Churchill and Napoleon

Amidst his many reminiscences about the battle of El Alemain in which he appeared to have played a major part, I recall my history master recommending Churchill's My Early Life. Now, more years later than I care to admit, I have finally read it, and can confirm his judgement.

What an excellent read it is: beautifully written, at times funny, and a fascinating window into the world of late Victorian British Imperialism. I also like my Folio Society edition - in the digital age there are few pleasures greater than handling a finely bound book.

I was aware that Churchill was a francophile and vaguely thought that he was, like a number of his class and generation, an admirer of Napoleon. It was with interest therefore that I read his account of his capture in the Boer War.

Churchill, who had lost his pistol, was confronted by a lone Boer horseman whose rifle was pointed at him.

I thought there was absolutely no chance of escape, if he fired he would surely hit me, so I held up my hands and surrendered myself a prisoner of war.

"When one is alone and unarmed", said the great Napoleon, in words which flowed into my mind in the poignant minutes that followed,"a surrender may be pardoned".

I admit I had to read this more than once. Here is Churchill recording, some 30 years later, that at the moment when he was faced with likely death if he sought to escape, he had thought about what Napoleon would have done, and decided that in his circumstances the great man would have thought that a surrender was pardonable. I wondered whether this was simply another example of the ironic and self deprecatory humour which is a feature of the book, so I decided to fish around a little, and came across this extract from a recent article:

In September 1897, Churchill wrote to his mother from the North-West Frontier of India explaining the force of his ambition: "I have faith in my star--that is, that I am intended to do something in the world." As this allusion and innumerable others to Napoleon make clear, the 22-year-old soldier already imagined himself as the young emperor. During this period, he seems to have been consumed with Napoleon--he planned to write a biography of the French military genius, and the eponymous hero of his 1899 novel Savrola is nothing if not Napoleonic in his ambitions: "Ambition was the motive force, and he was powerless to resist it.... 'Vehement, high, and daring' was his cast of mind. The life he lived was the only one he could ever live; he must go on to the end." Right up to the devastating failure of the Dardanelles campaign in 1915, Churchill was routinely criticized by his colleagues for his ebullient, Napoleonic sense of himself. In September 1913, Lloyd George noted that all politicians are keen on success but most lacked what Churchill possessed in abundance, that is "the Napoleonic idea." After the Dardanelles fiasco, he concluded in a similar vein that Churchill "had spoiled himself by reading [too much] about Napoleon." (1)

Hard to believe that Churchill has become the hero of American neo-conservatives, and that the US President who renamed French Fries "Liberty Fries" had a bust of him on his desk!

Size is Important

One of the things that the British have always held against Napoleon was his height, or rather his lack of it. A recent article in the left wing tabloid Daily Mirror described both Napoleon and President Zarkozy as French pipsqueaks . Napoleon has even been rewarded with his own syndrome, although modern scholars seem to think that he was actually of fairly average height for his time, 5' 6" - 5' 7". So the big question is, how tall was Sir Winston Churchill?
The answer seems to be 5' 7"!

Churchill on Captivity

Finally I was struck by Churchill's comments about captivity. When reading this it is worth recalling that he escaped after less than a month:

Prisoner of war! That is the least unfortunate kind of prisoner to be, but it is nevertheless a melancholy state. You are in the power of your enemy. You owe your life to his humanity, and your daily bread to his compassion. You must obey his orders, go where he tells you, stay where you are bid, await his pleasure, possess your soul in patience. Meanwhile the war is going on, great events are in progress, fine opportunities for action and adventure are slipping away. Also the days are very long. Hours crawl like paralytic centipedes. Nothing amuses you. Reading is difficult; writing impossible. Life is one long boredom from dawn till slumber
Moreover, the whole atmosphere of prison, is odious. Companions in this kind of misfortune quarrel about trifles and get the least possible pleasure from each other's society. If you have never been under restraint before and never known what it was to be a captive, you feel a sense of constant humiliation in being confined to a narrow space, fenced in by railings and wire, watched by armed men, and webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions. I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I ever hated any other period in my whole life.

Although there are striking differences between Churchill's brief captivity and the captivity of Napoleon, this passage surely gives some indication of how Napoleon and his companions at Longwood must have felt.

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(1) Paul Stevens, "Churchill's military romanticism"Queen's Quarterly , 2006.

Maldivia St Helena Revisited.

Another email, this time from Aishath Naaz, a clinical psychologist from the Maldives and a member of the Maldives 1st Human Rights Commission, who is currently living in Manchester where she is studying for a PhD.

