Napoleon Symphony: "Can Burgess write on Napoleon? Of Corsican." (1)

Burgess's Novel published in 1974, based on the script he wrote for Kubrick

Last year's Ridley Scott film on Napoleon inevitably triggered memories of Kubrick's ill-fated epic, abandoned half a century earlier. The film's reported comedic traits and preoccupation with Napoleon's sex life was a feature of Anthony Burgess's script which following Kubric's rejection metamorphosed into Burgess's much under-rated, comic but unfunny novel.

The inside of the dust cover of Napoleon Symphony describes Napoleon as

inspired general, starry eyed lover, laughable cuckold, evangelising republican, great emperor, bloody tyrant, wretched invalid exile, mythic hero.

Anthony Burgess 1917-1993

Several years ago I came across a file in the Anthony Burgess Centre in Manchester containing a large number of reviews of the novel, including one from Playboy which described it as "his best novel yet", a view endorsed by Robert K. Morris in the Nation (2).

The novel was written in the early years of UK membership of what was then known as the "Common Market", and one reviewer who took this theme was Ronald Blythe, self taught Suffolk writer, author of Akenfield and collaborator with Benjamin Britten and E.M. Forster. Blythe saw the book as profoundly anti-Napoleon and anti Common Market, which views he endorsed:

What Wellington (and de Gaulle) prevented, Heath arranged.

In those days of course the main opposition to UK membership of the European Union came from the Left, which is why the then Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, called a referendum to try to keep the party together, and Blythe was a life-long Labour voter.

One American reviewer wrote on the same theme:

was a "humbled" Britain's entry into Europe's Common Market a belated fulfillment of Napoleon's long-ago war aims? Such a possibility is the final irony in Anthony Burgess's latest extravaganza. (3)

Time Magazine picked up Burgess's pessimism about England and vision of the Anglosphere, including the United States, all united under a constitutional monerchy.

It may sound positively Napoleonic, but it has vision, the vision of a bold artist who has yet to meet his Waterloo.

The novelist Kay Dick clearly did not care for Burgess, whom she rather snobbishly described as "that proverbial bright grammar school sixth former .. yet never quite beyond that sixth form humour." He was "the best barker in the English literary scene", and "a wizard with words, knows them all, uses them as often as he can" and "like his hero, Napoleon, he does not care for women to think." (4)

A number of other reviewers picked up on Burgess's treatment of Napoleon's sexuality and his relations with women. For one American writer the book was "a randy tomcat's view of the Corsican Ogre" and another saw Burgess's Napoleon as "entirely baffled by women" (5) One reviewer saw

a bad lover, as quick in sex as he is in battle..(6)

and another concluded:

Burgess has given us a Napoleon we've never known before. Invincible, crusading, charming, humble, to be sure. Also gross, profane, plagued with heartburn, flatulence, bad breath.. premature ejaculation and, obviously, self-doubt. (7)

Many reviewers made much of Burgess's Joycean love of language and music, his rather self-indulgent cleverness, and his encyclopedic knowledge and cerebrality. As for the portrait of Napoleon, a number of reviewers saw that beyond the earthy, priapic conqueror Burgess was portraying a more complex figure, the rational, Enlightenment ruler who was ultimately defeated by the English who failed to see the light, and by Slavic and German mysticism and nascent German nationalism.

Even his last ingenious construct, the great garden on Saint Helena, is uprooted by a nature drawn like the Greek fate to opposing his grandiose schemes. (8)

Victoria Glendinning's summary of Burgess's Napoleon seems very apt

.. a violent amalgam of intellect and physicality, a 'machine on top of an animal.' The machine part of him juggles with states, statesmen, school textbooks, regiments, rulers, sisters-in-law and the map of Europe. Under the brain machine his body throbs and aches. He lusts lyrically after his whorish Josephine, who dislikes his bad breath and his perfunctory performances.(9)"

Finally a reminder that the book itself was ostensibly based on Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. Its four movements were set in Egypt and Italy, Paris, Moscow and St Helena. For some reviewers it was more noise than symphony, although at least one felt that Burgess like Napoleon and Beethoven had proved that he too was a man of vision, and the Financial Times review concluded that the novel would be relished by admirers of all three! (10)

For a recent review see The Great Napoleonic Novel: "It's a sin to want to die for a nation."
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1. Ed Powers writing in Cleveland Press July 26th 1974.
2. The Nation , Aug 3rd 1974.
3. Roderick Nordell Christian Science Monitor May 29th 1974
4.The Scotsman 12 October 1974.
5. Charles A. Brady, Buffalo Evening News June 29th 1974; Martin Washburn, Village Voice July 4th 1974.
6. Newsweek May 27th 1974.
7. Rod Cockshutt, News and Observer North Carolina, June 16th 1974.
8. Mark Mirsky Washington Post May 26th 1974
9. New Statesman 27th September, 1974.
10. John D. Gates. No other identification. Isobel Murray Financial Times 26th September 1974

Elba 1814: Napoleon meets a man from Bungay.

John Barber Scott (1792-1862)

John Barber Scott was the much travelled son of a wealthy merchant from Bungay in Suffolk. His diaries, provide a fascinating glimpse of life in the Waveney valley in the first half of the nineteenth century from the perspective of the mercantile-gentry class. (1)

His early diary provides several accounts of his being in the presence of the great people of his day: Byron speaking in the House of Lords in support of the Luddites and again at the opening of the Drury Lane New Theatre; the exiled Louis XVIII speaking at Cambridge; a Bible Society meeting in Dover at which Lord Liverpool and Wilberforce were present; Madame de Staël at her booksellers in Bond Street; and accompanying 150 Cambride graduates with a petition to the Prince Regent congratulating him on the victories of 2013 in the presence of too many Dukes and Lords to mention.

Waveney House, Bungay

He was also outside the doors of Westminster Abbey on the day of George IV's coronation, and "saw the doings of the Queen Caroline." (2) He noted the coronation celebrations in Bungay, at which his father gave a feast to 300 of the poorer citizens of the town in front of Waveney House. He also noted

A Queen riot in the evening, when all the flags and laurels in the town were pulled down and destroyed, except those of my father, which were not touched.(3)

Probably the most memorable day of Scott's life occurred in 1814 when like a number of his countrymen, including future Prime Minister Lord John Russell, Scott made his way to a small island off the Italian coast, in the hope of seeing the legendary Napoleon Bonaparte, now for a short time Emperor of Elba.

Souvenir that Scott brought back from Elba

Initially Scott was unimpressed with Napoleon, "the figure that has awed emperors and kings, has gained victory on victory, and the sight of whom has been equivalent to ten thousand men on the field of battle ", now appeared a "graceless figure so clumsy and awkward" whose countenance seemed to "indicate stupidity", and who had " a very large corporation, and his thighs are large - out of all proportion." Scott did however, correctly estimate Napoleon's height,which was rather greater than British caricature and propaganda suggested "about five feet seven inches", about average height for his day. (4)

Like many who were to meet him on St Helena, Scott was soon charmed by Napoleon. He noted his constant half-smile, "which gives one a feeling of confidence and ease. His eyes are remarkably expressive and quick, his voice is deep, his entire manner indicates great talent and he certainly inspires respect" (5)

Napoleon spent 22 minutes talking to Scott and his companions, and betrayed his usual curiosity, peppering them with questions. To a Scottish artillery officer he said, "They say you don't have any trousers " and being told that Scottish soldiers did indeed wear "skirts" asked if the officer had them with him, and was disappointed that the answer was no:"Je voudrais bien les voir." (6) When it came to Scott's turn to be questioned he declared that as yet he had no profession but was a member of the University of Cambridge, which Napoleon had trouble pronouncing, "Quoi? Camerige" Camerige? " Napoleon then decided that one day Scott would become Lord Chancellor, and asked if "Skine - kini- Erskine" still held that position, to which the polite young Scott addressing Napoleon as "Sire " informed him that Lord Eldon was the Lord Chancellor, to which Napoleon characteristically replied, "ah yes, I remember."(7)

