Benjamin Bathurst entered the diplomatic service at an early age and was promoted to the post of Secretary of the British Legation at Livorno in what was then the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (now Italy).

On 25 November 1809, Bathurst and his courier, a Herr Krause, who were travelling by chaise under the aliases of "Baron de Koch" and "Fischer" respectively, stopped at the town of Perleberg, west of Berlin.

After Klitzing was notified of Bathurst's disappearance, he took immediate steps to mobilise his troops and conducted a vigorous search, apparently working on the initial assumption that the missing man had vanished of his own accord.

The following day, Bathurst's valuable fur coat – worth 200 or 300 Prussian thalers – was discovered hidden in an outhouse owned by a family named Schmidt.

Frau Kestern, a woman employed at the German Coffee House, testified years later that immediately after Bathurst had visited the establishment, August had come in, asked her where the visitor had gone, then hastened after him and (she supposed) taken some opportunity to murder him.

[3] A reward of 500 thalers was offered for any news of Bathurst's whereabouts, and money was paid to members of the local police to expedite matters.

She then travelled to Berlin and then Paris (under special safe conduct since Britain and France were then at war) to see Napoleon Bonaparte himself, hoping to obtain from him some account of her husband's fate.

The Times published a piece that month which subsequently appeared in other English newspapers:[2] There is too much reason to fear that the account of the death of Mr Bathurst, late envoy to the Emperor of Austria, inserted in a Paris journal, is correct as to the principal fact.

It was stated, as an article of Berlin news, of the date of December 10, that Mr Bathurst had evinced symptoms of insanity on his journey through the city, and that he had subsequently fallen by his own hand in the vicinity of Perleberg.

No success, however, has attended the offer.The French government was agitated by the accusation that they had kidnapped or murdered Bathurst and replied in their official journal, Le Moniteur Universel: England alone, among all civilised nations, has renewed the example of paying assassins and encouraging crimes.

The English diplomatic corps is the only one in which examples of madness are common.On 15 April 1852, during the demolition of a house near Perleberg, located three hundred paces from the White Swan, a skeleton was discovered under the threshold of the stable.