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 clever 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 breakneck 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)
The existence of a ménage-à-trois (or quatre, if one includes Jackson) doesn’t necessarily mean that Montholon hated Napoleon, as some modern writers have assumed. Such arrangements were not unusual among the French aristocracy, and as he had already slept with the wives of Maret and State Councillor Duchâtel, Chaptal’s mistress and Pauline’s reader, the Napoleonic court clearly acknowledged the concept of droit de seigneur. The compliant Montholon would hardly have stayed on St Helena after Albine’s return to Europe, and remained a leading Bonapartist all his life – suffering seven years’ imprisonment for his part in Napoleon’s nephew’s coup attempt of 1840 – if he had loathed him.
On December 10, 1815 Napoleon moved into Longwood, with a heavy heart. When Bertrand, who lived nearby in a cottage at Hutt’s Gate, told him that his ‘new palace’ was ready, he replied: ‘Do not call it my palace but my tomb.’75 It comprised a billiard room (with shockingly loud green walls as the East India Company had that colour paint in abundance), a drawing room, dining room, library, staff accommodation and sleeping quarters for the Montholon family. The British government had insisted that Napoleon only have the rank of ‘a general officer not in employ’, who was under no circumstances to be called emperor for fear of offending the Bourbons (even though, retaining medieval claims, George III had officially included ‘King of France’ among his titles for the first forty-two years of his reign).76 Britons therefore tended to call Napoleon ‘Sir’, ‘Your Excellency’ or ‘General Bonaparte’. When an invitation to a ball arrived at Longwood addressed to ‘General Bonaparte’, Napoleon quipped: ‘Send the card to the addressee; the last I heard of him was at the Pyramids and Mount Tabor.’77
Although Napoleon was not allowed newspapers by order of Lord Bathurst, secretary for war, on grounds of national security, news nonetheless seeped through.78 When he heard that Joseph had successfully evaded capture and was living in Bordentown, New Jersey, he ‘remained thoughtful for some time’ – doubtless considering what would have happened if he had taken up the impersonation offer – before he ‘then expressed satisfaction’.79 Although he mourned the outrageous execution of General de La Bédoyère by the Bourbons on August 19, 1815, he himself reacted disgracefully to the news of their shooting Marshal Ney, telling Gourgaud: ‘Ney got no more than he deserved. I regret him because he was inestimable on a field of battle, but he was too hot-headed, and too stupid to succeed in anything but a fight.’80 Later remarks about Ney’s betrayal of him at Fontainebleau in April 1814 explain his ire.81
Murat’s execution in Calabria at the hands of the Neapolitan Bourbons initially produced a similar reaction – ‘Murat has only had what he deserved’ – but on further reflection he said: ‘It was all my own fault. I ought to have let him stay a marshal, and never made him Grand Duke of Berg; still less King of Naples. He was off his head. He was very ambitious.’82 In case anyone thought that hypocritical, he added, ‘I rose to distinction step by step, but Murat wanted at a bound to be chief of everything.’ Napoleon was impressed when he heard of the sensational escape of Lavalette from the Conciergerie prison in Paris, where he had been awaiting execution for treason, when his wife – whom Napoleon had hitherto thought of as ‘a little fool’ – took his place and allowed him to escape wearing her clothes.83 (With their customary generosity, the Bourbons imprisoned her until she went insane.) Napoleon pronounced himself ‘glad’ when he heard of Marie Walewska’s marriage in 1816 to the Bonapartist Duc d’Ornano. ‘She is rich,’ he said of the 10,000 francs a month that he had been giving her at one point, ‘for she must have laid by considerable sums.’84 She did not have long to enjoy them, as the following year she died of kidney failure in Liège, where the duke was in exile. Napoleon was perfectly willing to name his mistresses to Gourgaud on St Helena, when discussing his ‘bonnes fortunes’ with women, although he insisted he had only had six or seven, whereas the true figure was at least three times that.85
Until April 14, 1816, although Napoleon’s imprisonment was not comfortable or by any means pleasurable – for such a big man on so tiny an island it couldn’t be – it was relatively bearable. But that day a new governor, Hudson Lowe, arrived on St Helena, to take over from the affable Colonel Mark Wilks. At their first meeting Napoleon gave Lowe a gold watch – which can now be seen in the National Army Museum in London – but their relationship deteriorated swiftly. Napoleon was already chafing at his fate, and his punctilious, unimaginative, regulations-obsessed new jailer was a bad choice for the post. Montholon was later to admit that ‘an angel from heaven could not have pleased us as governor of St Helena’, but Lowe’s military career virtually guaranteed a clash.86 In the draft of his unpublished autobiography in the British Library, Lowe describes how he led a company during Nelson’s night attack on the Convention Redoubt in San Firenzo Bay, Corsica, in early February 1794:
The whole of the troops then rushed on and the party with which I was proceeding made its entrance at the breach, which we found absolutely blocked up with the bodies of the French garrison, who had been employed in defending it. They were all of the Regiment of La Fère … They lay heaped in the breach on which we had to make our way over the dead and dying bodies.87
Since Napoleon had left the regiment a matter of months beforehand, Lowe was trampling over his maimed and dead comrades, fighting alongside an anti-French Corsican force he was eventually to command himself called the Royal Corsican Rangers, despised by Napoleon as traitors.
Lowe had also fought at Bastia and Calvi, and been quartered at the Casa Bonaparte in Ajaccio, before serving in Portugal and Minorca and commanding the Corsican Rangers in Egypt, where he was involved in the French surrender in 1801, escorting the defeated French army from Cai
ro to its embarkation at Rosetta, a humiliating moment of Napoleon’s consulship. He had spent two years in charge of a printing press at Capri ensuring that every success of the Allied armies in the Peninsular War was surreptitiously pasted up in Naples and other Italian cities, which Napoleon would not have respected as the proper work of a soldier.88 Beyond that, Lowe knew and greatly admired Tsar Alexander and was present at the battle of Leipzig, after which he was attached to the staff of Blücher, whom he also revered. He was present at Napoleon’s defeats at La Rothière and Lâon, and entered Paris after Marmont’s surrender. He had even put in a recommendation in early 1815 that the ridge at Waterloo be fortified (though he was not present at the battle itself, having a command in the force that drove Brune out of Toulon in July).89 In his thirty-four years of service, therefore, during which he had taken no more than a total of twelve months of leave, Lowe had witnessed many of Napoleon’s worst humiliations and defeats and had reversed his earliest victory. There could be no possible sympathy between the two men, and Lowe was unlikely to find any aspect of Napoleon’s character attractive. ‘You never commanded any men but Corsican deserters,’ Napoleon sneered at him at the last of their interviews. ‘You’re not a general, you’re only a clerk.’90
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