Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  The Bellerophon was at Plymouth for three weeks. During that time, Admiral Viscount Keith, Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet, was responsible for the security of the prisoner and represented the voice of the British government.10 The Times urged government ministers ‘to do their duty and rid the world of a monster’,11 but it seemed ‘the whole population of the country, without distinction of rank or sex’, was descending on the port for a glimpse of him.12 ‘I am worryed to death with idle folk coming, even from Glasgow, to see him,’ Admiral Keith complained to his daughter. ‘There is no nation so foolish as we are!’13

  An officer reported that people had flocked from all parts of the country to see Bonaparte. His every appearance on deck was an event for thousands of citizens who came out in tour boats and waved their hats. Upwards of a thousand boats were from morning to night around the warship, and its seamen were willing to give an account of Napoleon’s movements for the avid spectators. They wrote in chalk on a board, and exhibited a short account of his different occupations: ‘At breakfast’, ‘In the cabin with Capt. Maitland’, ‘Writing with his officers’, ‘Going to dinner’, ‘Coming upon deck’, et cetera.14 One of the ship’s officers reported that the ‘great number of well-dressed females . . . never failed to attract his particular attention . . . He appeared greatly pleased with the beauty and elegance of our fair countrywomen, and was always wishing to know their names, families, and any circumstance that could be communicated to him concerning them.’15

  The celebrity prisoner understood that he was awaiting the Prince Regent’s decision. He hoped for a refuge in the English countryside and ruminated on the best place to retire as a county gentleman, perhaps to the Cotswolds under the name ‘Colonel Muiron’, after a fallen comrade-in-arms, so as not to cause a local fuss.16 The ministers of the ailing George III did not trust Bonaparte’s charm nor his ability to flatter the suggestible and vainglorious prince, whom the Duke of Wellington privately described as ‘the most extraordinary compound of talent, wit, buffoonery, obstinacy and good feeling that I ever saw in any character in my life’.17 They joined Admiral Lord Keith in the view that if the defeated emperor ‘obtained an interview with His Royal Highness, in half an hour they would have been the best friends in England’.18 The commotion about him at Plymouth demonstrated ‘his genius for upheaval’, his capacity for exciting a movement of sympathisers. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, advised: ‘We are all decidedly of opinion that it would not answer to confine him to this country . . . Very nice legal questions might arise upon the subject, which would be particularly embarrassing.’ They obtained the agreement of the Allies in wishing him deported somewhere so remote that even he would find it impossible to abscond, and took up the Admiralty’s suggestion, supported by Wellington, that the island of St Helena was ‘the place in the world best calculated for the confinement of such a person’.19

  Although Bonaparte had heard rumours, it still came like a physical blow when told he was destined for the remote Atlantic rock which had once been considered as an alternative exile to Elba. (Another, almost as bad, had been Botany Bay in New South Wales.) Bonaparte was instructed to select twelve servants and ‘three principals’ to accompany him. Of the fifteen officers who clamoured to join him—either through loyalty, misplaced ambition or calculated avarice, or to escape a death sentence in France—at last he chose generals Bertrand and de Montholon and Count de Las Cases. The British agreed to increase the number to 26 to include the generals’ wives and children, the count’s adolescent son Emmanuel, a physician, and more servants to personally attend them all. Some of these volunteers had been with Bonaparte on Elba.

  General Baron Gaspard Gourgaud, a temperamental bachelor aged 31 was not initially chosen, for he was not a personal friend or a military officer of long standing, although he had taken part in the Russian disaster and was more of a campaign veteran than the effete Montholon. But he caused such a violent emotional scene, pleading to be with his emperor, that Napoleon reluctantly included him. To do so he was obliged to attach him as one of the principals and to designate the aristocratic Las Cases as merely his secretary, in effect a servant.

