13
Following his second abdication, Napoleon understood that he could have no political future in Europe, and he took advice on where to seek refuge. One idea was the United States, the Americas being a favoured destination for Bonapartists and imperial officers looking to escape from France; and in June, he and his close collaborators made for Rochefort with the apparent intention of embarking for the New World. The French government was complicit in these plans, the naval minister sending instructions to the prefect in Rochefort and assigning two frigates to accompany the expedition.1 But the Royal Navy had blockaded France’s Atlantic coast, cutting off any possible escape route. Napoleon chose not to risk running the blockade, preferring to board a British warship, theBellerophon, and ask for refuge in England. He himself seemed almost satisfied with that solution, which had the virtue of offering international protection from his more vengeful enemies at home, and it is clear that he expected the British government to treat him honourably: to imprison him or keep him under house arrest in England, somewhere where he could retire from public life and concentrate on writing his memoirs. Or so he mused. After his recent adventures, however – his escape from Elba had plunged Europe once more into a bloody war – this was nothing more than a utopian dream. His former adversaries were not in a conciliatory mood, and, in Britain just as in Prussia or Russia, unforgiving voices called for exemplary punishment that would teach both the former Emperor and the French people a powerful lesson. To keep him in England would create a political outcry as well as pose insuperable problems of state security.
To the British public Napoleon was more a criminal than a victim, and it became fashionable for cartoonists to portray him as England’s prisoner, suffering the humiliation of defeat or appearing before the London populace in the guise of a caged beast. In July 1815 Rowlandson drew him disguised as a harlequin and imprisoned in a small cage mounted on a cart drawn by two mules. The caption proclaimed him to be ‘A Rare Acquisition for the Royal Menagerie’, a former potentate who now had no other function than to amuse and divert the King and his guests.2 Politicians joined journalists and artists in demanding his exclusion from Europe, some even proposing that he be tried as a warmonger and sentenced to death. The Francophobe editor of The Times, John Stoddart, had no time for clemency and argued that Bonaparte and those who had rallied to him should be exposed to the full rigours of the law.3 Others expressed the view that he should have been left to the mercy of the Bourbons and the French courts. The political problem, of course, was acute – the same as for any deposed ruler, whether Bonaparte or Louis XVI. If he were to be executed by order of his enemies he would become a political martyr and a hero to his admirers, an outcome which the Allies wanted to avoid if at all possible. If, on the other hand, he were to be imprisoned on British soil, or in a nearby country, he risked becoming the focal point for future insurrection, a leader waiting to be recalled to power. All were agreed that Napoleon could not be trusted, and that his promised good conduct – ‘I would have given my word of honour to have remained quiet and to have held no political correspondence in England,’4 he said – was wholly worthless. The apprenticeship in exile that was Elba had demonstrated how tight security would have to be if he was not to escape for a second time. If he were imprisoned, escape must be impossible; there must be no second vol de l’aigle.
