NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1 The 74-gun Northumberland was escorted by the brigs Zephyr, Redpole, Ferret and Icarus and troopships Havannah, Bucephalus and Ceylon.

2 Thomas Brooke, A History of St Helena, London, 1824, 387, noted: ‘Napoleon landed and walked to the house prepared for his reception, accompanied by Sir George Cockburn and in the presence of perhaps the largest concourse of people that had ever assembled at St Helena on any former occasion.’

3 Mrs L.E. Abell (late Miss Elizabeth Balcombe), Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon during the First Three Years of his Captivity on the Island of St Helena, including the time of his residence at her father’s house, ‘The Briars’, [1844], 2nd edn, London, John Murray, 1845, 15.

4 Actually 1118 miles (1800 km) from the Angolan coast of Africa and 2025 miles (3260 km) from the Brazilian coast. (The South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha may have a stronger claim but it has a much smaller population.)

5 Mark Wilks, Colonel Wilks and Napoleon: Two conversations, London, John Murray, 1901 (first published in The Monthly Magazine, 1901), quoting Catherine Younghusband in the introduction by Julian S. Corbett, 5.

6 St Paul’s, as the principal church of the island, was sometimes described as its cathedral.

7 Mrs Abell, Recollections, 10. The second edition of this book appeared in 1845, a third in 1853, and a fourth (incorrectly labelled ‘third’) in 1873 with a new appendix by Mrs Abell’s daughter, Bessie (Mrs Charles Johnstone). Note that in Chapter 1 the author states that ‘The news of his escape from Elba . . . had of course not reached us’, but the news was brought to the island in May 1815.

8 Cockburn Papers COC/4, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich: ‘Secret letter, Instructions to the Governor of St Helena, 1 August 1815’.

9 Letter from EIC Court of Directors to Governor Wilks, 1 August 1815, Extracts from the St Helena Records, compiled by Hudson Ralph Janisch, St Helena, 1885.

10 Desmond Gregory, Napoleon’s Jailer: Lt. Gen. Sir Hudson Lowe, A life, London, Associated University Presses, 1996, 11–12.

11 M. Meneval, cited in Eclectic magazine, 1843.

12 Mrs Jane Balcombe and her girls returned in either May or June 1815. Eldest son William (aged seven) remained in England for schooling with Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt as guardian. To return with her family to the island—where they had been living since December 1805—it was necessary for Mrs Balcombe to apply to the East India Company for a bond. The amount needed as security was £1600. The guarantors were the merchants William Burnie & Co., Old South Sea House, London. Bond No. 236 was granted on 15 February 1815: 1815 Court Book, St Helena Archives.

13 Quoted in Arthur Bryant, The Years of Victory, 1802–1812, London, Collins, 1945, 62.

14 Quoted in Christopher Woodward, ‘Napoleon’s Last Journey’, History Today, July 2005, 51.

CHAPTER 2

1 Anonymous broadside, A Descriptive Sketch of The Island of St Helena, London, J. & E. Wallis, 1815, 1. There were in fact other bays—Ruperts Bay, Sandy Bay, Powells Bay—but a landing was difficult at all of them.

2 William Warden, Letters Written on Board His Majesty’s Ship the Northumberland and at St Helena, London, Ackermann, 1816, published in Clement Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, London, Cassell, 1908, 289.

3 Attributed to Madame Bertrand by Bernard Chevallier, Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, Thierry Lentz and Jacques-Olivier Boudon, Sainte-Hélène, Île de memoire, Paris, Fayard, 2005.

4 Lieutenant John Bowerbank, ‘An Extract from a Journal Kept on Board HMS Bellerophon’, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 316.

5 Lady Charlotte Fitz Gerald, letter dated 11 August 1815 to ‘dear Charles’ (probably Sir Charles Imhoff, stepson of Warren Hastings), quoted in ‘Napoleon and Richard III’, Notes and Queries, January 1961, 5; Lady Jerningham to daughter Charlotte, 3 August 1815, The Jerningham Letters, 1780–1843, Egerton Castle (ed.), London, Richard Bentley & Son, 1896, Vol. II, 77.

6 Warden, Letters, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 290.

7 Bathurst quoted in Gilbert Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, translated from the French by Frances Partridge, London, John Murray, 1968, 3.

8 Warden, Letters, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 290.

9 Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné Comte de Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène: Journal of the private life and conversation of the Emperor Napoleon at Saint Helena, London, Henry Colburn, 1823, Vol. I, 241.

10 His surname is variously spelled ‘Flahaut’ and ‘Flahault’; for consistency I have adopted the former.

11 Carnot, cited in Dominique de Villepin, Les Cent-Jours, Paris, Librairie Académique Perrin, 2001, 492; Steven Englund, Napoleon: A political life, New York, Scribner, 2004, 445.

12 Queen Hortense, Memoirs of Queen Hortense, Mother of Napoleon III, compiled by Sir Lascelles Wraxall and Robert Wehrhan, London, Hurst and Blackett, 1864, quoted in Dormer Creston, In Search of Two Characters: Some intimate aspects of Napoleon and his son, London, Readers Union & MacMillan, 1947, 236.

13 Queen Hortense, Memoirs of Queen Hortense, 320–4.

14 Louis Joseph Marchand, Mémoires de Marchand, Jean Bourguignon and Henry Lachouque (eds), Paris, Librairie Plon, 1955, Vol. I, 203–5.

15 Nathaniel Wraxall, Vol. III, 151, quoted in Saul David, Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the making of the Regency, London, Abacus, 1999, 51.

16 George Home, ‘Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon: Being a Chapter from The Memoirs of an Aristocrat, 1838’, published in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 20.

17 Quoted in Liverpool Mercury, 4 August 1815; compiled in Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation for Life to St Helena: His treatment and mode of living since his arrival and a description of Mr Balcombe’s estate, The Briars, Napoleon’s residence, London, W. Hone, 1816, 5.

18 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 17.

19 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. I, 61n.

20 Captain F.L. Maitland, Narrative of the Surrender of Buonaparte, and of His Residence on Board HMS Bellerophon, London, Edinburgh, William Blackwood & Sons, 1826.

21 Maitland, Narrative of the Surrender of Buonaparte, vi–vii.

CHAPTER 3

1 Quoted in Christopher Hibbert, George IV Prince of Wales 1762–1811, Newton Abbot, Readers Union, 1973, 156n.

2 Trevor James, ‘Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt: A brief appraisal’, Dartmoor Magazine, No. 54, Spring 1999, 9.

3 J. Brooking-Rowe, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt and Princetown, Plymouth, W. Brendon & Son, 1905, 9.

4 Horace Walpole, quoted in David, Prince of Pleasure, 8.

5 Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt to William Balcombe, 5 August 1815, Abell, Recollections, 3rd edn, 2. The letter from Tyrwhitt does not appear in the first edition of 1844, but was included in the 3rd edition of 1873 (which was actually the 4th edition).

6 While the brewery was a reward to Balcombe for his loyalty, Governor Beatson’s intention was that the supply of more beer to the garrison, rather than spirituous liquors and Cape wine, would reduce drunkenness.

7 Thomas G. Wheeler, Who Lies Here? Napoleon’s last days, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974, 30.

8 T.H. Brooke, appendix to Clement Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, London, Cassell & Co., 1910, 262.

9 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 9.

10 Admiral Keith: George Keith Elphinstone (1746–1823).

11 Quoted in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 300.

12 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 5.

13 Admiral Lord Keith to his daughter Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, 3 August 1815, ‘The Journal and Letters of Admiral Viscount Keith’, in the Earl of Kerry (ed.), The First Napoleon: Some unpublished documents from the Bowood Papers, Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925, 167.

14 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 5–6.

15 ‘Authentic Particulars of Bonaparte’, Morning Chronicle, 18 October 1815.

16 Colonel Muiron was a comrade-in-arms of Napoleon who fell in the Battle of Arcola. In seeking settlement in England, Napoleon may have had in mind the experience of his younger brother Lucien, who from 1810 to 1814 lived as a British prisoner of war under comfortable house arrest at Dinham House, Ludlow, then at Thorngrove near Worcester: see Francis Abell, Prisoners of War in Britain, 1756 to 1815, London, Oxford University Press, 1914, 448.

17 David, Prince of Pleasure, 429–30.

18 Admiral Lord Keith, quoted in Vincent Cronin, Napoleon, London, HarperCollins Fontana, 1971, 414.

19 G.J. Marcus notes in Heart of Oak: A survey of British sea power in the Georgian era, London, Oxford University Press, 1975, 269–70: ‘John Barrow, Second Secretary of the Admiralty, appears to have been chiefly responsible for the decision to send Napoleon to St Helena. “At such a distance and in such a place,” he declared, “all intrigue would be impossible, and being withdrawn so far from the European world, he would very soon be forgotten.”’

20 Maitland, Narrative of the Surrender of Buonaparte, 1826.

21 Barry O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile or A Voice from St Helena, London, Jones & Co., [1822], 1827, Vol. 1, 5.

22 Finlaison to O’Meara, quoted in Norwood Young, Napoleon in Exile: St Helena (1815–1821), London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1915, Vol. I, 77–8, citing Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20231 f.15; Add. 20232, f.245.

23 Plymouth Telegraph, reprinted in the London Morning Post, 8 August 1815.

24 Fanny Bertrand’s cousin Henry Augustus (Dillon), 13th Viscount Dillon (1777–1832), succeeded to the peerage in 1813: Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 83.

25 Hon. W.H. Lyttelton, ‘Some Account of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Coming on Board HMS the Northumberland, August 7 1815’, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 82.

26 Captain Charles Ross, 26 July 1816, to W.J. Hall of Kingston, Jamaica, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 59.

27 George Home, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 31.

28 Count de Las Cases, Mémorial, quoted in Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 247.

29 Warden, Letters, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 139.

30 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 11.

31 Sir George Bingham, ‘Napoleon’s Voyage to St Helena’, in Gareth Glover (ed.), Wellington’s Lieutenant, Napoleon’s Gaoler: The Peninsular letters & St Helena diaries of Sir George Ridout Bingham, Barnsley, Pen & Sword Books, 2005, 257.

32 Warden, Diary, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 194.

33 Glover, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 84.

34 Warden, Letters, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, 151–2. Clement Shorter notes: ‘Napoleon did, however, acquire a sufficient knowledge of the English language in a year or so to read it by himself, although he never had any but the most elementary command of the spoken tongue. Las Cases tells us that he had a very bad memory so far as the grammar was concerned . . . The Emperor read much in the Encyclopaedia Britannica apparently without assistance. The article on the Nile in that work seems specially to have interested him.’

35 Albert Benhamou, Inside Longwood: Barry O’Meara’s clandestine letters, London, Albert Benhamou Publishing, 2012, 11, gives O’Meara’s correct age in 1815 as 29, concurring with the Dictionary of National Biography, which gives the year of his birth as 1786. Some other sources incorrectly state he was 33.

36 Dr Barry O’Meara, secret letter to Mr Finlaison at the Admiralty, 20 October 1815, quoted in William Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, From the Letters and Journals of the Late Lieut.-Gen. Sir Hudson Lowe, London, John Murray, 1853, Vol. I, 23–4.

CHAPTER 4

1 After the Balcombes’ departure in 1818, the upper storey of The Briars was extended right across the ground floor, resulting in a handsome villa with at least six bedrooms.

2 St Helena Census, 30 September 1814, courtesy of the late Trevor Hearl, St Helena historian.

3 Trevor Hearl in letter to Anne Whitehead, 3 July 2006.

4 Betsy (Mrs Abell) did not name the school in her Recollections, but did so to a friend, Fanny Anne Burney, who reported it. See Fanny Anne Burney (Mrs Wood), A Great-Niece’s Journals from 1830 to 1842, London, Constable & Company, 1926, 109. The curriculum at Mrs Clarke’s is described in ‘Mansfield in the News’, Nottingham Journal and Nottingham Review, 1808, July 2 and 30.

5 Quoted in Dame Mabel Brookes, St Helena Story, London, Heinemann, 1960, 5.

6 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 30.

7 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 343.

8 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 34.

9 Abell, Recollections, 19–20.

10 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 34.

11 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 348.

12 Napoleon’s interest in this pretty young girl’s education was more solicitous than it had been for the young females of France when he designed a school system for girls, which, because of ‘the weakness of women’s brains, the mobility of their ideas, their destination in the social order’, concentrated on religion to produce not ‘pleasing women but virtuous women’. See Napoleon Bonaparte, Note Sur L’Établissement D’Écouen, quoted in Susan G. Bell and Karen M. Offen, Women, the Family and Freedom: The debate in documents, Vol. I, 1750–1880, Stanford University Press, 1983, 95.

13 Abell, Recollections, 23–4.

14 The Balcombes ‘spoke French with difficulty, that language being then much less studied in England than it is at present’: Abell, Recollections, 24–5.

15 Abell, Recollections, 25–7.

16 General Gaspard Gourgaud, The St Helena Journal of General Baron Gourgaud, 1815–1818, English edition, London, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1932, 18 October 1815.

CHAPTER 5

1 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 34–5.

2 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 35–6.

3 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. I, 246.

4 Comte de Las Cases’ aristocratic titles cited in Frédéric Masson, Napoleon at St Helena 1815–1821, translated by Louis B. Frewer, New York, Medill McBride Company, 1950, 80.

5 See Memoirs of Count de Las Cases, London, Henry Colburn, 1818, quoted in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, 7.

6 Memoirs of Count de Las Cases, quoted in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, 8.

7 Las Cases, quoted in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 29–30.

8 William Balcombe to Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, 20 October 1815, Yale-Beinecke Collection, Osborn Shelves FC111-112/23.

9 Sir George Cockburn to J.W. Croker, Secretary to the Admiralty, 22 October 1815, in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 34.

10 Sir George Cockburn, quoted in Marcus, Heart of Oak, 270.

11 Colin Fox, The Bennett Letters: A 19th century family in St Helena, England and the Cape, Gloucester, Choir Press, 2006, 24.

12 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 13.

13 According to the St Helena Census of 30 September 1814, the stock Balcombe owned consisted of one bull, six cows, five calves and eight swine: Extracts from the St Helena Records, compiled by Hudson Ralph Janisch, St Helena, 1885.

14 Abell, Recollections, 32–3.

15 ‘This piece of silver,’ wrote Marchand, ‘was very elegant, had cost 10,000 francs and was the focus of the Balcombe family’s admiration’: Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 350.

16 Octave Aubry, St Helena, translated into English by Arthur Livingston, Philadelphia & London, J.B. Lippincott, 1936, 308.

17 The Bonapartist historian John Holland Rose has observed that this period at The Briars revealed ‘the softer traits of his character, which the dictates of policy had stunted but not eradicated’: John Holland Rose, The Life of Napoleon I, London, G. Bell & Sons, 1935, Vol. II, 499.

18 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. I, 114–15, refers to Napoleon’s boyhood when he was ‘turbulent, adroit, lively and agile in the extreme. He had gained, he used to say, the most complete ascendancy over his elder brother Joseph’; Philip Dwyer, Napoleon: The path to power 1769–1799, London, Bloomsbury, 2007, 11, quotes a letter by Napoleon in September 1786 in which he looked forward to returning to Corsica, ‘seeing my compatriots and my relatives . . . Tender sensations that the memory of my childhood allows me to experience . . .’

19 Dwyer, Napoleon, 422.

20 ‘Ship News: Dover, September 29’, Morning Chronicle, 1 October 1801.

CHAPTER 6

1 Brookes, St Helena Story, 291.

2 Information from the late Trevor Hearl in letter to Anne Whitehead, 3 July 2006.

3 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 36.

4 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 13–14.

5 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 37.

6 Comte de Las Cases, from Mémorial, 24 October 1815, quoted in John S.C. Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, London, Ward, Lock & Co., 1850, 555.

7 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 37.

8 Brooke, A History of St Helena, 388.

9 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 37.

