‘Boyes, Boyes, will you allow me the pleasure of drinking wine with you?’
He drank his bumper and I pledged him. So there was an end of our difference. I met him at Government House the other day where we were assembled to be introduced to the new Archdeacon Scott and we shook hands.20
At the same time, Governor Brisbane received a letter from the Colonial Office, recalling him to England. He understood he was to be replaced by another military officer, General Ralph Darling. It was not entirely unexpected but it was privately hurtful and infuriating. He believed it had come about through unkind gossip and misrepresentations in the press.
Many of the citizens of Sydney rallied around the governor, expressing regret that he was leaving. He was surprised to find he had so many friends. The Sydney Gazette reprinted an item from the Hobart Town Gazette deploring the replacement of Brisbane: ‘The appointment of General Darling, in succession to our beloved Governor in Chief, Sir Thomas Brisbane KCB, was noticed in most of the London papers.’21
The Balcombes entertained Sir Thomas to dinner a second time on the evening of 19 May. Chief Justice Forbes and his wife may have joined them. The Forbes couple had bonded ‘like one family’ with the Brisbanes during the fortnight they had stayed with them at Parramatta when they first arrived, and Amelia Forbes also regarded the Balcombes as their ‘firm friends’.22
The governor needed the advice of the magistrates who now included, as well as Balcombe, the new police chief Francis Rossi (a Corsican, who had been in charge of Indian convicts on the island of Mauritius). Brisbane requested the magistrates’ opinion of trial by jury and its effects—how far they viewed it ‘as proper to admit the Emancipist class of Colonists to a participation of the privilege of sitting in Juries’.23
Brisbane would take with him to the British government the response of the eight magistrates: ‘We beg leave to state, that it is our unanimous opinion that the Juries have conducted themselves with great propriety, and that the establishment of the Trial by Jury, even upon its present limited scale, has given a general feeling of security in the enjoyment of our civil rights; and we beg leave to further respectfully submit to your Excellency, that we consider this Colony is now in a state to allow of the Trial by Jury being extended with public advantage to the Supreme Court.’24
William Wentworth wrote an editorial in the Australian of 6 October heartily endorsing the magistrates’ verdict: ‘When so respectable and weighty a body as the Justices of the Peace thus step forward and pledge their opinions so liberally and so publicly, it would be madness for any party here to resist the introduction of Trial by Jury; it would be frivolous trifling, and serious injustice.’
CHAPTER 33
A FLEETING ENTENTE CORDIALE
The present-day suburb of La Perouse in Sydney occupies the protective northern arm of Botany Bay, a wide, relatively shallow body of water ‘discovered’ as an anchorage by Captain James Cook in 1770, its shores long occupied by the Eora people who fished its abundant waters. Eighteen years later, an extraordinary encounter occurred there.
On 18 January 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip, in charge of the First Fleet of eleven ships and over a thousand people—convicts, marines and officers—arrived to found the penal settlement of New South Wales. Returning from investigating a large waterway further north, Phillip was astonished to discover two French vessels, La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, in the bay. They were under the command of Captain JeanFrançois de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, renowned as a great explorer of the Pacific. He was seeking sanctuary after some of his two hundred crew had been attacked by Samoans. Captain Phillip treated the French with civility but great caution, uncertain of relations between their two countries on the far side of the world. He sailed nine miles north with his fleet and entered the magnificent waterway of Port Jackson, having chosen Sydney Cove as the preferred site of settlement.1
La Pérouse anchored in Botany Bay and set up camp on the northern promontory so that his wounded men could receive medical attention. A scientist on his expedition, Father Receveur, died in February and was buried at the site. A First Fleet surgeon, Philip Gidley King, came to visit in February and enjoyed an amicable dinner with the French.2 After six weeks, La Pérouse with his vessels sailed on into the vast Pacific and disappeared. Nothing was heard of them for decades, a mystery and source of grief for the French people.3
Today the Sydney suburb of La Perouse has the name and three reminders of that lost expedition. On the tip of the peninsula is the grave of Father Receveur and a large monument, erected in 1825, honouring Captain La Pérouse and his men. A small museum nearby gives visitors an account of the history. There is mention that before the great navigator set off from France, a young trainee French army officer had applied to switch to the French navy to join his expedition to the Pacific. Napoleon Bonaparte’s application was rejected because of his lack of seafaring experience. Otherwise the course of modern history would have been very different.
