Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  13 Queen Hortense, Memoirs of Queen Hortense, 320–4.

  14 Louis Joseph Marchand, Mémoires de Marchand, Jean Bourguignon and Henry Lachouque (eds), Paris, Librairie Plon, 1955, Vol. I, 203–5.

  15 Nathaniel Wraxall, Vol. III, 151, quoted in Saul David, Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the making of the Regency, London, Abacus, 1999, 51.

  16 George Home, ‘Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon: Being a Chapter from The Memoirs of an Aristocrat, 1838’, published in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 20.

  17 Quoted in Liverpool Mercury, 4 August 1815; compiled in Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation for Life to St Helena: His treatment and mode of living since his arrival and a description of Mr Balcombe’s estate, The Briars, Napoleon’s residence, London, W. Hone, 1816, 5.

  18 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 17.

  19 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. I, 61n.

  20 Captain F.L. Maitland, Narrative of the Surrender of Buonaparte, and of His Residence on Board HMS Bellerophon, London, Edinburgh, William Blackwood & Sons, 1826.

  21 Maitland, Narrative of the Surrender of Buonaparte, vi–vii.

  CHAPTER 3

  1 Quoted in Christopher Hibbert, George IV Prince of Wales 1762–1811, Newton Abbot, Readers Union, 1973, 156n.

  2 Trevor James, ‘Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt: A brief appraisal’, Dartmoor Magazine, No. 54, Spring 1999, 9.

  3 J. Brooking-Rowe, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt and Princetown, Plymouth, W. Brendon & Son, 1905, 9.

  4 Horace Walpole, quoted in David, Prince of Pleasure, 8.

  5 Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt to William Balcombe, 5 August 1815, Abell, Recollections, 3rd edn, 2. The letter from Tyrwhitt does not appear in the first edition of 1844, but was included in the 3rd edition of 1873 (which was actually the 4th edition).

  6 While the brewery was a reward to Balcombe for his loyalty, Governor Beatson’s intention was that the supply of more beer to the garrison, rather than spirituous liquors and Cape wine, would reduce drunkenness.

  7 Thomas G. Wheeler, Who Lies Here? Napoleon’s last days, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974, 30.

  8 T.H. Brooke, appendix to Clement Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, London, Cassell & Co., 1910, 262.

  9 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 9.

  10 Admiral Keith: George Keith Elphinstone (1746–1823).

  11 Quoted in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 300.

  12 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 5.

  13 Admiral Lord Keith to his daughter Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, 3 August 1815, ‘The Journal and Letters of Admiral Viscount Keith’, in the Earl of Kerry (ed.), The First Napoleon: Some unpublished documents from the Bowood Papers, Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925, 167.

  14 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 5–6.

  15 ‘Authentic Particulars of Bonaparte’, Morning Chronicle, 18 October 1815.

  16 Colonel Muiron was a comrade-in-arms of Napoleon who fell in the Battle of Arcola. In seeking settlement in England, Napoleon may have had in mind the experience of his younger brother Lucien, who from 1810 to 1814 lived as a British prisoner of war under comfortable house arrest at Dinham House, Ludlow, then at Thorngrove near Worcester: see Francis Abell, Prisoners of War in Britain, 1756 to 1815, London, Oxford University Press, 1914, 448.

  17 David, Prince of Pleasure, 429–30.

  18 Admiral Lord Keith, quoted in Vincent Cronin, Napoleon, London, HarperCollins Fontana, 1971, 414.

  19 G.J. Marcus notes in Heart of Oak: A survey of British sea power in the Georgian era, London, Oxford University Press, 1975, 269–70: ‘John Barrow, Second Secretary of the Admiralty, appears to have been chiefly responsible for the decision to send Napoleon to St Helena. “At such a distance and in such a place,” he declared, “all intrigue would be impossible, and being withdrawn so far from the European world, he would very soon be forgotten.”’

  20 Maitland, Narrative of the Surrender of Buonaparte, 1826.

  21 Barry O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile or A Voice from St Helena, London, Jones & Co., [1822], 1827, Vol. 1, 5.

  22 Finlaison to O’Meara, quoted in Norwood Young, Napoleon in Exile: St Helena (1815–1821), London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1915, Vol. I, 77–8, citing Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20231 f.15; Add. 20232, f.245.

