In the late afternoon of 17 June 1816, the Newcastle frigate put in at James Bay, bearing the flag of Rear-Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm, KCB. He was to succeed Sir George Cockburn as commander of the South Atlantic naval station with its bases at St Helena and the Cape of Good Hope. Also on board were his wife, Lady Clementina, and the three foreign commissioners sent to monitor Bonaparte’s detention, in accordance with the Allies’ convention of August 1815. The Continental powers were determined that there should be no repetition of the escape from Elba. Count Balmain was the representative for Russia, Baron von Stürmer for Austria, accompanied by his wife, and the Marquis de Montchenu for France. Prussia had sent no commissioner, consistent with its position that Bonaparte should have been executed.
The following day (as it happened, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo), the dignitaries were welcomed ashore and Sir George Cockburn was farewelled with much ceremony, a military parade and salutes fired from the Ladder Hill battery.1 Many of the leading citizens gathered for the occasion, including the Balcombes. They established an immediate rapport with the new admiral and his wife and invited them to stay at The Briars until a house was prepared for them.
Sir Pulteney Malcolm, in the prime of his career at 48, had entered the navy at the age of ten and seen action in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, North Sea, East Indies and China; he had served as third in command behind then Rear-Admiral Cockburn during the Anglo-American War of 1812–14. He was exceedingly well connected: three of his brothers were also knighted, one of them a vice-admiral; and his wife Clementina was the eldest daughter of the Honourable William Fullarton Elphinstone, a director of the East India Company. Significantly, she was also the niece of Admiral Lord Keith, who had informed Napoleon of his final destination.2 Malcolm was on good terms with the Duke of Wellington, having commanded the squadron that cooperated with him during the Waterloo campaign.
At Longwood House, someone mentioned the Waterloo anniversary and ‘a shade of anguish passed over the features of the emperor. In slow and solemn tones he said, “Incomprehensible day! Concurrence of unheard-of fatalities!”’3
Also on that day, Madame de Montholon gave birth to a daughter. Dr O’Meara, always spiteful about the Frenchwoman, sent a note to Major Gorrequer: ‘I don’t imagine there was half so much anxiety over the birth of the King of Rome. You would have thought it the case of a girl of fifteen, newly married, instead of the wrinkled, middle-aged woman who has three husbands, all living, and eight or nine children.’4 Madame presented the baby to ‘His Majesty’, who permitted her to call the child ‘Hélène Napoleone’.5
Keen to assess the new admiral, Napoleon agreed to the governor presenting him. Lowe was able to report to Lord Bathurst of the meeting on 20 June that Bonaparte’s ‘questions were of no significant import; but they indicated quite a different disposition to that with which he had received me on the occasion of my last conference with him, and had to Sir Pulteney Malcolm the appearance of a very marked overture’.6 The charm was intended for the new admiral, whose person and rumoured connections had impressed Napoleon.
