Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

At dinner, Napoleon needed to consume a whole bottle of wine to calm himself. The thwarting of his hopes made him bitter. He told Gourgaud: ‘The English have no exalted feelings. They can all be bought. I would have done well to buy Poppleton—he would have let me go riding alone. Do you imagine that O’Meara is sympathetic towards us? He hopes to receive some recompense. He considers that he is worth £3000 sterling a year.’38 That O’Meara accepted a bribe soon afterwards is clear from Gourgaud’s journal entry of 4 October: ‘His Majesty is sure of O’Meara and of his devotion . . . The Emperor again remarks that, with money, one can buy any Englishman. “The doctor has only been good to me since I gave him money.”’39 William Balcombe was clearly also included in Bonaparte’s cynical view of Englishmen.

  Meanwhile, the governor had just received an urgent despatch from Lord Bathurst: ‘I transmit to you herewith the copy of a paper containing intelligence of an expedition stated to have lately sailed from Baltimore, the real object of which is represented to be to furnish the means of General Bonaparte’s escape from St Helena. I have directed a copy of this paper to be transmitted to the Admiralty in order that it may be communicated to Rear Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm. I have the honour etc, Bathurst.’40

  CHAPTER 18

  AT THE MERCY OF THE ENGLISH

  Everlasting daisies—immortelles—are scattered across the plateau at Longwood. Lady Holland sent the seedlings to remind Napoleon of his native Corsica, and now the immortelles have become the wildflowers of St Helena, extending as far as Hutt’s Gate and the entrance to the Tomb.

  With permission from honorary consul Michel Dancoisne-Martineau—for the Tomb is strictly part of the French domains—I squelched down a path past grazing donkeys to a woodland clearing in Sane Valley, or ‘Geranium Valley’ as it used to be called. On his walks Napoleon often came to this glade, and he requested the planting of weeping willows to remind him of those bordering the lake at Malmaison. Now the willows have gone and a sentry in a pillbox guards a grave surrounded by an iron railing. The most singular thing about the Tomb is that it is empty. Napoleon’s remarkably preserved corpse was exhumed in 1840 after nineteen years and taken back to Paris to lie in splendour at Les Invalides (formerly a military veterans’ hospital) by the Seine. I gazed at the bare slab inside the iron fence—no name ever appeared on it, because Governor Lowe would not approve the simple and elegant ‘Napoléon’ and the French rejected the addition of ‘Bonaparte’.

  After Napoleon’s death, this place became a pilgrimage site for the passengers of every ship that called. Charles Darwin, who stayed six days on the island during his epoch-making voyage on HMS Beagle in 1836, had more important things to do with his time—studying the island’s geology, vegetation, birdlife and marine species—and found all the fuss irritating: ‘After the volumes of eloquence which have poured forth on this subject, it is dangerous even to mention the tomb. A modern traveller, in twelve lines, burdens the poor little island with the following titles—it is a grave, tomb, pyramid, cemetery, sepulchre, catacomb, sarcophagus, minaret, and mausoleum!’1

  The willows that once shaded the grave no longer exist, destroyed by visitors over the years who broke off sprigs or whole branches. Some of those people were on their way to Australia and planted their souvenirs when they arrived. So it could be said that Napoleon made a posthumous invasion of the great southern land with the willows that still border its inland creeks and rivers.

  Betsy’s fifteenth birthday, on 4 October 1817, was celebrated with a lavish party at Ross Cottage, Balcombe’s poultry farm. The main reason it was not held at The Briars was no doubt because of the embarrassment of Admiral Plampin and his mistress living in the pavilion there. However, another reason was the hope that Napoleon would join the festivities, as the cottage was within the permitted 12-mile boundary, beyond which he had to be accompanied by a guard. Betsy wrote: ‘There was so very little to vary the monotony of Napoleon’s life, that he took an interest in the most trifling attempts at gaiety on the island, and he generally consented to our entreaties to be present at some of the many entertainments which my father delighted in promoting.’ (Here Betsy was surely being imaginative as there is no record of Napoleon attending any of her father’s earlier entertainments! However as Ross Cottage was within his boundary, this account of a party he had no intention of attending may be true.)