At the end of the conversation Napoleon took off his hat and bowed to them, which people who knew him claimed he had never done before. Scott and his companions, all army officers,

were so delighted with the reception he gave us that I must confess we drank "Napoleon" unanimously, in a bumper, on our return - a part of the afternoon on which, upon reflection I feel rather ashamed (8)

Apparently Napoleon invited them to meet him again the next day, but because of the slowness of one of their party, Major Maxwell at his toilette they were too late. Scott was convinced that had they arrived sooner they would have been invited to accompany Napoleon and his party on a three day trip to the island of Pianosa. From his boat Napoleon again took off his hat and bowed to them two or three times.

we have been so fortunate that we ought not to lament anything; yet we cannot help abusing Maxwell. .. We remained a long time on the shore looking at the boat which bore this wonderful man away. (9)

Scott speculated that Napoleon might escape from Elba, but "where to go?", perhaps to Italy to "erect her into an independent kingdom." On the return journey he conversed with a Frenchman who had told General Bertrand that he thought Napoleon would not remain long in Elba. Bertrand, who within a year was to faithfully follow Napoleon to St Helena, told him that Napoleon was content, and that he would always remain on Elba! (10)

Scott came from a Tory background, and had accompanied his father in campaigning against Coke of Holkham, the Foxite Whig and famous agricultural reformer, and would himself have gone into politics but for his father's loss of much of his wealth. Unsurprisingly then, for all his admiration of Napoleon, Scott's reaction to Waterloo and Napoleon's death was fairly conventional. On hearing of the Waterloo victory he recorded with characteristic Loyalist hyperbole, "the days of Agincourt and Cressy are come again." In his diary he wrote at some length on the news of Napoleon's death.

This extraordinary man is no more! He has closed his mortal career, leaving behind him but the name of one on whom the gaze of mankind was more intensely fixed than on any that has found a place in the pages of history. His end, however questionable the justice of his treatment in his latter days, is a fine lesson of the vanity of what has too often been called greatness.

He concluded with the hope that Napoleon's death

may do more to strip of their tinsel the Alexanders and Caesars of the world than any event that ever occurred.(11)

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1. An Englishman at Home and Abroad 1792-1828 (London 1930) and An Englishman at Home and Abroad 1829-1862 (Bungay 1996)
2. Caroline, the estranged Queen of George IV was denied admittance to the coronation. There was much popular support for her in England, particularly among the radicals.
3. Diary 1792-1828 p. 190. Perhaps the generous feast given to the poor was the reason why Scott's decorations were spared.
4. Diary 1792-1828 pp 96-98.
5. Diary p. 102
6. "I would very much like to see them". Diary 1792-1828 p. 99
7. ibid
8. Diary 1792-1828 p. 102.
9. Diary 1792-1828 p.103 ,br> 10. Diary 1792-1828 p 107
11. Diary p 188-189

Britain's Wars against Napoleon: Two Reviews

I have recently read two books with very different perspectives on the British Government's wars against Napoleon. David Andress intertwines diplomacy, war and the domestic challenges often brutally faced down by Britain's rulers. He approaches the wars from the viewpoint taken by most British historians: Napoleon wasn't serious about peace, and presented a challenge which had to be defeated.

I do not like the Emperor Napoleon but am prepared to forgive the Duke of Wellington for his outrageous snobbery in the light of his many other virtues.(1)

So Napoleon is never given the benefit of any doubt. He is described in language that makes it clear that he was a thoroughly bad lot. We find him therefore revealing "the depths of his dictatorial nature" having " a growing sense of absolute and monarchical power " and "snuffing out the last lingering elements of the Dutch Republic ." (2)

Despite this declared bias Andress paints a bleak picture of Britain during the wars against France. It was a time of low wages, high living costs and sometimes famine, mass revolt in Ireland, mutiny in the fleet, fear of the press gang, and a time of great corruption. The elite he admits cared nothing about the costs of war, had contempt for the rights of ordinary people, pursued a witch hunt against radicals, and used a vast network of spies and informers against its internal enemies.

He describes in detail the concentration of large numbers of troops in Manchester, Lancashire, the Midlands and Yorkshire that were used to suppress the Luddites, but is still convinced that despite the "brutal suppression" of popular protest, which he describes as "shocking and tragic", the elite received "stout patriotic support from the mass of the population." Less controversially he concludes that the net result was the revival of

"aristocratic sense of imperial mission, the revival of hierarchy, a monarchical, paternalistic social order. It was a mark of the resilience of the British elite that it faced all those challenges and prospered. (3)

Tim Clayton, as his book's title suggests, takes a rather darker view. Whilst making it clear that the book is not a defence of Napoleon, he suggests that while there may have been a germ of truth in British propaganda about Napoleon, the "monster" created was a gross exaggeration and Britain's enduring enmity pushed him to extremes that he probably would not otherwise have entertained and ultimately led to his downfall. It was Britain, not Napoleon that wouldn't make peace.

In his view what kept the long wars against France going was the determination of many in its ruling circles to stamp out the last vestiges of the French Revolution at home as well as overseas. So the final wars in the century long struggle for supremacy between Britain and France were in short more about ideology than realpolitik. It was not so much Britain as the British oligarchic system that was under threat, until the "usurper" was safely on St Helena and "legitimacy" restored to the throne of France

Attentat de la rue Saint-Nicaise à Paris contre le 1er consul, le 3 nivôse au 9 (24 décembre 1800)

Clayton's focus is on the British state's undercover struggle against Napoleon. This included incitements to civil war, the distribution of fake currency in France and the most mendacious propaganda campaign the world had yet seen. The propaganda was not only designed to destroy Napoleon's reputation and to undermine support for him and the ideas of the French Revolution at home as well as in France, but also to make the assassination attempts which the British Government sponsored seem acceptable. (4)

On December 24th 1800, very early in Napoleon's period of power, royalist insurgents detonated a bomb, the machine infernale, intended to kill Napoleon as he left for the theatre. On arrival at the theatre Napoleon remarked, "Those bastards tried to blow me up. Have someone bring me the libretto of Haydn's oratorio." This attempt, the first ever use of a bomb in an assassination attempt killed and wounded many and destroyed a number of buildings. It was financed by the British Government, and most of the conspirators had been transported from Britain to France in British naval ships. (5)

1801 Watercolour by Thomas Girton showing bomb damage

In 1804 a more elaborate plan was plotted by Royalists in London whose agents, Jean-Charles Pichegru and Georges Cadoudal were secretly landed in France on a British ship captained by John Wesley Wright.(6) The plot was uncovered and the agents hunted down. It initiated a chain of events which led to the death of the duc d'Enghien and the decision to make Napoleon an hereditary monarch, an attempt to provide stability and to make assassination less attractive.