Two large and handsome vessels came through Sydney Heads on 29 June 1825 and dropped anchor. They were flying the French flag. The pilot boarded them, and the following day Captain Piper, as naval officer, went out to investigate. The large frigate La Thétis, he was delighted to discover, was under the command of Commodore Baron Hyacinthe Yves de Bougainville, a 43-year-old French naval officer and the son of the famous navigator of the South Seas, Louis Antoine, Comte de Bougainville.
This was Hyacinthe’s second visit to Sydney, where he had been as a young man more than twenty years earlier with the Nicolas Baudin expedition. He was in overall command of this one, with the corvette L’Espérance under Captain Paul-Anne de Nourquer Du Camper. It was explained to Piper that theirs was a scientific voyage through the southern seas, to conduct hydrographic research, discover trade possibilities and hopefully to learn the fate of the La Pérouse expedition after it left Sydney in 1788, a mystery still haunting their nation.
Piper, who viewed diplomacy as being part of his duties as naval officer, welcomed the two commanders and invited them to make his home their own while in Sydney. ‘Although we were always shown a great deal of kindness by the local inhabitants,’ wrote Bougainville in his private journal, ‘this fine fellow outdid all others by his efforts to please us and his extremely obliging behaviour towards us.’4 Nothing was too much trouble for Piper. He had found the previous French visitors from the 1824 Duperrey expedition stimulating company and was sure that these men would be also.
On the evening of 5 July, Piper hosted a party in their honour at his home, Henrietta Villa. Bougainville and Du Camper brought three of their officers. Governor Brisbane and Lieutenant-Governor Stewart arrived at 6 pm, and almost everybody who was anybody in the colony made an appearance: the chief justice, the archdeacon, the attorney-general and the colonial treasurer, with their families. The Macarthurs, however, had declined.
At dinner, the bachelor Bougainville found himself next to ‘a certain Mrs Abel, the daughter of the colonial treasurer’, which seemed well-judged seating on the hosts’ part, placing him next to an attractive young woman who spoke fluent French (although his English was excellent). He was astonished and intrigued to learn that she had lived on St Helena when Napoleon was exiled there. He wrote that night in his journal: ‘She is reportedly famous and goes by the name of Betsy Balcombe who was “a great favourite of Napoleon’s”. He gave her the nickname of Rosebud of St Helena. She told me all this in good French and thought Napoleon a very amiable gentleman.’5
Betsy was perhaps trying too hard. She may not have reported that she was famous, but clearly she had claimed to have been ‘a great favourite of Napoleon’s’, which was of course true (Bougainville seemed to have doubts). Furthermore, Betsy’s former relationship with Napoleon was interesting enough without inventions; it is odd that she told him that Napoleon gave her the nickname ‘Rosebud’, when it was actually his name for the pretty daughter of a neighbouring farmer on St Helena. His admiration for ‘Rosebud’ had anno
yed Betsy—perhaps it still rankled sufficiently for her to wish to annex the name for herself.
After dinner, which probably involved many toasts in the English fashion and which Hyacinthe thought ‘took far too long’, he danced with Betsy Abell to the music of Captain Piper’s band. He was dancing with ‘a great favourite’ of the fallen conqueror who had died just four years earlier. The historian Colin Dyer has suggested that ‘here in Sydney, as Bougainville danced with her, he held in his arms an almost personal link with the Emperor who had dominated Europe for so many years’.6 At 10 pm, Governor Brisbane ‘took his leave’, wrote Hyacinthe, ‘and was hailed by salvos from Captain Piper’s artillery’. When he himself and his compatriots left near midnight, they ‘were saluted with three hurrahs’.7
As Betsy and her parents returned home, probably in Balcombe’s new purchase, a handsome barouche pulled by two grey horses, one wonders if her emotions were in turmoil. Her life in Sydney was giddy, but unreal and essentially lonely. So many parties, so many balls, dancing close to gentlemen, especially in the waltz, their arms around her, bodies pressed together, reminding her of her physicality, her sexuality. She was 22 years old, blonde, beautiful and vivacious; she had always been a flirt. Was she to be alone for the rest of her life? In a colony where the ratio of the sexes was radically unequal, three men or more to one woman, it is certain that any number of men were interested in her, even without knowing of the added piquancy of her former connection with Bonaparte.8
Perhaps she cared for none of the men she had met so far in New South Wales; perhaps none of them attracted her, amused her, compelled her interest. But if her interest was ignited, she was still in an impossible situation, as she had explained in her letter to Sir Henry Torrens. She was a deserted wife, not a widow, so she could not marry again without breaking the law by committing bigamy. There was no legal ruling preventing her from cohabiting with a man, but polite society had its own strict rules that would brand her as an outcast. Genteel women would no longer call on or receive her. Betsy had only to remember how Admiral Plampin’s mistress had been shunned on St Helena; that was a future she could not possibly contemplate for herself.