These considerations led the British government to alight, as a place of exile, on Saint Helena, an impoverished and windswept outpost of Empire cut off from the world in the far South Atlantic. Battered by Atlantic storms, it was a bleak and inhospitable island – especially during the long winter months – a rocky outcropping in a distant ocean, dominated by the mountain peaks which punctured the low clouds that greeted Napoleon and his party – High Peak to the west, and the twin peaks of Actaeon and Diana nearer to the centre of the island and dominating the house at Longwood where, after the early months, Napoleon would take up residence. When Charles Darwin landed on Saint Helena in 1836 it was the bleakness that he emphasised: ‘the habitable part is surrounded by a broad band of black desolate rocks, as if the wide barrier of the ocean were not sufficient to guard the precious spot’.5 The island had no native population, but it was an important staging post for ships of the East India Company and sustained a population of up to five thousand, including a British garrison, a large number of slaves from Madagascar, and Chinese indentured labourers; it serviced and supplied around a thousand ships every year.6 Jamestown, the capital, was ‘a village squeezed between two mountains’, without port installations, where ships lay at anchor off the coast and passengers were brought ashore in open boats.7 Assurances from the British government that the island’s climate was healthy were more than a little deceptive. Summers were semi-tropical, but in winter Saint Helena was exposed to fierce storms that regularly piled in from the Atlantic, and there was a pervasive damp that clung to walls and seeped into the foundations of buildings.8
The journey from Europe to the South Atlantic was dull and seemingly endless, introducing the former emperor to something of the boredom that would afflict him once he reached Saint Helena. First the Bellerophon brought him to Plymouth, from where he would begin his voyage into exile. He was transferred to the seventy-eight-gun British warship Northumberland, which would take him to the South Atlantic, along with the French entourage that would become famous through their association with him: Bertrand, with his wife and three children; the Montholons, husband and wife; the young general, Gaspar Gourgaud, and the only civilian among them, Comte Emmanuel-Joseph de Las Cases, who was appointed Napoleon’s chamberlain and was accompanied by his young son. Others would have gone, too, but the British authorities had no wish to create a thriving Bonapartist colony on Saint Helena and were especially determined to avoid any military concentration there. Of the fifteen army officers who had accompanied Napoleon from France, only three were allowed to share his exile. He was also given the right to take twelve servants, including his personal valet, Louis Marchand, a young man of twenty-four who had served in the imperial household since 1811 and had been with Napoleon on Elba. The servants included a cook, a butler, and, most famously, the devoted Saint-Denis, who had followed the Emperor across Europe and was universally known as Mameluke Ali.9 As his doctor on Saint Helena he chose an Irish naval surgeon, Dr Barry O’Meara.
Conditions on board the Northumberland were cramped and rather Spartan, and the ship’s captain was adamant that Napoleon should be granted only the space appropriate to a state prisoner; he was no longer an emperor, and could no longer bank on special privileges. When he came aboard he was greeted with the honours appropriate to a general, but not to a head of state. He did not complain, comparing conditions on board to those in the bivouacs he had endured on campaign. The ship itself, though it had been extensively refitted for the voyage and appeared resplendent with an admiral’s ensign, was old and creaky. There were some one thousand and eighty men on board, many of them soldiers, and the ship was accompanied to Jamestown by two smaller troop ships, theCeylon and the Bucephalus. The voyage from Plymouth took sixty-seven days, during which the little flotilla was battered by winds and high seas.10 Despite claims that it was one of the best sailing ships in the Royal Navy, the Northumberland’s voyage to Saint Helena would be her last in active service. On her return from Saint Helena she was retired and converted to a hospital ship, in which capacity she would remain in service until she was sent to the breaker’s yard in 1850.11
