Napoleon
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The existence of a ménage-à-trois (or quatre, if one includes Jackson) doesn’t necessarily mean that Montholon hated Napoleon, as some modern writers have assumed. Such arrangements were not unusual among the French aristocracy, and as he had already slept with the wives of Maret and State Councillor Duchâtel, Chaptal’s mistress and Pauline’s reader, the Napoleonic court clearly acknowledged the concept of droit de seigneur. The compliant Montholon would hardly have stayed on St Helena after Albine’s return to Europe, and remained a leading Bonapartist all his life – suffering seven years’ imprisonment for his part in Napoleon’s nephew’s coup attempt of 1840 – if he had loathed him.
On December 10, 1815 Napoleon moved into Longwood, with a heavy heart. When Bertrand, who lived nearby in a cottage at Hutt’s Gate, told him that his ‘new palace’ was ready, he replied: ‘Do not call it my palace but my tomb.’75 It comprised a billiard room (with shockingly loud green walls as the East India Company had that colour paint in abundance), a drawing room, dining room, library, staff accommodation and sleeping quarters for the Montholon family. The British government had insisted that Napoleon only have the rank of ‘a general officer not in employ’, who was under no circumstances to be called emperor for fear of offending the Bourbons (even though, retaining medieval claims, George III had officially included ‘King of France’ among his titles for the first forty-two years of his reign).76 Britons therefore tended to call Napoleon ‘Sir’, ‘Your Excellency’ or ‘General Bonaparte’. When an invitation to a ball arrived at Longwood addressed to ‘General Bonaparte’, Napoleon quipped: ‘Send the card to the addressee; the last I heard of him was at the Pyramids and Mount Tabor.’77
Although Napoleon was not allowed newspapers by order of Lord Bathurst, secretary for war, on grounds of national security, news nonetheless seeped through.78 When he heard that Joseph had successfully evaded capture and was living in Bordentown, New Jersey, he ‘remained thoughtful for some time’ – doubtless considering what would have happened if he had taken up the impersonation offer – before he ‘then expressed satisfaction’.79 Although he mourned the outrageous execution of General de La Bédoyère by the Bourbons on August 19, 1815, he himself reacted disgracefully to the news of their shooting Marshal Ney, telling Gourgaud: ‘Ney got no more than he deserved. I regret him because he was inestimable on a field of battle, but he was too hot-headed, and too stupid to succeed in anything but a fight.’80 Later remarks about Ney’s betrayal of him at Fontainebleau in April 1814 explain his ire.81
Murat’s execution in Calabria at the hands of the Neapolitan Bourbons initially produced a similar reaction – ‘Murat has only had what he deserved’ – but on further reflection he said: ‘It was all my own fault. I ought to have let him stay a marshal, and never made him Grand Duke of Berg; still less King of Naples. He was off his head. He was very ambitious.’82 In case anyone thought that hypocritical, he added, ‘I rose to distinction step by step, but Murat wanted at a bound to be chief of everything.’ Napoleon was impressed when he heard of the sensational escape of Lavalette from the Conciergerie prison in Paris, where he had been awaiting execution for treason, when his wife – whom Napoleon had hitherto thought of as ‘a little fool’ – took his place and allowed him to escape wearing her clothes.83 (With their customary generosity, the Bourbons imprisoned her until she went insane.) Napoleon pronounced himself ‘glad’ when he heard of Marie Walewska’s marriage in 1816 to the Bonapartist Duc d’Ornano. ‘She is rich,’ he said of the 10,000 francs a month that he had been giving her at one point, ‘for she must have laid by considerable sums.’84 She did not have long to enjoy them, as the following year she died of kidney failure in Liège, where the duke was in exile. Napoleon was perfectly willing to name his mistresses to Gourgaud on St Helena, when discussing his ‘bonnes fortunes’ with women, although he insisted he had only had six or seven, whereas the true figure was at least three times that.85
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Until April 14, 1816, although Napoleon’s imprisonment was not comfortable or by any means pleasurable – for such a big man on so tiny an island it couldn’t be – it was relatively bearable. But that day a new governor, Hudson Lowe, arrived on St Helena, to take over from the affable Colonel Mark Wilks. At their first meeting Napoleon gave Lowe a gold watch – which can now be seen in the National Army Museum in London – but their relationship deteriorated swiftly. Napoleon was already chafing at his fate, and his punctilious, unimaginative, regulations-obsessed new jailer was a bad choice for the post. Montholon was later to admit that ‘an angel from heaven could not have pleased us as governor of St Helena’, but Lowe’s military career virtually guaranteed a clash.86 In the draft of his unpublished autobiography in the British Library, Lowe describes how he led a company during Nelson’s night attack on the Convention Redoubt in San Firenzo Bay, Corsica, in early February 1794:
The whole of the troops then rushed on and the party with which I was proceeding made its entrance at the breach, which we found absolutely blocked up with the bodies of the French garrison, who had been employed in defending it. They were all of the Regiment of La Fère . . . They lay heaped in the breach on which we had to make our way over the dead and dying bodies.87
Since Napoleon had left the regiment a matter of months beforehand, Lowe was trampling over his maimed and dead comrades, fighting alongside an anti-French Corsican force he was eventually to command himself called the Royal Corsican Rangers, despised by Napoleon as traitors.
