Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  Meanwhile, Bonaparte stayed on at the Elysée palace. Here he met with his ex-wife Josephine’s daughter, Hortense, who was both his stepdaughter and, through her marriage to his brother Louis, his sister-in-law. He sought Hortense’s permission to come to the Château de la Malmaison where, in the days of the Consulate and before his marriage to Josephine soured, he had enjoyed family life with his wife and her children. When he had heard news of Josephine’s death in May 1814 when he was in exile on Elba, it was said that he locked himself in his room for two days.

  Hortense still liked to be addressed as the ‘Queen of Holland’; Louis Bonaparte had been imposed on the Dutch throne by his imperial brother but had now been supplanted, and the couple had long since separated. It was an open secret in Paris that Hortense was involved in a passionate affair with General Auguste Charles, Comte de Flahaut, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp in the Russian campaign and at Waterloo.10 Four years earlier, in Switzerland, she had given birth to a son by Flahaut; it had been discreetly arranged for the child to be raised by a landowner in the West Indies.

  Friends advised Hortense against taking Napoleon into her home but she did not heed them. Bonaparte’s mother and brothers arrived at Malmaison with a group of supporters. Among them was Hortense’s lover, Comte de Flahaut, who soon left on a hopeless mission to request more time from the provisional French government. However, he will appear again in an unexpected role in this story.

  Instead of making his escape, Bonaparte lingered five days in some kind of emotional paralysis, reading novels and essays about America, where he planned to seek refuge. An adviser had suggested that from there ‘you can continue to make your enemies tremble. If France falls back under the Bourbon yoke, your presence in a free country will sustain national opinion here.’11 He thought often about Josephine and told her daughter: ‘Poor Josephine, I cannot get used to living here without her. I always expect to see her emerging from a path gathering one of those flowers which she so loved . . . How beautiful La Malmaison is! Wouldn’t it be pleasant, Hortense, if we could stay here?’ ‘I could not reply,’ wrote Hortense, ‘my voice would have betrayed all my emotion.’12

  Guns rumbled in the distance. Blücher’s Prussian army was advancing fast and Bonaparte’s options for escape were closing. He decided at last to quit the country with his brother Joseph and sail to America—but he knew that the English anticipated this and their navy blocked the Channel. With Joseph and some faithful officers and servants he would aim instead for the port of Rochefort on the Bay of Biscay.

  Finally, Bonaparte stood facing his strong-willed mother, Letizia, known throughout Europe as ‘Madame Mère’. Hortense reported that they gazed silently at each other, then Letizia stretched out both her hands towards him and in a clear sonorous voice said: ‘Farewell, my son!’ He gathered her hands in his, looked long and affectionately in her face and, with a voice as firm as hers, exclaimed: ‘Farewell, my mother!’13

  Travelling in a series of carriages, spaced well apart, the fugitives reached Rochefort on 8 July. The valet Marchand rode in a carriage crammed with the accoutrements of gracious living that he had hurriedly packed—his master’s campaign bed, table linen, a Sèvres porcelain dinner service, gold plates, silverware, an assortment of snuff boxes and almost six hundred books. At Rochefort the group boarded the frigate La Saale, but it could not weigh anchor for Boston. The harbour was emphatically blocked by the 74-gun British warship HMS Bellerophon and two naval frigates.

  Bonaparte resolved to surrender, bargaining on the British sense of justice he claimed to admire. He told General Bertrand: ‘It is better to risk confiding oneself to their honour than to be handed over to them as de jure prisoners.’ He had in fact few alternatives: the naval blockade prevented his escape by sea, while General Blücher and the Bourbons wanted him shot. First though, on 13 July, he penned a grandiloquent letter to the Prince Regent, comparing the English royal to the King of the Persians who offered safe harbour to his enemy:

  Royal Highness—A victim to the factions which divide my country, and to the enmity of the greatest Powers of Europe, I have terminated my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to place myself at the hearth of the British people. I place myself under the protection of their laws, which I claim of your Royal Highness as of the most powerful, the most constant and the most generous of my enemies.