The British Government went to extreme lengths to hide its involvement in this plot. Lord Hawkesbury, soon to inherit the title Lord Liverpool and to become a long serving Prime Minister (1812-27), had all the incriminating letters removed from the Foreign Office. He also bought similarly incriminating papers from the children of Francis Drake, Ambassador to Bavaria, one of the most senior British officials involved in undercover plots against Napoleon. (7)

Clayton concludes that Napoleon was no more tyrannical than any ancien regime monarch and less than most of the regimes set up after his downfall, but Britain's rulers were confident of their ability ultimately to beat the French:

Britain was superior to France at sea and financially, and a lot of people appreciated it. It bred an unattractive sense of national superiority and self-satisfaction that survives today even though the underlying conditions have changed totally. (8)

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1.David Andress Beating Napoleon, How Britain faced down her greatest challenge (London 2012) p XIV
2. Andress pp 136-7.
3. Andress p 381
4. The 1657 pamphlet Killing No Murderreappared in the 1790's to justify the execution of Louis XVI. It was subseqyuently used to justify the assassination of Napoleon.
5. Tim Clayton This Dark Business, The secret war against Napoleon (London 2018) pp.7,9. The watercolour by Thomas Girtin was described by him as showing, "Part of the Tuileries the palace where Buonaparte resides .. and the ruins of the houses blown up by the infernal machine." Clayton opp p. 135.
6. Wright was subsequently captured and died in prison in 1805. Clayton accepts the French Government view that he committed suicide. Clayton p. 354.
7. He also paid them an annuity on condition that publication was suppressed. Clayton p 356.
8. Clayton pp 347-349

The Emperor's Shadow : The Strange Story of the Balcombes

The Emperor's Shadow, London 2015

The author has done a tremendous amount of research, and has gathered together a large amount of information on the Balcombe family, much of which was unknown to me at least. Her basic thesis is that Napoleon, the calculating arch-manipulator, cultivated the Balcombe family because of their connection to the Prince Regent through their benefactor, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt.(1)

"He had no intention of adjusting to the situation; he would devise how best to escape from it - and the Balcombe family might just offer an avenue. Meanwhile, surprisingly, there was some pleasure to be had.(2)

And of course whilst Napoleon may have enjoyed himself, Mme de Staël's somewhat biased judgement of him is endorsed:

"doubtless there was calculation on his part even amid the fun and silly games. He knew the accounts of them .. made him seem sympathetic, humanised him." (3)

The author makes a good case for Betsy being several months pregnant at the time of her marriage to Edward Abell in 1822. This she suggests may be the reason the marriage took place at Exminster, rather than Chudleigh where the Balcombes had been living. The author also makes a good case for her daughter being born in St Omer in France, away from the gossip of London and Devon.(4)

As for the bridegroom Edward Abell, solid facts are a bit thin on the ground. He was an Indian Army Officer, about 11 years older than Betsy, and the author speculates that they may have met on St Helena four years earlier when his ship docked. The evidence suggests that he married Betsy because of her family's connections. The author speculates that he may have impregnated Betsy deliberately so that he could marry her, "maybe he heard stories that her father was the natural son of George IV." Abell soon deserted Betsy, but later followed her to Australia, intending to sue William Balcombe for keeping his wife from him. (5)

The book sheds light on the deal which Balcombe made with Hudson Lowe to support him in his case against O'Meara. This cleared the way for Balcombe's appointment as Colonial Treasurer in New South Wales, where he spent the remaining five years of his life, and some of his heirs were to prosper. (See the Melbourne Blogger for more information on the Australian connection.)

Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt (1762-1833)

Over all the manoeuvering on St Helena and off presided Balcombe's mysterious benefactor, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt. Tyrwhitt met Lowe in 1815 before he sailed to St. Helena and helped Balcombe secure his lucrative role procuring supplies for Longwood. It was he who came to Balcombe's aid when Lowe and Lord Bathurst began to have suspicions about his relations with Longwood. It was Tyrwhitt who strongly advised Balcombe to leave the island, whilst at the same time flattering Lowe with Royal gossip and making clear his lack of sympathy with the Whigs who were critical of Lowe's treatment of Napoleon.

Lord Holland is in a week or two to give us a Display upon Napoleon's Calamities; but as long as you keep him close, nobody cares for speeches.(6)

It was also probably Tyrwhitt who got the Times to retract a story that the Balcombes had been forced to leave St Helena, and it was Tyrwhitt who again met with Lowe and brokered the deal that removed Lowe's objection to Balcombe's subsequent colonial appointment. (7)

Balcombe, despite his association with Longwood House and Napoleon, was far better connected in London and better rewarded than Sir Hudson Lowe who had done the dirty business of the Liverpool Administration. On return from St Helena, Balcombe is to be found in the company of Sir Pulteney Malcolm and Admiral Sir George Cockburn, neither of them admirers of Sir Hudson Lowe. He is also interviewed three times by Lord Bathurst, who had to endure Lowe's endless long letters from St. Helena and perhaps was looking for an alternative source of information. Bathurst did however over-rule Balcombe's wish to return to St. Helena in 1819.

The author's conclusion about the famous relationship between Betsy and Napoleon is perhaps worth quoting, although it does overlook Napoleon's acknowledged love of children.

Betsy had brought out the best in Napoleon, that complex, brilliant, calculating and turbulent man, severely formal with others but always approachable for her. She had loved him and she would never recover from knowing him.(8)

Overall I have to admit that this book is really not to my taste. It meanders over some 400 pages, and includes material on Peterloo, the Cato Conspiracy, Queen Caroline, the Royal Divorce, the King's Coronation and much else besides. It includes a great deal of speculation and also gives an account of the the extensive travels the author undertook on her research. A more concise, factual treatment would have suited me far better, although I appreciate that I am a far from typical reader. Nevertheless it is a very useful source for anyone interested in the Balcombes and the story of their association with Napoleon,
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1. Apparently the Prince Regent was unusually loyal to Tyrwhitt but he didn't take his advice on the Royal Divorce Bill and it was Tyrwhitt who had to present the divorce bill to Queen Caroline. Whitehead pp 257-259. Tyrwhitt had a number of nicknames among the royal family: ‘the Dwarf’, the ‘twenty third [sic] of June’ or ‘the shortest night’; ‘Saint Thomas’ from ‘the shortest day’, and so to ‘the Saint’.
2. Whitehead pp 54-55. The author says that says that Napoleon would have remembered Tyrwhitt's visit to Paris in 1801 as secretary and emissary of the Prince Regent.
3. Mme de Staël is uncritically quoted at some length in support of the author's view, concluding with, "he is a chess-master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity". She also quotes Philip Dwyer in claiming that Napoleon dispensed with people when they ceased to be useful. One does wonder about his tolerance of Talleyrand and Fouché in this respect! Anne Whitehead, The Emperor's Shadow, Bonaparte, Betsy and the Balcombes (London 2015) pp 49,62, 94
The author also exaggerates Napoleon's desire to escape, which was virtually non-existent, but which nevertheless understandably preoccupied Hudson Lowe and Lord Bathurst. For example the author comments on a conversation between Napoleon and Admiral Pulteney Malcolm in which the latter said had rowed around the island, that it was "useful information that a rowing boat could approach the cliffs." Whitehead p. 129.
4. Whitehead pp 281,300, 330.
5. The author and I disagree whether William Balcombe was actually at the wedding. I have a copy of the certificate and am pretty certain that the first signatory was Jane Balcombe, not William Balcombe. It could of course be Betsy's mother, but her mother although known as Jane was christened Emma Jane.
According to Betsy, Abell later admitted that he never had any affection for her, and that "he merely married under the hope of gaining something good thru my father and his exalted interests. " Letter from Betsy to Major-General Sir Henry Torrens, 10 August 1824, quoted in Whitead pp330-332.
6. Tyrwhitt to Hudson Lowe, Dec 8th 1817, quoted in Whithead p 191.
7. Whitehead pp 203-4, 282-4.
8. Whitehead p 197

THE REAL NAPOLEON - John Tarttelin

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Napoleon in Egypt(1868)

John Tarttelin is a Fellow of the International Napoleonic Society, and a recipient of the society's Legion of Merit. THE REAL NAPOLEON, The Untold Story (GB 2013) is dedicated to the memory of Ben Weider, the founder of the society, and it should perhaps come as no surprise to find that John is no fence sitter. The book's cover with its capitalised title and modified painting of Napoleon demands our attention.

Even before the preface a quote from Napoleon sets out the author's intent

The great works and monuments that I have executed, and the code of laws that I formed, will go down to the most distant ages, and future historians will avenge the wrongs done to me by my contemporaries.

Sunburst representing the Englightenment added by the author

The book puts much emphasis on Napoleon as an Englightenment figure, and reminds us that 177 scientists accompanied him on his Egyptian campaign. There is also a useful checklist of Napoleon's attributes that are too often overlooked by those keen to paint a negative portrait.