  23 Plymouth Telegraph, reprinted in the London Morning Post, 8 August 1815.

  24 Fanny Bertrand’s cousin Henry Augustus (Dillon), 13th Viscount Dillon (1777–1832), succeeded to the peerage in 1813: Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 83.

  25 Hon. W.H. Lyttelton, ‘Some Account of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Coming on Board HMS the Northumberland, August 7 1815’, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 82.

  26 Captain Charles Ross, 26 July 1816, to W.J. Hall of Kingston, Jamaica, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 59.

  27 George Home, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 31.

  28 Count de Las Cases, Mémorial, quoted in Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 247.

  29 Warden, Letters, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 139.

  30 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 11.

  31 Sir George Bingham, ‘Napoleon’s Voyage to St Helena’, in Gareth Glover (ed.), Wellington’s Lieutenant, Napoleon’s Gaoler: The Peninsular letters & St Helena diaries of Sir George Ridout Bingham, Barnsley, Pen & Sword Books, 2005, 257.

  32 Warden, Diary, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 194.

  33 Glover, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 84.

  34 Warden, Letters, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 151–2. Clement Shorter notes: ‘Napoleon did, however, acquire a sufficient knowledge of the English language in a year or so to read it by himself, although he never had any but the most elementary command of the spoken tongue. Las Cases tells us that he had a very bad memory so far as the grammar was concerned . . . The Emperor read much in the Encyclopaedia Britannica apparently without assistance. The article on the Nile in that work seems specially to have interested him.’

  35 Albert Benhamou, Inside Longwood: Barry O’Meara’s clandestine letters, London, Albert Benhamou Publishing, 2012, 11, gives O’Meara’s correct age in 1815 as 29, concurring with the Dictionary of National Biography, which gives the year of his birth as 1786. Some other sources incorrectly state he was 33.

  36 Dr Barry O’Meara, secret letter to Mr Finlaison at the Admiralty, 20 October 1815, quoted in William Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, From the Letters and Journals of the Late Lieut.-Gen. Sir Hudson Lowe, London, John Murray, 1853, Vol. I, 23–4.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 After the Balcombes’ departure in 1818, the upper storey of The Briars was extended right across the ground floor, resulting in a handsome villa with at least six bedrooms.

  2 St Helena Census, 30 September 1814, courtesy of the late Trevor Hearl, St Helena historian.

  3 Trevor Hearl in letter to Anne Whitehead, 3 July 2006.

  4 Betsy (Mrs Abell) did not name the school in her Recollections, but did so to a friend, Fanny Anne Burney, who reported it. See Fanny Anne Burney (Mrs Wood), A Great-Niece’s Journals from 1830 to 1842, London, Constable & Company, 1926, 109. The curriculum at Mrs Clarke’s is described in ‘Mansfield in the News’, Nottingham Journal and Nottingham Review, 1808, July 2 and 30.

  5 Quoted in Dame Mabel Brookes, St Helena Story, London, Heinemann, 1960, 5.

  6 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 30.

  7 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 343.

  8 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 34.

  9 Abell, Recollections, 19–20.

  10 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 34.

  11 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 348.

  12 Napoleon’s interest in this pretty young girl’s education was more solicitous than it had been for the young females of France when he d
esigned a school system for girls, which, because of ‘the weakness of women’s brains, the mobility of their ideas, their destination in the social order’, concentrated on religion to produce not ‘pleasing women but virtuous women’. See Napoleon Bonaparte, Note Sur L’Établissement D’Écouen, quoted in Susan G. Bell and Karen M. Offen, Women, the Family and Freedom: The debate in documents, Vol. I, 1750–1880, Stanford University Press, 1983, 95.

  13 Abell, Recollections, 23–4.

  14 The Balcombes ‘spoke French with difficulty, that language being then much less studied in England than it is at present’: Abell, Recollections, 24–5.

  15 Abell, Recollections, 25–7.

  16 General Gaspard Gourgaud, The St Helena Journal of General Baron Gourgaud, 1815–1818, English edition, London, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1932, 18 October 1815.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 34–5.

  2 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 35–6.

  3 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. I, 246.

