Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/184

This page has been validated.
164
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

the authorities took measures against the recurrence of such outrages. After the Terror the ten remaining Irish students were allowed to return to their own country. James Coigley or Quigley, a priest destined to the gallows at Maidstone for treason in 1798, had left in 1789, having proved an unruly spirit, but he had witnessed the beginning of the Revolution, and mistaken for a royalist priest, had had a narrow escape from the lanterne. He was in Paris again in 1797, conspiring against England.

The Scotch college, adjoining the Austin convent, was made a prison, and St. Just was taken thither on the 9th Thermidor, but the gaoler refused to receive him. The gilt-bronze urn, containing in a leaden case the brain of James II., was wrenched off the monument to his memory, and the case was not discovered till four years ago, in laying a pipe under the chapel floor. James's manuscripts, sent for safety into the provinces, were ultimately destroyed. His coffin at the Benedictine monastery was opened, and the body made away with.

Of this "resurrection" we have two accounts. An anonymous correspondent of the Gentleman's Magazine in 1798, a prisoner at the Scotch college, was told by a Miss White, an eye-witness, that James's nose was very prominent, the end of it being long and "abundant," whereas the lower part of his long oval face was anything but pro-