Napoleon's Poisoned Chalice

by Dr Martin Howard

  Stokoe is accused of not limiting his conversation to entirely medical matters. Perhaps he mentioned the weather or indulged in other pleasantries with the Longwood residents. Young acknowledges that this charge was trivial.

  2nd. For having on or about the same day, on receiving communication both in writing and verbally from some of the French prisoners at Longwood, taken notice of and given an answer to such communications previous to making the same known to the Commander-in-Chief, contrary to the said standing orders.

  This refers to Stokoe’s conditional acceptance of the ‘articles’, the proposals for replacing O’Meara as Napoleon’s doctor.

  3rd. For having in pursuance of such unauthorised communication signed a paper purporting to be a bulletin of General Buonaparte’s health and delivering the same to the said General or his attendants, contrary to the said orders, and to his duty as a British Naval Officer.

  Stokoe’s medical bulletin is interpreted as being in contravention to the regulations outlawing ‘correspondence’ with Longwood.

  4th. For having in such bulletin stated facts related to the health of General Buonaparte which did not fall under his, the said Mr John Stokoe’s own observation, and which as he afterwards confessed were dictated or suggested to him by the said General or his attendants, and for having signed the same as if he himself had witnessed the same facts, which was not the truth and was inconsistent with his character and duty as a British Naval Officer.

  Stokoe is charged for reaching a medical opinion based not only upon his own immediate observations but also on a history of previous symptoms related to him by the patient and his close attendants. It was transparent that some of the symptoms noted in his bulletin pre-dated his first consultation with the Emperor and there is no justification for the charge of subterfuge.

  5th. For having in the said bulletin inserted the following paragraph,

  ‘ The more alarming symptom is that which was experienced in the night of the 16th instant, a recurrence of which may soon prove fatal, particularly if medical attention is not at hand,’ intending thereby contrary to the character and duty of a British Officer to create a false impression or belief that General Buonaparte was in imminent or considerable danger, and that no medical assistance was at hand, he, the said Mr John Stokoe not having witnessed any such symptoms, and knowing that the state of the patient was so little urgent that he was four hours at Longwood before he was admitted to see him, and further knowing that Dr Verling was at hand ready to attend if required in any such emergency.

  Stokoe, like O’Meara before him, is stated to have exaggerated the severity of Napoleon’s illness. Without a second independent medical opinion, this charge could not be proven. Verling’s presence was of little significance as the Emperor had repeatedly refused to see him.

  6th. For having, contrary to his duty, communicated to General Buonaparte or his attendants information related to certain books, letters and papers said to have been sent from Europe for the said persons, and which had been intercepted by the Governor of St. Helena, and for having conveyed to the said General or his attendants some information respecting their money concerns, contrary to his duty, which was to afford medical advice only.

  This refers to the ‘Holmes correspondence affair’. Despite the evidence that Stokoe was innocent of any active involvement, a fact acknowledged by Bathurst in a letter to Lowe, his persecutors were unable to resist the temptation to add this slur to the list of allegations.

  7th. For having, contrary to his duty and to the character of a British naval officer, communicated to the said General Buonaparte or his attendants an infamous and calumnious imputation cast upon Lieutenant-General Sir Hudson Lowe, Governor of St. Helena, by Barry O’Meara, late surgeon in the Royal Navy, implying that Sir Hudson Lowe had practised with the said O’Meara to induce him to put an end to the existence of the said General Buonaparte.

  Stokoe is alleged to have discussed O’Meara’s accusation against Lowe – that the Governor had plotted to shorten Napoleon’s life – during his first visit to Longwood. He apparently admitted this to the Admiral. Lowe used Verling to obtain further information from the French but Montholon denied any knowledge of such a conversation with Stokoe and added that O’Meara’s accusations were well known to them before Stokoe’s arrival. Verling was an unwilling accomplice, pointing out to Lowe that it was O’Meara who should be held to account for the slander.