The presence of the commissioners disturbed Lowe. The British government had not welcomed their appointment or their purpose—to make clear that Bonaparte was ‘a prisoner of Europe’. The Newcastle brought an official despatch from Bathurst and also his private letter to Lowe suggesting that the commissioners would ‘have too little to do where they are going not to be tempted to do a little mischief ’, such as forming a ‘cabal’—a conspiratorial group—with the French. He thought they should be encouraged ‘to amuse themselves by going to the Cape by way of a change of scene,’ and Lowe could engage to furnish them and their Court with a regular account of the state of the prisoner.7 Napoleon actually agreed. ‘What folly it is,’ he exclaimed to O’Meara, ‘to send those commissioners out here. Without charge or responsibility, they will have nothing to do but to walk about the streets and creep up the rocks. The Prussian government has displayed more judgment and saved its money.’8
Catherine Younghusband informed her aunt, Lady Roche in Ireland, that important personages seemed to be everywhere on the few streets: ‘There is nothing now to be seen in St Helena but Generals, Admirals, Staff officers & Military & Naval heroes of all ages. You cannot walk through the streets of James Town without knocking against Knights or Knights Companions. My Eyes are dazzled by Gold Lace & Nodding Plumes & my Ears confused by the Sir Georges, Sir Thomases, etc.’ 9
Alexandre Antonovich, Comte de Balmain, capable, urbane, multilingual and literate, with a Scottish and Russian background, represented the Czar and was to send his reports through the Russian foreign minister, Count Nesselrode. Balmain was asked to make a daily record of what he observed and any conversations of interest. His astute despatches were soon eagerly anticipated and read with pleasure at the Russian court. 10
The Austrian commissioner, Baron Barthelemy von Stürmer, an elegant young man of 29, came with instructions from Prince Metternich and a sense of self-importance. Another trained diplomat, he brought with him to St Helena a beautiful young French wife.11 Betsy Balcombe left an account of how, soon after her arrival, Madame von Stürmer visited The Briars to see the pavilion formerly occupied by her hero, and burst into tears at its tiny size.12
The French commissioner came from an ancient and distinguished family. The Marquis Claude Marin Henri de Montchenu, aged 59, had escaped France early in the Revolution and been an émigré, living in Prussia, for over twenty years. A devout royalist, on the return of Louis XVIII he had pestered him for a position. It was Talleyrand who suggested appointing him commissioner to St Helena: ‘He will bore the prisoner to death.’13 With his social ineptitude, portly build and old-fashioned pigtail tied with a ribbon, Montchenu was soon regarded on the island as a figure of fun, a buffoon.14 Napoleon commented: ‘When you have seen Montchenu you have seen all the old nobility of France before the revolution.’15
The commissioners were accommodated at the Porteous lodgings in town and took most of their evening meals with the governor and his wife at Plantation House. Montchenu spoke no English but performed excessive gallantries towards the attractive Lady Lowe, while his prodigious appetite soon earned him the nickname ‘Old Munchenough’.
A parcel of books and journals, unloaded from the Newcastle, was delivered to Longwood. Napoleon was so eager he unpacked them himself. O’Meara found him in his bedchamber the next day, ‘surrounded with heaps of books: his countenance was smiling and he was in perfect good humour. He had been occupied in reading nearly all the night.’16
Also included in the official despatch from Lord Bathurst to Lowe (which emphasised that the expense of Bonaparte’s household should not exceed £8000 a year and hoped a number of the French would accept an offer to leave) was a confidential letter from Sir Henry Bunbury, Under-Secretary of State, giving Lowe cause to keep a close watch on all correspondence to and from Longwood: ‘By an intercepted letter to Bonaparte which Sir George Cockburn sent home, it is clear that the ex-Emperor has large sums of money in different parts; and that his agents have lodged money on his account in the principal towns of America as well as in England, with the hope of his being able to get at some one or other of their deposits. We have been unable hitherto to obtain any clue to this matter: it is very desirable to discover both the treasure and the agents.’17
Napoleon looked forward to his next meeting with Sir Pulteney and Lady Malcolm. He was now aware that she was the niece of Admiral Lord Keith, Commander-in-Chief of the English Channel Fleet, whom he had met at Plymouth and through whom the decisions of the British government were conveyed. She was also friendly with the liberals Lord Holland and John Cam Hobhouse, who had protested in the press and Parliament against the severity of his incarceration. It was at this meeting that he was to learn from Lady Clementina Malcolm of an extraordinary, quite unprecedented circumstance concerning her first cousin, Admiral Keith’s daughter.
The time came for the Malcolms’ visit to Longwood on 25 June. Napoleon made a special effort to be hospitable. Lady Malcolm described for her cousin how he sent his four-wheeled ‘German barouche drawn by six little Cape horses’ for herself and Madame Bertrand while the admiral and grand marshal rode beside them. The visitors arrived and were ceremoniously shown into the drawing room, darkened with green venetian blinds. Lady Malcolm was invited to sit on the sofa beside the former emperor, a rare privilege.
