Napoleon's Poisoned Chalice

by Dr Martin Howard

  The response of the other Longwood inhabitants to O’Meara’s revelations of their private world is more contentious. Montholon, writing to his wife in November 1819, rubbished the Exposition, referring to it as a ‘collection of stupidities and trivialities’ and saying that it left a ‘bad odour’. However, interpretation of St. Helena sources is rarely straightforward and as Montholon knew that his letters from the island to his wife in Europe would be scrutinised by Lowe it is quite possible that these opinions were expressed purely for the Englishman’s consumption and were not real. This view is supported by the fact that Montholon was in the habit of feeding the British Governor snippets of false information. Also, he and his wife remained on good terms with O’Meara, regularly corresponding with him.18

  Lowe had vowed that he would not demean himself by attacking O’Meara directly, but the public humiliation he had suffered at the doctor’s hands left him no option but to seek legal redress and a stage where he could clear his name. He consulted the Solicitor General, Sir John Copley, and the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (an accomplished lawyer), Mr Tindal. Although he laid his case before them in August 1822, because of the long vacation he only received their joint opinion in November. They advised him to make a selection of what he regarded to be the most obnoxious and injurious passages in O’Meara’s volumes with the object of applying to the courts for a ‘criminal information’ – the most serious form of libel action.

  This process took Lowe a considerable period of time as he found the task to be much more difficult than he had anticipated. He moaned that the work had been composed with a ‘peculiar art’ and that ‘truth and falsehood were artfully blended together’. It is clear that his lawyers were not confident. They emphasised to their client that he would have to prove that the passages selected from the book were not only ‘abusive’ but also ‘false’. Moreover, many of these statements had been put into the mouth of Napoleon and it was unlikely that a jury would find the defendant guilty of libel unless they could be convinced that speeches attributed to the Emperor were actually a fabrication, a cover for O’Meara’s ‘malignity’.

  Despite the lukewarm support of his legal team, Lowe decided to forge on and he managed to obtain twenty-three affidavits from officers who had served under him on St. Helena and were willing to testify that the accusations made against him in the book were untrue. He had powerful allies such as Sir George Bingham, but it is likely that many signed affidavits in his support out of duty or expediency. Those who made affidavits in favour of O’Meara, willing to testify that his book was truthful, were as follows: John Fernandez, Captain of the 53rd; R.H.Reardon, Lieutenant of the 44th, late of the 66th; A.W. Birmingham, late Lieutenant of the 66th; Thomas Poppleton, Captain of the 53rd; Thomas Cook, late Commander of the Tortoise store ship; Robert Yonghusband, Captain of the 53rd; John Cumming, late purser of the Princess Charlotte of Wales H.E.I.C.; and of the French residents at Longwood: – Montholon, Las Cases, Antommarchi, Marchand, Coursot, Chandelier, Saint-Denis and Pierron.

  Bertrand was apparently under obligation to Lowe and Gourgaud’s non-appearance in the ranks of O’Meara’s supporters was almost certainly because he did not wish to repeat statements he had first made on his return from St. Helena. Norwood Young dismisses the seven British officers in this list as a ‘little band of failures’ but this is unfair as their lack of career progression was guaranteed by their history of conflict with Lowe.19

  When the case finally opened in June 1823, O’Meara’s counsel objected that the application should have been entered at a time nearer the date of publication of the alleged libel. The court upheld the objection and the case was dismissed. O’Meara had to pay his own costs as he had taken a stand on the time element – if he had wished to proceed with the case, he could have waived this technical flaw. He was presumably relieved to escape unscathed and was not willing to take the risk of charging Lowe with having committed perjury against him. Lowe immediately protested that he had not been informed of the time limit by his solicitor. His apologists struggle to account for the failed legal action. Forsyth glosses over the affair as an unfortunate accident, Seaton refers to it as ‘very strange’, and Young attributes his downfall to ‘the carelessness of his eminent counsel and the incompetence of his solicitor’.

  It is inconceivable that Lowe’s legal advisors, the foremost lawyers in the land, were unaware of the time restriction or that they simply forgot to warn their client of it. More likely, they were so doubtful of a successful outcome that, unable to persuade Lowe not to proceed, they deliberately employed delaying tactics to save both him and the Government needless embarrassment. This was certainly the contemporary opinion of some of Lowe’s friends. The Governor now considered other forms of legal redress such as indictment or a civil action for damages but Tindal advised him against this. Even if he were to succeed, the damages were unlikely to be great. There is an interesting aside in Gorrequer’s diary suggesting that Lowe also had concerns regarding the vagaries of the jury system: ‘That one dissenting voice and one bad character, among such men as London juries are composed of, might perhaps clear him [O’Meara].’ His supporters exhorted him to instead take a stand outside the courts. Bathurst wrote to him,

  I have always thought that whatever might have been the result of your late proceedings, you owed it to yourself, after all that had been said against you, to draw up a full and complete vindication of your government at St. Helena coupled with all the documents in your statement. It will be for consideration when it will be prudent to publish it.

