Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/97

Rh being an additional inducement. He joined the Jacobin Club, and Brissot in September 1792 suggested the conferring of French citizenship on him, but this was not acted upon. He translated Collot d'Herbois' "Spirit of the French Constitution," which he appended to an ode of his own on the Triumph of Freedom. He was one of the founders of the Chronique du Mois, a political magazine. Vegetarian though he was, he considered bloodshed necessary to the success of the Revolution. In March 1792 he placarded the faubourg St. Antoine with bills advocating the abolition of standing armies, all able-bodied citizens to be armed with pikes. He was commissioned to organise a regiment of volunteers, but found them very refractory, and being a stern disciplinarian, he had "almost as many enemies as soldiers in his corps." He had left his wife and three children in England, but he sent for his two boys, and made them drummers in his regiment. He was dispatched against the Vendée insurgents, but in almost the first engagement he and his sons perished. It is believed that they were killed by their own men. Another Englishman who fell with them may have been Dr. Maxwell, who in December 1792 joined the French army, and is not again heard of. Three months previously Maxwell started a subscription in London for the French, citing the Corsica subscription as a precedent; but his house was mobbed on the day