In America, a different plague seemed to be spreading, and the entire national economy appeared to be in chaos. The nation’s president, Andrew Jackson, had done battle with the Bank of the United States and had won: he vetoed the renewal of a charter for this financial institution, created by Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s. But in slaying what he called the dragon of economic privilege, he unleashed economic instability, panic, and depression. William Patterson used the economic crisis as an occasion to reprimand his daughter. “We are in great confusion and distress in this country,” he told her, adding that “there is no saying how it may end, or that it may not ultimately bring about a revolution. Your presence here is absolutely necessary to look after your affairs and property, and the sooner the better.” For once, Betsy decided her father was right.
The America she was returning to had, like Europe, experienced a surge of democratic reform. In a land whose credo was now more solidly egalitarian and whose feminine ideal was more firmly domestic, Betsy’s aristocratic tastes would continue to alienate neighbors and family. She knew she had no choice but to return to Baltimore and manage her property there, yet she could not accept now, any more than she could in the past, her father’s conviction that “sweet home and the natural intercourse and connexion with our family is, after all, the only chance for happiness in this world.”
By 1834, Betsy had felt the winds of change on both continents. But perhaps the change that shook her most deeply was an intimate one: her father had grown old. In a letter in August 1833, Nancy Spear had warned Betsy what to expect: “Your Father is excessively old & miserably infirm.” But the shock of seeing the man who had so dominated her life for what he now was—lonely and feeble—must have been great. A decade before, the Patterson patriarch had found himself in a house empty except for a mistress. To remedy his loneliness, he had brought his son Henry to live with him. But it was his attachment to Betsy, expressed as always in a potent mix of criticism and disapproval, that remained his most intense emotional connection. Now in old age, he revealed to Nancy Spear the longing that lay beneath the surface of that criticism. “He frequently talks of you to me & of your leaving him,” she told Betsy. It was time, she continued, to heal the breach. “I wish most ardently you would forgive him for your own sake as well as his, for he is almost childish.”
William’s recent letters to his daughter revealed the twisted expression of this need. “How could you have neglected the duty of writing for so long a time,” he wrote in perverse welcome to the news that his daughter was returning home. This reprimand was followed by the surprising confession that “it still affords me much pleasure to have heard from you at length.”
Betsy’s relationship with her father was not the only emotional Gordian knot she faced. She had not seen her only child since they said their goodbyes in 1825. Now in 1834, Bo was not only a husband but also the father of a four-year-old boy. Betsy could not forgive his marriage, and she could not accept Susan May Williams into her family, yet she found herself drawn to her grandson, the third male in her life to carry the name Jerome Bonaparte. As this Jerome grew older, he would find many of her old dreams of greatness rewoven around him as they had once been woven around his father.
In the winter of 1835, the long war—and its brief, fragile truce—between Betsy and her father at last ended. William Patterson died that February, leaving behind a will that testified to his enduring anger at a daughter who would not accede to his wishes, heed his advice, or lead a life he could approve. When the will was published in the local newspaper, his condemnation of Betsy became a matter of public record. Despite his promise in her marriage contract of 1803, she would not receive an equal share of his estate. “The conduct of my daughter Betsey has through life been so disobedient that in no instance has she ever consulted my opinions or feelings; indeed, she has caused me more anxiety and trouble than all my other children put together, and her folly and misconduct have occasioned me a train of expense that first and last has cost me much money. Under such circumstances it would not be reasonable, just, or proper that she should inherit and participate in an equal proportion with my other children in an equal division of my estate.” Insult was then added to injury, for William announced a willingness to temper justice with mercy: “Considering, however, the weakness of human nature, and that she is still my daughter,” he had chosen not to entirely exclude her from a share in his property.
