• • •
Maitland gave Napoleon his own captain’s cabin, and when he appeared on deck again, he showed him around the ship. Napoleon asked whether Maitland thought he had ever had a chance of escape, but the British captain assured him that a seventy-four-gun ship like the Bellerophon was a match for three frigates, and so the odds on escape were ‘much against’.36 As they went around, Napoleon tapped a midshipman on the head and pinched his ear good-naturedly, asking the bosun, Manning, about his duties. He ‘looked quite at ease’, according to another midshipman, George Home, ‘and as completely at home as if he had been going on a pleasure trip on one of his own imperial yachts’.37 He quickly won over everyone on board. One officer wrote that ‘his teeth were finely set, and as white as ivory, and his mouth had a charm about it that I have never seen in any human countenance’. Maitland himself was to admit:
It may appear surprising that a possibility could exist of a British officer being prejudiced in favour of one who had caused so many calamities to his country, but to such an extent did he possess the power of pleasing that there are few people who could have sat at the same table as him for nearly a month, as I did, without feeling a sensation of pity, allied perhaps to regret, that a man possessed of so many fascinating qualities, and who had held so high a station in life, should be reduced to the situation in which I saw him.38
During the journey to England, Napoleon ‘showed no depression of spirits’ and was treated with the formal dignities of a head of state. He let Maitland and Admiral Hotham, who went aboard soon after the surrender, see his portable library and 30-inch-wide camp bed, asked lots of questions in broken, almost unintelligible, English, and said that had Charles James Fox lived, ‘it would never have come to this’.39 At dinner on the second night he patted Maitland on the head, saying, ‘If it had not been for you English, I should have been Emperor of the East; but wherever there is water to float a ship we are sure to find you in our way.’40
The question of how to deal with their prisoner was a tricky one for the British. The Hundred Days following his return from Elba had cost almost 100,000 men killed or wounded on all sides, and no repetition could be risked.41 On July 20 Lord Liverpool wrote to the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, who was in Vienna, to tell him how the cabinet viewed matters:
We are all very decidedly of the opinion that it would not answer to confine him in this country. Very nice legal opinions might arise on the subject, which would be particularly embarrassing . . . He would become the object of curiosity immediately, and possibly of compassion in the course of a few months, and the circumstances of his being here, or indeed anywhere in Europe, would contribute to keep up a certain degree of ferment in France . . . St Helena is the place in the world best calculated for the confinement of such a person . . . the situation is particularly healthy. There is only one place . . . where ships can anchor, and we have the power of excluding neutral ships altogether . . . At such a place and such a distance, all intrigue would be impossible; and, being so far from the European world, he would soon be forgotten.42
Napoleon made some over-optimistic remarks in his career, but so did his enemies.
Napoleon saw France for the last time on July 23, casting ‘many a melancholy look at the coast’ but making few observations.43 After they had anchored at Torbay on the English south coast the next day, he immediately became an irresistible ‘object of curiosity’ for sightseers, some of whom came down from as far as Glasgow for a glimpse of him – indeed the Bellerophon had to put out her boats around the ship to keep them at bay. He went out on deck and showed himself at the gangways and stern windows in order to please the public, saying that Torbay reminded him of Portoferraio. Maitland noted that Napoleon, ‘whenever he observed any well-dressed women, pulled his hat off, and bowed to them’.44
At Plymouth on the 27th Napoleon enjoyed even greater celebrity status; three days later Maitland estimated that as many as a thousand pleasure boats had collected around the ship, averaging eight people each. Meanwhile Napoleon was ‘often falling asleep on the sofa, having within these two or three years become very lethargic’, a curious comment for a man who had known him for only twelve days.45 This agreeable limbo ended at 10.30 a.m. on July 31, however, when Admiral Lord Keith and Sir Henry Bunbury, the under-secretary of state for war, arrived on Bellerophon to inform Napoleon – whom they addressed as ‘General Bonaparte’ – of his intended fate on St Helena, about which he had been forewarned by reading the British press. They told him that he could take three officers and twelve domestic staff with him, though not Savary or General Lallemand, who both would be imprisoned on Malta for, respectively, the murder of the Duc d’Enghien and betraying the Bourbons.