10 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 12–13.

11 Quoted in Fox, The Bennett Letters, 24; The Times, 8 January 1816.

12 Quarterly Review, Vol. 14, No. 27, October 1815 and January 1816, 91; reprinted in The Times, 18 April 1816.

13 Abell, Recollections, 41.

14 Abell, Recollections, 56, 167.

15 Las Cases, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 115–16.

16 Napoleon quoted in Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 114.

17 Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery; British prime minister under Queen Victoria (March 1894 – June 1895). He described himself as an ‘intelligent admirer of Napoleon’ in his Napoleon: The last phase, London, Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1900, 133–4.

18 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 14; reprinted in The Times, 17 January 1816.

19 Trevor W. Hearl, ‘Puzzling Partners in Prestbury Churchyard II—Catherine’s Encounters with Napoleon’, Prestbury Churchyard News, March 2004.

20 Catherine Younghusband to her aunt, Lady Roche, 4 November 1815, ‘Letters from St Helena’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 262, August 1947, 144–5.

21 Abell, Recollections, 31–2.

22 Felix Markham, The Bonapartes, NY, Taplinger Publishing, 1975, 14.

23 ‘Napoleon and the Balcombe sisters on St Helena, as visualised in a French lithograph of the period’ is reproduced in Anthony Masters, Napoleon, Longman, Burnt Mill, Harlow, Essex, 1981, 64. (This is almost certainly by Marchand, as a sketch of Napoleon in the same style is signed ‘Marchand’.)

24 The suggestion that Catherine Younghusband was the artist is proposed by Honorary Consul Michel Dancoisne-Martineau in his blog: <http://domainesdefranceasaintehelene.blogspot.com> under Biographies/The Family Skelton.

25 The G.W. Melliss photograph of Betsy (Mrs Abell) in 1857 is reproduced in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 19.

26 Thanks to Keith and Shirley Murley, volunteers at The Briars museum, Mt Martha, Victoria, whose research found the Alfred Tidey painting The Music Party.

27 Admiral Cockburn to J.W. Croker at the Admiralty, 22 October 1815, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 120.

28 See Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 91.

29 Abell, Recollections, 34–5.

30 Abell, Recollections, 36.

31 Abell, Recollections, 36–8.

32 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 14; reprinted in The Times, 17 January 1816.

CHAPTER 7

1 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 49.

2 In 1815 Napoleon Bertrand was aged seven, Hortense five and Henri three.

3 Steven Laurence Delvaux, PhD Thesis, ‘Witness to Glory: Lieutenant-Général Henri-Gatien Bertrand, 1791–1815’, Department of History, Florida State University College of Arts and Sciences, 2005, 405; citing Maitland, Narrative of the Surrender of Buonaparte, 140.

4 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 132.

5 Abell, Recollections, 80.

6 B. De Gaissart, ‘La naissance, le mariage et la mort de Fanny Dillon, Comtesse Bertrand’, Revue du Nord, No. 193, April–June 1967, 333.

7 Henry, 11th Viscount Dillon (1705–1787); Honourable General Arthur Dillon, Henry’s second son (1750–1794): H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

8 De Gaissart, ‘La naissance, le mariage et la mort de Fanny Dillon, Comtesse Bertrand’, 334, notes that Laure was the ‘widow of Francois Alexandre Le Vassor de la Touche Longpré’, so she was known as Madame de Longpré; she was also a former mistress of Josephine’s philandering husband Alexandre de Beauharnais.

9 Andrew O’Reilly, Reminiscences of an Emigrant Milesian: The Irish abroad and at home, 3 vols, London, Richard Bentley, 1853, Vol. II, 86–7.

10 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 50.

11 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 49.

12 De Gaissart, ‘La naissance, le mariage et la mort de Fanny Dillon, Comtesse Bertrand’, 335.

13 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 51.

14 De Gaissart, ‘La naissance, le mariage et la mort de Fanny Dillon, Comtesse Bertrand’, 336.

15 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 50.

16 Abell, Recollections, 82.

17 Masson, Napoleon at St Helena, 57–71.

18 Gourgaud, Journal, 21 October 1815.

19 Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 235.

20 Abell, Recollections, 83–4.

21 Abell, Recollections, 80–1.

22 Abell, Recollections, 89, 181.

23 The Commentaries of the Great Afonso D’Albuquerque, Hakluyt Society, quoted in Philip Gosse, St Helena 1502–1938, [London, Cassell, 1938], Oswestry, Anthony Nelson, 1990, 5.

24 Gaspar Corrêa, Portuguese historian c.1496–1563, Secretary to Afonso D’Albuquerque and author of Lendas da India (Legends of India). His account of Lopez, ‘The Earliest Exile of St Helena’, translated by Hugh Clifford, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 173, quoted in Gosse, St Helena 1502–1938, 5.

25 Abell, Recollections, 181–3.

CHAPTER 8

1 In 2006, the French honorary consul Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, who controlled the ‘French domains’, including the land of the ‘heart-shaped waterfall’ valley, donated it to the St Helena National Trust. An accessible path for tourists to the waterfall has been developed.

2 High Knoll fort, described by building archaeologist Ben Jeffs, a consultant to the St Helena National Trust, on St Helena government website: <www.sthelenatourism.com/pages/ high_knoll_2.html>.

3 Gordon Chancellor and John van Wyhe (eds), Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 13 July 1836.

4 Abell, Recollections, 77–8.

5 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 355.

6 Abell, Recollections, 199.

7 Abell, Recollections, 200.

8 Brookes, St Helena Story, 292.

9 Abell, Recollections, 201.

10 Abell, Recollections, 44.

11 Colonel Bingham inspected Napoleon’s sword on the Northumberland and confirms this description: Glover (ed.), Wellington’s Lieutenant, Napoleon’s Gaoler, 257.

12 Abell, Recollections, 39.

13 Courrier de Mannheim, 1 November 1816, quoted in footnote to French edition of Mrs Abell’s Recollections—Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène: Souvenirs de Betzy Balcombe, Traduction annotée et précédée d’une Introduction par Aimé Le Gras, Paris, Librairie Plon, 1898, 48–9. Reference thanks to Tom Molomby SC.

14 Baron von Stürmer, Despatch No. 10 to Prince Metternich, 4 July 1817, Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène, Rapports Officiels du Baron Sturmer, ed. Jacques St Cere et H. Schlitter, Paris, La Librairie Illustrée, 84.

15 Catherine Younghusband to her aunt, Lady Roche, 4 November 1815, ‘Letters from St Helena’ in, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 262, August 1947, 144.

16 Gourgaud, Journal, 3 November 1815.

17 Anon., Interesting Particulars of Napoleon’s Deportation, 13.

18 Abell, Recollections, 28.

19 Quoted in ‘Letters from the Cape’, in Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, 85.

20 Cronin, Napoleon, 233, noted that Napoleon ‘invariably cheated at games’.

21 Abell, Recollections, 50–1.

22 Thomas Brooke, letter, 3 January 1816 in appendix to Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, 264.

23 Catherine Younghusband to her aunt, Lady Roche, 8 December 1815, ‘Letters from St Helena’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 262, August 1947, 147.

24 Lieutenant W. Innes Pocock RN, Five Views of the Island of St Helena from Drawings taken on the Spot, to which is added A Concise Account of the Island, London, S. & J. Fuller, 1815, 10.

25 Miss Knipe was a pretty farmer’s daughter known by the French as La Bouton de Rose or ‘Rosebud’.

26 Gourgaud, quoted in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 129.

27 H.E. Busteed, Echoes from Old Calcutta, London, Calcutta and Simla, W. Thacker & Co, 1908, 144.

28 Abell, Recollections, 153.

29 Recollection of Major Hodson in appendix to Shorter (ed.), Napoleon in His Own Defence, 266.

CHAPTER 9

1 This is an abbreviated version of a poster for a slave auction held on St Helena as late as 18 May 1829. Slavery was to be eliminated under a graduated system introduced in 1818, but actually continued until 1838, when the condition of slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire.

2 O’Meara, cited in Fox, The Bennet Letters, 25.

3 Gourgaud, Journal, 30 October 1815.

4 Arnold Chaplin, Napoleon’s Captivity on St Helena 1815–1821, [first published as St Helena Who’s Who, 1919], London, Savannah Publications, 2002, 142, gives the date as 10 November 1815.

5 Las Cases, Mémorial, quoted in Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 558.

6 On 20 May 1802 Napoleon reintroduced slavery into the French colonies, although it had been abolished during the French revolution. On 8 June 1802, French troops under order from Bonaparte seized the Haitian leader and revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture and sent him to prison at Fort de Joux. On 2 August 1802 Napoleon was confirmed as First Consul.

7 General Count Montholon, Récits de la Captivité de l’Empereur Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène, Paulin, Paris, 1847. English translation: History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Philadelphia, Carey & Hart, 1847, Vol. I, 79.

8 Napoleon dictating his memoirs on St Helena, quoted by David Brion Davis, ‘He changed the New World’, New York Review of Books, Vol. 54, No. 9, 31 May 2007, 54–8.

9 See D.K. Basset, ‘Great Britain in the Indian Ocean’, Historical Studies, Vol. 14, No. 53, October 1969, 80–4.

10 Anon. (Francis Duncan), A Description of the Island of St Helena, London, Phillips, 1805, 8.

11 Gosse, St Helena 1502–1938, 81.

12 Oswell Blakeston (pseudonym of Henry Joseph Hasslacher, 1907–1985), Isle of St Helena, quoted by Tony Weaver in St Helena National Trust, St Helena, 500 Years of History, 2002, 6.

13 St Helena Census of 1817, St Helena Archives.

14 Abell, Recollections, 58, 166.

15 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 68–9; see also Las Cases, Mémorial, 29 November 1815 and O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 18.

16 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 78.

17 Bingham, letter to his wife Emma, 30 November 1815, Glover (ed.), Wellington’s Lieutenant, Napoleon’s Gaoler, 261–2.

18 Catherine Younghusband to her aunt, Lady Roche, 8 December 1815, ‘Letters from St Helena’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 262, August 1947, 147.

19 Abell, Recollections, 89.

20 Abell, Recollections, 97.

21 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 40.

22 Gourgaud, Journal, 1 December 1815.

23 Bingham, letter to his wife Emma, 6 December 1815, Glover (ed.), Wellington’s Lieutenant, Napoleon’s Gaoler, 262–3.

24 Catherine Younghusband to her aunt, Lady Roche, 4 November 1815, ‘Letters from St Helena’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 262, August 1947, 145.

25 Gourgaud, Journal, 2 December 1815.

26 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 50.

27 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 50.

28 Abell, Recollections, 93.

CHAPTER 10

1 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 17.

2 William Burchell was later to earn fame as a pioneering naturalist for his great collecting expeditions in southern Africa and Brazil. His Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa was published to acclaim in 1822.

3 Noted by William John Burchell in his ‘St Helena Journal’, 6 July 1808, St Helena Archives (copy of original of ‘St Helena Journal’ in Hope Collection, Oxford University Museum of Natural History).

4 ‘William Tomset Balcombe: Born: 25 December 1777 Rottingdean, Sussex; Christened: 28 December 1777 Rottingdean, Sussex; Father: Stephen Balcombe, Mother: Mary née Vandyke’: according to East India Company Navy ‘Certificates of age & baptism’ [L/MAR/C/699] No. 762 on reverse, 1020 on front, from naval researcher Stephen T.J. Wright, commissioned by Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha, Victoria. Christening details from International Genealogical Index (IGI). The 1777 birth date conforms with information on William Balcombe’s death certificate that he was 51 years old when he died on 19 March 1829. St Margaret’s Church records, Rottingdean, note the marriage of William’s parents, Stephen Balcombe to Mary Vandyke on 27 May 1777, which would indicate that Mary was two months pregnant with William at the time of the wedding. They had three children—William, Stephen, and Thomas, who died in infancy in 1784. Mary Vandyke was born at Lewes in 1757.

5 George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales, was born on 12 August 1762.

6 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 10, 188.

7 Harry Edgington, Prince Regent: The scandalous private life of George IV, Feltham, Middlesex, Hamlyn Paperbacks, 1979, 17; another sexual partner of the fifteen-year-old prince was said to be ‘the robust wife of one of the Court grooms’: Christopher Hibbert, George IV, Prince of Wales 1762–1811, Newton Abbot, Readers Union, 1973, 11–12, citing Papendiek Journals, Mrs Vernon (ed.), Delves Broughton, 1887, Vol. I, 91.

8 Brighthelmstone was not officially renamed Brighton until 1810. It is well documented that the prince did not meet Maria Fitzherbert, his long-term mistress, until 1784. (They married a year later in a ceremony that was not formally recognised because of her Roman Catholic faith.) Nor could William Balcombe’s mother have been the prince’s previous mistress, the actress Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson, because she was not pursued by her royal beau until the London theatre season of 1779.

9 Andy Durr, ‘The making of a fishing museum’, History Workshop Journal, No. 40, 1995, 229–32; Anne Whitehead, correspondence with Brighton Fishing Museum and with historian Andy Durr, July 2009.

10 Brookes, St Helena Story, 5. There is a difficulty with Dame Mabel’s suggestion that William had an elder brother, Robert, who became equerry to the Prince Regent, as his sole surviving brother was three years younger, and became a London businessman. IGI records show sons of Stephen Balcombe and Mary (née Vandyke) of Rottingdean as William, christened 28 December 1777, and Stephen, christened 21 May 1780. No Robert Balcombe could be located in army or court lists. A John Balcomb of the First King’s Regiment of Dragoon Guards joined the army in about 1787. He was of sufficient rank in 1803 possibly to have been equerry to the prince, but he disappeared, at the rank of major, from army lists after 1805, perhaps indicating that he was killed in the French wars. He seemed too old to have been the stated brother of William. Despite the different spelling of the surname, perhaps this man was a cousin. Information from Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha.

11 Laurian d’Harcourt, Rottingdean: The village, Brighton, UK, DD Publishing, 2001.

12 The Prince of Wales was generous in compensating for accidents in which he had a part. Workers injured in an accident during the construction of the Brighton Pavilion were compensated: Morning Herald, Brighton, 3 July 1787. Even when he was in no way responsible, such as when a boxer called Earl dropped dead in the ring during a match at Brighton, the prince settled an annuity on Mrs Earl and family: John Ashton, Florizel’s Folly, London, Chatto & Windus, 1899, 115.

13 The boating accident story is in Burchell, ‘St Helena Journal’, 6 July 1808; Sir Hudson Lowe to Lord Bathurst, 24 February 1818, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20121 f.230; Brookes, St Helena Story, 5—Dame Mabel may have obtained the information from the Lowe Papers rather than family legend.

14 Percy Fitzgerald, The Life of George the Fourth, London, Tinsley Brothers, 1881, 641.

15 David, Prince of Pleasure, 113–14.

16 Information from Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha, and Jane Jones.

17 On 25 December 1788, Mary Balcombe née Vandyke married Charles Terry, a tailor. The family moved to a Tudor cottage in Rottingdean, next to the whipping post where wrongdoers were flogged.

18 India Office Records L/MAR/C/657 ‘Descriptions of Officers’ Service 1798–1801’, 140, lists William Balcombe, 22 years of age, having ‘used the sea 8 years’. It is noted that he spent two years and six months as a Royal Navy midshipman, one ten-month voyage to the West Indies on the Phoenix as midshipman, and two voyages on the Phoenix to Bengal, one of one year and two months as fifth mate, and the other of one year and seven months as acting fourth mate. This rendered his service as six years and one month—but Balcombe ‘used the sea 8 years’. The unaccounted period of one year and eleven months was spent in the navy as a ‘Captain’s servant’, an officially unlisted position.

