Lady Hamilton, the mistress of Admiral Nelson (who had died heroically ten years earlier), had died in January, lonely and overweight; Lord Byron had married Annabella Milbanke, but no one expected the match to last; the daring waltz was finally in, the visiting Czar having given a demonstration at Almack’s Assembly Rooms; gaslights illuminated the London streets; and thin muslin dresses in the Parisian style were being worn by the girls in Vauxhall Gardens. In Africa, Shaka had become King of the Zulus; further afield, America had a new railroad charter, the first commercial cheese factory had opened in Switzerland, the Blue Mountains were finally crossed in the colony of New South Wales, and British missionaries packed Bibles for New Zealand to save the heathen Maori.

For years Napoleon Bonaparte was the leading story and a grim one, but for some nine months the English papers had been remarkably free of his outrages. The man who from the beginning of the century had dominated the news and the continent of Europe—with the notable exception of Russia—had from May 1814 languished in exile on Elba, an island off Italy in the Mediterranean Sea, where he survived very well. He was permitted the title ‘Emperor and Sovereign of the Isle of Elba’ and a new flag of his own design, featuring his beloved golden bees. He enjoyed the comforts of a modest palace, a large shabby villa high on the cliffs, and the presence of his mother, his favourite sister Pauline and a devoted group of courtiers. He had charmed the British commissioner, Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, and dined regularly with him. Some wondered if it was an oversight on his captors’ part that he was allowed a private army of 1000 men, including 600 of his loyal Old Guard.

Even from the perspective of a remote island in the South Atlantic, Europe must have seemed unrealistically calm. But in May 1815 an East India Company ship brought the St Helenians the alarming information that in late February Bonaparte had escaped from Elba. He entered Paris in triumph on 20 March 1815 to the cheering of thousands of Parisians who lined the streets—those who did not applaud kept their feelings to themselves—and he was carried shoulder-high to the Tuileries Palace to cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

Then on 15 September a ship arrived at Jamestown bringing splendid news. Bonaparte’s new regime had lasted just ‘One Hundred Days’, as it came to be known. There had been an epic battle on the field of Waterloo in Flanders, conducted in an intermittent thunderstorm. The great warmonger had been defeated at last by a glorious British fighting force—there was grudging mention of Belgian and Dutch troops as well—led by the Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Wellington. A Prussian force under General Blücher had arrived late to the battle. Bonaparte had escaped on horseback, weeping, it was claimed, into his saddle, but his days were numbered. France, after some silken diplomacy by the veteran courtier Talleyrand, was to be returned once again to the Bourbons.

Governor Wilks arranged for a royal salute to be fired in honour of the Waterloo triumph and approved celebrations at the garrison with an extra quota of wine for each soldier. He ordered that all prisoners, civil and military, be released, with the exception of a fellow awaiting trial for burglary. The island residents returned to their familiar routines.

But they were rudely awakened on 11 October. The news brought by Captain Devon of the Icarus, a sloop-of-war, was extraordinary, too much to take in all at once: Bonaparte, foiled in his plans to escape to America, had surrendered to a British ship at the French Atlantic port of Rochefort. The Allied powers, after convoluted negotiations (from which Prussia withdrew, preferring the firing-squad option), had reached agreement that while France, Austria and Russia would keep a watching brief, he was to be England’s prisoner and England’s problem.

But the most outrageous news was that the Monster of Europe, the Disturber of the World, the Corsican half-breed, the Villain Bonaparte, the Anti-Christ, the savage Butcher of Jaffa—no words were bad enough but all were used in the newspapers—was being brought into exile on their own peaceful island. His ship was on the seas behind the Icarus. He would be arriving in a few days’ time.

And for five and a half turbulent years, St Helena would become one of the most talked about places on earth.

‘Our little isle was suddenly frightened from its propriety,’ Betsy Balcombe wrote later in her Recollections, ‘by hearing that Napoleon Bonaparte was to be confined as a prisoner of state.’ She felt ‘excessive terror, and an undefined conviction that something awful would happen to us all, though of what nature I hardly knew’.7

The townsfolk had never been so rattled. It seemed unbelievable that the most evil man in the world, and not so long ago the most powerful, was within a few days’ sail and coming to live among them. Apart from the St Helena Regiment—their own garrison, provided by the East India Company—there would be a huge body of soldiers and seamen arriving with him, just to keep him secure, all of them to be housed and fed, taking over the streets and taverns of the little town. The prisoner was travelling with the largest guard ever assembled in European history to watch over a single man. HMS Northumberland, with Bonaparte aboard, was accompanied by four warships with 116 guns between them and three troopships transporting the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Regiment of Foot.

Rumours were rife and anxieties noisily expressed. Just where was the prisoner to be kept? And would the soldiers be able to prevent him escaping the island, just as he gave his guards the slip on Elba? What was to prevent a raiding party of Frenchmen—or Americans for that matter—coming to rescue him? And as Boney made his escape, what was to stop his henchmen cutting all their throats? There were frightful visions of blood on the cobbled streets of Jamestown.

The captain of the Icarus had brought Colonel Wilks a ‘Secret letter’ from the British government, advising him of the arrival of the prisoner; it emphasised that in all matters relating to ‘General Napoleon Buonaparte’ he was to defer to Rear-Admiral Sir George Cockburn, commander of the fleet.8 Wilks was informed that the island would be removed from the jurisdiction of the East India Company, its traditional employer, and placed under British government administration. At the same time he received a confidential letter from the Company’s directors acknowledging ‘the high importance of effectually securing the person of a man whose conduct has proved so fatal to the happiness of the world’. Despite Wilks’s great merits, His Majesty’s Government had determined on appointing a new governor, a military man ‘of the class of General officers who served in the scene of the late continental events’.9 That officer was Major-General Hudson Lowe, most recently quartermaster-general to the Allied armies in the Netherlands and Belgium, who was then making his way from Europe to London. Lowe was to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general and created a Knight Commander of the Bath, befitting the gravity of his office as Bonaparte’s custodian.10

The immediate issues were housing and catering. The official ‘Secret letter’ stated that any residence on the island could be allocated for Bonaparte, ‘with the exception of the Governor’s Plantation House’.