The Depot for Prisoners of War at Norman Cross, Huntingdonshire. 1796 to 1816

CHAPTER XII
THE TRUCE AND THE PEACE—PRISON EVACUATED, 1802—FINALLY CLEARED, 1814—DEMOLISHED, 1816

 
Joyous presage of ultimate bliss
   For the heart long depressed by vain yearning;
Timely token of pardon—the kiss
   That reviveth Faith’s innermost burning;
Peace prevailing o’er War’s artifice,
   Love o’er Hate, and delight over Mourning.
 

Norman Hill, Lingering Winter.

With what feverish anxiety must the occupants of the courts and caserns of Norman Cross have listened to the garbled accounts of the progress of the war which reached their ears towards the close of the eighteenth and the dawn of the nineteenth centuries.  How their hopes must have been raised when they heard of the defeat of the Austrians by Moreau at Hohenlinden, of the sudden crossing of the Alps by their hero Buonaparte, his swoop on to another Austrian army and its defeat at Marengo.  When they learned that in 1800 Austria had signed a Treaty of Peace with France (The Treaty of Lunéville, Feb. 1801) and that England was left to fight single-handed, they must have thought delivery extremely near.  To cheer them further would come the news of the alliance of Russia, Denmark, Sweden, and Prussia to constitute “the armed neutrality,” which though not actually at war with Great Britain, was formed to check her progress and paralyse her navy.  The time when the French Army would have England under its foot and the prison doors would be thrown open must be close at hand.

Then would come to discourage them, and to dash their happy anticipations to the ground, the news of Abercrombie’s victory at Alexandria, and the defeat and surrender of the French Army of Egypt in March of the same year.  This would be followed rapidly by the report that Nelson had in April attacked the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen, destroying or capturing the greater part of it, and thus breaking up the Armed Neutrality. ¹¹²  The more astute of the prisoners may have seen that a pause in the hostilities must come, but after five years’ confinement within a fence enclosing two and a half acres of ground, despair must have prevailed and almost drowned hope.  France’s prospect of defeating Britain in the Mediterranean was slight, and on the other hand England, having taken almost all the French colonies, and being compelled to hold them, although supreme on the sea, had no army with which to attack France itself.  Even though the news reached Norman Cross that in October 1801 the preliminaries of a treaty of peace had been signed, the prisoners could feel no certainty that these would come through the troublesome negotiations which must follow, and that peace would actually be concluded.

Therefore when at length the Treaty of Peace was signed at Amiens in Picardy on 27th March 1802, and the news reached the captives, it was received with frantic demonstrations of joy.  The great uncertain terror had gone; captivity was at an end; France, Holland, Spain, with parents, wives, children, sweethearts, and all they loved, were in sight.  At once preparations for departure were made: the prisoners forced the sale of their manufactures, they drew out their money, and got together their various belongings ready to leave at the first chance.  The prisoners’ joy was unbounded, and left no room for a disturbing thought or feeling; but great as was the sense of relief to the British nation at large, there was much dissatisfaction as to the terms of the Treaty, and naturally the storekeepers and prison officials, suddenly thrown out of employment, had a dash of bitterness in their cup.

After Amiens the Government took instant steps to relieve the country of the expense and responsibility of the prisoners, the object being to get the prison empty and the establishment closed at the first possible moment.  Immediately after the signature of peace, cartels to carry 2,600 prisoners were chartered at Norman Cross.  The Admiralty allowed 15s. 6d. per man as payment for conveying the prisoners to France.  A facsimile of the order to Captain Holditch, Master of the Argo, is, by the kind permission of his grandson, Mr. Share of Truro, here reproduced, and it will be seen that it is dated only twelve days later than the Treaty of Peace. ¹¹³

The number of captives at Norman Cross was at that time very low, about half the number of those confined at the time of the second clearance, twelve years later.  They left in four detachments, the first 1,000 strong, the second 1,040, the third 600, the last 100.  With what joy did they take that journey, cheered on their way by the good wishes of the country folk, even if they did shout “Good-bye, Froggies!”  This return of 3,100, as the number of those confined at Norman Cross on 27th March 1802, indicates the difference in the matter of exchange during the first period of the war, 1793–1802, and the second, 1803–14.  In this second period there was no steady outflow from the prisons to keep down the numbers, and they were ever filling with the captives sent in by Wellington and others.