Lowe had also fought at Bastia and Calvi, and been quartered at the Casa Bonaparte in Ajaccio, before serving in Portugal and Minorca and commanding the Corsican Rangers in Egypt, where he was involved in the French surrender in 1801, escorting the defeated French army from Cairo to its embarkation at Rosetta, a humiliating moment of Napoleon’s consulship. He had spent two years in charge of a printing press at Capri ensuring that every success of the Allied armies in the Peninsular War was surreptitiously pasted up in Naples and other Italian cities, which Napoleon would not have respected as the proper work of a soldier.88 Beyond that, Lowe knew and greatly admired Tsar Alexander and was present at the battle of Leipzig, after which he was attached to the staff of Blücher, whom he also revered. He was present at Napoleon’s defeats at La Rothière and Lâon, and entered Paris after Marmont’s surrender. He had even put in a recommendation in early 1815 that the ridge at Waterloo be fortified (though he was not present at the battle itself, having a command in the force that drove Brune out of Toulon in July).89 In his thirty-four years of service, therefore, during which he had taken no more than a total of twelve months of leave, Lowe had witnessed many of Napoleon’s worst humiliations and defeats and had reversed his earliest victory. There could be no possible sympathy between the two men, and Lowe was unlikely to find any aspect of Napoleon’s character attractive. ‘You never commanded any men but Corsican deserters,’ Napoleon sneered at him at the last of their interviews. ‘You’re not a general, you’re only a clerk.’90
Napoleon’s supporters made Lowe out to be ignorant, cruel and sadistic, which he wasn’t, but also tactless, arrogant and small-minded, which he was. The 5th Earl of Albemarle, who had fought at Waterloo, recorded that several officers of the Corsican Rangers thought Lowe ‘a man of churlish manners and an irritable and overbearing temper’.91 Wellington was even harsher, calling Lowe ‘a very bad choice; he was a man wanting in education and judgment. He was a stupid man, he knew nothing at all of the world, and like all men who knew nothing of the world, he was suspicious and jealous.’92 Considering how well Napoleon got on with other Britons – Fox, Cornwallis, Yarmouth, Campbell, Macnamara, Ebrington, Russell, Fazakerley, Venables-Vernon, Douglas, Ussher, Maitland, O’Meara, Cockburn and the Balcombes among them, as well as many visitors on St Helena – Britain wasted an opportunity by sending such an unsympathetic martinet. Napoleon could have been drawn out and debriefed on the myriad political secrets of the European courts over the previous sixteen y
ears, and had already told Cockburn useful naval secrets about the mining of Cherbourg harbour.