  Bathurst’s final sentence is revealing. Even if Lowe were to assemble the evidence in his favour, the Government would not necessarily encourage its immediate disclosure. O’Meara’s connections within the Admiralty and particularly the support of his anti-Lowe correspondence by senior figures such as Lord Melville could cause embarrassment. Ministers might be attacked for both their cruelty to Napoleon and their treachery to the Governor.20

  In the event, Sir Hudson Lowe was never to produce any written work defending his actions on St. Helena. William Forsyth tried to vindicate him in his History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St. Helena published nine years after Lowe’s death. The book is valuable as it contains many original documents but, in the words of Lord Roseberry, ‘as a defence of Lowe it is futile because it is unreadable.’ Few who have attempted the stodgy volumes would disagree. Forsyth also weakens his own case by selectively including and excluding material to show his hero’s opponents in a poor light.

  In the absence of any coherent defence, either in the courts or by his own hand, Lowe was left to bear the brunt of O’Meara’s broadside. He became a pariah. Men moved away from him at his club and refused to sit next to him in public. He was subjected to an unsuccessful attempt at assault by the young Emanuel Las Cases in London. The Government kept him at arm’s length by appointing him Commander of the Forces in Ceylon, a subordinate position for a man of his experience. He continued to be castigated in the press and in popular literature, for instance by Walter Scott in his Life of Napoleon, and his name gradually became a byword for inadequacy. In the House of Lords in 1833, when Lord Teynham was speaking critically of a proposal to entrust additional powers to Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant, the Marquis of Normanby, he commented, ‘Now suppose the noble marquis were to be succeeded in the government of Ireland by a Sir Hudson Lowe.’ This was presumably a common usage but it could not be left unchallenged in such a public arena and the Duke of Wellington rose to protest, describing Lowe in glowing terms. This testimony from Wellington would be much in Lowe’s favour was it not for the fact that the Duke later revealed his true opinion in conversation with Lord Stanhope. When asked if he knew the ex-Governor personally, he replied;

  Yes, I did; I knew him very well. I conceive that he had a bad irritable temper; and in that point was ill-qualified for his post. He was a stupid man … he was not an ill-natured man, but he knew nothing at all of the world, and like all men who know nothing
he was suspicious and jealous.21

  Why did Lowe not defend himself more vigorously? His actions suggest that he was not fully convinced of the validity of his own case. It is possible that he was entirely misled by his lawyers but we know him to have been a fastidious, even an obsessive individual. It would be remarkable if he was unaware of any time constraint in a process that would define his reputation. More likely, he feared that he would lose the case and that his unsavoury behaviour on St. Helena would be more widely publicised. A dread of ultimately losing the argument with his detractors may have also served to deter him from publishing his memoirs or any form of justification of his record as Governor.

  In contrast to Lowe’s public decline, O’Meara had become what we would now term a ‘celebrity’. Byron expressed general opinion when he eulogised the naval surgeon in his poem, The Age of Bronze, published in April 1823. There was little prospect of him returning to simple military service. His popularity did not alter the fact that he had been dismissed from his post. O’Meara claimed that his allies in the Admiralty had offered him the lucrative situation of surgeon to the Greenwich Hospital but John Finlaison wrote to the Morning Chronicle denying this. O’Meara ensured his financial security in 1823 by entering into a marriage which complemented his increasingly eccentric life. His rich wife had first married years before O’Meara’s birth and had been widowed twice. Her first husband had been executed for poisoning a relative.

  O’Meara now became a proponent of controversial and anti-authoritarian causes. He first involved himself in the ‘Queen Caroline Affair’. This explains the odd reference in Bertrand’s journal; ‘O’Meara is now physician to the Queen’. Caroline had married the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, in 1795. They disliked each other from the start and their estrangement was such that popular legend states that when, upon the death of Napoleon, Wellington announced to the King, ‘Sire, your greatest enemy has died’, the startled monarch replied, ‘What! When did the Queen die?’

