Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  By the time the Winchelsea put in at Hastings on 19 May, Balcombe’s gout had become so excruciating that it was considered news. But, at the time, everything about the family was of interest because of their notorious connection: ‘Mr Balcomb, who landed at Hastings on Tuesday morning, from St Helena, was taken so extremely ill, immediately on his going on shore, that three physicians were instantly called in, and were almost in constant attendance the whole day. Mrs Balcomb who had previously arrived in this country with her son, left town yesterday to attend her husband.’10 All the family gathered at Balcombe’s bedside. His wife had already made contact with their distinguished friends from former days on St Helena—Sir George Cockburn and Sir Pulteney and Lady Malcolm—and also with a naval shipping agent, William Holmes of Lyons Inn, London. O’Meara had engaged Holmes to send books and journals to the French at Longwood, not intending them to arrive at the island through official channels.

  The one letter by Mrs Jane Balcombe that has survived in archives was written to O’Meara on 27 May from her husband’s bedside:

  My Dear O’Meara

  Poor Balcombe has been confined to his bed almost ever since he left your dear Island he is now getting better of this long and melancholy fit of Gout and we hope in the course of another fortnight that he will be able to proceed to London. Thank God I am much better notwithstanding all the nursing anxiety &c—Mr B has written to your agent [Holmes] and he sent him a Book and wished to know if it had reached St Helena yet and also his opinion of it—which B appears much pleased with. All our friends Sir T Tyrwhitt, Sir George C and Lady Malcolm &c have been very solicitous and kind writing continually to inquire after poor Balcombe—whom they are very anxious to see in London—I am very anxious to be there also. You must excuse my not writing you a long letter—as the Sick room affords nothing that can amuse you. My kind remembrance to Madame Bertrand and all her family—I will write you again the first opportunity. The Girls unite with me their kindest regards to you.

  —Remaining very Sincerely Yours, Jane W. Balcombe11

  Once Balcombe was sufficiently recovered, he hastened to Winchelsea in East Sussex, where his mother and her second husband, Charles Terry, had settled after leaving Rottingdean. He arrived to be confronted by a family tragedy. When he left St Helena in March the news had not reached him that his stepfather had died in mid-January at the age of 70. Now he had to absorb a greater shock, that his mother, Mary Terry, had passed away on 1 May, almost three weeks before he landed in England. There had been no chance to be with her at the end. This must have been devastating for William, who had not seen his mother for thirteen years.

  General Gaspard Gourgaud had arrived in London on the Marquis of Camden on 8 May and his belongings were not searched before disembarking. Two days later, he was intensively questioned at the Colonial Office by Henry Goulburn, under-secretary to Lord Bathurst. Gourgaud gave him much the same information as that which had startled Lowe and the commissioners on St Helena: that the French at Longwood had no difficulty enjoying ‘a free and uninterrupted communication’ with Britain and the Continent for correspondence, pamphlets, money and any items they wanted. They were enabled to do this by means of visiting Englishmen, attendants and servants. The captains of visiting merchant ships were ‘peculiarly open to the seduction of General Bonaparte’s talents’, so that it was ‘a matter of small difficulty to procure a Passage on board one or other of the ships for General Bonaparte if escape at any time should be his Object’. Escape for General Bonaparte was apparently easy; he could without difficulty elude the sentries posted around the house, and this had been discussed. But Gourgaud said that Bonaparte was waiting for a change of government in England, or for the refusal of the English to continue the expense of detaining him. In particular, he ‘has always looked to the period of the removal of the Allied Armies from France as that most favourable for his return’.

  Goulburn noted in his report that Gourgaud had revealed that General Bonaparte had received a considerable sum in Spanish dollars, equivalent to £10,000, at the very time that he disposed of his silver plate. ‘He assured me however in answer to my inquiries, that neither Mr. Balcombe nor Mr. O’Meara were in any degree privy to the above transaction; and that the former, although recently much dissatisfied with his situation, had never, in any money transaction, betrayed the trust reposed in him. He declined however most distinctly, giving me the same assurance with respect to their not being, either or both, privy to the transmission of a clandestine correspondence.’