19 Correspondence from the Royal Archives to Caroline Gaden, wife of a Balcombe descendant (through the Thomas T. Balcombe line). Note that neither William Balcombe nor his brother Stephen make an appearance in the eight volumes of the prince’s collected letters, nor in the three volumes of his correspondence as George IV: A. Aspinall (ed.), The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770–1812, 8 vols, London, Cassell, 1971; The Letters of King George IV 1812–1830, 3 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1938; David Hilliam, in Kings, Queens, Bones and Bastards, Phoenix Mill, Sutton Publishing, 1998, 229, observed: ‘Unlike Charles II . . . George had very few bastards. Two illegitimate sons were privately acknowledged, and it is possible that he had four other children, but they were never given prominence or titles.’ (Reference courtesy of Shirley Joy.)

20 Quoted in Hibbert, George IV: Prince of Wales 1762–1811, 156.

21 He was the son of the Reverend Edmund Tyrwhitt, rector of Wickham Bishops, Essex.

22 Baron Stürmer, Despatch No. 10 to Prince Metternich, 4 July 1817, Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène, Rapports Officiels du Baron Stürmer, 84; Queen Victoria’s prime minister, Lord Rosebery, in his Napoleon: The last phase, 209, repeated it: ‘the traditions of the island declared him to be a son of George IV’; the rumour is repeated in Aimé Le Gras’s introduction to the 1898 French edition of Mrs Abell’s Recollections, Napoléon à Sainte-Hèléne, v, in which Balcombe is described as ‘un honorable fonctionnaire de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales, que l’on disait fils naturel du Régent’. Lord Rosebery had an incorrect theory about William Balcombe’s parentage, Napoleon: The last phase, 180: ‘Mr. Balcombe was a sort of general purveyor, sometimes called by courtesy a banker; and the traditions of the island declared him to be a son of George IV. As a matter of fact, his father was the landlord of the New Ship Inn at Brighton.’ Not so.

23 Germaine de Staël, quoted in Paul Johnson, Napoleon: A life, London, Penguin Books, 2002, 119.

24 Count de Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, 80.

25 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 19–22.

26 Sir George Cockburn to Comte de Montholon, 22 December 1815, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 183.

27 Desmond Gregory, Napoleon’s Jailer, Lt. Gen. Sir Hudson Lowe: A life, London, Associated University Presses, 1996, 17–114, for pre-St Helena career, in particular p. 119.

28 Gregory, Napoleon’s Jailer, 122, quoting Military Surgeon Walter Henry; see also Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 219.

29 Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt to Sir Hudson Lowe, 8 December 1815, Yale University, Beinecke Collection, Osborn Shelves FC111-112/24.

30 In 1816, Samuel Brown (1776–1852), who had retired from the navy, took out a patent for wrought-iron chain making and in 1817 the first chain-supported suspension bridge was built, followed by many constructions, including notably the Union Chain Bridge across the River Tweed and the Chain Pier at Brighton. In 1838 he was knighted by Queen Victoria.

31 Gourgaud, Journal, 1 January 1816.

32 Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 561.

33 Gourgaud, Journal, 18 January 1816.

34 Abell, Recollections, 99.

35 Abell, Recollections, 102.

36 Napoleon to Las Cases, quoted in Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 254.

37 Count de Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. I, 61n.

38 Gourgaud, Journal, 30 December 1815.

39 Lowe Papers, BL Add. MSS 20,114, f.253; see also G.L. de St M. Watson (ed.), A Polish Exile with Napoleon, London and New York, Harper & Brothers, 1912, 177n, for description of this carriage, which in May 1821 became Napoleon’s funeral car.

40 Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 561.

41 Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 190.

42 Gourgaud, Journal, 6 January 1816.

43 Abell, Recollections, 62–3.

44 Las Cases, quoted in J.M. Thompson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, [1952] 1988, 392.

45 Gourgaud, Journal, 28 January 1816.

46 Mrs Abell, writing 30 years later, placed the game at The Briars, but Gourgaud, writing at the time, placed it at Longwood on 24 February 1816.

47 Abell, Recollections, 72–5.

48 Las Cases, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 177, 194.

49 Napoleon in letter to Las Cases, 8 March 1816 in Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, 73.

50 Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 194–5.

51 See Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 198.

52 See Ralph Korngold, The Last Years of Napoleon: His captivity on St Helena, London, Victor Gollancz, 1960, 274: ‘Gourgaud was to say to Sturmer: “Everybody knows that the Princess of Wales has for him an almost fanatical admiration. He hoped that when her daughter mounted the throne, she would take advantage of the influence she has over her to have him taken to England. ‘Once there’ said he ‘I am saved.’”’

53 St Helena Archives and Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20115 ff.124–5.

54 Gourgaud, Journal, 19 February 1816.

CHAPTER 11

1 The Times, 4 December 2008.

2 R.C. Seaton (Robert Cooper), Sir Hudson Lowe and Napoleon, London, David Nutt, 1898, 215, quoting Prime Minister Lord Liverpool to Lowe at time of St Helena appointment.

3 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, Part 8, 48, cited in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 132–3.

4 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 75.

5 O’Meara to Finlaison, cited in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 145.

6 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 76.

7 Lowe to Sir Henry Bunbury, Under-Secretary of State, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 142–3.

8 Napoleon was born on 15 August 1769, Sir Hudson Lowe just over a fortnight earlier, 28 July 1769. Lowe’s father was a British army surgeon, his mother an Irishwoman from Galway: see Gregory, Napoleon’s Jailer, 17–19.

9 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 71.

10 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 135.

11 Napoleon, quoted in Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 564.

12 O’Meara to Finlaison, including French translation, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 147.

13 O’Meara to Finlaison, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 149.

14 O’Meara to Finlaison, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 148.

15 It was not until 23 January 1818 that Bathurst informed Lowe that O’Meara’s correspondence with Finlaison was sighted at the Admiralty: see Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 540.

16 Gourgaud, Journal, 19 April 1816.

17 Wilks, Colonel Wilks and Napoleon, 26.

18 Wilks, Colonel Wilks and Napoleon, 28–35.

19 Abell, Recollections, 53.

20 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 210.

21 Lowe, despatch to Secretary of State Lord Bathurst, 30 April 1816, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 158–62.

22 Quoted in Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 261.

23 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 26–8.

24 Gourgaud, Journal, 5 May 1816.

25 Général Bertrand, Cahiers de Sainte-Hélène, Journal 1816–1817, Paul Fleuriot de Langle (ed.), Paris, Editions Sulliver, 5 May 1816.

26 Watson (ed.), A Polish Exile with Napoleon, 207n.

27 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 81–2.

28 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 197.

29 Gourgaud, Journal, 20 May 1816; Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 20 May 1816, 49n.

30 Colonial Office, 247.5; Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 160; Watson (ed.), A Polish Exile with Napoleon, 177.

31 Abell, Recollections, 102–3.

32 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 29 May 1816.

33 Gourgaud, Journal, 30 May 1816.

CHAPTER 12

1 The Times, 24 September 1816.

2 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 259–60.

3 Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Vol. II, 566.

4 O’Meara, letter to Gorrequer, 24 June 1816, quoted in Aubry, St Helena, 207.

5 Gourgaud, Journal, 18 June 1816. The little girl’s formal name was soon abandoned for ‘Lilli’, just as her brother Tristan was usually called ‘Charles’. Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 145, has noted that Lilli lived until 1907, ‘the last of the “witnesses” of St Helena’.

6 Lowe to Bathurst, 21 June 1816, cited in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 195.

7 Bathurst to Lowe, 15 April 1816, cited in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 189–90.

8 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 18 June 1816.

9 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 18 June 1816.

10 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 18 June 1816.

11 Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 270; Julian Park (ed.), Napoleon in Captivity: The reports of Count Balmain, Russian commissioner on the island of St Helena 1816–1820, New York, The Century Co., 1927, xv.

12 Mrs Abell, Recollections, 238–9.

13 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 100–4.

14 Park (ed.), Napoleon in Captivity, Introduction, xiii.

15 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 31 March 1817, 476.

16 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 23 June 1816, 67.

17 Bathurst to Lowe, 15 April 1816, with letter from Sir Henry Bunbury to Lowe, cited in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 189–92.

18 See J.F. Bernard, Talleyrand: A biography, London, Collins, 1973, 52. (Madame de Souza lived as Talleyrand’s mistress from 1783 to 1792. Auguste Charles was born in 1785.)

19 E. Tangye Lean, The Napoleonists: A study in political disaffection 1760–1960, Oxford University Press, 1970, 176–7.

20 Tangye Lean, The Napoleonists, 176.

21 ‘Letters from Lady Malcolm During Napoleon’s Captivity’, in Earl of Kerry (ed.), The First Napoleon, 181–5.

22 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 20 June 1816, 65.

23 Earl of Kerry (ed.), The First Napoleon, 156.

24 See Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 206.

25 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 28 June 1816: ‘M. Balcombe, venu à Hutt’s Gate, dit que Lady Malcolm a été fort heureuse des réponses de l’Empereur; que l’Empereur a en Angleterre beaucoup de partisans, surtout parmi les femmes et que le nombre en augmente tous les jours; et que l’amiral restera ici plus d’un an, à moins que l’Empereur pareur ne parte et qu’alors il l’accompagnera.’

26 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 19n.

27 Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 271.

28 Park (ed.), Napoleon in Captivity, Report No. 6, 1 May 1817, 85–6.

29 O’Meara to Sir Thomas Reade, 10 July 1816, in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 237–8.

30 Lady Malcolm to Lady Keith from the Briars, 4 July 1816, in Earl of Kerry (ed.), The First Napoleon, 189.

31 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 11 July 1816.

32 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 11 July 1816.

33 The Times, 27 March 1816.

34 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, 316.

35 See Chaplin, Napoleon’s Captivity on St Helena, ‘A Chronological List of Napoleon’s Visitors in St Helena’, 142–52.

36 The Times, 14 February 1816.

37 Lowe to Bathurst, 17 July 1816, despatch 27 July, cited in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 220–6. Note that Lowe dates this meeting as 17 July 1816, whereas other accounts place it on 16 July.

CHAPTER 13

1 Lowe to Sir Henry Bunbury, 29 July 1816, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 232.

2 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 199.

3 Abell, Recollections, 94.

4 O’Meara to Sir Thomas Reade, 24 July 1816, cited in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 239–40.

5 HMS Griffon was a sixteen-gun brig-sloop, captured from the French in 1808. It was sold in 1819.

6 Clementina E. Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena (1816, 1817): The journal of Lady Malcolm, containing the conversations of Napoleon with Sir Pulteney Malcolm, London, A.D. Innes & Co, 1899, 25 July 1816, 35–43.

7 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 6 August 1816.

8 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 6 August 1816.

9 Abell, Recollections, 153.

10 Brookes, St Helena Story, 51–8. George Carstairs is not mentioned by name in Mrs Abell’s Recollections, nor in St Helena records of the period such as Chaplin, who lists army and navy officers. Dame Mabel had access to family papers for her book and mentions a diary by the young Betsy as a source, although it is not included in her bibliography and seems no longer to exist. In her charming The Emperor’s Last Island, London, Secker & Warburg, 1991, 62, Julia Blackburn claimed: ‘The diary does exist and it has apparently made its way into a collection of papers and documents that lie in the archive department of an art gallery in Melbourne, Australia.’ However, an extensive search by researchers at The Briars, Mt Martha, has not located a Betsy Diary in either The Briars’ collection, the Mornington Regional Museum or the National Gallery of Victoria, nor is it held by any Balcombe family descendants they have contacted.

11 Abell, Recollections, 153.

12 Lady Malcolm to the Hon. Miss Mary Elphinstone, 26 January 1817, in Earl of Kerry (ed.), The First Napoleon, 197–9; Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 10 August 1816, 45–6.

13 Quoted in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 128.

14 James Kemble (ed.), St Helena During Napoleon’s Exile: Gorrequer’s diary, London, William Heinemann, 1969, quoted in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 145.

15 Abell, Recollections, 138–9.

16 Abell, Recollections, 139.

17 See J.B. Priestley, The Prince of Pleasure and his Regency 1811-20, London, Heinemann, 1969, 87.

18 Brookes, St Helena Story, 52.

19 Quoted in Creston, In Search of Two Characters, 301.

20 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 15 August 1816.

21 The ice-making machine was the invention of Professor John Leslie in 1810.

22 Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 16 August 1816, 48–9.

23 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 16 August 1816.

24 Abell, Recollections, 142–3.

25 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 243; Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 17–18 August 1816, 54–6.

26 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 246–56; Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 18 August 1816, 55–64; Gourgaud, Journal, 18 August 1816; O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 19 August 1816.

27 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 57.

28 Gourgaud, Journal, 18 August 1816; O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 19 August 1816.

29 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 57–8.

30 Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 23 August 1816, 66.

31 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 26 August 1816.

32 Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 28 August 1816, 67.

33 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 167.

34 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 5 and 7 September 1816.

35 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 13 September 1816.

36 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 17 September 1816.

37 Bathurst to Lowe re warning from Milan-based Menet, Lowe Papers, BL Add. MS 20116, 310.

38 Charles Stuart, British ambassador to France, to Viscount Castlereagh, 8 July 1816, enclosed in Bathurst despatch to Lowe, 17 July 1816, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20115 ff.190, 204.

39 Bathurst to Lowe, 12 and 17 July 1816, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20115 ff.202, 210.

40 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 5 October 1816.

41 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 4 and 6 October 1816.

42 O’Meara to Finlaison, 10 October 1816, BL Lowe Papers, Add. 20146, 20116, 20117, quoted in Benhamou, Inside Longwood, 61–76.

CHAPTER 14

1 Aubry, St Helena, 286–7.

2 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 200–1.

3 Quoted in Abbott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 571.

4 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 5 November 1816.

5 Abell, Recollections, 134–5.

6 Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 25 November 1816, 76–7.

7 Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 15.

8 See Park (ed.), Napoleon in Captivity, Report No. 20, 1 October 1817, III.

9 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 279, claimed that it was an earlier letter Las Cases had attempted to send to Lady Clavering that was intercepted—but Montholon was often unreliable.

10 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 178, noted that for stealing two glasses of wine from Sir Thomas Reade, ‘a slave received two years hard labour; whoever cut down a tree without permission was threatened with two hundred lashes’.

11 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, Part 7, 277–81.

12 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, Part 7, 282.

13 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 135.

14 Las Cases’ journal, quoted in Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 12.

15 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 25 November 1816.

16 O’Meara to Finlaison, 23 December 1816, quoted in Benhamou, Inside Longwood, 77–96.

17 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, Part 7, 295.

18 O’Meara to Finlaison, 23 December 1816, quoted in Benhamou, Inside Longwood, 93.

19 Napoleon to Las Cases, 11 December 1816, quoted in Abbott, The Life of Napoleon, 573.

20 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, Part 7, 319–20.

21 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, Part 8, 3.

22 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. I, 61–2n. (O’Meara to Finlaison, 23 December 1816, quoted in Benhamou, Inside Longwood, confirmed the high security: ‘They were kept au secret and placed in charge of an officer and sentinels properly placed about them . . . None but staff officers were afterwards permitted to see them.’)

23 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 141.

24 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 24 December 1816.

25 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. I, 62n.

26 Lowe, private letter to Bathurst, 3 December 1816, confirming procedure concerning Las Cases papers, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 385.

27 Las Cases, Mémorial, Vol. IV, Part 8, 40.

28 Marchand, Mémoires, II, 151.

29 O’Meara to Finlaison, 29 December 1816, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. II, 62–78.

30 Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 11 January 1817, 81–97.

31 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 17 November 1816.

32 Abell, Recollections, 148–9.

33 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 31 December 1816.

34 O’Meara, to Sir Hudson Lowe, 16 December 1816, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/42 ff. 225–34.

CHAPTER 15

1 Gourgaud, Journal, 17 January 1817.

2 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 26 January 1817.

3 Lady Malcolm to the Hon. Miss Mary Elphinstone, 26 January 1817, in Earl of Kerry (ed.), The First Napoleon, 197–9.

4 Lady Malcolm to her cousin Margaret, Madame de Flahaut, 3 September 1817, in Earl of Kerry (ed.), The First Napoleon, 199–205.