• a phenomenal memory and capacity for concentration and hard work
• kindness to his servants and people of all ranks
• his approachability to his soldiers
• the only ruler who promoted careers open to talent
• tolerance of people who were disloyal to him - Fouche, Talleyrand and Bernadotte
• passion for intellectual enquiry- he sought out the great minds of his time
• voracious reader of history and literature
• support of the rights of Jewish people

The author reminds us of the support the British Government gave to Royalist attempts to assassinate Napoleon. He also correctly disputes the conventional British view which holds Napoleon personally responsible for all the wars that were later to bear his name. As he points out, the Liverpool Government and its allies were determined to "snuff out equality and restore privilege." After the wars Britain actively encouraged Louis XVIII to use far more severe repression against Bonapartists than any Napoleon had carried out against his opponents, but such repression was of course common place in the United Kingdom at the time.

Ultimately of course the struggle with Napoleon was not just about the threat that the ideas of the Englightenment and the French Revolution posed to the established order. Britain's payrolling of all the coalitions against France over two decades was the climax of its century long struggle for European and World domination. In this contest the continental land wars were to some extent a sideshow. The real victory was being forged in the cotton mills of Lancashire, but that is another story, and outside the terms of reference of this book!

I have to admit that I find the book a little disjointed and bitty, and the language is very unacademic, perhaps as befits the times in which we live. I do not have a taste for polemicism, nor for hero worship, and on Napoleon in particular I have been a fence sitter, as I indicated some eight years ago when I thought my blogging was nearing its end! But I do share John's revulsion at the treatment of Napoleon by many historians and particularly by the British press, so maybe he has finally got me off the fence.

Over the past decade I have covered the views of a number of Whigs and Radicals who refused to accept Government propaganda about Napoleon, admired much of what he had achieved, and compared the UK unfavourably with contemporary France. On any rational basis of comparison they were right to do so.

John's quote from one British academic historian, Clive Elmsley is worth reproducing

there's no dispute that Napoleon launched modern Europe. He completely redrew the map, he swept away ramshackle governments, modernized administrations, and he didn't just do this in France, but in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and .. in what is now Belgium."

I may add that when coming across British or more exactly English chauvinists I always find it ironic to remember that Napoleon was the hero of the man who not long ago was voted the greatest ever Englishman, Sir Winston Churchill no less.

This Dark Business

John Tarttelin, the author of The Real Napoleon, The Untold Story, has drawn my attention to a new book by Tim Clayton which describes the secret attempts of the British Government to remove Napoleon from power by whatever means necessary, including of course assassination.

The publisher's synopsis is worth quoting:

We have been taught to think of Napoleon as the aggressor - a man with an unquenchable thirst for war and glory - but what if this story masked the real truth: that the British refusal to make peace either with revolutionary France or with the man who claimed to personify the revolution was the reason this Great War continued for more than twenty years? At this pivotal moment when it consolidated its place as number one world power Britain was uncompromising. To secure the continuing rule of Church and King, the British invented an evil enemy, the perpetrator of any number of dark deeds; and having blackened Napoleon's name, with the help of networks of French royalist spies and hitmen, they also tried to assassinate him.

None of this comes as a surprise to me, nor would it have surprised the many contemporary opposition figures who refused to accept the Loyalist caricature of Napoleon as the "Corsican Ogre".

John Tarttellin's own book, which was published over 5 years ago but which I only found out about recently, takes a similar view. I picked up the following from its online description:

He was not short, he was often generous and he seldom forgot a friend, particularly those from his early days before he was famous. France was attacked in 1802, 1805, 1806, 1807, 1809 and 1814 - yet it is always Napoleon who is blamed for the so-called Napoleonic Wars, a misnomer if ever there was one.

That is as concise a rebuttal of the conventional UK view of Napoleon as I have seen. Andrew Roberts's Napoleon the Great does a similar job, but in far more words!

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Napoleon’s Representative on Earth : "I am the keeper of the empty tomb"

To the Saints, Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, the Honorary French Consul and Curator of the French Properties on St. Helena, is simply “THE Frenchman”, but to many tourists he is, along with Jonathan the 185 year old tortoise that resides at Plantation House, one of the curiosities of the island.

Apparently French visitors just want to meet him, and often have little or nothing to say. Those from the English world seem to be more loquacious, sometimes telling him how much they disapprove of the work he has done at Longwood House. Michel recounts in detail one such meeting with three British visitors in 2016. The first, a Hong Kong resident, asked him what Napoleon would have thought of Brexit, and said that now it would no longer be politically incorrect to quote Lord Nelson: "you must hate a Frenchman as much as you hate the Devil." He also added that it would now not be necessary to follow the dictatorial directives of Brussels. "Delivered with such arrogance" said another who now resides in Port Elizabeth, with the approbation of the third, the only one to live in the UK!

The title of the book was given unwittingly by a man Michel met at the Castle in Jamestown, the centre of Government on the island. The man, whom Michel did not know, voicing the typical contempt of the Saints for officialdom, said that they all perfected the art of seeming indispensable even when they were only in charge of the broom cupboard. But Michel he said excelled them all: he had received the Légion d'Honneur for looking after an empty tomb!

Michel Dancoisne-Martineau and Inger Tyrrell, in Les Invalides, a non-empty tomb. (April 2016)

This is a fascinating read for anyone interested in St. Helena, but more than that, it provides a frank account of Michel’s own amazing story. Napoleon once was reported to have said “What a novel my life has been.” Michel could justifiably say the same. Growing up as the youngest and eighth child in a poor, conservative, religious farming family in Picardy, Michel knew nothing about Napoleon other than a nursery rhyme, although curiously he played as a child in the ruined fortress at Ham, from which the future Napoleon III and the Count de Montholon had escaped in 1846. It was Michel's meeting with Gilbert Martineau that changed his life.

Although an agricultural student, Michel had developed an interest in literature, and particularly in Lord Byron. So he wrote to Gilbert, the author of a recent biography of Byron, they corresponded a few times, and eventually they met. Apprised of Michel's very unhappy childhood, within a few hours of their meeting Gilbert astonished Michel by saying he would like to adopt him. Then, as later, Gilbert was distressed to find that others suspected his motives, but as he protested to Michel, "I want a son, not a lover". He also wanted someone to take over from him on St Helena. He had reached retirement age, and after some four years nobody had applied for the job!

So Michel was adopted, and soon succeeded his adopted father as French Consul and Curator of the French Properties, a job which he has filled with distinction and increasing confidence over 30 years. His aim was to make Longwood a place of memory, not a museum of the greatness of France, which he felt it had become in Gilbert's time. With some satisfaction he claims that after a century of indifference, ordinary Saints have now become aware of the importance of the years of exile and the death of Napoleon on their island.

A young Gilbert Martineau

The book affords an interesting insight into Gilbert Martineau. A proud Gaullist who had moved in the highest intellectual circles in Paris in the decade after the second world war, Gilbert was determined to maintain French prestige on St Helena. A recluse for whom appearances were all important, he remained on the island for some 40 years, interspersed with lengthy trips back to his home on Ars-en-Ré, an island he loved. For many years Gilbert's life on St Helena was shared by his parents. His mother died on the island, and his father died at breakfast the day after they arrived back in France with her embalmed body.

Gilbert was apparently respected by many Saints for being able to contact the recently dead, and claimed to be in touch with Lord Byron, and through him to spirits on the "other side". After Gilbert's death Michel consigned his ashes to the Atlantic, close but not too close to St Helena, the island to which he had dedicated his life and to which he was irrevocably attached, but which at the same time he actually hated.

Michel clearly differed from Gilbert on many things, but his love and admiration for him shines through: his intellectual sophistication, his verve, his presence, his art of living, the scars he bore, his elegance. Whether he or anyone else ever got close to Gilbert is another matter.

