Betsy and the Emperor Read online

  Betsy

  AND THE

  Emperor

  ANNE WHITEHEAD is an author, historian and former TV producer-director with the ABC. She is the author of Bluestocking in Patagonia and her book Paradise Mislaid was winner of the NSW Premier’s Award for Australian History.

  ‘A fascinating exploration of the life journey of Betsy Balcombe Abell from St Helena to Sydney to London. This is a well-researched and readable history of the dramatic repercussions for an English family of its proximity to Napoleon in his final years on St Helena.’

  —Professor Ann Curthoys, University of Sydney

  ‘St Helena: an exiled emperor in the garden pavilion and in the house a pretty, flighty teenager. And therefrom spring some fascinating narratives, ending up, after a disastrous marriage to a stylish cad, in colonial New South Wales.’

  —Marion Halligan, award-winning author

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  OTHER BOOKS BY ANNE WHITEHEAD

  Bluestocking in Patagonia: Mary Gilmore’s quest for

  love and utopia at the world’s end

  Paradise Mislaid: In search of the Australian tribe of Paraguay

  First published in 2015

  Copyright © Anne Whitehead 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  This book has been written with the generous assistance of a Writer’s Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 293 6

  eISBN 978 192 526 661 0

  Internal and cover design by Christabella Designs

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover images: Madame Charles Maurice de Tallyrand Pérgord (detail), Baron François Gérard (c.1804), Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art; The Roads, Views of St Helena, George Hutchins Bellasis (1815), National Library of Australia.

  To Allan, with love

  —who treated Napoleon with caution,

  but accompanied me with Betsy and the

  Balcombes every step of the way

  And to Keith and Shirley Murley, with gratitude

  —dedicated volunteer researchers at The Briars, Mt Martha, Victoria,

  for their unstinting generosity

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PART ONE

  1 The News

  2 The Prisoner

  3 Friends and Foes

  4 The Briars

  5 The Pavilion

  6 Boney’s Little Pages

  7 The French Suite

  8 The Admiral’s Ball

  9 Last Days at the Pavilion

  10 Longwood House

  11 The New Governor

  12 Gold Lace and Nodding Plumes

  13 This Accursed Place

  14 The Thinning Ranks

  15 The Sick Lion

  16 Our Beautiful Island

  17 The Company of a Green Parrot

  18 At the Mercy of the English

  19 Farewell to the Island

  PART TWO

  20 The Ties that Bind

  21 The Embattled Surgeon

  22 An Impending Tempest

  23 The St Helena Plot

  24 Official Disgrace

  25 An Item of News

  26 The One that Got Away

  27 Marry in Haste . . .

  28 ‘La Petite Angleterre’

  29 The Clearing Fog

  PART THREE

  30 Sydney Town

  31 ‘The Interesting Mrs Abell’

  32 The Fashionables

  33 A Fleeting Entente Cordiale

  34 The Treasury Under the Bed

  35 ‘Terrible Hollow’

  36 A Fractured Family

  37 Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon

  Picture section

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  PREFACE

  About ten years ago I was browsing along the shelves of an antiquarian bookshop, enjoying the sensual pleasure of the rich bindings, the gilded lettering, the mental travel to places called Abyssinia, Okavango, Patagonia, Smyrna, when I saw a little 1844 book, Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon on the Island of St Helena by Mrs Abell. Who was she, I wondered, and what brush with infamy had she inflated? I turned the fragile pages to discover that she had been a young girl called Betsy Balcombe when the exiled Bonaparte in 1815 was brought to the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena where she and her family lived. She had seen much of him over the course of three years. But how and why, I wondered, did this English family come to socialise with their nation’s great enemy? And why did he bother with them? I bought the little book and found it a charming memoir. Mrs Abell, obviously a feisty person, wrote only about those three years on St Helena and revealed nothing of her later life except a hint of some tragedy. Who was she really?

  I went back to work on other projects. However, Betsy’s book lingered in my mind and years later I returned, to seek the larger story behind the memoir. My attempt to answer those questions has led me on a detective trail to the manuscripts collection of the British Library, sifting through the vast correspondence of Sir Hudson Lowe and Lord Bathurst’s private papers; on a week’s voyage on the last operational Royal Mail ship to the island of St Helena, to work in its archives and visit locations where Betsy and her family lived and Napoleon was imprisoned; to the English counties of Sussex, Kent and Devon, to their record offices, and up to bleak Dartmoor; to the highlands of Scotland; to Paris and the northern French town of Saint-Omer; to old Madras in India; and to state archives and libraries in Australia as well as the Balcombes’ former homes in New South Wales and Victoria. The quest involved my reading several French journals by Napoleon’s companions never translated into English and making surprising discoveries that have not been revealed before.

