Napoleon's Poisoned Chalice

by Dr Martin Howard

  At first the Emperor’s moods matched the stormy weather and rough seas. Cockburn found him to be ‘uncouth and disagreeable’ and noted that he behaved in a most overbearing manner to his French friends. As the days passed, he became more placid and apparently more resigned; the Admiral’s secretary thought that he appeared ‘perfectly unconcerned about his fate’.13

  Those who flew too close to the Emperor’s dimming sun could still have their wings burnt. In the light of subsequent events on St. Helena, an account of the experiences of William Warden might be regarded as a cautionary tale. Warden studied medicine at St. Andrews and entered the navy as a Surgeon’s Mate in 1795 at the age of seventeen. He was popular with the sailors – after the Mutiny of the Nore, it was one of the conditions of the crew of a return to obedience that their current surgeon should be replaced by the ‘little doctor’. His Captain advised Warden not to accept this promotion which would have been a black mark against his name, but he soon made full Surgeon and served at the Battle of Copenhagen. When war broke out with America in 1812, Warden accompanied Rear-Admiral Cockburn and was with the joint naval and military forces which entered Washington the following year. Cockburn was well disposed towards the young doctor and when the Admiral received the command of the Northumberland with orders to convey Napoleon to St. Helena, he nominated Warden as the ship’s surgeon.

  Warden wrote regular letters home and in these he described his conversations with the French aboard the Northumberland. He particularly talked to the Bertrands and Las Cases. His first impressions of the captives were mixed and he was relived that it was Surgeon O’Meara and not himself who had become Napoleon’s doctor. ‘Deuce take me if I would reside in the island of St. Helena with this gang if they would make me bishop of St. Asaph. They have got a volunteer, and I heartily rejoice at it.’ Warden took a dislike to Gourgaud who he dismissed as a ‘Cossack bully’. Conversely, he grew to like the Grand Marshal and his wife. ‘My friend Bertrand wins in every person’s opinion. He certainly is an honest man, the kindest friend and the best of masters. Such a father and such a husband will seldom be found.’

  In a letter of 17th March, written to his future wife Miss Hutt, he admits that he has become quite close to the French. ‘You say I shall become an inmate [sic] among them. No, never! But, indeed, I have a fair opportunity for I know I am not a little in favour.’ The surgeon’s chance to befriend the exiles was limited by his lack of French. The Montholons spoke almost no English and the Emperor only a few words. Nevertheless, Warden did speak to the illustrious prisoner with Las Cases acting as an interpreter. Napoleon was interested in the health of the crew and also in the British doctor’s faith in the use of bleeding as a cure-all – Warden describes the sailors as ‘young, healthy and florid’ and says that their complaints ‘required a free use of the lancet’. The Emperor was bemused by this blood letting and, when he saw Warden on deck, he enjoyed ribbing him about it.

  On meeting me, he would apply his fingers to the bend of the opposite arm, and ask, ‘Well, how many have you bled today?’ Nor did he fail to exclaim, when any of his own people were indisposed, ‘O, bleed him, bleed him! To the powerful lancet with him; that’s the infallible remedy.’

  On one occasion, Napoleon summoned the surgeon to the quarter-deck and quizzed him both about bleeding and also blistering, another popular contemporary treatment. Warden’s contact with the French entourage did not end on their arrival at St. Helena. He remained on the island for nine months and, after attending Gourgaud for an attack of dysentery, he was invited to dine with Napoleon and his retinue. The Navy surgeon was seated next to the Emperor who was in the habit of referring to him as ‘Bertrand’s friend’. Napoleon first asked after Gourgaud’s health and then launched into a detailed and often critical discussion of other medical matters. Las Cases describes the evening in his Mémorial and he says that Warden was taken aback by the Emperor’s deep knowledge of the subject. When Warden left the island, he parted company with the captives on friendly terms. After being given the honour of breakfasting with Napoleon, he was presented with a chess set and buckles from some trousers that had belonged to the Emperor. Gourgaud remembers that the young doctor was enchanted.14