She was in a worse position than any ‘old maid’ depicted in a Jane Austen novel. An old maid was in a wretched situation, dependent on her family or humiliated as a governess or lady’s companion. But at least an old maid could hope that a rescuer might appear, perhaps a suitor from her past, as Captain Wentworth did for Anne Elliot in Austen’s Persuasion. The only hope that Betsy could have to be courted again respectably was a ‘private separation’, which required Edward Abell’s signature on a deed; there may have been such an attempt but it had failed. Otherwise she could hope for his death. She must have devoutly prayed for that.
So far in her life in Sydney it did not appear that she had met anyone who made the matter an issue. Despite all the dinners, parties, race meetings and balls she attended, there is no indication in the newspapers or in others’ private correspondence that she evinced the slightest interest in any particular man. But perhaps Hyacinthe de Bougainville, who happened to be a bachelor, was different . . .
She would have been horrified by Hyacinthe’s further description of herself in his journal that night: ‘She is twenty-five or thirty years old, perhaps even younger, but is worn out because of ill-health. However, she still has a certain charm and must have been quite a beauty in her day. We talked about Napoleon but it seemed to me that she had fonder memories of M. de Monelon [Montholon]. She stressed several times that she preferred Frenchmen to Englishmen and French customs to English ones. Except for this example of sound judgement, I do not believe that she is very bright.’9
Betsy may have seen Bougainville again two nights later at another ‘splendid Ball and Supper in honour of our distinguished French Visitors’ at Tavern Hill, financed by subscription of the gentlemen of the colony. If so, he did not single her out for comment.10
The next week was a tragic one for Captain Piper. His second son, Hugh, was killed in a riding accident. The French commanders paid a visit to express their condolences to their first and most generous host. ‘The whole family was in mourning.’11
The Frenchmen’s social calendar rapidly filled as other leading families in the colony played host to them. They dined with attorney-general Saxe Bannister, who, the following day, 29 July, took Hyacinthe to see the treadmills in the Sydney penitentiary, which police chief Rossi had boasted were restoring law and order. Hyacinthe found it ‘a sickening spectacle’.12
Two days afterwards, taking what he described as his ‘customary walk from 4 pm to 5.30 pm’ in the Botanical Gardens, Bougainville ‘met the Rosebud of St Helena (Mrs Abel)’, but he said no more about their encounter. At the same time three afternoons later, again in the Gardens, he was in discussion with the colonial botanist Charles Frazer, who promised him some Norfolk pine and casuarina seeds, when again he met up with ‘Mrs Abel’, perhaps not by accident. She apparently told him ‘it is [sic] her sister and not she who was Napoleon’s favourite’.13 This was odd, even bizarre, as Betsy was of course the indisputable favourite. Perhaps she sensed that she had been too boastful on the first night she met Bougainville and was now attempting an ungainly retreat. She was hardly being cool and mysterious.
