The Emperor's Shadow

Bonaparte, Betsy and the Balcombes of St Helena

Anne Whitehead

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781925267693
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

After Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, he was sent into exile on St Helena, arriving in October 1815. For the six years until his death, he was an 'eagle in a cage', reduced from the most powerful figure in Europe to a prisoner on a rock in the South Atlantic. But the fallen emperor was charmed and entertained by Betsy Balcombe, the pretty teenage daughter of a local merchant.

Anne Whitehead brings to life Napoleon's time on St Helena and the web of connections around the globe which framed his last years. Betsy's father, William Balcombe, was well-connected in London, and he smuggled letters and undertook a clandestine mission to Paris for Napoleon.

Betsy's friendship with Napoleon cast a shadow over the rest of her colourful life. She married a Regency cad, who soon left her and their daughter, and she travelled to Australia in 1823 with her father, who was appointed the first Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales. After her father was exposed for fraud and the family lost their fortune, she returned to London and published a memoir which turned her into a celebrity.

With her extraordinary connections to royalty in London and to the Bonaparte family and their courtiers, Betsy Balcombe led a life worthy of a Regency romance. This new account reveals Napoleon at his most vulnerable, human and reflective, and a woman caught in some of the most dramatic events of her time.

PART
ONE

A new Prometheus, I am attached to a rock
where a vulture is gnawing at me.
I had stolen the fire of heaven to endow France with it;
the fire has come back to its source, and here I am.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

CHAPTER 1

THE NEWS

When HMS Northumberland anchored in James Bay, accompanied by four men-of-war and three troopships, it became known that the prisoner would not be brought ashore for another two days.¹ Word spread that it would be the most extraordinary event in living memory.

On the evening of 17 October 1815, people from all parts of the island made their way to the Jamestown waterfront, descending into the village, hemmed by mountains, by one of two steep roads. By dusk a great crowd had gathered at the narrow quay between the castle wall and the Atlantic Ocean.²

It did not take much persuasion for the merchant William Balcombe to agree that his wife and two daughters should witness the event. Betsy was thirteen and her sister Jane fifteen. Their little brothers Tom and Alexander, aged five and four, had to stay behind with their nurse, but their father knew that the girls would always remember the sight of the most powerful man in the world brought down to size. One of the Balcombes’ slave boys opened The Briars’ gates, guiding the horse cart with a lamp as they joined the Sidepath, the vertiginous road carved into the rocks by slave labour. The whole mountainside was aglow with dancing, glimmering lanterns as they joined the throng making the mile-long descent.

It was almost dark when they reached the marina. The whole population of St Helena, all 3500 of them, white, black, Asian and mulatto, bond and free, seemed to have gathered, their lanterns and torches bouncing and flaring. With apologies to this person and that, acknowledging familiar faces among the many strangers and soldiers, the Balcombes made their way through the crush. Betsy, just returned from school in England, could hardly believe that the island contained so many inhabitants. She found a position outside the castle wall near the drawbridge. Further along near the landing stage she made out the courtly figure of the governor wearing his plumed hat and full dress uniform. Beyond the row of sentries, the surf smashed and hissed on the rocks.

A hush descended on the watching crowd when the slap of oars was heard. As the tender approached from the looming dark hulk of the warship Northumberland, Betsy saw five huddled figures. They stepped onto the landing stage from the bobbing craft, and she heard someone say that the man in the middle was Bonaparte. He brushed past Governor Wilks, who had extended his hand in formal greeting, and walked up the lines between the British admiral and another important-looking man. Napoleon wore the familiar cocked hat but was enveloped in a greatcoat, and it was too dark to distinguish his features. The diamond star on his chest glinted within the coat’s folds as he walked.

The crowd surged forward. Sentries with fixed bayonets moved to clear a path. Hundreds of eyes glared at that solitary figure but no word of welcome was uttered. As he went past, Betsy caught a glimpse of the famous aquiline face, tight with anger, his eyes downcast. He said later that he had been gawked at ‘comme une bête féroce’—like a savage beast.³

A mere four days earlier, Colonel Mark Wilks, the island’s governor, had received the astounding message, brought by a fast sloop-of-war, that he and the motley inhabitants of their small remote island were about to play host to the most dangerous man on earth. The prisoner was on HMS Northumberland, accompanied by a flotilla of warships, and already sailing towards them.

News always came late to St Helena. It was an awesome distance to the rock marooned in the Atlantic between the African and South American continents, a dot on the charts known to seafarers, to British ships on the home route from the Far East, India and the Cape. It was said to be the most remote inhabited place on earth—1120 miles from the nearest land in Africa and over 2000 miles from the Brazilian coast.⁴ For the past decade and a half of the Napoleonic Wars it had gained importance as a strategic base, but the St Helenians could still dream in the sun and proceed with their lives in their own relaxed, insular way. Mail took ten weeks to come from London to Jamestown, the island’s capital and only town, so the locals were accustomed to receiving belated accounts of the goings-on in the world. At the same time they had their own important affairs and pursuits.