5 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 17 November 1817.

6 Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 31 January 1817, 97–111.

7 Gourgaud, Journal, 4 February 1817.

8 Gourgaud, Journal, 8 February 1817.

9 Abell, Recollections, 242.

10 Gourgaud, Journal, 12 February 1817.

11 Abell, Recollections, 120.

12 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 12 January 1817.

13 Abell, Recollections, 158.

14 Information from website ‘The Journal of Ross Dix-Peek’—‘Notes on Lieutenant-Colonel Olof Godlieb Fehrzen (1784–1820), 53rd Regiment of Foot; Bingham, who had been his commander in the Peninsular Campaign and was a personal friend, spelled the surname ‘Fehrszen’, perhaps the original spelling; however, the name was anglicised to Oliver George Fehrzen.

15 See Glover (ed.), Wellington’s Lieutenant, Napoleon’s Gaoler, 139–40.

16 Chaplin, Napoleon’s Captivity on St Helena, 75–6.

17 Gourgaud, Journal, 12 February 1817.

18 Gourgaud, Journal, 13 February 1817.

19 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 13 February 1817.

20 Gourgaud, Journal, 13 February 1817.

21 Gourgaud, Journal, 14 February 1817. In the interests of clarity I have corrected Gourgaud’s spelling ‘Ferzen’ to Fehrzen.

22 Jean-Paul Kauffmann, The Dark Room at Longwood, translated from French by Patricia Clancy, London, Harvill Press, 1997, 118–19, citing unpublished notes by Louis-Étienne Saint-Denis in Fonds Jourquin-Jourquin collection.

23 See Chaplin, Napoleon’s Captivity on St Helena, 97, citing Lady Russell, Swallowfield and Its Owners, London, 1901.

24 Quoted in Korngold, The Last Years of Napoleon, 242.

25 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 16 February 1817.

26 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 1 March 1817.

27 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 8 & 11 March 1817, 415, 425–6.

28 O’Meara, quoted in Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 5 March 1817.

29 Abell, Recollections, 242–3.

30 The Times, 28 December 1816.

31 Footnote to French edition of Mrs Abell’s Recollections—Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène: Souvenirs de Betzy Balcombe, Traduction annotée et précédée d’une Introduction par Aimé Le Gras, 48–9. Translation thanks to Janet Bell.

32 The expression should have been ‘viel imbécile’—so Mrs Abell’s French left room for improvement.

33 Abell, Recollections, 106.

34 Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 7 March 1817, 111–21.

35 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 5 March 1817, 410–11.

36 Abell, Recollections, 159.

37 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I., 8 March 1817.

38 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I., 8 March 1817.

39 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 7 March 1817.

40 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 5 March 1817.

41 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 157.

42 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 11 March 1817.

CHAPTER 16

1 Finlaison to O’Meara, 25 February 1817, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20121, quoted in Benhamou, Inside Longwood, 98.

2 Dr James Miranda Barry (born c. 1789–99, died 25 July 1865) was a military surgeon in the British army who served in India, Cape Town, Mauritius, and later on the island of St Helena. After dying in 1865, Dr Barry was revealed to have been a woman, born Margaret Ann Bulkley. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Stephanie Pain, ‘The “male” military surgeon who wasn’t’, New Scientist, 6 March 2008.

3 O’Meara to Sir Thomas Reade, 24 August 1816, arguing the need for a proper fowlhouse: B.L. Lowe Papers Add. 20115 and St Helena Archives Vol. 20115 f.304.

4 Gourgaud, Journal, 7 April 1817.

5 Bathurst to Lowe, 23 February 1817, St Helena Archives.

6 William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘The Four Georges: Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Town Life’, The Cornhill Magazine, London, Smith, Elder & Co, September 1860, 258; D.J. Taylor, Thackeray, London, Chatto & Windus, 1999, 24.

7 Conversation quoted in Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 3 May 1817.

8 ‘Buonaparte’, The Times, 15 March 1817.

9 The Times, 14 and 18 March 1817.

10 Quoted in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 201.

11 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 202.

12 Gourgaud, Journal, 21 June 1817.

13 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. I, 20 May 1817.

14 Gourgaud, Journal, 15 May 1817.

15 Esther Vesey’s mother was a mixed-race woman, possibly a slave, but her father was identified as ‘a sergeant in the St Helena Corps’ in a letter by Captain Thomas Poppleton to Lowe, 22 May 1816, listing the Longwood domestics: Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20115 f.110.

16 Gourgaud, Journal, 9 June 1817.

17 Gourgaud, Journal, 9 June 1817.

18 Gourgaud, Journal, 18 June 1817.

19 Gourgaud, Journal, 5 June 1817.

20 Gourgaud, Journal, 9 June 1817.

21 Lady Malcolm to her cousin Margaret, Madame de Flahaut, 3 September 1817, in Earl of Kerry (ed.), The First Napoleon, 199–205.

22 Malcolm, A Diary of St Helena, 19 June 1817, 146–66.

23 Gourgaud, Journal, 19 June 1817.

24 Hester Lynch Piozzi et al., The Piozzi Letters 1817–1821, University of Delaware Press, 1999, 100.

25 Piozzi et al., The Piozzi Letters 1817–1821, 100.

26 Abell, Recollections, 180–1.

CHAPTER 17

1 J. Ralfe on Admiral Plampin in The Naval Biography of Great Britain, London, Whitmore & Fenn, 1828, Vol. III, 372–86.

2 Paul Frémeaux, With Napoleon at St Helena: Being the memoirs of Dr John Stokoe, naval surgeon, translated from the French by Edith S. Stokoe, London, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1902, 40.

3 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 135–6.

4 Frémeaux, With Napoleon at St Helena, 41–2.

5 William Pitt, 1st Earl Amherst, 1773–1857. After his diplomatic mission to China he was appointed Governor General of India.

6 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 18 July 1817.

7 Chaplin, Napoleon’s Captivity on St Helena, 223.

8 Brookes, St Helena Story, 196. Dame Mabel Brookes claimed that Betsy’s victim was Charlotte Johnson, Lady Lowe’s elder daughter, which may well have been so, but the evidence must be in Betsy’s untraceable diary.

9 Abell, Recollections, 41–2; Brookes, St Helena Story, 196.

10 Gourgaud, Journal, 8 July 1817.

11 Chaplin, Napoleon’s Captivity on St Helena, 223; see also Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 135–6.

12 Chaplin, Napoleon’s Captivity on St Helena, 222–3.

13 Chaplin, Napoleon’s Captivity on St Helena, 222–4.

14 Gourgaud, Journal, 12 July 1817.

15 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 18 July 1817.

16 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 18 July 1817.

17 Gourgaud, Journal, 22 and 24 July 1817; Bertrand’s Cahiers 1816–1817, on 22 July 1817, noted: ‘The Emperor visits Mme Bertrand and returns when Mr Balcombe arrives. He gives his hair to Mr Balcombe for the Empress and the Cardinal Fesch; Major Fehrzen undertakes to carry them.’

18 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 23 July 1817.

19 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 23 and 25 July 1817.

20 Gourgaud, Journal, 27 July 1817.

21 Gourgaud, Journal, 28 July 1817.

22 Quoted in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 201.

23 Bathurst to Lowe, 19 August 1817, St Helena Archives, Lowe Papers.

24 Quoted in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 203–4.

25 Gourgaud, unpublished journal, 12 February 1817, translated and quoted in Aubry, St Helena, 209; Felix Markham, Napoleon, London, Penguin, 1995, 250.

26 Quoted in Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 145.

27 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 22 August 1817, 156.

28 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 177.

29 Gourgaud, Journal, 8 September 1817, and O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 9 September 1817.

30 Kemble (ed.), St Helena: Gorrequer’s diary, 19, entry for 9 September 1817.

31 Abell, Recollections, 112–13; St Helena historian Trevor Hearl noted in a letter to the author, 10 March 2006, that ‘Mrs Abell herself did not attempt to embroider the occasion’, but he considered some later writers overstated ‘Betsy’s equestrian performance at the races—such as it was!’ One had her entering Napoleon’s horse in a steeplechase, and Dame Mabel Brookes wrote that she was awarded a ‘little silver trophy’, presumably by the governor (Brookes, St Helena Story, 151)—whereas, as Hearl observed, ‘her father was later summoned before Sir Hudson and curtly warned that another display from his daughter like that, and he would be on the next ship back to Britain’. See Trevor Hearl, ‘“Derby Days” at Deadwood: Highlights of Horse-Racing at St Helena’, Part I, article for Wirebird: Journal of the Friends of St Helena, Issue 29, Autumn 2004.

32 Abell, Recollections, 125–6.

33 Gourgaud, Journal, 25 September 1817.

34 Gourgaud, Journal, 26 September 1817.

35 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 26 September 1817.

36 Sir Thomas had relinquished his formal position as the prince’s secretary in 1812 when he became Black Rod in the House of Lords, while remaining a close friend of the prince. Balcombe, on the island since December 1805, may have been unaware that he no longer held the secretary position, or not have mentioned it, for he was known to boast of his connection through Tyrwhitt to the prince.

37 Gourgaud, Journal, 26 September 1817.

38 Gourgaud, Journal, 26 September 1817.

39 Gourgaud, Journal, 4 October 1817.

40 Bathurst to Lowe, 21 August 1816, St Helena Archives, Lowe Papers Vol. 20115 f.80.

CHAPTER 18

1 Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 1845, Heron Books, 1968, 486, entry for 9 May 1836.

2 Abell, Recollections, 114–16.

3 Information from A. Hyatt King, Some British Collectors of Music c.1600–1960, 2011, 51.

4 Frémeaux, With Napoleon at St Helena, 52–4.

5 Frémeaux, With Napoleon at St Helena, 54.

6 Lowe Papers, BL Add. MSS 20,140, f.53.

7 Gourgaud, Journal, 12 October 1817.

8 Gourgaud, Journal, 15 October 1817.

9 G.H. Heathcote in Edinburgh, letter to Mrs Jane and Betsy Balcombe in Sydney, 25 March 1826, Mitchell Library Folio ML MSS 848X.

10 Gourgaud, Journal, 15 October 1817.

11 Gourgaud, Journal, 16 October 1817.

12 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 13 October 1817.

13 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 18 October 1817.

14 Gourgaud, Journal, 18 and 19 October 1817.

15 Gourgaud, Journal, 6 November 1817.

16 Gourgaud, Journal, 18 November 1817.

17 Bertrand, Cahiers 1816–1817, 18 November 1817.

18 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 176.

19 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 181.

20 Gourgaud, Journal, 21 and 14 December 1817.

21 Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 145.

22 Gourgaud, Journal, 1 January 1818.

23 Park (ed.), Napoleon in Captivity, Report No. 27, 13 December 1817, 146.

24 Gourgaud, Journal, 1 January 1818.

25 H. Chamberlain, British ambassador to Brazil to Lowe, 3 December 1817, St Helena Archives, Lowe Papers.

26 Général Bertrand, Cahiers de Sainte-Hélène, Journal 1818–1819, Paris, Éditions Albin Michel, 1878, 19. Note that in this volume, precise dates are given only erratically, events grouped under months; therefore page numbers are indicated instead.

27 Gourgaud, Journal, 26 and 27 January 1818.

28 Gourgaud, Journal, 30 January 1818.

29 Park (ed.), Napoleon in Captivity, Report no. 3, 15 February 1818, 162.

30 Gourgaud, Journal, 2 February 1818.

31 Princess Charlotte died on 6 November 1817.

32 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 3 February 1818.

33 Stürmer to Metternich, quoted in Park (ed.), Napoleon in Captivity, Balmain Report No. 3, 15 January 1818, 165.

34 Gourgaud, Journal, 6 and 11 February 1818.

35 Quoted in Park (ed.), Napoleon in Captivity, 164. Balmain (or editor Park) quoting Bonaparte to Bertrand, ‘Speak to me no more of that man.’

36 Kemble (ed.), St Helena: Gorrequer’s diary, 41, entry for 12 February 1818.

37 Bertrand, Cahiers 1818–1819, 71.

38 Gourgaud, as quoted in Park (ed.), Napoleon in Captivity, Report No. 3, 14 March 1818, 164.

39 Gourgaud, Journal, 27 February 1818.

CHAPTER 19

1 See Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena, 173.

2 Kemble (ed.), St Helena: Gorrequer’s diary, 39, entry for 10 February 1818.

3 Park (ed.), Napoleon in Captivity, Balmain Report No. 3, 14 March 1818, 164.

4 Stürmer Reports, quoted in Park (ed), Napoleon in Captivity, Report No. 3, 15 January 1818, 165–7.

5 Sir Hudson Lowe to Major-General Sir Henry Torrens, 2 September 1818, BL Add. 20123 f.342: ‘respecting a present reported to have been given by Napoleon Bonaparte to Major Poppleton . . . I feel it a duty to address you officially on the subject’. Torrens was head of the Horse Guards, the army equivalent of the Admiralty and Poppleton’s ultimate superior. Lowe wrote to him after he heard that Poppleton had been promoted to major; he obviously expected his information might cause Poppleton to be dismissed. He also wrote to Lord Bathurst on the same matter (Lowe to Bathurst, 4 September 1818, BL Add. 20123 f.351).

6 Jacques St-Cère and H. Schlitter (eds), Napoléon a Sainte-Hélène, Rapports Officiels de Baron Stürmer, Commissaire du Gouvernement Autrichien, Paris, a La Librairie Illustrée, n.d., Stürmer to Prince Metternich, Report No. 11, 31 March 1818, 174.

7 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 186.

8 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 17 February 1818.

9 Kemble (ed.), St Helena: Gorrequer’s diary, 43, entries for 11 and 17 February 1818.

10 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 18 February 1818.

11 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. II, 209: O’Meara reports to Lowe ‘he apprehended his patient might be suffering under an attack of chronic hepatitis’.

12 Goulburn to Lowe, 18 September 1817, St Helena Archives, with enclosures from Charles Stuart, British ambassador in Paris, 4 September 1817.

13 Bathurst to Lowe, 1 January 1818, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20121 f.3.

14 Although its content is referred to, the actual letter from Tyrwhitt has not been located. It may be that he asked for the letter to be destroyed, or that Balcombe did so on his own initiative.

15 Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt to Sir Hudson Lowe, 8 December 1817, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20120.

16 Lowe to Bathurst, 24 February 1818, Bathurst Private Papers, 57/43 f.184; Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20121 f.230.

17 Lowe to Bathurst, 24 February 1818, Bathurst Private Papers, 57/43 f.184; Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20121 f.230.

18 Journal for ‘Earl Spencer’, 25 April 1803 to 16 April 1805, BL India Office Archives L/MAR/B/227D, naval researcher Stephen T.J. Wright via Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha,; census records, East India Company records and The National Archives, CO/201/229 under ‘Balcombe’.

19 Journal for ‘Earl Spencer’, 25 April 1803 to 16 April 1805, BL India Office Archives L/MAR/ B/227D.

20 Balcombe’s debt was paid at Ryde on the Isle of Wight in 1805 by Matthew Burchell, father of William Burchell, Balcombe’s new business partner, just before the departure of Burchell as well as Balcombe and his family for St Helena: Burchell, ‘St Helena Journal’, St Helena Archives.

21 Marcus Arkin, ‘John Company at the Cape: A history of the Agency under Pringle 1794–1815’, Archives Year Book for South African History, 1960, Vol. 2, Pretoria 1962, 257–8 (Arkin notes the following sources: re ‘improper trade in East India goods’, Pringle to Beatson, 17 May 1813, CGH, FR, XIX; re ‘condemned by Customs’, D. Denyssen (the Fiscal) to Pringle, 19 May 1813, CGH F.R. XII; re ‘escorted out of Table Bay . . . no longer heard of’, Pringle to Beatson, 19 May and 28 May 1813, CGH, FR, XIX).