There is much in the book about the changes to St Helena over the 30 years, and many anecdotes about locals and about expatriates and the hostility of a number of the latter to the French presence on the island. Unlike Gilbert, Michel has mixed freely with ordinary Saints, and it was their relaxed, accepting approach to life, the ambient amoralism, that attracted him to the island. He writes openly about his bisexuality, and among the most surprising encounters was his seduction at the age of 19 by a 71 year old Countess, a friend of Gilbert's whom he assures us was still very beautiful and looked at least 20 years younger! He writes also of the sexual mores on St Helena, and of the tolerant and at times rather surprising reception he has received, living in an openly gay relationship on an island which has still not legally accepted same-sex marriage.

The very last sentence in the book, which does not translate easily into English, acknowledges Michel’s mother who confirmed all the awful details of his early life. Elle le fit avec un simplicité et une aisance dont je luis d'autant plus reconaissant que je ne lui en soupçonnais pas l'aptitude.*

Michel's book has already gone into a second printing in France. It is a pity that it is unlikely ever to be translated into English. Whether it will succeed in Michel's aim of making him less of an object of curiosity is I fear rather unlikely.
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* My best effort at a very loose translation: She did so with a simplicity and ease which made more impression on me because I did not think she was capable of it.

Imperial Exile: The Napoleon Diaries

Imperial Exile by James Hartley, now published on Kindle

Everybody around him at Longwood wrote their accounts of Napoleon's exile, but until now we have not heard from the man himself! Only joking! This is a work of fiction!

Some time ago I was in correspondence with James Hartley about the book he was then writing on Napoleon and St. Helena. It turned out to be a rather long labour of love?, and James has now decided to publish it on Kindle. I understand that it is going live tomorrow, which happens to be Napoleon's 248th birthday!

The Keeper of the Empty Tomb - new book by Michel Dancoisne-Martineau

Michel Dancoisne-Martineau has just produced another book. This time an account of his life since he left France for St.Helena at the age of 18.

It is just over a year since Michel told us that he had signed a contract for this book. I wondered whether it was a good idea: he is a very private person, and doesn't welcome the intrusions into his life by the press and by tourists on St. Helena. He hopes that this book will still the interest in him, and enable him to focus on the Napoleonic heritage which has been his life's work. I hope he is right.

The book's title is a fairly typical expression of Michel's dry sense of humour and his self-deprecating manner. A remarkable, energetic and multi-talented man, he has led an unusual but very productive life on St. Helena. When he eventually retires, it will be a very hard act to follow. I look forward to reading this book when it becomes available on 10th May.

Postscript Review of Je suis le gardien du tombeau vide

Napoleon's Rosebud

Humphry Knipe, a descendant of the Knipe family from St Helena, has written an historical novel about Napoleon and Humphry's much admired Great Great Grand Aunt Charlotte. It is not really the kind of thing I read, but maybe some readers of this blog will be interested, and may like to nominate "Napoleon's Rosebud for publication by Kindle.

Black Rock by Louise Hoole

The latest historical novel on Napoleon, by Louise Hoole

The daughter of a former Governor of St. Helena, Louise Hoole spent a number of her early years on the island, fell in love with it, and has subsequently done a great deal of research into the captivity of Napoleon.

The divide between "history" and "literature" is not as clear cut as many imagine, but having admitted that, I should declare that I am not a great fan of historical novels. I cannot fully understand why an author puts considerable effort into research, and then writes a book which contradicts the findings of that research! Despite that reservation I must admit that I enjoyed Black Rock . I particularly admire the economy and precision of Louise Hoole's writing. The first few pages convinced me that I would have to read further:

I staggered to my feet, wrapped a pillow around my head, and forced myself to suffer the appalling pain of movement. The shriek of the doorknob as I turned it was like that of a man losing a limb.

As I entered the billiard room, the dreadful noises seemed to die down as quickly as they had begun. I closed my eyes .. When I opened them again, I found myself looking down upon a body. I recognised immediately that it was my own.

The novel explores the motives and feelings of those who shared Napoleon's exile on St. Helena, and as the author admits in an appendix, she is persuaded by the research of Ben Weider that Napoleon was poisoned by one of his own followers, perhaps because of their hidden Bourbon sympathies.

The novel also attempts to explore Napoleon's own feelings, by making him, or rather his ghost, the narrator of most of the chapters. This is a task beyond the capabilities of a mere historian: Napoleon kept no diary and confided in nobody; the voluminous first hand accounts of the captivity all take an external view of the main player. The only other very different attempt that I have come across was the journalist Jean-Paul Kauffman's The Dark Room at Longwood, which is among the secondary sources Louise Hoole cites in an appendix. Lord Rosebery's, Napoleon the Final Phase is also mentioned in the same place. Like Rosebery, Louise Hoole has a lot of time for General Gourgaud, perhaps because of his lack of deference to Napoleon, and she even extends Gourgaud's actual stay on the island by three years!

Appropriately perhaps for a former resident of Plantation House, Ms. Hoole implies that Governor Hudson Lowe's failed career and shattered reputation was all the design of Napoleon. I am persuaded that Lowe, an appropriate tool and a scapegoat for an unpopular British Government, had more than a hand in his own downfall. Napoleon's aim was to secure his own return to Europe from an exile that he thought was totally unjustified and a betrayal of the confidence he had shown in surrendering to the British Government. Within that framework Lowe was little more than an irritation, and his appointment an insult. But hey, this is a novel, and an enjoyable one at that! I look forward to hearing Louise Hoole's talk at the next meeting of the Friends of St Helena.

"Napoleon the Great" - new book by Andrew Roberts

"Napoleon the Great" - by Andrew Roberts

Biographies of Napoleon come thick and fast, and doubtless more will follow as we near the bicentenary of Waterloo. The latest is the work of the Conservative British historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon and Wellington and Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble , who visited St Helena last year.

The publishers' blurb makes interesting reading:

It has become all too common for Napoleon Bonaparte's biographers to approach him as a figure to be reviled, bent on world domination, practically a proto-Hitler. Here, after years of study extending even to visits paid to St Helena and 53 of Napoleon's 56 battlefields, Andrew Roberts has created a true portrait of the mind, the life, and the military and above all political genius of a fundamentally constructive ruler. This is the Napoleon, Roberts reminds us, whose peacetime activity produced countless indispensable civic innovations - and whose Napoleonic Code provided the blueprint for civil law systems still in use around the world today.

Andrew Roberts at Longwood House in 2013

Anybody with any awareness of epistemology and/or the philosophy of history would be a little uncomfortable with claims to have produced "a true portrait", but nevertheless it will be interesting to read Roberts' work alongside Soldier of Destiny by Michael Broers, published earlier this year.

I also notice that on October 8th a debate is to take place in London between Roberts and Adam Zamoyski, author of 1812. Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow and Rites of Peace. The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna :

all mention of Napoleon as ‘great’, ‘hero’, ‘villain’ or ‘monster’ has Adam Zamoyski running for the hills, bemused why – in his opinion – this rather ordinary man excites such passion in otherwise level-head intelligent people.

The debate is to be chaired by Jeremy Paxman no less.

Napoleon in America: "I should have stayed on St Helena"

Napoleon wrote a novel in his youth, in exile on St Helena described his life as one, and over the past two centuries inspired quite a few others. The latest Napoleonic novel, by the Canadian author Shannon Selin, provides an alternate history: instead of dying on St Helena in 1821 Napoleon escaped to America and continued his action packed life there.

The book's great strength lies in the depth of its research. The author claims to have consulted some 300 sources in order to tell "a plausible whopper", and at the end provides a list of over 100 major and minor historical characters whom she has to a greater or lesser extent researched. Inevitably in an alternate history some had their lives changed: one Napoleonic General's life was truncated by 40 years; the very young wife of another, in real life to live until 1880, succumbed to the ex-Emperor's rather clumsy advances.