When discussion turned to the East India Company, Napoleon hinted at a conflict between Lady Malcolm’s father being a slave company’s director and her own liberal sentiments. He expressed surprise, ‘with a satirical expression of countenance, at finding slaves on an island so long in possession of the English, and belonging to so rich a Company’. She admitted that she could not reply, ‘feeling it was a disgrace’.
It was from Lady Malcolm that Napoleon then heard a fascinating story. It was the talk of society circles in England. One of Napoleon’s trusted aides-de-camp, Comte Auguste Charles de Flahaut, who had been with him during the Russian campaign and at Waterloo, had escaped to England after the final defeat. He was widely believed to be the natural son of the wily and brilliant Count Talleyrand, with whom his mother had lived openly for a decade. Talleyrand’s care in furthering the boy’s career virtually confirmed the assumption.18
In adulthood, as we have already seen, the dashing young Flahaut became the lover of Queen Hortense of Holland, stepdaughter of Napoleon and estranged wife of his brother Louis. After Waterloo, Hortense sent her lover anxious letters, beseeching him to join her in Switzerland. Instead, Flahaut stayed in England. In danger of arrest as a Bonaparte accomplice, he was given refuge at Holland House. At a Christmas dinner with the Hollands he met the attractive Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, the only child of Admiral Lord Keith. Lord Byron was present and fancied her himself, but she and the Frenchman had eyes only for each other. Hortense was left to languish in Switzerland.19
Beneath the careful orchestration of Regency society courtship, with its balls, house parties, whist drives, assembly rooms and spas, was the ruthless marriage market depicted by Jane Austen, where high social status and wealth were the trading stocks, followed by beauty and youth. Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, possessing all four, was a grand prize. A graceful 28-year-old, the daughter of a viscount who was a much-respected admiral, she was independently wealthy, heiress to her mother’s fortune. She was also the best friend and confidante of Princess Charlotte, the Prince Regent’s daughter.
Margaret had declined numerous marriage proposals from rich and powerful men. Notably, she knocked back William Cavendish, the fifth Duke of Devonshire, owner of the magnificent Chatsworth in Derbyshire, Devonshire House in London and other great estates. Four months after the Holland House dinner, Byron sent her a message from Dover, ‘that he would not have had to go into exile if he had married her’.20 But she was smitten with the Count de Flahaut, former aide and personal friend of Britain’s greatest enemy. On hearing of this, Admiral Lord Keith was apoplectic. He emphatically refused permission for his daughter to marry the Frenchman; when she persisted, he disinherited her. Margaret confided her distress to her cousin and close friend, Lady Malcolm.
London society was avid for details of the unlikely match (the wedding was to occur in June 1817, without Lord Keith’s blessing). Gossip thrived in the newspapers. The story was naturally of riveting interest to the people at Longwood.
Lady Malcolm had actually arrived on the island with a letter from Flahaut for his good friend Fanny Bertrand; she had been asked by her cousin to deliver it secretly, but she replied from The Briars, where she and her husband were staying with the Balcombes, that she felt constrained from giving Fanny the letter from Flahaut. Governor Lowe had told her he objected to it being delivered as it had not come through the ‘proper channels’ and he was annoyed by the volume of mail that was reaching the Bertrands, ‘sent in parcels and in various clandestine ways’.21
O’Meara reported that his patient was ‘much pleased’ with Sir Pulteney Malcolm and his wife.22 Of course he was. Napoleon was bound to cultivate the Malcolms, given their connections. As fond as he was of his stepdaughter Hortense, now abandoned by her lover, he would have been delighted to hear of his former aidede-camp moving in such influential circles in London, of his new romance and of Miss Margaret Elphinstone’s close friendship with the Princess of Wales.23
Meanwhile, Hortense was residing at Baden Baden with her sons by her estranged husband: Napoleon Louis was aged twelve and Louis Napoleon four years younger. The latter, in subsequent years, was to become a friend of Betsy Balcombe and would entreat her to tell stories about his illustrious uncle. Later still he would proclaim himself Emperor Napoleon III.