On 29th April 1802 the prison was emptied, and although the Government had not sufficient confidence in the permanence of the peace entirely to dismantle the Depot, it was ordered that while all stoves, ranges, and grates, with the large iron boilers, were to remain until further orders, the copper boilers were to be sold, lamps and lamp irons were to be securely locked up, the furniture to be delivered to the barrack master, the hammocks to be sold at 1s. 3d. each, the coverlets at the best price obtainable, and as the barrack master refused to take the soil carts, these also were to be disposed of for what they would fetch. ¹¹⁴  All books, letters, papers, etc., were to be sent to the Transport Office in London.

The net proceeds of the sale amounted to £757 4s. 10d., to which must be added £15 for old store at the Port of Lynn.  In the Stamford Mercury of the 17th September 1802 appeared the following advertisement:

“THE LATE DEPOT FOR PRISONERS OF WAR

Norman Cross-Barracks to Let

“Sixteen large buildings, lately occupied as prisons, with sundry convenient buildings thereto belonging; with square yards, comprising about an acre of land in each, with good wells in the centre, and a quantity of land round the prisons fit for grazing sheep, etc.  Also sundry good dwellings, comprising Turnkeys’ lodges, stewards’ rooms, also two good houses lately occupied by the superintendents, well calculated for small families—may be viewed by applying to Mr. Henderson, Auctioneer, New Inn, Norman Cross.”

In their instructions to the auctioneer, the Government made conditions that the tenants were to keep the buildings in repair, and to deliver them up on three months’ notice if required.  The property does not read in the advertisement as one that there would be a rush for.

The landlord of the Old Bell Inn, still in the glory of the coaching and posting days, apparently treated for the wooden building, containing the two houses occupied one by Captain Woodriff the agent and the other by the steward and another officer, the rental of Captain Woodriff’s house to be £12 and that adjoining £10; but even at that rent he did not close.

In January 1803 the whole was let to Mr. Henderson, on condition that he lived on the premises, the barrack master keeping one key of the great gate.  Mr. Henderson paid an extra sum of £10 for Captain Woodriff’s house, which he probably wished to fit up either for his own residence or for the man whom he proposed to leave in charge when he was in London attending to another business which he had there; he also agreed to level the huts, which are not represented on any of the plans, and to sow the ground covered by them with grass seeds.

His tenancy lasted only six months.  Hostilities recommenced in May 1803, and on 3rd July Henderson had to hand over everything to two clerks appointed by the Admiralty.  He pleaded that he had ploughed and sown crops, and claimed £30 18s. compensation; he received £18 13s.  On the whole the Government would probably have saved money if they had locked the gates when Captain Woodriff, their agent, left the empty depot in June 1802, kept the keys themselves, and unlocked them on the 3rd July 1803.

Between those dates much had taken place to affect the history of the Depot.  The complete supremacy of the British Fleet, the blow given to the Northern Alliance (the Armed Neutrality) by Nelson in the battle of Copenhagen, and on the other hand the defeats inflicted on Austria, England’s continental ally, on whom she relied for her land forces, and the consequent Treaty of Lunéville, left England and France alike in a position which made them in 1802 anxious for a cessation of hostilities, the Treaty of Amiens being the result.

But its conditions were not such as to satisfy the British, who gave up all their conquests but Trinidad and Ceylon, restored the Cape to Holland, with the condition that it should be a free port, and agreed that Malta was to go back to the Knights of St. John, under the guarantee of one of the Great Powers.  France also made sacrifices and withdrew claims, but to the British nation these did not appear to balance those made by their own Government.  Buonaparte had no intention of allowing the peace to be more than a truce.  Among other objects he had in view, he recovered his veterans from their confinement in English prisons, and he never paused in his ambitious schemes.  He strove to increase French influence in Switzerland, Holland, and Italy.  Under the name of consuls he sent agents to England and Ireland, their real object being to make themselves acquainted with the resources of those countries and the chance of their successful invasion.  Egypt had been restored to the Porte by the Treaty, but instead of evacuating that country, the First Consul was utilising his position there to equip a fresh army.

In the face of these proceedings Britain did not withdraw her troops from Egypt, nor did she evacuate Malta, which she should have done in fulfilment of the Article which restored that island to the Knights of St. John.  Angry disputes arose over her action, or rather want of action, in this matter.  Commenting on the Treaty of Amiens, Count Guillaume de Garden ¹¹⁵ writes:

“L’article est le plus important de tout le Traité, mais aucune des conditions qu’il renferme n’a été exécutée et il est devenu le prétexte d’une guerre, qui s’est renouvelée en 1803 et a duré sans interruption jusqu’en 1814.”

