Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  11 Colonel Bingham inspected Napoleon’s sword on the Northumberland and confirms this description: Glover (ed.), Wellington’s Lieutenant, Napoleon’s Gaoler, 257.

  12 Abell, Recollections, 39.

  13 Courrier de Mannheim, 1 November 1816, quoted in footnote to French edition of Mrs Abell’s Recollections—Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène: Souvenirs de Betzy Balcombe, Traduction annotée et précédée d’une Introduction par Aimé Le Gras, Paris, Librairie Plon, 1898, 48–9. Reference thanks to Tom Molomby SC.

  14 Baron von Stürmer, Despatch No. 10 to Prince Metternich, 4 July 1817, Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène, Rapports Officiels du Baron Sturmer, ed. Jacques St Cere et H. Schlitter, Paris, La Librairie Illustrée, 84.

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

  16 Gourgaud, Journal, 3 November 1815.

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

  18 Abell, Recollections, 28.

  19 Quoted in ‘Letters from the Cape’, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, 85.

  20 Cronin, Napoleon, 233, noted that Napoleon ‘invariably cheated at games’.

  21 Abell, Recollections, 50–1.

  22 Thomas Brooke, letter, 3 January 1816 in appendix to Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, 264.

  23 Catherine Younghusband to her aunt, Lady Roche, 8 December 1815, ‘Letters from St Helena’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 262, August 1947, 147.

  24 Lieutenant W. Innes Pocock RN, Five Views of the Island of St Helena from Drawings taken on the Spot, to which is added A Concise Account of the Island, London, S. & J. Fuller, 1815, 10.

  25 Miss Knipe was a pretty farmer’s daughter known by the French as La Bouton de Rose or ‘Rosebud’.

  26 Gourgaud, quoted in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 129.

  27 H.E. Busteed, Echoes from Old Calcutta, London, Calcutta and Simla, W. Thacker & Co, 1908, 144.

  28 Abell, Recollections, 153.

  29 Recollection of Major Hodson in appendix to Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, 266.

  CHAPTER 9

  1 This is an abbreviated version of a poster for a slave auction held on St Helena as late as 18 May 1829. Slavery was to be eliminated under a graduated system introduced in 1818, but actually continued until 1838, when the condition of slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire.

  2 O’Meara, cited in Fox, The Bennet Letters, 25.

  3 Gourgaud, Journal, 30 October 1815.

  4 Arnold Chaplin, Napoleon’s Captivity on St Helena 1815–1821, [first published as St Helena Who’s Who, 1919], London, Savannah Publications, 2002, 142, gives the date as 10 November 1815.

  5 Las Cases, Mémorial, quoted in Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 558.

  6 On 20 May 1802 Napoleon reintroduced slavery into the French colonies, although it had been abolished during the French revolution. On 8 June 1802, French troops under order from Bonaparte seized the Haitian leader and revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture and sent him to prison at Fort de Joux. On 2 August 1802 Napoleon was confirmed as First Consul.

  7 General Count Montholon, Récits de la Captivité de l’Empereur Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène, Paulin, Paris, 1847. English translation: History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Philadelphia, Carey & Hart, 1847, Vol. I, 79.

  8 Napoleon dictating his memoirs on St Helena, quoted by David Brion Davis, ‘He changed the New World’, New York Review of Books, Vol. 54, No. 9, 31 May 2007, 54–8.

  9 See D.K. Basset, ‘Great Britain in the Indian Ocean’, Historical Studies, Vol. 14, No. 53, October 1969, 80–4.

  10 Anon. (Francis Duncan), A Description of the Island of St Helena, London, Phillips, 1805, 8.

  11 Gosse, St Helena 1502–1938, 81.

  12 Oswell Blakeston (pseudonym of Henry Joseph Hasslacher, 1907–1985), Isle of St Helena, quoted by Tony Weaver in St Helena National Trust, St Helena, 500 Years of History, 2002, 6.

  13 St Helena Census of 1817, St Helena Archives.

  14 Abell, Recollections, 58, 166.

  15 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 68–9; see also Las Cases, Mémorial, 29 November 1815 and O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 18.

  16 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 78.