Your Blog Reflections on a Journey to St. Helena, I think has caught the attention of every Maldivian who has access to internet. The article written by you on, Thursday, February 14, 2008 Maldivia, St. Helena has caught our attention and it has touched many in a very special way.

We never knew that our people were captured and taken as slaves, and something moved me to tears reading about these 10 people ( From the Jamestown Records) who were then made to work on these plantations. Our history is buried in mystery, may be even the fates of these people but after 256 years we suddenly, through your blog came to know that these people from our country settled elsewhere and lived and died as slaves.Yet, they left behind the name"MALDIVIA' perhaps so that one day ......that is today we would come to know some of our people lived and died...in this spot.
I am very interested in finding even the smallest clue on what happened to these people,...any more details ...any possibility of finding any thing more about what happened to these people.
I would be very grateful if you can give your response.

Aishath has supplied a link to the Dhivehi Observer;
there is also a link to Aishath's blog, which deals with issues of real substance, and makes my efforts seem rather trivial and inconsequential.

I can understand why she and other Maldivians are so touched by this. Surprising perhaps that it has taken so long for them to find out about it. One more indication of the tremendous power of the internet. I just wish I had more information that I could pass on. If anyone can add anything to this story please let me or Aishath know.

Dartmoor Prison: 200 Years Commemoration

Michel Martineau has an interesting blog Les couleurs françaises sur une autre prison anglaise !, mostly in English, about an Anglo-French ceremony that took place on May 24th 2009 at Dartmoor prison.



Exactly 200 years earlier a long line of French prisoners straddled the 17 miles from Plymouth Harbour, where they had been kept in appalling, insanitary prison hulks, to Prince Town where a new prison was constructed to house them and later American prisoners of war. (1) Apparently there was snow on the ground when they arrived.



Painting by Paul Deacon.

Over 1100 Napoleonic prisoners subsequently died at Dartmoor prison in 1809-1816.

More information may be found on the Napoleonic Organization web site.

I notice on the Devon Council web site that

The brutal mistreatment of American prisoners of war was investigated after the war by an Anglo-American commission, which awarded compensation to the families of those who had died there.

According to this same site

Between 1812 and 1816 about 1,500 American and French prisoners died in Dartmoor prison and were buried in a field beyond the prison walls.

One sometimes wonders if we intentionally give the French cause for grievance! The 200 or so American casualties were dwarfed by the casualties suffered by the French, and there is no record of any compensation to French families for mistreatment of their relatives.

The following contains a video giving interesting historical background on the prison, which apparently now attracts 30,000 tourists a year. St Helena could do with some of those!

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1. It is now often forgotten, by Brits if not Americans, that the UK was at war with the United States in 1812-1814 as well as with the French! Prince Town was named after the Prince of Wales, who later became George IVth.

The Racehorse Blucher and St Helena

I have said on a previous blog that one of the best things about blogging is the emails that you get.


I have recently had a very interesting query from novelist and historian Mike Hutton about one of the horses that raced on St Helena in Napoleon's time.






Some Background: Horse Racing on St Helena

During the captivity horse racing took place twice a year at Deadwood from April 1817. The organiser was the young Captain (later Admiral) Henry John Rous, pictured above in later years, who was to become the 'dictator' of English horse racing. (1)

Napoleon used to watch the races from behind the shutters at Bertrand's cottage (2). I understand that his horses were lent for the racing, as were those of the Governor.

The horses which took part in the first meeting were

African, Brickdust, Blucher , Bacchus, Botherum, Comet, Creeper, Dolly, Emperor, Feather, Fidget, Grinder, Hambletonian, Hope, John Bull, Kutusoff, Manks, Marske, Mansel, Negro, Pringle, Prime of Life, Regent, Royal Oak, Regulus, Sebastian, Salamanca, Toussaint, Tom Tit, Tom Crop, Tickler, Whiskey.

Basil Jackson's Reminiscences are worth recording

... recalls to my memory our St Helena racing,
over which Captain Rous ruled with all the authority he so long exercised at Newmarket. We had our Turf Club, and an excellent mile-and-a-half course at Dead wood. It is true that our horses were not of high quality, but they afforded quite as much amusement as if they had been thoroughbred Rous infected me with his racing taste, and he found me an apt pupil, though invariably opposed to him. The Gover- nor was very liberal in his patronage, giving two handsome plates annually, and generally attended the sport in person ; he also placed his horses at the command of Captain Rous, and as they, or some of them, were English, and the best in the island, he enjoyed great advantages. The light weights of both army and navy furnished jockeys, and all turned out in proper racing equipment.
(3)

The Mystery of Blucher


To return to the query from Mike Hutton. He is doing some research on early English horse racing and is trying to find out what happened to the famous English race horse Blucher. This horse won the Derby in 1814 and was recorded as being at stud in the UK in 1817, but disappears without trace from the records by 1822. He wondered whether the horse on St Helena which was listed as racing in the first meeting in 1817 was the same horse.

