Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Napoleon’s supporters made Lowe out to be ignorant, cruel and sadistic, which he wasn’t, but also tactless, arrogant and small-minded, which he was. The 5th Earl of Albemarle, who had fought at Waterloo, recorded that several officers of the Corsican Rangers thought Lowe ‘a man of churlish manners and an irritable and overbearing temper’.91 Wellington was even harsher, calling Lowe ‘a very bad choice; he was a man wanting in education and judgment. He was a stupid man, he knew nothing at all of the world, and like all men who knew nothing of the world, he was suspicious and jealous.’92 Considering how well Napoleon got on with other Britons – Fox, Cornwallis, Yarmouth, Campbell, Macnamara, Ebrington, Russell, Fazakerley, Venables-Vernon, Douglas, Ussher, Maitland, O’Meara, Cockburn and the Balcombes among them, as well as many visitors on St Helena – Britain wasted an opportunity by sending such an unsympathetic martinet. Napoleon could have been drawn out and debriefed on the myriad political secrets of the European courts over the previous sixteen years, and had already told Cockburn useful naval secrets about the mining of Cherbourg harbour.

  Napoleon refused to meet Lowe more than six times over four months, despite living only 3 miles from him, after which the two men fought an exceptionally petty war against each other until Napoleon’s death five years later. Lowe complained about the amount of kindling Longwood burned, reprimanded William Balcombe when Betsy rode one of Napoleon’s horses, refused to allow Napoleon’s piano to be retuned, stopped him receiving history books, a bust of the King of Rome and ivory chess pieces with the imperial ‘N’ carved on them. (Napoleon was allowed no contact of any kind with his son, who was prevented from learning French and given an Austrian title, the Duke of Reichstadt, in 1818.) Lowe also refused to allow Napoleon to buy the freedom of Toby, the Balcombes’ elderly Malay gardener/slave, although Lowe abolished slavery for all children born after Christmas Day 1818.93 He even denied Napoleon’s request to see Captain Murray Maxwell’s boa constrictor, which could eat a goat, and banned the senior chaplain on St Helena from receiving a snuffbox from Napoleon, regarding it as the attempted bribery of an official.94

  Lowe’s most absurd moment came in May 1820, when he reported to Lord Bathurst that Montholon had spoken to the French commissioner on the island, the Marquis de Montchenu, about Longwood’s success in growing vegetables, and offered him both green beans and white beans from the kitchen garden. Lowe saw this as having a deep political meaning since green was the Bonapartist colour and white the Bourbon. ‘The Marquis, it appears to me,’ Lowe reported to Bathurst, ‘would have acted with more propriety if he had declined receiving either, or limited himself to a demand for the white alone.’ This was not the only time Lowe mentioned the bean-colour issue to the (presumably completely nonplussed) secretary for war.95 Wishing to learn English, Napoleon had a copy of children’s fables sent to him, in one of which a sick lion endured with fortitude the insults of the other animals until he was finally kicked in the face by a donkey. ‘I could have borne everything but this,’ says the lion before expiring. ‘It is me and your governor,’ Napoleon told Betsy.96

  Yet the baiting and paranoia were not all one way. Napoleon had a wall and trench built so that he could garden out of sight of Lowe’s sentries; he had chairs removed so that Lowe was forced to stand during their interviews, as with a head of state; he had holes cut – indeed it is said on St Helena that he did it himself with his penknife – in the shutters of the billiards room so that he could spy on the sentry-box in his garden, even though it faces away from the house rather than towards it.97 Calling Lowe ‘the Sicilian henchman’, Napoleon regularly alleged that he was an assassin sent by ‘the English oligarchy’ (that is, the British government), claiming that the guards around the house had orders to kill him, and that one day he would be killed by an ‘accidental’ bayonet thrust.98 ‘I cannot bear red,’ he said during one bout of Anglophobia, ‘it is the colour of England.’99

  One major area of contention with Lowe was the governor’s attempt to cut the costs of Napoleon’s imprisonment, from £20,000 to £12,000 per annum (that is, from 400,000 to 240,000 francs). The rows over his expenses descended to the cost and quality of the butter served at Longwood. Lowe found it hard to understand why Napoleon needed a pastry-chef and lamp-lighter there, but for all Bertrand’s protestations over the cutbacks, the household hardly went short.100 In the last three months of 1816, for example, 3,700 bottles of wine – 830 of them claret – were delivered to Longwood.101*

