Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 26, 2025
On Mr Harvey telling him the state of things in front, he directed us to proceed to the quarters of the Comte de Puisaye, to say that he would endeavour to drive back the Republicans and to hold the fort until the Count should come up with all the troops he could collect. Mr Harvey and I accordingly hastened forward on the errand. As we went on, we heard several of the fugitives passing us.
In Calvados, the insurrection had had the same royalist character, since the marquis de Puisaye, at the head of some troops, had introduced himself into the ranks of the Girondists.
At the head of them all was the Count de Puisaye, the most politic and influential of the émigrés, a man who had been in touch with the Girondins in Normandy, who had obtained the ear of ministers at Whitehall, and who had been washed in so many waters that the genuine, exclusive, narrow-minded managers of Vendean legitimacy neither understood nor believed him.
Méhée's narrative contains few details and dates, such as enable one to test his assertions. But I have examined the Puisaye Papers, and also the Foreign and Home Office archives, and have found proofs of the complicity of our Government, which it will be well to present here connectedly. Taken singly they are inconclusive, but collectively their importance is considerable. In our Foreign Office Records (France, No 70) there is a letter, dated London, August 30th, 1803, from the Baron de Roll, the factotum of the exiled Bourbons, to Mr. Hammond, our Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, asking him to call on the Comte d'Artois at his residence, No. 46, Baker Street. That the deliberations at that house were not wholly peaceful appears from a long secret memorandum of October 24th, 1803, in which the Comte d'Artois reviews the career of "that miserable adventurer" (Bonaparte), so as to prove that his present position is precarious and tottering. He concludes by naming those who desired his overthrow Moreau, Reynier, Bernadotte, Simon, Masséna, Lannes, and Férino: Sieyès, Carnot, Chénier, Fouché, Barras, Tallien, Rewbel, Lamarque, and Jean de Bry. Others would not attack him "corps
The clergy restrained Charette and Stofflet from uniting with Puisaye and his questionable allies, whom they accused of seeking the crown of France for the Duke of York; and they promised that, if they waited a little, the Count d'Artois would appear among them. They effectively ruined their prospects of success; but Pitt himself had contributed his share.
Since the enterprise of Wimpfen, in which Puisaye had a command, there already existed, in Calvados and Morbihan, bands of Chouans, composed of the remains of parties, adventurers, men without employment, and daring smugglers, who made expeditions, but were unable to keep the field, like the Vendeans.
"One of members observed that there would be a good deal of trouble in raising an armed force of one thousand men." The principal military leaders at Caen and at Lyons, Wimpffen, Precy, Puisaye, are Feuillants and form only a provisional alliance with the Girondists properly so called, Hence constant contentions and reciprocal mistrust. Buchez et Roux, XXVII, 360.
I tell you that, in the emigration, the Abbe de la Marche who was here and was employed in the Quiberoon business with Puisaye and Tinteniac, was the same Colonel of Mousquetaires Gris with whom Steyne fought in the year '86 that he and the Marchioness met again that it was after the Reverend Colonel was shot in Brittany that Lady Steyne took to those extreme practices of devotion which she carries on now; for she is closeted with her director every day she is at service at Spanish Place, every morning, I've watched her there that is, I've happened to be passing there and depend on it, there's a mystery in her case.
He had then put himself at the disposal of the Princes, and had enlisted men for the royal army in Veudée, Poitou and Normandy, helping priests to emigrate, and saving whole villages from the fury of the blues. He named Charette, Frotté and Puisaye as his most intimate friends, and these names recalled the chivalrous times of the wars in the west in which he had taken a glorious part.
Daring, however, attracts daring; and this prince had gathered around him in our land the most desperate of the French royalists, whose hopes, hatreds, schemes, and unending requests for British money may be scanned by the curious in some thirty large volumes of letters bequeathed by their factotum the Comte de Puisaye, to the British Museum.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking