The Crisis of 1792

Throughout September 1792, London newspapers reported an “almost incredible” influx of foreigners, “great beyond what most people can imagine,” evoking unsettling scenes of roads crowded by wagons, carts, chaises, and carriages teeming with French emigrants.Footnote ¹³ Some articles sympathized with the destitute condition of these new arrivals and ran announcements listing banks where donations might be left for refugees.Footnote ¹⁴ But many also observed that suspicious Frenchmen were circulating in the country and claimed that greater control was needed over them.Footnote ¹⁵ Although government records indicate that four thousand French refugees landed in Britain during September 1792 alone, inflated reports in the popular press estimated that there were forty thousand, even one hundred thousand, landings, further alarming many Britons who already feared that revolutionary ideas and emissaries were infiltrating their nation.Footnote ¹⁶ By the fall of 1792, Britons were responding in a variety of ways to the numerous French émigrés in their midst. On the one hand, they evinced deep compassion for those who fled the persecutions of revolution. On the other hand, many remained deeply afraid that dangerous radicals had hidden themselves among deserving refugees, intent upon subverting king, liberty, and stability in Britain.

For many reasons, September 1792 represents a critical moment in both the histories of emigration and Britain's evolving reaction to the French Revolution. The “incredible influx” observed by the press did reflect a dramatic increase in the number of émigrés leaving France during the late summer and fall of 1792, as well as important shifts in their reasons for flight. French émigrés from across the social spectrum had been arriving in Britain since the early days of the revolution; between 130,000 and 150,000 left France over the course of the revolutionary period, a migration that represented just under 1 percent of the population.Footnote ¹⁷ Britain was not initially the émigrés’ favored destination, but as the republican armies gained ground in Europe and successive French governments passed increasingly punitive legislation against them, Britain remained one of the only places of asylum.Footnote ¹⁸ Somewhere between twenty thousand and thirty thousand émigrés would reach its shores, arriving in a series of waves triggered by events in France.Footnote ¹⁹ The first wave, which followed the storming of the Bastille and the abolition of the feudal regime in the summer of 1789, was relatively small and largely made up of individuals who tended to move in elite British social circles, biding their time until they could return home. The second wave, following Louis XVI's attempted flight to Varennes in June 1791, was slightly larger; it included individuals who had fallen afoul of the increasingly radical National Assembly and individuals frightened by legislation in late 1791 that made emigration punishable by death. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed in July 1790, followed by new oaths required of the clergy in November 1790 and decrees of 1791 and 1792 that made nonjuring priests liable to summary expulsion and deportation, led to increasing numbers of clergy among the exiles.Footnote ²⁰ The majority of those who reached England during this period remained self-sufficient, if impoverished, though their departures signaled increasingly hostile attitudes toward the established church gaining ground in revolutionary France and a dangerous tendency to criminalize the decision to leave France.

The third wave of emigration, however, forced the British public and government to grapple with their obligations to individuals fleeing an increasingly republican political regime. This wave was precipitated by the imprisonment of the French royal family, the institution of a second oath required of citizens employed by the state in August 1792, and the massacres and abolition of the monarchy in September 1792. Indeed, the vast majority of émigrés left France between 1792 and 1794, during the most radical phases of the revolution. For many of these men and women, escaping persecution and violence with little more than the clothes on their back, the term refugees was probably most apt. Although contemporaries often used the terms émigrés and refugees interchangeably, I refer here most frequently to refugees, given my focus on relief efforts.Footnote ²¹

Prominent among those reaching London in September 1792 were thousands of destitute clergymen, most of whom had fled rather than subscribing oaths to the constitution. By December 1792, close to three thousand clergymen had fled to England, a number that subsequently averaged around five thousand each year between 1793 and 1800.Footnote ²² The suffering of this highly visible group provided ongoing reminders that, by 1792, the French Revolution was no longer merely anti-privilege or anti-noble. It had become anticlerical, antimonarchical, and, to some, increasingly terroristic.Footnote ²³

Newspapers from September 1792 also reflected a decided retreat from Britain's earlier enthusiasm for revolutionary principles. If many Britons had initially celebrated the promises of the French Revolution, believing their neighbors to be advancing toward a more constitutional monarchy like their own, disillusionment had set in by 1792; the early warnings of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) had come to seem eerily prescient. Tensions between Britain and France were also increasingly threatening to boil over at the level of government. Anxiety about revolutionary France's intentions ran high, particularly after the National Convention passed the Decree of Fraternity addressed to all who wished to recover their liberties in November 1792. While members of Parliament professed a commitment to maintaining peace when they convened in December 1792, they nonetheless voted increases to both the army and navy and rapidly passed legislation aimed at containing a Jacobin threat.Footnote ²⁴ By the time Louis XVI was executed on 21 January 1793, all but the staunchest supporters in Britain had turned against the “barbarity” across the channel,Footnote ²⁵ even if war remained in the future.

In this highly charged context, the carriages teeming with French refugees posed a particular set of challenges. The men and women fleeing in September 1792 were predominantly Catholic, and although the clergy's reasons for leaving France were certainly religious, the vast majority of lay refugees fled revolution, violence, and the threats experienced under France's new political system. While the plight of refugees was a familiar trope for the British government and public, earlier refugees had been “persecuted Protestants” whose skills, labor, and bodies were clearly seen as capable of strengthening Britain in any conflict with Catholic France and of advancing “the wealth and strength of our Nation.”Footnote ²⁶ England had demonstrated a long-standing national commitment to sheltering Protestant foreigners who fled violence in Catholic continental states even before the influx of Huguenots in the 1680s brought the term refugee into the English lexicon.Footnote ²⁷ Both the public and government had previously mobilized to meet refugee needs with the waves of Protestant Huguenots between the late 1670s and 1700s and Palatines in 1709. In both cases, monarchs had authorized briefs for national collections across the parishes, and the government had involved itself directly with refugee relief, appointing commissioners to handle collections and distributions.

Similarly, with seven thousand to eight thousand white loyalist refugees reaching Britain during the American Revolutionary War, the government had responded with systems for evaluating need and providing payments to deserving individuals, pioneering an early example of state welfare at a time when pension schemes were only beginning to emerge.Footnote ²⁸ Britain's reasons for aiding loyalists differed from those for relieving foreign Protestant refugees: the loyalist refugees were British subjects who had suffered and been driven into exile because of their loyalties to “the mother country.” But as in both 1681 and 1709, the British government assumed a degree of responsibility for the loyalists. And as with earlier waves of refugees, the government worked alongside refugee community leaders and members of the British public; developed structures, bureaucratic networks, and hierarchical procedures to manage delivery of aid to thousands of people; and succeeded in generating extensive monetary support from both the public and the government itself.Footnote ²⁹ There were thus numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedents for seeing the plight of refugees as a “national concern,”Footnote ³⁰ though aid offered to these individuals had been viewed as a matter of national interest because of shared Protestantism or shared loyalty to the crown.

In the fall of 1792, however, providing aid to French Catholic refugees generated new and divisive questions about the politics of philanthropy that the British government and public would each need to negotiate and address. Was it in Britain's best interests to provide aid to Catholics fleeing a long-standing rival? Did doing so represent condemnation of the French system? How could Britons actually ensure that anyone arriving from France was a refugee prepared to be loyal to George III rather than a radical arriving to foment revolution? In the early fall of 1792, the British government, which feared ideological contagion from France and simultaneously professed its commitment to a tenuous peace, hesitated to directly aid French Catholic refugees despite ample information about their numbers and needs. It instead initially elected to leave decisions to philanthropists in the absence of a clear sense that aid to these refugees was in the national interest.

Indeed, as newspapers dramatized the refugees’ descent upon England in August and September 1792, magistrates from Sussex, Gosport, and Portsmouth reported that hundreds of impoverished priests were among the new arrivals and consulted with superiors about appropriate responses. Thomas Trigge, the lieutenant-governor at Portsmouth, inquired about housing priests in one of the unoccupied buildings previously used for French prisoners of war. His letter also anticipated the dilemma that would face the nation: “If they continue here, their subsistence must become a national Concern, either to be furnished by Government, or by means of a general national Subscription: without one of these measures, they have no other prospect than starving, which in this Country, will I trust not be suffered.” These individuals were a matter of “national concern” because they arrived bedraggled and deserved hospitality and because they excited alarm among some local inhabitants who were persuaded that they circulated dangerous opinions.Footnote ³¹ Trigge assumed that national honor could not permit such suffering and indicated that the government, or the public, or both must respond, as they had with previous refugees.

Henry Dundas, secretary of the Home Office, concurred but evaded direct answers. As the minister most involved in monitoring and shaping policy relating to foreigners, he observed, “The description of Persons you refer to are certainly objects of much commiseration, but the whole subject involves questions of serious consideration.”Footnote ³² To Lord Hood, who raised similar questions about housing priests a week later, Dundas merely observed that the government did not feel it was “adviseable to object” to providing such accommodation, but that it was a temporary measure only.Footnote ³³ Elsewhere, Dundas alluded to pressure on the government to assume “a more executive part in the business than We intend,” though he was clear that “it is impossible that Government can send over articles of provisions.”Footnote ³⁴ His correspondence reveals that the influx of refugees was potentially a matter of national concern, but that the government had neither reached a decision about its level of involvement nor prepared to authorize direct maintenance of refugees. Allowing local administrators to house refugees in converted prisons was one thing, but the government's subsidizing provisions remained out of the question. Dundas did, however, note the emergence of a subscription society, one of whose “material benefits . . . was to avoid that direct interference on the part of government.”Footnote ³⁵ The subscription to which he referred was none other than the Wilmot Committee, which had taken up the illustrious national mantle of providing aid to refugees and had begun to fulfill a role that the government could not—or would not—formally embrace in September 1792.

Contemporaries were not silent about their government's decided ambivalence. When Edmund Burke, member of Parliament and one of the Wilmot Committee's most vocal members, learned that the government had agreed to provide the French clergymen with shelter at the King's House at Winchester but refused to provide bedsteads and bedding, he minced few words: “What think you of a ministry that gives the walls of an House at Winchester for hospitality, but suppose that to put beds in it would be a breach of neutrality and an act of hostile aggression upon . . . the sovereign assassins of France?”Footnote ³⁶ Burke's caustic comment that bedsteads were a violation of neutrality shed light on some of the reasons that the government, which had assumed responsibility for refugees in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, favored allowing a subscription committee to handle such relief in September 1792. At that moment, the British government still cleaved to a policy of strict neutrality with France; Pitt had refused to join the French princes or to involve Britain when France declared war on Austria, upholding George III's earlier statement that “we have honourably not meddled with the internal dissension of France.”Footnote ³⁷

Given tenuous diplomatic relations between Britain and France, Burke was correct that the government continued to avoid intervention for fear that it would be seen as a violation of neutrality. But the government also eschewed direct aid to Catholic foreigners, particularly those who were historically among Britain's greatest rivals, because such assistance was still viewed as incompatible with national interests and liable to provoke public outcry. It would require not only the outbreak of war but also a shift in how foreigners were viewed before the government committed itself to supporting French Catholic refugees financially. In September 1792, Dundas believed that a subscription charity was better suited to the task of relief and would allow the government to circumvent the politics of such aid. He confidently refused to be drawn any further into relief efforts, denying provisions and bedding to destitute refugees knowing that individuals had stepped in to fill the breach.

A Committee of “Respectable Persons”

Concern for abject poverty among French Catholic refugees, particularly the clergymen, and appreciation for the fears their presence engendered had surfaced in a variety of circles by the late summer of 1792. With a government reluctant to take responsibility for refugees’ welfare, British social and political elites mobilized and convened at the Freemasons’ Tavern on 20 September 1792.Footnote ³⁸ Many of these individuals were members of Parliament or connected to centers of power, but it was as individuals acting in their private capacity that they initiated relief efforts. This group became known as the Wilmot Committee and would operate with the government's full knowledge and tacit blessing from its inception. However, it capitalized on methods for securing and allocating relief made possible by new forms of eighteenth-century philanthropic activity, just as it relied on systems already in place within the refugee community to ensure administration. The committee's success was linked to both its efficient delivery of critical aid and its ability to represent clergymen as pious and harmless individuals whose relief was ultimately intertwined with wider government aims.

Throughout the fall of 1792 and much of 1793, a charitable organization therefore played a pivotal role in influencing how French Catholics were represented to the British public and in shaping perceptions of which foreigners could be allowed to remain in Britain, even as the government grappled with these same questions. By late 1793, the relationship between this committee and the government would evolve into a partnership, with funds from the Treasury used to fund the committee's work. From this period forward, the work of charitable organization and government became increasingly intertwined, if not inseparable; moreover, these relief efforts continued well past 1800–1802, when the vast majority of refugees had returned to France, encouraged by Napoleon's Concordat with the Vatican (1801), the brief Peace of Amiens (1802), and the general amnesty (1802) offered to all but about one thousand of the émigrés.Footnote ³⁹ Despite shifts in how this aid was administered during the revolutionary 1790s, certain continuities of practice endured, suggesting that the provision of subsistence to refugees remained a space where foreigners whose principles aligned with national interests might be identified and monitored.

The Committee for the Relief of the French Clergy was officially convened by John Eardley-Wilmot, a respected lawyer and member of Parliament whose service on the American Loyalist Claims Commission had only recently ended.Footnote ⁴⁰ With at least two aims in mind, Wilmot placed advertisements in newspapers throughout mid-September 1792. First, these advertisements appealed for subscriptions, apprising the public of the hourly arrivals of French clergymen in need of “immediate relief” and specifying that donations would be distributed under the direction of the bishop of Léon, another respected figure in London by that date. Second, the advertisements explained that Wilmot had been asked by the “noblemen and gentlemen” among the subscribers to call a meeting, suggesting that forming a committee of “respectable persons” was the logical mechanism for addressing the present crisis and administering the necessary funds.Footnote ⁴¹

With this advertisement, the Wilmot Committee announced itself as a subscription charity par excellence, reflecting a critical innovation in British philanthropy. By the 1790s, Britons’ capacity for charitable giving was considered a source of national strength; diverse forms of “voluntary relief” resulted from bequests, alms, and gifts, and these coexisted with many options for “legal relief,” provided by the Poor Laws, legislative intervention, or royal letter. However, it was the emergence of the subscription charity over the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that provided new opportunities for addressing distresses in this “mixed economy of welfare.”Footnote ⁴² That there were almost no subscription charities in 1650 and yet dozens by 1800 suggests that the form was well suited to the times. It was inspired by the joint-stock business ventures of the era and likely also reflected traditions developed by guild associations. Thus, subscription charities formed when Britons, recognizing that the resources of many could provide more than the resources of one, partnered in voluntary societies and embraced a collective approach to alleviating social evils.Footnote ⁴³

The flexibility of the subscription charity, its success in joining subscribers of different backgrounds, and its ability to provide for those neglected by existing structures of relief, are critical variables in explaining the Wilmot Committee's emergence and success in 1792, and why ministers like Dundas might plausibly have argued that it was the most appropriate vehicle for relief. Tellingly, several other subscription charities also formed in response to refugee arrivals, though none was ever as visible as Wilmot's. The Mansion House Committee, convened by the lord mayor of London as a separate subscription, agreed to consolidate with the Wilmot Committee in order to reduce confusion among donors and costs in October 1792. Another London organization known as the Marine Society Committee also emerged to relieve both the French laity and the clergy; it remained a separate committee until December 1793, when the Treasury ordered its merger with the Wilmot Committee. In addition, other local subscription committees formed throughout the country, although most sent their contributions to the Wilmot Committee for centralized disbursement.Footnote ⁴⁴

As the Wilmot Committee's first meetings suggested, a subscription society was ideally positioned to meet foreign clergymen's needs, particularly since this relief was intended to be temporary, “for their present Relief, or as long as their present Necessities continue or til they can return to their own Country with safety.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Unlike statutory relief, which was constrained by a variety of formal limits and not usually the “favoured resort in periods of special crises,” the subscription charity allowed organizers to raise money relatively quickly and concerned parties to respond effectively to short-term changes.Footnote ⁴⁶ Furthermore, because subscription charities did not draw revenue from taxation and were largely independent from state and ecclesiastical authorities, they were not required to focus on particular geographical, religious, or occupational groups, arguably making them most capable of responding to those who fell outside existing structures of relief, including foreigners.Footnote ⁴⁷

The subscription society also transcended some of the existing rigidities of eighteenth-century society, mobilizing individuals from varied backgrounds around a common cause. The Wilmot Committee immediately secured the support of Britain's recognized elites, which in turn helped enlist further benefactors. Its formal committee was made up of bishops, members of Parliament, prominent professionals, and community leaders, among them Edmund Burke and William Wilberforce. Atop its published subscription list were the archbishops of Canterbury and York, followed by the dukes of Portland and Newcastle. Equally key to the Wilmot Committee's continued survival was its ability to generate subscriptions from across the social spectrum—from high officers of state who gave £100 to “unknown persons” who gave less than £1. Subscribers were both British and foreign born, with several “French gentlemen” offering donations alongside “sundry persons” through the bishop of Léon.Footnote ⁴⁸

A “hallmark of associated philanthropy”Footnote ⁴⁹ in the eighteenth century was the active participation of subscribers, acting in a voluntary capacity, who took varying levels of responsibility for investing funds, managing property, fund-raising, nominating objects of relief, and administering finances. The Wilmot Committee's successful leveraging of subscribers’ skills rather than relying on the services of appointed figureheads further enabled a rapid response to the challenge at hand. The committee capitalized on Wilmot's reputation and expertise to attract subscribers, just as his invaluable guidance and tireless work as chair provided momentum. Similarly, the talents and efficiency of the organization's secretary and the connections of its numerous other members were critical to ensuring the success of its charitable efforts.

In addition, the committee's ability to capitalize on the networks and resources within the existing refugee community was crucial to ensuring efficient administration and allotment of aid to both those in need and those perceived as worthy. From its inception, the committee relied heavily on the bishop of Léon. Having himself fled his diocese in Brittany and reached England in the spring of 1791, he immediately became an indefatigable advocate for other émigré clergy. He served as a “one-man committee of assistance” for the better part of a year,Footnote ⁵⁰ dispensing material and financial aid to his impoverished brethren from the lodgings he had secured in the home of Mrs. Dorothy Silburn, a Catholic woman who also worked alongside him and became known to clergymen as “La Providence.”Footnote ⁵¹ The bishop first opened a subscription fund at a local bank in August 1792.Footnote ⁵² When the Wilmot Committee coalesced, not only was he an illustrious member of the refugee population but he had already established the networks that would become the foundation of its efforts. Indeed, although English members of the Wilmot Committee typically approached the government or solicited funds from the public, the bishop oversaw many of its everyday tasks and dedicated his life to the refugee community until his death in 1806.Footnote ⁵³

The committee immediately adopted the allowance system being used by the bishop as its official one. The committee also relied on the bishop's “wide personal knowledge of the exiles” and his networks of trusted “grand vicars” and local paymasters to provide both an effective accounting system and a vital mechanism for scrutiny and review of claims.Footnote ⁵⁴ Doing so allowed the Wilmot Committee to capitalize on traditional modes for verifying identity and honorable behavior, what some scholars have called “face-to-face knowledge” embedded within a transplanted community, and to better familiarize themselves with the circumstances of those requesting relief.Footnote ⁵⁵ Relying on information provided by members of the refugee population mirrored practices adopted during earlier efforts to relieve the Huguenots or the Palatines, but by 1792 it also illustrated the ways in which a subscription charity could effectively mobilize the resources of its members.Footnote ⁵⁶