Napoleon replied to Keith (either with Gallic splendour or ridiculous histrionics, according to taste) by declaring that ‘his blood should rather stain the planks of the Bellerophon’ than that he should go to St Helena, and that the decision ‘would throw a veil of darkness over the future history of England’.46 He added that the climate would kill him in three months. After Keith and Bunbury had left, Napoleon told Maitand: ‘It is worse than Tamerlaine’s iron cage. I would prefer being delivered up to the Bourbons. Among other insults . . . they style me General; they may as well call me Archbishop.’47 Some of the more hot-headed of his staff agreed that dying on St Helena would be ‘very ignoble!’ and ‘Better be killed defending ourselves, or set fire to the powder magazine.’ That same night General Montholon stopped Bertrand’s hysterical and depressed English-born wife Fanny from drowning herself, by pulling her back through a porthole from which she was attempting to jump.48
Notwithstanding the despatch of another letter to the Prince Regent protesting ‘I am not a prisoner, I am a guest of England’, around noon on August 7 Napoleon was transferred to the eighty-gun HMS Northumberland, commanded by Rear-Admiral Sir George Cockburn (one of the commanders who had burned down Washington the previous year) for the 4,400-mile journey to St Helena.49 He was accompanied by an entourage of twenty-six people willing to go to the other end of the earth with him; several more, such as his sister Pauline and Méneval, applied to go but were turned away by the British authorities. Along with General Henri Bertrand and his clearly reluctant wife and their three children, there was Montholon, his pretty wife Albine and their three-year-old son Tristan, the Marquis Emmanuel de Las Cases (who had fine secretarial skills and spoke good English, though he pretended not to) and his thirteen-year-old son, as well as General Gaspard Gourgaud, the valets Marchand and Noverraz, Napoleon’s valet/bodyguard ‘Mamluk Ali’, his groom and coachman the brothers Achille and Joseph Archambault, a footman called Gentilini, his maître d’hôtel Francheschi Cipriani, the butler and pastry-chef Piéron, the cook Le Page, a Corsican usher-barber Santini and Rousseau the lamplighter, who doubled as a toymaker. There were also four servants of the Montholons and Bertrands.50 When Napoleon’s doctor, Louis Maingault, refused to go, the Bellerophon’s surgeon, the Irishman Barry O’Meara, took his place. All but Napoleon were stripped of their swords, and Cockburn also confiscated 4,000 gold napoleons from them, allowing them little more than pocket money with which to play cards.51 (Nonetheless, eight members of the entourage managed to conceal money-belts hiding a total of a quarter of a million francs, which would be worth £5,000 on St Helena.52)
On the first night on Northumberland, its British officers won seven or eight napoleons off the former Emperor playing vingt-et-un and he ‘chatted in a very good-natured mood with everybody’, as one recalled. ‘At dinner he ate heartily, and of almost every dish, praised everything, and seemed most perfectly reconciled to his fate.’53 Though there was no advantage to be gained, Napoleon was charming during the ten-week voyage – at least when he wasn’t being ‘miserably’ seasick – inquiring into the state and nature of British forces in India, asserting that he had thoroughly expected Grouchy to arrive at Waterloo, declaring that Tsar Alexander was ‘a more active and c
lever man than any of the other Sovereigns of Europe, but that he was extremely false’, claiming that Spain and Portugal had privately promised not to fight against him in 1815, questioning the ship’s chaplain about Anglicanism and the British consul-general of Madeira, which they sailed past on August 23, about the island’s produce, its height above sea level and population. He also discussed his plans to capture the Channel Islands, predicted that Bernadotte wouldn’t last in Sweden, described Desaix as ‘the best general he had ever known’, and denied an affair with an actress called Saint-Aubin, saying ‘The prettiest women are the hardest to make love to.’54
Most days on the voyage Napoleon rose between 10 and 11 a.m., had a meat and wine breakfast in his bedroom, stayed there before getting dressed at 3 p.m., took a short walk on deck, played chess with Montholon (who generally contrived to lose) until dinner at 5 p.m., where Cockburn recorded he ‘eats and drinks a good deal, and talks but little. He prefers meats of all kinds, highly dressed, and never touches vegetables.’55 He then walked on deck with Cockburn for ninety minutes, played cards from 8 to 10 p.m., and went to bed. He took English lessons, complained of the heat, walked on deck in the rain, put on weight and did maths problems with Gourgaud, extracting square and cube roots. On August 15 he spoke of previous birthdays – ‘Oh, how different!’ – and didn’t go to bed till 11.30 p.m.56 That same day Marie Louise wrote to the Emperor Francis about her husband, saying:
I hope he will be treated with kindness and clemency and I beg you, dearest Papa, to make certain that it is so . . . It is the last time I shall busy myself with his fate. I owe him a debt of gratitude for the calm unconcern [ruhige Indifferenz] in which he let me pass my days instead of making me unhappy.57
Cockburn obligingly altered their route to sail between the islands of Gomera and Palma in the Canary Islands because Napoleon wanted to see the peak at Tenerife, and as they crossed the Equator on September 23 the former Emperor ordained that a hundred napoleons be thrown over the side as an offering to Neptune. Bertrand thought it much too much, Cockburn that Neptune would be happy with five.58 The following week he spoke about Waterloo – ‘Ah! If it were only to be done over again!’ – which he was to do often over the next five years.