Had William failed to revise his will in that last year, when Betsy had come home to him? Would he have removed its condemnation and punishment had death not come upon him so soon after his daughter’s return? No one will ever know. But Betsy’s resentment and hurt could still be felt years later when she wrote: “The clause in his will which relates to myself plainly betrays the embarrassment of a loaded conscience, & of a bad cause.” Her anger was as enduring as his, her condemnation as complete: “He had violated every principle of honour & of equity to make a ruin of my ambition, of my hopes & of my happiness. & it has ever been a principle in human nature that men cannot forgive those to whom they have been guilty of great cruelty, perfidy & injustice.” In her mind, William’s animosity toward her was a companion sin to his contemptuous infidelity to her mother: “The grave of my Mother had never interposed a barrier between herself & this malignant & relentless hatred with which he had pursued her from the day of her fatal marriage to him.” With this will, he had meted out his vengeance from the grave, hoping to drown Betsy’s defense of herself—not as he had done with his wife, through a demand for feminine submission, but with his “falsehood, persecution, injustice & calumny.” Still, Betsy felt a sense of triumph, for, in their battle of wills, she had always been his equal. “He had flattered himself,” she wrote, “that his firmness of purpose & his cunning could defraud Death of the right to freeze that torrent of injuries & of misfortunes of which he my father had been to me the first, the copious & the unfailing Source,” yet he had defeated neither death nor Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte.
Betsy may have privately shed tears over the loss of her father. She surely shed them over the humiliation he had meted out to her. But tears would not wash away the injustice she had suffered. To do that, she must contest the will, and this, she knew, would require that she take legal action. She went looking for a lawyer. In the end, she decided on not one but three: two who represented one of Philadelphia’s premier firms dealing with contested wills, and one, Roger B. Taney, who was about to become the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Betsy did not go to these men as a helpless female, eager to place her fate in their more capable hands. She came to them prepared with the materials she believed they would need to win her an equal share of William’s estate. She brought the 1803 marriage agreement that her father had signed, with its promise that she would receive a share equal to her siblings’ of her father’s property. She alerted them to her mother’s verbal deathbed will, which bequeathed funds to Betsy and which her father had ignored. She composed a list of questions for each of them, hoping to guide the direction of their arguments. This preparation focused on the past; the present proved more complicated.
At William’s death, six of his children remained living, Betsy and five of her brothers. One of these men, John Patterson, had as much reason to be as indignant as Betsy, for he was scarcely mentioned in his father’s will. William had given John property in Virginia several decades before and apparently felt his parental obligation to this son had been fulfilled. All John could now expect was some household furnishings—and a fifth share of William’s wine cellar. Joseph, Edward, George, and Henry, on the other hand, received city real estate, businesses, warehouses, and wharves, shares in their father’s ships, and bank and other company stock. They were heirs as well to William’s country estates and to the slaves who labored there. Betsy’s own son, Bo, had been generously provided for through bank stock, Baltimore real estate, and one of the country estates, Pleasant View.
Bo, always ready to enjoy
wealth that he did not earn himself, resented that his share of William’s estate was smaller than his uncles’. His dissatisfaction made him Betsy’s firm ally in her efforts to challenge the will. For as his mother’s direct heir, Bo had a stake in the outcome of her lawsuit. His marriage to Susan May Williams had driven a wedge between mother and son; his eagerness to secure future wealth now united them.
The biggest hurdle facing mother and son was the penalty clause William had inserted in his will. Hoping no doubt to prevent the very actions Betsy had now set in motion, William wrote: “Should any of my heirs be so far dissatisfied and unreasonable as to attempt to break and undo this my Will,” that person would forfeit everything. To ensure that the remaining heirs would not provide support to the challenger, William declared that the forfeited property would be divided equally among his more obedient legatees.