  —Napoleon14

  It is doubtful if the Regent saw the letter until much later, but when he did, despite his image as a wastrel and a rake, the reference from Plutarch’s Lives would not have been lost on him; he was said to be ‘probably the only prince in Europe . . . competent to peruse the Greek as well as the Roman poets and historians in their own language’.15

  Bonaparte sent Gourgaud and Las Cases under a flag of truce to deliver the letter to the Bellerophon. They were well received by Captain Frederick Maitland. Two days later, the former emperor and his companions stepped aboard the great warship, veteran of the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar, known affectionately by its crew as the ‘Billy Ruffian’. As they came on deck the officers and seamen formed a parade of honour. A midshipman left an account: ‘And now came the little great man himself, wrapped up in his grey great coat, buttoned to the chin, three-cocked hat and Hussar boots, without any sword, I suppose as emblematical of his changed condition. Maitland received him with every mark of respect . . .’16

  ‘He is extremely curious,’ wrote one of the officers. ‘Nothing escapes his notice; his eyes are in every place and on every object . . . He immediately asks an explanation of the ropes, blocks, masts and yards, and all the machinery of the ship. He also stops and asks the officers questions relative to the time they have been in the service, what actions, &c, and he caused all of us to be introduced to him the first day he came on board . . . He inquired into the situation of the seamen, their pay, prize money, clothes, food, tobacco &c, and when told of their being supplied by a Purser or Commissary, asked if he was not a rogue!’17

  Meanwhile, the devoted Marchand—a famous exception to the adage that ‘No man is a hero to his valet’—had arranged that the 250,000 francs they had managed to hide from British investigation, their reserve against hard times, ‘were in eight belts that we put around our bodies’.18 Walking in the stern gallery with Las Cases, Napoleon cautiously withdrew a weighty velvet band from under his waistcoat and gave it to his companion. The count wrote: ‘The Emperor told me soon after that it contained a diamond necklace, worth two hundred thousand francs, which Queen Hortensia forced him to accept on his leaving Malmaison.’19

  The men on board were bound to romanticise their brush with the most compelling figure in contemporary history, having actually found him human. One of them wrote: ‘If the people of England knew him as well as we do, they would not hurt a hair of his head.’20 Captain Maitland wrote in his book that although it might appear surprising that a British officer could be ‘prejudiced in favour of one who had caused so many calamities to his country, to such an extent did he possess the power of pleasing, there are few people who could have sat at the same table with him for nearly a month, as I did, without feeling a sensation of pity, allied perhaps to regret, that a man possessed of so many fascinating qualities, and who had held so high a station in life, should be reduced to the situation in which I saw him’.21

  But for all the graciousness and goodwill, when Bonaparte boarded the Bellerophon he had taken an irrevocable step: he was from that moment until the end of his life a prisoner of Great Britain.

  CHAPTER 3

  FRIENDS AND FOES

  Friendly Saints extended helping hands as we stepped from the rocking launch onto the landing place. I could see that when a swell was running this could be tricky. (The island’s governor, welcoming Prince Andrew in 1984, famously lost his footing and suffered a dunking, much replayed on UK television.)

  RMS St Helena was moored out in the bay, its derricks already unloading vital cargo onto a barge, everything from frozen meat to roofing iro
n, refrigerators, cars, carrots, and cats and dogs. Our luggage, brought by an earlier barge, was stacked in the customs shed, where a copper-skinned policewoman—in her British bobby’s uniform and chequerboard bowler—led a beagle on a sniffing inspection. Returning Saints hugged family and friends they had not seen for months, sometimes far longer. The isolation of the island and the poor local wages mean that many residents have become long-distance commuters, taking up jobs in the UK, the Falkland Islands, and at the British and American bases on Ascension Island, returning on the ‘RMS’ when they can. The economic necessity of such unwieldy commuting will change for many of them when the airport under construction is completed. Tourism is the great hope.

