by Alan Schom
“Failing to recognize the king’s authority, cowardly putting his life under the orders of the foreigner [Napoleon], are acts so unworthy of a Frenchman,” the Journal des Débats editorial concluded, “that they silence any commiseration that we might have otherwise felt for him...Now we have accomplished a great act of justice.”
Meanwhile, at Plymouth, ex-emperor Napoleon, having been transferred from Bellerophon to Northumberland on August 7, 1815, accompanied by General and Mrs. Bertrand, the Montholons, General Gourgaud, and Las Cases and his son, ten weeks later stepped ashore on an isolated island owned by the East India Company, called St. Helena, the same island a twenty-year-old Lieutenant Bonaparte had recorded in one of his notebooks — the only item he had not had time to complete. Now he would do so.
Chapter Forty-One – Final Casualties
‘French historians will have to deal with the Empire...and will have to give me my rightful due.’
“Boney! Boney!” the two English schoolgirls cried out in the garden of the house not far from Jamestown, the port and only town of the forty-seven-square-mile-island of St. Helena. The girls giggled as they tied the blindfold over the eyes of the smiling, portly ex-emperor, much to the dismay of their parents, the William Balcombes, while a seething comte de Montholon looked on helplessly. “Boney,” indeed!
That had been during the good days, the first days at the house known as the Briars, shortly after the ten-vessel British naval squadron — including troop transports and the seventy-four-gun Northumberland, commanded by Adm. Sir George Cockburn — had finally sighted “this black wart rising out of the ocean,” as naval surgeon Henry described this volcanic outcrop jutting some 2,500 feet out of the South Atlantic, following an exhausting seventy-one-day voyage from England, dropping anchor at Jamestown on the evening of Saturday, October 17. Mr. Balcombe in particular had been kindness itself, something Napoleon had not expected of an Englishman, an employee of the East India Company, to which this island belonged but now placed at the disposal of His Majesty’s Government for a unique assignment.
Then came the move up the sharply rising heights to the more arid but refreshingly cooler slopes to Longwood House, a couple of miles away from the Briars and four miles from Jamestown, while to the east, less than two miles distant, precipitous cliffs dropped abruptly to a raging surf below. It had been raining on December 9 as they made their way up the winding mountain road to the house of Lieutenant Governor Skelton, situated at an altitude of 1,730 feet, where the Skeltons gave Napoleon and his large entourage a warm welcome before a much needed glowing fire in the sitting room, Mrs. Skelton then giving her house guests a tour of their eleven-room country house. They were quite charming about relinquishing their home, as Napoleon later remarked.
It was hardly surprising that London had insisted on tight security for the most hated war criminal in Europe, and Longwood was the best choice, situated high up the windward side of the island buttressed by forbidding cliffs. Furthermore, there was room for an army camp just a few miles away, to foil the anticipated schemes to rescue the dethroned emperor. The British were not about to take any chances. Indeed, it was not long before London learned from the Spanish ambassador accredited to Washington, D.C., that Joseph Bonaparte was plotting to launch a flotilla of a half dozen vessels carrying some three hundred mercenaries to rescue brother Napoleon in June 1816. This led to London reinforcing both the St. Helena garrison and the South Atlantic squadron by several thousand men. They had peace at last, and an exhausted Europe was not about to jeopardize it by taking half-measures at St. Helena.
Despite the spaciousness of Longwood and its pleasant gardens, it could hardly accommodate Napoleon’s entire entourage, including their wives and children, not to mention twenty servants. The Bertrands and their children, for instance, were housed at the cottage known as Hutt’s Gate, a mile away, and most of the servants were much farther than that. But His Majesty’s Government had foreseen this problem and had already ordered a large amount of lumber and stone to be hauled up the mountain with which to build a spacious additional wing, waiting only for Napoleon’s personal specifications and wishes — which, as it turned out, he declined to offer.
