Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  For years Napoleon Bonaparte was the leading story and a grim one, but for some nine months the English papers had been remarkably free of his outrages. The man who from the beginning of the century had dominated the news and the continent of Europe—with the notable exception of Russia—had from May 1814 languished in exile on Elba, an island off Italy in the Mediterranean Sea, where he survived very well. He was permitted the title ‘Emperor and Sovereign of the Isle of Elba’ and a new flag of his own design, featuring his beloved golden bees. He enjoyed the comforts of a modest palace, a large shabby villa high on the cliffs, and the presence of his mother, his favourite sister Pauline and a devoted group of courtiers. He had charmed the British commissioner, Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, and dined regularly with him. Some wondered if it was an oversight on his captors’ part that he was allowed a private army of 1000 men, including 600 of his loyal Old Guard.

  Even from the perspective of a remote island in the South Atlantic, Europe must have seemed unrealistically calm. But in May 1815 an East India Company ship brought the St Helenians the alarming information that in late February Bonaparte had escaped from Elba. He entered Paris in triumph on 20 March 1815 to the cheering of thousands of Parisians who lined the streets—those who did not applaud kept their feelings to themselves—and he was carried shoulder-high to the Tuileries Palace to cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

  Then on 15 September a ship arrived at Jamestown bringing splendid news. Bonaparte’s new regime had lasted just ‘One Hundred Days’, as it came to be known. There had been an epic battle on the field of Waterloo in Flanders, conducted in an intermittent thunderstorm. The great warmonger had been defeated at last by a glorious British fighting force—there was grudging mention of Belgian and Dutch troops as well—led by the Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Wellington. A Prussian force under General Blücher had arrived late to the battle. Bonaparte had escaped on horseback, weeping, it was claimed, into his saddle, but his days were numbered. France, after some silken diplomacy by the veteran courtier Talleyrand, was to be returned once again to the Bourbons.

  Governor Wilks arranged for a royal salute to be fired in honour of the Waterloo triumph and approved celebrations at the garrison with an extra quota of wine for each soldier. He ordered that all prisoners, civil and military, be released, with the exception of a fellow awaiting trial for burglary. The island residents returned to their familiar routines.

  But they were rudely awakened on 11 October. The news brought by Captain Devon of the Icarus, a sloop-of-war, was extraordinary, too much to take in all at once: Bonaparte, foiled in his plans to escape to America, had surrendered to a British ship at the French Atlantic port of Rochefort. The Allied powers, after convoluted negotiations (from which Prussia withdrew, preferring the firing-squad option), had reached agreement that while France, Austria and Russia would keep a watching brief, he was to be England’s prisoner and England’s problem.

  But the most outrageous news was that the Monster of Europe, the Disturber of the World, the Corsican half-breed, the Villain Bonaparte, the Anti-Christ, the savage Butcher of Jaffa—no words were bad enough but all were used in the newspapers—was being brought into exile on their own peaceful island. His ship was on the seas behind the Icarus. He would be arriving in a few days’ time.

  And for five and a half turbulent years, St Helena would become one of the most talked about places on earth.

  ‘Our little isle was suddenly frightened from its propriety,’ Betsy Balcombe wrote later in her Recollections, ‘by hearing that Napoleon Bonaparte was to be confined as a prisoner of state.’ She felt ‘excessive terror, and an undefined conviction that something awful would happen to us all, though of what nature I hardly knew’.7

  The townsfolk had never been so rattled. It seemed unbelievable that the most evil man in the world, and not so long ago the most powerful, was within a few days’ sail and coming to live among them. Apart from the St Helena Regiment—their own garrison, provided by the East India Company—there would be a huge body of soldiers and seamen arriving with him, just to keep him secure, all of them to be housed and fed, taking over the streets and taverns of the little town. The prisoner was travelling with the largest guard ever assembled in European history to watch over a single man. HMS Northumberland, with Bonaparte aboard, was accompanied by four warships with 116 guns between them and three troopships transporting the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Regiment of Foot.