Bertrand, Montholon, Las Cases and Gourgaud would become Napoleon’s closest companions on Saint Helena – they were commonly referred to as the ‘four apostles’, and each would leave his memories of the former Emperor’s final years. They were in some ways a motley crew, united only by their loyalty to Napoleon and by years of service in his cause. Count Bertrand had risen to the rank of general on merit alone; he was a talented artillery officer who would stay with Napoleon until his death in 1821, as would the second of the ‘apostles’, the Count de Montholon. Although also a general, Montholon had not enjoyed a notable military career and, unlike Bertrand, was the scion of an old aristocratic family and a man of traditional tastes. Las Cases, a former maître des requêtesin the Council of State, had no military experience, but came to understand Napoleon well. He would become his confidant and memorialist on Saint Helena, noting down his intimate thoughts and discussing with him the high and low points of his Empire. For the British, indeed, the bond between Las Cases and the former Emperor was uncomfortably close, and when in November 1816 he was discovered smuggling his secret correspondence out of the island Las Cases was promptly deported. The fourth of Napoleon’s companions, General Gourgaud, also left before Napoleon’s death. In 1815 he was a young man of thirty-two who had enjoyed rapid promotion in the imperial army and whose talents had favourably impressed the Emperor. Unlike the others, he had volunteered himself for the expedition. Disappointed to be omitted from the official list of those who were to go, he pleaded to be included in an emotional tirade. ‘He was’, he shouted, ‘a Baron of the Empire, a Lieutenant General; his life had been devoted to serving the Emperor! He had fought in thirteen campaigns, had received three wounds during that time, had even saved the Emperor’s life at the Battle of Brienne, and had borne Napoleon’s letter to the Prince Regent’.12 Death, he said, was to be preferred to such an insult. Napoleon listened to the young man’s pleadings, noted the strength of his devotion, and relented. Gourgaud got his way, but by 1817 Napoleon had had enough of his jealous outbursts, his quarrels with the others and his seemingly close relationship with the British governor, Hudson Lowe. Gourgaud was fast becoming a disruptive influence, and Napoleon asked that he be removed.13
The presence of his French companions undoubtedly helped to make life on the island more bearable, as his exile would otherwise have condemned him to long periods of total solitude. With Las Cases, as with Bertrand, Napoleon built a solid foundation of trust, and it was to them that he vouchsafed his thoughts about his achievements, about his victories and defeats, and about the glories of his Empire. They spent hours closeted together, with Napoleon holding forth on some aspect of his reign or denouncing some bête noire he chose to blame for his failures. Las Cases and Bertrand would scribble away faithfully, recording their master’s words and preserving them for posterity. Their presence supplied him with congenial company, which was itself important for him. They also gave him a sense of purpose in his exile, as he prepared his memoirs, embellishing and massaging his side of the story, his version of the events he had lived through and had so often dominated. In 1816, in his conversations with Las Cases, and thereafter with Bertrand, he offered a commentary on the past which he hoped would provide the master narrative for his contemporaries and for future historians of the Empire. Nothing that he wrote or dictated, however, should be read uncritically; every word was carefully chosen and its implications weighed. He remained a subtle propagandist, and his memoirs were to be a key tool in securing his place in history. He may also have hoped that British hatred of him would be assuaged, and that he might return to Europe from what he increasingly felt as a hateful exile. That hope was diluted by Bathurst’s dismissive reply on behalf of the British government in 1817, then extinguished completely by the Allies in 1819 at Aix-la-Chapelle.14
Curiously little had been prepared for the Napoleon’s arrival on Saint Helena. The house that had been identified as his place of captivity, Longwood, required considerable work before it was ready for occupation, while the temporary lodging allocated to him by the British government, Plantation House, was wholly unsuitable. In the first months on the island, he preferred to stay in a pavilion attached to a family house at The Briars, the same house where Wellington had lodged when he landed on Saint Helena back in 1805. The current owner, William Balcombe, employed as superintendent for public sales for the East India Company, agreed to the arrangement and made him as comfortable as he could, and, despite the simplicity of his surroundings, Napoleon later acknowledged that this was the happiest period of his enforced sojourn on the island. Yet already he was beginning to baulk at the petty restrictions imposed by his captors. He was subject to a curfew; if he left the garden he had to be accompanied by a British soldier; and if his friends came to visit, they were obliged to return to Jamestown by nine in the evening.15 At Longwood, once Hudson Lowe had been installed as governor, the restrictions would become more numerous and Napoleon’s contempt for them more unbridled. By 1816 his relations with British bureaucracy were tense and acrimonious, with Lowe the customary target of his anger. After August 1816 he refused all face-to-face discussions with the governor, and over time became more withdrawn and more depressed about his lot. Even when the British government recognised the inadequacies of Longwood and started building a new house for him, he refused to show any interest. No doubt he was aware that this was no generous gesture but the confirmation of what he most feared: that he would spend the rest of his days on Saint Helena.