  In discussing Bonaparte’s health, Gourgaud was at his most malicious. He said that the British ‘were much imposed upon’. He could confidently assert that Napoleon’s physical health had changed very little and that it was ‘not at all worse than it had been for some time previous to his arrival at St Helena’. O’Meara was certainly ‘the dupe of that influence which General Buonaparte always exercises over those with whom he has frequent intercourse’.12 This confirmed for Bathurst that his recent instruction to Lowe to dismiss the Irish doctor from the island was the correct one. The Admiralty had at last been persuaded that the man was too much trouble. It left Bonaparte without a physician acceptable to him, but it seemed he did not need one.

  Gourgaud, after this treachery, was permitted to remain in England, a free man. When he met with the French ambassador, the Marquis d’Osmond, he told him how easy it would be for Napoleon to escape. The ambassador answered: ‘Easily said.’ ‘No,’ replied Gourgaud, ‘easily done and in all kinds of ways; supposing, for instance, that Napoleon was placed in one of the barrels that are sent to Longwood full of provisions and returned to Jamestown every day without being inspected. Do you believe it impossible to find a captain of a craft who for a bribe of one million francs would undertake to carry the barrel on board a vessel ready to sail?’13 The marquis passed this information on to the Colonial Office. It was noted that any barrel of provisions fell within the business of the purveyor.

  Gourgaud’s information had confirmed their suspicions that Balcombe was the conveyor of clandestine correspondence, although not yet of anything more heinous. For the present, there was no necessity to move against him—partly because of his important connections, but possibly also because of his earlier confidential services for the Colonial Office, as much later events would suggest. But he had shown that he could not be trusted and should be watched.

  Balcombe had given Lowe his forwarding address in London as 26 Cornhill, in the heart of the City financial district, opposite the Royal Exchange.14 This was the head office of Hornsby & Co., Stockbrokers and Lottery Office Keepers; the director, Thomas Hornsby, was married to Mrs Balcombe’s elder sister, Lucia Elizabeth, after whom Betsy was named.15 The couple, who had a country house at South Cave in Yorkshire, had been guardians to the girls when they were at school in Nottinghamshire. Now the Balcombe family were welcomed into their London home, but there was no time to celebrate a happy reunion.

  William’s brother Stephen, younger by three years, was dying at his Pentonville house. He had never married, so Mrs Balcombe, her daughters and the servant Sarah Timms immediately took over his care. There is no record of his illness, but soldiers returning from the Napoleonic wars had brought various pestilences with them: tuberculosis, influenza and measles were rife, and dysentery was an epidemic in London in 1818, causing an estimated 45,000 deaths.16 Another scourge was typhus fever, a major epidemic in Ireland in 1818, with 65,000 deaths, and it had reached London as well.17 Any of these diseases could have struck Stephen, and he may have passed the infection to his mother. Stephen Balcombe, a businessman and ‘Gentleman of Pentonville’, had made out his will in April, naming his mother Mary Terry as a joint executor, which indicates that her death in May was sudden. He died in June or July, for his will was proved on 7 September, leaving his estate of approximately £500 to be shared equally between the children of his brother William, to be accessed when they turned 21.18

  Within three months, William had lost his only
immediate family in England. But he still had his protective patron. It is curious to note that if there was validity in Lowe’s hearsay that the Balcombe boys were cared for by Tyrwhitt after their father’s drowning in an accident involving the prince’s yacht, one would expect Sir Thomas to have acted in the same nurturing way towards Stephen. But there is not the slightest evidence that he did.

  After their arrival in London, the Balcombes paid several visits to Sir Thomas at the tiny grace-and-favour home he had occupied for the past six years. From 1785, he had occupied a suite of rooms at the prince’s Carlton House, but since being knighted in 1812 and appointed Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, he moved into the snug Gothic-style cottage that went with his new position. It nestled on the north bank of the Thames, adjoining the medieval complex that was the old Palace of Westminster. Known as ‘Black Rod Lodge’, its address was simply ‘Parliament Place’.

