Betsy and the Emperor
Betsy
AND THE
Emperor
ANNE WHITEHEAD is an author, historian and former TV producer-director with the ABC. She is the author of Bluestocking in Patagonia and her book Paradise Mislaid was winner of the NSW Premier’s Award for Australian History.
‘A fascinating exploration of the life journey of Betsy Balcombe Abell from St Helena to Sydney to London. This is a well-researched and readable history of the dramatic repercussions for an English family of its proximity to Napoleon in his final years on St Helena.’
—Professor Ann Curthoys, University of Sydney
‘St Helena: an exiled emperor in the garden pavilion and in the house a pretty, flighty teenager. And therefrom spring some fascinating narratives, ending up, after a disastrous marriage to a stylish cad, in colonial New South Wales.’
—Marion Halligan, award-winning author
Napoleon Bonaparte
OTHER BOOKS BY ANNE WHITEHEAD
Bluestocking in Patagonia: Mary Gilmore’s quest for
love and utopia at the world’s end
Paradise Mislaid: In search of the Australian tribe of Paraguay
First published in 2015
Copyright © Anne Whitehead 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
This book has been written with the generous assistance of a Writer’s Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 76011 293 6
eISBN 978 192 526 661 0
Internal and cover design by Christabella Designs
Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Cover images: Madame Charles Maurice de Tallyrand Pérgord (detail), Baron François Gérard (c.1804), Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art; The Roads, Views of St Helena, George Hutchins Bellasis (1815), National Library of Australia.
To Allan, with love
—who treated Napoleon with caution,
but accompanied me with Betsy and the
Balcombes every step of the way
And to Keith and Shirley Murley, with gratitude
—dedicated volunteer researchers at The Briars, Mt Martha, Victoria,
for their unstinting generosity
CONTENTS
Preface
PART ONE
1 The News
2 The Prisoner
3 Friends and Foes
4 The Briars
5 The Pavilion
6 Boney’s Little Pages
7 The French Suite
8 The Admiral’s Ball
9 Last Days at the Pavilion
10 Longwood House
11 The New Governor
12 Gold Lace and Nodding Plumes
13 This Accursed Place
14 The Thinning Ranks
15 The Sick Lion
16 Our Beautiful Island
17 The Company of a Green Parrot
18 At the Mercy of the English
19 Farewell to the Island
PART TWO
20 The Ties that Bind
21 The Embattled Surgeon
22 An Impending Tempest
23 The St Helena Plot
24 Official Disgrace
25 An Item of News
26 The One that Got Away
27 Marry in Haste . . .
28 ‘La Petite Angleterre’
29 The Clearing Fog
PART THREE
30 Sydney Town
31 ‘The Interesting Mrs Abell’
32 The Fashionables
33 A Fleeting Entente Cordiale
34 The Treasury Under the Bed
35 ‘Terrible Hollow’
36 A Fractured Family
37 Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon
Picture section
Acknowledgements
Notes
PREFACE
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.
PART
ONE
A new Prometheus, I am attached to a rock
where a vulture is gnawing at me.
I had stolen the fire of heaven to endow France with it;
the fire has come back to its source, and here I am.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
CHAPTER 1
THE NEWS
When HMS Northumberland anchored in James Bay, accompanied by four men-of-war and three troopships, it became known that the prisoner would not be brought ashore for another two days.1 Word spread that it would be the most extraordinary event in living memory.
On the evening of 17 October 1815, people from all parts of the island made their way to the Jamestown waterfront, descending into the village, hemmed by mountains, by one of two steep roads. By dusk a great crowd had gathered at the narrow quay between the castle wall and the Atlantic Ocean.2
It did not take much persuasion for the merchant William Balcombe to agree that his wife and two daughters should witness the event. Betsy was thirteen and her sister Jane fifteen. Their little brothers Tom and Alexander, aged five and four, had to stay behind with their nurse, but their father knew that the girls would always remember the sight of the most powerful man in the world brought down to size. One of the Balcombes’ slave boys opened The Briars’ gates, guiding the horse cart with a lamp as they joined the Sidepath, the vertiginous road carved into the rocks by slave labour. The whole mountainside was aglow with dancing, glimmering lanterns as they joined the throng making the mile-long descent.
It was almost dark when they reached the marina.
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