Their destination finally came into view on Saturday, October 14. Only 85 square miles in area and 28 miles in circumference, the volcanic rock of St Helena is 1,150 miles from Angola, over 2,000 miles from Brazil and 700 miles from the nearest land at Ascension Island. It has been described as ‘further away from anywhere than anywhere else in the world’.59 From the mid-seventeenth century to 1834 this most remote, most obscure speck of the British Empire was used as a watering-station on the journey to and from India. In 1815 it had a population of 3,395 Europeans, 218 black slaves, 489 Chinese and 116 Malays.60 The British government entered into an arrangement with the East India Company, which ran the island, by which it agreed to pay for Napoleon’s imprisonment there.
Arriving at St Helena’s only town, Jamestown, by sea, presents a tremendously imposing sight as 600-foot black cliffs rise up steeply and forbiddingly on either side of the small port. On October 15, leaning on Marchand’s shoulder, Napoleon looked at the island through the telescope he had used at Austerlitz. ‘It is not an attractive place,’ he said. ‘I should have done better to have stayed in Egypt.’61 With two Royal Navy frigates patrolling the island constantly, and no vessel able to approach from any direction without being seen by the numerous signal posts on the island that communicated with each other, he must have known he was going to die there.
On October 17, as a prevailing south-easterly wind blew violently, Napoleon disembarked and was taken briefly to Longwood, the house that was being made ready for him on the Deadwood Plateau.62 Longwood had been the lieutenant-governor’s residence, but he had stayed there for only three months of the year because its elevation of 1,500 feet above sea level meant that it had – and still has – a micro-climate different from the rest of the temperate, tropical island. British officials who had lived on St Helena could legitimately call the island’s climate ‘perhaps the mildest and most salubrious in the world’. Wellington, who had visited in 1805 on his return from India, wrote of ‘the climate apparently the most healthy I have ever lived in’.63 But these visitors had mostly remained in or around Jamestown. Longwood, by contrast, lies in cloud for over three hundred days a year.64 The humidity is typically 78 per cent but very often reaches 100 per cent. Everything is therefore slightly but constantly damp, even the wallpaper. The trees, bent over from the wind, all have lichen growing over them. Napoleon’s playing cards had to be dried in the oven to stop them sticking together.