  Betsy and Jane remembered Sir Thomas as the kind man who had been helpful to their mother three years earlier when she had come from the island to collect them from school. Young Thomas and Alexander, born on St Helena in 1810 and 1811 respectively, were meeting their father’s friend for the first time, but Thomas understood his middle name was Tyrwhitt because this man was his godfather.

  Tyrwhitt would have been much taken with the two attractive young women and they with him. They were bound to have been fascinated by his aura of glamour, knowing that he knew the Prince Regent so well and all the princes and princesses. They heard that he had also been friends with the old King, who was now said to wander about at Windsor Castle in a white nightdress, and slip in the mud with the pigs at his little ‘farm’. (It is usually now suggested that the mental illness of George III was caused by the blood disease porphyria, although J.B. Priestley argued it was brought on by distress over the death of his favourite child Amelia, in 1810.19)

  For Balcombe, this reunion with Tyrwhitt, the tiny man with the ruddy complexion and curly powdered wig, was meeting up again with someone who had been like a father to him since childhood, and more recently a guardian to his eldest son. But there was one particular piece of business that the two men needed to address. Balcombe had now discovered that his purveyorship to the French at Longwood had been removed from Balcombe, Cole & Company by Governor Lowe. He was furious that this had been done with no warning or explanation, the position annexed under his nose while he was still on the island, and he hoped that the decision could be reversed. He knew that his patron saw Lord Bathurst frequently in Parliament and he may have asked if an interview could be arranged. But it is more likely that the Secretary of State initiated the request (or summons), because three meetings between Bathurst and Balcombe were to follow in rapid succession.

  Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt and Earl Bathurst knew each other well. In the oligarchy that ran the British government—men who had been to Eton or another of the great public schools and thence to Oxford or Cambridge—there were always connections. Bathurst and Tyrwhitt were both born in 1762 (like the Prince Regent), and both went to Eton and then on to Christ Church, Oxford, ‘the college most favoured by the peerage’, although they probably did not mix there. Bathurst (then Lord Apsley, not yet having succeeded to the earldom) joined, as his biographer observed, ‘other sprigs of aristocracy, conspicuous in gold-trimmed silk gowns and with gold tassels in their caps’, who ‘had their own table in hall and could dine with the dons at high table’. Tyrwhitt was on a ‘canon’s fellowship’ and worked hard, awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1784 and a Master of Arts three years later, whereas ‘like most aristocrats, Apsley did not trouble to take his degree at Oxford’, embarking on a tour of France and Germany instead.20 In 1794, Bathurst succeeded to the earldom, and in 1812 he was made Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, the same year that Tyrwhitt became Black Rod. Thereafter the two men saw each other in the House of Lords whenever it was in session.

  Balcombe went to meet Bathurst at the Colonial Office, a house at the end of Downing Street, situated where steps now lead down to St James’s Park. This was the first time they had met in person, and he was surely overawed. Tyrwhitt would have counselled him that this was a chance to make his mark and that, despite his recent difficulties, he had the experience to qualify for a new colonial appointment. Bathurst, the brilliant administrator, then aged 56, must have seemed almost legendary to Balcombe, ruling as he did through the governor on almost every aspect of life on St Helena. Yet the island and its prisoner, in theory at least, formed a very small part of his administrative remit. Until 1815 and the victory at Waterloo, the pursuit of the war against France was his main concern. After peace was restored, trade resumed, and the consolidation of Britain’s far-flung empire became of prime importance: the administration, through colonial governors, of Upper and Lower Canada, Newfoundland, Malta and Gibraltar, the Cape Colony, Sierra Leone, the Gambia and the Gold Coast, Ceylon, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand, Mauritius and the Seychelles, an assortment of islands in the Caribbean, and in the South Atlantic, tiny Ascension, St Helena and Tristan da Cunha. Bathurst was a friend to both George III and the Prince Regent, and was so trusted by the Tory prime minister Lord Liverpool and his foreign secretary Castlereagh that, according to his biographer, ‘he quickly became a member of a triumvirate that for all practical purposes decided the country’s foreign, military and imperial policy for the next decade’.21