Napoleon still considered that his best hope of release from St Helena, other than through the Regent himself, was by Princess Charlotte taking a personal interest in his case. He was delighted to learn that she had married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha at the beginning of May. He said that the prince, who had once applied to be his aide-de-camp, was one of the most handsome and pleasant young men he had ever met.24 All the while, the tantalising rumour of William Balcombe’s blood connection with the royal family persisted.
The purveyor visited the Bertrands at Hutt’s Gate on 28 June and was particularly indiscreet about his house guests. According to Bertrand’s 1816 journal, still with no published English translation, Balcombe reported that Lady Malcolm was very happy about her conversation with the emperor; that Napoleon had many supporters in England as well as many women admirers and that their numbers were increasing daily; and that Admiral Malcolm would be staying on the island for just one year, and for less time than that if the emperor himself departed, in which case he would accompany him.25
It may have been to impress the Malcolms that Napoleon reopened the issue of the slave Toby’s freedom. O’Meara recorded: ‘When Napoleon discovered some time after the departure of Sir George Cockburn that the poor man had not been emancipated, he directed Mr Balcombe to purchase him from his master [a certain Captain Wrangham, who had left the island], set him at liberty and charge the amount to Count Bertrand’s private account.’ Both Balcombe and O’Meara had put this to the governor, who ‘however, thought proper to prohibit this’.26 Montholon’s memoirs provide further details, including the alleged reason for Lowe’s refusal: his fear of a great slave uprising such as that led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in the Caribbean.
On 2 July, Lowe visited Longwood and spoke to Montholon, the official manager of the household, about a reduction in expenses, particularly for food and wine. Balcombe’s purveyorship was criticised too, not just for the excessive quantity of food provided, but for its inedible nature.
The governor refused Montchenu permission to visit Madame Bertrand, which drove her to distraction, as the marquis had seen her ailing mother in France before setting off for St Helena. Napoleon still declined to meet the commissioners, which suited Lowe. Count Bertrand had conveyed the message that ‘if they wished to be introduced as private persons’ they should apply to him, but ‘The Emperor’ would not receive them officially. He did not recognise the right of the Allied powers to arbitrate upon his fate. He was the prisoner of England ‘in fact, but not in right’, but not the prisoner of Europe.27
Lowe fretted about what the commissioners were doing, determined to prevent any undue association between them and the people at Longwood. They in turn, finding themselves watched and their freedom curtailed, complained about him to their home governments, so adding to Lowe’s growing unfavourable reputation. Count Balmain’s assessment went to the Czar: ‘The responsibility with which he has been charged makes him tremble, and he becomes alarmed at the slightest incident, puzzles his brain for hours over nothing, and does with vast trouble what any one else would do in a minute.’28 Balmain had no idea at the time that he was writing about his future father-in-law.
On 10 July, O’Meara sent a letter from Longwood to Sir Thomas Reade, officially the governor’s deputy adjutant-general, effectively his espionage agent. In it the doctor sounded remarkably like a spy himself: ‘I understand from Madame that they have it in contemplation here to forward a letter of complaint against Sir Hudson to England (by what channel I did not understand), containing, no doubt, divers untruths, and praying he may be recalled. You had better give Sir Hudson a hint about it, but let it be between you and him only; as, though I have some reason to think that some plot is hatching, I am not quite sure of it, and any premature disclosure of it would not be the thing.’ 29
He went on to protest again about the food supplies to Longwood, lodging the blame to Balcombe’s partners rather than to the man he claimed as a friend. He said that Montholon was building up a file, finding out the price of every item of food and drink brought to the house. However, the purveyor had defenders in Sir Pulteney and Lady Malcolm, who were still at The Briars. Lady Malcolm wrote to her aunt, the wife of Admiral Lord Keith, that she sympathised with Balcombe for having to feed the ingrates at Longwood: ‘They complained that the wine was bad, but how can it be otherwise, for if they get a week’s supply at a time, the servants drink it all in three days.’ Bonaparte had a great appetite and demanded a roast every day; after fourteen consecutive days of roast pork, he complained: ‘“Encore cochon de lait”. It was the fault of his own people, who took the turkeys and geese, and continued to send the pigs to his table!’30 But the cost of catering was enormous and Bonaparte himself had said that Balcombe ‘costs more than he is worth’.
