When Mrs Phillida Bathurst heard
of the disappearance of her husband Benjamin she arranged for her brother and
herself to go immediately to Perleberg, Prussia, travelling via Sweden and the
Baltic on Swedish passports. She sent Herr Heinrich Röntgen ahead, to gather
what information he could, and they met him in Berlin, where he told her that
he had heard from a lady in Magdeburg that Benjamin had been taken prisoner and
was being held in the fortress there. She had told him that the Governor of
Magdeburg, had said to her, “They are looking for the English Ambassador,
but I have him up there,” pointing to the fortress.
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| Magdeburg |
Röntgen added that he
had been to see the Governor himself, who confirmed that he had said this, but
it had been a mistake. Mrs Bathurst determined to speak to the Governor herself
and went to Magdeburg, where she had a two-hour audience with him. He told her
what he had told Röntgen, that he had spoken to the lady at a ball and said he
had the English Ambassador in custody, but the mistake was his as the prisoner
was one Louis Fritz, an English spy in the pay of George Canning, the English
Foreign Secretary (and later, he served the shortest-ever term as Prime
Minister – he died after only 119 days in office).
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| George Canning |
Mrs Bathurst demanded to see
Fritz but was told that he had been transferred to Spain. When the party
returned to London, Röntgen wrote to Canning, inquiring about this Louis Fritz
and received a reply denying all knowledge of him. Röntgen also told Mrs
Bathurst that a certain Comte D’Antraigues, someone unknown to him, wished to
speak to her. She knew the name from the incomplete letter discovered in her
husband’s trousers, found by two peasant women collecting fuel in the woods
outside Perleberg, and she received D’Antraigues the following day.
He railed
against Napoleon and the French, but Mrs Bathurst was cautious and on her
guard. The Comte told her that what she had heard about Magdeburg was true,
that Benjamin had been abducted by armed men and taken to the fortress, and
that the Governor had written to Paris, to Fouché, the Minister of Police,
asking what he should do with the prisoner. The Minister had replied that mad
Englishmen should not bother the Emperor, and that the Governor should dispose
of him. As he had already spoken about Bathurst, the Governor made up the story
about Fritz to cover himself but it was all a lie and Mrs Bathurst’s husband
had perished at Magdeburg. She thanked him for the information but begged his
pardon and asked if he could furnish her with proof of what he had told her. He
could, he said, but he would need to send a ciphered message to France and
would return with the reply, which he would translate for her when it arrived.
He asked her to stay in London and wait for him to return.
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| Comte d'Antraigues |
Emmanuel Henri Louis
Alexandre de Launay, Comte d'Antraigues, was born in Montpellier on Christmas
Day 1753, and had joined the army at the age of fourteen, rising to become a
cavalry Captain. In 1778, he left the army and mixed in intellectual circles –
he was a friend of Rousseau and Voltaire – and became a supporter of the French
revolution, issuing pamphlets in defence of it, but following the storming of
Versailles by a mob on October 5th 1789, he changed sides and became
a defender of the Bourbon monarchy (it was rumoured that he had once,
unsuccessfully, tried to seduce Marie Antoinette). When his part in a plot to
aid the Royal family to escape from Paris was exposed, d’Antraigues fled to
Switzerland, where he married his former mistress Madame de Saint-Huberty, a
famous opera singer, before moving to Italy.
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| Madame de Saint-Huberty |
He became a secret agent for the
future King Louis XVIII, but as the political landscape of Italy became much
more fluid he was again forced to flee. The French captured him at Trieste,
where Napoleon Bonaparte questioned him, but he and his wife managed to escape,
(aided, it was said, by Napoleon’s wife, who was an admirer of Madame de
Saint-Huberty’s vocal abilities). Louis XVIII, suspicious that he may have
betrayed his interests in return for his freedom, dismissed d’Antraigues from
his service, which antagonised him greatly and he became a vocal critic of the
King. D’Antraigues’s loyalties passed to Czar Paul I of Russia, for whom he
also worked as a secret agent, before moving to London, where he spied for
Canning, the Foreign Secretary.
On the morning of July 22nd 1812,
d’Antraigues had a ten o’clock appointment with Canning, so he and his wife
rose early to travel from their home in Queen Anne Street West, Barnes Terrace,
London into the city. At seven o’clock, their Italian servant Lorenzo drew a
poignard and a pistol from his master’s bedside, and standing six paces from
him on the staircase, he shot at him. The ball missed, passing between
d’Antraigues and his wife, and Lorenzo lunged at his master, stabbing him in
the shoulder. The Comte, mortally wounded, staggered back into his bedroom and
Lorenzo turned the blade next on his mistress, stabbing her fatally in the
breast. She did not scream but only repeated, “Lorenzo, Lorenzo,” as she died.
The murderer went back up to his master’s room and found him lying dead from
his wounds on the floor. D’Antraigues, ever cautious because of his dubious
dealings, always kept the poignard and four loaded pistols by his bedside, and
Lorenzo took another of these, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He
died instantly. Madame was noted for her sharpness with her servants and had
fired Lorenzo the previous day. It was this, some said, that had caused him to
seek vengeance, although others felt that Napoleon and Louis XVIII had
sufficient cause to wish d’Antraigues dead and drew their own conclusions. In a
later biography of d’Antraigues, Un Agent Secret sous la Revolution et
L'empire - Le Comte D'antraigues by Léonce Pingaud (1893) there is
no mention at all of Benjamin Bathurst.
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| Un Agent Secret sous la Revolution et L'empire - Le Comte D'antraigues by Léonce Pingaud |
In either case, Mrs Phillida Bathurst did not receive the
proof from d’Antraigues that she had sought from him. But this was not the end
of the tribulations of this poor lady.
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