Whitehead The Emperor's Shadow

Bonaparte, Betsy and the Balcombes of St Helena
Main
ISBN: 978-1-925267-69-3
Verlag: Allen & Unwin
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten

After Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, he was sent into exile on St Helena, arriving in October 1815. For the six years until his death, he was an 'eagle in a cage', reduced from the most powerful figure in Europe to a prisoner on a rock in the South Atlantic. But the fallen emperor was charmed and entertained by Betsy Balcombe, the pretty teenage daughter of a local merchant. Anne Whitehead brings to life Napoleon's time on St Helena and the web of connections around the globe which framed his last years. Betsy's father, William Balcombe, was well-connected in London, and he smuggled letters and undertook a clandestine mission to Paris for Napoleon. Betsy's friendship with Napoleon cast a shadow over the rest of her colourful life. She married a Regency cad, who soon left her and their daughter, and she travelled to Australia in 1823 with her father, who was appointed the first Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales. After her father was exposed for fraud and the family lost their fortune, she returned to London and published a memoir which turned her into a celebrity. With her extraordinary connections to royalty in London and to the Bonaparte family and their courtiers, Betsy Balcombe led a life worthy of a Regency romance. This new account reveals Napoleon at his most vulnerable, human and reflective, and a woman caught in some of the most dramatic events of her time.

Anne Whitehead is an author, historian and former TV producer-director. Her previous books include Paradise Mislaid, winner of the 1998 NSW Premier's Award for Australian History, and Bluestocking in Patagonia. She lives in Sydney.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Whitehead, Anne

Leseproben

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 Lewis 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.

For years Napoleon Bonaparte was the leading story and a grim one, but for some nine months the English papers had been remarkably free of his outrages. The man who from the beginning of the century had dominated the news and the continent of Europe—with the notable exception of Russia—had from May 1814 languished in exile on Elba, an island off Italy in the Mediterranean Sea, where he survived very well. He was permitted the title ‘Emperor and Sovereign of the Isle of Elba’ and a new flag of his own design, featuring his beloved golden bees. He enjoyed the comforts of a modest palace, a large shabby villa high on the cliffs, and the presence of his mother, his favourite sister Pauline and a devoted group of courtiers. He had charmed the British commissioner, Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, and dined regularly with him. Some wondered if it was an oversight on his captors’ part that he was allowed a private army of 1000 men, including 600 of his loyal Old Guard.

Even from the perspective of a remote island in the South Atlantic, Europe must have seemed unrealistically calm. But in May 1815 an East India Company ship brought the St Helenians the alarming information that in late February Bonaparte had escaped from Elba. He entered Paris in triumph on 20 March 1815 to the cheering of thousands of Parisians who lined the streets—those who did not applaud kept their feelings to themselves—and he was carried shoulder-high to the Tuileries Palace to cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

Then on 15 September a ship arrived at Jamestown bringing...