  8th. For having disobeyed the positive command of his superior officer in not returning from Longwood on or about the 21st of January aforesaid at the hour especially prescribed to him by the Rear-Admiral, there being no justifiable cause for his disobeying such command.

  This is perhaps the most cogent charge as Stokoe undeniably disobeyed Plampin’s directive by delaying his departure from Longwood. Whether he was justified in remaining with Napoleon, partly at his patient’s request and partly to observe the outcome of treatment, is a question at the heart of the medicine versus duty dilemma facing all the British doctors dealing with the Emperor. He was further delayed by the fall from his horse.

  9th. For having knowingly and willingly designated General Buonaparte in the said bulletin in a manner different from that in which he is designated in the Act of Parliament for the better custody of his person, and contrary to the practise of His Majesty’s Government, of the Lieutenant-General, Governor of the Island, of the said Rear-Admiral, and for having done so at the especial instance and request of the said General Buonaparte or his attendants, though he, Mr John Stokoe, well knew that the mode of designation was a point in dispute between the said General Buonaparte and Lieutenant-General Sir Hudson Lowe and the British Government, and that by acceding to the wish of the said General Buonaparte he, the said Mr John Stokoe, was acting in opposition to the wish and practice of his own superior officers, and to the respect which he owed them, under the general printed instructions.

  This convoluted and petty charge – that Stokoe had referred to Napoleon as ‘the patient’ rather than ‘General Bonaparte’ – was also hypocritical. Gorrequer notes in his diary for 3rd May, 1819,

  Dottore Great Gun [Verling] used the term Napoleon in speaking of our Neighbour in his report of Confab 1st same month. This was one of the charges against Stokoe. Humble Spine [Orderly Officer Blakeney] did the same also several times in his reports and so did O.O.Nick [Orderly Officer Nicholls], as Polyphemes 3rd [Plampin] observed to Ego [Gorrequer] one day pointing it out to him in one of the notes given before the Tribunal of Stokoe, saying: ‘Better have it altered, for’ said he, ‘it is one of the very charges against Stokoe and here is O.O. doing the same.’

  Two years later, Gorrequer catches Plampin referring to Napoleon as ‘L’Empereur’ and Lowe himself eventually referred to his prisoner as Napoleon Bonaparte.

  10th. For having in the whole of his conduct in the aforesaid transactions evinced a disposition to thwart the intentions and regulations of the said Rear-Admiral, and to further the views of the said French prisoners in furnishing them with false or colourable pretences for complaint, contrary to the respect which he owed to his superior officers, and to his own duty as an officer in His Majesty’s Royal Navy.

  This final charge adds little and was presumably included by way of a resumé or simply to inflate the total number of charges.

  Forsyth’s treatment of the case against Stokoe is revealing. He was a lawyer and his account of the St. Helena episode and Lowe’s part in it is exhaustive – indeed exhausting. However, instead of simply listing the ten charges, he chose to include only the ‘principal ones’. This allowed him to exclude the 5th, 8th and 9th charges. The reasons are not difficult to discern. Forsyth’s work appeared in the mid-nineteenth century so the 5th charge, that Stokoe exaggerated the Emperor’s illness, hardly reflected well on his accusers, particularly Lowe. Readers would have known of Napoleon’s death less than two years later of a disease from which he was quite possibly already suffering at the time of the trial. Similar reas
oning led Forsyth to omit the 8th charge – it would be unseemly to criticise Stokoe for remaining with his patient rather than attending an arbitrary meeting with Plampin. It was Forsyth’s contention that the Governor was anxious to give Napoleon the best possible medical care; he did not wish him to appear grudging. The 9th charge referring to Napoleon’s title was presumably omitted because it was overly trivial or because Forsyth was aware that many others on the island were breaking the regulations in their references to Napoleon.

