PARKES HAD A quick return passage, not stopping off anywhere, arriving in Marseilles on his thirty-fourth birthday, 24 February 1862, and was in Britain a couple of days later. He was immediately confronted with the fact that he was a star; the Foreign Secretary said that ‘he had never known in all his experience such excitement and interest’ as was felt about his and the other prisoners’ captivity, and people had ‘thought and spoke[n] of nothing else’.

On his arrival in the country, he was given an official reception by the mayor of Dover, ‘anxious to pay every possible mark of honour to a gentleman for whom they entertained the highest respect’. The mayor ‘trusted that a knowledge of the sympathy felt for his sufferings by his fellow countrymen would alleviate very materially the remembrances of all he had so nobly and heroically endured for the honour and welfare of their land’. In reply, Parkes said that he ‘found it more difficult to meet the representatives of the Burgesses of Dover than the Chinese Mandarins’. The Burgesses probably laughed politely at this, but it was surely no more than the truth. He had been dealing with Chinese officials nearly all his life but had no experience of British receptions. He would have to get used to them.

He took a house in Oak Hill Park, Hampstead – presumably Fanny and their daughters had been living with her family up to that point – a street that had been laid out around 1851 so it was still fairly new. (The young Gerard Manley Hopkins was living in the street when the Parkes family moved there.) It was a lovely spot, away from the grime and pollution of London, but because of the opening of the North London Line in 1860 he could get into town fairly easily.

Oak Hill Park is, in estate agent speak, one of Hampstead's ‘premier roads’ and as is often the case, we are left wondering about how Parkes managed his finances on a Consul's salary. On the face of it, he looked well paid.