As a subscription charity responsible for coordinating the public's munificence, the Wilmot Committee also embraced a variety of approaches to aiding and sheltering the French clergy. In addition to distributing allotted sums to specific individuals through the bishop, the committee immediately organized and contracted for collective solutions to relieving the clergymen. Once they received notice that they might use the King's House at Winchester for priests, for example, they then secured furniture, bedding, and contracts for victuals and beer, ultimately housing close to 680 French clergymen there with significantly reduced costs. They continued to seek unoccupied houses in the country to shelter the priests communally for years. They routinely partnered with individuals and communities who offered in-kind donations or services. And they regularly reported on visits to hospitals, dispensaries, schools, and madhouses where French refugees were cared for at the committee's expense.Footnote ⁵⁷

If much of its energy was consumed by allocating relief, the Wilmot Committee assumed another crucial role in its early months, equally important to understanding its longer-term survival. Wilmot, and others, served as intermediaries for the refugees with the government. They considered and proposed various plans for the clergymen's relief. Although in their initial meetings they approached government for the use of public buildings, subsequently they proposed subsidized remigration to reduce their costs: they asked the government to order Post Office packets to transport refugee clergy to Flanders and Holland free of cost in late September, urged the government to consider a plan for sending the ecclesiastics to Canada to reduce operating costs in November, and even suggested to Dundas that the government might consider removing priests from the kingdom in December given the high costs of maintaining them.Footnote ⁵⁸ They also helped clergymen navigate new legislation as it was passed, with staff at Winchester House assisting priests in completing the declarations necessary to comply with the Aliens Act.Footnote ⁵⁹

The advantages of subscription committees were numerous when the Wilmot Committee emerged: by leveraging the generosity and skills of subscribers, such organizations facilitated both relatively rapid responses to unexpected crises and cost-effective relief for individuals who could not be accommodated by existing institutions. But the Wilmot Committee also met several less tangible needs given uncertainties that autumn. It enabled the nation to continue envisaging itself as an asylum for sufferers of conscience while shielding a government from direct involvement. Replete with parliamentarians, many of whom were increasingly hostile to revolutionary violence but nonetheless served in a government struggling to preserve a precarious peace, the committee provided an outlet for many to respond to revolution with charity. Above all, the Wilmot Committee had begun to secure access to knowledge and networks within the refugee community that would remain critical to delivering aid and to legitimizing its work. There were thus many who hoped that a public subscription, intended for temporary relief, would prove sufficient in September 1792.

Whether Charity Be “Politick”

With a government already eschewing the politics of aid, founding members of the Wilmot Committee needed to remain sensitive to how the public might perceive aid for French Catholic priests. Indeed, at a preliminary meeting prior to the public one held on 20 September 1792, a small group agreed to avoid taking a direct stance on the French Revolution.Footnote ⁶⁰ Its November 1792 advertisement observed that the subscription had “been set on foot, & is continued, merely from motives of Humanity and Christian Charity, without having any respect either to the Commencement, Progress or present State of the Revolution in France.”Footnote ⁶¹ Despite the anti-Jacobin leanings of numerous committee members, positioning itself as a simple charitable organization dedicated to relieving human suffering was presumably key to continued success at this time; other attempts to raise a public subscription for French clergymen, like the one organized by the lord mayor of Dublin, were vetoed precisely because inhabitants believed that they were liable to be “construed as a censure of the French Revolution.”Footnote ⁶²

Despite their stated public stance, however, there was already significant disagreement among members of the Wilmot Committee, as well as among the general public, about whether such aid could simply represent relief of human suffering or whether it represented condemnation of France and its republican ideology. For a member like Burke, who opposed the committee's public stance, donating to clergymen was about meeting the worldly needs of fellow-Christians. Further, it honored their virtuous suffering by expressing “abhorrence also of the principles of that persecution” Footnote ⁶³ and by condemning “the most barbarous System of assassination ever known.”Footnote ⁶⁴ For Burke, and for others, charity to clergymen was inherently political. Indeed, there was nothing “devised by the Act of man more politick than this Charity,” though it would take the onset of war alongside the determined efforts of the Wilmot Committee to make clear that such aid served the national interest before the government was persuaded.Footnote ⁶⁵

Their political differences aside, what united Wilmot, Burke, and others throughout the fall of 1792 were the imperatives of succoring clergymen. In the wake of the government's hesitancy, it was ultimately the Wilmot Committee that diffused tensions surrounding the presence of refugees and contended with questions of why Britons should aid those historically marked as enemies. Here, understanding how a subscription charity like the Wilmot Committee interacted with the public in 1792 is critical to demonstrating how they represented refugees as worthy, principled, and nonthreatening sufferers, and how they subtly shaped both public and government views of foreigners. Like other eighteenth-century associated charities, the Wilmot Committee depended on the public for revenues, and so managers were forced to engage contemporaneous concerns and respond to donors in new ways. They cultivated preexisting forms of fund-raising through such organized events as concerts, charity sermons, and pamphlets. They also adopted a number of new approaches, including the “declaration of purpose,” which publicly justified their utility and appropriateness as an association, and the printing of reports and minutes, which detailed activities and simultaneously offered proof of accountability and efficiency.Footnote ⁶⁶

One of the committee's few initial expenditures was on newspaper advertisements, which members used alongside pamphlets to project their activities to an increasingly diverse public. Such materials reveal managers’ ongoing efforts to depict clergymen as principled opponents of an increasingly republican revolution who could ultimately serve British interests. Initially, those who supported the clergymen appealed to the public's desire to relieve suffering and its sense of national honor and duty. When Burke published his Case of the Suffering Clergy of France in September 1792, he urged compassion and generosity for those who had undergone “unmerited sufferings,” reminding readers of England's historic role in providing refuge and its record of charitable giving.Footnote ⁶⁷ As the months wore on, however, and the committee needed to keep securing donations, pamphlets like the bishop of Léon's “Address” and newspaper advertisements increasingly began to emphasize the clergymen's honor, gratitude, and destitution.Footnote ⁶⁸ When concerns arose that allowances to clergymen were too generous or that foreigners flocked to England to benefit from such largesse, the committee published its rates of relief and announced that 52 guineas had been returned by clergymen who had found other means of support, “as proof of the integrity and honour of the distressed Clergy.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Still other advertisements stressed clergymen's readiness to accept employment, even to make waistcoats for the British army gratis, a testament to their gratitude for the generosity shown to them and a statement that only those who were truly destitute received the public's bounty.Footnote ⁷⁰

As stewards of relief efforts, the Wilmot Committee essentially became guarantors for the refugees’ good behavior, using newspapers to publicize proofs of both the clergymen's exemplary lives and their own successful oversight. Guidelines for the clergymen's behavior were published, instructing gratitude and piety, urging them to refrain from publicly discussing Britain's government or established religion, and asking them only to gather in groups of two to three for walks so as not to cause uneasiness.Footnote ⁷¹ Subsequent advertisements observed that not a single clergyman, “in any part of England, has been called before the Magistracy, or known to have violated any law, or merited the least punishment.”Footnote ⁷² The committee prided itself on successfully monitoring ongoing behavior, largely through the bishop of Léon, and responded with severity to behavior they deemed inappropriate; remaining records indicate that, throughout their existence, managers withdrew allowances from someone like the Abbé de Vicq, found to be living with a woman “in a state of Prostitution” and to have an illegitimate child.Footnote ⁷³

