The Anglo-French Entente in the Seventeenth Century. Charles Bastide
after the defeat at Worcester are now known with the utmost accuracy. Extraordinary adventures, including the episode of the famous Boscobel oak, brought the royal outlaw to the little port of Shoreham in Sussex, where the captain of a brig bound for Poole with a cargo of coal consented to take him over to France. On 25th October 1651, about seven or eight o'clock, the tide came up and they set sail. No sooner did the boat stand to sea than Charles began playing a little comedy to avert suspicions. Drawing near the men, he told them he was a merchant fleeing from his creditors, but with money owing to him in France. He entreated them to induce the captain to sail for the coast of Normandy, and made them a gift of twenty shillings. After feigning to refuse, the captain ended by listening to the men's entreaties. Next morning the coast of Normandy was sighted, but the wind failing, they had to cast anchor two miles from Fécamp. Thereupon a sail came in sight and the captain fancied it might be an Ostend privateer. A boat was instantly lowered, and the King, together with Wilmot, reached the port with all possible speed.
On the 27th, Charles and Wilmot took horses for Rouen. At the inn where they resolved to stay, they were mistaken for thieves, so disreputable was their appearance, and, no doubt, trouble would have befallen them had not some English merchants vouched for their respectability. Refreshed and supplied with new clothes more befitting their rank, the two wanderers set out for Paris, the day after, in a coach.
Forty-eight hours later, they had reached the capital. Having slept at Fleury, they arrived on the 30th at Magny, where Queen Henrietta, James Duke of York, the Duc d'Orléans and a number of gentlemen met them. Late at night Charles, much tired but always good-humoured, entered the Louvre. "His retinue," wrote the Venetian ambassador, "consisted of one gentleman and one servant; his costume was more calculated to induce laughter than respect; his appearance was so changed that the outriders who first came up with him, thought he must be one of his own servants."[27]
To-day, in London, one may read every morning letters from France. It was not so three centuries ago. The mails for France, the "ordinary," as it was then called, left London twice a week, on Monday and Thursday.[28] An answer would be forthcoming a fortnight later, if no mishap had taken place, that is to say, if the carrier had not been drowned on the way,[29] or if the Secretary of State had not caused the bags to be opened in his office. "Here," wrote Cominges to Louis xiv., "they know how to open letters with more dexterity than anywhere in the world; they think it the right thing to do and that no one can be a great statesman without prying into private correspondence."[30] The Record Office preserves the melancholy letters that never reached those to whom they were addressed.
The present house-to-house delivery of letters was unknown. They had to be called for at the Post Office in Lombard Street. Contemporary guides never fail to give a lengthy description of the building, and the grand court where the City merchants used to walk up and down while the officers sorted the foreign mails.
Frenchmen of rank seldom leave London. "The quarter of the Common Garden is ordinarily that of the travelling Frenchmen, more busy at Court than at the Exchange. … Most of our young Frenchmen who go to London know only that region, and have ventured only as far as the Exchange by land or the Tower by water."[31]
How does the Frenchman of rank spend his time in London? Moreau de Brazey has answered the question in the most satisfactory manner: "We rise at nine, those who assist at the levees of great men have plenty to do till eleven; about twelve, the people of fashion assemble in the chocolate and coffee houses; if the weather is fine, we take a walk in Saint James's Park till two, when we go and dine. The French have set up two or three pretty good inns for the accommodation of foreigners in Suffolk Street, where we are tolerably well entertained. At the inn, we sit talking over our glasses till six o'clock, when it is time to go to the Comedy or the Opera, unless one is invited to some great lord's house. After the play one generally goes to the coffee-house, plays at piquet, and enjoys the best conversation in the world till midnight."[32]
At that late hour, the kind help of the City constable may be needed: "the watchmen or guards are so civil and obliging that they lead a foreigner to his home with a lantern; but if he rebels and is overbearing, they are content to lead him to the Roundhouse, where he spends the night till the fumes of the wine may have vanished."[33]
Though the guide-book has expatiated on the attractions of London life, the Frenchman soon gets weary. Neither the country nor the people please him. The English, he thinks, are haughty, fantastic, unfriendly. Moreover, they are melancholy because their climate engenders spleen. Complaints against the fogs ever recur in the ambassador's dispatches: "What I wish," wrote the Duc d'Aumont to the Marquis de Torcy (19th January 1713), "is that the fog, the air, and the smoke did not irritate my lungs." Courtin speaks in the same strain: "an ambassador here must be broad-shouldered. M. de Cominges has an everlasting cold that will follow him to the grave or to France, and I who am by nature of delicate health, have grown hoarse for the last four or five days and feel a burning in my stomach, with great pains in the side."[34] A bad winter, a fit of influenza, were enough to make the Grand Monarch's envoys loathe a country which they did not care to understand.
Never was a king worse informed by his ambassadors than Louis xiv. None of them dreamed of forsaking the Court to study the middle classes and the people. Of the institutions of England they knew what contemporary lawyers and archæologists had to teach. The love of freedom, the insular pride, they did not even suspect. Ignorant as they were, they tried by giving advice to the king, who mocked them, and money to his ministers, to subvert parliamentary government established at the price of six years of civil war and six years of dictatorship. "The French nobility do not travel"; when the gentlemen of France left Versailles they carried away with them their spirit of caste and narrow-mindedness. Forgetting nothing, they did not readily learn anything new.
But France had unofficial representatives beyond the Channel besides the royal envoys and their retinue of brainless young marquises.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Jusserand, French Ambassador at the Court of Charles ii., Appendix.
[2] Guizot, Répub. d'Angleterre, i. p. 420.
[3] Jusserand, French Ambassador at the Court of Charles ii.
[4] Babeau, Voyageurs en France, p. 78.
[5] Lettres de Locke à Thoynard (ed. Ollion), p. 35.
[6] Jusserand, French Ambassador at the Court of Charles ii.
[7] Evelyn, Diary, 12th November 1643.
[8] Locke, Journal in France, November 1675.