He had reason to be sceptical.

Records show that William Balcombe was born at the seaside village of Rottingdean near Brighton on Christmas Day 1777.4 George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales (later George IV), would not have turned fifteen when—or a very problematic if—he had sired William.5 It is an unlikely scenario, but not altogether impossible. The prince was flagrantly precocious, with at least three known sexual partners by the age of fifteen. His tutor at that time, Bishop Richard Hurd, predicted that he would be ‘either the most polished gentleman or the most accomplished blackguard in Europe—possibly both’.6 The prince followed the pattern of his roistering uncles, the dukes of Gloucester and Cumberland: ‘He was an ardent and unmitigated admirer of their sexual adventures and excesses. He eagerly followed their example, slipping out of the royal house for clandestine escapades when his parents thought he had retired to bed for the night. The King was aghast when he heard the open talk going round the household staff of the fifteen-year-old prince seducing one of the Queen’s maids of honour, who clearly found it impossible to live up to the title of her job. More distressing was the news relayed to him that among his early conquests, George numbered the Duchess of Cumberland—his uncle’s wife.’7

Balcombe’s mother, Mary Vandyke, was from Lewes in Sussex; she was two months pregnant with William when she married Stephen Balcombe of Rottingdean on 27 May 1777. Was the baby his or was he accepting, knowingly or not, a royal ‘by-blow’? But it is difficult to imagine how Mary and the prince could have met, let alone mated. George did not adopt Brighton and the Sussex coast as his playground until 1784.8

Burchell’s journal entry indicates that the rumour of Balcombe as a royal bastard existed at least seven years before Napoleon came to the island to confer reflected celebrity on him. Balcombe did not dispute the story, and may indeed have encouraged it, and his indiscretion had annoyed Tyrwhitt, the prince’s long-term secretary—knighted four years later for loyalty such as this—who requested he contradict it. (Of course, if William really was the biological son of the prince and not of the fisherman Balcombe, he may have compromised an agreed cover story and deserved Tyrwhitt’s rebuke for bragging.)

The Sussex village of Rottingdean was notorious in the late eighteenth century for smuggling (brandy, wine, tobacco and French lace), the contraband brought across the Channel from France and Belgium in little boats. Rottingdean lacked shelter for larger vessels, so serious fishermen worked out of the Steine at Brighton, Stephen Balcombe perhaps among them.9 There are three differing stories concerning his drowning.

William’s great-granddaughter, Dame Mabel Brookes, while not absolutely denying ‘the possibility of a royal father’ for William, proposed in her St Helena Story that his father was ‘captain of a frigate’ who was ‘reputedly . . . lost at sea with his ship’, and that ‘the boys were educated by the King’s Bounty’ as a consequence.10 But there is no Balcombe in Syrett’s definitive lists of Commissioned Sea Officers of the Royal Navy 1660–1815.

A Rottingdean history has suggested that William’s father was a privateer in the Channel during the wars with France and drowned at sea.11 A fisherman with a substantial vessel could become a privateer by obtaining a government licence—a Letter of Marque—to attack enemy shipping and take prizes. If he was killed in action, his family might perhaps be given royal support. There are other examples of the prince’s generosity to victims of misfortune.12

The most likely theory, however, because written to Lord Bathurst by Sir Hudson Lowe, who was about to become St Helena’s next governor, had Balcombe’s father drowned in a boating accident caused by a yacht belonging to the Prince of Wales.13 After the prince moved to Brighton in 1784, advised by his physicians to take up sea bathing, it is known that ‘aquatic excursions’ became ‘his favourite amusement in the summer months’, his vessel negotiating its way through up to a hundred fishing smacks.14 The contemporary Brighton newspapers make no mention of an accident causing a death, but nor were they likely to if it implicated the prince. Newspapers of the period were hamstrung, dependent upon whichever political party supported them. While many publications demonstrated their freedom to lampoon the prince’s lubricious lifestyle, they were restricted in discussing more serious matters affecting the royal family or the state. The government ‘used secret service funds—allotted to prevent “treasonable or other dangerous conspiracies against the state”—to ensure a favourable press’.15

What is certain is that Stephen Balcombe met an untimely death, between 1784, when his youngest son was born (who died in infancy), and December 1788, when Mary, the boys’ mother, married again, to Charles Terry, a tailor.16 The wedding, at St Margaret’s Rottingdean, was held on William’s eleventh birthday.17

A year later, young William went to sea as a ‘captain’s servant’ in the Royal Navy and within two years was officially appointed a midshipman, a much-sought-after position only gained through patronage.18 Whether he was sired by a precocious prince or was merely a beneficiary of his charity after his father’s drowning (and one version does not necessarily exclude the other), it is undeniable that from an early age he enjoyed the protection and assistance of the royal go-between Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt.

Correspondence with the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle has produced acknowledgement of two illegitimate children born to George IV, but no record of a Balcombe in their files.19 Nevertheless, it is intriguing to study images of the prince and the one known portrait of William Balcombe and to perceive a distinct likeness in the wide, genial countenance, tousled curly hair, the straight nose and determined chin, the high-boned meaty cheeks, large frame and tendency to overweight . . .

If the thought occurs that Sir Thomas himself was William’s natural father, it should almost certainly be dismissed. Apart from the fact that there was not the slightest physical resemblance—Tyrwhitt was so florid and diminutive that he was known to the royal family as ‘our little red dwarf ’20—he was exactly the same age as the prince but, the son of a country parson, he was not known then or later to have sexual relations with the opposite sex.21 Tyrwhitt never married and may not even have had the sexual orientation.

Balcombe’s paternity cannot be confirmed now, and never was during the years of Napoleon’s captivity. But the rumour persisted on St Helena. Baron von Stürmer, later the Austrian commissioner based on the island, mentioned it to Prince Metternich: ‘Mr Balcombe, a trader, who is said to be the natural son of the Prince Regent . . .’22 The fact that Balcombe certainly had the otherwise inexplicable patronage of the prince’s friend and former private secretary meant there could be something to the story—so it could not be discounted by Napoleon and his retinue.

If the merchant was in fact the natural child of the prince, then no person on the island, not the governor nor the admiral, had more direct access to the centre of power in Britain. Napoleon believed that his best hope of removal from the hated rock, or at least of more lenient treatment, depended on the Prince Regent, or on the accession to the throne of his daughter Princess Charlotte. It was essential that the merchant’s friendship be nurtured.

Bonaparte was known to always act in a measured way, calculating the odds best suited to achieve his objectives. As Germaine de Staël, the great female intellectual of the era, observed of him quite early in his career: ‘I had the disturbing feeling that no emotion of the heart could ever reach him. He regards a human being like a fact or a thing, never as an equal person like himself.