The Wilmot Committee's success in raising £26,000 from the public during its first few months in existence resulted from its ability to depict the clergymen as both deserving and nonthreatening. The task of cultivating the image of French clergymen as peaceful, principled, and potentially fiercely loyal was of the essence, particularly given widespread reports that dangerous Frenchmen were circulating in England determined to destabilize the established government. Shortly after they first convened and then at subsequent intervals, for example, the committee published the numbers of clergymen in England actually seeking relief in order to help allay vicious rumors that thousands of vagabonds were descending upon England and living at the public's expense or that their presence was increasing the cost of provisions.Footnote ⁷⁴ Several years later, when a priest at Winchester was accused of proselytizing, the committee took upon itself yet another role in managing the public's view of foreign Catholics. They asked the Reverend Dr. Sturges to investigate, thereby assuring the public that they took such charges seriously. They then determined to publish several hundred copies of Dr. Sturges's thorough report, which noted that during three years at Winchester he had never known any priest “to be accused of any behavior immoral or unbecoming” but had instead always heard the clergymen express “their gratitude for the protection, the relief, and the humanity, they have experienced from us.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The committee sought to project an image of the virtuous, grateful, loyal, and law-abiding foreign Catholic—who, contrary to popular belief, was not attempting to convert local Protestants.

There were practical reasons that the Wilmot Committee could claim that its recipients were principled and potentially loyal to Britain. Despite initial reports that it had disclaimed “all party motives” and was focused entirely on charity to pious and grateful recipients, methods for allocating aid nonetheless reveal that the committee specifically sought to aid priests and later laity likely to be hostile to the increasingly republican, anticlerical, and antimonarchical turn taken by the French Revolution.Footnote ⁷⁶ Crucial to the committee's identification of worthy clergymen were the bishop of Léon's systems for verifying principles: every French ecclesiastic seeking relief was required to write to the bishop specifying “his late Situation in France and the diocese to which he belonged.” Footnote ⁷⁷ An outspoken critic of the Civil Constitution and subsequent required oaths, the bishop “had very little sympathy,” for example, for juring priests who had sworn loyalty to the new French nation and its laws: “They were not eligible for help from the relief fund and had to apply to other charities for help.”Footnote ⁷⁸ After the bishop had confirmed that each ecclesiastic possessed appropriate principles, often after having consulted with other senior ecclesiastics, he sought the authorization of the committee for dispensing relief. By relying on the bishop and his networks to determine which clergymen were deserving, the committee ensured that recipients were individuals hostile to the course taken by the French Revolution and committed to supporting the pillars of monarchy and church, attributes that rendered such aid more palatable to most Britons.

Remaining correspondence between the Wilmot Committee and Home Office also provides clear hints that relief efforts were seen as potentially working in tandem with other government undertakings from their inception and well before the outbreak of war with France. Although the government avoided direct intervention in September 1792, Dundas nonetheless immediately recognized the utility of philanthropy, observing that he would use information from the Wilmot Committee “as I do . . . every other Means in my Power to learn with Accuracy the Nature and Description of the Persons who are now crouding into this Country from France.”Footnote ⁷⁹ As early as 21 September, newspapers noted that the bishop of Léon had taken “very particular pains to keep a register of all the French Priests that arrive in London, who are regularly classed, with their names and places of abode,” which he had sent to the government.Footnote ⁸⁰ John Thomas Stanley, a member of the committee to relieve the laity, was also compiling a list of émigrés who had applied for aid in December 1792, which he promised to forward to government soon.Footnote ⁸¹ In subsequent months, information fed to the Home Office by the relief committees, alongside magistrates, ships’ captains, and other concerned individuals, provided critical insight into the numbers of French men, women, and children reaching England and about their political principles. One such register remaining from September 1792, for example, reveals that its author attempted to differentiate between “dangerous Jacobins” and “persecuted people” upon their landing.Footnote ⁸² For the Home Office, responsible for coordinating efforts to monitor foreigners even before the Aliens Act was officially passed, these lists and collaboration provided essential information.

Thus, by October 1792, a subscription society had settled into the work of relieving French clergy, raising significant funds by evoking the suffering of deserving fellow Christians and by appealing to a sense of national duty. Many newspapers reported that the arrangements did “honour to the national character.”Footnote ⁸³ The committee had also developed strategies for assuring the public that among foreign Catholics, there were many who were deserving, grateful, and loyal men of the right principles who would not harm the nation and who might even strengthen Britain in its impending fight against revolutionary France. Although the Wilmot Committee ostensibly remained a “private” organization dedicated to the relief of suffering, it was nonetheless participating in redefining which foreigners were worthy of relief and assessing which might safely be allowed to remain in Britain. Its mechanisms for distributing aid already hinted at critical links between providing subsistence and providing for surveillance of refugees’ principles that would have critical repercussions for the nation more generally, particularly amid the changing climate of 1792 and 1793. As subsequent developments would make clear, national interests were served by economic strength, military preparedness, imperial stability, and security of property—but Britain might also be bolstered by identifying and mobilizing those whose support of limited monarchy could help stem the republican tide.

A Matter of National Concern

If the British government had hoped that a subscription charity could both address refugee needs and shield ministers from protests against charity to foreign Catholics, the advent of war would confirm just how fleeting such hopes were. The nuances of the arrangement were lost on the French, who failed to see the difference between widespread voluntary charity, willingness to grant asylum, and government policy. For the French National Assembly, any assistance to the émigrés was political. The declaration of war that came on 1 February 1793 lambasted the Aliens Act and its “inquisitorial vexations,” just as it singled out the “protection and pecuniary succours given to emigrants” as a cause for war.Footnote ⁸⁴

France's declaration of war also changed the stakes for both the British government and public. The ministry, which had at least publicly proclaimed a desire for peace, now found itself engaged in another war with its long-time rival. Moreover, there was no longer anything temporary about the needs of the French refugee clergy, since there was little chance of their returning home in the immediate future. The outbreak of war had also changed the refugees’ status more generally. They were no longer simply refugees from persecution and violence; instead, they were refugees from an enemy republic that opposed monarchy and established church and whose political system directly challenged Britain's own. Old questions now surfaced with increasing intensity: Were these French men and women enemy aliens fomenting the cause of revolution abroad? Or were they sufferers whose principles might, in fact, make them among Britain's most loyal supporters? Their presence on British soil was now marked by greater danger but also, as the efforts of both the Wilmot Committee and subsequent wartime legislation like the Emigrant Corps Act (1794) made clear, by greater opportunity. In this changed climate, a critical reevaluation of foreigners’ potential reliability occurred at the level of both charitable organization and government; in predicting utility to Britain, political principles came to matter more than a shared Protestantism.