  My companion and I were greeted by our new landlord, Edward Thorpe, a tall young man from one of the oldest English families on the island. Passengers were already signing up for excursions. Of the thirty or so tourists from the ship, mainly from South Africa, few had expressed much interest in the island’s most famous exile. They were coming for the stark scenery, the Georgian buildings, the formidable hiking trails, and to visit the graves of some two hundred Boer War prisoners. However, most would devote a few hours of the nine-day stay—while the RMS made a circuit 1120 kilometres north-west to Ascension Island—to the ‘Napoleonic tour’ of Longwood House, ‘the Tomb’ and The Briars Pavilion.

  ‘Well, Papa, have you seen him?’ William Balcombe’s children at The Briars rushed him on his return from visiting the Northumberland.

  He had not, although he had paid his respects to General and Madame Bertrand, General and Madame de Montholon and General Baron Gourgaud. He had been in discussion with Admiral Sir George Cockburn and Governor Wilks, who had decided that the prisoner and a few of his companions could be temporarily accommodated at Henry Porteous’s boarding house at the bottom of the main street next to the castle gardens, while the French servants would be billeted in nearby cottages. This was a concession on the admiral’s part. Officially he was empowered to insist they all stay on board until a suitable house was ready. The choice of that house had still to be made.

  During Balcombe’s meeting with the admiral he was handed a sealed letter from the London mail brought by the flagship. It bore the House of Lords insignia and was from his patron, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod in the House of Lords. This ceremonial position, established during the reign of Henry VIII, was by decree given to ‘a gentleman famous in arms and blood’. He controlled entry of ‘Strangers’ to the House, made staff appointments and carried an ebony rod surmounted by a golden lion for all state occasions; he could arrest any lord guilty of breach of privilege or of disturbing the House’s proceedings. During the opening of Parliament, ‘Black Rod’ carried the King’s command to the House of Commons to attend him in the House of Lords.

  But another factor altogether meant that Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt was close to the very centre of power in Britain. He had been an intimate friend and trusted confidant of George Augustus, the Prince Regent, for 26 years, ever since they met at Oxford and discovered they shared the same sense of humour and even the same birthday—12 August 1762. The then Prince of Wales invited his new friend to occupy an apartment at Carlton House, his sumptuous London mansion, and made him his unofficial secretary, confirmed a few years later. Tyrwhitt, a diminutive, bustling, rosy-cheeked man, rapidly became a favourite of both King George III and Queen Charlotte and of the royal princes and princesses, who described him with patronising affection as ‘the Saint’ or ‘our little red dwarf ’.1 Nonetheless, he commanded great respect and for several years acted ‘as sole mediator between the King and the prince during the time they spent apart in mutual dislike and disagreement’.2 While the King was often impatient with his spendthrift son, he always had time for his ‘old friend Tom Tyrwhitt’.3

  In the nineteenth century, ‘interest’, the influence of a powerful person, was essential to advance in the professions. Horace Walpole pronounced that ‘Merit is useless: it is interest alone that can push a man forward. By dint of interest one of my coach-horses might become poet laureate, and the other, physician to the Royal household.’4 ‘Interest’ was virtually indispensable, and William Balcombe, said to be merely the son of a fisherman from the Sussex village of Rottingdean, obviously had access to it from a very high level. Those on St Helena who knew of the connection with Sir Thomas—and Balcombe had little hesitation in mentioning it—wondered how and why this influential man showed such concern for his young protégé:

  5th August 1815

  Dear Balcombe,

  Napoleon is about to proceed to your island so quickly that there seems some doubt whether this dispatch will reach Plymouth in time to catch the Northumberland. Since yesterday Beatson has forwarded me a very strong letter indeed, recommending you to Sir George Cockburn as Naval Agent. This letter goes in this cover to him and I sincerely hope it will answer the purpose intended . . .