  Rumours were rife and anxieties noisily expressed. Just where was the prisoner to be kept? And would the soldiers be able to prevent him escaping the island, just as he gave his guards the slip on Elba? What was to prevent a raiding party of Frenchmen—or Americans for that matter—coming to rescue him? And as Boney made his escape, what was to stop his henchmen cutting all their throats? There were frightful visions of blood on the cobbled streets of Jamestown.

  The captain of the Icarus had brought Colonel Wilks a ‘Secret letter’ from the British government, advising him of the arrival of the prisoner; it emphasised that in all matters relating to ‘General Napoleon Buonaparte’ he was to defer to Rear-Admiral Sir George Cockburn, commander of the fleet.8 Wilks was informed that the island would be removed from the jurisdiction of the East India Company, its traditional employer, and placed under British government administration. At the same time he received a confidential letter from the Company’s directors acknowledging ‘the high importance of effectually securing the person of a man whose conduct has proved so fatal to the happiness of the world’. Despite Wilks’s great merits, His Majesty’s Government had determined on appointing a new governor, a military man ‘of the class of General officers who served in the scene of the late continental events’.9 That officer was Major-General Hudson Lowe, most recently quartermaster-general to the Allied armies in the Netherlands and Belgium, who was then making his way from Europe to London. Lowe was to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general and created a Knight Commander of the Bath, befitting the gravity of his office as Bonaparte’s custodian.10

  The immediate issues were housing and catering. The official ‘Secret letter’ stated that any residence on the island could be allocated for Bonaparte, ‘with the exception of the Governor’s Plantation House’. Wilks learned from the captain of the Icarus that a retinue was coming with the prisoner, not only his officers and servants but also some aristocratic Frenchwomen. He thought that Longwood House, the lieutenant-governor’s isolated summer residence, could be a possibility, but it was badly in need of repairs.

  And what of Bonaparte’s Austrian wife, the former empress Marie Louise—would she be expecting to join him, although she had declined to do so on Elba? Rumour had it that the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Metternich, had thoughtfully organised a handsome aide-de-camp for her, Count von Neipperg, who had lost no time in becoming her lover; he was reputed to be ‘a perfect serpent in matters of seduction’.11 But if the lady chose to make the voyage, she was authentic royalty, the daughter of the Austrian Emperor, and conditions must meet her satisfaction.

  With the fleet imminently arriving under the command of the rear-admiral, there would also be another 2000 sailors and soldiers and the massive logistical exercise of feeding them all. Most of the island’s food came from the Cape of Good Hope and shortages were chronic. It would be a challenge for the commissary-general and storekeeper, who allocated provisions brought by the twice-yearly storeship, and for Solomons Merchants and William Balcombe, the Company sales agent with a providore business on the side.

  In fact, the merchants recognised splendid commercial opportunities in the new situation. Balcombe was pleased; as well as his providore business, he owned the Union brewery supplying beer to the garrison, and had an orchard and large vegetable garden at his home, The Briars. He would soon, like the Solomons, take advantage of the increase in the island’s population by doubling his prices. But there were negative implications for the merchants as well: with the island removed from the jurisdiction of the East Indi
a Company and patrolled by the Royal Navy, ships of other flags would be unable to call for water, victualling and trading, thereby limiting business. However, Balcombe was a man who looked in every setback for an opportunity and usually succeeded in finding one.

  Few people were more agitated by the news than Balcombe’s younger daughter Betsy. Just five months earlier, she and her sister Jane had arrived back at the island with their mother from school in England.12 Believing Bonaparte was still incarcerated on Elba it had at last seemed safe to make the voyage. At their Nottinghamshire boarding school the girls had heard of Bonaparte’s outrages, the lands laid waste, the innocent souls massacred and, almost certainly, the whispered stories of unspeakable deeds perpetrated on young girls. The yellow cover of a contemporary English children’s primer bore a picture of Bonaparte brandishing a cat-o’-nine-tails, and nannies warned disobedient children that he would come down the chimney to snatch them.13 Betsy, a pretty adolescent with blonde curls, always a prankster and mischief-maker, was certain to have been chided by some grim teacher with a warning much in currency at the time, ‘Be good or Boney will get you!’, or by the more savage ‘Limb from limb he’ll tear you, just as pussy tears a mouse!’14

