A Constitutionalist Deception

The document that established Wickham in his career as an espionage controller on the Continent was in the handwriting of the Constitutional Monarchist and political writer Jacques Mallet du Pan. It later transpired that similar documents were circulating in Vienna, Madrid and Paris. The mémoire reported a secret peace proposal from two leaders of the moderate Republican Thermidorians, the group that had controlled the French Convention in Paris since the fall of Robespierre. The conduit lay through émigré Constitutional Monarchists such as Théodore Lameth and Mathieu Dumas, who had been trying since June 1794 to bring together in one party in the interior of France all those of moderate political views. Contact had supposedly been made with Jean-Lambert Tallien via his society hostess wife, to whom a secret message had been passed on a length of gauze sent from Geneva. (Gauze was the fabric of choice for the skimpy dresses worn by the fashionable merveilleuses, led by Mme Tallien, in Paris.) At the time Tallien, who had succesively been Lameth's secretary, a revolutionary representative on mission and a Thermidor conspirator against Robespierre, was clinging shakily to power in the Convention and had, it was claimed, responded favour-ably. As a repentant terroriste and ‘the very model of the “weathervane”, a political turncoat’, he had proposed the cessation of hostilities while moderates of all political hues established a secure regime in France based on a limited monarchy and amnesty for all regicides. Lameth had passed on this information to Mallet du Pan and Mounier, who in turn had informed Robert Fitzgerald.

Grenville received the mémoire by express from Fitzgerald on the evening of 4 October. Its contents intrigued him, for he was also receiving political bulletins from another source – the ultra-Royalist comte d'Antraigues, who was reporting through Francis Drake, the minister at Genoa – a recent one of which had focused on divisions within the Convention and on the moderating influence of Tallien. There was enough evidence, therefore, for Grenville, after discussing the issue with a few cabinet colleagues, to suggest to the King that, in the ‘strictest and most inviolable secrecy’, someone ought to be sent to Switzerland to discover if the proposals were genuine.