At an Old Bailey trial on 23 July, he was found guilty of running an operation which sent secret naval intelligence to France, which supported the rebelling American colonists and had been at war with Great Britain since 1778.
In July 1781, the American Revolutionary War had not ended and the navies of Great Britain and France were still fighting not only in the North Atlantic but as far as the Indian Ocean.
[2] Public executions were considered a spectator sport in the eighteenth century, and when individuals of high rank were involved the attraction was irresistible.
[3] As for Thackeray, in his last, unfinished novel, Denis Duval we find de la Motte and his sometime accomplice, Henry Lutterloh, figuring there as leading characters.
Still less is that the impression conveyed in a sympathetic memoir[4] published by a French writer some time between the trial verdict and the execution — in the hope (perhaps) of mitigating the severity of the sentence.