From the very beginning, following the departure of the Skeltons from their home, a formal decision was made by the French to appeal to European public opinion about the cruel and unusual conditions inflicted on the great man by the brutal, insensitive English, not to mention the evil “vexatious interference” of the British governor to render life intolerable for them in this tiny, windswept “cabin” where they were being starved and ill-treated. Letters were immediately written and some safely smuggled out to Europe. Who was to know that in fact the prisoner was provided with a stable of horses for himself and his staff and was allowed to ride in any direction within a circumference of twelve, later reduced to eight, miles of Longwood, his to use whenever he chose? Far from being chained to walls of a stone cell in the Temple in Paris, as he had done to his English captives, he had instead comfortable furniture, staff, and servants, even his own French cook, all of his own choosing, waiting on him hand and foot. Indeed, far from starving, he was provided with seventy pounds of beef and mutton, along with seven chickens, daily, not to mention his own wine cellar, while he and his friends dined off rare porcelain and fine silver plate. And yet Napoleon complained to the governor: “What is the use of silver plate when you have no food to put on it?” Well, it sounded good in the grim letters Napoleon, Montholon, Bertrand, and Gourgaud were carefully concocting for the gullible back in the old country.
Napoleon, certainly the most successful public relations man of his day, had elaborated this plan of attack at a long meeting convened on November 30, as eyewitness Las Cases remarked:
We were possessed of moral arms only, and in order to make the most advantageous use of them, it was necessary to reduce to a system, our demeanour, our words, our sentiments, even our privations, with the intention of exciting a lively interest in Europe, and to rouse the political opposition in England to attack their own government regarding their violent conduct towards us.[798]
Soon the complaints of the “inhumane” living conditions the French were forced to endure at Longwood reached Rear Adm. Sir George Cockburn, and the governor, and were repeated in secret corresondence. As Napoleon himself put it to Las Cases: “All eyes are focused on us and this island. We remain the martyrs of an immortal cause. Millions of men are weeping for us, the fatherland sighs, and national glory is in mourning. We struggle here against the oppression of the gods.”
The Napoleon who had drafted the highly imaginative Army Bulletin about his alleged destruction of the fortress of Acre had lost none of his editorial skill. When he ordered Gen. Henri Bertrand personally to carry one complaint after another to the governor, the honorable man flinched and protested but in the end obeyed, as he always did.
Prisoner of war Napoleon Bonaparte found it outrageous that the British did not trust him and required a small escort of one or two soldiers to accompany him when he left the grounds of the house, and that all letters sent to, or received from, the outside world had first to be submitted to the governor’s office for careful perusal. “Any protest from me would be beneath my dignity,” he told his inner circle. Therefore it was up to them to “make your protests...and make Europe learn how badly we are being treated here, so that they may become indignant...The Government has declared that he is a prisoner of war. The Emperor is not a prisoner of war.” Such were the ploys and fantasies spread by Napoleon and the inmates of Longwood House. When years later Montholon was asked about these attacks against the British and the blatant defamation of Sir Hudson Lowe’s character, he merely shrugged his shoulders and replied, “C’était notre politique, que voulez-vous?”
In reality the governor of the island not only meticulously followed his instructions from London but when ordered by them later to cut back on Napoleon’s rather luxurious level of living and to reduce the Longwood budget to
£8,000 per annum, the new governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, not only vigorously protested to the secretary of state but unilaterally rejected it, adding on his own authority £4,000 which Napoleon of course never mentioned. And then when Bonaparte sent down some of his silver plate to Sir Hudson, asking him to sell it for him, Lowe instead sealed it and saved it in storage for the emperor, while giving him its value, £250, out of his own pocket, without telling Napoleon its source.