The author presents a very broad historical canvas: London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Washington, New Orleans and numerous lesser places. St Helena, "a dark wart in the Atlantic", according to the racy blurb on the back cover, is dismissed in a single short chapter, which concludes poetically with Hudson Lowe staring at the ocean from a window in Longwood House, his career "splintering as rapidly as the silvery ripples that broke upon the shore." I am not convinced that it is possible to see the ocean from Longwood House, but a little literary license is excusable! One might also note that Hudson Lowe's future career was not much better in real life.

The author makes effective use of direct speech, letters and newspaper cuttings to set the contemporary scene and describe the events that unfold and the reactions to them. Here you will find the Bonaparte family on two continents, Francis 1st of Austria, Metternich, Wellington, Canning, John Quincy Adams, Monroe, Louis XVIII and the Count of Artois, Lafayette and the French opposition, Bonapartists and Liberals. Here too one can read about the machinations of the Holy Alliance, its members united in little except a fear of revolution and a hatred of Napoleon, the tensions within France's newly restored and somewhat precarious Bourbon monarchy and also within the British Government over France's invasion of Spain. Here too the author intelligently explores the concerns of the young American Republic, the ex-Emperor in its midst, desperate to avoid entanglement with the politics of the old world, still wary of British naval power which less than a decade earlier had burned down the White House under the command of the same Admiral who was later to escort Napoleon to St Helena, but with its own expansionist impulses and, like all the European powers, concerned about the fate of Spain's empire in the Americas.

The novel does not explore Napoleon's character in any great depth, this is thankfully no psychological novel, but it brings out his gaucheness towards women and his great love for the son whom he had not seen for a decade. The author has a lightness of touch and a sense of humour, most noticeable in her frequent references to Napoleon's sense of destiny. At one point she makes Napoleon say, "There is no role for me here. I should have stayed on St. Helena.", a reference to his comment that he should have stayed in Egypt, when he first saw the forbidding rock of St Helena in 1815. She also neatly captures the egotism of the Duke of Wellingon, who claimed that everything was turning out precisely as he had predicted: "How nice it would be, thought Dorothea [von Lieven, wife of the Russian Minister and Metternich's mistress], to one day meet a man who did not mind saying, "I was wrong.""

I am not a great reader of historical novels, and try to avoid counterfactual history, so had I not been volunteered by Simon Pipes of St Helena Online, I almost certainly would never have read Napoleon in America. To my surprise though I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the turbulent post Waterloo period.

Napoleon as "careful pragmatist"

I read quite a lot of biography, but generally find biographies of Napoleon uninteresting: there are too many of them, they tend to be over long, few seem to me to get remotely close to the man, and too often they reveal more about the authors' own prejudices.

The latest biography by Oxford historian Michael Broers looks to have addressed the problem of externality: it is the first to have benefited from the publication of Napoleon's complete correspondence in 2004. This the publishers claim is "the first life in which Napoleon speaks in his own voice, but not always as he wanted the world to hear him."

According to the Financial Times it is a nuanced study and does not view Napoleon through the "prism of 20th-century totalitarianism."

The publisher's summary of the Napoleon revealed by the biography seems spot on to me: "a man of intense emotion, but also of iron self-discipline; of acute intelligence and immeasurable energy. .. the sheer determination, ruthlessness and careful calculation that won him the precarious mastery of Europe by 1807 .."

The FT reviewer picked out a number of points from the biography which seem eminently sensible judgements to me:

1. Only a positive optimistic mind would have thought about progressive reform to the degree Napoleon did all his life.

2. He had to work hard to try to hang on to what power he had won. Caution and self-discipline were necessary in the revolutionary climate in which he emerged to power.

3. He had a deep fear of popular assemblies. I always found it ironic that on St Helena, reading about the Peterloo Massacre, Napoleon showed no sympathy for Orator Hunt and the men and women who had assembled to demand parliamentary reform in Manchester in 1819. The radical reformers of course had great sympathy and admiration for Napoleon, and at previous meetings had expressly dissociated themselves from the British Government's action in imprisoning him on St Helena.

4. He relied greatly on committees to govern, recognising and promoting talent, and often deferring to the opinion of others.

5. Far from being a "paranoid psychopath", he took his revenge bloodlessly. The execution of the Duke of Enghien, "a stooge of the British ", was far from typical. His whole philosophy was one of ralliement and amalgame, atttempts to persuade reactionaries of the error of their ways and to promote cooperation between former reactionaries and revolutionaries in the new France.

6. A simple but obvious point: Napoleon's expansionism began as a riposte to the alliance of Britain, Russia and Austria, rather than from the megalomanic tendencies so beloved of many of his modern biographers.

Perhaps most important of all, the author recognises that never before in human history had anyone from outside the governing circles risen to such power. This to me is the key to the contemporary reaction towards him: to the loyalists he was an upstart whom they hated, feared, made fun of, and in whose fall from power and humiliating exile they delighted; to the radicals he was a romantic hero, a symbol of hope for a better world in which a man could rise to heights commensurate with his talents, an enemy and victim of hierarchy, heredity and privilege, as British seamen apparently used to sing Boney was an Emperor! Oh! Aye, Oh!.

I look forward to reading this biography, and even more to the second volume when it appears, to see what the author makes of Napoleon's decline and exile.

St Helena Britannica - new publication by the Friends of St Helena

The Friends of St Helena have recently published this collection of short pieces by the late Trevor W. Hearl(1924-2007) with an excellent preface by Alexander Schulenburg. The author's long association with St Helena began in July 1969 when he stepped ashore on the island "just thirty hours before the first Moon landing" and continued until his death. The current work is both a tribute and a substitute for the one that Mr Hearl was planning to write.

The book reflects the author's determination to rescue St Helena's history from historians of the captivity of Napoleon, its most famous inhabitant. As he reminds us, St Helena has not only been a "prison and fortress", but a vital part of British overseas expansion for 200 years, a natural treasury and scientific observatory, a seaport and whaling centre, a base in the fight against slavery and "a mecca for enterprising tourists, philatelists, naturalists, yachtsmen and game fishermen."

Among the pieces printed is the rather sad story of one of St Helena's first surgeons, Francis Moore whose premature death along with that of his wife left their children somehow to be cared for out of whatever proceeds could be gleaned from their property. Here too are chapters on the forgotten French Huguenots and St Helena's forlorn attempt to start a wine industry, on the East Indiamen that made St Helena a vital port for the British Empire before the opening of the Suez Canal, on the Southern Whale Fishery, on Consuls and Consular Agents, on scientific interest in St Helena, nicluding a short chapater on Charles Darwin which recalls the deep impression the island made on him and concludes

Today in the popular mind Darwin's name is tied to the Galapagos Islands, but if he could be asked which island he would like to explore again, I wonder what his choice would be? St Helena?

Perhaps most revealing were a couple of chapters on St Helena's "Social Revolution",the loss of power and influence of the country gentlemen at the top of the social pyramid in the days of the East India Company. From the 1830's they faced inadequate pensions, collapsing property prices and restricted opportunity for their children in a world in which the formerly despised trades people of Jamestown were now in the ascendancy. The book sheds a little more light on one of these, Charles Hodson, nicknamed "Hercules" by Napoleon after he visited him at Maldivia in 1815. Here we find him retired to England, St Helena still on his mind, concerned among other things about the introduction of Roman Catholic and dissenting places of worship, a reminder to us of the total dominance and social and political importance of the Anglican Church in the days of the East India Company.