  4 Comte de Las Cases’ aristocratic titles cited in Frédéric Masson, Napoleon at St Helena 1815–1821, translated by Louis B. Frewer, New York, Medill McBride Company, 1950, 80.

  5 See Memoirs of Count de Las Cases, London, Henry Colburn, 1818, quoted in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, 7.

  6 Memoirs of Count de Las Cases, quoted in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, 8.

  7 Las Cases, quoted in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 29–30.

  8 William Balcombe to Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, 20 October 1815, Yale-Beinecke Collection, Osborn Shelves FC111-112/23.

  9 Sir George Cockburn to J.W. Croker, Secretary to the Admiralty, 22 October 1815, in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 34.

  10 Sir George Cockburn, quoted in Marcus, Heart of Oak, 270.

  11 Colin Fox, The Bennett Letters: A 19th century family in St Helena, England and the Cape, Gloucester, Choir Press, 2006, 24.

  12 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 13.

  13 According to the St Helena Census of 30 September 1814, the stock Balcombe owned consisted of one bull, six cows, five calves and eight swine: Extracts from the St Helena Records, compiled by Hudson Ralph Janisch, St Helena, 1885.

  14 Abell, Recollections, 32–3.

  15 ‘This piece of silver,’ wrote Marchand, ‘was very elegant, had cost 10,000 francs and was the focus of the Balcombe family’s admiration’: Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 350.

  16 Octave Aubry, St Helena, translated into English by Arthur Livingston, Philadelphia & London, J.B. Lippincott, 1936, 308.

  17 The Bonapartist historian John Holland Rose has observed that this period at The Briars revealed ‘the softer traits of his character, which the dictates of policy had stunted but not eradicated’: John Holland Rose, The Life of Napoleon I, London, G. Bell & Sons, 1935, Vol. II, 499.

  18 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. I, 114–15, refers to Napoleon’s boyhood when he was ‘turbulent, adroit, lively and agile in the extreme. He had gained, he used to say, the most complete ascendancy over his elder brother Joseph’; Philip Dwyer, Napoleon: The path to power 1769–1799, London, Bloomsbury, 2007, 11, quotes a letter by Napoleon in September 1786 in which he looked forward to returning to Corsica, ‘seeing my compatriots and my relatives . . . Tender sensations that the memory of my childhood allows me to experience . . .’

  19 Dwyer, Napoleon, 422.

  20 ‘Ship News: Dover, September 29’, Morning Chronicle, 1 October 1801.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 Brookes, St Helena Story, 291.

  2 Information from the late Trevor Hearl in letter to Anne Whitehead, 3 July 2006.

  3 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 36.

  4 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 13–14.

  5 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 37.

  6 Comte de Las Cases, from Mémorial, 24 October 1815, quoted in John S.C. Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, London, Ward, Lock & Co., 1850, 555.

  7 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 37.

  8 Brooke, A History of St Helena, 388.

  9 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 37.

  10 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 12–13.

  11 Quoted in Fox, The Bennett Letters, 24; The Times, 8 January 1816.

  12 Quarterly Review, Vol. 14, No. 27, October 1815 and January 1816, 91; reprinted in The Times, 18 April 1816.

  13 Abell, Recollections, 41.

  14 Abell, Recollections, 56, 167.

  15 Las Cases, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 115–16.

  16 Napoleon quoted in Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 114.

  17 Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery; British prime minister under Queen Victoria (March 1894 – June 1895). He described himself as an ‘intelligent admirer of Napoleon’ in his Napoleon: The last phase, London, Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1900, 133–4.

  18 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 14; reprinted in The Times, 17 January 1816.

  19 Trevor W. Hearl, ‘Puzzling Partners in Prestbury Churchyard II—Catherine’s Encounters with Napoleon’, Prestbury Churchyard News, March 2004.

  20 Catherine Younghusband to her aunt, Lady Roche, 4 November 1815, ‘Letters from St Helena’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 262, August 1947, 144–5.

  21 Abell, Recollections, 31–2.

  22 Felix Markham, The Bonapartes, NY, Taplinger Publishing, 1975, 14.

  23 ‘Napoleon and the Balcombe sisters on St Helena, as visualised in a French lithograph of the period’ is reproduced in Anthony Masters, Napoleon, Longman, Burnt Mill, Harlow, Essex, 1981, 64. (This is almost certainly by Marchand, as a sketch of Napoleon in the same style is signed ‘Marchand’.)