  Gathered around the generously laden tables were most of the island’s eligible young women, also O’Meara, the Bertrands and their children, and a group of military and naval officers, including Dr John Stokoe and Ensign George Heathcote from the Conqueror. The party was in full swing when Betsy saw a lone figure on horseback on the hill above. She beckoned to Napoleon but he shook his head. ‘I did not consider this was fulfilling his promise of coming to the party.’ So she scampered up the hill and begged him to join them, saying he could not refuse on her birthday. He said he could not face all those people staring at him. She insisted he taste her birthday cake and ran back down. The cake, sent by a friend in England unaware of the governor’s strict rules, was decorated with a confectionery eagle. The governor had rebuked Balcombe for it. Betsy returned with a large slice for Napoleon, saying: ‘It is the least you can do for getting us into such disgrace.’ He pinched her ear, called her a saucy simpleton, and rode off humming ‘Vive Henri Quatre’.2

  Dr Stokoe had become a welcome visitor at The Briars; some believed he was paying court to Jane Balcombe, who had recently been ill but had recovered. Stokoe hailed from Durham, Northumbria, and was a man of refined sensibilities, a lover of chamber music ‘from Corelli through the eighteenth century to Beethoven and Kreutzer’.3 O’Meara liked him and promised an introduction to Bonaparte; the emperor’s state of health was worrying and O’Meara valued his colleague’s opinion.

  A few days after the party, O’Meara and Stokoe walked about in the garden at Longwood, contriving to attract the emperor’s attention, and the doctor was permitted to present his friend. When O’Meara explained that Stokoe spoke fluent Italian, Napoleon asked him where he had seen action and learned that he had served almost three years in Sicily.

  When Napoleon asked, ‘Are you married?’, it produced an awkward response from Stokoe: ‘To this question I stupidly replied, non ancora [not yet], when I observed a smile on Madame Montholon’s face, and I thought there was a faint reflection of it on Napoleon’s countenance, which I was puzzled to account for. O’Meara explained it afterwards by telling me that I only confirmed the common report on the island that I was paying my addresses to the eldest Miss Balcombe. This report arose from my having attended the young lady soon after our arrival during a serious illness. On her recovery we were often seen together on the public walk. The people of St Helena, accustomed to see marriages take place after a very short courtship, soon made up their minds that we were to make a match of it. As it did not take place so soon as they expected, they chose to account for its failure in their own way, ie. by saying that I could not obtain the consent of the father by reason of my age.’4 Jane was seventeen and Stokoe forty-two.

  According to Stokoe’s memoir, a few days after this interview Napoleon confronted Balcombe and asked: ‘Why have you refused your daughter to the surgeon of the flag-ship? C’est un brave homme. [He’s a good man.]’ Balcombe replied: ‘But I have not refused. The doctor has never asked me for my daughter.’5 Perhaps Stokoe protested too much. His memoir was written years later, after he had wed late in life, and it is not surprising that he denied a prior marriage proposal. In fact, Lowe noted in a despatch to Bathurst that the surgeon had formally requested Jane Balcombe’s hand and been refused by her father.6

  Attempting to follow correct procedure, Stokoe reported his interview with Napoleon to Admiral Plampin, but received a severe reprimand for having spoken to General Bonaparte without permission. At Plantation House the surgeon was marked as a man to watch.

  On 9 October, the same day as Stokoe’s meeting with Napoleon, the East India Company’s Woodford anchored i
n James Bay. It had come from India by way of Île de France (present-day Mauritius) with a number of Company civil servants and officers on board, returning home to England. One of them, Edward Abell Esquire from Madras, would, five years into the future, become Betsy Balcombe’s husband and give her a daughter and nothing else but misfortune.

  The Woodford was in port for five days. No record has been located in the St Helena Archives of a meeting between Edward Abell and the Balcombes, but nor would there be such a record unless something eventful occurred. However, as the Longwood purveyor and one of the island’s leading traders, Balcombe went aboard every Company ship calling at the island and, due to his hospitable nature, anyone personable usually received an invitation to The Briars.

  A plan had been developed at Longwood, apparently with the connivance of O’Meara, to emphasise Napoleon’s ill health—which was wretched enough—to justify his removal from the island on medical grounds. Gourgaud noted: ‘I inform Bertrand that I have warned my mother not to be distressed if I mention Napoleon’s liver trouble in my letters, as a pretext for getting away from here.’7 The plan was to rebound on them.