  17 Bingham, letter to his wife Emma, 30 November 1815, Glover (ed.), Wellington’s Lieutenant, Napoleon’s Gaoler, 261–2.

  18 Catherine Younghusband to her aunt, Lady Roche, 8 December 1815, ‘Letters from St Helena’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 262, August 1947, 147.

  19 Abell, Recollections, 89.

  20 Abell, Recollections, 97.

  21 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 40.

  22 Gourgaud, Journal, 1 December 1815.

  23 Bingham, letter to his wife Emma, 6 December 1815, Glover (ed.), Wellington’s Lieutenant, Napoleon’s Gaoler, 262–3.

  24 Catherine Younghusband to her aunt, Lady Roche, 4 November 1815, ‘Letters from St Helena’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 262, August 1947, 145.

  25 Gourgaud, Journal, 2 December 1815.

  26 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 50.

  27 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 50.

  28 Abell, Recollections, 93.

  CHAPTER 10

  1 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 17.

  2 William Burchell was later to earn fame as a pioneering naturalist for his great collecting expeditions in southern Africa and Brazil. His Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa was published to acclaim in 1822.

  3 Noted by William John Burchell in his ‘St Helena Journal’, 6 July 1808, St Helena Archives (copy of original of ‘St Helena Journal’ in Hope Collection, Oxford University Museum of Natural History).

  4 ‘William Tomset Balcombe: Born: 25 December 1777 Rottingdean, Sussex; Christened: 28 December 1777 Rottingdean, Sussex; Father: Stephen Balcombe, Mother: Mary née Vandyke’: according to East India Company Navy ‘Certificates of age & baptism’ [L/MAR/C/699] No. 762 on reverse, 1020 on front, from naval researcher Stephen T.J. Wright, commissioned by Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha, Victoria. Christening details from International Genealogical Index (IGI). The 1777 birth date conforms with information on William Balcombe’s death certificate that he was 51 years old when he died on 19 March 1829. St Margaret’s Church records, Rottingdean, note the marriage of William’s parents, Stephen Balcombe to Mary Vandyke on 27 May 1777, which would indicate that Mary was two months pregnant with William at the time of the wedding. They had three children—William, Stephen, and Thomas, who died in infancy in 1784. Mary Vandyke was born at Lewes in 1757.

  5 George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales, was born on 12 August 1762.

  6 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 10, 188.

  7 Harry Edgington, Prince Regent: The scandalous private life of George IV, Feltham, Middlesex, Hamlyn Paperbacks, 1979, 17; another sexual partner of the fifteen-year-old prince was said to be ‘the robust wife of one of the Court grooms’: Christopher Hibbert, George IV, Prince of Wales 1762–1811, Newton Abbot, Readers Union, 1973, 11–12, citing Papendiek Journals, Mrs Vernon (ed.), Delves Broughton, 1887, Vol. I, 91.

  8 Brighthelmstone was not officially renamed Brighton until 1810. It is well documented that the prince did not meet Maria Fitzherbert, his long-term mistress, until 1784. (They married a year later in a ceremony that was not formally recognised because of her Roman Catholic faith.) Nor could William Balcombe’s mother have been the prince’s previous mistress, the actress Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson, because she was not pursued by her royal beau until the London theatre season of 1779.

  9 Andy Durr, ‘The making of a fishing museum’, History Workshop Journal, No. 40, 1995, 229–32; Anne Whitehead, correspondence with Brighton Fishing Museum and with historian Andy Durr, July 2009.

  10 Brookes, St Helena Story, 5. There
is a difficulty with Dame Mabel’s suggestion that William had an elder brother, Robert, who became equerry to the Prince Regent, as his sole surviving brother was three years younger, and became a London businessman. IGI records show sons of Stephen Balcombe and Mary (née Vandyke) of Rottingdean as William, christened 28 December 1777, and Stephen, christened 21 May 1780. No Robert Balcombe could be located in army or court lists. A John Balcomb of the First King’s Regiment of Dragoon Guards joined the army in about 1787. He was of sufficient rank in 1803 possibly to have been equerry to the prince, but he disappeared, at the rank of major, from army lists after 1805, perhaps indicating that he was killed in the French wars. He seemed too old to have been the stated brother of William. Despite the different spelling of the surname, perhaps this man was a cousin. Information from Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha.