Longwood was set among lava fields, what Louis Marchand would describe in his memoirs as ‘volcanic terrain without a trace of vegetation’. Yet Napoleon admitted that he found the scenery haunting and rather inspiring. Behind the house was the forest of Deadwood, which contrasted vividly with the layers of cooled black lava. ‘Pockets of soil spread by time gave birth to a few stunted trees and patches of greenery’. But the initial impression did not take long to wear off. ‘For one who had remained at The Briars for six weeks without going outside’, he wrote, ‘this countryside was not without charm; but this favourable impression dissipated more and more the closer I approached the house. The trees forming a green roof were really very stunted, with such sparse foliage that they provided no shade. The lawn that appeared fresh was so only by comparison with the rocky ravines and volcanic land separating me from it.’ His initial sense of a verdant landscape, of trees and lawns, did not survive close inspection. The foliage was stunted, the lawns dried and shrivelled. ‘Scorched by the sun it was . . . more like a field of straw than of grass.’16
Longwood was a spacious residence by the standards of Saint Helena, though it hardly compared with the palaces to which Napoleon had become accustomed as Emperor. It contained a billiard room, a salon, a dining room and a library, as well as accommodation for Gourgaud, Las Cases and O’Meara, and family quarters for Montholon. Bertrand, at his wife’s insistence, lived away from the main house, first at Hutt’s Gate and later in a cottage the family built on ground opposite the front entrance to Longwood.17 Long-wood also had a substantial garden, set against the backcloth of volcanic rocks, where Napoleon was given to take the air and, in 1819, developed a brief passion for gardening. He declared his love of nature, planting trees and even raising a few sheep, but this was only a façade: for a man who had always been physically active his years of captivity proved a cumulative torture. In the first months of his stay at Longwood he took long walks or went riding to keep himself in good physical condition, but he became quickly bored, acutely aware that he was merely filling in the hours, and he began to lose interest. More and more, his time on Saint Helena was spent in reminiscence, looking back over his career and dictating his reflections to Las Cases or one of the other apostles. He also read profusely. He looked forward avidly to shipments of books from Europe, and enjoyed listening as Marchand or one of the others read to him of an evening.18 His other great pleasure was to entertain visitors and indulge in good food and wine. We know that Napoleon’s household greatly exceeded the domestic budget it was allocated by the British government, and that huge quantities of drink were consumed. In the last three months of 1816 alone, over thirty-seven hundred bottles of wine were delivered to Longwood, among them eight hundred and thirty bottles of Bordeaux.19
At his best, Napoleon had always been a social animal who enjoyed conversation and good company. In his early months at Longwood he appeared relaxed – even courtly – when he received visitors, even English ones, and he did not hesitate to discuss his past achievements, or the state of current affairs, or such changes as the future might bring. He was interested by stories of the outside world and struck visitors as well informed about what was happening in Europe. He particularly welcomed naval visitors, ships’ captains and officers who put ashore from British vessels passing through on their way to India.20 Throughout his life he remained something of a ladies’ man, and was notably more welcoming to female visitors such as Lady Malcolm, the wife of Sir Pulteney Malcolm, a British admiral who came to Jamestown with the commissioners of the Allied powers and stayed there for some months in 1816 and 1817. Relations between the two men were amicable, and Lady Malcolm visited Napoleon at Longwood. A naval captain and diarist, Henry Meynell, was present at one of their meetings, taking notes on what he saw and heard. He was impressed by the variety and lightness of Napoleon’s conversation, which clearly surprised him. ‘On their arrival B. received Lady M. most graciously;’ he notes, ‘asked her several questions; how she bore so long a sea voyage; and if she was not very sea-sick? He then asked her if she was fond of hunting, as he understood that ladies in England were partial to that amusement.’ Then, turning to another of his favourite topics, ‘he talked to her much about Ossian’s poems, which he had always admired’. His conversation was artistic, animated, and informed. ‘He said he had seen two translations of them in French, that neither were good, but that the one he had seen in Italian was excellent and beautiful. He then asked Lady M. if she thought them genuine, that there had been many controversies about them, and whether she did not think that Macpherson had written them.’ Napoleon showed he could listen too: ‘Lady M. replied that she did not think Macpherson capable of writing them, that the Highland Society had taken much pains to investigate it and proved their authenticity.’21
But by 1817 these convivial social gatherings were becoming a thing of the past. Napoleon would spend long hours alone in his room at Longwood, skimming through a few books or lost in a depressive daze. There is little to suggest that he enjoyed solitude or adjusted easily to the constraints of his captivity. Over time Long-wood took its toll: his capacity for conviviality dimmed and he grew increasingly self-absorbed. Lethargy overcame him, and he would sit alone or lie on his bed for hours, plunged in thought or simply doing nothing – classic symptoms of depression. By 1818 he was further isolated by the departure of a number of his contacts on the island: Gourgaud – whose departure he had requested – but also the Balcombes and his trusted physician, O’Meara, who was transferred by the British because he was seen as too friendly with their prisoner. He was saddened, too, by the death of one of his servants, his maître d’hôtel Cipriani, a fellow Corsican whom he liked and trusted. By the end of the year he had even given up work on his memoirs, which had previously given his captivity some shape and purpose.
