switzerland by Lord Grenville, certain overtures had been made to the English Government by M. Mounier, afterwards Prefect and Councillor of State under Napoleon, and by M. Mallet du Pan ; and Mr. Wickham was instructed to discuss with them the conditions upon which a restoration of the Bourbons might or could be effected. The King, Lord Grenville wrote in Mr. Wickham's instructions, did not desire to interfere for the purpose of giving to France any particular form of government ; but " seeing in the principles which all the Republican parties in France have uniformly professed the certain ruin of all civil society in Europe, if those principles should be suffered ultimately to establish themselves in so powerful a country as France, he is naturally led to seek as the means of peace some legitimate principle of government in that country, which can, as it appears, only be looked to from the restoration of a monarchy in the person of the undoubted heir of that throne." George III., whose brain afterwards gave way when it was proposed to him to emancipate his own Roman Catholic subjects, was also of opinion that as a primary condition of peace the Catholic Church must be re- established in France. " On the subject of religion and public worship," Mr. Wickham was instructed,—" it is conceived that
whatever party really wishes to restore public peace in France must see that the bulk of the people there can never be brought back to the habits of industry and subordination but by the aid of religion, and that is, therefore, an indispensable part of any plan for the re-establishment of a quiet and well-ordered government there." As to the means to be employed and the objects to which they were to be directed, Mr. Wickham had a very wide commission. In a subsequent letter of direction he is
informed His Majesty is pleased to authorize you to make any such advance in the way of Secret Service money as you are satisfied is likely to be usefully applied to these objects" (purchase of arms for French Royalist insurgents), " or to that of gaining over any part of the enemy's army, or the commandants or officers of any of his camps, garrisons, or posts ; or generally to promote the success of the enterprise which is in view." One of the measures employed was the raising of a Swiss regiment in the name of the deposed Government of France ; and in this operation, which was of course a gross violation of the neutrality of the Swiss Republic, Mr. Wickham took an active part and was very proud of his suc- cess. " Your lordship will please to recollect," he writes, " that this will be the first Swiss regiment that ever was raised without either an avowed treaty, a subsidy to the State, or pensions to in- dividuals. In a political point of view I cannot help considering the thing at this moment as of importance, were it only considered as a real and a sensible blow given to the French Republican in- terest here, as severe as it was certainly unexpected." Another of Mr. Wickham's favourite projects showed an audacity of concep- tion that might move the envy of Count Bismarck. In moments when he was tolerably confident of success in the project of a counter-revolution, he urged with much ardour the advan- tage of substituting Lyons for Paris as the capital of France. Lyons was then, especially as to its young men, intensely Royalist, owing entirely, in the British Minister's opinion, to the personal influence of his friend the Count de Precy.
That " the gold of Pitt" was spent profusely in the purchase of " all reasonable patriot men," these volumes, alas ! supply abun- dant and lamentable evidence. Of Pichegm's treason there is early proof. Mr. Wickham writes of him to Lord Gren- ville in October, 1794, " He repeats the strongest assurances of his good intentions, and of his full determination to attempt
something whenever a favourable opportunity shall offer He requests, above all, that we will keep his army constantly sup- plied with copies of the King's manifesto and counter-revolutionary pamphlets of every kind, all of which he says may be sent under cover to him by the common post." At this moment Pichegru was commanding a French army in the field against the Austrians. In the same letter from Mr. Wickham is found this suggestive sentence, " Among other French Generals, I learn from Boyard that several Generals of the army near Paris have been gained, besides those named in the convention. He treated himself directly with one of them, who only desired a small sum to distri- bute among his soldiers. Unfortunately there was not a penny to be found." In a letter to the Prince de Conde, a month later, after referring to the sum which the Prince had received through Colonel Craufurd for the maintenance of his army, a sum of £140,000, he alludes to the advances of money which he had him- self made " pour la marche de Baptiste." Pichegru is sometimes spoken of as Baptiste, sometimes as La Maitresse. By way of dis- tinction, Moreau is referred to as La Marie.e. But Moreau, it would appear, was approached rather on the side of his ambition, and never condescended to receive offers of money. Pichegru on the other hand had apparently an unlimited credit. " Mes moyens sont toujours a see ordres ; " writes Mr. 1Vickham, " je les tiens toujours prets. C'est a lui seal a en indiquer l'emploi." The measure of Fiche- gru's treachery is perhaps best and most succinctly defined in Mr. Wickham's despatch to Lord Grenville of 8th March, 1797. He had at this time expressed himself ready to enter into communication through Mr. Wickham with the Austrians, and " to answer any particular question that the Austrian Generals might think proper to make to him." Pichegru's general estimate of the situation was, " That there was but one certain way of putting an end to the war and the revolution, and that was by beating and fatiguing the Republican armies, inasmuch as those armies constituted the whole strength and means of the Directory ; and that if that could not be done with spirit and constancy the revolution would over run all Europe, and he knew no means of stopping it, as with their armies unbeaten the Directory would be sure to find finances either within or without their own territory." Another proof of his consummate villainy is found in a letter of two years earlier date, at a moment when an attack on Franche Comte from the side of Switzerland had been organized almost wholly by Mir.. Wickham's exertions and at English expense. " Pichegru," he- writes, " has left only 4,000 men now in all Franche Comte. He could not with decency leave less." Mr. Drake, afterwards recorder- of Wells, was at this time engaged on a secret mission, one of whose duties was the arming of the peasantry in the district pro- posed to be raised in rebellion. It is curious, as an indication of the character of the war contemplated, that in the estimate of arms required for the insurgents by Mr. Drake, there are 5,000 muskets with bayonets, and double the number, 10,000, poignards, pour la defense personelle, specified. In January 1796, Mr.. Wickham reports to Lord Grenville that " not only the Generals,. but all the administrators of the different French armies, may be gained either by promises or by money." He adds, " of four suc- cessive general officers stationed at Lyons, three have been entirely gained." There were doubts, nevertheless, as to whether some of these Generals, whether even Pichegru himself, might not be play- ing a double game,—doubts which happily came to an end, so far as Pichegru was concerned, when the Directory suspended his- command and banished him from France. On that occasion, the• Duke of Portland, touched to the heart by so sad a spectacle of fallen greatness and injured innocence, wrote to Mr. Wickham,. " Pray cherish Pichegru. I need not desire you to do it, but I wish him to feel that it is the wish of this Government to treat him as a.. gentleman and a man of perfect honour." The italics are his Grace's-
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