inchelsea._]

[Sidenote: THE WESTONS]

All that remains of the Grey Friars monastery may now be seen (on
Mondays only) in the estate called The Friars: the shell of the chapel's
choir, prettily covered with ivy. Here once lived, in the odour of
perfect respectability, the brothers Weston, who, country gentlemen of
quiet habit at home, for several years ravaged the coach roads elsewhere
as highwaymen, and were eventually hanged at Tyburn. Their place in
literature is, of course, _Denis Duval_, which Thackeray wrote in a
house on the north of the churchyard, and which is all of Winchelsea and
Rye compact, as the author's letters to Mr. Greenwood, editor of
_Cornhill_, detailing the plot (in the person of Denis himself) go to
show. Thus:--

"I was born in the year 1764, at Winchelsea, where my father was a
grocer and clerk of the church. Everybody in the place was a good
deal connected with smuggling.

"There used to come to our house a very noble French gentleman,
called the COUNT DE LA MOTTE, and with him a German, the BARON DE
LUeTTERLOH. My father used to take packages to Ostend and Calais for
these two gentlemen, and perhaps I went to Paris once, and saw the
French Queen.

"The squire of our town was SQUIRE WESTON of the Priory, who, with
his brother, kept one of the genteelest houses in the country. He
was churchwarden of our church, and much respected. Yes, but if you
read the _Annual Register_ of 1781, you will find that on the 13th
July the sheriffs attended at the TOWER OF LONDON to receive
custody of a De la Motte, a prisoner charged with high treason. The
fact is, this Alsatian nobleman being in difficulties in his own
country (where he had commanded the Regiment Soubise), came to
London, and under pretence of sending prints to France and Ostend,
supplied the French Ministers with accounts of the movements of the
English fleets and troops. His go-between was Luetterloh, a
Brunswicker, who had been a crimping-agent, then a servant, who was
a spy of France and Mr. Franklin, and who turned king's evidence on
La Motte, and hanged him.

"This Luetterloh, who had been a crimping-agent for German troops
during the American war, then a servant in London during the Gordon
riots, then an agent for a spy, then a spy over a spy, I suspect to
have been a consummate scoundrel, and doubly