Probably there was no argument. At the time, young men in society who lacked inheritances were willing to go to extremes to secure their position. Such a man would marry a very plain or much older woman as long as she had wealth or useful connections; some would actively seek out such women, often planning to leave them soon after the wedding, knowing that the law entitled them to take the wife’s assets. (The parliamentarian Henry Fox (later an earlier Lord Holland), in debating Lord Hardwicke’s 1753 Marriage Bill had agreed that ‘something needed to be done to halt the fraudulent seduction of heirs and heiresses’. His hope was that the Marriage Act would stop this, but even after it was passed, the practice continued.37)
It would have been a bonus for Abell that Betsy was attractive. There are indications that he was a more than willing bridegroom, that he had actively courted her, and may have aimed to get her pregnant, having heard stories that her father was the natural son of George IV—stories that may have come from Balcombe’s own bragging when in his cups. Abell must have had expectations of future riches and influence from marriage to the granddaughter of the King of England. He would have observed what seemed clear evidence of a connection to the palace in the family’s protection by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, known to be close to the King.
Once the news of Betsy’s situation was confided to Sir Thomas, he would have made his own enquiries concerning Abell’s background, and naturally turned to General Sir Henry Torrens, whom he knew well from the latter’s period as aide-de-camp to the Prince Regent. He must have been disturbed by what he heard, and would have felt no confidence that this footloose former officer without prospects could be a reliable husband. What concerned him even more was that Balcombe, at the age of 44, had a family to support and no foreseeable future. He would do what he could for the family that he loved.
On 29 March 1822, Sir Thomas paid a surprise visit to Sir Hudson Lowe at his lodgings at 1 Edgware Road. Lowe had always had respect for the diminutive courtier, who clearly still had influence with George IV. He would have made him welcome. Sir Thomas told him that he was distressed to see William Balcombe and his family living in near-penury; it was making Mrs Balcombe ill with anxiety. He could not help them financially himself, having had to underwrite the float for the Plymouth and Dartmoor Railroad when too few subscribers were found. He believed it might be a year or so before any financial return could be expected. However, he had reason to believe that Lord Bathurst was willing to offer Balcombe a position in the colonies, but not if that offended Sir Hudson himself, who had been such a loyal servant of the government. These comments flattered Lowe, but he remained truculent. He said he did not see how he could assist Balcombe to any position of responsibility when he had shown no remorse, nor willingness to change his ways.
Sir Thomas then asked Balcombe to come up to London. Once they were together, this experienced strategist explained the politics of the situation to him: William should realise that Lowe’s hatred of O’Meara had come to embrace him as well. He saw them as part of a conspiracy against him, even though William had tried to disassociate himself. Tyrwhitt would have indicated that he believed it almost certain that Bathurst did not particularly care for Lowe—not least because of his time-wasting correspondence—but the governor had after all been a loyal public servant in following Bathurst’s instructions, even if he had interpreted them rather too rigorously. Therefore his lordship would not permit Balcombe to return to St Helena nor assist him to any government or colonial position if that offended Lowe. So William should realise that the barrier to his future was Sir Hudson Lowe. A profound apology was necessary.
On 4 April, Balcombe posted a letter from the London office of his wife’s brother-in-law Thomas Hornsby. He must have gritted his teeth writing every word of it:
Sir
Having just learned from Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt that you are pleased to lay aside all feeling of displeasure which my conduct towards you had so justly excited, I take the liberty of returning to you my sincere and grateful acknowledgement and to assure you that no person can more deeply feel Penitent for past indiscretions than myself.
I beg also to express to you my sincere thanks for your extreme kindness in your intention, in pity towards my family, of furthering my hopes of some Provision from the Colonial Office.