  In the middle of the month, the Balcombe family moved to a rented house at Arnos Vale, a narrow valley three miles across the mountain from The Briars. The move was to an inferior dwelling but resolved the socially compromising situation of Admiral Plampin and his paramour living at the pavilion; it also had economic benefits, with the admiral renting the whole Briars property. Lowe, who rarely had anything good to say about Balcombe, conceded to Bathurst that the purveyor was generous in giving up his house ‘at great personal inconvenience for him and his family’.

  Napoleon was in much physical pain that October and fractious because of it. It did not help his temper when O’Meara issued a health bulletin referring to him as ‘General Bonaparte’. However, most of all it would seem he was angry with the Balcombes. This may have been because the purveyor had failed to write to Tyrwhitt; but Betsy was also the object of considerable wrath. Gourgaud recorded: ‘The Emperor remarks that the Balcombes are a family of scoundrels [canaille]. “They belong to the lowest people,” he says “and dare not invite me to dinner. Betsy will not marry the Major—he has too much intelligence to lose caste in this way!”’ Gourgaud added his own comment: ‘I always thought that Fehrzen never intended to marry—all this is His Majesty’s invention!’8 It is difficult to fathom the reason for this righteous indignation about Major Fehrzen, who had already left for England with the 53rd Regiment in July and was then on his way to India. Could it be that Betsy had been seen dallying with another man—perhaps with Edward Abell Esquire, passenger from Madras, whose ship had left for England just two days earlier?

  She had acquired a new admirer—who fancied Jane as well—in Ensign George Heathcote. He had been ill and was convalescing in a nearby house at Arnos Vale. Young Tom and Alexander Balcombe visited to read to him, but it was the sisters who interested Heathcote and he simply could not decide between them. He would wait for their visits; as he recovered, they played games on the lawn. Jane observed the rules, but Betsy was always rough, knocking the invalid down on the grass and delighting in his feebleness compared to her own strength. Years later he wrote to the girls’ mother, admitting that his heart ‘was held so completely divided that I thought I loved neither because I loved both. Besides, I had no fortune, and all these things kept back those strong feelings which future circumstances have brought to light.’9

  Napoleon was ill and depressed. The English papers brought news that the Allied powers had determined that his son would never succeed to the Duchy of Parma. ‘His Majesty is tired and unable to walk,’ wrote Gourgaud. ‘He says he would have lived until he was eighty, if he had not come to St Helena. Here, he will never make old bones.’10 They read in the papers about the marriage of Charles de Flahaut and the heiress Margaret Mercer Elphinstone. ‘I tell you,’ Napoleon assured Gourgaud, ‘that I will find you a bride, with three or four thousand pounds a year. That should justify your staying here with me. When we are in England, all the women will want you. Look at Flahaut.’11

  Romance was in the air, but not for Gourgaud. Ali the valet announced that he was in love with Josephine, the Montholons’ maid. Napoleon disapproved of ‘such an ill-assorted marriage. I do not believe in sympathy, the love that exists in novels. This is not nature . . . The best marriages are of convenience.’12

  A few days later, the Balcombe sisters came to stay overnight with the Bertrands.13 Something clandestine was occurring. The next morning, Gourgaud was invited to the Bertrand house to breakfast with the girls, ‘but when we get there, they are still in bed. It seems that Hudson Lowe suspects something, for, last night, he increased the number of sentries. It is probably because of a rumour that an American schooner is cruising in the neighbourhood. Later in the morning, when the Emperor sends for me, he is quite gay, and sends me to lunch with the Balcombes.’14

  Meanwhile, O’Meara was having a difficult time determining how to describe his patient in his reports to satisfy both Bonaparte and the governor. ‘If you send any more bulletins without showing them to me,’ Napoleon said, ‘you will be acting the part of a spy, which is what the gaoler of St Helena wishes.’ He refused to discuss his complaints and would see the doctor only as a friend. Lowe relented and agreed that Napoleon could sight future bulletins.

  In early November, Gourgaud recorded in his journal: ‘For several days past Bertrand has been holding conferences with Balcombe.’15 He gave no hint of the nature of these discussions. But some intelligence gleaned from the English newspapers cheered them all. ‘Great news!’ Napoleon announced. ‘I hear there is to be a change of Ministry in England. We shall see Wellesley [the Duke of Wellington], Holland and Grenville in power. The Little Princess will punish the Ministers for ill-treating her mother . . . The Bourbons are to be cleared out. Austria and Russia are going to withdraw their troops [ from France]. The English will be asked to recall theirs, and, then, the Bourbons will be expelled. There is to be a complete change. Wellesley is for me. He says they were wrong in driving me out of France in 1815. Lowe is being abused in the Gazettes.’16

  O’Meara knew the editor of the Morning Chronicle and offered to arrange publication of whatever Napoleon wished to write. He said, according to Bertrand, that English opinion about the emperor had changed; ‘as for the threat of libel, we laugh and know what to expect’.17 His overweening confidence of being in favour with the Admiralty meant he did not fear the governor’s threats.

