No. 23.
Viscount Enfield to Mr. Stewart.
Sir: I am directed by Earl Granville to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 30th ultimo, in which, with reference to the answer which Lord Granville caused to be returned to your letter of the 22d of March, respecting the losses which you state you have sustained by the occupation of your houses in Paris and the neighborhood by French troops during the war, you now submit that your case does not come within the terms of that which had been submitted to the law-officers of the Crown, and upon whose opinion with reference thereto the answer to your representation had been founded, inasmuch as there was “no destruction of property by invading armies,” but that the damage was caused in consequence of the occupation of your property by French troops, which property had been vacated by orders of the French authorities themselves.
I am now to state to you that Lord Granville has taken the opinion of the law-officers upon your further application, and I am to observe that Her Majesty’s subjects resident in France cannot of right claim to be in a better position in respect to their immovable property in France than French subjects, and that, if you have been correctly informed as to the law of France, the intervention of Her Majesty’s government will not be required to enable you to prefer a claim before the French authorities to compensation for any losses resulting to you from the occupation of your houses by French troops. But whether you have been correctly informed or not, Her Majesty’s government cannot intervene, if you receive at the bands of the French government the same treatment which French subjects themselves receive.
With regard to your allusion to the case of the British ships which have sunk at Rouen, I am to observe that there is no analogy between ships and immovable property.
I am, &c.,
Another pertinent case has recently been decided by the British government against a claimant. Mr. Worth, a British subject, claimed indemnity on account of imprisonment to which he was subjected by the German authorities on his capture, in an attempt to escape from Paris in a balloon.
Lord Enfield, in a note of the 3d of April, informs Mr. Worth that Lord Granville regrets that, “after consultation with the proper law-adviser of the Crown, he does not feel justified in placing such a claim on your (Mr. Worth’s) behalf before the German government.”—British Blue-Book, 1871; Correspondence respecting the imprisonment of Mr. Worth by the Prussians.