  Lowe’s biographer was forced on to the defensive because the charges against the surgeon were contrived and specious. The regulations extant on St. Helena had been manipulated to render normal medical practice illegal. Stokoe was in the dock for crimes such as talking to his patient of non-medical matters, referring to his patient as ‘the patient’, for taking a thorough history of the symptoms, and for writing medical bulletins. Worst of all, he had suggested that the patient was actually ill. We have to agree with Ralph Korngold’s words, ‘To have a medical officer travel a total of 188 days to be tried on such charges must have been something novel in the annals of the Royal Navy.’6

  The trial was initially arranged for 26th August 1819 but Stokoe obtained a postponement of a few days and the court-martial met on the 30th aboard the Conqueror. The members were as follows:

  Captain Francis Stanfell of HMS Conqueror, and second officer in the command of His Majesty’s ships and vessels in St. Helena Roads (President); Captain Wauchope (Eurydice); Captain Rennie (Tees); Commander Sir William Wiseman (Sophie); Commander James Hanwy Plumridge (Sappho); Mr George Nicholls, Purser of H.M.S. Sophie (Officiating Deputy Judge Advocate); Mr William Davies, Clerk of the Conqueror (Registrar).

  Stokoe was keen to call Bertrand and Montholon as witnesses. This was understandable as they alone could confirm the truth of his account of events at Longwood. At first, Lowe objected on the grounds they were foreigners, prisoners, and attendants upon Napoleon. Nicholls wrote to Stokoe warning him that there were ‘legal objections’ to the French attending the trial. The Governor then relented but, for reasons that are obscure, neither attended the court-martial. Bertrand was allegedly stricken with dysentery and Montholon was necessarily detained at Longwood to perform the Grand Marshal’s routine duties. In his journal, Bertrand makes reference to the court-martial and alludes to some correspondence with Nicholls on the subject but he gives no reason for his non-attendance. It was certainly a late decision – Nicholls records on 30th August that, in the early hours of the morning, Bertrand agreed to accompany him to the trial but that, at 8am when the horses were ready, he sent a note excusing himself. Perhaps the Orderly Officer was too tactful to document the precise nature of the Frenchman’s indisposition.7

  Robert Plampin was the first witness to appear. He was fired with a hatred of Stokoe and a fervent desire to please Lowe and he gave his evidence passionately. He commenced by producing written evidence of his various conversations with the doctor but then perjured himself by declaring that he had given Stokoe no command to attend Longwood on the morning of 17th January. The note written by his secretary to Stokoe, channelled via Captain Stanfell, clearly contained the words, ‘you are to order Mr Stokoe to go directly to Longwood.’ The surgeon had obtained this note and had refused to return it to the Admiral but he had left it among his papers in England. Already, his defence was being compromised by the failure of the Admiralty to give him proper notice of the proceedings against him. Plampin’s account of events on the 17th was so confused that the court was forced to alter the wording of the first charge; instead of ‘when permitted by the Admiral to go to Longwood’ they decided upon ‘permitted or ordered’. Abashed by his uncertain start, Plampin became more restrained and argued that Stokoe should not have agreed to the articles on a conditional basis. He then brought up the Holmes correspondence, claiming that this proved that the surgeon was a willing tool of Longwood. By now, he was fully into his stride again and his language became so violent that the court decided to suspend proceedings, requesting him to calm down.8

  More witnesses were now called. Plampin’s secretary simply confirmed the Admiral’s statements. Stanfell declared that he had no memory of the word ‘order’ on the initial note to Stokoe. Verling and Nicholls told what they knew of Stokoe’s relationship with the French. These were all witnesses called for the prosecution and, as the defendant could only call his own witnesses at the end of the trial, it was now time for him to speak in his own defence. The full transcript of the surgeon’s speech is documented in the official minutes. Stokoe opened by reminding the court’s members of his twenty-five years of faithful service and of his immaculate record up to the time of his arrival on St. Helena. He trusted that they would feel more pleasure in the acquittal rather than in the condemnation of a loyal officer who had been placed in such a trying situation. The doctor then questioned the sincerity of Plampin’s evidence, pointing out that the presence of a third person during his conversations with the Admiral and the fastidious transcription of every word suggested a premeditated attempt to incriminate him. When Stokoe invoked the absence of Bertrand and Montholon as another example of unfairness, he was brusquely reminded that they had been summoned but had refused to attend. He concluded this preamble with a declaration that he had been motivated only by a desire both to accommodate the wishes of his military superiors and to meet the needs of his patient; as he uttered these words, he must have reflected on the incompatibility of these objectives. He reiterated that he had not wanted to attend Napoleon and that, once this became unavoidable, he had expressed a preference to be accompanied by his colleague Verling; hardly the actions of a man trying to comply with a secret French-inspired agenda.