Napoleon refused to meet Lowe more than six times over four months, despite living only 3 miles from him, after which the two men fought an exceptionally petty war against each other until Napoleon’s death five years later. Lowe complained about the amount of kindling Longwood burned, reprimanded William Balcombe when Betsy rode one of Napoleon’s horses, refused to allow Napoleon’s piano to be retuned, stopped him receiving history books, a bust of the King of Rome and ivory chess pieces with the imperial ‘N’ carved on them. (Napoleon was allowed no contact of any kind with his son, who was prevented from learning French and given an Austrian title, the Duke of Reichstadt, in 1818.) Lowe also refused to allow Napoleon to buy the freedom of Toby, the Balcombes’ elderly Malay gardener/slave, although Lowe abolished slavery for all children born after Christmas Day 1818.93 He even denied Napoleon’s request to see Captain Murray Maxwell’s boa constrictor, which could eat a goat, and banned the senior chaplain on St Helena from receiving a snuffbox from Napoleon, regarding it as the attempted bribery of an official.94
Lowe’s most absurd moment came in May 1820, when he reported to Lord Bathurst that Montholon had spoken to the French commissioner on the island, the Marquis de Montchenu, about Longwood’s success in growing vegetables, and offered him both green beans and white beans from the kitchen garden. Lowe saw this as having a deep political meaning since green was the Bonapartist colour and white the Bourbon. ‘The Marquis, it appears to me,’ Lowe reported to Bathurst, ‘would have acted with more propriety if he had declined receiving either, or limited himself to a demand for the white alone.’ This was not the only time Lowe mentioned the bean-colour issue to the (presumably completely nonplussed) secretary for war.95 Wishing to learn English, Napoleon had a copy of children’s fables sent to him, in one of which a sick lion endured with fortitude the insults of the other animals until he was finally kicked in the face by a donkey. ‘I could have borne everything but this,’ says the lion before expiring. ‘It is me and your governor,’ Napoleon told Betsy.96
Yet the baiting and paranoia were not all one way. Napoleon had a wall and trench built so that he could garden out of sight of Lowe’s sentries; he had chairs removed so that Lowe was forced to stand during their interviews, as with a head of state; he had holes cut – indeed it is said on St Helena that he did it himself with his penknife – in the shutters of the billiards room so that he could spy on the sentry-box in his garden, even though it faces away from the house rather than towards it.97 Calling Lowe ‘the Sicilian henchman’, Napoleon regularly alleged that he was an assassin sent by ‘the English oligarchy’ (that is, the British government), claiming that the guards around the house had orders to kill him, and that one day he would be killed by an ‘accidental’ bayonet thrust.98 ‘I cannot bear red,’ he said during one bout of Anglophobia, ‘it is the colour of England.’99
One major area of contention with Lowe was the governor’s attempt to cut the costs of Napoleon’s imprisonment, from £20,000 to £12,000 per annum (that is, from 400,000 to 240,000 francs). The rows over his expenses descended to the cost and quality of the butter served at Longwood. Lowe found it hard to understand why Napoleon needed a pastry-chef and lamp-lighter there, but for all Bertrand’s protestations over the cutbacks, the household hardly went short.100 In the last three months of 1816, for example, 3,700 bottles of wine – 830 of them claret – were delivered to Longwood.101*
Though Lowe couldn’t have known it, Napoleon never considered trying to escape from St Helena, which is surprising considering the adventurousness of the rest of his life and the fact that until Rochefort his record for seaborne escapes – Corsica, Egypt, Elba – had been good. He did feign an escape early on, for a joke, suddenly riding up a precipice and away from his orderly officer, Captain Thomas Poppleton of the 53rd Regiment, but Cockburn failed to become alarmed and told Poppleton that he would probably find him back at Longwood, which indeed he did.102 There was much discussion among his entourage about escaping, and several plans, including ones concocted by a Colonel Latapie and General Lallemand, who had escaped from Malta two months after being imprisoned there.103 (Latapie was going to seize the Portuguese prison island of Fernando de Noronha, 220 miles off the Brazilian coast, incite a rebellion of the 2,000 prisoners there and sail to St Helena to free Napoleon. Napoleon himself denounced the whole idea as ‘a fable they have invented to give more authority to the vexations of Sir Hudson Lowe’.104*) Gourgaud boasted that they often discussed how Napoleon ‘might escape in a basket of soiled clothes, or in a cask of beer, or a case of sugar’, but added that the Emperor had made it clear he would neither disguise himself nor make the slightest physical effort to escape, as it was too undignified.105 Besides, Lowe’s paranoia led him to station no fewer than 125 men around Longwood during the day and 72 at night.
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Napoleon spent more than five and a half years on St Helena, longer than his time as First Consul, and apart from Longwood, which was destroyed by termites in the next century and had to be rebuilt, he could only leave one monument there: his memoirs. In 1802 he had said that he would ‘hear the last hour strike without regret and without anxiety as to the opinion of future generations’, yet his principal activity on St Helena was an unvarnished attempt to influence that opinion.106 That he was so successful lay both in the extraordinary nature of the tale he had to tell, and in his literary ability. ‘The historian like the orator must persuade,’ Napoleon told Bertrand, ‘he must convince.’107 So in June 1816 he began dictating to Las Cases (both father and son), Gourgaud, Montholon and occasionally O’Meara – sometimes for up to twelve hours a day – what was to be, when it was published two years after his death by Las Cases in four volumes under the title Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, the greatest international bestseller of the nineteenth century.108 Once he had finished, he dictated a 238-page book on Julius Caesar, which, as we have seen, had plenty of autobiographical overtones.