  Though Lowe couldn’t have known it, Napoleon never considered trying to escape from St Helena, which is surprising considering the adventurousness of the rest of his life and the fact that until Rochefort his record for seaborne escapes – Corsica, Egypt, Elba – had been good. He did feign an escape early on, for a joke, suddenly riding up a precipice and away from his orderly officer, Captain Thomas Poppleton of the 53rd Regiment, but Cockburn failed to become alarmed and told Poppleton that he would probably find him back at Longwood, which indeed he did.102 There was much discussion among his entourage about escaping, and several plans, including ones concocted by a Colonel Latapie and General Lallemand, who had escaped from Malta two months after being imprisoned there.103 (Latapie was going to seize the Portuguese prison island of Fernando de Noronha, 220 miles off the Brazilian coast, incite a rebellion of the 2,000 prisoners there and sail to St Helena to free Napoleon. Napoleon himself denounced the whole idea as ‘a fable they have invented to give more authority to the vexations of Sir Hudson Lowe’.104†) Gourgaud boasted that they often discussed how Napoleon ‘might escape in a basket of soiled clothes, or in a cask of beer, or a case of sugar’, but added that the Emperor had made it clear he would neither disguise himself nor make the slightest physical effort to escape, as it was too undignified.105 Besides, Lowe’s paranoia led him to station no fewer than 125 men around Longwood during the day and 72 at night.

  Napoleon spent more than five and a half years on St Helena, longer than his time as First Consul, and apart from Longwood, which was destroyed by termites in the next century and had to be rebuilt, he could only leave one monument there: his memoirs. In 1802 he had said that he would ‘hear the last hour strike without regret and without anxiety as to the opinion of future generations’, yet his principal activity on St Helena was an unvarnished attempt to influence that opinion.106 That he was so successful lay both in the extraordinary nature of the tale he had to tell, and in his literary ability. ‘The historian like the orator must persuade,’ Napoleon told Bertrand, ‘he must convince.’107 So in June 1816 he began dictating to Las Cases (both father and son), Gourgaud, Montholon and occasionally O’Meara – sometimes for up to twelve hours a day – what was to be, when it was published two years after his death by Las Cases in four volumes under the title Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, the greatest international bestseller of the nineteenth century.108 Once he had finished, he dictated a 238-page book on Julius Caesar, which, as we have seen, had plenty of autobiographical overtones.

  Napoleon spread maps all over the billiard table, using billiard balls to hold them open, and sought to remember the events of his sixty battles with the help of his bulletins. When asked by a visitor how he could recall the details of units that fought in each engagement, he replied: ‘Madam, this is a lover’s recollection of his former mistress.’109 Yet like other statesmen engaged on this exercise, his factual recall was by no means exact. ‘What a novel my life has been!’ he said, and his retelling of it certainly owed as much to fiction as to fact.110 He exaggerated achievements, underplayed defeats and pretended to a pan-Europeanism that was never his policy. (Las Cases even inserted the fraudulent document mentioned in Chapter 20.) He unsurprisingly wanted his memoirs to confound his detractors.111 ‘Many faults, no doubt, will be found in my career,’ he said, ‘but Arcole, Rivoli, the Pyramids, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland – these are granite: the teeth of envy are powerless here.’112 He also felt the need to denigrate other great men of the past – except Julius Caesar – pres
umably in order to build himself up. Thus Gustavus Adolphus made few able manoeuvres, Frederick the Great ‘did not understand artillery’, ‘Henri IV never did anything great … St Louis was a simpleton’, even Alexander the Great made ‘no fine manoeuvres worthy of a great general’.113 When, after Napoleon’s death but before the Mémorial came out, Gourgaud published some of Napoleon’s reminiscences, Marshal Grouchy believed the references to himself and Ney at Waterloo to be so garbled and incorrect that he wrote a pamphlet entitled Doubts of the Authenticity of the Historical Memoirs Attributed to Napoleon, stating that they could not have come from him.114 But they had.