  Stokoe now dealt with each of the charges in turn, making many of the obvious objections already alluded to. For the first charge, he constrained himself to an appeal to the common sense of the members of the court-martial; how could he have only spoken of medical matters? With respect to the second charge, he stressed that any consent he had given to the articles was entirely conditional and that he had only gone so far as he believed that there was nothing in the conditions ‘derogatory to my character as a British officer and a gentleman’. He refuted the third charge on the basis that he did not believe that any law should forbid a doctor writing a medical bulletin for his patient and the fourth charge because he had only taken a proper history of the symptoms and that these were not dictated to him but were the result of his own enquiries. The fifth charge, that he had exaggerated Napoleon’s symptoms, could only be denied. He reminded the court that Verling’s presence made little difference as General Bonaparte refused to see him.

  Stokoe dismissed the sixth charge, saying that he had previously been exonerated from any involvement in the Holmes correspondence. He did not deny repeating O’Meara’s accusations at Longwood, the substance of the seventh charge, but commented that this was ‘a common topic of conversation’. His defence against the eighth charge was, he claimed, weakened by the absence of the French witnesses, as they could have testified that he was ‘extremely anxious’ to punctually attend his appointment with Plampin and that the delay was caused by both Napoleon’s demands and his accident on the road. He expressed surprise at the ninth charge, stating that by using the purely professional term ‘patient’ he had judged that he would offend no one. The tenth charge was repetition and did not need to be answered.

  Having done his best to nullify the specific accusations, Stokoe moved on to the attack. The charges brought against him were ‘strained and coloured with all the art of legal ingenuity and backed by local power and prejudice, in order to accomplish the object of a prosecution instituted by an overwhelming authority’. It may have been unwise to remind the members of the court-martial of this ‘overwhelming authority’ as they were all naval officers with their own career aspirations and they will have been in no doubt as to the outcome favoured by Plampin and Lowe. Having risked antagonising the court, Stokoe now requested its ind
ulgence and sympathy, listing the difficulties he had faced. Firstly, there was the unprecedented nature of his employment as Napoleon’s doctor. If he had erred, it was not because of any preconceived design, but because he had been placed in ‘circumstances of peculiar delicacy and embarrassment’ with no clear guidance from the Governor as to his correct behaviour.

  Secondly, that he had been denied the attendance of the only witnesses who could refute the charges (Bertrand and Montholon) and, thirdly, that the trial had been kept secret from him until the last moment, depriving him of vital documents. He could not resist a dig at Plampin. Although he intended not even ‘the most distant disrespect’ to his Commander-in-Chief, he was surprised at his demeanour during his testimony and would have been much alarmed by this did he not have complete confidence in the justice of the court. He regarded the members as being his advocates as well as judges.

  I therefore submit my character, my honour, and everything that is dear to me into your hands, and shall rest perfectly satisfied with your decision whatever it may be.

  The surgeon called Plampin as his first witness. He wished to know whether his interviews had been documented at the time or written from memory at a later date. This question demanded a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but the Admiral was allowed to wriggle out of a straight reply, launching into interminable digressions. The court was clearly influenced by the rank of the witness. He did, however, acknowledge that Holmes had written to Stokoe without approval to use his name – a tacit acceptance that the charge pertaining to the recent correspondence was meaningless.