Gen. Sir Hudson Lowe arrived at Jamestown on April 14, 1816, to assume command of the troops and the island. The forty-seven-year-old Lowe knew Bonaparte’s homeland well, and in addition to French and German, spoke the Corsican dialect of Italian he had learned while serving on that island and later commanding a corps of Corsican exiles in various campaigns, including Egypt. In 1813 he was transferred to Russia and assigned as liaison officer with Blücher’s staff, giving him the opportunity to witness several Prussian battles with Napoleon, including the final battles in France in 1814, leaving him in great admiration of Bonaparte’s astonishing military abilities. It was Lowe who brought the first news of Napoleon’s abdication to London in the spring of 1814, and he was subsequently knighted for his many years of active service by the Prince Regent, and decorated by both Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia and the czar. In 1814-15 he served as quartermaster general of the British forces in the Netherlands, old Blücher himself praising him, even the Anglophobe General Gneisenau complimenting him on “your rare military talents, your sound judgment on the great operations of war, and your imperturbable sang froid on the day of battle.” Finally, Lowe had been present at Waterloo when Napoleon fled the battlefield, and that was one humiliation Bonaparte could never forgive him. In fact, the British government could not have selected a more qualified man for the disagreeable job.
Lowe was a dedicated public servant who found himself saddled with the unenviable task of having to enforce the strict, detailed orders given him by London. The rigidly upright Lowe was precisely the sort of gentleman Napoleon could never begin to understand, nor did he make any attempt to do so.
On Sir Hudson’s initial visit to Longwood at nine one morning in April 1816, Montholon rudely informed the English general that the emperor was “indisposed” and could not see him until four o’clock the following day. Lowe arrived punctually the next afternoon, with Admiral Cockburn at his side. General Bertrand, aided by a muscular valet, stood before the British officer, physically barring the way. A determined Lowe sidestepped them and went into the room, introducing himself to Bonaparte, and they were soon talking in the Corsican dialect. Apparently it had never occurred to Bonaparte, Montholon, or Bertrand that Lowe could summarily have summoned him to Plantation House instead. From the beginning Sir Hudson made every attempt to be conciliatory.
Later, when Lowe learned of the French complaints to the Prince Regent, relations between the governor and Longwood grew strained. But still Lowe attempted to improve the situation, and when for instance Las Cases, serving as Napoleon’s secretary, came to Plantation House in the spring of 1816, Lowe put his entire library at Napoleon’s disposal. This, however, drew Napoleon’s ire, as did occasions when the new governor invited Napoleon and his suite — General Gourgaud, the comte and comtesse de Montholon, General and Mme. Bertrand — to dinners and soirées. For the ladies in particular these occasions were a great relief from the constraints of an ever glowering Napoleon. But when la Grande Maréchale, Bertrand’s wife — née Fanny Dillon and a native English speaker — dared leave Napoleon’s table at one such supper and ball to join her new English friends, Napoleon afterward sharply rebuked her and Madame Montholon publicly. Bonaparte insisted on severing all social relations with Plantation House, forcing the minuscule French community to withdraw into its own world, which in turn led to severe repercussions, including insipid quarrels between those couples.
This was further complicated when the members of Napoleon’s immediate male entourage vied for the privilege of becoming his favorite. Gourgaud quarreled with Bertrand and Montholon, Montholon despised them both, and Napoleon thought the whole thing amusing. The wives rarely spoke to one another, and Madame Montholon was jealous of Madame Bertrand having a separate house away from Longwood, while she and her husband and children shared three rooms under Napoleon’s roof. Then, just to complete this petty state of affairs, on the visit of the wife of the governor general of India who was stopping off at St. Helena before continuing her long voyage, Governor Lowe considerately sent a dinner invitation to Napoleon, but addressed him as “General Bonaparte” instead of “Emperor Napoleon.” A furious Napoleon interpreted this as the insult of insults, in his reply calling Lowe his “executioner,” while managing to slip in a complaint that he was allowed to travel only within a limited area around Longwood, and that Lowe had added to this humiliation by posting soldiers on the island. (Britain of course had never recognized the “Empire” or the title “emperor,” and Lowe was therefore required by London to use the title “general.”)
The last two interviews between Lowe and Bonaparte took place on August 17 and 18, when Napoleon again taunted the governor in outrageous language about the disgraceful habitation he had foisted upon him, the lack of food, and so on. “You make me smile, sir,” the phlegmatic five-foot-seven, blond, blue-eyed Lowe said, looking down at the plump little man. “How is that, monsieur?” “You force me to smile, because your misconception of my character and the rudeness of your manners excite my pity. I wish you good day.” He turned about, leaving a dumbfounded Napoleon Bonaparte turning red with anger. No one had ever done such a thing to the mighty conqueror.