  Napoleon’s daily routine at Longwood, at least until he fell ill in 1820, was to rise at 6 a.m., take tea or coffee, wash, shave and have a full-body massage with eau-de-cologne. (‘Rub harder,’ he would tell his valets, ‘as if you were rubbing down a donkey.’)115 He had lunch at 10 a.m., after which he dictated his memoirs and would then have a bath lasting between one hour and three (sometimes he even ate meals in the bath). He received visitors in the early evening in the drawing room, standing by the fireplace with his hat under his arm, before walking over to the Bertrands, and later returning to correct the dictated copy before dinner.116 There he would hold senior members of his entourage entranced with his reminiscences of great people and events, but then bore them after dinner by reading aloud to them from Corneille, Voltaire, Ossian, Homer or sometimes the Bible until bedtime at 11 p.m.117 Two of his mini-court plotted to ‘lose’ his copy of Voltaire’s tragedy Zaïre if he suggested reading it one more time.118

  In mid-June 1816 Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm arrived to replace Cockburn as the senior military officer on St Helena. Napoleon enjoyed his company and that of his wife, who happened to be a sister of the Captain Elphinstone he had helped the day before Waterloo. She took down their many, long and detailed conversations immediately afterwards.119 Malcolm found him ‘taller and not so fat as from his pictures he expected … his manner plain and agreeable’. They discussed Admiral of the Fleet Earl St Vincent’s gout, Pitt’s income tax – ‘Almost every person complained of it, which showed that they all paid’ – the ‘disgrace’ of slavery, Nelson’s tactics at Trafalgar, how Wellington risked too much fighting at Waterloo, and the fate of the Bourbons. Discussions about d’Enghien and the Jaffa massacre showed that nothing was out of bounds.120 In a single meeting they spoke about the Scottish aristocracy, how Wellington and Nelson chose their titles, Sheridan’s play The Rivals, John Milton’s republicanism, how much the English language had changed since Shakespeare, and whether Dryden and Addison had modernized it. Napoleon asked about Byron and contrasted Italian poetry and prose, before sitting down with Lady Malcolm to play chess. The Malcolms record Napoleon laughing a good deal, and when he saw the new ice-making machine brought to the island by its inventor, the pioneer of refrigeration Professor Leslie, he managed to break its thermometer, modestly remarking of his own clumsiness: ‘That is worthy of me.’121

  To stave off boredom Napoleon gave interviews to scores of people who visited St Helena as their ships revictualled. On June 7, 1817 he met Dr Thomas Manning, the explorer of Tibet, who was on his way to China. He wanted to know about the revenues of the Grand Lama of Lhasa and ‘asked a thousand questions respecting the Chinese, their language, customs, etc’. Otherwise, life on St Helena was monotonous, enlivened occasionally by the rat infestations at Longwood. On one occasion he told Betsy he had been ‘startled by observing a huge one jumping out of his hat, as he was in the act of putting it on’.122 He would also amuse himself by imitating the famous cries of London street-vendors.

  From late October 1816 – a full four and a half years before his death – Napoleon started to exhibit serious signs of ill-health. This was partly because once his relations with Lowe grew toxic he stopped riding much and became something of a hermit, but also partly because he ate few vegetables and little fruit, and because he refused to take the medicine prescribed to him, only agreeing to ever-longer hot baths. (The medicine he was prescribed included tartar emetic, mercurous chloride and a decoction of tree bark, so refusing it may not have done him much harm.) He was also afflicted by a growing depression about his fate on what he called, at different times, ‘this accursed’, ‘frightful’, ‘vile’ and ‘miserable’ rock.123

  Barry O’Meara reported to Lowe regularly on his patient’s health, and from these detailed summations, written weekly, sometimes daily, it is possible to follow his symptoms. When O’Meara fell out with Lowe in October 1817 over his diagnosis of hepatitis, which Lowe thought would be blamed on the British government for sending Napoleon somewhere inherently unhealthy, a Lowe-appointed doctor called Alexander Baxter, whom Napoleon refused to see, had to take dictation from O’Meara for his reports to the governor. This absurd situation continued until Lowe had O’Meara expelled from the island in August 1818. (Gourgaud had also by then been expelled by Lowe, for trying to communicate with Lucien Bonaparte.)