  As it happened, Dr O’Meara, the Irish senior surgeon on the Bellerophon, had attended members of the French party—mainly for seasickness—during the voyage from Rochefort and had made a good impression on Napoleon.20 The two enjoyed several conversations in Italian, a language in which O’Meara was fluent, and discussed Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, where the surgeon had been. Bonaparte proposed that O’Meara be seconded as his personal physician. The request went up to Admiral Lord Keith and was acceded to readily, because of the opportunity the position offered for close observation. O’Meara, in the self-justificatory introduction to the book he would publish after Bonaparte’s death, stated that ‘this was an employment which I could hold perfectly consistent with my honour, and with the duty I owed to my country and my sovereign’.21

  O’Meara had already sent a lively description of Bonaparte and his French companions to his friend John Finlaison, a senior clerk at the Admiralty, where Lord Melville was First Sea Lord. At Plymouth he received a reply: ‘My Dear Barry—Thanks for your kind letter which was so extremely interesting that I showed it to Lord Melville, who made some corrections in it and then expressly permitted and was well pleased that I should insert it in the Sun of tomorrow. This will do you no harm. You will on no account mention this to a soul, except your Captain if you find that necessary for your justification in having written. I cannot tell you now my reasons for printing it. When we meet you will find them good as they are partly political. It is the highest authority that did it.’22 The following day an item appeared in the Sun and the Plymouth Telegraph reporting that a gentleman who saw Bonaparte regularly said that recent newspaper reports that Bonaparte was unhappy at the prospect of going to St Helena were incorrect: the Corsican seemed quite cheerful about going and frequently laughed.23

  On 7 August, the French party was transferred to HMS Northumberland under Sir George Cockburn. The admiral permitted an English friend, Lord Lyttelton, to make a visit aboard. The aristocrat spoke good French and was introduced to Bonaparte. Afterwards, Lyttelton observed of the two wives in the French entourage that they were completely different in look and manner: ‘Madame Bertrand, who had behaved with great violence in the Bellerophon, seemed rather exhausted than pacified, and had a look of great irritation and impatience. She is a tall, thin woman, with an aquiline nose, very like Lord Dillon, to whom she is, I believe, rather nearly related.24 Madame Montholon, on the other hand, had all the quiet resignation that so well becomes her sex, and one could not help sympathising with her sufferings so meekly borne. She is a pretty woman, of a sweet and intelligent countenance.’25

  Albine Hélène de Montholon was grieving. She and her third husband were travelling with their three-year-old son Tristan, but they had left behind in France her twelve-year-old boy from an earlier marriage and their own baby son, born the previous year, in the care of a wet nurse; Montholon had deemed him too young to travel. During this voyage to St Helena, as if in protest, Albine became pregnant again.

  Napoleon was presented to the Northumberland’s flag captain, Charles Ross, who felt disappointed, as he had never seen a picture that showed Napoleon as he really was: ‘He appears by no means that active man he is said to be. He is fat, rather what we call pot-bellied, and altho’ his leg is well-shaped, it is rather clumsy and his walk appears rather affected, something between a waddle and a swagger . . . He is very sallow and quite light grey eyes, rather thin greasy-looking brown hair, and is altogether a very nasty, priest-like looking fellow.’26

  On 11 August, the Northumberland, with 1080 people on board, set sail. It was said that Bonaparte stood on deck for five hours, gazing at the receding coast of France; when it slipped from sight he was distraught.27

  During the Northumberland’s 71 days at sea, twenty of them becalmed in the doldrums, Napoleon wondered aloud what to do
with the dreary future stretching ahead. ‘Sire,’ answered Count de Las Cases, ‘we will live in the past—there is surely enough there to satisfy us! Do we not enjoy the Lives of Caesar and Alexander? We will have a still better: you will, Sire, re-read yourself!’ ‘Yes,’ Napoleon agreed, ‘we must work. Work is also the scythe of time.’28

  The dictation of the memoirs began, the count hunched in a corner of the cabin, creasing his old naval uniform, his quill scratching across parchment. Dr Warden was amused by his ‘diminutive appearance’. Some Englishmen, he wrote, had ‘expected Herculean figures to be employed in the service of a man who had lately bestrode so large a portion of Europe’, whereas ‘Count de Las Cases does not exceed five feet and an inch in height, and appears to be fifty years of age, of a meagre form, and with a wrinkled forehead’.29