  Balcombe’s three personal meetings in June with Bathurst can be seen as a watershed in his life: if he was viewed with disfavour, any prospect of a return to St Helena was dashed. Notwithstanding his patron’s influence because of the affections of the royal family, Bathurst possessed far greater political power, if compelled to exercise it, a fact that Tyrwhitt would have understood. Certainly Sir Thomas would have prepared his protégé for this august audience. He would have warned him to moderate how he expressed his dislike of Lowe and his annoyance at the loss of the purveyorship. He would have made clear to Balcombe that he should not interpret Bathurst’s ability to be exceedingly amiable and even humorous as an indication of a less than totally serious and resolute mind, able to see through any dissembling or bravado; but he may also have made the point that Balcombe need not fear facing some austere, remote official, ready to condemn all fallibilities.

  Therefore Balcombe was truly on notice that he would be judged on Bathurst’s assessment of his merits and weaknesses. Clearly the immensely powerful and busy Bathurst considered him sufficiently interesting to grant him a personal audience three times rather than have one of his under-secretaries or clerks ‘debrief ’ him, although Under-Secretary Goulburn was almost certainly present, taking notes. For Bathurst, listening to Balcombe was gaining first-hand knowledge of his great foe. No other Englishman had been so close for so long to Britain’s prisoner and his entourage.

  Balcombe would certainly have mentioned his unhappiness at the loss of the purveyorship, and a later letter suggests that he also defended his friend O’Meara and confirmed that Bonaparte’s poor state of health required a trusted physician.22 If Balcombe attempted to learn what information Gourgaud had passed on to the Colonial Office, Bathurst kept his own counsel, evidently preferring to listen to Balcombe and study him. However, a discussion of Balcombe’s position and Bonaparte’s health would have been worth one meeting at most for the Secretary of State; instead there were three within a month. This was a large commitment for a man with many responsibilities, but nothing compared to the cost if Bonaparte escaped.

  Receipt of every piece of information about Longwood was important to Bathurst, given that he was facing constant Whig criticism in Parliament over allegations of arbitrary harsh treatment of the exile. Here was a man who had enjoyed unique access, both to Bonaparte and the members of his entourage and, in London, to a trusted Parliamentary official who was a friend of the royal family. It would have seemed almost negligent on Bathurst’s part if he had not from the beginning requested Tyrwhitt to engage Balcombe in some intelligence role. Any c
orrespondence from Balcombe to his patron avoided Lowe’s scrutiny and was guaranteed secure transmission to London and thence to Whitehall. Moreover, in certain respects Balcombe’s personality would have made him less suspect at Longwood as an agent than almost anyone else on St Helena. He was an authentic rough-and-ready extrovert, something of a buccaneer in business dealings; he gave every appearance of genuinely disliking Lowe; while his wife and daughters had become close friends with the Bertrands and their company obviously gave much pleasure to Bonaparte himself. And Balcombe gained prestige from the persistent rumour that he was the natural son of the Prince Regent.

  That three meetings were held suggests that Bathurst, after the first encounter, asked Balcombe to prepare a detailed account of his points made orally, to be followed up by further discussions and questions. But if a record was kept of what was said, those minutes have not been located.23 They may have been filed as classified documents, or destroyed—if Balcombe had been acting as a secret government agent for Bathurst on St Helena. Later, there was possible substantiation that for a time he did operate in this way.

  When Bathurst considered St Helena (which Lowe’s correspondence ensured that he did far more frequently than he wished), there were matters of immediate concern. Another member of the ruling class, Admiral Lord Cochrane, heir to the earldom of Dundonald, had gone rogue. A hero of the Royal Navy for his leadership, courage and brilliant tactics (he was later a model for Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey books), he had been forced out of the navy and Britain, risking gaol because of his monumental gambling debts. He had become a privateer, and was appointed commander-in-chief of the Chilean navy, assisting their liberation struggle against Spain. The Times reported that he had called Bonaparte an ‘illustrious prisoner’ and was said to be willing to mount an expedition to rescue him.24