22 Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt to Sir Hudson Lowe, 8 December 1815, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20120; Yale University, Beinecke Collection, Osborn Shelves FC111-112/24.

23 Lowe to Bathurst, 24 February 1818, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/43 f.184; Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20121 f.230; Brookes, St Helena Story, 211–12.

24 Gourgaud, Journal, 13 March 1818.

25 Gourgaud, Journal, 13 March 1818.

26 Gourgaud, Journal, 14 March 1818.

27 Abell, Recollections, 228.

28 Kemble (ed.), St Helena: Gorrequer’s diary, entry for 16 March 1818.

29 See Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. I, 170.

30 Abell, Recollections, 189–90.

31 Montholon, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 17, and on 97 confirmed in Napoleon’s will, dictated to Montholon, 26 April 1821.

32 Marchand, Mémoires, Vol. II, 187–8.

33 Abell, Recollections, 230–1.

CHAPTER 20

1 Sir Thomas Reade to Sir Hudson Lowe, March 1818, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20121 f.473 & f.96.

2 Mrs Charles Johnstone, appendix to 3rd [4th] edition (1873) of her late mother Mrs Abell’s Recollections, 311–12.

3 The death in Paris of the Countess Dillon was reported in the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, December 1817.

4 The Indiaman Waterloo sailed just after the Winchelsea, also the naval vessel HMS Melville. The name of the recipient of Fanny Bertrand’s letter is obscured, but as the letter was written in English it was almost certainly to her aunt, Lady Jerningham in Norfolk.

5 The Countess Bertrand letter was supplied by Barbara George, found in the St Helena Archives by Lally Brown (aka Liz Sargeant) for her book The Saint Helena Counterpoint: Napoleon’s exile—The myth exploded, Warwick, Sargeant Press, n.d., 90.

6 Lowe to Bathurst, 22 March 1818, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/43 f.190.

7 The Times, 12 May 1818, Ship News: Lymington, 10 May, half past 4 pm, ‘Just landed here the Purser of the Winchelsea Indiaman’. Other passengers who disembarked were Major Gall of the Bengal Bodyguard with his wife and family and Mr Torin of the Bombay Establishment.

8 The Times, 8 May 1818.

9 The Times, 18 May 1818.

10 The Times, 23 May 1818.

11 BL Add. 20126, f.313.

12 Goulburn to Bathurst, 10 May 1818, BL Add. MSS 2021 f.119.

13 Clarence Edward Macartney and Gordon Dorrance, The Bonapartes in America, Philadelphia, Dorrance & Co., 1939, Ch XIV, ‘American Plots to Rescue Napoleon’.

14 Lowe to Bathurst, 14 March 1818, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/43 f.186.

15 Information courtesy of Caroline Gaden.

16 ‘Irish typhus and dysentery epidemic’, 1817–1818, George Childs Kohn (ed.), Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence, Facts on File Library of World History, 3rd edn, 2007; Keighley & District Family History Society, ‘Major Epidemics and Disease Outbreaks Timeline’, compiled in 2011 for the Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies.

17 In Ireland in 1818 one in six suffered from typhus out of a population of six million, and 65,000 died of it: ‘Irish typhus and dysentery epidemic’, 1817–1818, Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence, Keighly, Keighly and District Family History Society, 2011.

18 Will of Stephen Balcombe, proved September 1818, Public Record Office, UK National Archives.

19 Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, ‘The “Insanity” of King George III: A classic case of Porphyria’, British Medical Journal, 8 January 1966, 65–71; Priestley, The Prince of Pleasure, 14.

20 Neville Thompson, Earl Bathurst and the British Empire, 1762–1834, Barnsley, Leo Cooper, 1999, 9–10; J. Brooking-Rowe, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt and Princetown, Plymouth, W. Brendon & Son, 1905, 9.

21 Thompson, Earl Bathurst and the British Empire, 1762–1834, 52.

22 In letter from ‘James’ [William] Balcombe to O’Meara on 24 June 1818 he noted ‘I have been hard at work for you, and what has been said has been listened to. I am just going to the Secretary of State’s office where I have been twice before on your business.’ Enclosed in Lowe despatch to Bathurst, 29 September 1818, BL Add.20123 ff.399–406.

23 Lowe despatch to Bathurst, 29 September 1818, BL Add. 20123 ff.399–406, containing letter from ‘James’ [William] Balcombe to O’Meara, 24 June 1818.

24 The Times, 5 June 1818.

25 The Times, 10 and 13 June 1818.

26 Thompson, Earl Bathurst and the British Empire, 109–10.

27 The Examiner, 1 February 1818.

CHAPTER 21

1 Lowe to Bathurst, 24 February 1818, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/43 f.184; Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20121 f.230: ‘The [Balcombe] daughters I believe correspond occasionally with Lady Malcolm, but of this I cannot speak with positive certainty.’

2 Christopher Summerville (ed.), Regency Recollections: Captain Gronow’s guide to life in London and Paris, Welwyn Garden City, Ravenhall Books, 2006, 89.

3 Gronow, Regency Recollections, 131: Christopher Summerville (ed.) estimates that during the Regency the ‘vast majority of British subjects, an impoverished working class [were] lucky to earn ten shillings a week’, and that figures for the period should be ‘multiplied by a factor of fifty for a rough modern equivalent’; by that calculation, the five Balcombe children had inherited £5000 each.

4 Gronow, Regency Recollections, 49.

5 Bryant, The Years of Victory, 1802–1812, London, Collins, 1945, 318.

6 Bryant, The Years of Victory, 1802–1812, 313–14.

7 EIC Court Book April 1818 to September 1818, 178, 22 May 1818, BL India Office 126-B/167. (Confirms appointment of Edward Abell Esquire as civil agent of the Government of Ceylon to the EIC Presidency of Madras. Travel at his own expense.)

8 The Times, 27 June 1818.

9 The Times, 13 January 1818.

10 O’Meara to John Finlaison, 12 July 1818, quoted in Benhamou, Inside Longwood, 161.

11 Dr John Stokoe to Admiral Plampin, 13 July 1818, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 404.

12 But Boys would return, to Lowe’s disappointment—this was apparently only a holiday.

13 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 235–6; letter published in Morning Chronicle, 21 August 1818.

14 Morning Post, 20 July 1818.

15 O’Meara to Sir Hudson Lowe, dated Longwood 19 April 1818; Morning Chronicle, 18 July 1818; duplicated in The Times and Morning Post, 20 July 1818.

16 Finlaison to O’Meara, 24 January 1818, BL Add. 20231, f.21.

17 Bathurst to Lowe, 18 May 1818, Despatch No. 132, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 400.

18 Sir Thomas Reade to Dr O’Meara, 19 April 1818, published in Morning Chronicle, 22 July 1817.

19 Napoleon’s margin comments of 25 April 1818, published in Morning Chronicle, 22 July 1817.

20 Morning Chronicle, Bury & Norwich Post, 21 and 22 July 1818.

21 Bathurst to Lowe, 22 July 1818, BL Add. 20123 f.128.

22 Morning Post, 27 August 1818.

23 O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 236.

24 Young, Napoleon in Exile, Vol. II, 104; Young noted that the articles described were mentioned in O’Meara’s will.

25 O’Meara to Finlaison, 10 August 1818, quoted in Benhamou, Inside Longwood, 169–74.

CHAPTER 22

1 Lowe to Bathurst, 29 September 1818, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/43 f.407.

2 W.J. Burchell, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, 2 vols, London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1822; Burchell, ‘St Helena Journal’, St Helena Archives.

3 Sir George Cockburn was Conservative MP for Plymouth in 1818 and appointed a Junior Lord of the Admiralty from April 1818 to 1827. That Balcombe assisted in his electoral campaign is confirmed in a letter from Lowe to Bathurst of 25 September 1818, BL Add. 20123 f.382: ‘Captain Brash went to Mr. Holmes’ office who told him that Mr. Balcombe was at the time attending an election.’

4 Balcombe from Hythe to William Fowler, 21 August 1818, Lowe Papers, BL MS Add. 20123 f.320.

5 Kemble (ed.), St Helena: Gorrequer’s diary, 102, entry for 10 December 1818.

6 Holmes to Stokoe, 26 August 1818, Lowe Papers, BL MS Add 20123 f.329.

7 Chaplin, Napoleon’s Captivity on St Helena, 233–4; St Helena Council Minutes for 24 August 1818, St Helena Archives.

8 EIC Court of Directors to Lowe, 21 April 1819, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 55.

9 Morning Post, The Times, (both with headline ‘Slave Abolition on St Helena’), 12 November 1818.

10 Morning Chronicle, 5 September 1818. Las Cases’ Memoirs were only a precursor to his massive eight-volume Mémorial de Saint-Hélène, not written until after his papers were returned by the Colonial Office after Napoleon’s death in 1821.

11 The Times, 15 September 1818.

12 Edinburgh Review, Vol. 30, September 1818, 444–62.

13 Lowe to Bathurst, 15 May 1819, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/44 f.286.

14 William Holmes from Lyons Inn to ‘James Forbes’, St Helena, 30 August 1818, BL Add. 20123 f.331.

15 Lowe despatch to Bathurst, 29 September 1818, BL Add. 20123 ff.399–406, containing letter from ‘James’ [William] Balcombe to O’Meara, 24 June 1818.

CHAPTER 23

1 O’Meara to John Wilson Croker, 28 October 1818, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, Appendix No. 150, 432–3.

2 John Wilson Croker to O’Meara, 2 November 1818, quoted in Benhamou, Inside Longwood, 201.

3 The Times, 10 November 1818.

4 The Times, 10 November 1818.

5 ‘Minute of what passed at the Colonial Office, Sunday 8 November 1818, Earl Bathurst, Viscount Sidmouth and Viscount Melville present. Mr. Balcombe attending’, BL MS Add. 20201 f. 193–4.

6 William Balcombe to Earl Bathurst, 9 November 1818, BL MS Add. 20201 ff.195–6.

7 William Fowler on St Helena to William Balcombe c/- Messrs W&J Burnie, 29 September 1818, BL MS Add. 20201 f.191.

8 William Balcombe to Earl Bathurst, 10 November 1818, BL MS Add. 20201 ff.197–8.

9 Morning Post, 17 November 1818.

10 The Times, 10 November 1818.

11 Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt proposal for horse-drawn railroad presented to the Plymouth Chamber of Commerce, 3 November 1818

12 William Balcombe from Chester Place, Kennington, to cousin Miss Cheal, 14 November 1818. Letter transcribed by author, courtesy of the late Richard a’Beckett and family from their collection of Balcombe family letters. Copies at The Briars, Mt Martha.

13 Gourgaud to Madame Mère and Prince Eugene, October 1818; to Emperor of Russia, 2 October 1818; to Emperor of Austria, 25 October 1818; to Marie Louise, 25 August 1818, in St Helena Journal of General Baron Gourgaud, Vol. II, Appendix II, 348–53.

14 Courier, 25 November 1818, reprinted in Aberdeen Journal, 25 November 1818; also The Asiatic Journal, 14 November 1818.

15 Henry Goulburn to Lowe, 16 November 1818, BL MS 20201 f.187.

16 Henry Goulburn to Lowe, 16 November 1818, BL MS 20201 f.187.

17 Bathurst to Lowe, 16 November 1818, BL MS 20201 f. 183.

18 Bury & Norwich Post, 18 November 1818. Queen Charlotte died on 17 November 1818.

19 Morning Chronicle, Bury & Norwich Post, 18 November 1818.

20 Bathurst to Lowe, 20 November 1818, BL MS Add. 2021 ff. 201–2.

21 Morning Post, 25 November 1818.

22 Cardinal Fesch in Rome was Madame Mère’s brother and uncle to Napoleon.

23 Morning Chronicle, 2 December 1818.

24 Morning Post, 2 December 1818.

25 Lowe to Goulburn, 10 October 1818, BL MS 20137 f. 23, letter which arrived in London around late November to early December.

26 Lowe to Bathurst, 23 December 1818, BL MS 20124, ff. 473–6.

27 George Gordon Lord Byron, The Age of Bronze, London, John Murray, 1823.

CHAPTER 24

1 Reported in the Salisbury & Winchester Journal of 20 December 1819: ‘At a meeting of the Bath and West of England Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture, Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, in the presence of Lord Arundel, the Marquis of Lansdowne and various admirals, a paper by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt was read, who had successfully grown nine acres of flax on Dartmoor and believed much of the moor could be brought into cultivation for flax. It caused “great excitement”.’

2 Les Landon, ‘Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt: His life and times’, Dartmoor Magazine, No. 15, n.d.

3 Elaine Sylvester, ‘Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt of Princetown’, Margins Literary Magazine, No. 3, ‘Dartmoor’, 2008, 44; Landon, ‘Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt’, 5.

4 See Abell, Prisoners of War in Britain 1756 to 1815, 238: ‘By the foreign prisoners of war Dartmoor was regarded, and not without reason, as the most hateful of all the British prisons.’

5 John Hirst, Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s first colony, Melbourne, Black Inc., 2008, 80: ‘The large influx of convicts after 1816 with 2000 arriving each year.’

6 Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt met with Plymouth Chamber of Commerce, 3 November 1818, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 5 November 1818.

7 Landon, ‘Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt’, 5.

8 ‘Prospectus of the Plymouth & Dartmoor Rail-Road’, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 11 February 1819.

9 Sir George Magrath MD, quoted in S. Baring-Gould, A Book of Dartmoor, London, Wildwood House, (1900) 1982, 259–60.

10 St Helena Archives, 1819–1820 Index of Court of Directors’ Minutes: 762, 24 February 1819, ‘Mr William Balcombe requests permission to return to St Helena’.

11 Hubert O’Connor, The Emperor and the Irishman: Napoleon and Dr Barry O’Meara on St Helena, Dublin, A.A. Farmar, 2008.

12 Barry E. O’Meara, An Exposition of some of the Transactions at St Helena since the Appointment of Sir Hudson Lowe as Governor of the Island; with an authentic account of the past and present Treatment of Napoleon, corroborated by various Official Documents, printed for James Ridgway, Piccadilly, price 8s in Boards. The book was advertised as ‘Published this day’ in the Morning Chronicle, 26 May 1819. It had been advertised as ‘forthcoming’ on 11 March 1819.

13 The Times, 5 April 1819.

14 The Times, 8 April 1819.

15 Lowe to Bathurst, 16 May 1819, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/44 f.292.

16 Lowe to Goulburn, 29 June 1819, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/44 f.304.

17 Françoise de Candé-Montholon (ed.), Journal Secret d’Albine de Montholon, maîtresse de Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène (The Secret Journal of Albine de Montholon, mistress of Napoleon on St Helena), Paris, Albin Michel, 2002. The journal is generally considered unreliable and gives Albine too central a role, but certainly declares her role as Napoleon’s mistress.

18 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 168.

19 Bathurst to Lowe, Despatch No. 162, 12 July 1819, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 484.

20 Lowe to Bathurst, 26 July 1819, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/44 f.320.

21 G. and J. Hearder, ‘Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt’, The South Devon Monthly Museum, Plymouth, March 1836, Vol. VII, 97–9; ‘Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt’, Encyclopaedia of Plymouth History, Plymouth, n.d.: ‘The iron rails were on granite sleepers, with an unusual gauge of 4 feet, 6 inches, soon known as the “Dartmoor gauge”.’

22 Exeter Museum, The Regency in Devon, Exeter, Exeter Museum Publication No. 94, 1978, 4; David R. Fisher, The History of Parliament Online, 1790–1820, ‘Masseh or Manasseh Lopes (1755–1831)’. See <www.historyofparliamentonline.org>.

23 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, [1963] 1984, 752.

24 R.J. White, Waterloo to Peterloo, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1957, 192–3.

25 Samuel Bamford, quoted in Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 754. (The number killed and wounded was not established with certainty—it may have been many more.)