Despite the author's non-Napoleonic orientation there are still five or six chapters spanning the period 1815-1821. These include one on the problem of supplying the islands with food stuffs and other essentials which the author claims gave Hudson Lowe more headaches than his relations with the inhabitants of Longwood. Another is on the races at Deadwood which began during the captivity of Napoleon and continued for a century thereafter. Here too is an excellent chapter on one of St Helena's most important inhabitants, Saul Solomon, a Jew who converted to Anglicanism, founded the Company that still bears his name, and was regarded with great suspicion by Hudson Lowe for his perceived sympathy and business relationship with the occupants of Longwood House, from which he derived great financial benefit. Solomon died many years later while on holiday in England, and his daughter brought his body back in a trunk, in fear that it would be discovered and consigned to the deep. There are though no secrets on St Helena, the body's arrival was greeetd with acclaim, and a suitably grand funeral soon followed.

The preface alone is worth consulting by anyone interested in the history of St Helena for its scholarly survey of the relatively little work that has been produced by professional historians. It correctly situates Hearl's contribution, his roots as a journalist and educator rather than a historian, his constant admission of the provisionality of his knowledge and expressions of hope that others would carry on from where he left off.

As a friend of mine said, it is a bit like a blog. You can dip into it and read whatever takes your fancy at the time. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Produced by the Friends of St Helena, it may not be easily available from the usual places. I would recommend contacting Ian Mathieson at Miles Apart for this and any other books on St Helena that are otherwise difficult to obtain.

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1. Trevor W. Hearl, St Helena Britannica studies oin South Atlantic island history edited by A.H. Schulenbu rg, Society of Friends of St Helena, London 2013, pp 8-9

Inside Longwood by Albert Benhamou

It is now several months since I previewed Albert Benhamou's latest book, Inside Longwood , the first full publication of the letters that Napoleon's doctor Barry O'Meara wrote to the Admiralty from 1815 until his dismissal in 1818. I felt I was too close to the work to write a review, certainly at the time of publication, but having recently re-read it, I feel it is time to flag up its value for anyone interested in the history of Napoleon's captivity on St Helena.

O'Meara was in a privileged albeit uncomfortable position: one foot in Plantation House the other in Longwood, his daily access to Napoleon inevitably invited the suspicion of Sir Hudson Lowe. His letters were long, although not perhaps as long as those Sir Hudson or his minions wrote, but full of fascinating accounts of Napoleon's views as well as the paranoia and caprice of Sir Hudson.

I found particularly amusing the image of Lowe fetching a copy of the Quarterly Review and making O'Meara read out aloud some observations on Napoleon's character

"he understands enough of mankind to dazzle the weak, to dupe the vain, to overcome the timid, and to make the wicked his instruments." (1)

This apparently to fend off the proposal that Sir Pulteney Malcolm should be called upon to mediate between Lowe and Napoleon. Malcolm apparently "was too open and too likely to enter into his [Napoleon's] views."

Among the issues discussed in the later chapters is why the Government did not remove Lowe. It is fairly clear that he had no real political support, as he was to find out when after Napoleon's death he found himself expendable, without a job and an all too useful scapegoat for a beleaguered Government.(2) Albert Benhamou seems to suggest that having made the appointment, against the advice of Lord Wellington who regarded him as a fool and had removed him from his own command, Lord Bathurst had no real choice but to battle it out, and to try to deny the version of events that O'Meara and others promulgated.

Beset by serious social and economic problems, the Government simply wanted the world to forget about Napoleon. Many Whigs and Radicals had serious reservations about his treatment, and the dismissal of Lowe would have added fuel to the fire. It made more political sense to tough it out and to try to discredit the witness.

There is also enough evidence to suggest that many in the Government, and doubtless among its supporters in the country, derived some amusement from the plight in which that upstart Napoleon found himself. Lord Wellington's letter to Sir Pulteney Malcolm is well known:

You may tell "Bony" that I find his apartments at the Elisee Bourbon very convenient, and that I hope he likes mine at Mr. Balcom's. It is a droll sequel enough to the affairs of Europe that we should change places of residence.

Less well known are the comments of the up and coming politician Sir Robert Peel,

George Cockburn is come back in good health and spirits; he gives us no hopes of Buonaparte's dying. He eats, he says, enormously but he drinks a little, takes regular exercise, and is in so very careful of his carcass that he may live twenty years. Sir Hudson Lowe is as strict as Cockburn, but without any of his liveliness, and little of his activity and talents. (3)

And of course, as this book reminds us, O'Meara was initially encouraged to write these letters to the Admiralty because of the amusement they provided to those in the highest circles.(4)

Albert Benhamou has done a great service in extracting these letters from the archives so that we may for the first time read them as a whole and judge for ourselves.

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1 The Quarterly Review was a Tory journal set up by Croker, whom O'Meara knew was reading his letters, and who ultimately sealed O'Meara's fate. The passage came from a review of Miot's Expedition to Egypt . Albert Benhamou, Inside Longwood: Barry O'Meara's Clandestine Letters, Albert Benhamou Publishing 2012, pp 102-3
2. Hudson Lowe is "none of my child" was Foreign Secretary George Canning's pointed comment to Lord Bathurst when Lowe was causing some embarrassment by a protracted stay in Paris in 1825, "you would perhaps think it expedient to give him a little hint to be joggling onward." Geroge Canning to Lord Bathusrt, 18th November 1825,Inside Longwood, footnote p. 223
3. Inside Longwood, p. 202
4. Letter from Finlaison to O'Meara July 5th 1816 described O'Meara's recent letters as having "furnished a real feast to some very great folks here." Inside Longwood,p. 213

St Helena One Man's Island: "He had little time for Napoleon"

Front Cover of Ian Baker's, "St Helena: One Man's Island" (1)

I have recently been reading Ian Baker's interesting and beautifully written book on St Helena. The first few paragraphs of the Introduction hooked me

Islands are special places. They are finite, complete. They are of the sea, and because of that, their land has added value.

An island can become part of you, though perhaps not you part of it.

An island allows you to stop and stare, to look anew at things with which you're familiar , and to find the things with which you are'nt. It gives you chances to look more closely at yourself."

He has woven together a fascinating account of St Helena, rooted in his unrivalled knowledge of its geology, which began with a lengthy research visit in the early 1960's.

Created over a period of millions of years from volcanic eruptions in the mid-Atlantic rift, which ceased in St Helena's case about seven or eight million years ago, it is at its longest only ten miles across, about the size of Greater Manchester he tells us, but at its base, deep below the surface of the Atlantic, it is eighty miles across, and higher than Mont Blanc before it breaks the water's surface.

One Man's Island might perhaps be seen as an early example of what is coming to be known as "Big History", an approach which gives homo sapiens a less privileged position in the story of our planet. Such an approach presents challenges when you are telling the story of a small remote island largely unknown apart from its association with the captivity of the legendary Emperor of the French.

"One Man" and Napoleon

Please don't get me wrong. I've as much time as the next for Napoleon, probably a lot more. But there is much more to this island than even that special bird of passage. (2)

So in his attempt to focus on the bigger picture, Ian Baker enlists the support of Charles Darwin, certainly focused on far greater forces, who during his short stay on St Helena in 1836 never bothered to visit Napoleon's tomb and, as the author says, probably "didn't have a great deal of time for Napoleon".