The complaint of the First Consul against the English Press, and his demands that Britain should alter her laws, putting restraints on the liberty of the Press, and depriving of their freedom those living under her protection, roused the indignation of the country.  The British Government prosecuted under her own laws a Frenchman, M. Peltier, who in articles he had written had brought himself within the arm of the law of the land, but it refused to alter those laws at the bidding of another power.  M. Norvus, Napoleon’s apologist, wrote:

“Napoleon demanded from Great Britain what was nearly the same thing as proposing the sacrifice of its constitution, and to insist upon its abandoning the two pillars of its freedom, the liberty of the press, and the privilege of Habeas Corpus.”

Some months later Buonaparte in a State paper practically challenged Great Britain to fight him single-handed, as she would be if war broke out again.  After much fruitless negotiation England declared war against France on the 16th May 1803, and eleven years more were added to the active existence of Norman Cross, as one factor in the gigantic struggle between the two nations.  Six days after the declaration of war, France, by the First Consul’s decree, filled her prisons with the 10,000 British men of all degrees, between the age of eighteen and sixty, whom she found within her bounds at that date.  This step she justified as a fair reprisal for the action of an English captain who seized two French merchant vessels before the declaration of war had reached the French Minister.  Buonaparte knew that a bill for a levée en masse had been presented to Parliament, and that to secure, before they could be enrolled, 10,000 of the able-bodied men of the nation, (the whole of the population at that date was only twelve and a half million) was a wise step.

Our Admiralty, immediately after the renewal of the war, called upon the Transport Board to find depots for the parole prisoners, whom we were taking, in merchant vessels and other craft, not ships of war.  Bishops Waltham and Tavistock were suggested, and should the numbers be considerable, Oldham and Tiverton were to be added, while Stapleton Prison was to be prepared for prisoners of war.  This, it will be remembered, was the third and last time that Stapleton had been requisitioned for such a purpose, it having been built originally in 1782 to receive prisoners taken in the war which was ended in the following year by the Treaty of Versailles.  In 1833 it was converted into a workhouse.

The prisons first suggested, being deemed insufficient, Peterborough was proposed to the Transport Board, and the Board replied, that on receipt of an intimation from the Admiralty, they would make the necessary arrangements for the reception of prisoners at Norman Cross.

On 18th June 1803 the Admiralty appointed, as agents for prisoners of war, Captain Thesiger at Portsmouth, Captain Baker at Stapleton, Captain Pressland at Liverpool, Captain Poulden at Norman Cross.

In consequence of Stapleton being used instead of Liverpool, Captain Pressland, R.N., was sent to Norman Cross, at a salary, in addition to his full pay, of £200 per annum, and 7s. 6d. per diem for expenses. ¹¹⁶  Thus manned for the work, the Norman Cross Depot started on the eleven years of arduous work which lay before it.  The agents were to be in supreme authority, but were not to interfere with the medical or surgical treatment of the sick, this being entirely in the hands of the Board of the Sick and Hurt.

Mr. Hadley of Lynn contracted to convey prisoners to and from Norman Cross on lighters at 1s. 9d. each, and to victual them at 7d. each, the military guard being carried on the same terms.

Prisoners soon arrived, the first detachment being 179 Frenchmen on 28th August.  Then came 250 from Portsmouth.  They arrived at Portsmouth on board the Pegasus, but deprived of the winged horse and reduced to Shanks’ pony, their journey from Portsmouth to Norman Cross took them from the 5th to the 18th September.  In October several detachments arrived, among them one of over 200 French and 5 Dutch.

Between the years 1803 and 1814 no fewer than 122,440 prisoners of war of various nationalities were brought to Great Britain, most of them during the years 1805–10; of these 10,341 died in prison, and 17,607 were exchanged or paroled to France as invalids. ¹¹⁷  Norman Cross had its full share of this enormous crowd of prisoners, and the discipline of the prison, the life, and occupation of the prisoners can have differed little from that of the previous seven years.  The greatly diminished chance of a prisoner obtaining his freedom by exchange, and the longer duration of each man’s term of durance, must, however, have greatly aggravated for the worse their mental misery and physical discomfort.

On the other hand, experience had suggested to the authorities various details in the treatment of their captives, which were adopted with the object of bettering their lot.  In the structure of the prison itself there were, during this period, several important changes.  The outer stockade fence was replaced by the brick wall, within which ran the dry, paved ditch.  The boys’ separate prison was built in a bricked-in enclosure, outside the prison wall, through a door in which was the only entrance into the new enclosure.  In 1805 the surgeon’s new brick house was built in the hospital quadrangle, but beyond these points there is nothing special to add to the description already given.