  On October 20, 1816, O’Meara reported that Napoleon – whom Lowe insisted O’Meara call ‘General Bonaparte’ in his reports – was complaining of ‘sponginess of his gums which … bled on a slight touch, countenance paler than usual’.124 Thereafter Napoleon was ‘in difficulty of respiration’ (October 21), had ‘swelling and coldness of the lower extremities’ (November 10) and suffered from ‘occasional attacks of nervous headaches, to which he has been subject for several years … slight diarrhoea’ (March 5, 1817), ‘some little tumefaction of the cheek and red gums’ (March 28), ‘swelling of the cheek … extremely painful’ (June 30), ‘severe catarrh’ (July 3), ‘an oedematous [swollen] appearance about the ankles … want of rest at night, and frequent inclination to make water voided in small quantities at a time’ (September 27), a dull pain ‘in the right hypochondriac region and a similar sensation in the right shoulder’, a rise of his pulse from 60 to 68 beats a minute, excitable bowels, a painful cheek and a pain in his side (October 9), from which O’Meara surmised: ‘Should it continue or increase, there will be every reason to believe that he has experienced a bout of chronic hepatitis’ (October 1).

  In the autumn of 1817 O’Meara removed one of Napoleon’s teeth, in the only medical operation he underwent in his life. By October 9 Napoleon had ‘a dull pain in the right side further back than before, his legs are rather less swelled’ and ‘the sensation [of] pain in the right side still continues the same. Last night he had some symptoms of palpitations of the heart … rather an acute pain under the scapula, and shooting down the right side, which in some degree affected the respiration … it is probable that the pain was produced by his having sat for a considerable time out on the steps of the veranda yesterday’ (October 11), ‘a dull pain in the right side and want of sleep’ (October 13).125 Napoleon wasn’t yet dying, but he clearly wasn’t well.

  By late 1817 Napoleon was suffering from depression, as well as liver problems, stomach pains and perhaps hepatitis B. ‘The thoughts of the night are not gay,’ he told Bertrand.126 He nonetheless does not seem to have seriously considered committing suicide, despite having attempted it once at Fontainebleau in 1814 and possibly again at the Élysée the following year. The only indication that he might have thought about it on St Helena emerged second-hand over half a century after his death, in the 1877 memoirs of Albine de Nontholon’s lover Basil Jackson, who claimed that on St Helena Gourgaud ‘would … talk strangely, even going so far as to more than insinuate that Napoleon had suggested to him self-destruction; this was on an occasion when death by means of the fumes of charcoal were talked of.’127 (Grilled charcoal exudes carbon monoxide.) By 1818, it was true, he had written his memoirs; he was never going to see any of his family again; he complained of failing memory and libido; he was obviously ill and often in pain. He was also easily brave enough to kill himself, and his lack of religious faith meant that ‘I don’t have chimerical fears of Hell.’128 ‘Death is nothing but a sleep without dreams’, and ‘As to my body, it will become carrots or turnips. I
have no dread of death. In the army I have seen many men perish who were talking to me.’129

  ‘Does a man have the right to kill himself?’ he had asked in his 1786 essay, ‘On Suicide’. ‘Yes, if his death harms no other person and if life is ill for him.’130 He knew that Seneca, Pliny, Martial, Tacitus and Lucan all celebrated the act.131 Yet when in 1802 a grenadier called Gobain had killed himself for love, the second such incident in a month, Napoleon sternly addressed an Order of the Day on the issue, stating that a ‘soldier should know how to conquer the pain and the melancholy of his passions; that there is as much courage evinced in suffering with constancy mental pain as in remaining firm under a storm of grapeshot. That to give oneself up to chagrin without resistance and to kill oneself is to abandon the battlefield before being conquered.’132 Although Marcus Porcius Cato’s suicide was praised by his contemporaries, in his biography of Julius Caesar Napoleon asked: ‘But to whom was his death useful? To Caesar. To whom did it give pleasure? To Caesar. For whom was it fatal? For Rome, for his party … He killed himself out of scorn, out of desperation. His death was the weakness of a great soul, the error of a Stoic, a blemish on his life.’133 Napoleon didn’t commit suicide on St Helena probably because it would give his enemies too much pleasure; as he himself put it: ‘It needs more courage to suffer than to die.’134 He told the Malcolms in June 1817,

  I have worn the imperial crown of France, the iron crown of Italy; England has now given me a greater and more glorious [one] than either of them – for it is that crown worn by the Saviour of the world – a crown of thorns. Oppression and every insult that is offered to me only adds to my glory, and it is to the persecutions of England I shall owe the brightest part of my fame.135