Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/176

 162 yards. At his death these plans, accompanied by a mass of correspondence, were found by his successor, Louis XVI., in long tin cases in his cabinet at Versailles. All of them were destroyed except one, which was preserved, as containing the most complete plan for reducing England. Amongst the most active of these secret agents of Louis XV. was said to be the celebrated chevalier D'Eon, who was some time ambassador here, and for many years resident in this country, and who is supposed to have died here.



This so-called chevalier was, in truth, a woman dressing and living as a gentleman, and who was not only doctor of civil law, advocate of the parliament of Paris, censor of belles lettres and history in that capital, but had been secretary of embassy to the due de Nivernois in London, afterwards herself minister-plenipotentiary here, and, still more extraordinary, a captain of dragoons, and aide-de-camp to marshal Broglie, and had routed troops of Prussians at the head of her regiment. This woman, whose real name was Charlotte Genevieve Louise Auguste Timothee D'Eon du Beaumont, was known to maintain a private correspondence with Louis XV., was pensioned by him, sent on embassies to the courts of Russia and Austria, and honoured with the cross of St. Louis. Her sex was discovered in London, and she was compelled to resume female attire; but it would seem that she had a garb of duplicity that never was drawn from her, for she affected a great regard for England to the last, and a preference for living in it.

Since the Americans had arrived at the court of France, these atrocious designs had been renewed, and on the 7th of December of the present year the rope-house of the royal dockyard at Portsmouth was found to be on fire. By active exertions it was got under, after it had destroyed that building, and was imagined to be an accident. But, on the 15th of January, 1777, one of the officers of the dockyard found a machine and combustibles concealed in the hemp in the hemp-house of the same dockyard. It was now clear that the previous fire had been the work of an incendiary, and that, notwithstanding the vast quantity of hemp in the house, this second attempt had failed. Suspicion now fell on a moody, silent artisan, who, on the day of the fire, had been looking about the dockyard, and who, by some chance, had got locked up in the rope-house the night before. His name was not known, but the fact only that he was a painter, and had been called John the Painter. Government immediately offered a reward of fifty pounds for his apprehension; the same sum, with a strange simplicity, being offered to him if he would surrender himself for examination. Nothing, however, could be learned of him in Portsmouth or the country round; but fresh fires were now breaking out at Plymouth dockyard