Governor Wilks was regular in sending his despatches to his masters in London, the directors of the Honourable East India Company in Leadenhall Street. His post was hardly taxing, a reward for services to the Company in India, where he had been Resident at Mysore. He took an interest in poultry-keeping and agricultural projects, the eradication of the introduced blackberry, the problem of the wild goats and sheep, while he worked on his memoirs and a book, Historical Sketches of the South of India. Described by an admirer as ‘a tall, handsome, venerable-looking man with white curling locks and a courtier-like manner’,⁵ he was gracious with important visitors to the island, attended St Paul’s church on Sundays, and hosted the odd fundraising levée and whist drive.⁶ There was the usual Governor’s Ball at the castle in Jamestown and an annual garden party at Plantation House, and those representing society on the island generally saw fit to attend. Many of these property owners were also employees of the East India Company as officers, administrators or merchants. Those islanders in private commerce depended upon the ships bringing news and trade goods.

In 1815, William Balcombe had his official duties as superintendent of public sales for the Company but also his separate interests as senior partner in the firm Balcombe, Cole and Company, supplying vessels calling at Jamestown. Saul Solomon, proprietor with his brothers Lewis and Joseph of the town’s only emporium—‘Ladies’ Fashions, Fabrics, Lace, Jewellery and Rosewater’—studied the papers for trends, knowing that styles would be half a year out of date by the time their order arrived (allowing three months for the requisition and three for the despatch) but that this did not matter to the ladies of St Helena as long as they kept pace with one another. The officers of the St Helena Regiment did a little trading on the side with ships returning from the East, while the regiment’s 890 soldiers drilled, their garrison having been constantly on alert during the long war years. The 1200 or so black and mulatto slaves employed by the Company worked in the vegetable gardens and on the boats supplying fish to the local population, and the few hundred Chinese ‘coolies’ hewed wood and hauled water for passing vessels, with often up to fifty ships anchored off Jamestown.

While few people in the outside world bothered with St Helena, the islanders were eager enough for accounts of the world; for the bundles of newspapers and magazines, letters from relatives and friends, the items of gossip, delivered by passing ships. The newspapers that had arrived in April indicated that 1815 in Europe was shaping up as a very mixed year. They read that His Majesty King George III remained lamentably unwell; his son the Prince Regent had declined to attend the Congress of Vienna but still danced attendance on his mistresses; he continued to build his Oriental folly and reduce the national exchequer. Questions had been put in Parliament but waited for an answer. Lady Hamilton, the mistress of Admiral Nelson (who had died heroically ten years earlier), had died in January, lonely and overweight; Lord Byron had married Annabella Milbanke, but no one expected the match to last; the daring waltz was finally in, the visiting Czar having given a demonstration at Almack’s Assembly Rooms; gaslights illuminated the London streets; and thin muslin dresses in the Parisian style were being worn by the girls in Vauxhall Gardens. In Africa, Shaka had become King of the Zulus; further afield, America had a new railroad charter, the first commercial cheese factory had opened in Switzerland, the Blue Mountains were finally crossed in the colony of New South Wales, and British missionaries packed Bibles for New Zealand to save the heathen Maori.

For years Napoleon Bonaparte was the leading story and a grim one, but for some nine months the English papers had been remarkably free of his outrages. The man who from the beginning of the century had dominated the news and the continent of Europe—with the notable exception of Russia—had from May 1814 languished in exile on Elba, an island off Italy in the Mediterranean Sea, where he survived very well. He was permitted the title ‘Emperor and Sovereign of the Isle of Elba’ and a new flag of his own design, featuring his beloved golden bees. He enjoyed the comforts of a modest palace, a large shabby villa high on the cliffs, and the presence of his mother, his favourite sister Pauline and a devoted group of courtiers. He had charmed the British commissioner, Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, and dined regularly with him. Some wondered if it was an oversight on his captors’ part that he was allowed a private army of 1000 men, including 600 of his loyal Old Guard.

Even from the perspective of a remote island in the South Atlantic, Europe must have seemed unrealistically calm. But in May 1815 an East India Company ship brought the St Helenians the alarming information that in late February Bonaparte had escaped from Elba. He entered Paris in triumph on 20 March 1815 to the cheering of thousands of Parisians who lined the streets—those who did not applaud kept their feelings to themselves—and he was carried shoulder-high to the Tuileries Palace to cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

Then on 15 September a ship arrived at Jamestown bringing splendid news. Bonaparte’s new regime had lasted just ‘One Hundred Days’, as it came to be known. There had been an epic battle on the field of Waterloo in Flanders, conducted in an intermittent thunderstorm. The great warmonger had been defeated at last by a glorious British fighting force—there was grudging mention of Belgian and Dutch troops as well—led by the Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Wellington. A Prussian force under General Blücher had arrived late to the battle. Bonaparte had escaped on horseback, weeping, it was claimed, into his saddle, but his days were numbered. France, after some silken diplomacy by the veteran courtier Talleyrand, was to be returned once again to the Bourbons.