CHAPTER 25

1 Morning Post, 14 August 1819.

2 The Times, 3 November 1819, reprinted from the Morning Chronicle.

3 The Times, 29 November and 6 December 1819.

4 St Helena Archives, 1819–1820 Index of Court of Directors’ Minutes: 762, 10 November 1819, Balcombe’s request noted.

5 St Helena Archives, 1819–1820 Index of Court of Directors’ Minutes: 897, 17 December 1819, ‘Request of Mr William Balcombe to return to St Helena discussed in relation to letter from Henry Goulburn.’

6 See Lowe to Bathurst, 16 May 1819, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/44 f.292,.

7 Priestley, The Prince of Pleasure, 14.

8 The future Queen Victoria was born on 24 May 1819.

9 Wellington quoted in Priestley, The Prince of Pleasure, 15.

10 Lowe to Bathurst, 1 December 1819, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/44 f.351.

11 St Helena Archives, Longwood Orderly officer noted: ‘Napoleon sighted in garden in a dressing-gown, 26 December 1819’. Napoleon’s gardening attire also reported in Caledonian Mercury, 17 April 1820.

12 John Stanhope, The Cato Street Conspiracy, London, Jonathan Cape, 1962; Malcolm Chase, ‘Arthur Thistlewood (1774–1820)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.

13 The story was thought to be apocryphal until the death of George IV. Then that respectable medical journal The Lancet reported that the physicians attending the late king had found 10,000 labelled envelopes in the former monarch’s bedside cupboard, each containing a few strands of hair.

14 See Steven Parissien, George IV: Inspiration of the Regency, London, John Murray, 2001, 219.

15 The coronation was postponed until 19 July 1821.

16 The Times, Bristol Mercury, Glasgow Herald, 10 July 1820; Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 13 July 1820.

17 Morning Chronicle, 14 August 1820; Newcastle Courant, 19 August 1820.

18 Bristol Mercury, 19 July 1820.

19 Lady Granville to Lady Morpeth, 18 August 1820, quoted in E.A. Smith, A Queen on Trial: The affair of Queen Caroline, Phoenix Mill, Sutton Publishing, (1993) 2005, 102.

20 Jane Robins, Rebel Queen: The trial of Queen Caroline, London, Simon & Schuster, 2006, 223–7.

21 Robins, Rebel Queen, 237, 242.

22 See Smith, A Queen on Trial, viii.

23 Parissien, George IV, 222.

24 Robins, Rebel Queen, 289.

25 R.K. Webb, Modern England: From the 18th century to the present, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1969, 163, quoting Crabb Robinson’s Diary, 1 December 1820, London, Dr William’s Library.

26 P.L. O’Reilly to Denzil Ibettson, 11 July 1820, BL Add. 20220 ff. 144–5; Denzil Ibbetson to Major Gorrequer, n.d., BL 20220 ff. 146.

27 Brookes, St Helena Story, 239.

28 Broadside by London pamphleteer James Catnach, 1820, BL Add. 38565, intended as satire but taken seriously by some.

29 Bathurst to Lowe, 30 September 1820, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 250–1.

30 Quoted in Frank McLynn, Napoleon, London, Jonathan Cape, 1997, 653.

31 Sir William Doveton to Sir Hudson Lowe, 18 January 1820, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20233, f.109.

32 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 242–5.

33 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 247.

34 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 248.

35 Despatch No. 170, Bathurst to Lowe, 16 February 1821, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 493.

36 Dr Arnott report of 1 April enclosed with letter from Lowe to Bathurst, 10 April 1821, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/46, f.467.

37 Lowe to Bathurst, 24 April 1821, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/46, f.479.

38 Napoleon I, ‘Napoleon’s Last Will and Testament’, The Fondation Napoléon, <www.napoleon.org>.

39 Despatch No. 174, Lowe to Bathurst, 6 May 1821, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 498.

40 Philip Henry Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington 1831–1851, Oxford University Press, 1947, quoted in Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: Pillar of State, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972, 77.

41 Sir William Fraser, Words on Wellington, London, John C. Nimmo, 1889, 228.

CHAPTER 26

1 Edwin Emerson, Comet Lore: Halley’s comet in history and astronomy, New York, Schilling Press, 1910.

2 John Bull, 9 July 1821, 53–6; Maik Meyer, ‘Charles Messier, Napoleon and Comet C/1769’, International Comet Quarterly, January 2007, 3–6.

3 Lowe to Bathurst, 20 July 1822, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/47 f.545, in which Lowe himself confirmed the argument over the wording of the inscription for the coffin.

4 Wellington at his club, quoted in Gilbert Martineau, Napoleon’s Last Journey, translated from the French by Frances Partridge, London, John Murray, 1976, 3; Elizabeth Longford, Wellington, 78, quoting The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, Francis Bamford and Duke of Wellington (ed.), London, Macmillan & Co., 1950, Vol. I, 105.

5 See Jill Hamilton, Marengo: The myth of Napoleon’s horse, London, Fourth Estate, 2000, 201.

6 The French companions departed on the Camel on 27 May 1821.

7 Lowe to Bathurst, 26 May 1821, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/46 f.492.

8 Lowe to Bathurst, 25 March 1820, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/46 f.367; Lowe to Bathurst, 30 April 1820, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/46 f.375.

9 Kemble (ed.), St Helena: Gorrequer’s diary, 154, entry for ‘1819 end of year’.

10 Lowe to Bathurst, 14 July 1821, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/46 f.500.

11 ‘Secret and Confidential’ from EIC Court of Directors to Sir Hudson Lowe, 2 May 1821, BL Add. 20,237, ff.288–301.

12 Address by British residents of St Helena to Sir Hudson Lowe, 25 July 1821, quoted in Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 313–14.

13 ‘Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway’, Brian Moseley, Encyclopaedia of Plymouth History, Plymouth, Devon Record Office publication, 2002.

14 Sidmouth is 22.4 miles from Chudleigh.

15 ‘The Knowle, Sidmouth, England, Record Id: 4362’, Devon Record Office.

16 R.N. Worth, A History of Devonshire with Sketches of its Leading Worthies, London, Elliot Stock, 1886, 74–5: ‘The west window of the church is a memorial to the Duke of Kent, father of Queen Victoria, who died at Sidmouth in 1820.’

17 Sidmouth’s population had risen to 2747 in 1821: D.M. Stirling, The Beauties of the Shore; Or, a Guide to the Watering-places on the South Devon Coast, Exeter, Roberts, 1838, 111.

18 Auction listing: Morning Post, 15 August 1820; Salisbury & Winchester Journal, 19 March 1821. T.L. Fish bought Knowle Cottage, the property of the late Mrs Drax.

19 John Mockett, Mockett’s Journal: A collection of interesting matters relating to Devonshire, Canterbury, Kentish Observer Printing Office, 1836, 262; Stirling, The Beauties of the Shore, 120.

20 Mockett, Mockett’s Journal, 262.

21 The Western Times, 13 October 1828.

22 Anon., Guide to Illustrations and Views of Knowle Cottage, Sidmouth; the Elegant Marine Villa Ornée of Thos. Fish Esq., Sidmouth, J. Harvey, 1834, 11–19; republished by Devon County Council, 2004.

23 Woolmer’s Exeter & Plymouth Gazette, 11 July 1846, notes of The Knowle: ‘Great additions have been made to the numerous objects of interest. A few days since, a large number of valuable animals were received, and also several waggon-loads of curiosities’; on 19 July 1851, announced ‘a valuable acquisition of articles . . . many of which were intended for the Crystal Palace’.

24 Morning Chronicle, 25 March 1861.

CHAPTER 27

1 Parissien, George IV, 304.

2 Robins, Rebel Queen, 309.

3 Longford, Wellington, 70.

4 Henry Brougham, quoted in Thomas Creevey Papers, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1985, 205.

5 Parissien, George IV, 311.

6 Quoted in E.A. Smith, George IV, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1999, 190.

7 Smith, George IV, 193.

8 John Bull, 6 August 1821.

9 Quoted in Smith, George IV, 194.

10 Martineau, Napoleon’s Last Journey, 3.

11 Lowe (on board the Dunira East Indiaman) to Goulburn, 8 September 1821, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/46 f.501, re furniture from Longwood; Martineau, Napoleon’s Last Journey, 23.

12 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 315.

13 Forsyth, History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena, Vol. III, 316.

14 Lowe from 1 Edgware Road to Bathurst, 1 January 1822, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/47.

15 Brookes, St Helena Story, 245.

16 Nevill, Earls of Abergavenny research from The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant, 13 vols, 1910–1959; reprinted in 6 vols, Gloucester, Alan Sutton Publishing, 2000, Vol. I, 43.

17 No record of Edward Abell’s birth has been found except International Genealogical Index suggested birth date of 1801, which must be incorrect. (The handwriting in the 1810 application to the EIC is not that of a nine-year-old, his education would not by then have been ‘Classical and Mathematical’ and he would not have joined the EIC army and gone into battle at the age of ten.) Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha, found records through the Essex Historical Society of the births of Edward’s six full brothers and sisters, by their mother Mary née Stock, their father’s third wife: Mary-Ann (1784), James (1785), William (1787), Sophia (1788), and twins Charles and Robert (1789). (Only two of these siblings, William and Charles, survived to adulthood.) Given the pattern of birth spacing and the mother’s likely exhaustion after the family’s move to Alphington, it would be reasonable to speculate on a gap of two years before the birth of the youngest, Edward, therefore positing 1791. It is unfortunate that most of the records of St Gregory’s parish—where Abell’s details might have been registered—were destroyed in the London Blitz.

18 Francis Abell, Edward’s father, was baptised 17 December 1738. Abell family research courtesy of Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha.

19 Information on the Abell family background courtesy of Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha.

20 Francis Tillett Abell was born c.1764 (and was later a mayor of Colchester). Edward’s other half-siblings were Charlotte, born c.1770, and Sarah. Research from Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha.

21 Messrs. Dodwell & Miles, Army of India, Alphabetical List of the Officer of the Indian Army for the Year 1760 to the Year 1837, London, Longman, Orme & Co., 1811; Madras Almanac and Compendium, Madras, 1820.

22 ‘Major General Sir Henry Torrens’ from Entries for Queen’s Royal Surrey Regimental Association. (Given the disparity in their ages, Francis and Henry Torrens may have been half-brothers.)

23 William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A year in Delhi, London, HarperCollins, 1993, 105–9, 126–30.

24 See Mildred Archer and Toby Falk, India Revealed: The art and adventures of James and William Fraser, London, Cassell, 1989, 15; William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A year in Delhi, London, HarperCollins, 1993, 98–9; William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and betrayal in eighteenth-century India, HarperCollins, 2002, 53–4.

25 Dalrymple, City of Djinns, 98–9, 105–7.

26 Dalrymple, City of Djinns, 127–30.

27 Kalanga Fort was also known as Nalapani Fort; ‘List of Inscriptions on Christian Tombs and Tablets of historical interest in the United provinces of Agra and Oudh’.

28 Sir Charles Metcalfe (1785 –1846) was between 1822 and 1845 a British colonial administrator, acting governor-general of India in 1835, and lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces from June 1836 to June 1838; Metcalfe, quoted in G.L. Rai-Zimmdar, AngloGorkha Friendship, Lulu.com, 2008, 20.

29 John Pemble, Britain’s Gurkha War: The invasion of Nepal, 1814–16, Barnsley, UK, Frontline Books, 2009.

30 See Archer and Falk, India Revealed, 27–35; James Baillie Fraser, Journal of a Tour through part of the snowy range of the Himala mountains, and to the sources of the rivers Jumna and Ganges, London, Rodwell & Martin, 1820.

31 On 22 May 1817, Edward Abell left Madras on the Benson for Mauritius. There he joined the Woodford, Captain Brady, for his passage to England, calling at St Helena between 9 and 13 October, arriving at Deal on 29 November. The Morning Chronicle of 4 December 1817 noted the arrival of ‘Edward Abell Esq’, a private passenger, not an officer.

32 East India Company Court Book April 1818 to September 1818, 178, 22 May 1818, BL India Office 126-B/167.

33 Abell was approved by Henry Goulburn in May 1818 as the civil agent for Ceylon to the Madras Presidency: BL India Office 126-B/167; the Madras Year Book lists him as a Madras British resident, with ‘Occupation: None’ until 1820. He does not appear in the Madras Year Book for 1821.

34 The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and its Dependencies, 1821, gives 19 October 1820 as the date of Francis Torrens’ death and lists numerous cases of cholera. FIBIS (Families in British India) notes that Lieutenant-General Francis Torrens, born 1748, died 5 August 1820, ‘after uninterrupted residence in this country of 51 years’. He was buried at St Mary’s ‘New cemetery’, Madras.

35 Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India, 1822, 286, 491–3, quoting Madras Courier, 30 October 1821.

36 Colonel Torrens in India to General Sir Henry Torrens in London, 19 and 24 February 1822, Sir Henry Torrens Papers, BL Add 620967, f.146.

37 John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British marriages, 1600 to the present, Oxford University Press, 1985, 141. For this reference and for Lawrence Stone’s Road to Divorce, I am indebted to Stephen Scheding and his research for his book-in-progress, ‘My Friend’s Masterpiece: An object lesson in art (& love)’.

38 Balcombe from 28 Essex Street, Strand, to Lowe, 4 April 1822, Lowe Papers, BL Add. 20133, f.304.

39 Lowe, 1 Edgware Road to Wilmot, 7 April 1822, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/47, f.519. (NB: In that year Under-Secretary Robert Wilmot changed his name to ‘Wilmot Horton’, too short a time afterwards to be worth adding this confusion.)

40 Gillis, For Better, For Worse, 136–8.

41 Gillis, For Better, For Worse, 140.

42 Gillis, For Better, For Worse, 129, 194.

43 Edward Abell and Lucia Elizabeth Balcombe marriage certificate, Exminster, 28 May 1822, UK National Archives.

44 ADB now gives the correct date, 28 May 1822, but early encyclopaedias and Wikipedia still follow Dame Mabel’s line of exactly one year earlier.

45 Sir Hudson Lowe to Lord Bathurst, 18 March 1818, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/43 f.189–59.

CHAPTER 28

1 J. Pike, ‘Cholera—Biological Weapons’, in Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2007, <GlobalSecurity.com>: ‘Hundreds of thousands of Indians and tens of thousands of British troops died during the first cholera pandemic in India 1816–26.’

2 Dalrymple, City of Djinns, 145–6.

3 Aleck Fraser letter from St Helena to his brothers William and James in India, 26 March 1813; after Edward’s death on 25 April this letter would surely have been sent on to their mother. Fraser Collection, National Register of Archives of Scotland (hereafter NRAS) 2696.

4 Richard Mullen and James Munson, The Smell of the Continent: The British discover Europe, London, Macmillan, 2009, xii–xiii.

5 Lowe from 1 Edgware Road to Bathurst, 6 June 1822, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/47 f.537.

6 O’Meara’s book, Napoleon in Exile, was in its fifth edition by 1823.

7 Martineau, Napoleon’s Last Journey, 22–3.

8 The tower of the Abbaye Saint-Bertin, ‘which could be seen for miles around’, collapsed in 1946.

9 Edward Satchwell Fraser junior, born 26 April 1786, died 25 April 1813 at St Helena; Alexander (Aleck) Fraser, born 10 April 1789, died 4 June 1816 in India. Information courtesy of Malcolm and Kathy Fraser.