  When Napoleon heard that a French translation of Letters from St Helena by William Warden was on sale in Brussels, he sat down to write a pseudonymous refutation of the exaggerations in the book, pretending to be a Bonapartist supporter in Cape Town. He asked Fanny Bertrand to translate it into English, and it was eventually published as Letters from the Cape of Good Hope in reply to Mr Warden.

  The relationship between the governor and O’Meara deteriorated further. On 18 December, they had another argument in the library at Plantation House about the nature of his conversations with his patient. ‘I am caught between the anvil and the hammer,’ O’Meara told Marchand.18 A few days later, when his cantankerous patient was still arguing about the wording of the health bulletins, O’Meara collapsed. Napoleon shouted to his valet, who was in the adjoining room. Recalled Marchand: ‘I came hurriedly and found him busy undoing the doctor’s necktie which seemed to interfere with him; I grabbed a bottle of cologne and poured a large quantity onto a handkerchief which the Emperor applied to his temples, while I put smelling salts under his nose. O’Meara slowly came to his senses. “I feared,” said the Emperor, “that it was a stroke, your face became that of a dead man: I thought your soul had left you.”’19

  This show of concern touched O’Meara. The stress of working for two masters (or actually for three), of being between the anvil and the hammer, had become too great. The episode was the turning point. He crossed to the Bonapartist side.

  On 20 Dec
ember, the Bertrands came to dinner at Longwood, leaving their children and going to the trouble of dressing formally, as demanded. But Napoleon was displeased with Fanny’s effort. ‘That hat doesn’t suit you!’ he exclaimed. ‘And your dress—it comes from China. I don’t like it!’ Earlier he had remarked to Gourgaud: ‘Madame Bertrand dresses badly, and when she is dressed up, she looks like a country wench all decked out in her Sunday clothes.’20

  They endured a dull Christmas. On New Year’s Eve the Balcombe sisters stayed with the Bertrands once again and went to a ball at Deadwood Camp in torrential rain, Gourgaud accompanying them. Madame de Montholon, once more in advanced pregnancy, stayed at home. (Napoleon complained about her habitually ‘protruding belly’.21 Some wondered if he was responsible for it.) During the quadrilles and supper, Gourgaud watched Madame Bertrand and then O’Meara enjoy a lengthy discussion with the Russian commissioner.22 Count Balmain gleaned sufficient information to send a grim report on Napoleon’s health to St Petersburg: ‘Bonaparte’s liver is seriously affected, and his health is visibly deteriorating. The devouring air of the tropics, his excessive leisure, are altering his blood and his temperament. At night he does not sleep. In the daytime he is torpid. His complexion is livid, his eyes sunken. His condition excites pity. Dr O’Meara told me confidentially that he did not give him more than two years of life. Only exercise can bring him back.’23

  On New Year’s Day, Napoleon sent sweetmeats on Sèvres porcelain plates to the Bertrand house for Betsy and Jane. There was news that a ship had arrived directly from England. O’Meara hurried to town to gain information. ‘It is a boat specially sent,’ Napoleon speculated. ‘The Governor is recalled!’ They waited anxiously for the doctor’s return. He dismounted amid great excitement. Gourgaud reported: ‘His Majesty receives him in the reception room, while we stay in the billiard room. The Emperor returns to us with the news. It is a boat from Brazil, which has brought two despatches from another boat from England. One is for the Governor and the other for the Admiral, both countersigned by Lord Bathurst. Their contents are as yet unknown. Balcombe has been dining with the Admiral, attempting to find out something.’24 They soon learned, apparently from Balcombe, the gist of Bathurst’s communication to Lowe: letters to Longwood with the word ‘Emperor’ would not be delivered; a new house was to be built for General Bonaparte; and a chambermaid would be provided for Madame Bertrand, paid for by her English aunt, Lady Jerningham.