For what seemed an age, the people of New South Wales were left wondering and waiting. The Sydney Gazette of 30 December 1804 had told them, ‘A report prevailed at New York that Lord Nelson had had the good fortune to fall in with an enemy’s squadron in the Mediterranean, which he defeated, but as this is unconfirmed, we trust the next advices will effectually tend to the removal of doubt.
‘The project of invading Great Britain appears to be in a state of torpor. Though some of the continental papers declare it to be still the favourite theme in ex-republican politics, and the procrastination of the grand event is accounted for from the inefficiency of the Gallic armada. The number of floating machines necessary to the accomplishment of a task that was once declared easy must not be less than 9800, and as they can be of no possible utility in any other service, how must the nation regret the lavish expenditure of its treasure, should the whole eventually appear a feint and, as the republic has done before it, terminates in an empty bubble?
‘They know, they feel, that in the Empire of United Britain, no single heart inclines towards them but, on the contrary, that ardent millions crowd the envied shores to welcome their prodigious heaps as soldiers and as patriots. The cause of republican freedom no longer their pretext, what specious argument will now defend them from the contempt and contumely, insolently scattered at surrounding nations?’1
Now, at last, the rumours of Nelson’s victory and an end to the threat of invasion have been confirmed, and Honor Bowman has cut up her wedding gown. It is the silk dress the Cornish woman wore back in the old country on the day she married her Scottish husband John, a carpenter. She had carefully packed it for the long voyage when, in 1798, John secured free passage to New South Wales for the couple and their two children. John was granted 40 hectares on the Hawkesbury, near Richmond, and the family has prospered, expanding their holdings and stock at their farm ‘Archerfield’, and in all that time Honor’s wedding gown has remained a treasured keepsake.
Yet now she has taken the scissors to it, cutting the silk fabric into a swallow-tailed flag, and in oils has painstakingly painted upon it a coat of arms with the English rose, the Scottish thistle and the Irish shamrock, supported on each side by an emu and a kangaroo. Above the coat of arms is the word ‘Unity’, and beneath it the motto ‘England expects every man will do his duty’.
The Bowman flag – the first flag designed in Australia, and the inspiration for the national coat of arms – is a demonstration of unabashed patriotism, created and flown at Archerfield farm to celebrate Lord Horatio Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar.
On 21 October 1805, off Cape Trafalgar on the Spanish coast, Nelson’s British fleet attacked and destroyed a larger combined French and Spanish fleet. Inspired by Nelson’s famous signal, ‘England expects every man will do his duty’, the British navy destroyed or captured 18 enemy ships, scuppering Napoleon’s plans to invade England, assuring British naval supremacy and immortalising Nelson, who was killed during the battle, as Britain’s greatest hero.
At least, that’s what myth and propaganda have led the British world to believe, and inspired Honor Bowman to create her flag. The truth of the matter is that Trafalgar was only one of the naval actions during the Napoleonic Wars that forced the French to abandon the invasion of England. British naval blockades of French ports along the Atlantic coast, and British control of the English Channel, were most effective in keeping Napoleon’s armada bottled up, and leaving his 100,000 troops cooling their heels in Brest and Rochefort.
Neither did Trafalgar convince Napoleon to throw up his hands and admit that Britannia ruled the waves. The loss of 20 per cent of the French and Spanish battle fleet was a temporary setback at best, and the ships were quickly replaced. Moreover, that fleet comprised only a small part of France’s total naval force.
But while Trafalgar might not have been tactically decisive it was a public relations coup, firing patriotic fervour throughout the empire as the British propaganda machine ratcheted up several cogs.
Thanks to that machine, Honor Bowman, like all loyal Britons, knows her enemy well – or thinks she does. He is a buffoon in a ridiculously oversized hat. Portrayed firstly as short and whippet-thin, then as short and pot-bellied, he is bow-legged, sharp-nosed and gimlet-eyed. So pervasive is this caricature of Napoleon created by British propagandists – a figure of fun while at the same time the monster devouring Europe – that it will persist into the twenty-first century.
In London and colonial towns alike, crowds jostle to get their hands on the latest poster, broadside or street ballad lampooning the man dubbed ‘the Corsican Fiend’, ‘the Devil’s Favourite’, ‘the Nightmare of Europe’ and, more often, ‘Little Boney’ or ‘the Little Corporal’, even though at 167.6 centimetres (five feet six inches) he is actually taller than the average Frenchman or Englishman of the day. It’s as if the world order is under threat from a cartoon character.