  11 Laurian d’Harcourt, Rottingdean: The village, Brighton, UK, DD Publishing, 2001.

  12 The Prince of Wales was generous in compensating for accidents in which he had a part. Workers injured in an accident during the construction of the Brighton Pavilion were compensated: Morning Herald, Brighton, 3 July 1787. Even when he was in no way responsible, such as when a boxer called Earl dropped dead in the ring during a match at Brighton, the prince settled an annuity on Mrs Earl and family: John Ashton, Florizel’s Folly, London, Chatto & Windus, 1899, 115.

  13 The boating accident story is in Burchell, ‘St Helena Journal’, 6 July 1808; Sir Hudson Lowe to Lord Bathurst, 24 February 1818, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20121 f.230; Brookes, St Helena Story, 5—Dame Mabel may have obtained the information from the Lowe Papers rather than family legend.

  14 Percy Fitzgerald, The Life of George the Fourth, London, Tinsley Brothers, 1881, 641.

  15 David, Prince of Pleasure, 113–14.

  16 Information from Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha, and Jane Jones.

  17 On 25 December 1788, Mary Balcombe née Vandyke married Charles Terry, a tailor. The family moved to a Tudor cottage in Rottingdean, next to the whipping post where wrongdoers were flogged.

  18 India Office Records L/MAR/C/657 ‘Descriptions of Officers’ Service 1798–1801’, 140, lists William Balcombe, 22 years of age, having ‘used the sea 8 years’. It is noted that he spent two years and six months as a Royal Navy midshipman, one ten-month voyage to the West Indies on the Phoenix as midshipman, and two voyages on the Phoenix to Bengal, one of one year and two months as fifth mate, and the other of one year and seven months as acting fourth mate. This rendered his service as six years and one month—but Balcombe ‘used the sea 8 years’. The unaccounted period of one year and eleven months was spent in the navy as a ‘Captain’s servant’, an officially unlisted position.

  19 Correspondence from the Royal Archives to Caroline Gaden, wife of a Balcombe descendant (through the Thomas T. Balcombe line). Note that neither William Balcombe nor his brother Stephen make an appearance in the eight volumes of the prince’s collected letters, nor in the three volumes of his correspondence as George IV: A. Aspinall (ed.), The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770–1812, 8 vols, London, Cassell, 1971; The Letters of King George IV 1812–1830, 3 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1938; David Hilliam, in Kings, Queens, Bones and Bastards, Phoenix Mill, Sutton Publishing, 1998, 229, observed: ‘Unlike Charles II . . . George had very few bastards. Two illegitimate sons were privately acknowledged, and it is possible that he had four other children, but they were never given prominence or titles.’ (Reference courtesy of Shirley Joy.)

  20 Quoted in Hibbert, George IV: Prince of Wales 1762–1811, 156.

  21 He was the son of the Reverend Edmund Tyrwhitt, rector of Wickham Bishops, Essex.

  22 Baron Stürmer, Despatch No. 10 to Prince Metternich, 4 July 1817, Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène, Rapports Officiels du Baron Stürmer, 84; Queen Victoria’s prime minister, Lord Rosebery, in his Napoleon: The last phase, 209, repeated it: ‘the traditions of the island declared him to be a son of George IV’; the rumour is repeated in Aimé Le Gras’s introduction to the 1898 French edition of Mrs Abell’s Recollections, Napoléon à Sainte-Hèléne, v, in which Balcombe is described as ‘un honorable fonctionnaire de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales, que l’on disait fils naturel du Régent’. Lord Rosebery had an incorrect theory about William Balcombe’s parentage, Napoleon: The last phase, 180: ‘Mr. Balcombe was a sort of general purveyor, sometimes called by courtesy a banker; and the traditions of the island declared him to be a son of George IV. As a matter of fact, his father was the landlord of the New Ship Inn at Brighton.’ Not so.

  23 Germaine de Staël, quoted in Paul Johnson, Napoleon: A life, London, Penguin Books, 2002, 119.

  24 Count de Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, 80.

  25 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 19–22.

  26 Sir George Cockburn to Comte de Montholon, 22 December 1815, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 183.

  27 Desmond Gregory, Napoleon’s Jailer, Lt. Gen. Sir Hudson Lowe: A life, London, Associated University Presses, 1996, 17–114, for pre-St Helena career, in particular p. 119.