  In fact, she was alive, and when she returned to England from an exile in Europe in 1820 riots broke out in her support. The King appealed to his ministers to get rid of her and a bill was introduced to strip her of the title of Queen Consort and to dissolve the marriage, in part because of her alleged adultery. O’Meara decided to help her and busied himself collecting papers, evidence and witnesses on her behalf. The doctor was now addicted to opposition. Although not a Catholic, he played a prominent role in the campaign for Catholic emancipation and he became an ardent supporter of Daniel O’Connell and the First Reform Bill.22

  O’Meara maintained close links with the Bonaparte family. The following letter was written to the physician by Louis Napoleon, the future Napoleon III, in 1836.

  My Dear Doctor

  I am sending you my work upon artillery, which appeared a few months ago and which will, I hope, interest you. I beg you to accept it as proof of my friendship which has too noble an origin for it ever to change.

  My work was received with much indulgence in France, which gave me great pleasure, and rewarded me for my long and arduous labours.

  You would be doing me a great pleasure by obtaining for me an accurate drawing of the cannons newly invented for the English Navy, which are loaded at the breach. I should be much interested to learn how they are made because I am now occupied with a new invention which is connected with that process. You will understand no doubt that whatever has reference to artillery must be of interest to me. I am happy to take this opportunity of renewing the assurance of my friendship.

  Napoleon Louis Bonaparte

  We do not know if O’Meara acted as a French spy and replied to this brazen request to disclose the secrets of the British Navy. That the letter was written at all suggests that the French authorities regarded him as a potential enemy of his former employer.

  The doctor died shortly afterwards at his home in London on June 10th 1836 at the age of fifty-four. He had caught a chill whilst attending one of O’Connell’s meetings. He was still held in high public esteem. A leader in The Courier which appeared three days after his death described him as a man of ‘rigid integrity, capable of any sacrifice in the support of principle … A warmer-hearted or a more sincere friend than O’Meara never lived’.

  He had won the war of words but he was not leaving anything to chance. He was buried in St. Mary’s Church at Paddington Green and, in his will, he directed that the following should be inscribed upon his tomb.

  I take this opportunity of declaring that with the exception of some unintentional and trifling errors in the Voice from St. Helena, the book is a faithful narrative of the treatment inflicted upon the great man Napoleon by Sir Hudson Lowe and his subordinates, and that I have even suppressed some facts which although true might have been considered to be exaggerated and not credited.23

  Notes

  1. Young, N, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, pp. 90–3; Gonnard, P, The Exile of St. Helena, pp. 182–4.

  2. Forsyth, W, History of the Captivity of Napoleon, Vol. I, pp. 584–5, Vol. II, pp. 553–4; Young, Vol. II, pp. 101–3.

  3. Gonnard, p. 81; Forsyth, Vol. I, pp. 589–90; O’Meara, B, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, pp. 414–6; Marchand, Mémoires de Marchand, Vol. II, p. 192; Masson, F, Autour de Sainte-Hélène, Vol. III, pp. 190–2.

  4. Forsyth, Vol. II, pp. 602–4; Korngold, R, The Last Years of Napoleon, pp. 301–4.

  5. Forsyth, Vol. I, p. 629; Young, Vol. II, p. 106.

  6. Young, Vol. II, pp. 106–8; Forsyth, Vol. II, pp. 583–4, 615, 21; Korngold, pp. 304–5; Masson, Vol. III, p. 193; Seaton, RC, Napoleon’s Captivity in Relation to Sir Hudson Lowe, p. 109; Jackson, B, Notes and Recollections, pp. 170–1.

  7. Forsyth, Vol. II, pp. 19–21; Young, Vol. II, pp. 107–8; Gonnard, p. 81.

  8. Masson, Vol. III, pp. 195–6; O’Meara, Vol. II, pp. 416–7; Gonnard, pp. 83–4.

  9. Masson, Vol. III, pp. 191–3; Young, Vol. II, p. 98; Korngold, p. 303.

  10. Gonnard, pp. 82–5; Roseberry, Lord, Napoleon The Last Phase, pp.102–3; Martineau, G, Napoleon’s St. Helena, pp. 204–5.

  11. Forsyth, Vol. II, pp. 532–9, 581, Vol. I, pp. 625–7; Young, Vol. II, p. 138; Seaton, p. 149.

  12. Chaplin, A St. Helena Who’s Who, pp. 78–9; The National Archives J 76/8/1; Gorrequer, Major G, St. Helena during Napoleon’s exile, pp. 2, 5.

