I was in a large house in the Scottish highlands. It was an unlikely place for me to be researching the Balcombes’ time in France—so far a frustratingly blank canvas—but that was the reason I was there.
Next door to my room was a library, with floor-to-ceiling books on mahogany shelving, some in Persian, others in Urdu, books of nineteenth-century travel, some of them written by former occupants of the house. An old leopard-skin was slung over a chair, an Oriental rug on the floor, trophies of the East. In other parts of the house old prints of India and the Himalayas graced the walls, cheerful fires warmed the rooms.
I was in the home of the five Fraser brothers who had gone to India to save the family estate—and in the end had succeeded. The eldest son, James Baillie Fraser, a Persian scholar, writer and talented artist, had returned home, riding or walking all the way overland through India, Afghanistan, Persia and the Ottoman Levant. He later added a Palladian portico to the house in expectation of the visit of a Persian prince who never turned up.
The property was saved, but at enormous human cost, heartbreaking for the parents, Edward Satchwell Fraser and his wife Jane. Four of their sons never came back; three of them succumbed to the fevers and infections of India, which, in an era before modern vaccines, killed tens of thousands of the British (and hundreds of thousands of Indians).1 William, the most famous, swashbuckling brother, spent 33 adventurous years in India and has been written about extensively by William Dalrymple, who described his 1835 murder in Delhi, after offending ‘a raffish Mughal nobleman’.2
The first of the Fraser boys to die was Edward, who had gone to India in 1813 at the age of 27 with his younger brother Alexander (Aleck). Soon after his arrival he became so ill that Aleck believed he could not survive unless taken to a more temperate climate. The two brothers joined a vessel bound for St Helena. Aleck was able to rent a cottage from a certain William Balcombe, whom he described as ‘an open-hearted liberal Englishman’.3 Aleck nursed his brother at the cottage, with the Balcombes kindly offering whatever assistance they could, until Edward passed away two months later.
Malcolm Fraser, my host, is a direct descendant of Edward Satchwell and Jane Fraser. Malcolm’s wife Kathy is completing a book about those five sons and the parents who prayed and waited for their return. Her source material is a remarkable collection of family letters and the mother’s diary, hidden in an old trunk in the cellar with a label noting it contained papers ‘of great interest’; they were first researched in 1979.
Edward Satchwell Fraser was highland gentry, a laird, but until his sons returned from India with the riches they hoped were possible, he and Jane were in financial difficulties. It had been a disastrous decision to buy into the cotton plantation in Guyana and then mortgage the family estate against it. With their only surviving daughter, Jane Anne, having made a good marriage to a cousin, the big house felt empty. Mr Fraser (as his wife always called him, even in her private diary) made the decision at the age of 70 that the most practical thing to do was to rent it out—almost certainly to wealthy English people who would play at being lairds—and he and his wife Jane would make a temporary move to Saint-Omer in France. Her sister Catherine was already there, married to Gregoire, a Frenchman, and she had convinced them that living costs were much cheaper.
Since 1593 there had been a particular connection across the Channel with Saint-Omer. After the Protestant Reformation, many British Roman-Catholic families, finding their sons barred from a Catholic education at home, sent them across the Channel as boarders to St Omer College, founded by English Jesuits. In 1762 the school moved to Bruges, and later to Liège. But with the building of the Catholic college of Stonyhurst in Lancashire in 1794, the need for the annual migration of British Catholic boys ceased.
After the Napoleonic Wars, another large British community formed at Saint-Omer, so much so that in local parlance the town became La Petite Angleterre (Little England). It began with the army of occupation: many British soldiers, finding life in northern France pleasant and economical during their posting, returned with their families after demobilisation. Jane Fraser’s sister had assured her that there were also a number of British gentlefolk living in the town, a congenial social group.4
William Balcombe delayed the planned move to France, in the hope that the outcome of his apology to Lowe might result in Bathurst making an early decision to offer him a colonial posting. He knew that Sir Thomas was working for him behind the scenes. It is likely that Betsy, in advanced pregnancy, had gone to live with Edward Abell at his home in St Gregory’s parish, near St Paul’s in London; only her close family and friends knew how short a time the couple had been married, but a decision had to be made about where she would give birth. Balcombe was bound to be unhappy about the reliability of Abell as the protector of his daughter and expected grandchild and would have been reluctant to leave the country without them.