  28 Gregory, Napoleon’s Jailer, 122, quoting Military Surgeon Walter Henry; see also Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 219.

  29 Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt to Sir Hudson Lowe, 8 December 1815, Yale University, Beinecke Collection, Osborn Shelves FC111-112/24.

  30 In 1816, Samuel Brown (1776–1852), who had retired from the navy, took out a patent for wrought-iron chain making and in 1817 the first chain-supported suspension bridge was built, followed by many constructions, including notably the Union Chain Bridge across the River Tweed and the Chain Pier at Brighton. In 1838 he was knighted by Queen Victoria.

  31 Gourgaud, Journal, 1 January 1816.

  32 Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 561.

  33 Gourgaud, Journal, 18 January 1816.

  34 Abell, Recollections, 99.

  35 Abell, Recollections, 102.

  36 Napoleon to Las Cases, quoted in Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 254.

  37 Count de Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. I, 61n.

  38 Gourgaud, Journal, 30 December 1815.

  39 Lowe Papers, BL Add. MSS 20,114, f.253; see also G.L. de St M. Watson (ed.), A Polish Exile with Napoleon, London and New York, Harper & Brothers, 1912, 177n, for description of this carriage, which in May 1821 became Napoleon’s funeral car.

  40 Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 561.

  41 Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 190.

  42 Gourgaud, Journal, 6 January 1816.

  43 Abell, Recollections, 62–3.

  44 Las Cases, quoted in J.M. Thompson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, [1952] 1988, 392.

  45 Gourgaud, Journal, 28 January 1816.

  46 Mrs Abell, writing 30 years later, placed the game at The Briars, but Gourgaud, writing at the time, placed it at Longwood on 24 February 1816.

  47 Abell, Recollections, 72–5.

  48 Las Cases, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 177, 194.

  49 Napoleon in letter to Las Cases, 8 March 1816 in Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, 73.

  50 Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 194–5.

  51 See Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 198.

  52 See Ralph Korngold, The Last Years of Napoleon: His captivity on St Helena, London, Victor Gollancz, 1960, 274: ‘Gourgaud was to say to Sturmer: “Everybody knows that the Princess of Wales has for him an almost fanatical admiration. He hoped that when her daughter mounted the throne, she would take advantage of the influence she has over her to have him taken to England. ‘Once there’ said he ‘I am saved.’”’

  53 St Helena Archives and Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20115 ff.124–5.

  54 Gourgaud, Journal, 19 February 1816.

  CHAPTER 11

  1 The Times, 4 December 2008.

  2 R.C. Seaton (Robert Cooper), Sir Hudson Lowe and Napoleon, London, David Nutt, 1898, 215, quoting Prime Minister Lord Liverpool to Lowe at time of St Helena appointment.

&
nbsp; 3 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, Part 8, 48, cited in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 132–3.

  4 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 75.

  5 O’Meara to Finlaison, cited in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 145.

  6 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 76.

  7 Lowe to Sir Henry Bunbury, Under-Secretary of State, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 142–3.

  8 Napoleon was born on 15 August 1769, Sir Hudson Lowe just over a fortnight earlier, 28 July 1769. Lowe’s father was a British army surgeon, his mother an Irishwoman from Galway: see Gregory, Napoleon’s Jailer, 17–19.

  9 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 71.

  10 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 135.

  11 Napoleon, quoted in Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 564.

  12 O’Meara to Finlaison, including French translation, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 147.

  13 O’Meara to Finlaison, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 149.

  14 O’Meara to Finlaison, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 148.

  15 It was not until 23 January 1818 that Bathurst informed Lowe that O’Meara’s correspondence with Finlaison was sighted at the Admiralty: see Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 540.

  16 Gourgaud, Journal, 19 April 1816.

  17 Wilks, Colonel Wilks and Napoleon, 26.

  18 Wilks, Colonel Wilks and Napoleon, 28–35.

  19 Abell, Recollections, 53.

  20 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 210.

  21 Lowe, despatch to Secretary of State Lord Bathurst, 30 April 1816, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 158–62.

  22 Quoted in Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 261.

  23 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 26–8.

  24 Gourgaud, Journal, 5 May 1816.

  25 Général Bertrand, Cahiers de Sainte-Hélène, Journal 1816–1817, Paul Fleuriot de Langle (ed.), Paris, Editions Sulliver, 5 May 1816.