The Napoleon who is depicted in the pages of Las Cases’ Mémorial is not the workaholic who had once led great armies and presided over a continent. He appears diminished, both physically and mentally, increasingly resembling some colonial planter in his straw hat, wandering round his garden inspecting the produce.22 This was the image that would be seized upon by cartoonists and pilloried by his opponents. It was the image of a man who was no longer young and vigorous, who tended to obesity, and was increasingly tortured by poor health – in short, a man who no longer posed any threat to his former enemies. By 1820 caricaturists could even allow themselves a degree of sympathy for him in his exile. An Irish cartoon of 1820, entitled ‘The Sorrows of Boney’, portrayed him in his terrible solitude, crouched on a barren rock, surveying the ocean and ruminating on the depths to which he has fallen. He had become a rather tragic figure, capable of eliciting pity rather than anger or condemnation.23
There was a degree of self-pity, too, as Napoleon relived his campaigns and lamented the defeats that had cost him his throne. In particular he fought and refought the Battle of Waterloo, arguing about the reasons for the defeat, persuading himself that only a minor error had robbed him of victory. Usually, as was his wont, that error was not his but was attributed to one of his commanders, a marshal whose rashness or loss of faith had cost him the day. Bertrand records a number of his recurrent regrets: ‘I made a great mistake in employing Ney. He lost his head. A sense of his past conduct impaired his energy.’ Elsewhere the fault was Soult’s. ‘Soult did not aid me as much as he might have done. His staff, notwithstanding all my orders, was not well organised. Berthier would have done better service.’ He would have done better with Suchet. Or the fault lay with the whole army. ‘The men of 1815 were not the same as those of 1792. My generals were faint-hearted men. Perhaps I should have done better to have waited another month before opening the campaign to give more consistency to the army.’24 Napoleon, it would seem, had become persuaded of his invincibility and sought scapegoats to explain his own failures. As he told Montholon, Waterloo could only be explained by the fact that fate had abandoned him. ‘I did not lose the battle because the Allies had three times more men. I lost it because Soult had made a bad choice of officers of his general staff and one of them did not deliver my orders. If the messengers sent to Grouchy had not behaved like simpletons, if my orders had been carried to Guyot . . . the battle would have been mine.’25 Always someone else was to blame.
In his later years at Longwood he was tormented by deteriorating health and reduced mobility, as a life of extraordinarily hard work and physical exertion, much of it spent in the saddle and in military quarters across Europe, finally took its toll. Despite his love of rapid military movements and taste for incisive decision-making, Napoleon was a perfectionist who never lost his faith in careful planning. He had worked prodigiously over many years, both as a military commander in the field and as Emperor, planning his every move in meticulous detail, dictating huge numbers of letters and dispatches, and poring over his maps late into the night. Over a long military career that stretched from Toulon in 1793 to Waterloo in 1815, he had been wounded on several occasions, surviving two shell bursts and a series of minor injuries to his chest, his Achilles tendon and his left leg. He had never shirked from danger or avoided the thick of a battle; in the course of twenty-two years he had survived numerous attacks and had seen nineteen horses killed under him. At Arcis-en-Aube in March 1814, when a shell dropped to earth only a few feet from where he stood, Napoleon calmly rode over it. According to David Chandler’s account of the incident, ‘the shell exploded, the horse, disembowelled, went plunging down, taking its rider with it. The Emperor disappeared in the dust and smoke. But he got up without a scratch’.26 There was no questioning his physical bravery. Increasingly, however, as the campaigns followed one upon the other in quick succession, he had suffered from sudden bouts of illness that contrasted with his normally robust good health and affected his capacity to lead his army in the field. Before Borodino he had difficulty breathing and his pulse rate was irregular; after Dresden he was assailed by vomiting and diarrhoea; at Leipzig he suffered acute stomach pains; and at Ligny he was incapacitated by illness immediately after the battle.27 His frenetic lifestyle and refusal to rest his body had, it seemed, finally come home to roost.