Meanwhile, the Colonial Office had sent out the components for a new prefabricated house to make the prisoner and his retinue more comfortable. Napoleon had refused to discuss it, saying he would not remain on the island long enough for it to be built. Lowe was trying to do his best and wanted to get workers started on the construction. He asked O’Meara where he thought General Bonaparte would like it erected. The doctor promptly answered: ‘He would like the Briars.’ The governor said that was out of the question—it was too close to town.31
‘I hate this Longwood,’ Napoleon fulminated. ‘The sight of it makes me melancholy. Let him put me in some place where there is shade, verdure and water. Here it either blows a furious wind, loaded with rain and fog, or the sun beats on my head through the want of shade, when I go out. Let him put me on the Plantation House side of the island if he really wishes to do anything for me. But what is the use of coming up here proposing things, and doing nothing?’32
He was in a bad mood, having read an account in The Times which he recognised as being by Catherine Younghusband. In a private letter that her aunt had sent to the newspaper, she had boasted that after she and her daughter sang Bonaparte an Italian duet, ‘I understood he talked of us for three days’. There was a description of the dinner to which she had been invited: ‘The greatest state and etiquette is observed at the Court of Longwood; not a single word was uttered during dinner, excepting by Buonaparte himself. All the Marshals and Countesses sat mumchance; but I chattered away to his Majesty without any fear, which appeared to amaze them all. You cannot form an idea of the awe they all stand in of him, and he treats them, ladies and all, in the most cavalier manner.’ The former emperor had offered her a plate of sweetmeats and ‘I was told by his Secretary, Count Lascases [sic], that it was a favour Queens had never received from him’.33
There would be no further invitations for Mrs Younghusband. Las Cases defended her and said that her words had been misconstrued. He wrote later that she had ‘declared openly that she had not written the ridiculous letter which had appeared under her name, and that either her friends in England had made alterations in that letter, or it had been read in company, imperfectly retained and incorrectly sent to the press’.34 Nonetheless, Catherine’s name never appeared again in the orderly’s log of visitors to Longwood.35
The Times caused more trouble, reporting that Madame Bertrand was ‘sick of the adventure, quarrels with her husband for being such a fool as to stay at St Helena and wishes to return home. All Buonaparte’s French cooks and servants mutinied, and said they were prisoners of war as well as himself, and would not obey him.’36
The omens were not auspicious when on 16 July Lowe arrived at Longwood for his fourth interview with his prisoner, which he reported in detail to Bathurst. He was ushered into the presence to find Napoleon with his hat under his arm. The prisoner launched into a litany of complaints about the restrictions imposed on him and his suite, especially the opening of their mail before it was delivered to them. Lowe replied that he acted only in compliance with his instructions.
Napoleon observed that it was unnecessary to impose so many restraints—it was almost impossible to get away from the island: ‘It would be impossible, unless with the connivance of the governor or of the admiral.’ He was not interested in the building of a new house; it would take six years’ construction ‘and by then there will be a change in the Ministry in England, or a new government in France, and I shall no longer be here’. In the meantime he wished to move to a more pleasant location. Lowe answered, as he took his leave, that he was ‘always happy to show attention to every request’ which was not incompatible with the main object of his duty.37