  Since the Victorian era, authors have interested themselves in Betsy’s story, sometimes as a children’s book, sometimes confabulating it as Napoleon’s last romance, rarely adding anything new to her Recollections. (A revised edition of Betsy’s book, titled To Befriend an Emperor, was published in 2005, making this delightful story available to the general public.) A direct Balcombe descendant, the redoubtable Melbourne figure Dame Mabel Brookes, in 1960 published St Helena Story, her own account of her forebears. It was a brave attempt and told part of the story, but she lacked the research tools available to a biographer today and left many gaps. She could only say of Betsy’s husband that he was reputedly ‘a handsome man-about-town’, whereas his family background and career are revealed here; she wrote that Mrs Betsy Abell lived in Sydney with her family ‘for a brief period’, when it was actually ten years.

  Most books about Napoleon’s captivity focus on the compelling prisoner, his anguish and his anger and his last great battle with the authoritarian British governor Sir Hudson Lowe. This book d
eals with that struggle, but from the perspective of the British family on the sidelines, who also incurred Lowe’s wrath because of their friendship with his charge. Through their relationship with Napoleon they inevitably also became closely acquainted with his immediate companions on the island: his devoted chamberlain and biographer Count de Las Cases; the Count and Countess Bertrand; Count de Montholon and his wife; the temperamental General Gourgaud; the loyal valet Marchand; and Napoleon’s physician and the Balcombes’ good friend, the duplicitous Irishman Dr Barry O’Meara. As Bonaparte ruled over his little household, demanding imperial respect, settling their intrigues and disputes, we see the domestic Napoleon, ‘father’ of an unhappy, bickering family, still mentally refighting his old battles, deploying his armies of red and black pins across a billiard table, his prodigious brain fretting over trifles: the thickness of mattresses, the scrawniness of a roast chicken, the escape of a dairy cow.

  We follow Betsy and the Balcombes as they leave St Helena under a cloud because of their dangerous friendship, only to confront larger and possibly life-threatening troubles in England; to another kind of exile in France; and then to the penal colony of New South Wales, at a time of transition to a new future in which they play significant parts. Although there are many references to Betsy, her father and the family in this new life, due to the shortage of source material in their own words, I have sometimes provided an imaginative interpretation of their possible feelings and responses to their changed circumstances.

  Their transfer across the world reveals the rich network of connections between Britain and the colonies in the 1820s and 1830s, all controlled by the remarkable Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, arbitrator and manager of the colonial governors, the prisoner Bonaparte, and the whole intricate skein of colonial connections.

  This book argues that Napoleon, a master of strategy, had a particular reason for cultivating the Balcombes. It also answers how and why the lives of that English family on St Helena—the merchant William Balcombe, his wife who resembled the Empress Josephine, and their two pretty daughters, Betsy and Jane—came to be entangled with Bonaparte’s; and the reason why he was anxious to entangle them. Finally, it shows how their involvement with him would change Betsy and her family for ever, and cast a very long shadow over the rest of their lives.

  PART

  ONE

  A new Prometheus, I am attached to a rock

  where a vulture is gnawing at me.

  I had stolen the fire of heaven to endow France with it;

  the fire has come back to its source, and here I am.

  NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

  CHAPTER 1

  THE NEWS

  When HMS Northumberland anchored in James Bay, accompanied by four men-of-war and three troopships, it became known that the prisoner would not be brought ashore for another two days.1 Word spread that it would be the most extraordinary event in living memory.

  On the evening of 17 October 1815, people from all parts of the island made their way to the Jamestown waterfront, descending into the village, hemmed by mountains, by one of two steep roads. By dusk a great crowd had gathered at the narrow quay between the castle wall and the Atlantic Ocean.2

  It did not take much persuasion for the merchant William Balcombe to agree that his wife and two daughters should witness the event. Betsy was thirteen and her sister Jane fifteen. Their little brothers Tom and Alexander, aged five and four, had to stay behind with their nurse, but their father knew that the girls would always remember the sight of the most powerful man in the world brought down to size. One of the Balcombes’ slave boys opened The Briars’ gates, guiding the horse cart with a lamp as they joined the Sidepath, the vertiginous road carved into the rocks by slave labour. The whole mountainside was aglow with dancing, glimmering lanterns as they joined the throng making the mile-long descent.

  It was almost dark when they reached the marina. The whole population of St Helena, all 3500 of them, white, black, Asian and mulatto, bond and free, seemed to have gathered, their lanterns and torches bouncing and flaring. With apologies to this person and that, acknowledging familiar faces among the many strangers and soldiers, the Balcombes made their way through the crush. Betsy, just returned from school in England, could hardly believe that the island contained so many inhabitants. She found a position outside the castle wall near the drawbridge. Further along near the landing stage she made out the courtly figure of the governor wearing his plumed hat and full dress uniform. Beyond the row of sentries, the surf smashed and hissed on the rocks.