Similarly he is able to call on the the first man to sail around the world single handedly, Joshua Slocum, who presumably had had time enough to think about more fundamental things. Slocum, with some justification, described St Helena as "an island of tragedies", but added with a sting in the tail, "tragedies that have been lost sight of in wailing over the Corsican." (3)

Ian Baker is I think on shakier ground when he tells us, "Gorrequer certainly had little time for Napoleon" , a conclusion based on the fact that in his long diary entry on May 5th 1821 Gorrequer did not mention Napoleon, and on the next day referred to him as defunct Neighbour". It is impossible to know precisely what he thought of Napoleon, and it doesn't much matter, but while Gorrequer's diary is full of venom directed at Hudson Lowe, Lady Lowe and Sir Thomas Reade, I cannot recall any negative comments about Napoleon. Ian Baker also somewhat misleadingly describes Gorrequer's nickname for Lowe as "Chief". He certainly used it at times, but far more common was the sobriquet "Mach", short for Machiavelli, which throws rather a different light on Gorrequer's sympathies! (4)

I also have my doubts about the rather sweeping conclusion as to why Longwood was allowed to deteriorate after Napoleon's death:

"When Napoleon died in exile in 1821, most of the world felt that he had got no more than his just desserts. It is all too easy to see Napoleon, the great leader, in hindsight, but at the time he was hated, feared and vilified. Many would rather the Prussians had taken him after Waterloo, and executed him, as they had wanted to." (5)

Having read this one might be surprised to hear of the large numbers who queued up to see Napoleon's body after his death, the crowd that attended his funeral, and the steady stream of visitors to his grave in succeeding years. It was indeed the fuss about Napoleon, rather than Napoleon himself, which Darwin commented on. There would of course not have been that fuss had Napoleon not had significant support in England and the New World, though not of course among the absolute monarchs who wielded power on the continent and for a time at least felt more secure that Napoleon was gone, and wished that he would be soon forgotten.

As for the neglect of Longwood, the house itself was in a state of dilapidation and presumably would have been demolished had Napoleon lived and moved into New Longwood House. Unlike the Valley of the Tomb, which was in private hands and earned a reasonable income for its owners, ownership was in the hands of the East India Company, and clearly it had neither commercial nor political interest in creating a memorial to Napoleon.

Perhaps though the most questionable section on Napoleon is the description of his removal from the Briars to Longwood. The book paints a picture of Napoleon playing for time, and of Cockburn losing patience with him. According to this version Napoleon was "furious at having to leave the Briars. Cockburn was impassive, either Napoleon moved or he would bring guards to move him. Take it or be taken. Napoleon took it." (6) This version of events had then as now a very satisfying ring for British patriots. All one can say is that there is no support for it in French sources, nor from O'Meara nor indeed from Betsy Balcombe. Those closest to Napoleon were of the view that he was pleased to move to Longwood, and to assemble all his followers in one place. One would like to know the source for this version, but One Man's Island is not that kind of book.

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1. Ian Baker St Helena One Man's Island (Wilton 65, 2004)
2. op cit p 101
3. op cit p 113
4. op cit p 164
5. op cit p 119
6. op cit p 62

New Books on Captivity of Napoleon on St Helena

Two new books about Napoleon's Captivity are shortly to be published.

First to appear will be Albert Benhamou's latest book, InsideLongwood: Barry O'Meara's Clandestine Letters which publishes the letters that Napoleon's doctor, Barry O'Meara, sent from St Helena to his friend at the Admiralty. These were circulated among the Government of the day, and were an added source of tension between O'Meara and Governor Sir Hudson Lowe who knew of the correspondence but was unable to stop it.

This will be the first time these letters have been published. I have had a pre-publication preview and believe that it will provide an important and unique perspective on Napoleon's captivity on St Helena in the years 1815-1818. It may be pre-ordered at Amazon.

Also due for publication in June is a reprint of Betsy Balcombe's famous Recollections of Napoleon on St Helena.

This is being reprinted by Fonthill Media, which has a number of other Napoleonic titles on its list.

The Emperor's Last Campaign - A Review

The Emperor's Last Campaign: A Napoleonic Empire in America - Emilio Ocampo

This is a fascinating and important book which provides a totally new perspective on Napoleon's captivity on St Helena. Based on a tremendous amount of research, notably in diplomatic archives, the author puts Napoleon's captivity on St Helena within an international context. Here it is not a footnote on a history written by the victors of Waterloo, but the symbolic centre of a liberal struggle against hereditary monarchy, reaction and oppression in Europe and the Americas.

From it one appreciates again that none of the great powers trusted each other, not least the Bourbon monarchy, restored to France by British and Prussian arms, yet fearful that the ancient enemy, Perfidious Albion, seemingly unperturbed at harebrained plots to free Napoleon, might connive at his escape to further its imperialist ambitions in Latin America.

The only thing they all had in common was fear of revolution, and a determination that the trouble maker in chief, as they saw him, should remain on his island in the South Atlantic. Thus Metternich, the Austrian chancellor and arranger of Napoleon's marriage to Marie Louise, which had given Napoleon the heir whose very existence gave the Bourbons sleepless nights, blamed Napoleon for the discontent of the lower orders in Europe: by fleeing Elba and setting himself at the head of a constitutional monarchy in 1815 he had betrayed his previous work and "set free the Revolution which he came to France to subdue."(1)

The book provides a mine of information from which the author attempts, perhaps not totally satisfactorily, to weave together a number of intersecting narratives:

the conflict in England between Loyalists and the Tory Government on the one hand and radicals, reformers, and some Whigs on the other, over reform at home and the fate of Napoleon;

the interaction of Bonapartist soldiers, refugees, adventurers and filibusters assembled largely in the United States with the independence struggles in Latin America;

the rather desperate speculations of Napoleon on St Helena as recounted by those around him; the thoughts and views of the Austrian, French and Russian commissioners who never saw Napoleon but kept themselves and their Governments very well informed; the suspicion and fear of the hapless Sir Hudson Lowe, whose career would be finished if Napoleon escaped, but as it turned out was finished even though he didn't.

Perhaps most interesting from the perspective of this blog is the light it throws on Napoleon's sympathisers and supporters in England. The author has done research in a number of private archives in the UK, and here one can read about the activities of General Sir Robert Wilson and his Bonapartist sister Fanny Wallis in France and England, and Wilson's planned but ultimately aborted adventures in the Americas.

Here along with the George IV's estranged wife, Queen Caroline, and his brother, the Duke of Sussex, appears a future Whig Prime Minister, Earl Grey, trying to hold the disparate Whig factions together, cautioning Sir Robert Wilson about the company he was keeping and particularly against involvement with the mad schemes of Lord Cochrane, but himself apparently privately sympathetic to the plight of the fallen Emperor.

"My son - the sailor - sails for St Helena next week on the Conqueror", Wilson wrote to Grey in December 1816,"I presume you have no commissions to execute in that part of the world as yet, but I hope and believe before three months that you will." (2)

Little wonder perhaps that Napoleon, isolated on St Helena and fed scraps like this, lived in hope and expectation that the Government would change and the Whigs, or even Queen Caroline, would come to his rescue.

The book is of course full of shadowy schemes to help Napoleon escape by submarine, balloon, steam-powered ship, oak barrels or more conventional means. There is not the slightest bit of evidence that Napoleon entertained serious interest in any of them.

The author is to be commended for having brought together so much fascinating material, although at times the evidence could have been treated more critically. As an example anyone reading it not too carefully might perhaps come away with the idea that Napoleon, Queen Caroline and Napoleon II were all poisoned. Doubtless there were, and maybe are, people who believed that all three were victims of a conspiracy, and certainly there were good reasons why those in power wanted all three of them dead, but the nature of the evidence, or maybe the lack of it, needs careful treatment.

Likewise there are a few "maybe" comments which at times undermine the overall quality of the work e.g. "Maybe she knew something we don't know" , re Napoleon's mother's belief that Napoleon had already left St Helena and therefore couldn't have died, or "Maybe he had heard the bad news about Brayer", an attempt to link Napolon's reported change of mood to events in the Americas.

One ought perhaps also point out that the title of the book is misleading: there is no evidence that Napoleon played any part in planning the various campaigns that his supporters waged alongside other adventurers in the Americas, and there was certainly no centralised campaign coordinated by him, by his brother Joseph in Philadelphia, or indeed anyone else.

These though are minor criticisms. The author is to be commended for having laboured so hard, for having brought together so much material and for getting us to look at this period in a rather different way.

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Notes

1. Emilio Ocampo, The Emperor's Last Campaign, A Napoleonic Empire in America(University of Alabama Press, 2009 p. 359)
2.Ocampo p. 103 Admiral Plampin and his lady were also on board the Conqueror.