There is fairly incontrovertible evidence of the sale of Blucher along with 3 slaves Under the Tree on St. Helena in 1829. I am inclined to doubt that this was the famous Blucher, although the sellers might have been happy to give that impression. Jackson indicates (see passages in bold above) that the standard of horse racing on St Helena was not very high, and I would have thought that the presence of a Derby winner would have received much notice. If anybody can help Mike to resolve the mystery of what happened to the famous Blucher, or any more information on the 1829 auction then please let me know, and I will pass the information to him.

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1. Henry John Rous (1795 –1877), second son of the 1st Earl of Stradbroke, British admiral, steward of the Jockey Club, author of the standard work on the Laws and Practice of Horse Racing, Conservative MP and First Lord of the Admiralty. Rous came out to St. Helena in the Conqueror, in August 1817 he was appointed to command of the Podargus. In January 1818 he was transferred to the Mosquito, and he left St. Helena in July 1819.

2. See my blog entry of March 4th 2008.

3. Basil Jackson Notes and Reminiscences of a Staff Officer, Chiefly Relating to the Waterloo Campaign and to St. Helena Matters During the Captivity of Napoleon (1877 & 1903). Jackson also describes an event that I have referred to on an earlier blog: : During the first day's sport after our arrival,
an awkward circumstance occurred on the course, which everybody regretted when it could not be helped. A certain half-mad and drunken piqueur of Napoleon, named Archambault, took it into his head to gallop within the ropes when the course was cleared, and the horses coming up. For this transgression he was pursued by one of the stewards, and horse-whipped out of the forbidden limits. This gentleman knew not that the offender belonged to the Longwood establishment, or he would, no doubt, have spared his whip — particularly as Napoleon at the time was sitting on a bench outside his residence, looking at the crowd through a glass, and we were apprehensive that he might in-terpret the accidental chastisement his servant had received, into a premeditated insult to the master.

But we did Napoleon injustice by the sup- position. Mr O'Meara told me the next day, that he had distinctly witnessed everything thai passed, and had been very angry when he saw Archambault galloping alone along the course, and was pleased to see him chastised ; and that he had called him into his presence, and ex- pended on him a few f- beies and sacri cochons, afterwards.

Napoleon and the British

So beg the bones of Bonaparte! the Frenchmans pride.
Oh! bring him back again 'twill ease the Frenchmans pride.
And in a tomb of marble we will lay him with his son,
we will decorate him with his son
We will decorate his tomb with the glories he has won,
And in letters of bright gold inscribe Napoleon.

(British song circa 1840 reproduced in Semmel, Napoleon and the British)

For some time I have been intending to develop one of the sub themes of this blog - the attitude of the British/English to Napoleon. (1)



I have finally been spurred to do so after reading a letter sent by Michel Martineau to the St. Helena Independent and reproduced on his blog.

The Napoleonic sites on the island are the most explicit monument to the friendship between two great nations: the United Kingdom and the French Republic. To work towards that goal is not easy as I walk on an extremely fine cord. Of course, I upset some French who are nostalgic of an era, which has long since gone, and I irritate some British who cannot stand the idea that we preserve the memory of the one who they still call “General Bonaparte”. I respect both attitudes but do not share their opinion. I find it much more rewarding to work together rather than against one another. The European flag flying next to the French one at Longwood House is not only a reminder of our common past but of our common future.

Michel is right in his perceptions of the discomfort and even hostility which some English people instinctively feel about the celebration of the life and achievements of Napoleon. For many, particularly those on the political right, Napoleon remains "the Ogre of Corsica" as depicted in early nineteenth century Tory propaganda. As Stuart Semmel has pointed out, Second World War propaganda which compared the threat of invasion after Dunkirk with that in the Napoleonic era had the unintended and totally unhistorical effect of cementing Napoleon in the popular imagination as a proto-Hitler. (2) For those brought up in this climate it is difficult to comprehend that Queen Victoria actually told the young Prince of Wales to bow down before the "Great Napoleon" when she visited Les Invalides in Paris in 1855, or even that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth chided the French Government for the sad state of Longwood House after their visit to St. Helena in 1947!