Meanwhile, Lowe was hoping for a colonial or government position himself. On 6 June 1822, he wrote to Bathurst with the news that he had received a letter from His Royal Highness the Duke of York, ‘acquainting me His Majesty has been graciously pleased to appoint me to the command of the 93rd Regiment’. He said that he was flattered by His Majesty’s favour. But the appointment was a long way short of a governorship.5
That same month, Dr Barry O’Meara launched his massive two-volume work, Napoleon in Exile or A Voice from St Helena, not on an unsuspecting world but on a fully expectant one. There had been four years of previews in newspapers around the country of the correspondence between O’Meara and Lowe. The public had not lost its appetite for more. The Irish doctor was still seen as something of a hero, and Napoleon’s death had confirmed his forecasts about his critical state of health.
Napoleon in Exile was composed from the detailed notes O’Meara had taken almost every night at St Helena, plus a great deal of imagination and personal vitriol. It was an instant bestseller. The publishers rushed out a second edition, then a third.6 Readers, whether on the side of O’Meara or infuriated by him, devoured his accounts of his conversations with Napoleon, his quarrels with Lowe, and the governor’s relentless persecution of his prisoner. Gilbert Martineau, former honorary French consul at St Helena (father of the present consul), has observed: ‘Napoleon emerged from the book ennobled, even purified by his end, but the gaoler of St Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe, was branded for ever as infamous by one of his own staff, and his portrait hung in the rogues’ gallery of history.’7 The book enraged Lowe, who engaged a prominent lawyer and planned a defamation suit.
O’Meara had become rich, with a fourth edition of his book soon printed to meet the demand. It was banned in France, but young Emmanuel de Las Cases obtained a copy. Reading it reignited his fury at the mistreatment of his father and he planned revenge. He would go to London and challenge Lowe to a duel. But in order to find him he had to contact O’Meara.
Before he did so, the Balcombe family, along with Edward and Betsy, crossed the Channel to France in the regular packet boat. At Calais their luggage was cleared by customs and they took a coach for the 22-mile journey to Saint-Omer, passing through flat fertile pastureland, the road lined with elms on either side. When they were still a long distance away they sighted the towers of the town’s great medieval cathedral and the Gothic Abbaye Saint-Bertin.8
I arrived at Saint-Omer by train from Paris with a change at Lille. In my bag I had my notes from the collection of Fraser papers in Scotland. The station building was an imposing belle époque ruin, propped up with scaffolding. There was not a person in sight. I crossed the bridge of the River Aa, walked two deserted blocks to the Hôtel Le Bretagne, and left my bag in my room.
Several blocks uphill I found the spacious market square, Place Foch, with its handsome Hôtel de Ville. It seemed the whole of the town was at Sunday lunch in the buzzing restaurants. The British had left evidence of their patronage in a nineteenth-century Queen Victoria Bar-Pub and Le Dickens Brasserie.
Later, as I returned to my hotel, a dense mist swirled in from the surrounding wetlands. Le brouillard.
