He neither hates nor loves . . . The force of his will resides in the imperturbable calculations of his egotism. He is a chess-master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity . . .’23

As rain closed in, our charabanc slewed along the narrow muddy lanes, rounding hairpin bends, climbing higher. The windswept plateau on which Longwood House is built, 520 metres above the sea, is open to the south-east trades blasting across the Atlantic. Trees are misshapen and bent from their impact.

The driver directed our attention to the looming mountain called the Barn; its jagged cliffs plunging to the sea are said to be shaped like Napoleon’s profile, and indeed with a little imagination it was possible to discern an aquiline nose, chiselled lips and a severe brow.

The garden at Longwood, with agapanthus and iris in flower and the Tricolore flapping on the flagpole, is attractively wooded now, but was bare and unsheltered when the French were installed in December 1815. Napoleon was partly responsible for the improvement; in 1818, after three years of boredom, he began work, digging and planting out in the sun in loose trousers and a Chinese coolie hat, saying: ‘One day, perhaps one hundred years from now, people will visit this area and admire the garden.’24

Napoleon was five and a half years at Longwood House, longer than he ever spent at any imperial residence, for he used his palaces only between campaigns. Our tour group was guided through the rooms, shrines to the former emperor: the billiard room where he rarely played billiards but spread his old campaign maps on the table; the circular holes in the shutters where he squinted at Governor Lowe and the British guards through a telescope; the huge globe of the world, sepia with age, where the island of St Helena does not appear in the Atlantic, allegedly rubbed out by a furious finger. There is the dimly lit dining room where meals were served with formal pomp, and the emperor’s little bedchamber and sitting room, with his tricorne hat and a copy of the greatcoat he wore at the Battle of Marengo displayed on the pink chaise longue. We peered into the deep timber-clad copper bath in which he soaked for hours, reading and fretting away his life. ‘Boredom,’ wrote Gourgaud in his journal, ‘boredom, boredom, sadness . . .’ Most gloomy is the drawing room and the green-curtained campaign bed where Napoleon breathed his last on 5 May 1821.

Napoleon was unimpressed with the renovations to the sprawling and rackety farmhouse, still infested with rats. The only part he cared for was the new addition, an airy wooden reception hall with six windows and a small lattice-enclosed porch looking across to the Barn, dropping almost sheer to the ocean far below. His narrow bedroom on the ground floor adjoined a small study; an antechamber contained the one great improvement to his comfort: a deep lead-lined bath made for him by ship’s carpenters from the Northumberland (later replaced by an imported copper one), and filled from buckets heated over a fire outside.

His male companions and their wives, children and servants arrived in a cavalcade of wagons loaded with baggage and were soon squabbling about the arrangements. Although the Bertrands had precedence when they were present, Gourgaud disputed Montholon for the position near the emperor at the dinner table.

Madame Bertrand showed her usual independence of spirit by refusing the rooms offered; her family was lodged instead in a small cottage at Hutt’s Gate, about a mile distant. The Montholons were in two rooms opposite Bonaparte’s apartment, Las Cases in a former pantry near the kitchen, and his son in a cockloft above. The roof space over the old part of the house had been floored as sleeping accommodation for Cipriani, the valets Louis-Étienne Saint-Denis (known as ‘Ali’) and Marchand, and the Montholons’ maid Josephine; it was possible to stand upright only under the ridge beam and, in that intimate proximity, Josephine soon began an affair with Noverraz, the Swiss third footman. Rooms still had to be constructed for Dr O’Meara, General Gourgaud and the British orderly officer Captain Thomas Poppleton, who all had to make do with tents in the meantime and endure Longwood’s frequent downpours for over three months.

Napoleon loathed the bare surrounds of Longwood. He was incensed to be told that he could walk and ride freely in an area only 12 miles in circumference, much of it cut by ravines and therefore unusable; beyond that limit he was to be accompanied by a British officer. A complex code of signals had been issued to every sentry post, tracking the prisoner’s daily movements, whether inside the house, in the garden or within the 12-mile cordon: ‘General Bonaparte is well; General Bonaparte is unwell; General Bonaparte is properly attended’, with a blue flag to indicate the dire circumstance that ‘General Bonaparte is missing’. O’Meara considered the restrictions extraordinarily rigorous, with a sentinel guarding every landing place on the island and every goat path leading to the sea.25 After 9 pm ‘the General’ was not at liberty to leave the house at all. Sentries were posted around the garden.

Just before Christmas, the admiral received a terse letter, signed by Montholon, listing the emperor’s objections and demanding they be rectified. Cockburn responded in the same tone: ‘With regard to what is therein stated respecting an Emperor Napoleon, I have only to inform you that I have no cognizance of such a person. The very uncalled-for intemperance and indecency of the language which you have permitted yourself to use to me respecting my Government, I should not perhaps, Sir, condescend to notice, did I not think it right to inform you that I shall not in future consider it necessary to answer any letters which I may receive couched in a similar strain of unfounded invective.’26

Also in December, Lieutenant-General Sir Hudson Lowe was preparing to depart London for St Helena as Bonaparte’s official custodian. Although it has rarely been acknowledged, he was peculiarly well qualified for that role.

Lowe had been posted to Egypt early in his career. He had seen much action in Europe as attaché to Marshal Blücher; on the field at Bautzen in 1813 he had actually sighted Bonaparte.