Yet there is another side to the story. As E. Tangye Lean suggests, no enemy of the United Kingdom, ever received so much support and admiration from the British people as Napoleon did in his life time and in the years following his death. (3) This was undoubtedly a concern of the Government, which was exercised about the influence of radicals on the mass of a downtrodden population which was unrepresented in Parliament, was subject to a harsh penal code, endured appalling working and living conditions and whose young men were subject to the continuous threat of impressment into the navy. Also, as some radicals noted, soldiers in the "tyrant" Napoleon's army were not subject to the flogging which was a feature of life in the British army.

In my blog of February 11th 2008 I recalled my surprise at coming across Walter Runciman's account of the great admiration for Napoleon which he found among the sailors of the merchant navy in the mid nineteenth century. A reading of Semmel indicates that Runciman's experience was not atypical. There was a tremendous outpouring of songs and plays about Napoleon in Victorian Britain. E. Tangye Lean also confirms that there was a great deal of respect for Napoleon in the British Navy even during Napoleon's time.

On subsequent blogs I have covered some of Napoleon's British contemporaries who were most sympathetic to him - Lady Holland, Capel Lofft, Samuel Whitbread - and as anyone who dips into the literature will find, these represent the tip of a surprisingly large iceberg. I have also covered Napoleon's reception in Torbay and Plymouth, where, to the consternation of Government supporters, large crowds greeted him with the utmost respect. One recent author, a former Editor of the Times, has devoted his energies to try to prove that the sympathisers with Napoleon were in the minority. (4) Given the weight of official propaganda and the fact that France was Britain's traditional enemy and that Napoleon had threatened to invade Britain, it would have been very surprising if it were otherwise! Even Tom Paine, who earnestly wished the overthrow of the British oligarchy, and at one point hoped that Napoleon would invade, emphasised that this must be as a liberator, not as a conqueror.

An important chapter in the story, which has not been covered in my blogs, is that of Napoleon and the Romantics. Previous blogs have touched on Lord Byron - particularly in his association with Holland House, but the subject of Byron and Napoleon deserves fuller treatment than I have been able to give it.

Undoubtedly the best treatment of the complex topic of British attitudes to Napoleon is provided by Stuart Semmel's Napoleon and the British which has already been referred to; a good review is available online. The older book by E. Tangye Lean,The Napoleonists: A Study in Political Disaffection 1760/1960. is an excellent source of material, but is conceptually flawed.

The final section includes some contemporary quotations drawn from both these sources, of people who were to varying degrees sympathetic to Napoleon.


Some Contemporary Views

Tom Paine, I know Bonaparte, I have served under his Government, and he allows as much freedom as I wish or anybody ought to have.

Mrs Inchbald: Our great enemy is less wicked than most heroes and politicians have been; at the same time a vast deal wiser than them all.


Sir Robert Wilson, (Parlt 1810) - I join in none of the vulgar calumnies against the great ruler of the French nation, who I consider as the greatest statesman and ablest general of ancient or modern times; and I higly esteem the nation at whose head he has had the good fortune to be placed

The Duke of Bedford (1814) - everything I hear of this most extraordinary man, increases my desire to see him, Rely on it, he will again be numbered on the great scene of history

Lord Byron - His overthrow from the beginning was a blow on the head to me. Since that period we have been the slaves of fools.

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1. The usage of "English" and "British" is worth a blog on its own. Suffice it to say than many English people routinely regard both terms as synonymous. The Scots and Welsh have a different view. If a foreigner wishes to insult a Scot then the easiest way is to describe him as English. I myself try to avoid the the term British, although it seems appropriate for this blog entry.

2. Semmel, Stuart, Napoleon and the British. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ., 2004, page 239. Pieter Geyl, a Dutch historian and fierce critic of Napoleon who played a formative part in the post world war II re-evaluation of Napoleon nevertheless made this comment: .. even when as in my case one had hated the dictator in Napoleon long before the evil presence of Hitler began darkening our lives, one almost feels as if one should ask the pardon of his shade for mentioning his name in one breath with that of the other '' Pieter Geyl, Napoleon For and Against , preface to first Dutch edition, 1944.

3. E. Tangye Lean, The Napoleonists: A Study in Political Disaffection 1760/1960. OUP 1970.

4. Frank Giles, Napoleon Bonaparte: England's Prisoner, The Emperor in Exile 1816-21. Basic Books, 2001