  Bonaparte and Admiral Cockburn occupied cabins either side of the saloon and were civil without going out of their way to be friendly. The admiral deplored the prisoner’s habit of bolting his food—despatching his evening meal in fifteen minutes—and then abruptly leaving the table.30 Sir George Bingham thought he was a secret drunk: ‘he drinks regularly his bottle of wine at dinner; a bottle of claret is always carried into his cabin at breakfast, which never comes out again, but as his servants have no dislike to it, they possibly assist him’.31 (Bonaparte was in fact abstemious and tended to see the British as drunks.)

  When they briefly hove to at the island of Madeira, Bonaparte looked down at the assemblage of people on the shore and remarked to Dr Warden ‘that he never beheld women with such beautiful bosoms’. Warden noted for his fiancée Miss Hutt: ‘He is very anxious to know every particular respecting the females inhabiting the island of St Helena. Upon my word, I scarcely think Bonaparte can live without a wife.’32

  The former emperor walked the deck with the admiral and played games with Tom Pipes, Cockburn’s huge and amiable Newfoundland, throwing bones along the boards for the dog to retrieve, or he sat on a cannon and gazed at the flying fish. One day when a shark was caught, ‘Bonaparte’, wrote the admiral’s secretary John Glover, ‘with the eagerness of a schoolboy scrambled on the poop to see it’.33

  He even took a few English lessons from Las Cases—who had spent years as an émigré teacher in Britain and promised he would have him reading an English newspaper in the course of a month. The lessons were soon cut short by Bonaparte’s pronouncement: ‘I well know that you think me a very clever fellow; but be that as it may, I cannot do everything; and among those things which I should find impracticable, is the making myself master of the English language in a few weeks.’34

  Bonaparte’s questing intelligence was forever alert, collecting facts that might be of value, classifying and storing them in his capacious brain. He gained an astute understanding from Cipriani Franceschi, his butler and a fellow Corsican, about whom it was worth talking to, and who might provide useful information to help him win freedom. Cipriani’s espionage skills had made possible the escape from Elba and he would continue to be his master’s eyes and ears on their new island of exile.

  Dr O’Meara became Napoleon’s companion for a regular game of whist and Italian conversation, so excluding others of the party. Barry O’Meara was 29 years old, a native of County Cork with an idiosyncratic past.35 He had previously been in the British army, serving in Sicily, where he had gained his knowledge of the Italian language. But he had contravened military regulations by acting as second in a duel and was court-martialled and dismissed. He had then contrived to join the Royal Navy as a surgeon. He retained an abiding resentment of the British army, and showed sympathy towards the former emperor for his difficult situation.

  General Gourgaud simmered with resentment to see his hero enjoying such friendly relations with the Irishman. From the beginning he had his suspicions that the man was a British spy, ingratiating himself for a purpose. He was not altogether wrong. O’Meara was preparing an account of the voyage for Finlaison, aware now that it was likely to be read by First Sea Lord Melville, and perhaps by ‘the highest authority’, the Prince Regent. While waspish about some of the French, his comments about the prisoner were benign, simply describing his daily routine, the hours he got up, walked about, dined and retired. ‘He generally spoke a few words to every officer who could understand him; and according to his usual custom, was very inquisitive relative to various subjects.’36 When the clerk Finlaison received the letter, he passed it on to his immediate superior, John Wilson Croker, the influential Secretary to the Admiralty and a regular at the Prince Regent’s Carlton House dinners. A request came back from Croker to sight all further correspondence from O’Meara, in order to pass it up higher.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE BRIARS

  I was quite prepared for the awefulness—and even the awfulness—of St Helena; what I had not expected was to fall in love with the island.