I have the honour to remain, Sir
Your faithful and obedient servant,
(Signed) W. Balcombe38
It must have given Lowe tremendous satisfaction to enclose Balcombe’s letter with his own, dated 7 April, to Wilmot Horton, the colonial under-secretary who had replaced Goulburn:
Dear Sir,
I beg leave to acquaint you that I was visited upon Friday last by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, who spoke to me at some length respecting Mr Balcombe, whom with his family, he represented to be in the greatest distress on account of the loss of the offices he had held at St Helena. He told me he had grounds to believe Lord Bathurst was not indisposed to some act of consideration towards him, if it was understood no objections prevailed on my part. I acquainted Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt that although Mr. Balcombe’s conduct had been in the highest degree improper, both as regarding the public services and his personal relations with me, yet I had always considered him more as the Dupe & Instrument of others than as having acted originally from his own impulses, and knowing the distress he had brought upon his family, I would certainly not think on their account of opposing anything that might be done for him.
Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt wished me to make this much known either to Lord Bathurst, or to you, which I accordingly take the present means of doing. I afterwards received a letter from Mr Balcombe which I beg leave to inclose. In reference to the concluding passage of it, I should say, nothing of any actual interference in Mr Balcombe’s favour was assured by me, but simply that I would not oppose any steps Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt might take regarding him. In other respects the contrition his letter manifests will furnish the best argument in his favor.39
The wedding of Lucia Elizabeth Balcombe and Edward Abell was booked to take place not at Chudleigh but at St Martin’s Church, Exminster, and not by the traditional ‘thrice-called banns’, which involved waiting three Sundays in a row while a notice of the intended marriage was posted on the church door, but by the swifter process of a licence, the document to be purchased from a bishop or one of his surrogates. While marriage by licence in the nineteenth century often signified that the bride was with child, that was by no means always the case; because a licence wedding was private and cost at least four guineas (a workingman’s weekly wage), it became the preference of the ‘patrician class’.40 However, in the case of the wedding of Betsy and Edward there is no doubt that the bride was four or five months pregnant.
It is curious that Exminster, eight miles away, was chosen for the ceremony instead of Chudleigh, noted for its beautiful thirteenth-century church. The Marriage Act required that ‘at least one party had to be resident for at least three weeks in the parish where the marriage was to be celebrated’.41 One can only assume that Betsy’s pregnancy was so obvious that the family wished to avoid gossip among neighbours and had briefly become residents of Exminster. Otherwise, as John R. Gillis notes in For Better, For Worse, sometimes families rented a room in the parish where the wedding would be held just long enough to fulfil the Act requirement without actually living there.42
Sir Thomas almost certainly gave Balcombe some further advice: that while the outcome of his apology to Lowe was awaited, it might be advisable to move with his family—including the young married couple—to France. There they would be away from prying eyes and gossip about Betsy’s advanced pregnancy, and the actual birth date would not be on English church records. In addition, the living was far more economical in France. Sir Thomas, who visited the country regularly, recommended Saint-Omer, inland from Calais, where there was a large British community.
Betsy’s marriage to Abell was solemnised on 28 May 1822 at Exminster. The ceremony conformed with all the requirements of
the Marriage Act. The certificate stated: ‘Edward Abell Esquire, Bachelor of the Parish of Saint Gregory, London, And Lucia Elizabeth Balcombe, Spinster of this Parish, Were married in this Church by Licence with Consent of Parents this twenty-eighth day of May in the Year One thousand eight hundred and twenty two By me H. J. Burlton.’ The other signatures followed: ‘This marriage was solemnized between us—Edward Abell, Lucia Elizabeth Balcombe, In the presence of Wm Balcombe, Thos Tyrwhitt, Francis Stanfell RN, Jane Sophia Turner, Henry Brown.’43 Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt had come to be a witness at the wedding, supporting the family as always, and also Captain Stanfell, their old friend from St Helena.
It was clearly a desire to obscure the circumstances of the marriage that caused Dame Mabel Brookes to inform enquiring historians that it had taken place exactly one year earlier, 28 May 1821; as she was a Balcombe descendant, this date has been followed in most subsequent biographical listings and was accepted until pesky biographers began digging.44 The marriage certificate exists and the wedding was noted in the Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser of 29 May 1822: ‘Yesterday at Exminster, by the Rev. H.J. Burlton, Edward Abell Esq, to Lucia Elizabeth, daughter of W. Balcombe, Esq, of this place.’