  In 1812, her teachers had spoken gravely of his Russian campaign, how the buildings in Moscow were set on fire to repel him, and the devastating retreat of his great army in the snow. Hundreds of thousands of his soldiers died of starvation and frostbite, a horror that Betsy could not comprehend. What upset her most were the stories of the poor horses, not properly shod, slipping on ice and left to die or hacked at for food while still alive. And Bonaparte rode safely back to Paris in a carriage! She hated him! She knelt in church with the other girls and prayed for the successful progress of the war and a righteous victory for the great British Empire. But at night she tossed and turned in her narrow bed and the ogre with protruding teeth and one flaming red eye returned, his vast cape shadowed Europe and her own fevered thoughts; he circled like a vulture, swooping to leave battered, bleeding bodies and screaming horses in the snow. When she cried out, Jane would creep across the dormitory to hug her and smooth her hair.

  And now here he was at her island home, walking right past her, the monster of her nightmares.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE PRISONER

  From the deck in the dawn light, the island of St Helena appeared as a smudge on the grey horizon of the South Atlantic, a brooding apparition, something from Grimm. Another plunge and it was gone in a haze of sea mist and spume, a chimera. As we chugged closer, all that I’d read of its infamous, forbidding appearance could not prepare me for the starkness of those sheer basalt cliffs, their ridges shrouded in mist, plunging over 300 metres to murderous foaming rocks. All of us on deck were subdued.

  ‘It consists of one vast rock,’ wrote an 1815 visitor, ‘perpendicular on every side, like a castle, in the middle of the Ocean, whose natural walls are too high to be attempted by scaling ladders; nor is there the smallest beach except at the Bay . . . which is fortified with a strong battery of large cannon, and further defended by the perpetual dashing of prodigious waves against the shore, which, without further resistance, makes the landing difficult.’1

  I was on the island’s own vessel, subsidised by the British government, RMS St Helena, the last operational Royal Mail ship in the world. There were 88 on board for this voyage, two-thirds of them St Helenians, or ‘Saints’ as they call themselves, descended from people stolen from the East Indies, Madagascar and Africa during two centuries of slave trading. It had taken five days to come from Cape Town, 3100 kilometres to the south-east, following the Benguela current, as did the great wandering albatrosses which occasionally and magically swooped in our wake.

  We made a semi-circumnavigation north to the island’s only town and shipping roadstead, and a pod of some two hundred dolphins leaped and plunged beside us, the essence of life and joy. But as I gazed at those barren brown escarpments it seemed hard to credit that humans lived somewhere beyond them, that trees and grass grew, that birds sang. The island seemed saurian, like an ancient, hulking giant tortoise.

  ‘I almost feel sorry for Napoleon,’ I said.

  ‘He was a prisoner,’ growled an Afrikaner passenger, ‘he wasn’t coming here for any damned holiday. They should have shot him.’

  ‘The morning was pleasant, and the breeze steady,’ wrote William Warden, HMS Northumberland’s surgeon. ‘At dawn we were sufficiently near to behold the black peak of St Helena. Between eight and nine we were close under the Sugar-Loaf Hill. The whole of the French party had quitted their cabins, with the exception of Napoleon, and taken their respective stations. On the right stood Madame Montholon, with her arm entwined in that of the General her husband . . . On the poop-deck sat Madame Bertrand, and the Marshal stood behind her.’2

  The flagship rounded a looming promontory behind the escort brigs and dropped anchor, heaving on the swell. Guns fired a salute from Munden’s battery on the cliff above, answered from the gun emplacement high up the mountain across the bay. Northumberland’s guns responded.