  A hush descended on the watching crowd when the slap of oars was heard. As the tender approached from the looming dark hulk of the warship Northumberland, Betsy saw five huddled figures. They stepped onto the landing stage from the bobbing craft, and she heard someone say that the man in the middle was Bonaparte. He brushed past Governor Wilks, who had extended his hand in formal greeting, and walked up the lines between the British admiral and another important-looking man. Napoleon wore the familiar cocked hat but was enveloped in a greatcoat, and it was too dark to distinguish his features. The diamond star on his chest glinted within the coat’s folds as he walked.

  The crowd surged forward. Sentries with fixed bayonets moved to clear a path. Hundreds of eyes glared at that solitary figure but no word of welcome was uttered. As he went past, Betsy caught a glimpse of the famous aquiline face, tight with anger, his eyes downcast. He said later that he had been gawked at ‘comme une bête féroce’—like a savage beast.3

  A mere four days earlier, Colonel Mark Wilks, the island’s governor, had received the astounding message, brought by a fast sloop-of-war, that he and the motley inhabitants of their small remote island were about to play host to the most dangerous man on earth. The prisoner was on HMS Northumberland, accompanied by a flotilla of warships, and already sailing towards them.

  News always came late to St Helena. It was an awesome distance to the rock marooned in the Atlantic between the African and South American continents, a dot on the charts known to seafarers, to British ships on the home route from the Far East, India and the Cape. It was said to be the most remote inhabited place on earth—1120 miles from the nearest land in Africa and over 2000 miles from the Brazilian coast.4 For the past decade and a half of the Napoleonic Wars it had gained importance as a strategic base, but the St Helenians could still dream in the sun and proceed with their lives in their own relaxed, insular way. Mail took ten weeks to come from London to Jamestown, the island’s capital and only town, so the locals were accustomed to receiving belated accounts of the goings-on in the world. At the same time they had their own important affairs and pursuits.

  Governor Wilks was regular in sending his despatches to his masters in London, the directors of the Honourable East India Company in Leadenhall Street. His post was hardly taxing, a reward for services to the Company in India, where he had been Resident at Mysore. He took an interest in poultry-keeping and agricultural projects, the eradication of the introduced blackberry, the problem of the wild goats and sheep, while he worked on his memoirs and a book, Historical Sketches of the South of India. Described by an admirer as ‘a tall, handsome, venerable-looking man with white curling locks and a courtier-like manner’,5 he was gracious with important visitors to the island, attended St Paul’s church on Sundays, and hosted the odd fundraising levée and whist drive.6 There was the usual Governor’s Ball at the castle in Jamestown and an annual garden party at Plantation House, and those representing society on the island generally saw fit to attend. Many of these property owners were also employees of the East India Company as officers, administrators or merchants. Those islanders in private commerce depended upon the ships bringing news and trade goods.

  In 1815, William Balcombe had his official duties as superintendent of public sales for the Company but also his separate interests as senior partner in the firm Balcombe, Cole and Company, supplying vessels calling at Jamestown. Saul Solomon, proprietor with his brothers L
ewis and Joseph of the town’s only emporium—‘Ladies’ Fashions, Fabrics, Lace, Jewellery and Rosewater’—studied the papers for trends, knowing that styles would be half a year out of date by the time their order arrived (allowing three months for the requisition and three for the despatch) but that this did not matter to the ladies of St Helena as long as they kept pace with one another. The officers of the St Helena Regiment did a little trading on the side with ships returning from the East, while the regiment’s 890 soldiers drilled, their garrison having been constantly on alert during the long war years. The 1200 or so black and mulatto slaves employed by the Company worked in the vegetable gardens and on the boats supplying fish to the local population, and the few hundred Chinese ‘coolies’ hewed wood and hauled water for passing vessels, with often up to fifty ships anchored off Jamestown.

  While few people in the outside world bothered with St Helena, the islanders were eager enough for accounts of the world; for the bundles of newspapers and magazines, letters from relatives and friends, the items of gossip, delivered by passing ships. The newspapers that had arrived in April indicated that 1815 in Europe was shaping up as a very mixed year. They read that His Majesty King George III remained lamentably unwell; his son the Prince Regent had declined to attend the Congress of Vienna but still danced attendance on his mistresses; he continued to build his Oriental folly and reduce the national exchequer. Questions had been put in Parliament but waited for an answer. Lady Hamilton, the mistress of Admiral Nelson (who had died heroically ten years earlier), had died in January, lonely and overweight; Lord Byron had married Annabella Milbanke, but no one expected the match to last; the daring waltz was finally in, the visiting Czar having given a demonstration at Almack’s Assembly Rooms; gaslights illuminated the London streets; and thin muslin dresses in the Parisian style were being worn by the girls in Vauxhall Gardens. In Africa, Shaka had become King of the Zulus; further afield, America had a new railroad charter, the first commercial cheese factory had opened in Switzerland, the Blue Mountains were finally crossed in the colony of New South Wales, and British missionaries packed Bibles for New Zealand to save the heathen Maori.