In Vienna, the critic for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung describes the first performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s new symphony, on 7 April 1805, as daring but too long. ‘Moreover, there were very few people who liked the symphony,’ he writes.2 The first symphonic work to last longer than an hour, a heckler in the audience calls out that he will pay for it to stop.
The new symphony, the composer’s third, is called the Eroica, but was originally titled the Bonaparte. In the summer of 1803, when Beethoven began work on the symphony, he was inspired by Napoleon’s apparently humanist and egalitarian ideals. Beethoven considered such ideals a model to which all Europe should aspire, and dedicated the revolutionary new work to Napoleon’s heroism.
Since then, Beethoven’s hero has disillusioned him by declaring himself Emperor. Enraged to learn that the man he believed to be the architect of a united and democratic Europe had instead become a despot, the composer tore the top off the title page of the score and threw it to the floor. According to his friend and secretary Ferdinand Ries, who brought him the bad news, Beethoven shouted, ‘So he is no more than a common mortal! Now he, too, will tread under foot the rights of man, indulge only his ambition. Now he will think himself superior to all men, become a tyrant!’3
The symphony was renamed Eroica and dedicated to Bohemian prince and patron of the arts Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, not because Beethoven admired him but because he bought it.
If Napoleon had known that Beethoven had deleted him, it probably would not have bothered him greatly. He is no fan of Beethoven and might well agree with the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung’s lukewarm review. Napoleon likes only Italian music, and his favourite composer is Giovanni Paisiello, a composer of mostly comic operas. He is often heard singing Paisiello arias and popular tunes, but according to his valet Louis Constant Wairy he has a tin ear. When helping Napoleon dress in the mornings, Wairy is often forced to endure the sound of the Emperor of France murdering ‘La Marseillaise’.
Napoleon may not be the monster devouring Europe, but he is something equally monstrous and all too common – a man who beats his wife. The revolution and the Enlightenment have done little for the status of women, and under the Napoleonic Code married women are subordinate to their husband’s authority. Domestic violence is accepted as the natural order of things, whether the victim is a peasant or an empress, and even the murder of a wife or lover is excused as a ‘crime of passion’ and treated leniently.
Claire de Rémusat, a lady-in-waiting to Josephine, reveals in her memoirs that when Josephine complained to Napoleon about his infidelities, ‘her husband sometimes answered by violence, the excesses of which I dare not detail, until the moment when, his new fancy having suddenly passed, he felt his tenderness for his wife again renewed. Then he was touched by her suffering, replaced his insults with caresses which were hardly more measured than his violence and, as she was gentle and yielding, she fell back into her feeling of security.’4
While notoriously indiscreet about his own extramarital flings, the slightest suspicion of infidelity on his wife’s part sends Napoleon into a jealous funk.
Writing from Berlin, Napoleon informs Josephine, ‘I shall soon be at Malmaison. I warn you to have no lovers there that night.’ He adds, in a veiled threat, ‘I should be sorry to disturb them.’5
In Warsaw, after attending a ball, Napoleon writes to assure Josephine that, ‘all these fair Poles are Frenchwomen at heart, but there is only one woman for me’.6
When Josephine, in reply, dares to question his fidelity, he writes:
‘I take your bad opinion anything but kindly. You tell me that perhaps it is a fantasy of the night, and you add that you are not jealous. I found out long ago that angry persons always assert that they are not angry; that those who are afraid keep on repeating that they have no fear. You therefore are convinced of jealousy.
‘I am delighted to hear it. Nevertheless, you are wrong. I think of nothing less, and in the desert plains of Poland one thinks little about beauties.
‘I had yesterday a ball of the provincial nobility – the women good-looking enough, rich enough, dowdy enough, although in Paris fashions.’7
He is lying. It was at a ball in Warsaw that he met the beautiful Countess Maria Walewska, wife of a wealthy nobleman many years her senior. Maria will become Napoleon’s mistress and, after she follows him to France, their affair will be the worst-kept secret in Paris. In time, she will bear him a child, an illegitimate son, satisfying Napoleon that Josephine’s failure to present him with an heir is her fault, not his. Dark clouds are gathering over Malmaison.