Thus Napoleon increased his campaign of the grossest character assassination of Lowe, and when the governor next dismissed the British ship’s surgeon, Barry Edward O’Meara, who had been permitted to act as Napoleon’s physician, O’Meara added to the defamation in his book, A Voice from St. Helena. In fact Lowe had no choice but to dismiss O’Meara when it was learned that he had been sending mendacious reports from Longwood to Plantation House, and was in fact in the pay of Napoleon, even managing to aid the French in sending letters abroad.
No true view of the events taking place at Longwood over the next five years or so can be understood properly without a brief description of the entourage with which Napoleon decided to surround himself — in particular the four men with whom he spent most of his time: Gourgaud, Bertrand, Las Cases, and Montholon.
Gaspard Gourgaud was born in 1783, the son of a classical violinist employed by Louis XVI, while his mother worked as a domestic in the same palace. Gourgaud, though he had numerous relatives in the theater, instead chose to attend first the Ecole Polytechnique and then the Ecole de Châlons, emerging with a commission as an artillery officer. He participated in various campaigns, including Austerlitz, where he was wounded; then fought with distinction at Pultusk. Like many with the Grande Armée, he was ordered to Iberia, where he took part in the siege of Zaragoza, followed by rapid promotions. By 1811 he was serving as imperial ordnance officer with Napoleon on the long, bitter Russian campaign, resulting in another wound at the battle of Smolensk. Raised to the peerage as a baron for his zeal, intelligence, reliability, and loyalty, Gourgaud was at Napoleon’s side for part of the retreat from Moscow, himself only escaping at Berezina by swimming that icy river. He was promoted on his return, named Napoleon’s first ordnance officer, and followed him into battle before Dresden in August 1813 when he was awarded the prestigious Grand Eagle of the Legion. On January 29, 1814, he reached the pinnacle of his military career at the Battle of Brienne by shooting a Cossack who was about to stab Napoleon, which the latter later denied, while Gourgaud staunchly held his ground. Wounded again, at Montmirail, he was made a commander of the Legion of Honor. On taking leave of Napoleon at Fontainebleau on April 24, he was one of the few strongly praised by the emperor. He next served in the newly reconstituted Bourbon army of Louis XVIII, promoted to the rank of general, and awarded the Cross of Saint-Louis. But with the return of Napoleon, he
abandoned the king.
A vexed Napoleon at first refused to see Gourgaud. The highly emotional general screamed, cried, and swore he would blow out his brains. Two weeks later Napoleon relented, “pardoning” him with a simultaneous promotion as maréchal de camp. Gourgaud was to prove an unstable character, emotionally and fitfully jealous of his other three companions in exile.
Of all those associated with Napoleon now, Gen. Comte Henri Bertrand proved throughout the years to be the most faithful and reliable. The son of a wealthy upper-middle-class family from Berry, he emerged with his commission from the Ecole du Génie Militaire (Military Engineering School) and the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics (Central Civil Engineering School). He later served with the Army of Italy, and again with Napoleon in Egypt, returning from Egypt a brigadier general at the age of twenty-three.
Thereafter he served constantly with Napoleon, next in charge of the engineers at the St.-Omer invasion camp (1803-1805), and then named aide-de-camp to Napoleon himself. In 1807, at the age of thirty-four, he was promoted to the rank of major general and married Fanny, daughter of the late Gen. Arthur Dillon. As wedding gifts Napoleon heaped riches on the couple, including a small country house, entirely furnished, and hundreds of thousands of francs in one form or other.
For services rendered during the second Danube campaign in 1809, Bertrand was awarded the Grand Eagle of the Legion, and in April 1811 found himself named the governor general of the unruly Illyrian Provinces. With the death of Duroc in 1813, Bertrand was called on to replace him as grand marshal. Reliable, honest, hardworking, and intelligent, on his arrival at St. Helena with Fanny and their two children, initially he was the closest person to Napoleon. He was forty-two years old.