VI
THE LAST DAYS OF MONTRÉSOR AND
MONTRAVILLE
After his arrival home. Colonel Montrésor was
often asked to give his views of the American
war, and the causes of British defeat. Usually he
did so in terms critical and even caustic,
disclosing at times a bitterness of sentiment that
seems to have sprung from disappointment at not
securing promotion. He had ardently desired
promotion in accordance with the duration and
character of his services in America. Eventually
he was made a colonel, but during the years in
which he did his important work, including the
period when he was Chief Engineer in America,
his rank had been no higher than captain or
major.
His failure to secure better rank could not
have been due to want of a meritorious record.
Nor does it seem likely that in that age of bold
adventure and dissolute habits among British
Army officers, the connection of his name with
the tragedy of Charlotte Stanley, if known in
London, would have done his professional
reputation any serious harm. The more probable
reason is that successful engineers the British
Army at that time were not advanced in rank
after the manner successful soldiers. "In the
present state of the engineer corps," said he, "you
can be but colonel, should you arrive to be even
Chief Engineer of England."
Colonel Montrésor purchased an estate called
Belmont, near Faversham, in Kent, and added
to his purchase in the same neighborhood
afterward. He also had a London house in
Portland Place. Belmont some years later was
burned, and the house of one of his sons near
Belmont was also destroyed. Meanwhile he said
his wife's family in America had been "reduced
from opulence to poverty for their loyalty to the
Crown." Before the war he was "in independent
circumstances," but afterward had "all his
collateral connections to maintain, and was
tormented by a court of inquisition at the
Creditors' Office."
In 1785 and 1786 he made a tour of France,
England, and Switzerland with his family,
meeting in Germany several Hessian officers with
whom he had served in America, including
Knyphausen, then in receipt of a pension of 300
from England, with whom he dined. He
complains in his journal that from the Hessians
(except Knyphausen) he did not receive the most
hospitable treatment, altho he had brought letters
from prominent Englishmen. At the
Landgravine's Court, his welcome, however, was
most polite, and even friendly. He died in 1788,
in his fifty-first year, his wife surviving him until
1826.
The later career of Montraville, as we obtain
glimpses of it in "Lucy Temple," published more
than thirty years after "Charlotte Temple," and in
which he appears under the new name of Colonel
Franklin (Franklin being the family name of the
woman whom Montraville is represented as having
Married just before Charlotte died), accords
somewhat closely with known facts in the life of
Montrésor. For example, the author says "his
home was one of the most elegant in Portland
Place," and Belmont is described as "Beliview, a
large, handsome, and commodious mansion in
Faversham, Kent, with several well-tenanted
farms, pleaure-house, fish-ponds, green and hot,
houses."
Colonel Franklin is represented as dying before
his time, after a lingering illness. His character in
general is summed up as that of a man possessed
of "patient, noble, and generous feeling—a promise
of everything that was excellent
in character, and desirable in fortune—all
blighted by once yielding to the impulses of guilty
passion." He would have changed, "not only his
name, but his own self," could he have done it,
so deeply had he desired to blot out the dark
stain on his record.
The most striking scene in the book is that in
which the author describes Franklin's death.
Lucy, when approaching her twentieth birthday,
had become acquainted with Colonel Franklin's
son, a young lieutenant. Neither he nor she at the
time knew of the relation between their parents,
nor of the changes that had taken place in their
own names.
Lieutenant Franklin made Lucy an offer of
marriage. On her twenty-first birthday she
accepted it, and her guardian the same day
presented her with a miniature portrait of her
mother, taken when she was sixteen years old,
and bearing the initials "C. T."—a portrait she had
never before seen. The arrangements
for the marriage had been completed,
when Lieutenant Franklin was called to London
by news of the alarming condition of his father,
who, as it proved lay on his death-bed in the
house in Portland Place. The young man had
spoken to his father of his approaching marriage,
when the following dramatic scene took place:
"'I have a picture of her mother,' said he putting
his hand in his bosom, 'and it is good resemblance
of herself.'
" He drew forth the miniature and held it up
before his father, who rose up, seized it with a
convulsive grasp the moment the light fell on the
features, and, looking upon the initials upon the
back of it, shrieked out—
" ' It is-it is come again to blast my vision in my
last hour! The woman you would marry is my own
daughter! Just heaven! Oh, that I could have been
spared this! Go, my son; go to my private desk; you
will there find the records of your father's shame
an your own fate.'
"Nature was exhausted by this effort. He
fell back on the bed, supported by his trembling
wife, and in a few moments the wretched Franklin,
the once gay, gallant, and happy Montraville, was no
more. . . .
" Closeted with his bosom friend, Edward Ainslie,
young Franklin laid before him the manuscript which
he had found by his father's directions. It had been
written in deep remorse, and its object was evidently
to redeem from obloquy the memory of the
unfortunate Charlotte Temple, mother of Lucy
Temple Blakeney. He took the whole blame of her
ill-fated elopement upon himself; he disclosed
circumstances which he had discovered after her
decease which proved her faithfulness to himself;
and lamented in terms of the deepest sorrow that it
was in his power to make her no better reparation for
all her love and all her injuries, than the poor one of
thus bearing testimony to her truth and his own
cruelty and injustice."
Such are the known facts in Montrésor's later
biography, and such is the picture in "Lucy
Temple" of the melancholy scenes amid which
Colonel Franklin's life came to its untimely close.
These we may
cite in support of Mrs. Rowson's statement that
the last years of Montraville's life "would tend to
prove that retribution treads upon the heels of
vice."
Of the substantial truth of the story told in
"Lucy Temple," as affecting Colonel Montr6sor's
last days, there seems to be little room for serious
doubt. Samuel L. Knapp who, shortly after Mrs.
Rowson's death, wrote the memoir of her that
accompanies the first edition of the book
(published in 1828, and the called "Charlotte's
Daughter,") knew Mrs. Rowson well. After
quoting the remark, made by her in reply to
Cobbett's assault, that "from the most authentic
sources I could now trace his [Montraville's]
history from the period of his marriage to within a
very few late years of his death," Mr. Knapp adds
that the information which Mrs. Rowson thus
declared to be within her personal knowledge,
"forms the basis of 'Charlotte' Daughter.'"