In a family portrait Jane Fraser is a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face, warm brown eyes and auburn curls under a lacy bonnet. On 28 August 1822, her husband brought startling news from the centre of town: he had briefly met a Mr Balcombe from St Helena who had come to Saint-Omer with his family with the intention to remain some time. ‘How many sensations does his very name call up to me & the memory of those that are gone,’ Jane wrote in her diary. The grief never left her: the loss of her sons Edward, who died in 1813 at Balcombe’s cottage, and Aleck, who tried to save him, and three years later in India succumbed to fever himself.9
Mr Fraser said that the Balcombes had a son-in-law with them—a man called Abell ‘who had known William in Nypaul’.10 This was to Jane a remarkable coincidence: not just one connection between the Balcombe family and theirs through her sons Edward and Aleck, but also a second connection through the Balcombes’ son-in-law having known William. She was most anxious to meet this Mr Abell, to hear his description of William, to learn anything at all about her second son who had set off for India twenty years earlier and who rarely wrote home. She and her husband fretted about him and wished he could find a good Scottish wife.
She immediately wrote a letter to William in Delhi: ‘We have lately had a very interesting acquaintance come to St Omer in the family of a Mr Balcombe formerly of St Helena & in whose house your Beloved Brothers lived when it pleased God to spare them & received much kindness & attention. Their very name was sacred and interesting to us & yr Father waited on Mr B as soon as we heard of their arrival—he & his Lady remembered our Dear Boys with the fondest affection—indeed to know must have been to love them—they have been in England some years & have lately married their youngest Daughter (a favourite of Buonaparte as a girl on his first arrival) to an Indian [army man] of the name of “Abel” who knew you in Nypaul! Mrs B is in bad health & they seem to have changed climate on her account. Their acquaintance is extremely interesting to us & you may believe we shall endeavour to show them every attention in our Power.’11
Jane Fraser’s letter to William was more informative than her diary. If Balcombe had said that his daughter Betsy was with their family at Saint-Omer, Jane’s letter does not mention it, only that Abell was. Her diary entries are brief and circumspect. However, without my fortunate access to them, I would have no information at all about the Balcombes’ time in France, nor about what was happening concerning Betsy and her husband. Jane Fraser’s diary entries, as well as being concise, seem to be incredibly discreet, as if she did not trust even her journal with gossip. So I must read the entries as faint clues along a mystery trail; a code written in onion juice, which, brought to the light, reveals more than was at first apparent.
What does emerge clearly is that Betsy and Edward Abell had arrived in France with her parents; otherwise there would be absolutely no reason for Abell to be there without her, especially as it is probable that her parents actively disliked him. But where was Betsy?
The explanation could be that while the Balcombes might always have planned that Betsy and Abell would come with them to France for her to give birth there, both enabling her mother to be with her and avoiding English gossip, she may have gone into labour just at the time of their arrival. It took another seven days for Balcombe to respond to Mr Fraser’s invitation to visit, despite their remarkable St Helena connection. They were being offered entrée to British society in the town but did not immediately take it up.
On the eighth day, a curious Mr Fraser called at their lodgings himself, but he found the household unprepared and the son-in-law and both daughters absent. A newborn baby in the house would have been worthy of note but was not noted. He told his wife that Mrs Balcombe had seemed ‘very interesting but extremely “scatty”’ (which I take to mean ‘distracted’).12 That certainly seems unlike the calm, hospitable woman of St Helena who, with no prior warning, received without fuss the just-exiled former emperor of the French at whose command thousands of British soldiers had been slaughtered.
It is likely that Betsy’s baby girl, Elizabeth Jane (Bessie), was delivered at a ‘lying-in’ hospital or convent at Saint-Omer and that her sister Jane, with whom she had always been close, was with her for much of the time. Betsy must have given birth in 1822, for the daughter was ‘a little girl’, not a newborn, when they sailed for Australia the following year. (Furthermore, in 1832, a friend described Bessie as being aged ‘about ten’.) Betsy was unlikely to have given birth without her mother present, and this first fortnight at Saint-Omer is when Mrs Balcombe tended to be absent, either physically or else distracted, ‘scatty’. Unless the baby was premature, a September birth places her conception at the end of December 1821, soon after Betsy met the ‘man-about-town’, and would mean she was five months pregnant at the wedding.13
If Jane Fraser was aware during this period of Betsy and the birth of a baby, she did not mention it. The startling thing is that she did not even note the existence of Betsy anywhere in her Saint-Omer diary, although she referred to her in her letter to William. But Betsy does appear in Jane’s diary a year later, after the Frasers had left France.