There would necessarily be the same anxious watching on the part of the prisoners of the events of the war; they would probably mock at the 300,000 volunteers, foot and mounted, who came forward and rendered the levée en masse unnecessary.  With what elation they must have heard of the Grande Armée de Bretagne, ranged opposite the southern shore of England, separated only by the narrow channel, across which 150,000 French soldiers were to be floated by the 2,000 vessels assembled at Boulogne, ready to transport them so soon as the weather and the supporting fleet for which they were waiting combined to favour the enterprise!  That threatened invasion, which hung like a black terror over England in those early years of the nineteenth century, was for them within their prison walls the bright light of hopeful expectation; and when the news of the 21st October reached England, the news which was communicated to Cadet Hopkinson at Verdun, shorn of its glory and its fateful significance to the French in the taunting words, “Votre Nelson est mort,” it would be told to the prisoners at Norman Cross, in words conveying the whole truth, “Our Nelson has fallen, but not before he had destroyed your fleet, and your country is now no longer a naval power.”  What despair must have again filled their hearts!  If they disbelieved the fact at first, the arrival of Corporal de la Porte and his comrades, followed by crew after crew of the captured sailors and soldiers, must have too surely confirmed the news.

As the years of their captivity dragged on, they would hear of the conquests and of the King-making by their idol Buonaparte, now the Emperor Napoleon, and they would look forward in the near future to a Buonaparte on the throne of George III, and to their triumphal progress through the conquered country on the way back to their own dear France.  Then their hopes would fade again (as, alas! their bodily comfort would be decreased) as there came crowding in the prisoners sent from the Peninsula by Wellington, who although he had been ordered on the 3rd February 1811 not to send any more prisoners on account of the crowded state of the prisons, in 1811–12 sent 20,000. ¹¹⁸  Later on would spread through the courts the story of the disastrous invasion of Russia and the awful retreat from Moscow.  In the next year, 1813, they might hear that Wellington had crossed the Bidassoa, and thus secured for England—their hated hostess in their accursed abode at Norman Cross—the honour of being the first of the European powers to plant its victorious standard on French soil.

Hurtful as such items of news—which reached them solely through English sources or through equally unsympathetic French sources, such as the Bishop of Moulins, whose France was not their France—were to their patriotic feelings, they were all tending to bring about the day of their release.  In 1814 the Allies invaded France, and successfully advanced upon Paris.  Napoleon abdicated, and was allowed to retire to Elba, and at length the news reached Norman Cross that on the 30th May the Treaty of Paris, which meant freedom for all prisoners of war, had been signed.

Deeply as many an old soldier among the 4,617 of the prisoners at Norman Cross on that date resented the fall of the hero he had worshipped, his great general, the Emperor, bitterly as the majority resented the sight of the white flag of the Bourbons which had been mounted in each quadrangle, the one dominant feeling in the breasts of the prisoners was wild joy at their imminent freedom and restoration to their own loved country; they embraced, they danced, they sang, and they cried for joy.  The military barracks had not been an abode of luxury or comfort, and the garrison caught the infection of exuberant joy; a party of them seized the Glasgow Mail Coach, on its arrival at Stilton, and drew it to Norman Cross, whither the coachman, horses, and guard were obliged to follow.

Among the prisoners who witnessed the scenes of rejoicing at this time was M. Foulley, who had been confined at Norman Cross for five years and three months.  The scene impressed him so strongly, that after his return to France he made a model of the Depot as it appeared during the celebration of the departure of the first detachment of liberated prisoners for France.  This model has already been criticised and described in Chapter II, but the place for the photograph is here, in the last chapter of this volume.  The figures in the quadrangles, the garrison drawn up in line, with its back to the prison, at attention, ready to salute the departing prisoners, who only a day before it had to guard with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, tell of the buried hatchet, of the new-born peace between France and England, which has endured for ninety-eight years, and which is cemented and invigorated by the existing entente cordiale.

The prisoners began to prepare for departure.  Some would set to work with a will to finish articles which had been bespoken, or which they wished to put in the market before their departure.  Some could afford to take their stock of knick-knacks home, and would have money to draw from the agent and clerks—money they had realised by their work during the past eleven years.  Undoubtedly, in some instances, the sum earned amounted to as much as one, two, or three hundred pounds, but without seeing the banking account, it will hardly be credited that any prisoner had actually made the rumoured thousand pounds. ¹¹⁹  Others would pack the articles they were taking home as memorials of their long sojourn in the land of their enemy.  Every one would be in some way preparing for departure.  Some permitted on parole would have to bid farewell to the friends they had made within their bounds, others would have to write to friends made in the market or in conversations surreptitiously carried on through the pales of the stockade fences.