As a result of this war, the nature of the Wilmot Committee's partnership with government shifted, and relief accorded to French refugees entered a second stage. Over the course of 1793 and 1794, the government indicated increasing willingness to offer financial assistance, a response that differed from its hesitancy in 1792 but nonetheless contrasted with its more directive approach to relieving previous groups of refugees. The government's decision to leave aid distribution to the Wilmot Committee even after it assumed financial responsibility was not merely a result of wartime administration or a preference for specialized government agencies.Footnote ⁸⁵ Achieving this working partnership took time, though it ultimately reflected confidence that the Wilmot Committee's mechanisms for identifying deserving refugees were politically useful to Britain.

With the committee's balance reported at only £4,700 by 15 February 1793, managers found themselves needing to appeal again to the public, an effort that attracted only small sums.Footnote ⁸⁶ Their funds at an all-time low and their concerns at an all-time high that the subscription would fail, the Wilmot Committee pivoted to strategies used to secure relief for earlier refugees and found a more receptive government, albeit one that continued to eschew direct responsibility for French Catholics. The first strategy involved securing a royal breve (brief) for collections across the kingdom. The royal brief had been used throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to raise money for foreign Protestants in England, like the Huguenots and the Palatines, and for beleaguered Protestants abroad.Footnote ⁸⁷ The more immediate precedent, of which Wilmot was likely aware when he petitioned in 1793, was the letter used to authorize a collection to relieve loyalist refugee clergymen in 1779.Footnote ⁸⁸ It was, however, historically significant that a royal letter was sought urging the largely Protestant parishes of Britain to support the Catholic priests of France. Furthermore, the use of the royal warrant to support these Catholic foreigners subtly embedded them as individuals deserving of royal protection and succor.Footnote ⁸⁹

Issued on 17 April 1793, George III's letter accorded the committee's charitable work “His Royal Countenance and Protection.” Like earlier briefs, this royal letter noted that the objects of the collection were “sufferers alone for conscience sake,” evoking Britain's historic role in providing aid to victims of religious persecution.Footnote ⁹⁰ The response across parishes was immediate and generous, though the reasons that Britons raised more than £40,000 for Catholic clergymen by November 1793 were diverse.Footnote ⁹¹ Many parishioners took to heart the messages of their ministers that “the stranger . . . was peculiarly recommended in scripture” or of their king that charity irrespective of religious faith was “acceptable in the Sight of that Being who is the common Father of Mankind.”Footnote ⁹² Others heard the words of Hannah More, who argued that charity to Catholic clergymen, in fact, revealed the “purity of our religion, by the beneficence of our actions.” Footnote ⁹³ Wilmot reported that he encountered few who weren't willing to donate where their means permitted, suggesting that arguments about assistance to fellow Christians, national tradition, and national honor continued to resonate with the public.Footnote ⁹⁴

A new argument, however, emerged in the publications surrounding these collections: relieving Christian victims of persecution was important for Britain's religious and political identity. These clergymen, in the words of one reverend, provided a lesson about “the shocking effects resulting from anarchy and irreligion.” Had they not been “animated by a fervent sense of loyalty to his sovereign, and of religion to his God,” they might have lived in peace and prosperity, but their consciences “forbade them to embrace the atrocious system proposed to them.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Across numerous pamphlets published in 1793, the French clergymen came to signify far more than Catholicism or Frenchness—they became martyrs for loyalty to king and established government. They bore daily witness to the chaos and destitution created by a nation that threw off its established structures and turned to republicanism. They became, as Burke had insisted several months earlier, “worthy Sufferers in the cause of Honor, Virtue, Loyalty, and Religion,”Footnote ⁹⁶ or, as Fanny Burney wrote with great eloquence, “sufferers in the same cause, bred in the same faith, and firm in the same principles.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Where religious differences had once characterized the divided interests of Britain and France, Catholic clergymen had now become the embodiment of shared principles, of loyalty to king and established religion.

Although the grant of the royal letter and the generosity of parishioners eased the Wilmot Committee's burden, the scale of relief required only continued to increase throughout 1793. Committee members patiently continued their work, meeting with ministers, who repeatedly promised some permanent plan “for the disposal of the French Clergy,” and remaining advocates for clergymen, whom they cast as devout, frugal, and patient sufferers. They cultivated partnerships with supporters and voluntary efforts across the nation, including a Ladies Committee formed with the aim of increasing collections from women and a small factory established at Winchester.Footnote ⁹⁸

