92 Life of Count Rumford. 



son, then twenty years old, was bound in friendship with the 

 Governor of the Province, who was his compatriot and a 

 supporter of the government. The civil and "military trusts 

 with which, while still so young, he had already been invested, 

 continued to attach him to the royalist party by duty and grati- 

 tude. When the party in opposition had sway in his Province, 

 he was compelled to abandon his home and to seek an asylum 

 in Boston, then occupied by the English troops Thomp- 

 son was received with distinction by the British commander, 

 and called to raise a regiment for the King's service. But the 

 course of the war having brought about the evacuation of Boston 

 in the spring of 1776, he went then to England, and was made 

 bearer of important despatches for the government." 



Cuvier's report, in his Eloge, is to this effect : After 

 having referred to the incident by which " at the age of 

 nineteen, the hand of a rich widow had made the poor 

 scholar, at the moment when he least expected it, one of 

 the most considerable men in the colony," Cuvier adds : 



" Having taken side with the royalist party during the troubles 

 in America, the populace of Concord were so enraged against 

 him that he found it requisite to take refuge in Boston, leaving 

 his wife behind him pregnant of a daughter. The former he 

 never saw again ; the latter joined him for the first time when 

 twenty years of age. 



" One of the first triumphs of Washington was to compel 

 the British troops to evacuate Boston on the 24th of March, 

 1776, and Mr. Thompson was the official bearer of this dis- 

 astrous intelligence to London." 



Now it is hardly probable that the then Count Rum- 

 ford in confidential narration to his friends intended to, 

 or did, disclose a secret which he had up to that time 

 kept to himself, that he had from the first been a 

 royalist. He knew too well what he had left in writing 

 on this side of the waterj and remembered too well the 