Betsy had done just what Napoleon had forecast on the last day they met at St Helena. Afterwards, her father had informed Lowe of his prediction, which was immediately reported to Bathurst: Napoleon ‘told her she would be married immediately on her arrival in England & then railed her on her immediate Pregnancy’.45
CHAPTER 28
‘LA PETITE ANGLETERRE’
I was in a large house in the Scottish highlands. It was an unlikely place for me to be researching the Balcombes’ time in France—so far a frustratingly blank canvas—but that was the reason I was there.
Next door to my room was a library, with floor-to-ceiling books on mahogany shelving, some in Persian, others in Urdu, books of nineteenth-century travel, some of them written by former occupants of the house. An old leopard-skin was slung over a chair, an Oriental rug on the floor, trophies of the East. In other parts of the house old prints of India and the Himalayas graced the walls, cheerful fires warmed the rooms.
I was in the home of the five Fraser brothers who had gone to India to save the family estate—and in the end had succeeded. The eldest son, James Baillie Fraser, a Persian scholar, writer and talented artist, had returned home, riding or walking all the way overland through India, Afghanistan, Persia and the Ottoman Levant. He later added a Palladian portico to the house in expectation of the visit of a Persian prince who never turned up.
The property was saved, but at enormous human cost, heartbreaking for the parents, Edward Satchwell Fraser and his wife Jane. Four of their sons never came back; three of them succumbed to the fevers and infections of India, which, in an era before modern vaccines, killed tens of thousands of the British (and hundreds of thousands of Indians).1 William, the most famous, swashbuckling brother, spent 33 adventurous years in India and has been written about extensively by William Dalrymple, who described his 1835 murder in Delhi, after offending ‘a raffish Mughal nobleman’.2
The first of the Fraser boys to die was Edward, who had gone to India in 1813 at the age of 27 with his younger brother Alexander (Aleck). Soon after his arrival he became so ill that Aleck believed he could not survive unless taken to a more temperate climate. The two brothers joined a vessel bound for St Helena. Aleck was able to rent a cottage from a certain William Balcombe, whom he described as ‘an open-hearted liberal Englishman’.3 Aleck nursed his brother at the cottage, with the Balcombes kindly offering whatever assistance they could, until Edward passed away two months later.
Malcolm Fraser, my host, is a direct descendant of Edward Satchwell and Jane Fraser. Malcolm’s wife Kathy is completing a book about those five sons and the parents who prayed and waited for their return. Her source material is a remarkable collection of family letters and the mother’s diary, hidden in an old trunk in the cellar with a label noting it contained papers ‘of great interest’; they were first researched in 1979.
Edward Satchwell Fraser was highland gentry, a laird, but until his sons returned from India with the riches they hoped were possible, he and Jane were in financial difficulties. It had been a disastrous decision to buy into the cotton plantation in Guyana and then mortgage the family estate against it. With their only surviving daughter, Jane Anne, having made a good marriage to a cousin, the big house felt empty. Mr Fraser (as his wife always called him, even in her private diary) made the decision at the age of 70 that the most practical thing to do was to rent it out—almost certainly to wealthy English people who would play at being lairds—and he and his wife Jane would make a temporary move to Saint-Omer in France. Her sister Catherine was already there, married to Gregoire, a Frenchman, and she had convinced them that living costs were much cheaper.
Since 1593 there had been a particular connection across the Channel with Saint-Omer. After the Protestant Reformation, many British Roman-Catholic families, finding their sons barred from a Catholic education at home, sent them across the Channel as boarders to St Omer College, founded by English Jesuits. In 1762 the school moved to Bruges, and later to Liège. But with the building of the Catholic college of Stonyhurst in Lancashire in 1794, the need for the annual migration of British Catholic boys ceased.