10 Jane Fraser diary, 5 September 1822, Fraser Collection, NRAS 2696.

11 Jane Fraser from Saint-Omer to William Fraser in India, 6 September 1822, Fraser Collection, Bundle 440, NRAS 2696.

12 Jane Fraser diary, 5 September 1822, Fraser Collection, NRAS 2696.

13 In 1832, Betsy’s friend, Edward John Eyre assessed her daughter’s age as ‘about ten’.

14 Jane Fraser diary, 7 September 1822, Fraser Collection, NRAS 2696.

15 In fact, for the period of exactly five months—28 August 1822 to 28 January 1823—when the Frasers’ stay coincided with the Balcombes and we have the assistance of Jane’s diary, Mrs Balcombe was recorded as either ‘unwell’ or ‘distressed’ for 37 days, while Balcombe with his chronic gout was unwell for eight days of the same period.

16 Martineau, Napoleon’s Last Journey, 5–9.

17 The wedding gift from the Montholons (incorrectly labelled 1832 not 1822) was on display at ‘The Briars’, Mt Martha, but since the 2014 theft of other Napoleonic relics it was removed from exhibition. It is in storage but will be returned to display. (Information courtesy of Ilma Hackett of ‘The Briars’.)

18 Jane Fraser diary, 13 September 1822, Fraser Collection, NRAS 2696.

19 Lowe to Bathurst, 14 September 1822, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/47 f.551.

20 William Balcombe to Sir Hudson Lowe from Saint-Omer, 11 October 1822, BL Add. 20233, f.180.

21 Lowe to Bathurst, 23 October 1822, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/47 f.559.

22 The Examiner, 27 October 1822.

23 Morning Chronicle, 26 October 1822.

24 Lowe to Bathurst, 5 November 1822, marked ‘Never sent’, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/47 f.561.

25 Lowe to Bathurst or Wilmot (recipient’s name not clear), 5 November 1822, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/47 f.563.

CHAPTER 29

1 Jane Fraser diary, 25 October 1822, Fraser Collection, NRAS 2696.

2 Jane Balcombe née Green had two brothers—George and Francis Green—but which one was not specified.

3 Lowe to Bathurst, 3 January 1823, Bathurst Private Papers, BL 57/48 f.590.

4 Betsy’s daughter, Mrs Charles Johnstone, in an appendix to the third edition (1873) of her mother’s Recollections, claimed that George IV intervened in favour of Balcombe’s appointment: ‘George IV . . . being convinced by Sir George Cockburn that my grandfather’s loyalty was as strong as ever, sent him out to Australia as Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales and all its dependencies’, Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon, London, Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle, 3rd edition, 1873, 312–13. Mrs Johnstone may have come to this probably erroneous conclusion from the fact that the colonial treasurer was designated as a ‘Court appointment’.

5 Bathurst to Sir Thomas Brisbane, 2 October 1823, advising of appointment of William Balcombe as NSW Colonial Treasurer, HRA, I, Vol. XI, 138, Despatch No. 37 per Hibernia; Bathurst to Brisbane, 2 October 1823, advising appointment of Saxe Bannister as NSW Attorney General, HRA, I, Vol. XI, 140, Despatch No. 39 per Hibernia.

6 Betsy (Mrs L.E. Abell) described Abell’s admission in a letter from Sydney to Major-General Sir Henry Torrens, 10 August 1824, NLA MS 7022.

7 Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987, Oxford University Press, 1990, 143: without a written deed of separation, ‘how could a separated wife prevent her husband from intermittently raiding her home and seizing all her goods and earnings, which by law were still his?’ (With gratitude to Stephen Scheding for his introduction to me of the complexities of nineteenth-century marriage and divorce laws and to the Stone and Gillis reference books.)

8 See Hamilton, Marengo: The myth of Napoleon’s horse, 205.

9 Jane Fraser diary, 22 August 1823, Fraser Collection, NRAS 2696.

10 Christopher Hibbert et al., in The London Encyclopaedia, London, Macmillan, 1983, notes that Blackfriars Road was known as Great Surrey Street until 1829.

11 Jane Fraser diary, 22 August 1823, Fraser Collection, NRAS 2696.

12 Gillis, For Better, For Worse, 231.

13 Stone, Road to Divorce, 187–90.

14 Stone, Road to Divorce, 143.

15 Stone, Road to Divorce, 141, 149–82.

16 Information on death of Charles courtesy of Abell family research by Keith and Shirley Murley of The Briars, Mt Martha.

17 General Sir Henry Torrens to Mrs Abell, 8 October 1823, Sir Henry Torrens Papers, BL Add. 62096 f.174.

18 The three Bigge reports were published in Parliament in 1822 and 1823, advising the abolition of most features of the old convict system and the separation, as far as possible, of convicts from the mass of the population. ‘A pardon by the governor was to restore a man to full legal rights’, C.M.H. Clark, Melbourne, Penguin, 1995, A Short History of Australia, 50.

19 ‘Elizabeth Jane Balcombe Abell’, baptised in London on 23 October 1823, IGI Batch CO62361 Source No. 0918607. (IGI actually gives this as a birth date, which, as demonstrated, has to be incorrect, for on 22 August 1823 the Frasers visited Betsy at Blackfriars and spoke of seeing ‘her little infant, a lovely little girl’. The date would be for her baptism.)

20 The Times, 21 November 1823, gave an effusive description of the ‘stupendous work’. The line was ready for use only to King Tor quarry and would take another four years to extend to Princetown.

21 Balcombe repaid the loan on 15 August 1824, writing to Wilmot Horton, 15 August 1824, ‘Sir, I have the honor to enclose your fifty pounds you were so kind as to advance me . . . and I beg to assure you it will never be erased from my memory.’ Received by Horton on 3 January 1825, (NSW Colonial Treasurer Correspondence, NSW State Records Office.)

22 A.J. Hill, ‘Macarthur, Sir Edward (1789–1872)’, ADB.

CHAPTER 30

1 By 1824, Governor Phillip’s government vegetable beds, which gave the name to ‘Farm Cove’, had been replaced by rolling lawns, although soon enough they were replaced by the streets and buildings of commerce.

2 Many freed convicts, those on tickets-of-leave, and those assigned to employers or to their own spouses lived in The Rocks.

3 Margaret Maynard, in Fashioned from Penury: Dress as cultural practice in Colonial Australia, Cambridge University Press, 1994, 18–21, notes that attempts to standardise convict dress in colonial New South Wales had not been successful, but after a quantity of clothing of a coarse yellow cloth (probably kersey) was sent to the eastern colonies by chance in 1817, ‘its use became synonymous with Australian convicts in the 1820s and 1830s’.

4 Dame Mabel Brookes, St Helena Story, 245, suggested tuberculosis as the probable cause of Jane’s death. The captain’s log was sought in the NSW State Records Office, but was found to no longer exist.

5 Joseph Tice Gellibrand, the new attorney-general for Van Diemen’s Land, wrote from the Cape on 30 January 1824 to his friend Wilkinson in Hobart, ‘We have had a fine passage & very good weather’: State Library of Tasmania, ‘Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings’, N.S. 187/19.

6 Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A history, Vol. II, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2004, 39.

7 E.W. Dunlop, ‘Macqueen, Thomas Potter (1791–1854), ADB; HRA, I, Vol. 12, 141–3, Horton to Brisbane, 20 October 1823; Macqueen to Horton, 21 July 1823; Horton to Macqueen, 18 August 1823.

8 Vivienne Parsons, ‘Frederick Goulburn, (1788–1837)’, ADB.

9 The Clarence River Advocate, 24 November 1903, 4, noted that in 1903 ‘the old oak tree was computed to be 115 years of age at the time it made its disappearance’.

10 Boyes to his wife Mary in England, 12 April 1824: Peter Chapman (ed.), The Diaries and Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes, Vol. 1, 1820–32, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1985, 174.

11 Boyes to Mary, 12 April 1824: Chapman (ed.), The Diaries and Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes, Vol. 1, 173.

12 Sydney Gazette, 8 April 1824.

13 Earl Bathurst to NSW Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane, 2 October 1823, HRA, I, Vol. XI, 138, Despatch No. 37 per ship Hibernia; acknowledged by Brisbane on 8 June 1824.

14 R.L. Murray, letter from Hobart to D’Arcy Wentworth in Sydney, 27 March 1824, MLA 754.

15 Brisbane to Bathurst, 8 June 1824, advising that he has fixed Balcombe’s salary at £1200 annually, HRA, I, Vol. XI, Despatch No. 1, 138.

16 The Bulletin, 29 June 1905: ‘Soon known as the “Balcombe House”, ownership passed in 1837 when William Cox died to his son in England, the Reverend James Cox. It was occupied in 1838 by Sir Maurice O’Connell. CSR bought the site in 1902 and demolished the house to make room for the Colonial Sugar Refineries’ big building on the corner of O’Connell Street.’

17 John Hirst, Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s first colony, Melbourne, Black Inc., 2008, 13.

18 Michael Cannon, Who’s Master? Who’s Man?: Australia in the Victorian Age, Melbourne, Viking O’Neil, [1971], 1988, 19.

19 Margaret Steven, ‘Macarthur, John (1767–1834)’, ADB; Macarthur had a tenuous connection with George IV in this way: Macarthur met Sir Robert Farquhar in India in 1801 and they became close friends. This friendship became important in giving Macarthur access to ‘influential circles’ in England. Farquhar’s father was physician to the Prince of Wales (afterwards George IV). See Brian Fitzpatrick, British Imperialism and Australia, 1783–1833, Sydney University Press, [1939], 1971, 193.

20 Earl Bathurst to NSW Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane, 2 October 1823, plus note 36, 913, re then administration of the finances of the colony, HRA, I, Vol. XI, 138, Despatch No. 37 per ship Hibernia.

21 Andrew McMartin, Public Servants and Patronage: The foundation and rise of the New South Wales public service, 1786–1859, Griffin Press, Adelaide, 1983, 132–3

22 J.F. Harrison to Under-Secretary Robert William Hay, 14 September 1826, HRA, I, Vol. XII, 563–4. (This letter recommending his son was written after the Sydney appointment, seeking another position for James.)

23 The Blue Book of 1827, giving the formal establishment status of the Treasury, notes the appointment of James Stirling Harrison by the governor on 7 April 1825, at the recommendation of the Colonial Secretary Wilmot Horton.

24 George Forbes (ed.), Sydney Society in Crown Colony Days, being the personal reminiscences of the late Lady Forbes, ML typescript, 1914, 19–21.

25 Roger Therry, Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence in New South Wales and Victoria, 1863, facsimile edition, Sydney, Royal Australian Historical Society & Sydney University Press, 1974, 39.

26 Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Vol. II, 13.

27 Therry, Reminiscences, 40.

28 Therry, Reminiscences, 41–2.

29 Helen Heney, Australia’s Founding Mothers, Melbourne, Thomas Nelson Australia, 1978, 4.

CHAPTER 31

1 Forbes (ed.), Sydney Society in Crown Colony Days, 19–21.

2 Forbes (ed.), Sydney Society in Crown Colony Days, 21.

3 Forbes (ed.), Sydney Society in Crown Colony Days, 22.

4 Arthur McMartin, Public Servants and Patronage: The foundation and rise of the NSW Public Service, 1786–1859, Sydney University Press, 1983, 187.

5 Sydney Gazette, 20 May 1824.

6 Vivienne Parsons, ‘Goulburn, Frederick (1788–1837)’, ADB, indicates that Goulburn’s officious manner made a dangerous enemy in Macarthur.

7 Chapman (ed.), The Diaries and Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes, 198 (Wemyss’s dinner party was on 27 May 1824).

8 G.P. Walsh, ‘Sir John Jamison (1776–1844)’, ADB.

9 Chapman (ed.), The Diaries and Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes, 198.

10 Chapman (ed.), The Diaries and Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes, 198.

11 ‘The Fashionable World’, Sydney Gazette, 1 July 1824.

12 Jamison’s ‘invisible lady’ mentioned in M. le baron de Bougainville, Journal de la navigation autour du globe, Paris, Arthus Bertrand, 1837, Vol. I, edited and translated by Marc Serge Rivière as The Governor’s Noble Guest: Hyacinthe de Bougainville’s account of Port Jackson, 1825, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, 1999, 141–3.

13 ‘The Fashionable World’, Sydney Gazette, 1 July 1824.

14 Mary Reibey to her cousin in England, 10 February 1825, in Nance Irvine (ed.), Dear Cousin: The Reibey Letters, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1992, 87–8.

15 Christine Wright, Wellington’s Men in Australia: Peninsular war veterans and the making of the empire c.1820–40, Sydney, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

16 J.D. Heydon, ‘Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane (1773–1860)’, ADB.

17 Sydney Gazette, I July 1824.

18 Courtesy Keith and Shirley Murley of ‘The Briars’, Mt Martha, for land grant research.

19 Charles Bateson, ‘David Reid (1777–1840)’, ADB. Reid’s 1829 report on the activity of bushrangers in the Bungonia area led to the stationing of two military detachments there.

20 Brisbane to Bathurst, 18 June 1824, HRA, I, Vol. XI, Despatch No. 13.

21 Brisbane’s Proclamation of Martial Law, 19 August 1824.

22 Sydney Gazette, 22 July 1824.

23 John Macarthur, to his second eldest son John in London, from Some Early Records of the Macarthurs of Camden, 337, quoted in C.H. Currey, Sir Francis Forbes: The first chief justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1968, 40.

24 Michael Persse, ‘William Charles Wentworth (1790–1872)’, ADB.

25 C.H. Currey, ‘Robert Wardell (1793–1834)’, ADB.

26 Mrs L.E. Abell, letter from Sydney to Major-General Sir Henry Torrens, Horse Guards, London, 10 August 1824, NLA MS 7022.

27 Stone, Road to Divorce, 161.

28 Stone, Road to Divorce, 187–90.

29 Stone, Road to Divorce, 141, 149–82.

30 Stone, Road to Divorce, 160.

31 Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India, 1822, 286, 491–3, quoting Madras Courier, 30 October 1821.

32 See Australian National Gallery NGA 73 661, Richard Browne, ‘The Mountain Pheasant’, 1819. With thanks to art historian and collector Stephen Scheding for locating this illustration.

33 Lieut. Col. Williams, Bombay, to Torrens, 1 July 1825 and 27 August 1825, Sir Henry Torrens Papers, BL Add. 62096 f.58 and Add. 62096, f. 87.

34 Sydney Gazette, 23 September 1824. The shipping lists take some sorting out as there were two Prince Regent ships in port in Sydney at the same time, one commanded by Captain W.B. Lambe, the other by Captain Wales. The latter, with E. Abell Esq. on board, left Hobart Town for Mauritius on 24 October 1824. See Hobart Town Gazette, 8 October 1824: ‘The Prince Regent will, we understand, proceed with all possible expedition to England, via the Mauritius, where she will take in a cargo of sugar for the London market.’

CHAPTER 32

1 Forbes (ed.), Sydney Society in Crown Colony Days, Ch. III, ‘The Beneficent Rule of Sir Thomas Brisbane’, 25.

2 Quoted in Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney 1788–1831, 76.

3 Brisbane to Bathurst, 8 February 1825, HRA, I, Vol. XI, 514, Despatch No. 34, plus note 131.

4 Sydney Gazette, 30 September 1824.

5 Brisbane to Bathurst, 14 August 1824, HRA, I, Vol. IX, Despatch No. 14; Sydney Gazette, 17 February 1825.

6 Sydney Gazette, 11 October 1824.

7 D’Arcy Wentworth to Brisbane, 4 August 1824, Forbes Papers, ML A741; Magistrates to Brisbane, 23 September 1824, Forbes Papers, ML A1381; Currey, Sir Francis Forbes, 116.

8 C.A. Liston, Doctoral Thesis, ‘N.S.W. Under Brisbane 1821–1825’, Department of History, University of Sydney, 1980, 432–3, citing Colonial Returns 1825; HRA, I, Vol. XI, 894, Brisbane to Bathurst, 25 October 1825.

9 Sydney Gazette, 13 January 1825.

10 ‘Biography No. XI Barry Edward O’Meara Esq.’, Sydney Gazette, 7 April 1825.