Despite the charm of the little town with its medieval precinct and the beauty of the surrounding marshlands with their rich birdlife, the Balcombes’ year-long sojourn in Saint-Omer was miserable, relieved only by their friendship with the Frasers.
When Jane Fraser at last met Mrs Balcombe on 7 September, she found her ‘a mild & interesting woman but in very indifferent health’. She thought the elder daughter ‘a good looking girl about 20’ and promptly invited Jane and her brothers to come to visit in the afternoon.14 (This does suggest that she may have been giving Mrs Balcombe time with her younger daughter.) Around 8 and 9 September, Jane Fraser seemed to be minding the three Balcombe boys—William, fourteen, Thomas, twelve, and Alexander, eleven—at her house for much of the time. This could well have been the period when Betsy was still ‘lying in’ (recovering from the birth) and wanted the company of her mother and sister.
The two families became extremely friendly, despite the difference in age between the parents: William Balcombe was 44 in 1822 and his wife 49, whereas Edward Satchwell Fraser was 71 and Jane in her mid-sixties. The Frasers were of course predisposed to like the Balcombes from the beginning, and introduced them to their circle of friends. The days continued, when health allowed, in a series of house calls on each other and walks along the ramparts, the remaining medieval walls of the town.
Balcombe had explained his wife’s need for a change of climate as the reason they had come to Saint-Omer, although the damp atmosphere and recurring fogs could hardly have been helpful for her persistent hepatitis condition. While the two couples frequently called on each other for an hour or so, there were numerous days when Jane Fraser noted in her diary ‘Mrs Balcombe is unwell’, and others when she observed that ‘Mrs Balcombe is in a very distressed state’.15 Jane Balcombe must have experienced great anxiety about the relationship between Betsy and Abell and about the wellbeing of her new little granddaughter, who was no longer in France. The ‘son-in-law’ never appears again in Mrs Fraser’s Saint-Omer diary and Betsy never, so the young couple must have returned to Abell’s home in London. The Balcombes’ elder daughter was often mentioned (adding to the surfeit of ‘Janes’ in this story) and Jane Fraser became very fond of the three boys, although they must have reminded her painfully of her own lost sons.
As the Frasers waited for mail from their son James on his perilous journey overland, William Balcombe hoped for word from Lord Bathurst, or inside information from Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt concerning a colonial preferment. Sometime during their stay the Balcombes tried to get in touch with their old French friends from St Helena. General Bertrand’s military rank had been restored to him and he and Fanny had retired to their estate in the Berri, making only occasional visits to Paris to stay at their splendid house in the Rue Chantereine, purchased with Napoleon’s bequest. Montholon, according to Gilbert Martineau, ‘went off to his chateau at Frémigny, where he lived in lavish style, making frequent excursions to the capital’.16 Contact was clearly made with the Montholons, who sent a wedding gift for Betsy, a beautiful sewing and writing box made of tortoiseshell veneer with silver inlay and blue silk lining.17 Given her hasty wedding in Devon, it must have been sent to Saint-Omer.
The Balcombes were dissatisfied with their lodgings, and on 13 September William, on horseback, called by the Frasers at Rue de Dunkerque to tell them that he had found a better house. Although the two younger boys were enrolled at the local école, Balcombe worried about his son William’s education. He consulted the Frasers, who recommended an English boarding school in Boulogne. He took William to enrol there and was absent for three days while Thomas and Alexander stayed with the Frasers, as their mother continued to be ill.18 While Balcombe was at Boulogne, he may have just missed seeing a young friend from St Helena, Emmanuel, son of Count de Las Cases. It was at about this time that 22-year-old Emmanuel boarded a packet boat for England, to confront an old enemy.