  All this was harmless enough and would usually have been no more than a trivial footnote in the story of the exile. However, after his return to England, Warden edited his earlier letters and published them as a book, the full title of which was Letters written on board His Majesty’s Ship the Northumberland and Saint Helena in which the Conduct and Conversations of Napoleon Bonaparte and his suite during the voyage and the first months of his residence in that Island are faithfully described and related. In the introduction, the surgeon admitted that he had not originally intended to publish his writings but that he had been persuaded to do so by the entreaties of his friends and by the realisation that every word and action of Napoleon was of extraordinary interest to the British public. He was, he said, a reluctant author. As to the content of the letters, Warden acknowledged that he had procured the assistance of a ‘literary gentleman’ to make grammatical corrections but he vehemently insisted that they were factually correct.

  In their style, the letters are a curious mix of picturesque detail, literary allusions and childlike conceit. The surgeon is continually astonished by his proximity to Napoleon and the attention he receives from the great man’s entourage. A short extract from his account of his dining with the French gives a flavour of the book.

  A very short time before dinner was announced, General Montholon whispered in my ear that I was to take my seat at table between the Emperor and the Grand Marshal – Here are honours for you, and I will give you leave to figure your plain, humble, unassuming friend in his elevated station. I cannot say that my situation resembled that of Sancho Pancha [a character from Don Quixote] because every dish was at my service; but a piece of roast beef or a leg of mutton with apple sauce would have afforded a relief to my appetite which has never been familiarised with ragouts and fricassees – I had Napoleon on my right, and the Marshal on my left; and there was a vacant chair, that had the air of ceremonial emptiness, as a reserved seat for Maria Louisa. A bottle of claret and a decanter of water was placed by each plate…

  Warden interspersed his descriptive prose with allegedly verbatim accounts of his conversations with the Emperor. Much of this dialogue was of a medical nature and was entirely inoffensive but Napoleon was allowed to give his version of a number of controversial events which had occurred during the wars, such as the poisoning of the French sick in Egypt. Far from demonising the former Emperor, the surgeon portrays him in a human light. On the Northumberland, he applauds the prisoner’s ‘placid countenance and unassuming manners’.15

  In his original manuscript letters to his future wife, Warden is dismissive of his literary efforts; ‘If any person else than the best of friends were to read this trash I have been uttering I should bite my fingers off.’ His letters had now been polished and many fingers were leafing through the pages. The book was a resounding success, entering an astonishing sixteen editions in 1816 and the following year. Whereas the average British reader was desperate for any news of St. Helena and was unlikely to find fault with the surgeon’s reflections, more informed opinion was divided as to the merit of the work. In March 1817, news of the book reached St. Helena and Napoleon eventually obtained a copy. ‘Warden,’ he said, ‘is a man of good intentions and the foundation of his work is true; but many of the circumstances are incorrectly stated, in consequence of misconception and bad interpretation.’ Gourgaud, who believed himself to have been libelled by Warden, tried to convince his master that the book had caused harm but Napoleon was having none of it. The book had, to the contrary, done him ‘an immense good’ and there only remained the need to clear up some of Warden’s errors. The Emperor dictated his reply to the surgeon’s letters to Bertrand. In 1817, there arrived in London a small volume entitled Letters from the Cape of Good Hope in reply to Mr William Warden. I
t was generally attributed to Las Cases.

  The British press divided along political lines. The Edinburgh Review gave Warden a thumbs-up, saying that it was one of the few works on Napoleon that was ‘neither sullied by adulation nor disgraced by scurrility’. The readers of the Quarterly Review were told that the work was a fake. The author was a ‘blundering, presumptuous and falsifying scribbler’. The official British response was equally scathing. Hudson Lowe, who also first read the book in March 1817, believed Warden to have been a puppet in the hands of the French, a view that he communicated to Earl Bathurst, Secretary for War and the Colonies.

  General Bonaparte seems to have found in Mr Warden an instrument even out stepping his own immediate view. This person was at the time in the service of the Government, and had obtained access to Longwood [Napoleon’s residence] only through the ostensible pretext of his professional duty.