Finally, after months of delay, the government formally announced its willingness to assist. On 14 December 1793, the Treasury apprised the Wilmot Committee that monthly sums of £7,830 and £560 were to be paid for the relief of the clergy and laity, respectively, based on reports that there were 4,008 clergymen and 375 laity being relieved from public contributions at the time.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, rather than appointing a commission or channeling this grant through existing government offices as it had with previous groups of Protestant or loyalist refugees, in late 1793 the government determined to maintain the overarching structures of a subscription charity. The government did order the merger of two separate relief committees, one for the clergy and one for the laity, under the direction of Wilmot. The Treasury did issue instructions about how the distribution of aid should occur, as was customary with parliamentary grants. But essentially, the government endorsed most of the committee's existing structures. Treasury funds were deposited into accounts drawn on and administered by subscription managers, who continued to review all changes to the lists of those receiving allowances and to submit them to the Treasury for approval. Albeit somewhat reluctantly and with caveats that this was “temporary” relief only, the British government committed itself to direct financial assistance to French refugees, making it the only European power to do so.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Ultimately, the government disbursed close to £3 million for refugee relief between 1794 and 1810, with additional allowances continuing until at least 1823.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Significantly, however, the government's decision to provide grants to the refugees did not mean an end to the Wilmot Committee or its role in allocating aid. Between 1794 and 1806, when he retired, Wilmot diligently reported to the Treasury and conducted the work of the committee with the help of a diminishing group.Footnote ¹⁰² Government subsidies reduced the Wilmot committee's dependency on donations, but they also meant that the committee became a hybrid whose partnership with the Treasury subtly shifted over time, particularly as they were eventually given responsibility for disbursements or audits of disbursements to Jersey, Corsican and Toulonese refugees, and emigrants from St. Domingo. Beginning in 1798, when several committee members asked to be released from their increasing responsibilities distributing aid, the Treasury requested that Wilmot and Colonel Thomas Glyn undertake the “Superintendance of the Relief to the Suffering Clergy and Laity of France,” replacing the earlier subscription committee with a system of commissioners who were now paid £300 as an annual salary.Footnote ¹⁰³ There was no apparent parliamentary conveyance of title or position upon Wilmot, as there had been with the Commission for American Loyalists, but when Wilmot formally asked to resign in June 1806, citing fatigue, Buckingham responded, noting that Wilmot had completed his duties in the “office of Commissioners for the French Emigrants” with humanity and benevolence.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Glyn, who had worked alongside Wilmot beginning in 1798, would continue supervising this work until his death in 1813, aided by Mansel Dawkins Mansel, who remained present at the “Emigrant Office” even after 1815, continuing its diminishing work until the office was abolished in an extended process between 1820 and 1823.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Over the years, and particularly with Wilmot's resignation, the committee gradually came to resemble a “para-governmental” department.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The partnership that evolved between the Wilmot Committee and the British government would thus undergo several subtle shifts between 1793 and 1823, each in the direction of greater administrative accountability.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Individuals who had first mobilized in a voluntary capacity handled the day-to-day work but reported to the Treasury for final approval, an arrangement that continued well after 1802 when the vast majority of émigrés had returned to France. This collaboration remains particularly significant because it suggests that the government, even as it determined that refugee relief was a national concern and extended financial assistance, continued to see the subscription charity and its mechanisms for allocating aid as ideally suited to the revolutionary 1790s. Given its more direct intervention in earlier relief efforts, the government's decision to allow the Wilmot Committee to continue delivering aid deserves consideration, particularly during an era of increasing parliamentary oversight and “economical” reform.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Wilmot's sterling reputation and capacity to manage aid delivery may have been reason enough to let the committee endure rather than appointing commissioners. Moreover, the savings for government, occasioned by the subscription committee's heavy reliance on the unpaid labor of the French Committee (a group of “noblemen and gentlemen of the first respectability” familiar with the situations of the émigrés)Footnote ¹⁰⁹ and until 1798, of the English Committee, no doubt remained attractive.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As Dundas had hoped it would in 1792, perhaps the subscription charity also shielded ministers from criticism. To constituents opposed to supporting foreign poor, the government could claim that it had allotted only temporary assistance and urged the committee to retrench. For the émigrés themselves, who regularly sought and required further support, the government could direct them to the Wilmot Committee, protecting ministers from the appearance of indifference or insensitivity. To a public hesitant to embrace Catholics or to pass Catholic relief acts, it could legitimately claim it took no direct responsibility for foreign Catholics. The Wilmot Committee provided the government with critical flexibility and plausible deniability should the trust placed in foreign Catholics have proven a dangerous gamble.

The committee also persisted, however, because its structures for ascertaining the principles of those aided remained invaluable, even as the numbers of actual émigrés in England slowly dwindled. The committee had always relied on the knowledge and networks of the bishop of Léon, just as the committee and Treasury would remain dependent on the expertise of the French Committee.Footnote ¹¹¹ It was these French gentlemen who gathered information about applicants, advised about allocation of relief, and then worked to distribute sums, all the while providing subscription managers with critical information about who were suitable recipients of aid and whose principles aligned with government aims. Reliance on the French Committee allowed the English Committee, or core of the Wilmot Committee, to focus on supervision and direct policy.

But the French Committee was also essential in verifying the principles and conduct of anyone receiving a number on the “List of Persons receiving a government allowance,” implementing practices that had proven effective over the years. Refugees completed specific admission forms, which needed to be “certified by the signatures of two French Gentlemen who were acquainted with the Claimant in France.”Footnote ¹¹² Since the signatures required were typically from members of the French Committee who had already proven their hostility to the revolutionary regime, such signatures usually signified that claimants possessed principles congenial to Britain. Sometimes, the applicant's arrival in an English port also needed to be certified and his compliance with English legislation confirmed.Footnote ¹¹³ Most importantly, applicants had to provide “certificates” and “proofs,”Footnote ¹¹⁴ one of which typically testified that the applicant had been “obliged to Emigrate to this Country in consequence of the Rebellion in France.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Such certificates were designed to ensure that recipients had refused to embrace revolutionary ideology and fled the political system in France. As the backgrounds of refugees diversified, appointed individuals, who adhered to strict scales of rank in order to ensure “scrupulous equity,” were subsequently appointed to distribute aid to magistrates, officers, members of the marine, clergymen, and laity.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As had often been the case with earlier waves of refugees, aid was accorded to those deemed capable of strengthening Britain and its government.

Wilmot's ongoing practices of obtaining proofs of loyalty were, in certain ways, analogous to practices adopted with the Huguenots, who were sometimes required to prove their adherence to the reformed religion,Footnote ¹¹⁷ or the Palatines, who had to prove that they were Protestants, in order to receive aid.Footnote ¹¹⁸ What differed by the 1790s was that the French refugees, particularly clergymen, were assumed to be Catholic. Instead, what these foreigners were now being asked to demonstrate was their backgrounds and loyalties—they certified that they had fled France because of those principles and provided evidence that they were determined to return home only once their lawful sovereign was restored. The parallel is, in fact, probably closer to the emphasis placed on “loyalty” in the case of awarding aid to the loyalist refugees—those who had shown unswerving dedication to George III and borne arms on his behalf were more deserving of compensation than those whose loyalty to monarchy and the British political system was not publicly proven.Footnote ¹¹⁹

It is thus critical to note that by the 1790s, even French Catholic refugees were deemed deserving of protection and of shelter in Britain if they embodied loyalty to sovereign, religion, and established government, and if they stood alongside Britain against the tide of revolution. The certificates of principles that continued to be issued by the Wilmot Committee reveal a critical shift that had occurred in gauging which foreigners were deemed acceptable recipients of relief during the 1790s. The determining factor was no longer Protestantism, as it had been in previous centuries, but shared political principles. And even once the government assumed financial responsibility for refugees, it was arguably the committee that remained the entity best-equipped to monitor foreigners, verify their principles, and determine the loyalties of those who might be employed by government because of the networks it had developed within the refugee community itself.

Subsistence and Surveillance

If, at first glance, efforts to sustain foreigners may seem at odds with repressive proclamations and legislation used to monitor and deport foreigners, the Wilmot Committee's work would ultimately align with numerous government wartime efforts. Indeed, the intertwining of subsistence and surveillance provides some final insight into the Wilmot Committee's survival during the 1790s. Dundas had recognized even in 1792 that information provided by “the respectable Committee” might be useful to the government, foreshadowing some of the ways in which the goals of a charitable organization like the Wilmot Committee, and the goals of the Aliens Act (1793) or the Emigrant Corps Act (1794), would become mutually imbricated. Moreover, tracing some of these intersections can help make sense of Britain's seemingly multifaceted responses to foreigners during this period, each of which, in fact, centered around distinguishing between foreigners whose principles were dangerous and foreigners whose principles were useful to Britain.