For almost six weeks Betsy did not see the Frenchmen. Bougainville and Du Camper were entertained out of town, many of their activities reported in the newspapers. They visited the governor at Parramatta and had a more enjoyable time during a week with Sir John Jamison at Regentville, from where they visited other established settlers around the area. They learned the correct procedure on their return from an outing: ‘We fired three shots to warn the lady of the manor of our arrival (the invisible lady who lives with Sir John in a de facto relationship).’14
After all the hospitality they had received, the Frenchmen knew it was their turn. ‘We made preparations on board,’ Hyacinthe wrote in his journal of 24 August, ‘for the official dinner which we are obliged to give.’ On the deck of La Thétis, a long table was set with 25 places. It was an all-male event. The main office-bearers of the colony were all invited, as well as several officers of the garrison and all the French naval officers. Betsy would have heard an account of the dinner from her father.
Bougainville and Du Camper went touring again, this time welcomed at the homes of some of the colony’s most distinguished and self-regarding settlers: John Oxley, John Macarthur (his sons James and William took the Frenchmen on a kangaroo hunt), Archdeacon Scott and the Reverend Samuel Marsden. On his way back to Sydney, Hyacinthe sailed down the Parramatta River ‘alone in a yawl’ to revisit ‘the attractive Blaxland family’.15
Three nights later, on Saturday 10 September, the indomitable Captain Piper, who would long grieve over the death of his son, re-entered the social scene, hosting a ball at Henrietta Villa. Betsy danced again with Bougainville, as did Mrs Harriott Ritchie, one of John Blaxland’s daughters. (Her French mother gave Harriott her unusual first name.) ‘There was a charming small ball,’ Bougainville wrote in his journal, ‘where I danced like a young beau.’ He added that ‘Mrs Ritchie is a beautiful woman with a jealous husband’. His comment about his other dancing partner was unkind: ‘Mrs Abel, formerly Betsy Balcombe, the Rosebud of St Helena, today looks like a large spring-loaded doll.’16
There are two ways of interpreting Bougainville’s response to Betsy. She had always had a fey, giddy element to her behaviour as an adolescent girl on St Helena, in her pranks and laughter, her boisterousness. Perhaps that quality remained in her reaction to a man she found appealing, and her attraction to Bougainville is evident in her flirtatious declaration that she ‘preferred Frenchmen to Englishmen’, in her possibly contrived meetings with him in the Botanical Gardens, and in the invitation she was about to extend. On the other hand, it could simply be that Betsy’s sparkling vivacity, fascinating and even ‘bewitching’ to some men, did not appeal to Bougainville—and she was tall; he may have preferred
a petite, more demure, docile type of woman, such as Mrs Ritchie. Betsy must have noticed his interest in Harriott, but may have convinced herself that her rival was at least six years older,17 and above all was a married woman with a protector, a wealthy husband who had sat glowering all evening.
Betsy took the initiative and invited Bougainville and the French officers, who were planning to sail the following Wednesday, to ‘a small ball’ in farewell on the Tuesday night at the Balcombe house in O’Connell Street. She must have invited them that very evening, along with the Pipers, the Ritchies and the Blaxlands, for even a ‘small ball’ took three days’ planning: having the dance floor cleared and waxed, and arranging for a supper and musicians, although the kind Captain Piper would have loaned his band.
Hyacinthe said little in his journal about the ‘small ball’ at the Balcombes’, but wrote: ‘I found that I was more and more attracted to Mrs Ritchie, perhaps a little too much . . . How I miss her!’ He made the decision that night to delay the departure of his expedition, a frustrating matter for his few hundred seamen, who were refused shore leave unless accompanied by an officer.
Bougainville and Du Camper spent the next few days making social calls to thank their many hosts. On Friday 16 September, their closest friends were invited back to La Thétis for a lunch. Hyacinthe personally escorted Mrs Rossi and Harriott Ritchie, whose husband was not mentioned. The other guests were already on board—the Pipers, the Balcombes and Betsy Abell. Afterwards they all proceeded to Henrietta Villa where, Hyacinthe noted, ‘everyone offered his arm to his lady and went for a stroll in the garden’. They were joined for dinner by Francis Rossi and some of the French officers and midshipmen, and afterwards there was dancing. ‘I wooed the lady in question most assiduously,’ Hyacinthe wrote, ‘despite the jealous husband made rapid progress and fixed a rendez-vous for the next day. How unfortunate it is that we are on the eve of our departure!’18
Betsy and the Emperor Page 40