Jean-Guillaume, baron Hyde de Neuville

He was the son of Guillaume Hyde, a Frenchman of English descent whose Jacobite ancestors fled from Great Britain to France with Charles Edward Stuart after the failure of the rising of 1745.

[1] After arriving in France, Hyde was appointed as a diplomat by the newly restored King Louis XVIII and sent to London in order to persuade the Liverpool ministry to transfer the defeated Napoleon to a remoter place of exile than Elba, where he had been sent to.

In January 1816, Hyde was appointed to serve as the French ambassador to the United States, moving to Washington, D.C. where he negotiated a commercial treaty with the U.S. government as his first action in office.

[4] On another occasion, while dining with South Carolina senators William Smith and John Gaillard in January 1817, Hyde grew verbally abusive and loudly belched after consuming large amounts of alcohol.

[6] After Hyde returned to France, he declined an offer to serve as the French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and in November 1822 was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, representing the constituency of Cosne.

In 1823, he was appointed as French ambassador to Portugal, where he helped release King John VI from imprisonment imposed by his son Miguel and was rewarded with the Portuguese peerage of Comte de Bemposta.

Hyde planned for the Liverpool ministry to refuse this due to the British having proclaimed a principle of non-interventionism in European affairs, which would allow France to then be in a position to undertake an intervention that Britain had declined.

While in office, he supported the Greek War of Independence, worked to improve the governance of the French colonial empire and implemented the abolition of France's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.