Napoleon spread maps all over the billiard table, using billiard balls to hold them open, and sought to remember the events of his sixty battles with the help of his bulletins. When asked by a visitor how he could recall the details of units that fought in each engagement, he replied: ‘Madam, this is a lover’s recollection of his former mistress.’109 Yet like other statesmen engaged on this exercise, his factual recall was by no means exact. ‘What a novel my life has been!’ he said, and his retelling of it certainly owed as much to fiction as to fact.110 He exaggerated achievements, underplayed defeats and pretended to a pan-Europeanism that was never his policy. (Las Cases even inserted the fraudulent document mentioned in Chapter 20.) He unsurprisingly wanted his memoirs to confound his detractors.111 ‘Many faults, no doubt, will be found in my career,’ he said, ‘but Arcole, Rivoli, the Pyramids, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland – these are granite: the teeth of envy are powerless here.’112 He also felt the need to denigrate other great men of the past – except Julius Caesar – presumably in order to build himself up. Thus Gustavus Adolphus made few able manoeuvres, Frederick the Great ‘did not understand artillery’, ‘Henri IV never did anything great . . . St Louis was a simpleton’, even Alexander the Great made ‘no fine manoeuvres worthy of a great general’.113 When, after Napoleon’s death but before the Mémorial came out, Gourgaud published some of Napoleon’s reminiscences, Marshal Grouchy believed the references to himself and Ney at Waterloo to be so garbled and incorrect that he wrote a pamphlet entitled Doubts of the Authenticity of the Historical Memoirs Attributed to Napoleon, stating that they could not have come from him.114 But they had.
Napoleon’s daily routine at Longwood, at least until he fell ill in 1820, was to rise at 6 a.m., take tea or coffee, wash, shave and have a full-body massage with eau-de-cologne. (‘Rub harder,’ he would tell his valets, ‘as if you were rubbing down a donkey.’)115 He had lunch at 10 a.m., after which he dictated his memoirs
and would then have a bath lasting between one hour and three (sometimes he even ate meals in the bath). He received visitors in the early evening in the drawing room, standing by the fireplace with his hat under his arm, before walking over to the Bertrands, and later returning to correct the dictated copy before dinner.116 There he would hold senior members of his entourage entranced with his reminiscences of great people and events, but then bore them after dinner by reading aloud to them from Corneille, Voltaire, Ossian, Homer or sometimes the Bible until bedtime at 11 p.m.117 Two of his mini-court plotted to ‘lose’ his copy of Voltaire’s tragedy Zaïre if he suggested reading it one more time.118
In mid-June 1816 Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm arrived to replace Cockburn as the senior military officer on St Helena. Napoleon enjoyed his company and that of his wife, who happened to be a sister of the Captain Elphinstone he had helped the day before Waterloo. She took down their many, long and detailed conversations immediately afterwards.119 Malcolm found him ‘taller and not so fat as from his pictures he expected . . . his manner plain and agreeable’. They discussed Admiral of the Fleet Earl St Vincent’s gout, Pitt’s income tax – ‘Almost every person complained of it, which showed that they all paid’ – the ‘disgrace’ of slavery, Nelson’s tactics at Trafalgar, how Wellington risked too much fighting at Waterloo, and the fate of the Bourbons. Discussions about d’Enghien and the Jaffa massacre showed that nothing was out of bounds.120 In a single meeting they spoke about the Scottish aristocracy, how Wellington and Nelson chose their titles, Sheridan’s play The Rivals, John Milton’s republicanism, how much the English language had changed since Shakespeare, and whether Dryden and Addison had modernized it. Napoleon asked about Byron and contrasted Italian poetry and prose, before sitting down with Lady Malcolm to play chess. The Malcolms record Napoleon laughing a good deal, and when he saw the new ice-making machine brought to the island by its inventor, the pioneer of refrigeration Professor Leslie, he managed to break its thermometer, modestly remarking of his own clumsiness: ‘That is worthy of me.’121