  Sir George promptly approved the appointment, which would have gratified Balcombe, for, with the island now placed under government administration, his merchant’s business was going to become severely restricted. The new position involved much the same service, supplying vessels, but the difference was that they would be exclusively of the British navy or East India Company, with few chances for private trade. But Sir Thomas had a further suggestion, a potentially lucrative one concerning the prisoner’s possible accommodation: ‘It appears that Ministers will not pledge themselves to purchase any particular spot, but that all is to be left to the choice of two commanders, as to what place is best adapted to confine Napoleon comfortably but severely. Beatson thinks that when this inspection has taken place, they will fix upon The Briars.’5

  Major-General Alexander Beatson had been St Helena’s energetic governor from 1808 to 1813. After his recall he was promoted, in recognition of his efficient administration of the island and especially for his suppression of a mutiny by soldiers at the garrison in 1811. He executed the ringleaders. In Beatson’s despatch to the East India Company’s Court of Directors concerning that episode, he had praised the assistance of William Balcombe among a handful of loyal residents. The merchant had returned the compliment by naming his youngest son, born in that year, Alexander Beatson Balcombe, which, according to convention, meant that the governor became godfather to the boy. Soon afterwards, Balcombe was granted a lucrative licence to operate a brewery supplying beer to the island garrison.6

  Even though he and his family were greatly attached to their home, Balcombe had no objection to Sir Thomas’s idea of renting it out, for there could be handsome compensation in making it available to the French, so that it would be well worth him leasing elsewhere.

  Meanwhile, red-coated soldiers of the 53rd Regiment had come ashore from the transports and now patrolled the town. Every promontory was suddenly out of bounds, manned by armed sentries in sight of each other and able to communicate by a complex set of signals. Cannon were placed on ledges and in apertures in cliffs. Posters went up around the island, plastered on buildings and on rocks, formally announcing the detention of ‘General N. Buonaparte’ and serving notice that: ‘This is to warn all inhabitants and other persons on this island from aiding and abetting hereafter in any way whatsoever the escape of the said General and that of any of the French persons with him, and to interdict most pointedly the holding of any communication or correspondence with them. Any person presuming to act in violation of this ordinance will be immediately sent off the island to be further punished as the circumstances appear to deserve.’7

  Napoleon did not come ashore until the evening of 17 October and he refused to meet with the official party at the landing stage. There was time enough to encounter the governor of this savage little island. He found it hard to forgive the way he had been treated as a common exhibit, gaped at like a wild animal in Josephine’s menagerie at Malmaison, a zebra or ridiculous kangourou!

  Sir George Cockburn understood that the situation was difficult for the preservation of
dignity. He ensured that an armed guard kept the jostling crowd at bay as he escorted Bonaparte and his French companions across the drawbridge, through the town gates, past the castle entrance and its gardens to the three-storey lodging house owned by Henry Porteous. Bonaparte detested the tall narrow building as soon as he saw it and complained of its very public situation and lack of a private courtyard. He was no happier when he inspected the arrangements inside.

  As night set in, most of the crowd dispersed. Still holding lanterns and torches, people wended their way, mounted or on foot, up Ladder Hill or the Sidepath. But a few of the curious still loitered outside the Porteous house. Among them was Thomas Brooke, secretary of the governing council and the island’s first historian; he hoped to see a legendary figure at the candlelit windows, ‘everyone anxious to catch a glance whilst he walked up and down the room’. Brooke was astonished to be invited inside by the admiral and his credentials announced: ‘I was accordingly ushered up to Buonaparte, who was standing, and introduced in regular form. His first words were “Hah! L’auteur de l’Histoire de St Hélène.” He then said he had read it on the passage . . . I observed that I trusted he would find the interior of the island more prepossessing in appearance than the first view of it might lead him to expect.’8

  Three months earlier, at dawn on 24 July, Bonaparte had stood on the quarterdeck of HMS Bellerophon next to Captain Maitland and gazed through his field glass at the port of Torbay, the sea cliffs of Devon and green pastureland beyond. As the ship sailed on to Plymouth, he was astonished to find himself massively feted. They were surrounded by an immense clutter of small craft, filled with the curious, desperate to see the infamous enemy. Marchand tells us that ‘accompanied by the grand marshal [General Bertrand], he went on deck and showed himself to the eager crowd . . . But a painful scene for us was that a few ships with our prisoners wounded at Waterloo sailed by, some distance from the Bellerophon.’9 Within the month some 4000 French prisoners were marched 25 miles up to the grim granite prison on Dartmoor, established in 1809 by none other than Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, who, as Member of Parliament for Plymouth before he was appointed Black Rod in 1812, had seen the opportunity.