About ten years ago I was browsing along the shelves of an antiquarian bookshop, enjoying the sensual pleasure of the rich bindings, the gilded lettering, the mental travel to places called Abyssinia, Okavango, Patagonia, Smyrna, when I saw a little 1844 book, Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon on the Island of St Helena by Mrs Abell. Who was she, I wondered, and what brush with infamy had she inflated? I turned the fragile pages to discover that she had been a young girl called Betsy Balcombe when the exiled Bonaparte in 1815 was brought to the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena where she and her family lived. She had seen much of him over the course of three years. But how and why, I wondered, did this English family come to socialise with their nation’s great enemy? And why did he bother with them? I bought the little book and found it a charming memoir. Mrs Abell, obviously a feisty person, wrote only about those three years on St Helena and revealed nothing of her later life except a hint of some tragedy. Who was she really?
I went back to work on other projects. However, Betsy’s book lingered in my mind and years later I returned, to seek the larger story behind the memoir. My attempt to answer those questions has led me on a detective trail to the manuscripts collection of the British Library, sifting through the vast correspondence of Sir Hudson Lowe and Lord Bathurst’s private papers; on a week’s voyage on the last operational Royal Mail ship to the island of St Helena, to work in its archives and visit locations where Betsy and her family lived and Napoleon was imprisoned; to the English counties of Sussex, Kent and Devon, to their record offices, and up to bleak Dartmoor; to the highlands of Scotland; to Paris and the northern French town of Saint-Omer; to old Madras in India; and to state archives and libraries in Australia as well as the Balcombes’ former homes in New South Wales and Victoria. The quest involved my reading several French journals by Napoleon’s companions never translated into English and making surprising discoveries that have not been revealed before.
Since the Victorian era, authors have interested themselves in Betsy’s story, sometimes as a children’s book, sometimes confabulating it as Napoleon’s last romance, rarely adding anything new to her Recollections. (A revised edition of Betsy’s book, titled To Befriend an Emperor, was published in 2005, making this delightful story available to the general public.) A direct Balcombe descendant, the redoubtable Melbourne figure Dame Mabel Brookes, in 1960 published St Helena Story, her own account of her forebears. It was a brave attempt and told part of the story, but she lacked the research tools available to a biographer today and left many gaps. She could only say of Betsy’s husband that he was reputedly ‘a handsome man-about-town’, whereas his family background and career are revealed here; she wrote that Mrs Betsy Abell lived in Sydney with her family ‘for a brief period’, when it was actually ten years.
Most books about Napoleon’s captivity focus on the compelling prisoner, his anguish and his anger and his last great battle with the authoritarian British governor Sir Hudson Lowe. This book deals with that struggle, but from the perspective of the British family on the sidelines, who also incurred Lowe’s wrath because of their friendship with his charge. Through their relationship with Napoleon they inevitably also became closely acquainted with his immediate companions on the island: his devoted chamberlain and biographer Count de Las Cases; the Count and Countess Bertrand; Count de Montholon and his wife; the temperamental General Gourgaud; the loyal valet Marchand; and Napoleon’s physician and the Balcombes’ good friend, the duplicitous Irishman Dr Barry O’Meara. As Bonaparte ruled over his little household, demanding imperial respect, settling their intrigues and disputes, we see the domestic Napoleon, ‘father’ of an unhappy, bickering family, still mentally refighting his old battles, deploying his armies of red and black pins across a billiard table, his prodigious brain fretting over trifles: the thickness of mattresses, the scrawniness of a roast chicken, the escape of a dairy cow.
We follow Betsy and the Balcombes as they leave St Helena under a cloud because of their dangerous friendship, only to confront larger and possibly life-threatening troubles in England; to another kind of exile in France; and then to the penal colony of New South Wales, at a time of transition to a new future in which they play significant parts. Although there are many references to Betsy, her father and the family in this new life, due to the shortage of source material in their own words, I have sometimes provided an imaginative interpretation of their possible feelings and responses to their changed circumstances.
Their transfer across the world reveals the rich network of connections between Britain and the colonies in the 1820s and 1830s, all controlled by the remarkable Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, arbitrator and manager of the colonial governors, the prisoner Bonaparte, and the whole intricate skein of colonial connections.
This book argues that Napoleon, a master of strategy, had a particular reason for cultivating the Balcombes. It also answers how and why the lives of that English family on St Helena—the merchant William Balcombe, his wife who resembled the Empress Josephine, and their two pretty daughters, Betsy and Jane—came to be entangled with Bonaparte’s; and the reason why he was anxious to entangle them. Finally, it shows how their involvement with him would change Betsy and her family for ever, and cast a very long shadow over the rest of their lives.