  White fairy terns swooped against the harsh volcanic cliffs, and old cannon lay rusting along the waterfront marina. We passed over a moat—once there was a drawbridge—and through an archway in the town’s massive stone wall. Inside was an almost perfectly preserved Georgian main street, like a film set for a Jane Austen or Thackeray adaptation—as long as one’s eye did not stray to the grim cliffs looming on either side. The whitewashed castle—a seventeenth-century fort of the English East India Company—is still the centre of government administration. With brass cannon at its entrance and orange bougainvillea festooning the ramparts, it dominates the parade square and faces the old Company bond store and the eighteenth-century St James’s Anglican church. Next to it is the prison with its cheerful blue balcony and accommodation for just twelve miscreants. Behind are the basalt slopes of Ladder Hill and an almost vertical staircase called Jacob’s Ladder with 699 steps to the fort above. Brightly coloured Georgian houses, some with slave entrances to cellars, line the main street, along with a handful of shops, the post office and the Consulate Hotel, its wrought-iron balconies overhanging the footpath.

  Accommodation for the ship’s tourists had been booked beforehand—at the Consulate or other lodgings in Jamestown. My companion and I had an apartment in a classic Georgian building in Market Street above Thorpe & Sons’ grocery store. There were comfortable couches, a Regency dining table, and a mahogany glass-fronted bookcase with volumes of Scott, Dickens and Charles Kingsley. Through tall windows we looked across at the brown cliffs and the fairy terns wheeling and shrieking.

  For a long time St Helena has appeared an oddity, lost in a British imperial time warp. Overwhelmingly Anglican, its population varies now between 4500 and 5800, as transient workers for the building of the airport come and go, but they have His Lordship the Bishop presiding at St Paul’s cathedral and His Lordship the Chief Justice at the Supreme Court; His Excellency the Governor is chauffeured from Plantation House to his office at the castle in a black Jaguar with a Union Jack pennant, and until a few years ago donned a white-plumed hat for ceremonial occasions. Painted in big white letters on the cliffs above is the greeting ‘We Welcome You Prince Andrew’, still there from the prince’s 1984 visit as a member of the armed forces. Most shops display a fading portrait of the Queen.

  Apart from the mostly local government employees coming in and out of the castle, tapping smartly over the cobblestones clutching files, it was evident that the people of working age had generally fled; most Saints in town appeared to be adolescent or younger, or older than fifty. But everyone I passed gave a friendly greeting in the soft singsong St Helenian accent, said to be a throwback to eighteenth-century English—part Dickensian Cockney, part West Country burr—blended with African cadences.

  Admiral Cockburn elected to stay at the castle, where he had access to the warships in the bay, rather than be a guest at Plantation House, the governor’s mansion out of town. It was determined that Bonaparte’s permanent home would be Longwood House, up on the high plateau, remote enough to serve as a prison. It had recently been occupied by the lieutenant-governor and his family as a
summer retreat from the humidity of Jamestown, but its earlier use was as a cattle house and barn, to which some rough additions had been made. It was dilapidated and at least two months’ work would be needed before it could be acceptable accommodation.

  Because of this decision, the Balcombe family did not have to vacate The Briars, although William probably regretted the compensation he would have been offered. He had first rented The Briars property in early 1806, not long after he and his family had settled on the island, and he bought it one year later when he was made superintendent of public sales for the East India Company. It was one of the most favoured locations on the island, a vale on the sheltered middle level, protected from the prevailing winds, with a waterfall tumbling over a horseshoe-shaped cliff into a deep gorge behind the homestead.

  The house was in the style of a long Indian villa, with an upper section of three rooms; it had shuttered windows and a colonnaded verandah along the front onto which the ground floor rooms opened.1 The kitchen was in a separate building, while the twenty slaves lived in huts at the rear. Balcombe had statutory ownership of seven men, four women, four boys and five girls.2 Slavery was still legal on the island—the last outpost of empire where it was—despite the British government’s legislation four years earlier against the transportation of human beings. Toby, the old Malay gardener, although a slave, was allowed his own hut in the orchard. He had made the garden of The Briars envied throughout the island for its beauty and productivity, while Balcombe enjoyed a profit of £600 a year selling the fruit and vegetables.