The inspiration of the monument itself has been very marked. The “Sleeping Children” by Chantrey in Lichfield Cathedral is due to Mrs. Robinson, the mother of them, asking Sir Francis Chantrey, whom she had commissioned, to base his work on the monument to Penelope. The sculptor accordingly visited Ashbourne and made a sketch from the work of Thomas Banks.
Lichfield then speedily became the object of the hatred and jealousy of the Ashbourne people, who heard with bitter feelings that the group by Chantrey was even better than the figure they so prided themselves upon. So far back as 1829, a visitor told how “the venerable matron that shows the monument” in Ashbourne church said, in reply to a remark that Chantrey’s sculpture was the finer, “Humph! the like of that’s what I hear every day. Hang that fellow Chanty, or Canty, or whatever you call him! I wish he had never been born.”
Ashbourne Hall, the old home of the Boothbys, is now an hotel. It sheltered Prince Charles in 1745, and in the other bedrooms his chief officers quartered. Their names were chalked at the time upon the doors, and the chalk was afterwards painted over carefully in white paint by some Boothby eager to preserve memories of the historic occasion, but no traces of them are now to be seen.
During the wars with Napoleon, Ashbourne enjoyed a phenomenal prosperity; for, owing largely to its situation in the midst of England, rendering access to the sea rather a long business, the Government made the little town a place where, by 1804, two hundred captured French officers were stationed, on parole. They are said to have spent £30,000 a year in this place. The worst of which they had to complain was their enforced idleness and the obligation to be within bounds at nine o’clock in the evening. They were, in any case, not supposed to go beyond one mile from the town, and if they were late the penalty was a fine of one guinea, to be given to the informer. General Roussambeau was one of the most distinguished of these prisoners. One day he rode far beyond bounds, to Matlock, to meet Lord Macartney and General Boyer. He met them, and with them a humorous person who joked with him at breaking bounds. The Frenchman, incensed at this, promptly sent him a guinea, the informer’s fee, on his return to Ashbourne; whereupon, not willing for the Frenchman to have the last word, the humorist in haste informed the authorities in London, who at once removed Roussambeau to Yaxley, in Huntingdonshire.