  Lowe was also unconvinced of the veracity of the letters, reminding the Minister that Warden and Napoleon did not share a common language and that much of the information collected by the doctor was very likely second hand and garbled.

  The British authorities at home were doubly displeased. It was bad enough that a British naval officer had published an account of his experiences on St. Helena without their prior approval and even worse that he had written it in a manner that was sympathetic to Bonaparte. Most of the British public remained antagonistic to their old enemy but there were an outspoken minority who admired the ex-Emperor. In 1815, this hero-worship was widespread enough for the Tory Sir Walter Scott to complain of the ‘nonsense’ that people spoke – it was ‘enough to make a dog sick’. Warden hardly helped himself by being a frequent visitor to Holland House, the seventeenth-century mansion in Kensington that was home to Lord Holland and the social headquarters for the Whig opposition and a clique of Bonapartists who were popularly caricatured as dupes of the French. The irritation of the Admiralty with the recalcitrant surgeon grew to the point that he was summarily erased from the Naval List. His immediate financial security was guaranteed by his book sales – Napoleon said that the doctor had made 50,000 francs – but he was disgraced and his promising naval career was apparently over.

  Warden was reinstated to his surgeon’s post shortly after. The precise sequence of events is unclear but it is almost certain that he was saved by his old Captain, George Cockburn. The Admiral had remained friendly with the doctor despite being very disappointed at the contents of his book. This is proved by correspondence between the two men found among Warden’s papers. In January 1817 the Admiral wrote to Warden grieving the loss of his child from illness and regretting that Warden himself had not been there to tend him. Several years later, Cockburn was to congratulate the surgeon on the birth of his own son, the product of his marriage to Miss Hutt. Warden was forever grateful to the Admiral – the boy was given the Christian names ‘George Cockburn’. The doctor was later a senior surgeon in the Navy for many years, holding appointments at Sheerness and Chatham dockyards up until his death in 1849. He was a recipient of the war medal with ribbon and three clasps. If it had not been for a fortunate connection in the Admiralty, his dalliance with Napoleon and his circle would have cost him all this. 16

  The voyage from England to St. Helena lasted for seventy-one days. On 1st October 1815 the Northumberland anchored in Jamestown roads and Napoleon came on deck to view the third island, together with Corsica and Elba, which was to be associated with his name. The British authorities, notably the retiring Governor Colonel Mark Wilks and Cockburn, inspected several houses on the island and decided that the most suitable for the Emperor and his entourage was Longwood, the home of the Lieutenant-Governor Colonel Skelton. This required some repairs and enlargement and, in the meantime, Napoleon was first lodged in the town and then at the summer house of ‘The Briars’ the residence of a local merchant, William Balcombe. Here, he was at first distracted by the charming setting and his friendship with the Balcombe family, particularly the children who he enjoyed teasing. By early December he had grown weary of his cramped surroundings and the incessant rain and he was relieved when Cockburn informed him that his definitive accommodation was ready.17

  Longwood House had been built in 1753 as a cow-house and barn. In 1787 the Governor converted the cow-house into a four-room dwelling. Cockburn made numerous additions to try and make it a suitable abode for an ex-Emperor but it remained a hotchpotch of small rooms grouped around a court. Eventually there were thirty-six rooms on the ground floor and a number of garrets. Napoleon, who had slept in so many palaces, was confined to two rooms of equal size – about fourteen feet by twelve. Each was lit by two small windows from which he could see the regimental camp. In one corner was the small camp bed with green silk curtains that he had used at Marengo and Austerlitz.

  There was no cellar or any air space between most of the rooms. Originally a farm, the wood flooring covered a soil still impregnated with the manure of the stables. The build quality may have been adequate for cattle, but Longwood was a damp and unhealthy human habitation. A Captain of the French Engineers who lived in the house a few decades later, complained that ‘Silk stuffs and gloves, even when placed in closed boxes, become quickly covered with ineffaceable reddish spots; leather articles are, in the space of a few days, thickly covered with mildew’. The Longwood residents fought a constant battle against rats that lived under the floors and in the wooden partitions. Bertrand was seriously bitten whilst asleep and special precautions had to be taken to protect the children at night.