  Bonaparte stayed below deck. His French courtiers, their children and servants, and the British officers and men stared at the forbidding crags. Countess Françoise-Elisabeth Bertrand, born to an Irish military father—General Arthur Dillon—and a French mother from Martinique, was a woman of the world, equally at home in France, Britain, Italy and the Caribbean, but she was in despair contemplating this godforsaken rock. She said it was something the devil had shat on his way to hell.3 Fanny, as her friends called her, was accustomed to the glittering life of the Tuileries palace where her husband had been Grand Marshal. It was feared that, in horror at what her husband’s loyalty had committed them to, she might throw herself through a porthole again. She had attempted this once before, off the British port of Torbay. This supremely elegant woman had been rescued when jammed halfway out, an undignified position.4 ‘Madame Bertrand really did attempt to throw herself into the Sea,’ wrote an aristocratic English gossip, ‘but there was stage effect in it, as assistance was so near at hand.’5

  The Bertrands had shared Bonaparte’s previous exile on the island of Elba, occupying a large comfortable villa with pleasant gardens. At the prospect of this new, infinitely harsher banishment, she had persuaded her husband they should endure twelve months at most. He risked a death sentence in France but she had highly placed relatives in England.

  Bonaparte did not leave his cabin for a full hour after they had anchored. Closely watched by Dr Warden, who set down his impressions for posterity, the portly man in the green Chasseurs uniform then ascended to the poop deck ‘and there stood, examining with his little glass the numerous cannon which bristled in his view. I observed him with the utmost attention . . . and could not discover, in his countenance, the least symptoms of strong or particular sensations.’6

  The prisoner saw a compact settlement squeezed into a ravine between the steep sides of two mountains, their bare slopes devoid of vegetation and surmounted by gun emplacements. Behind a defensive wall at the waterfront were the whitewashed ramparts of the governor’s castle with the Union Jack flapping above and the square tower of the Anglican church; beyond them, pastel-coloured houses straggled the length of the narrow valley.

  The former emperor’s dress was meticulous, presenting the image that had long become iconic: the cocked hat, the green cutaway coat with the scarlet cuffs, the Légion d’Honneur flashing on his waistcoat, the white breeches kept spotless by his 24-year-old valet Louis-Joseph Marchand. He was soon joined by his new personal physician—the appointment still a surprise to them both—Irishman Dr Barry O’Meara.

  Admiral Sir George Cockburn, Knight Commander of the Bath, appeared in full dress uniform, ready to go ashore with Colonel Sir George Ridout Bingham, commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Regiment. During the voyage the admiral had formed a tolerable relationship with Bonaparte, walking with him on deck of an evening, allowing him to preside at mealtimes, an
d actually standing up in deference when he left the saloon. But such courtesies were about to end. He carried instructions from Lord Henry Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, conveying the wishes of the Prince Regent: ‘His Royal Highness . . . relies on Sir George Cockburn’s known zeal and energy of character that he will not allow himself to be betrayed into any improvident relaxation of his duty.’7 The prisoner, as far as British policy was concerned, was to be addressed as ‘General Bonaparte’—or preferably ‘General Buonaparte’, the Corsican spelling offering further disparagement. There was to be no emperor arriving on the island.

  Bonaparte retreated to his cabin to brood, telling General Gourgaud, a former ordnance officer: ‘It is not an attractive place. I should have done better to remain in Egypt. By now, I would be Emperor of all the East.’ Madame Bertrand turned to the attentive man behind her with her own decided opinion: ‘Oh, Dr Warden, we are indeed too good for St Helena!’8

  Taking in the whole scene was Count de Las Cases, the diminutive French aristocrat and the emperor’s former chamberlain who was to become Napoleon’s Boswell. When the anchor was put down in James Bay, he wrote: ‘This was the first link of the chain that was to bind the modern Prometheus to his rock.’9

  The mythologising had commenced.

  After his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon had fled back to Paris, conceding only that all was lost ‘for the present!’ He remained confident of raising another army—but found that the French people now craved only peace. The Allies refused to negotiate terms while he remained in power. In the end he had abdicated rather than be deposed, but only after his strict condition was granted, the proclamation of his four-year-old son as Napoleon II. But the little emperor’s ‘reign’ was less than two weeks, because the Duke of Wellington had other ideas. Instead, he proclaimed the return of the Bourbons and invited Louis XVIII, the overweight successor to his executed brother Louis XVI, back to Versailles.