He hoped for a refuge in the English countryside and ruminated on the best place to retire as a county gentleman, perhaps to the Cotswolds under the name ‘Colonel Muiron’, after a fallen comrade-in-arms, so as not to cause a local fuss.16 The ministers of the ailing George III did not trust Bonaparte’s charm nor his ability to flatter the suggestible and vainglorious prince, whom the Duke of Wellington privately described as ‘the most extraordinary compound of talent, wit, buffoonery, obstinacy and good feeling that I ever saw in any character in my life’.17 They joined Admiral Lord Keith in the view that if the defeated emperor ‘obtained an interview with His Royal Highness, in half an hour they would have been the best friends in England’.18 The commotion about him at Plymouth demonstrated ‘his genius for upheaval’, his capacity for exciting a movement of sympathisers. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, advised: ‘We are all decidedly of opinion that it would not answer to confine him to this country . . . Very nice legal questions might arise upon the subject, which would be particularly embarrassing.’ They obtained the agreement of the Allies in wishing him deported somewhere so remote that even he would find it impossible to abscond, and took up the Admiralty’s suggestion, supported by Wellington, that the island of St Helena was ‘the place in the world best calculated for the confinement of such a person’.19

Although Bonaparte had heard rumours, it still came like a physical blow when told he was destined for the remote Atlantic rock which had once been considered as an alternative exile to Elba. (Another, almost as bad, had been Botany Bay in New South Wales.) Bonaparte was instructed to select twelve servants and ‘three principals’ to accompany him. Of the fifteen officers who clamoured to join him—either through loyalty, misplaced ambition or calculated avarice, or to escape a death sentence in France—at last he chose generals Bertrand and de Montholon and Count de Las Cases. The British agreed to increase the number to 26 to include the generals’ wives and children, the count’s adolescent son Emmanuel, a physician, and more servants to personally attend them all. Some of these volunteers had been with Bonaparte on Elba.

General Baron Gaspard Gourgaud, a temperamental bachelor aged 31 was not initially chosen, for he was not a personal friend or a military officer of long standing, although he had taken part in the Russian disaster and was more of a campaign veteran than the effete Montholon. But he caused such a violent emotional scene, pleading to be with his emperor, that Napoleon reluctantly included him. To do so he was obliged to attach him as one of the principals and to designate the aristocratic Las Cases as merely his secretary, in effect a servant.

As it happened, Dr O’Meara, the Irish senior surgeon on the Bellerophon, had attended members of the French party—mainly for seasickness—during the voyage from Rochefort and had made a good impression on Napoleon.20 The two enjoyed several conversations in Italian, a language in which O’Meara was fluent, and discussed Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, where the surgeon had been. Bonaparte proposed that O’Meara be seconded as his personal physician. The request went up to Admiral Lord Keith and was acceded to readily, because of the opportunity the position offered for close observation. O’Meara, in the self-justificatory introduction to the book he would publish after Bonaparte’s death, stated that ‘this was an employment which I could hold perfectly consistent with my honour, and with the duty I owed to my country and my sovereign’.21

O’Meara had already sent a lively description of Bonaparte and his French companions to his friend John Finlaison, a senior clerk at the Admiralty, where Lord Melville was First Sea Lord. At Plymouth he received a reply: ‘My Dear Barry—Thanks for your kind letter which was so extremely interesting that I showed it to Lord Melville, who made some corrections in it and then expressly permitted and was well pleased that I should insert it in the Sun of tomorrow. This will do you no harm. You will on no account mention this to a soul, except your Captain if you find that necessary for your justification in having written. I cannot tell you now my reasons for printing it. When we meet you will find them good as they are partly political. It is the highest authority that did it.’22 The following day an item appeared in the Sun and the Plymouth Telegraph reporting that a gentleman who saw Bonaparte regularly said that recent newspaper reports that Bonaparte was unhappy at the prospect of going to St Helena were incorrect: the Corsican seemed quite cheerful about going and frequently laughed.23

On 7 August, the French party was transferred to HMS Northumberland under Sir George Cockburn. The admiral permitted an English friend, Lord Lyttelton, to make a visit aboard. The aristocrat spoke good French and was introduced to Bonaparte. Afterwards, Lyttelton observed of the two wives in the French entourage that they were completely different in look and manner: ‘Madame Bertrand, who had behaved with great violence in the Bellerophon, seemed rather exhausted than pacified, and had a look of great irritation and impatience. She is a tall, thin woman, with an aquiline nose, very like Lord Dillon, to whom she is, I believe, rather nearly related.24 Madame Montholon, on the other hand, had all the quiet resignation that so well becomes her sex, and one could not help sympathising with her sufferings so meekly borne. She is a pretty woman, of a sweet and intelligent countenance.’25

Albine Hélène de Montholon was grieving. She and her third husband were travelling with their three-year-old son Tristan, but they had left behind in France her twelve-year-old boy from an earlier marriage and their own baby son, born the previous year, in the care of a wet nurse; Montholon had deemed him too young to travel. During this voyage to St Helena, as if in protest, Albine became pregnant again.

Napoleon was presented to the Northumberland’s flag captain, Charles Ross, who felt disappointed, as he had never seen a picture that showed Napoleon as he really was: ‘He appears by no means that active man he is said to be. He is fat, rather what we call pot-bellied, and altho’ his leg is well-shaped, it is rather clumsy and his walk appears rather affected, something between a waddle and a swagger . . .