Was the penalty clause enforceable? Betsy’s lawyers assured her it was not. Was William Patterson of “sound mind” when the will was signed? They thought not. The distribution of the estate, they declared, was so arbitrary, the document itself so unusual, that they suspected it was the work of a deranged mind. And yet … they conceded that a challenge to the will would be unlikely to succeed. The 1803 wedding contract, on the other hand, was just that, a contract, and it could be enforced. The problem was that Betsy and Bo could not expect to collect what was promised to them in the marriage contract and what was bequeathed to them in the will. They had to choose one or the other. Determining which was more advantageous was no simple task, however. Myriad questions remained unanswered: What, exactly, was the value of each of the properties William owned? What was the value of the stocks and bank shares? Were the properties and stocks bequeathed to Betsy and Bo worth more than the one-third of his 1803 estate promised to her in the marriage contract? The best course of action, the lawyers concluded, was to petition the court of equity for a complete accounting of the entire estate and its value.
Unfortunately, pursuing this best course of action would make it impossible for Betsy or Bo to touch the property and wealth granted to them by the will until the accounting process was finished. This dilemma spawned a new dilemma: If the two did not work in tandem, what would be the consequences? If, for instance, Bo decided to file in the court of equity but Betsy chose to accept the terms of the will, what would be the legal consequences?
Whatever decisions she and Bo made, they would not be made in a vacuum. While her lawyers were busy drafting their opinions, her brothers were busy mounting a counteroffensive.
They had found William’s copy of the marriage contract and had enlisted Nancy Spear, long Betsy’s confidante and one of her financial advisers, to discover if Betsy too had a copy of the contract. If she did not, they had every intention of keeping her in the dark about the copy they had discovered. Betsy was no fool, however; she quickly realized what they were up to—and refused to reveal that she not only had a copy but had shared it with her lawyers. The brothers then tried a new tack. Perhaps they could find evidence in Betsy’s correspondence that would justify William’s depiction of her as a willful, troublesome, and undeserving child. Once again they turned to Nancy Spear, who proved more than eager to help out: she sold all the letters that Betsy had written her to Joseph and Edward.
Betsy was more hurt than frightened by the attempt to use her letters as a weapon against her. She had saved Nancy’s letters too, after all, and among them was a “graphic description, written by her, of the Introduction and expulsion of Matilda Somers,” William Patterson’s illegitimate child by one of his many mistresses. She warned her brothers that she would make this letter public if they attempted to use any of her correspondence against her.
The matter ended here, but its consequences were felt for years to come. The close relationship between Edward Patterson and Betsy was shattered, for he had been a party to the purchase of her letters. “Edward loved me,” Betsy wrote, “until the bad old man’s will killed his affection.” As for Joseph, there could be no reconciliation. He and Edward had “menaced” her with the publication of her letters. A new distance also developed between Betsy and her brother George, who had earlier won her respect by turning over his share of their mother’s property to Betsy. But he had refused to support her in the controversy over William’s estate. And Betsy and Nancy Spear never spoke again. In a letter to George, Betsy explained why there could be no reconciliation. “Having told many Persons that the Will was perfectly, admirably just,” Nancy had forfeited her claim on Betsy’s friendship. “Respectful Neutrality & Becoming silence on her part, were imperiously commanded by Good Sense (in Default of Gratitude) for the long continued & innumerable obligations, which the world has, with perfect truth, considered her to lie under to me.” Soon after, in a scathing poem, Betsy poured out her feelings about her friend’s betrayal, condemning her “Quaint Companion, / Whose viper tongue did ever gore / The friendly hand it fed on.” Long after Nancy’s death in 1836, that betrayal still burned brightly in Betsy’s memory.
Perhaps most painful to Betsy, however, was the toll that the long, drawn-out legal process took on her relationship with Bo. Their alliance had held the promise of rapprochement between mother and son, but as the matter dragged on, an icy formality on Bo’s part returned. Her son continued to send her reports from meetings with the Philadelphia lawyers, yet as Betsy sadly noted, “He never says ‘Dear Mama’ any more. He doesn’t end with anything.”