After the Napoleonic Wars, another large British community formed at Saint-Omer, so much so that in local parlance the town became La Petite Angleterre (Little England). It began with the army of occupation: many British soldiers, finding life in northern France pleasant and economical during their posting, returned with their families after demobilisation. Jane Fraser’s sister had assured her that there were also a number of British gentlefolk living in the town, a congenial social group.4
William Balcombe delayed the planned move to France, in the hope that the outcome of his apology to Lowe might result in Bathurst making an early decision to offer him a colonial posting. He knew that Sir Thomas was working for him behind the scenes. It is likely that Betsy, in advanced pregnancy, had gone to live with Edward Abell at his home in St Gregory’s parish, near St Paul’s in London; only her close family and friends knew how short a time the couple had been married, but a decision had to be made about where she would give birth. Balcombe was bound to be unhappy about the reliability of Abell as the protector of his daughter and expected grandchild and would have been reluctant to leave the country without them.
Meanwhile, Lowe was hoping for a colonial or government position himself. On 6 June 1822, he wrote to Bathurst with the news that he had received a letter from His Royal Highness the Duke of York, ‘acquainting me His Majesty has been graciously pleased to appoint me to the command of the 93rd Regiment’. He said that he was flattered by His Majesty’s favour. But the appointment was a long way short of a governorship.5
That same month, Dr Barry O’Meara launched his massive two-volume work, Napoleon in Exile or A Voice from St Helena, not on an unsuspecting world but on a fully expectant one. There had been four years of previews in newspapers around the country of the correspondence between O’Meara and Lowe. The public had not lost its appetite for more. The Irish doctor was still seen as something of a hero, and Napoleon’s death had confirmed his forecasts about his critical state of health.
Napoleon in Exile was composed from the detailed notes O’Meara had taken almost every night at St Helena, plus a great deal of imagination and personal vitriol. It was an instant bestseller. The publishers rushed out a second edition, then a third.6 Readers, whether on the side of O’Meara or infuriated by him, devoured his accounts of his conversations with Napoleon, his quarrels with Lowe, and the governor’s relentless persecution of his prisoner. Gilbert Martineau, former honorary French consul at St Helena (father of the present consul), has observed: ‘Napoleon emerged from the book ennobled, even purified by his end, but the gaoler of St Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe, was branded for ever as infamous by one of his
own staff, and his portrait hung in the rogues’ gallery of history.’7 The book enraged Lowe, who engaged a prominent lawyer and planned a defamation suit.
O’Meara had become rich, with a fourth edition of his book soon printed to meet the demand. It was banned in France, but young Emmanuel de Las Cases obtained a copy. Reading it reignited his fury at the mistreatment of his father and he planned revenge. He would go to London and challenge Lowe to a duel. But in order to find him he had to contact O’Meara.
Before he did so, the Balcombe family, along with Edward and Betsy, crossed the Channel to France in the regular packet boat. At Calais their luggage was cleared by customs and they took a coach for the 22-mile journey to Saint-Omer, passing through flat fertile pastureland, the road lined with elms on either side. When they were still a long distance away they sighted the towers of the town’s great medieval cathedral and the Gothic Abbaye Saint-Bertin.8
I arrived at Saint-Omer by train from Paris with a change at Lille. In my bag I had my notes from the collection of Fraser papers in Scotland. The station building was an imposing belle époque ruin, propped up with scaffolding. There was not a person in sight. I crossed the bridge of the River Aa, walked two deserted blocks to the Hôtel Le Bretagne, and left my bag in my room.
Several blocks uphill I found the spacious market square, Place Foch, with its handsome Hôtel de Ville. It seemed the whole of the town was at Sunday lunch in the buzzing restaurants. The British had left evidence of their patronage in a nineteenth-century Queen Victoria Bar-Pub and Le Dickens Brasserie.
Later, as I returned to my hotel, a dense mist swirled in from the surrounding wetlands. Le brouillard.
In a family portrait Jane Fraser is a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face, warm brown eyes and auburn curls under a lacy bonnet. On 28 August 1822, her husband brought startling news from the centre of town: he had briefly met a Mr Balcombe from St Helena who had come to Saint-Omer with his family with the intention to remain some time. ‘How many sensations does his very name call up to me & the memory of those that are gone,’ Jane wrote in her diary. The grief never left her: the loss of her sons Edward, who died in 1813 at Balcombe’s cottage, and Aleck, who tried to save him, and three years later in India succumbed to fever himself.9
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