  24 The suggestion that Catherine Younghusband was the artist is proposed by Honorary Consul Michel Dancoisne-Martineau in his blog: under Biographies/The Family Skelton.

  25 The G.W. Melliss photograph of Betsy (Mrs Abell) in 1857 is reproduced in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 19.

  26 Thanks to Keith and Shirley Murley, volunteers at The Briars museum, Mt Martha, Victoria, whose research found the Alfred Tidey painting The Music Party.

  27 Admiral Cockburn to J.W. Croker at the Admiralty, 22 October 1815, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 120.

  28 See Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 91.

  29 Abell, Recollections, 34–5.

  30 Abell, Recollections, 36.

  31 Abell, Recollections, 36–8.

  32 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 14; reprinted in The Times, 17 January 1816.

  CHAPTER 7

  1 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 49.

  2 In 1815 Napoleon Bertrand was aged seven, Hortense five and Henri three.

  3 Steven Laurence Delvaux, PhD Thesis, ‘Witness to Glory: Lieutenant-Général Henri-Gatien Bertrand, 1791–1815’, Department of History, Florida State University College of Arts and Sciences, 2005, 405; citing Maitland, Narrative of the Surrender of Buonaparte, 140.

  4 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 132.

  5 Abell, Recollections, 80.

  6 B. De Gaissart, ‘La naissance, le mariage et la mort de Fanny Dillon, Comtesse Bertrand’, Revue du Nord, No. 193, April–June 1967, 333.

  7 Henry, 11th Viscount Dillon (1705–1787); Honourable General Arthur Dillon, Henry’s second son (1750–1794): H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

  8 De Gaissart, ‘La naissance, le mariage et la mort de Fanny Dillon, Comtesse Bertrand’, 334, notes that Laure was the ‘widow of Francois Alexandre Le Vassor de la Touche Longpré’, so she was known as Madame de Longpré; she was also a former mistress of Josephine’s philandering husband Alexandre de Beauharnais.

  9 Andrew O’Reilly, Reminiscences of an Emigrant Milesian: The Irish abroad and at home, 3 vols, London, Richard Bentley, 1853, Vol. II, 86–7.

/>   10 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 50.

  11 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 49.

  12 De Gaissart, ‘La naissance, le mariage et la mort de Fanny Dillon, Comtesse Bertrand’, 335.

  13 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 51.

  14 De Gaissart, ‘La naissance, le mariage et la mort de Fanny Dillon, Comtesse Bertrand’, 336.

  15 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 50.

  16 Abell, Recollections, 82.

  17 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 57–71.

  18 Gourgaud, Journal, 21 October 1815.

  19 Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 235.

  20 Abell, Recollections, 83–4.

  21 Abell, Recollections, 80–1.

  22 Abell, Recollections, 89, 181.

  23 The Commentaries of the Great Afonso D’Albuquerque, Hakluyt Society, quoted in Philip Gosse, St Helena 1502–1938, [London, Cassell, 1938], Oswestry, Anthony Nelson, 1990, 5.

  24 Gaspar Corrêa, Portuguese historian c.1496–1563, Secretary to Afonso D’Albuquerque and author of Lendas da India (Legends of India). His account of Lopez, ‘The Earliest Exile of St Helena’, translated by Hugh Clifford, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 173, quoted in Gosse, St Helena 1502–1938, 5.

  25 Abell, Recollections, 181–3.

  CHAPTER 8

  1 In 2006, the French honorary consul Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, who controlled the ‘French domains’, including the land of the ‘heart-shaped waterfall’ valley, donated it to the St Helena National Trust. An accessible path for tourists to the waterfall has been developed.

  2 High Knoll fort, described by building archaeologist Ben Jeffs, a consultant to the St Helena National Trust, on St Helena government website: .

  3 Gordon Chancellor and John van Wyhe (eds), Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 13 July 1836.

  4 Abell, Recollections, 77–8.

  5 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 355.

  6 Abell, Recollections, 199.

  7 Abell, Recollections, 200.

  8 Brookes, St Helena Story, 292.

  9 Abell, Recollections, 201.

  10 Abell, Recollections, 44.