  13. Gorrequer, pp. 18, 30, 55–6, 60, 97, 38, 70–1, 61, 71–2, 62.

  14. Gorrequer, pp. 29, 56, 99, 81–3, 31, 75–6, 33, 43, 111–2; Forsyth, Vol. II, pp.587–94.

  15. Gorrequer, p. 79; Bertrand, General, Napoleon at St. Helena, p. 265; Markham, JD, Napoleon and Dr Verling on St. Helena, p. 104; Richardson, F, Napoleon’s Death: An Inquest, pp. 126–8; Young, Vol. I, pp. 249–50.

  16. Young, Vol. II, pp. 359–60, Vol. I, p. 574; Giles, F, Napoleon Bonaparte: England’s Prisoner, p. 164; Roseberry, p. 31.

  17. Martineau, p. 39; Gonnard, pp. 87–90; Gourgaud, Général, Journal de Sainte-Hélène, Vol. II, p. 290.

  18. Montholon, Comte de, Lettres du Comte et de la Comtesse de Montholon, p. 41; Gonnard, pp. 84–6.

  19. Forsyth, Vol. II, pp. 186–9; Korngold, pp. 409–10; Young, Vol. II, pp. 261–5.

  20. Forsyth, Vol. II, pp. 189–92; Young, Vol. II, pp. 265–7; Seaton, pp. 231–2; Gregory, D, Napoleon’s Jailer, p. 175; Gorrequer, p. 153.

  21. Forsyth, Vol. II, p. 192; Gonnard, p. 112; Roseberry, p. 76; Young, Vol. II, p. 268; Giles, p. 166; Gregory, pp. 185–6; Stanhope, Earl, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, p. 244.

  22. Young, Vol. II, pp. 260, 267; Seaton, p. 119; Forsyth, Vol. II, p. 647; Masson, Vol. III, pp. 194–5; Richardson, p. 129; Chaplin, A, The Illness and Death of Napoleon Bonaparte, p. 97; Bertrand, p. 265.

  23. Young, Vol. II, pp. 267–8; Chaplin, The Illness and Death of Napoleon Bonaparte, p. 97; Chaplin, A St. Helena Who’s Who, pp. 109–110.

  4

  TRAFALGAR VETERAN

  After the departure of O’Meara, the medical care of Na
poleon was largely left to chance. The Governor appointed James Verling of the Royal Artillery to the post of British physician at Longwood but Napoleon stubbornly refused to see any doctor offered by Lowe. Verling (to whom we will return) only caught a few glimpses of his ‘patient’ despite residing in the same house for over two years. Because of the lack of a reliable medical witness, little is known of the health of the Emperor at this time. Montholon infers that he was far from well. Verling notes in his journal of September 1818 that one of the servants described their master as ‘looking old, pale, and sallow’, and he later adds, ‘I thought from the slight views I had occasionally that he looked very ill’. Lowe remained sceptical of Napoleon’s illness but, if real, it was surely only a matter of time before his prisoner agreed to consult one of the Governor’s favoured doctors. However, when the call for medical help came, it was not to Verling or Baxter, but to John Stokoe, the surgeon of the Conqueror.1

  Stokoe was born in 1775 at Ferryhill in Durham. In 1794 he entered the British Navy as Surgeon’s Mate and was attached to a sloop of war, getting his first taste of action at the bombardment of Copenhagen. He was transferred to the Monarch, a ship of the line, and then to a frigate, the Acosta, and he spent two years in the Channel and the North Sea. He served at the Battle of Trafalgar on the Thunderer, which was last but one in Admiral Collingwood’s line. Relatively late into the action, she engaged a number of enemy ships and was fortunate to suffer only light damage, with sixteen casualties, four killed and twelve wounded. From September 1805 to November 1808 he was on the same vessel and saw the terrible siege of Gaeta, took part in an expedition to the Dardanelles and visited Sicily and Egypt. The vagaries of war next took him to a blockade of the Île de France and, on his return, he was appointed doctor to a prison ship anchored on the Medway. At the fall of Napoleon in 1814, he was selected by the Admiralty to accompany a Russian battalion which was being repatriated at Cronstadt. He was stationed at Sheerness and Leith in 1815 and 1816. We have no testimonies as to Stokoe’s character during these earlier years. His portrait suggests a country gentleman rather than a hardened naval veteran. Whatever his appearance, we may assume that he was no shrinking violet. By the end of 1816, he had been in the Navy for twenty-two years of which sixteen and a half had been at sea on active service. He had cured himself of typhus by quickly downing two bottles of wine. He was a survivor of hard times.2