When Balcombe returned to Saint-Omer he called at the bureau de poste, always hoping for news of an appointment. He was surprised to find that he had a letter from Sir Hudson Lowe, seeking his support. Lowe was outraged at the huge popularity of O’Meara’s book and at its portrayal of him as a vicious persecutor of a stoic prisoner and his caring physician. He was collecting evidence from former St Helena residents for his defamation case, ‘to refute the calumnies contained in the book’ and to win recompense for the insults to himself. (He did not mention that Bathurst had counselled against this action.19) There was no mistaking the obligation. Balcombe had sought a favour from Lowe and was now being asked for one in return. It concerned Bonaparte’s application to free the slave Toby, as O’Meara had stated that the governor had rejected it out of spite. Balcombe replied, confirming that the final decision against Toby’s purchase had been made by the sitting magistrate. His response was about as muted a show of support as was possible.20
In London on 22 October, Lowe received a much more direct affront resulting from O’Meara’s book. Emmanuel de Las Cases had arrived in the city and booked into Dog Tavern, near the doctor’s lodgings. He laid in wait outside Lowe’s new address at 21 Paddington Green.
Lowe had ordered a hackney coach and, unsuspecting, was walking towards it, when the young man dashed across the street and charged into him, challenging him to a duel. Lowe staggered back, not recognising his attacker. He described what happened next in a letter sent the following day to Bathurst: ‘I turned round to him to express my surprise at his behaviour, when he accosted me with a foreign accent by the following expression: “What do you mean Sir by insulting me!” or “Do you mean Sir to insult me?” “Insult you!” I replied, “Why it was you who ran up against me!” He persisted however in repeating that I had insulted him, and spoke in such a strange manner that it really struck me he must be insane, and finding it of no use to argue with him, I was getting into the carriage when he struck at me with a small whip, and then immediately drew away. Having an umbrella in my hand, and feeling myself thus provoked, I desisted from entering the carriage and followed him with the intention of giving him a blow with the end of the umbrella, when a person, apparently an Englishman who had been coming up behind him, instantly interfered and forcibly prevented me from striking him. Finding myself thus situated, and still under an impression the rencontre had been one of mere accident, I got into the carriage and was driving off when the young person who had first ran against me, came up with an impudent air to offer me his card, and finding I took no notice of him, he threw it into the carriage, and I threw it immediately out again, without even looking at it.’21 According to passers-by, the youth had shouted: ‘This man insulted my father!’ When Lowe returned home later that day he found that the maid had picked up two cards from the road, with the inscription ‘Baron E. de Las Cases, Dog Tavern, Holywell-street’. Lowe insisted that he had not recognised him: ‘the young man had left St Helena, a mere boy, between five and six years before’ and he ‘could not conceive him to be a gentleman’.22
The newspapers loved the story. ‘SIR HUDSON LOWE HORSEWHIPPED!’ reported The Examiner. The episode was soon news around the country. The Morning Chronicle published Baron de Las Cases’ own account and reported that the young Frenchman with ‘great manliness’ avowed ‘that “the sole object of his visit to England was to compel Sir H. Lowe to afford satisfaction for his wrongs”. The Baron concludes, by remarking, “that a son who vindicates the cause of an aged, sick and honoured father, only fulfils a most sacred duty imposed upon him, and in so acting pursues the path of honour and of rectitude”. And who will not agree with him?’23
A few days later, Lowe wrote to Bathurst from Tunbridge Wells that the young Las Cases, ‘having braved the Government and Laws of this country, has fled to his own, where he has dared to make a public boast of the Insult he offered to me’. He requested ‘Your Lordship’s consideration and that of His Majesty’s Government, as to the means of my obtaining due redress’.24 The letter was marked ‘Never sent’, so Lowe had thought better of it, but a week later he posted another protest, this time about a new French translation of O’Meara’s book, and asked if an injunction could not be taken out against it.25 His Majesty’s Government remained obdurately silent.