Читать книгу Prisoners of War in Britain 1756 to 1815. A record of their lives, their romance and their sufferings онлайн

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Foreign writers have included among their various complaints against the British Government its reluctance to allow religious ministration among the prisoners of war. But the Transport Office, as we shall see later, had learned by experience that the garb of sanctity was by no means always the guarantee of sanctity, and so when in 1808 a Danish parson applied to be allowed on the prison ships at Chatham, he got his permission only on the condition that ‘he does not repeat, the old offence of talking upon matters unconnected with his mission and so cause much incorrect inferences’—a vague expression which probably meant talking about outside affairs to prisoners, who had no other source of information.

In 1813 the Transport Office replied to the Bishop of Angoulême, who requested that a priest named Paucheron might minister on the prison ships at Chatham, that they could not accede inasmuch as Paucheron had been guilty ‘of highly improper conduct in solemnizing a marriage between a prisoner of war and a woman in disguise of a man’.