ing refused to oblige him by getting out of the
English Jesuits' College and sending him certain papers which the
Duchess of Hamilton (the wife of the brilliant duke who was killed in
Hyde Park by Lord Mohun and General Macartney) desired him to procure
for her use in a law suit against 'Lord Bromley.'[2] St.-Omer, then, not
having been besieged in 1710, why should a statue be set up in honour of
an Audomaraise dame for delivering it? On this point the Report of the
Society of Antiquaries throws a sufficient and interesting light. It
seems that there really lived in St.-Omer in 1710 a certain dame
Jacqueline Isabelle Robins, obviously a woman of mark and force, since
she carried on a number of thriving industries, and among them the
management, under a contract, of the boats between St.-Omer, Calais, and
Dunkirk. Napoleon would have thought her much superior to Madame de
Stael, for before she was forty years old she had married three
husbands, and surrounded herself with six or seven flourishing olive
branches. She was constantly in the law courts fighting for her rights,
not against private persons only, but against the 'mayor and echevins of
the city of St.-Omer.' Though St.-Omer, as I have said, was not besieged
by the allies, it was constantly occupied by the troops of his Most
Christian Majesty, who gave the magistrates and the people almost as
much trouble as if they had been enemies, and the records show that not
long before the surrender of Aire-sur-la-Lys to the allies in November
1710, the Comte d'Estaing (an ancestor of the Admiral who did such good
service to the American cause), under orders from Versailles succeeded
in bringing to St.-Omer from Dunkirk a complete supply of powder and
other munitions of war. It seems to be likely enough that in this
operation the military authorities availed themselves of the services of
dame Jacqueline and of her boats. As she was a masterful dame, and,
burying her third husband, who was twelve years her junior, in 1720,
lived on to depart at the age of seventy-five in 1732, a local legend
evidently grew up about her personal share in the events of the great
war of 1710. The first official historian of St.-Omer, a worthy priest
Dom Devienne, writing in 1782, gave this legend form. As he transformed
Jacqueline from a rich and prosperous woman of affairs into a 'woman of
the dregs of the people,' calling her Jane, by the way, instead of
Jacqueline, she became, after the Revolu