Longwood also had infestations of termites, rats, midges, mosquitoes and cockroaches, the last three of which it still has today (despite the fine work done by the resident honorary French consul, Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, to restore and maintain the residence). The clammy humidity throughout the September–February summer months meant that Napoleon and his entourage constantly suffered from bronchitis, catarrh and sore throats. But other than the governor’s mansion less than 3 miles away, it was the only place large and secluded enough to house the former Emperor and his suite of courtiers and servants, and its prominence on the plateau made it easier to guard from the nearby Deadwood Barracks. A flag telegraph station at Longwood told the governor what Napoleon was doing, with six possibilities from ‘All is well with respect to General Bonaparte’ to ‘General Bonaparte is missing’.65
• • •
In the seven weeks that it took for Longwood to be refurbished and extended, Napoleon stayed at a pretty bungalow called The Briars, closer to Jamestown, with the family of the East India Company superintendent William Balcombe, where he had one room and a pavilion in their garden.66 This period was his happiest on St Helena, not least because he struck up an unlikely, charming and innocent friendship with the second of the Balcombes’ four surviving children, Betsy, a spirited fourteen-year-old girl who spoke intelligible if ungrammatical French and to whom Napoleon behaved with avuncular indulgence. She had originally been brought up to view Napoleon, in her words, as ‘a huge ogre or giant, with one large flaming eye in the centre of his forehead, and long teeth protruding from his mouth, with which he tore to pieces and devoured little girls’, but she very soon came to adore him.67 ‘His smile, and the expression of his eye, could not be transmitted to canvas, and these constituted Napoleon’s chief charm,’ she later wrote. ‘His hair was dark brown, and as fine and silky as a child’s, rather too much so indeed for a man as its very softness caused it to look thin.’68
The friendship began when Napoleon tested Betsy on the capitals of Europe. When he asked her the capital of Russia she replied, ‘Petersburg now; Moscow formerly’, upon which ‘He turned abruptly round, and, fixing his piercing eyes full in my face, he demanded sternly, “Who burnt it?”’ She was dumbstruck, until he laughed and said: ‘Oui, oui. You know very well that it was I who burnt it!’ Upon which the teenager corrected him: ‘I believe, sir, the Russians burnt it to get rid of the French.’69 Whereupon Napoleon laughed and friendship with ‘Mademoiselle Betsee’, ‘lettle monkee’, ‘bambina’ and ‘little scatterbrain’ was born. They sang songs together, and would march around the room tunelessly humming the air ‘Vive Henri Quatre’. ‘I never met with anyone who bore childish liberties so well as Napoleon,’ recalled Betsy. ‘He seemed to enter into every sort of mirth or fun with the glee of a child, and though I have often tried his patience severely, I never knew him lose his temper or fall back upon his rank or age.’70
Staying with the Balcombes, Napoleon spent his time playing chess, billiards, whist (with Betsy, for sugar-plums), puss-in-the-corner (a children’s game) and blindman’s buff, in pistol marksmanship and relaying island social gossip. He spent many hours in hot baths, watching the clouds as they rolled towards Longwood, ‘listening to the thousand crickets’ after sunset and riding in his jaunting Irish carriage at bre
akneck speeds along the island’s few but vertiginous roads. Freed of responsibility, he allowed himself a good deal of levity, almost a second childhood. When Betsy’s brother Alexander called him by his British nickname ‘Boney’ he didn’t understand the allusion, especially after Las Cases interpreted it literally. He pointed out what was by then all too obvious: ‘I am not at all bony.’71
Napoleon told Betsy that Marie Louise was ‘an amiable creature, and a very good wife’, and less convincingly that ‘she would have followed him to St Helena if she had been allowed’. He commended Pauline’s and Mademoiselle George’s beauty and that of Albine de Montholon, who Betsy said was ‘renowned for her tall and graceful stature’. Albine had become pregnant on the journey to St Helena, but although the baby was christened Napoléone-Marie-Hélène she is not believed to have been Napoleon’s. At some later stage, however, Albine became Napoleon’s last mistress.72 Madame Bertrand, Gourgaud and others took it for granted that this was so – Albine’s bedroom was across the pantry from his – and indeed Madame Bertrand was jealous, even though she herself had rejected a pass from Napoleon.73 Albine seems to have understood Napoleon well. ‘His fire, for want of fuel, consumed himself and those around him,’ she later wrote. On January 26, 1818 she gave birth to another daughter, Joséphine-Napoléone, who might well have been Napoleon’s third and last illegitimate child, but who died at the Hôtel Belle-Vue in Brussels on September 30, 1819, after Albine had returned to Europe. (She went either for ‘health reasons’, as was claimed, or because she wanted to escape St Helena to carry on an affair with Major Basil Jackson, a Waterloo veteran and now aide to the island’s governor, who left St Helena for Brussels one week after her.74)
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