11 Therry, Reminiscences, 47.

12 Bathurst to Brisbane, 6 February 1825, HRA, I, XI, Despatch No. 19, 493–4.

13 Brisbane to Bathurst, 8 February 1825, HRA, I, XI, No. 34, 514–15; James Stirling Harrison had a family connection to Lieutenant Robert Stirling and his elder brother James Stirling, founder of the Swan River settlement and later governor of Western Australia.

14 Australian, 3 March 1825; Sydney Gazette, 3 March 1825.

15 Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest, 60: ‘He [Governor Brisbane] goes twice a week to Sydney but Lady Brisbane never does so.’

16 ‘Austral-Asiaticus’ letter of 19 March 1825 to London Morning Chronicle, published 19 February 1826, in Chapman (ed.), The Diaries and Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes, Vol. I, 618–21; Chapman concedes that Austral-Asiaticus was almost certainly Boyes.

17 Sydney Gazette, 15 December 1825; Dr O’Meara’s Napoleon in Exile was advertised for sale as part of a household auction.

18 The celebrations were remote from George IV’s actual birthday, which was 12 August.

19 Sydney Gazette, 28 April 1825.

20 Boyes’ letter to his wife on 8 May 1825, in Chapman (ed.), The Diaries and Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes, Vol. I, 229. Chapman notes: ‘Thomas Hobbes Scott (1783–1860) Archdeacon of NSW. The brother-in-law of Commissioner JT Bigge, he had accompanied him on his tour of inspection of NSW in 1819–21.’

21 Sydney Gazette, 19 May 1825, quoting Hobart Town Gazette.

22 Forbes (ed.), Sydney Society in Crown Colony Days, 17–18 and 127–8.

23 Brisbane to Magistrates of Sydney, 21 May 1825, HRA, I, XI, 894–5.

24 Sydney Magistrates to Governor Brisbane, 29 September 1825.

CHAPTER 33

1 G.R. Tipping (ed.), The Official Account through Governor Phillip’s Letters to Lord Sydney, Sydney, 1988, 42.

2 Colin Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney 1788–1831, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2009, 2, citing Voyage de Lapérouse, 362–3.

3 The La Pérouse mystery was to remain unsolved until 1828, when some of the ships’ wreckage and monogrammed silver were found at Vanikoro in the Santa Cruz Islands.

4 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 99.

5 Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest, 61–2.

6 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 104.

7 Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest, 62–3.

8 See Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 116, on the ratio of the sexes.

9 Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest, 5 July 1825, 62.

10 Sydney Gazette, 15 September 1825.

11 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 106.

12 Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest, 79, 179–80, and Journal de la navigation, I, 492–3, quoted in Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 129–30.

13 Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest, 83–4.

14 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 110.

15 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 120.

16 Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest, 10 September 1825, 126.

17 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 122, notes: ‘Although Harriott’s date of birth is unknown, she must have been in her late twenties or early thirties when she met the 43-year-old Frenchman.’

18 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 125.

19 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 125.

20 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 125.

21 Louis Claude de Saulces de Freycinet took his wife Rose, disguised as a boy, around the Pacific on the Uranie. See Danielle Clode, Voyages to the South Seas: In search of Terres Australes, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing, 2007, 160–75.

22 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 125.

23 Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest, quoted in Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, 139.

24 Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest, 35. In 1835, Harriott had become the second wife of Chief Justice Sir James Dowling, who died in 1844.

25 Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, x–xi.

26 Rivière, The Governor’s Noble Guest, 217–18, 241–2, Bougainville, Reports to Minister of the Navy, I, 536, quoted in introduction to Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney, x–xi, 136–8.

CHAPTER 34

1 Harrison senior to Under-Secretary R.W. Hay, 14 September 1826, HRA, I, Vol. XII, 563–4.

2 Courtesy Keith and Shirley Murley for research on Balcombe land.

3 Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, 44; Sydney Gazette, 20 October 1825.

4 Balcombe joined the Sydney Masonic Lodge in November or December 1825: Sydney Gazette, 28 November 1825.

5 Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon, London, Granta Books, 2004, 101–3, re ‘Napoleonic supporters all over France since 1816, notably among members of the military . . . as well as the Freemasons’. Loyalty to ‘Napoleon the Great’ became part of the Masonic oath.

6 Summerville (ed.), Regency Recollections, 131.

7 Sydney Gazette, 8 December 1825.

8 Fitzpatrick, British Imperialism and Australia, 1783–1833, 299.

9 John Wallace, a trustworthy and competent member of staff, would stay at the Treasury until 1837, be a valued support for Balcombe’s successor and become a respected public figure.

10 Bathurst to Governor Darling, 14 August 1826, HRA, I, Vol XII: ‘I do myself the Honour to acquaint you that I have been induced, in consequence of Sir Thos. Brisbane’s representation that the Colonial Treasurer could not carry on the Business of his Department (in the manner in which it ought to be conducted) without assistance . . .’

11 J.M. Bennett (ed.), Some Papers of Sir Francis Forbes, Sydney, NSW Parliament, 1998, 136.

12 Brian H. Fletcher, Ralph Darling: A governor maligned, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1984, 29–72.

13 ‘Darling, Sir Ralph (1772–1858)’, ADB.

14 Sydney Gazette, 25 December 1825.

15 Monitor, 19 April 1826; Female Orphan School Minutes, 27 May 1829, 585; Female Orphan School Correspondence 1825–9, AONSW 4/325; Minutes of the Executive Council, 28 December 1829, AONSW 4/1516; on Eliza Darling, see Brian Fletcher, ‘Elizabeth Darling: Colonial benefactress and governor’s lady’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 67, Part 4, March 1982.

16 Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Vol. II, 123, citing Fletcher, ‘Elizabeth Darling’, 309–10, 312–13.

17 M.H. Ellis, John Macarthur, London and Sydney, Angus & Robertson, (1955), 1978, 492–3.

18 NSW Census 1828—‘Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe—superintendent with the Australian Agricultural Company’.

19 Roger Milliss, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, Melbourne, McPhee Gribble/Penguin, 1992, 54.

20 Australian, 29 April 1826.

21 Courtesy Keith and Shirley Murley for research on Balcombe land.

22 S.J. Butlin, Foundations of the Australian Monetary System 1788–1851, Sydney, Sydney University Press, 1968, 199.

23 Colonial Secretary Macleay, report to Governor Darling on Bank of NSW investigation, HRA, I, Vol. XII, 307.

24 Cheques amounting to $27,200.

25 Darling to Bathurst, 22 May 1826, report on the transactions of Mr. Balcombe, the treasurer, HRA, I, Vol. XII, 322.

26 Colonial Secretary Macleay (representing Darling) to Balcombe, 2 June 1826, NSW State Records Office, Vol. 4/235, 70.

27 Darling to Bathurst, Despatch No. 32, 20 May 1826, HRA, I, Vol. XII.

28 HRA, I, Vol. XII, 337–8; NSW State Records Office, Colonial Treasurer’s ‘Out Letters’, 26 May 1826.

29 Balcombe to Colonial Secretary Macleay, 26 May 1826, HRA, I, Vol. XII, 337–8.

30 Macleay to Balcombe, NSW State Records Office, Vol. 4/235, 70.

31 Presumably Darling wrote that Balcombe ‘possesses no property’ in that it would be claimed by creditors.

32 Darling to Bathurst, 22 May 1826, HRA, I, Vol. XII, 321–2.

33 HRA, I, Vol. XII, 590.

34 HRA, I, Vol. XII, 590.

35 Butlin, Foundations of the Australian Monetary System, 527–30.

36 Marjorie Barnard, The Life and Times of Captain John Piper, Sydney, Ure Smith, 1973, 138.

37 Barnard, The Life and Times of Captain John Piper, 138–40.

38 Butlin, Foundations of the Australian Monetary System, 527n.

39 Butlin, Foundations of the Australian Monetary System, 527.

CHAPTER 35

1 A.H. Chisholm, ‘Wilson, John (?–1800)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 2, Melbourne, MUP, 1967.

2 J. Jervis, ‘Settlement in Marulan–Bungonia District’, Journal and Proceedings, Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 32, Part 2, 1946, 107–42, re Dr David Reid.

3 Government Notice of 5 May 1826, signed ‘Alexander Macleay, Colonial Secretary’.

4 HRA, I, Vol. XII, 1 July 1826, re Australia Bank.

5 Darling to Bathurst, 20 July 1826, HRA, I, Vol. XII, 371–3, re Treasurer Balcombe requests allowance for office rent for use of his house.

6 Sydney Gazette, 17 October 1825.

7 Australian, 15 July 1826.

8 Australian, 29 November and 2 December 1826; Monitor, 1, 22 and 29 December 1826; Marcus Clarke, ‘Governor Ralph Darling’s Iron Collar’, in Old Tales of a Young Country, Melbourne, Mason, Firth & McCutcheon, 1871.

9 Monitor, 19 June 1827.

10 Currey, Sir Francis Forbes, 192–9; Fletcher, Ralph Darling, 245–9.

11 Forbes (ed.), Sydney in Crown Colony Days, 51.

12 Sydney Gazette, 10 February 1827.

13 Bathurst to Darling, 14 August 1826, HRA, I, Vol. XII, 497.

14 List of NSW magistrates, 31 January 1827, HRA, I, Vol. XIII, 59.

15 Elizabeth Macarthur on Betsy Abell, quoted in Helen Heney (ed.), Dear Fanny: Women’s letters to and from New South Wales, 1788–1857, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1985, 106–7.

16 Captain Chestakoff to Captain John Piper, 30 April 182? (year unclear), MLA, Piper Papers, V2 A255, 447.

17 ‘Baxter, Alexander Macduff (1798–1836)’, ADB; HRA, I, XIII, October 1827, Governor Darling noted ‘Mr Baxter’s total incapacity and his total inexperience as a lawyer’.

18 Australian, 10 August 1827.

19 Australian, 29 August 1827.

20 Sydney Gazette, 24 September 1827.

21 Brian H. Fletcher, Ralph Darling, 263–4; Clark, A Short History of Australia, 64.

22 Darling to Viscount Goderich, Prime Minister, 14 December 1827, with enclosures to and from Sheriff Mackaness, HRA, I, Vol. XIII, 638–42, Despatch No. 122.

23 Sydney Gazette, 9 January 1828.

24 John Gibson Lockhart (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 10 vols, 2nd edn, Edinburgh, Robert Cadell, 1839, Vol. 9, 143–4. (Scott was made a baronet by George IV after Scott’s lavish welcome for him in Edinburgh in 1820.)

25 Mrs Abell to Captain John Piper, 26 June (the year is unclear but could be 1828), MLA, Piper Papers, V2 A255, 595–6.

26 Sydney Gazette, 26 March 1829.

27 Although some biographical records give Balcombe’s age at death as 52, he was born on 25 December 1777, so was still 51 at the time of his death.

28 William Balcombe to surveyor Robert Hoddle in 1827.

29 Darling to Sir George Murray, 20 March 1829, HRA I, Vol. XIV, 688.

CHAPTER 36

1 Governor Bourke to Secretary of State, 1 May 1833, HRA, I, Vol. XVII, 99, confirmed Alexander Balcombe ‘dismissed by my predecessor in April 1831, from the situation he held as Clerk in the Commissariat on account of negligence’.

2 HRA, I, Vol. XV, 67.

3 HRA, I, Vol. XV, 309. Admiral Cockburn wrote to the former prime minister, Viscount Goderich, in July 1829, supporting Mrs Abell’s request. Reply came to Darling from Sir George Murray via Under-Secretary Twiss.

4 Monitor, 3 April 1830.

5 Alexander M. Baxter to Governor Darling, 8 February 1831, included with Governor Darling’s despatch to Sir George Murray, ML A1209, NSW Governors’ Despatches to the Secretary of State for Colonies, Vol 20, 1015–18.

6 Darling to Under-Secretary Hay, 28 March 1831, HRA, I, Vol. XVI, 219–21.

7 Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay to Alexander Baxter, 7 February 1831, ML A1209, NSW Governors’ Despatches to the Secretary of State for Colonies, Vol. 20, 1026–7.

8 Fletcher, Ralph Darling, 287–8.

9 Sydney Gazette, 15 December 1831.

10 Extracts from the St Helena Records, compiled by H.R. Janisch, St Helena, 1885.

11 See Sydney Gazette, 6 March 1832, for an account of a Sydney resident visiting Napoleon’s Tomb.

12 Mrs Abell, Recollections, Appendix to the 3rd [4th] edition by Mrs Charles Johnstone, 327.

13 Mrs Jane Balcombe to Viscount Goderich, Earl of Ripon, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 18 July 1832, UK National Archives, CO/201/229-(2).

14 Lucia E. Abell to Lord Marcus Hill, 24 July 1832, BL Add. 40878 f.33 (Ripon Papers Vols. XVII–XIX ‘Applications for Colonial Appointments 1832. At that time Lord Ripon, as Lord Goderich, was Secretary of State for War and Colonies.)

15 Martineau, Napoleon’s Last Journey, 59–65.

16 Mrs Abell, Recollections, 315–17 (Appendix, Mrs C. Johnstone, 1873).

17 Viscount Goderich to Governor Bourke, 1 May 1833, with attached Memorandum, HRA, I, XVI, 714–15.

18 Ian Hawkins Nicholson, Shipping Arrivals & Departures Sydney, 1826–1840, Canberra, A Roebuck Book, 1981.

19 Edward John Eyre, Autobiographical Narrative of Residence and Exploration in Australia, 1832–1839, edited and annotated by Jill Waterhouse, London, Caliban Books, 1984, xiv.

20 Eyre, Autobiographical Narrative, 5.

21 Eyre, Autobiographical Narrative, 20, 29.

22 See Alan Atkinson and Marian Aveling (eds), Australians 1838, Sydney, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, 1987, 142–3.

23 Sydney Herald, 30 May 1833; Monitor, 1 June 1833.

24 Heney, Australia’s Founding Mothers, 1.

CHAPTER 37

1 Hampshire Telegraph, 1 September 1834; The Times, 2 September 1834.

2 Courtesy Keith and Shirley Murley for Kensal Green research.

3 Courtesy Keith and Shirley Murley and the Essex Historical Society for Abell family research.

4 See Theo Aronson, Queen Victoria and the Bonapartes, London, Cassell, 1972.

5 A.J.P. Taylor, review of Jasper Ridley, Napoleon III and Eugénie, Viking, 1980, in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 27, No. 14, 25 September 1980.

6 Philippe Séguin, Louis Napoléon Le Grand, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1990, 68.

7 John Bierman, Napoleon III and His Carnival Empire, London, John Murray, 1989, xiii.

8 Mrs Abell, Recollections, Appendix to the 3rd [4th] edition by Mrs Charles Johnstone, 315–20.

9 Information courtesy of Keith and Shirley Murley.

10 Sydney Herald, 1 April 1840.

11 1841 Census for England and Wales.

12 Morning Post, 19 January 1842.

13 Morning Post, 22 February 1842.

14 Mrs Abell, series of articles, ‘Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon’, New Monthly Magazine, 1843.

15 Mrs Abell, Recollections, Appendix listing subscribers.

16 A.J.P. Taylor, ‘His Uncle’s Nephew’, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 27, No. 14, 25 September 1980.

17 Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 28 November 1848. The original notice wrote of ‘Broncroft Castle, Salop’ and has been changed to ‘Shropshire’ for the general reader.

18 Mrs Abell, Recollections, Appendix to the 3rd [4th] edition by Mrs Charles Johnstone, 128.

19 Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Chronicle, 19 October 1861.

20 Story told by two Thomas T. Balcombe descendants to The Briars, Mt Martha.

21 Mrs Betsy Abell to Emma Balcombe at The Briars, Mt Martha, 10 June 1869 (Balcombe family letters courtesy of the late Richard a’Beckett and his family).

22 Mrs Abell, Recollections, Appendix to the 3rd [4th] edition by Mrs Charles Johnstone, 322–4.