  Cockburn’s planned extensions had not been completed when Napoleon first moved into Longwood. Gourgaud originally had to make do with a tent but ultimately he, Las Cases, and the Montholons were all housed in hastily constructed additions and conversions. Madame Bertrand refused to live at such close quarters with so many people and the Grand Marshal asked the Emperor’s permission to use a small cottage at Hutt’s Gate a mile and a half away. The Bertrands eventually moved to a new house much closer to Longwood. Lowe was fully aware of the shortcomings of the prisoners’ accommodation and a second new house was built for Napoleon but this was never occupied. Outside Longwood there was park consisting of two or three rows of pine and about a hundred scattered gum trees. The latter were twisted and distorted by the relentless trade wind. Around this copse stood a low wall about four miles in circumference which was known as the ‘four mile limit’. Sentries were posted at intervals of fifty paces; they only came inside this perimeter at night. The enclosure covered around a third of the plateau on which the house was built. An imaginary line, called the ‘twelve mile limit’, encompassed it almost entirely. Within this second boundary, Napoleon was allowed to walk freely but outside it he had to be accompanied by a British officer.18

  Despite the gloomy surroundings, Napoleon was determined that his entourage should retain the habits of his old Imperial Court. Thus Bertrand kept his appellation of Grand Marshal of the Palace and he remained the intermediary for presentations and was the representative of the Emperor on formal occasions. Montholon was styled ‘Lord Chamberlain’ and given responsibility for the service, provisioning and domestic details. Las Cases was ‘Secretary of State’ and Gourgaud was both ‘Aide de Camp General’ and ‘Master of the Horse’. The Pole, Piontkowski was ‘Equerry’ and Mesdames Bertrand and Montholon were ‘Dames d’honneur’.

  A daily routine was soon established at Longwood. Napoleon rose early, had his cup of coffee and shaved himself. He then washed and dressed with the assistance of Marchand or Saint-Denis. In the early days, the Emperor went out as early as 6am for his morning ride dressed in his green hunting coat. After having completed the prescribed circuit, he took a hot soak in the zinc bath provided for him by Cockburn. He was inclined to take his breakfast either in the bath or immediately afterwards in his sitting room. Then there was the dictation of his memoirs. All the followers had to take a share in this daunting task; the unwilling Bertrand was given the Egyptian Expedition, Gourgaud had the Battle o
f Waterloo, Las Cases the first Italian Campaign and Montholon worked on more general subjects. Napoleon interspersed his dictation with extensive reading. He had brought with him a library of about six hundred volumes and he was always keen to acquire British and French newspapers. Batches of new books sporadically arrived and he would sometimes read through the night.

  In the early afternoon, the Emperor went for a drive in his carriage drawn by six horses. The route was about six miles and high speeds were attained. Madame Montholon, who often accompanied him, declared that they went so fast that it was difficult to breathe. If in a more sedate mood, he might alternatively have a walk in the wood or the garden. It was during the afternoon that an outsider had the best chance of being presented to the famous captive. In the first two years Napoleon met more than a hundred British visitors, but in later times this was a rare event. Before dinner he went to the drawing room for a game of chess or cards. The meal itself was a formal affair attended by the whole suite; the men were in uniform and the ladies in evening dress. It was not necessarily an enjoyable experience. George Bingham, the Commander of British troops on the island, wrote that it was ‘stupid enough’. He added that the ‘people who lived with him scarcely spoke out of a whisper; and he was so much engaged in eating that he hardly said a word to any one’. When there was no foreign guest, the Emperor wolfed down his food even more quickly – twenty minutes usually sufficed. The meal was followed by coffee and reading aloud in the salon. Napoleon was not talented at oration and he took revenge on those who dozed off by waking them abruptly and handing them the book to continue. He retired to bed after the desultory conversation fizzled out.19