Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/235

Rh prisoners were at first treated indulgently, but when Lebon became proconsul rigour set in. Mrs. Thicknesse fancied that but for her obtaining a few hours' delay in the execution of an order for their transfer to the Annunciata convent—news of Robespierre's fall arrived in the interim,—they would have been stripped of their money and jewels and then massacred; but these hairbreadth escapes at Robespierre's overthrow must be distrusted. Shortly afterwards came an order that all who could earn their livelihood should be liberated, whereupon Mrs. Thicknesse sent the local authorities specimens of drawing and music-copying. There was some demur to allowing a lord's stepmother to profit by a decree in favour of working women, but Dumont effected her release, and she returned to England. A lively old lady, with well-preserved teeth and unbleached hair, she was seventy-nine at her death in 1826.

Sophia Kingdom, the future Lady Brunel, was among the captives at Rouen. The youngest of the sixteen children (nine surviving) of a deceased naval contractor at Plymouth, she had in 1792 accompanied West India friends, the Longuemars, to Rouen, as a good opportunity of learning French. Illness prevented her returning home when the Longuemars, uneasy at the political prospect, went back, and she was left in charge of the American Consul, Charpentier, whose wife was an Englishwoman. There young Brunel, a kinsman of