Despite numerous efforts to monitor the arrival of foreigners in 1792, the Home Office's mandate to systematically surveil aliens began in earnest with the passage of the Aliens Act in January 1793. This act, viewed as “unprecedented” even as it was passed, was used to deport approximately fifty aliens annually whose political principles or behavior were threatening to Britain and to proscribe the movements of hundreds of others.Footnote ¹²⁰ But just as important, the act also empowered the Home Office to collect information about foreigners and to evaluate their political principles, identifying individuals who could be useful to Britain. Indeed, most members of Parliament who supported the act professed that danger lay not in foreigners’ Frenchness or Catholicism but in the government's not being able to properly separate foreigners whose political principles aligned with Britain's from those whose did not. A number of those who spoke in favor of the Aliens Act, like Edmund Burke and R. B. Jenkinson, were in fact early members of the Wilmot Committee. They recognized that not all foreigners were dangerous and that many were deserving of assistance. They argued, however, that it was only by placing all foreigners under restraint that the government could distinguish “the real emigrant and object of generous compassion from the plotting incendiary.”Footnote ¹²¹

But while members of the Home Office and Alien Office charged with enforcing the Aliens Act made impressive efforts to verify landings, issue passports so that foreigners might legally move from their ports of arrival, and track aliens once they settled in England, they regularly acknowledged their herculean task in the face of inadequate information. The secretary of state attempted to institute a register of all the passports granted in September 1796, for example, but struggled to collect accurate data.Footnote ¹²² Furthermore, while the Home Office wrote to the lord mayor to ascertain whether it would be possible to provide monthly returns of aliens in London, lists were not regularly submitted.Footnote ¹²³ The challenges of such work would necessitate widespread collaboration.

One solution to these difficulties came from none other than John Eardley-Wilmot. In 1797, he observed that the French Committee had proven useful in identifying emigrants worthy of relief, and so might also help the government create a registry of Frenchmen and women. He noted that the Aliens Act and the Home Office did not, in fact, go far enough in verifying the credentials of foreigners, merely requiring name, rank, occupation, and place of abode; the Wilmot Committee gathered this and even more relevant information about the political backgrounds and principles of applicants. Wilmot proposed that all emigrants in Britain—not just those receiving relief—be requested to appear before the French Committee, which could be enlarged for this purpose and could effectively ascertain political principles. If emigrants refused to appear or failed to give a “satisfactory” account of themselves, they could then be sent out of the kingdom or disposed of as the secretary of state thought most fit under the Aliens Act.Footnote ¹²⁴ Here, Wilmot explicitly recognized how the work of his committee and the Aliens Act were mutually reinforcing, both dedicated to identifying foreigners who could further the national interest.

The ways in which provision of aid might be directly linked to wartime efforts is furthermore evident in considering some of the intersections between the Wilmot Committee and the Emigrant Corps Act. Passed into law on 9 May 1794, this act authorized regiments comprised nearly entirely of French subjects to be commissioned by the British crown, setting aside existing legislation against Catholics and the provisions of the 1701 Act of Settlement that prohibited foreigners from filling offices of trust.Footnote ¹²⁵ Although Britain had relied on foreign mercenaries during earlier conflicts and had been financing émigré troops on the Continent prior to 1794, the government's willingness to directly commission foreigners revealed a shift in national strategy and a belief that Frenchmen with the proper principles were among those best equipped to bolster British wartime objectives.Footnote ¹²⁶ Once again, political principles were the determining factor. At the level of the armed forces, too, a critical redefinition was occurring as to which foreigners might be allowed to remain and potentially be integrated into Britain. Commissioned officers were to be drawn from the pool of individuals who had loyally served France and its monarch; they were appointed to the rank or just below the rank that they had held in the French military service on 1 July 1789.Footnote ¹²⁷

To predict their utility and evaluate which émigrés might be accepted into these corps, the government employed procedures that paralleled those of the Wilmot Committee in verifying principles and loyalty. Testimonials submitted by men hoping to join the emigrant troops or receive British support underline that social class and political principles were an essential part of securing commissions. Most of these testimonials included long histories detailing individuals’ social backgrounds under the Ancien Régime and their support of Louis XVI; they typically included certificates from remaining members of the royal family or from trusted members of the émigré community, a number of whom were also members of the French Committee that certified the principles of applicants for relief.Footnote ¹²⁸ In order to make sure that the principles of subalterns were also compatible with service to Britain, colonels of the emigrant corps were furthermore urged to be cautious “in regard to the principles of the men” taken into their service.Footnote ¹²⁹ As Henry Dundas put it so eloquently in his defense of the Emigrant Corps Bill, these emigrants were men of rank who shared “the same object we have” and would “erect the standard of exiled religion, oppressed virtue, and expatriated loyalty.”Footnote ¹³⁰

The Emigrant Corps Act went into effect just as the first parliamentary grants were actually reaching Wilmot, and the linkages between these measures reveal how mutually beneficial the partnership between relief organization and government could be. As the expenses of war wore on and the government continued to insist on limitations to the numbers enrolled on relief lists, Wilmot Committee practices were adjusted to meet the varied requirements of government. Newspapers indicate that, as early as April 1793, the committee had already determined to exclude able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and fifty from receiving allowances, though the rule does not seem to have been systematically applied.Footnote ¹³¹ At the general reinscription in early 1796, however, a new rule was established “in conformity with the Intention of Government”; henceforth, all lay able-bodied emigrants between the ages of sixteen and fifty were expected to enter into military service and to be removed from the lists of those receiving allowances.Footnote ¹³² The committee appointed a physician to determine the male laity's physical fitness and ability to serve; new certificates testifying to incapacity were required for the male laity receiving allowances; and single men between the ages of sixteen and fifty who refused medical examination were removed from relief lists.Footnote ¹³³ In its partnership with government, the Wilmot Committee was no longer merely verifying refugees’ principles; it was facilitating the nation's access to their manpower and bodies, thus furthering wartime goals.

Although the committee's ability to identify the principles and monitor the behavior of its beneficiaries was initially important to assuring the British public that only appropriate clergymen were receiving aid, its practices for delivering aid were also instrumental in measuring the deservingness of the laity and even the military.Footnote ¹³⁴ The Wilmot Committee complemented numerous other private and government efforts, and its ways of viewing and evaluating foreigners were harnessed to become advantageous to the nation. It was able both to gather necessary information and to make refugee manpower legible for government. Inimical principles were deemed unworthy of aid, whereas those of shared principles were identified and, ultimately, mobilized. These tightened links between relief and other wartime efforts are crucial to understanding both the Wilmot Committee's longevity and the British public and government's wider willingness to appreciate the utility of French Catholics. Those who might now serve Britain, whether literally or symbolically, were those who refused to endorse a republican government and whose political principles aligned with Britain's.