Governor Wilks arranged for a royal salute to be fired in honour of the Waterloo triumph and approved celebrations at the garrison with an extra quota of wine for each soldier. He ordered that all prisoners, civil and military, be released, with the exception of a fellow awaiting trial for burglary. The island residents returned to their familiar routines.

But they were rudely awakened on 11 October. The news brought by Captain Devon of the Icarus, a sloop-of-war, was extraordinary, too much to take in all at once: Bonaparte, foiled in his plans to escape to America, had surrendered to a British ship at the French Atlantic port of Rochefort. The Allied powers, after convoluted negotiations (from which Prussia withdrew, preferring the firing-squad option), had reached agreement that while France, Austria and Russia would keep a watching brief, he was to be England’s prisoner and England’s problem.

But the most outrageous news was that the Monster of Europe, the Disturber of the World, the Corsican half-breed, the Villain Bonaparte, the Anti-Christ, the savage Butcher of Jaffa—no words were bad enough but all were used in the newspapers—was being brought into exile on their own peaceful island. His ship was on the seas behind the Icarus. He would be arriving in a few days’ time.

And for five and a half turbulent years, St Helena would become one of the most talked about places on earth.

‘Our little isle was suddenly frightened from its propriety,’ Betsy Balcombe wrote later in her Recollections, ‘by hearing that Napoleon Bonaparte was to be confined as a prisoner of state.’ She felt ‘excessive terror, and an undefined conviction that something awful would happen to us all, though of what nature I hardly knew’.⁷

The townsfolk had never been so rattled. It seemed unbelievable that the most evil man in the world, and not so long ago the most powerful, was within a few days’ sail and coming to live among them. Apart from the St Helena Regiment—their own garrison, provided by the East India Company—there would be a huge body of soldiers and seamen arriving with him, just to keep him secure, all of them to be housed and fed, taking over the streets and taverns of the little town. The prisoner was travelling with the largest guard ever assembled in European history to watch over a single man. HMS Northumberland, with Bonaparte aboard, was accompanied by four warships with 116 guns between them and three troopships transporting the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Regiment of Foot.

Rumours were rife and anxieties noisily expressed. Just where was the prisoner to be kept? And would the soldiers be able to prevent him escaping the island, just as he gave his guards the slip on Elba? What was to prevent a raiding party of Frenchmen—or Americans for that matter—coming to rescue him? And as Boney made his escape, what was to stop his henchmen cutting all their throats? There were frightful visions of blood on the cobbled streets of Jamestown.

The captain of the Icarus had brought Colonel Wilks a ‘Secret letter’ from the British government, advising him of the arrival of the prisoner; it emphasised that in all matters relating to ‘General Napoleon Buonaparte’ he was to defer to Rear-Admiral Sir George Cockburn, commander of the fleet.⁸ Wilks was informed that the island would be removed from the jurisdiction of the East India Company, its traditional employer, and placed under British government administration. At the same time he received a confidential letter from the Company’s directors acknowledging ‘the high importance of effectually securing the person of a man whose conduct has proved so fatal to the happiness of the world’. Despite Wilks’s great merits, His Majesty’s Government had determined on appointing a new governor, a military man ‘of the class of General officers who served in the scene of the late continental events’.⁹ That officer was Major-General Hudson Lowe, most recently quartermaster-general to the Allied armies in the Netherlands and Belgium, who was then making his way from Europe to London. Lowe was to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general and created a Knight Commander of the Bath, befitting the gravity of his office as Bonaparte’s custodian.¹⁰

The immediate issues were housing and catering. The official ‘Secret letter’ stated that any residence on the island could be allocated for Bonaparte, ‘with the exception of the Governor’s Plantation House’. Wilks learned from the captain of the Icarus that a retinue was coming with the prisoner, not only his officers and servants but also some aristocratic Frenchwomen. He thought that Longwood House, the lieutenant-governor’s isolated summer residence, could be a possibility, but it was badly in need of repairs.

And what of Bonaparte’s Austrian wife, the former empress Marie Louise—would she be expecting to join him, although she had declined to do so on Elba? Rumour had it that the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Metternich, had thoughtfully organised a handsome aide-de-camp for her, Count von Neipperg, who had lost no time in becoming her lover; he was reputed to be ‘a perfect serpent in matters of seduction’.¹¹ But if the lady chose to make the voyage, she was authentic royalty, the daughter of the Austrian Emperor...