DE LA MOTTE, François - ADAIR, James.

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A warrant for the arrest and execution of François Henri de la Motte, a spy charged with high treason. Signed and sealed by the judge, James Adair. De la Motte was found guilty of sending secret intelligence to France, supporters of the America during the Revolutionary War. The trial became synonymous with the "inescapable grotesquerie and horror of eighteenth-century justice" (Lockwood, p. 484) and Dickens used it as a model for the trial scene in A Tale of Two Cities.De la Motte was a former French army officer living in Great Britain during the 1780s. The Newgate Calendar remarked that he, "had elegant lodgings in Bond Street, dressed like a gentleman, kept the best company, and passed as a foreigner of fortune; he spoke the English tongue, and was well acquainted with the geography of the country" (p. 155). Suspicions arose that he was a spy, and soon after, de la Motte and a German accomplice named Henry Lutterloh were discovered procuring naval intelligence on the locations of ships in Portsmouth and sending them to the French navy. This resulted in at least one attack on Commodore Johnstone's fleet in the East Indies, costing the lives of 207 sailors. He was put on trial at the Old Bailey and sentenced on 23 July 1781 to be publicly hanged, drawn, and quartered; his actual execution saw him hanged before his heart was cut out and burned. De la Motte "long resonated in the minds of Englishmen, first as the arch-fiend and bogeyman, and later as a potent symbol of a bruta

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