Speedily, detachments began to move off.  The Depot had been costing £300,000 a year, and every day it remained full represented a large sum.  The local newspapers, where formerly they described the prisoners making their weary way under a strong escort from the coast to Norman Cross were now filled with reports of parties of released prisoners marching to the coast in comparative freedom.  One paper notes how, of a detachment of 500, some got so drunk (is it much to be wondered at?) that they could not go on; while, on the contrary on 6th May, according to the Cambridge Chronicle, another detachment of 200, which was to embark from Chatham, passing through Cambridge on their way to that port, walked about the town and the University buildings, conducting themselves in an orderly manner.

So detachment followed detachment, until in the Times of 19th August 1814 appeared a paragraph, “Of all the great body of Prisoners of War, who were lately at Norman Cross Barracks, at this time only one single prisoner remains, and he, in consequence of illness preventing his removal.”  What must have been this poor fellow’s feelings when he knew that all his fellow prisoners had left for their native country.  Was he happily unconscious?  We are sure that everything possible would be done to lighten his sad fate.  Probably he was the last of his countrymen to be laid in the now desolate cemetery. ¹²⁰

One shudders to think that his disappointment may have been as heartrending as that of the poor prisoner whose fate is narrated by Basil Thomson.

“On 20th June, when the last draft was being formed, it happened that one unfortunate man could not produce his bedding; probably it had been stolen by others to make up their complement.  On being refused at the gate, he rushed frantically back into his prison to look for it, and then, fearful of being left behind, he ran back to the gate to plead his cause with the guard.  On being again refused he became frantic with grief, and crying that he had been eleven years in prison, in an agony of despair he pulled out his knife, and there before the guards and his own countrymen cut his throat.  There is no more sorrowful incident in the history of Dartmoor.” ¹²¹

When the gate closed behind that man who had been left in Norman Cross on the 19th August, it closed for the last time on a prisoner.  The campaign of a hundred days which followed between the escape of Napoleon from Elba and his final defeat at Waterloo sent no prisoners to the Depot, and in 1816 the buildings were demolished and the site sold.  The sale, including that of the remaining stores, furniture, and fixtures, occupied thirteen days and realised only £11,060 4s. 4d. ¹²²

In Peterborough, Stilton, and the neighbouring villages much of the material sold was re-erected and is still in use; but on the site itself, the houses of the barrack master, the agent, and the steward, the wells, the wide fosse which ran round inside the outer wall, and about 60 yards of the wall itself, alone remain of that Norman Cross Prison which, for twenty years in the most eventful period in the history of Europe, played so important a part; over which, and its inmates, the two Governments, French and English, argued and fought, while the prisoners suffered.  That prison, where these victims of war—our foemen, it is true, but patriots, and foemen worthy of our steel—pined in prolonged confinement, surrounded by prison walls, held down by cannon, muskets, and bayonets, hoping for release which never came, enduring an agonising longing for freedom—a longing so keen that many of them purchased it by enlisting in the ranks of Britain, their country’s enemy—and suffering, alas! other miseries, of which not the least was the moral deterioration and degradation consequent on their condition and surroundings.  Gone are the prisons and their miseries, gone the barracks and their busy life of active duties, and gone, also, all personal recollection of the great events of 1789 to 1816, of which the life here was a part.

But, standing on the great North Road, between the two fields, the one to the right and the other to the left, nothing to distinguish them from the thousands of similar fields in every county of England, the reader will, if this narrative has in a measure aroused in him the interest with which the writer has hoped to inspire him, be able to call up in his mind’s eye the Norman Cross of a hundred years ago.  The courts, the caserns, and the various other buildings rise before him; he sees them filled with the Dutch and French sailors and soldiers who for years lived in the one field, and of whom nearly two thousand for ever sleep in the other.  The vision fades, and the gazer realises that of it nothing remains but a name, the beautiful works of art made by the prisoners, some musty documents, in the Public Record Office or British Museum, and 1,770 skeletons in the undistinguished field on the North Road.  Before him lies the site of Norman Cross Prison, a typical scene of sylvan calm.

 
We pass; the path that each man trod
   Is dim, or will be dim with woods:
   What fame is left for human deeds
In endless age? it rests with God.