In the end, Betsy abandoned her legal struggle. She accepted the terms of her father’s will, acknowledging that, with careful management, she would have enough income to live comfortably for the rest of her life. But where she would live out that life remained uncertain. Her distaste for Baltimore and the loss of her small circle of friends like Edward and Nancy Spear made her long to escape once again to Europe. She had once written that “no one who has lived long in Europe can ever be happy out of it.” Happiness, she conceded, might not be possible anywhere, but in France or Switzerland or Italy “there are more ways … of forgetting one’s misfortunes than can be found in America.” By the summer of 1839, the wish to forget her misfortunes prompted Betsy to set sail across the Atlantic once again.
Chapter Fourteen
“My Birth Is Legitimate”
Betsy went to Paris to forget her misfortunes, but this time Europe proved no antidote. Here, in the City of Light, she felt the same weariness that had burdened her in Baltimore, and she feared that “melancholy and regrets have become a chronic disease from which I can never recover.” Writing to her friend Sydney Morgan, she admitted that her two months in Paris had “passed very dully,” for “death, time and absence have left me scarcely an acquaintance at Paris.” Friends like David Warden who did remain had grown old. He was, she told Sydney, “unchanged in kind feelings, but, poor man, time has dealt hard with his exterior; he looks as if he had begun to exist a century ago.” In this respect, Warden was not alone; Betsy believed that she too had been worn down by time. She was fifty-five, and she had, she told Sydney, “grown fat, old and dull, all good reasons for people not to think me an intelligent hearer or listener.”
Bo too had come to Europe, but not to escape his life in Baltimore—he was headed to Italy to see the Bonapartes. It was far from a social visit: despite all the extravagant promises his father’s family had once made to Betsy and her son, little fortune had come to him from them. But Cardinal Fesch, Madame Mère’s brother, had not forgotten him. On his death, the cardinal had left his grandnephew a small legacy, and Bo now hurried to collect it. Betsy no doubt envied her son, for she too would have preferred to make Italy her destination. If she could live anywhere, she told Sydney, it would be Florence. But this was not possible, for “there lives there one individual whom I wish not to meet again.” She no longer cared if Jérôme had been the willing or the “unreflecting cause” of spoiling what she still considered her true destiny—a lawful place within the Bonaparte family during Napoleon’s reign—but she wished to avoid
any possibility of encountering her former husband. There was nothing for her to do, she knew, but go home once again.
Home, for Betsy, might have meant Baltimore, but it did not mean the house in which she had grown up, even though William had bequeathed it to her. She had spent much of her adult life in boardinghouses, rented apartments, and guest quarters in other peoples’ homes and villas. She had never set up housekeeping herself, and she had felt no desire to do so now. Instead, she moved into a boardinghouse on Lexington Street.
Here her life took on a pattern: she spent her summers at Rockaway Beach, a resort near New York City frequented by European diplomats and sophisticated urban dwellers eager to escape the heat; she spent winters in Baltimore; and she made an occasional visit to a spa in Virginia. Her companion on many of her summers at the beach was her grandson. Although Betsy never warmed to his “unamiable mother,” she doted on the young Bonaparte whom the family called “Junior.”
Then in 1848, with a suddenness that jolted Betsy, everything changed. News came from Europe that King Louis-Philippe’s government had failed and a French republic had been declared. Miraculously, Bo’s cousin, Louis-Napoleon, whose reckless attempts to bring down the king and establish himself as the emperor had landed him in prison in the late 1830s, had been elected France’s new president. The news thrilled Betsy; she saw Louis-Napoleon’s ascent to power as an act of homage to the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte himself. Writing to Sydney Morgan, she confessed, “I do feel enchanted at the homage paid by six millions of voices to [Napoleon’s] memory in voting an imperial president.” Democracy, which she had long abhorred, seemed vindicated by the wisdom French voters had shown. “I never could endure universal suffrage until it elected the nephew of an emperor for the chief of a republic,” she declared, “and I shall be charmed with universal suffrage once more if it insists upon their president of France becoming a monarch.”
Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte Page 13