Why Kill the Innocent (Sebastian St. Cyr #13)(99)

While I have altered her name and some details, a seventeen-year-old wife of an impressed sailor was hanged at Newgate for theft after walking up to London from Cornwall in search of her husband; her newborn baby was taken from her arms on the scaffold. The description of Amy Hatcher’s hanging is an amalgamation of several contemporary accounts of hangings from the period of the Napoleonic Wars. Murderers were typically (but not always) hanged on a Monday morning; prisoners guilty of any of the period’s two hundred other capital crimes could be hanged any day of the week. Hangings were usually multiple; the record is believed to be twenty at one time.

Napoléon really did set up a “ville des smoglers.” One of the best sources for this strange chapter in history and the role played by Rothschild is Gavin Daly’s 2007 article in The Historical Journal, “Napoleon and the ‘City of Smugglers,’ 1810–1814.” The claim that Rothschild’s January 1814 gold shipments to Paris were then sent on to Wellington is disputed by some; attempts by certain later apologists to further claim that all of Rothschild’s well-documented gold smuggling ventures had for years been going to Wellington are patently ridiculous. As Hero notes, the Royal Navy had control of the Channel and had no need for such costly and dangerous subterfuge.

Rothschild was only one of many London financiers engaged in activities that aided France. Apart from arranging the loan that enabled the United States to buy Louisiana from Napoléon, London bankers also gave Napoléon the five million pounds he needed to raise an army after he escaped from Elba. Napoléon was what some have called a “bullionist”; he really did distrust paper money and hated bankers and credit. Despite his constant wars, he is said to have left France a credit balance in 1814. (Of course, looting Switzerland and the Vatican helped make that possible.)

Lord Wallace is a fictional character modeled largely on Lord Grey (of Earl Grey tea fame), although I have given him the more abrasive and opportunistic personality of Henry Brougham, one of Caroline’s best-known supporters.

Famous for his plays The Rivals and The School for Scandal, Richard Sheridan was also a Whig MP for more than thirty years. His marriage to Elizabeth Linley (of the musical Linley family) was colorful. He did live on Savile Row, although at the time it was called Savile Street. He lost his seat in Parliament after the Prince moved against him and, ruined by the burning of Drury Lane and Covent Garden theaters, he died in great poverty.