Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/520

 426 NOTES AND QUERIES. F-12S. X.JUNES, 1922. examination, only proved that there had been an inquiry by letter, whether such a person resided in Oxford ; and that having answered the letter, soon afterwards a stranger called at the Post Office, whom he conducted to Le Maitre ; that afterwards, at the Cross Inn in this City, he was privy to a conversation in which the person threatened the prisoner, that if he refused signing the deed, he would make discovery of a forgery of which he had been guilty. The prisoner, after this, rested his defence upon a most impudent and iniquitous assertion, that he first received two of the medals from a member of the Univer- sity, who stood indebted to him for Tambour Waistcoats ; that he had very inadvertently been thus entrapped ; but that upon remonstrating with the Gentleman when they came to settle accounts, he was held in defiance, and threatened with the consequences ; that finding the deplor- able situation to which he was reduced, he had afterwards received from the same person all the rest ; yet, that though he should suffer whatso- ever the Law could inflict upon him, he was firmly resolved never to divulge the secret. His Lordship then summed up the evidence with great candour, yet with just indignation reprobated the horrid insinuation which the prisoner had sug- gested, in hopes of deluding the world into a belief of his own innocence. The Jury, without with- drawing from the Court, returned their verdict GUILTY. He was afterwards sentenced to hard labour on the Thames for five years, and then to be discharged. Another and shorter account of the trial is printed in The Gentleman's Magazine for March 7, 1777, in which the prisoner's alias is spelt Matra, and it is stated that he was admitted into the Museum as a teacher of French, and after the theft went off in a post-chaise and four, pledging two of the medals to pay the postboy. In the book of the Oxford Summer Assizes of 1776 the prisoner's names are given as " John Peter Le Maitre, alias Maire, alias Mara " (Globe, March 31, 1890, letter from Mr. J. L. Mathews, Oxford Cir., Temple) ; and they are similarly given in the book of the Crown Court Office, Oxford Assizes, for March 5, 1777 (Merivale's * Historical Studies,' 1865, art. ' Marat '). Le Maitre, then, having been safely in- terned in the hulks at Woolwich in March, 1777, and shortly afterwards, ' as we learn from The Monthly Repository, recognized there by a native of Bristol who had been a former pupil of his at Warrington, it is sig- nificant to note that the real J. P. Marat, M.D., of Church Street, Soho, had succeeded in obtaining an appointment on the medical staff of the Comte d'Artois at Paris on June 24 of the same year, or scarcely three months later. This fact seems, at first sight, to shatter the whole Le Maitre hypothesis, and, not unnaturally, has been so interpreted by i some of his biographers. A reference to contemporary records, however, shows that the matter cannot be so lightly dismissed, for on April 23, 1777, The Annual Register tells us that : One day last week the ballast lighter working on the east coast was drove over to Woolwich by the high wind, when 14 of the convicts rose upon their keepers, cut one of them terribly on the shoulder, and made their escape. A naval officer meeting them at Greenwich persuaded eight to return to their duty, but the other six have not been heard of since. No records relating to escapes from the hulks have, unfortunately, been preserved, nor, perhaps, were they very scrupulously kept, for later on a scandal was unearthed which showed that the warders were bribed to conceal such incidents, so that the con- tractors might continue to draw payment for the absentees. These escapes must, in fact, have become fairly common, as apart from unpublished instances the flight of other gangs from Woolwich is recorded both earlier and later than that above mentioned (Vincent's ' Records of Woolwich,' vol. i., pp. 359-64 ; The Gentleman's Magazine, Nov. 7, 1776). Was Le Maitre, then, one of the escaping convicts either of April 23, 1777, or of some other date, unrecorded, but prior to June of that year ? Assuming an affirma- tive answer to this question, which the present theory necessarily requires, we have now reached the close of the first phase of Jean Paul's enigmatic career his early and largely anonymous life in England. SIDNEY L. PHIPSON. (To be continued.) ROBERT HERRICK'S GRAVE. IT has long been dfesumed that the poefc Robert Herrick lies in an unmarked grave in the churchyard at Dean Prior. Indeed, the memorial tablet placed on the north wall of the church by Herrick's kinsman* William Perry-Herrick, in 1857 states that ' in this churchyard lie the remains of Robert Herrick." Yet, so far as I am aware, the only evidence in regard to his burial is the following entry in the parish register : " Robert Herrick, Vicker, was buried ye 15th day of October, 1674." In the summer of 1917 certain discoveries were made that suggest the possibility that Herrick may be buried within the church,, instead of in the churchyard, and that his grave may, after all, be marked. From time to time for a number of years alterations and improvements have been made within