On Saint Helena Napoleon was notoriously distrustful of doctors, especially once O’Meara left and he had only the physicians allotted to him by the British authorities. He dismissed as incompetent the doctor sent out by his family in 1819, the Corsican Francesco Antommarchi, who tended him during his final months and performed the official autopsy after his death.28 In all, he had six doctors during his six years on the island, a rate of expenditure that reflected his fear of British perfidy – and of Hudson Lowe in particular – and his tendency to believe in plots and conspiracies where medicine was concerned.29 This lack of trust has made it difficult for historians to establish reliable medical records for his last illness, though from the observations of those close to him it is clear that his health had been failing for some years. From 1817 he was suffering liver problems and stomach pains, possibly the result of cancer; or he may have been assailed by hepatitis, which was prevalent in Saint Helena’s unhealthy climate.30By the autumn of 1820 he had taken to his bed, often in pain, unable to digest food, and growing steadily weaker. It is clear that he knew he was dying; indeed, he accepted death with a calm fatalism, comforting Louis Marchand with the thought that his death was pre-ordained and admitting to Bertrand that he would die with no belief in an afterlife. ‘I am lucky not to believe,’ he is quoted as saying, ‘for I don’t have chimerical fears of hell.’31 He also found the energy in April 1821 to make a will, an elaborate document in which he left bequests to his family, as well as to Bertrand, Montholon and Marchand, whom he appointed as his executors, and to several of his former companions in arms. Even in his final illness he revived from time to time and had moments of astounding clarity, though they became increasingly rare. By the first days of May he was suffering increasing pain and was prescribed ever-larger doses of drugs.
Napoleon died on 5 May 1821, at the age of fifty-two. He was surrounded by those of his friends who had stayed with him to the last: Bertrand and Montholon and their children, and his two most loyal servants, Marchand and Ali.
This is probably not the place to resurrect the controversy that has raged over the causes of his death since traces of arsenic were discovered in the strands of his hair. These had been lovingly taken by Marchand as a keepsake after his master’s death, and only much later subjected to scientific analysis. The evidence offered to suggest that Napoleon was poisoned seems, at best, circumstantial. There are other explanations that could account for the arsenic, including the effect of damp seeping into the wallpaper at Longwood. Napoleon’s health was sufficiently poor to be considered life-threatening, and the doctors at the time attributed his death to hepatitis, stomach cancer and an ulcerated stomach lining. More recent medical opinion agrees. In the last days of his life there was clear evidence of gastric bleeding; some have talked of tuberculosis, others of longstanding renal problems which had weakened him throughout his life.32 Napoleon had worn out and abused his body until it could take no more. It needed no external agency to kill him.
There remained the question of his funeral. Napoleon had expressed his wish to be buried in Paris, but there was scant chance of that being acceptable to either the British or the new French government. His other expressed wish was that his body should return to Corsica and be placed alongside his ancestors in the cathedral at Ajaccio. That, too, was rejected. Napoleon, it was agreed, must stay on Saint Helena; he could not be allowed to return to Europe where, even in death, his presence would be a threat to the new political order. Hudson Lowe did, however, grant Napoleon his choice of burial site, in the verdant Geranium Valley, under the willow trees and close to the spring where he had watched the Chinese labourers loading drinking water for Longwood. For the funeral procession he authorised a level of ceremonial appropriate to an army general; again, the British government could not contemplate giving him the honours due to a head of state. Nonetheless, the funeral could not fail to make an impression on the islanders. The entire population lined the route as Napoleon’s coffin was carried by twelve grenadiers to its final resting place; so did the two thousand or so British soldiers and sailors who were on duty on the island. The coffin was covered in blue velvet, and on it were placed his sword and the cloak that he had worn at Marengo; the tassels on the four corners of the pall were held by Bertrand and Montholon at the rear, and by Louis Marchand and Bertrand’s eldest son, Napoleon, at the front. The coffin was followed by Napoleon’s state horse, led by his groom, in front of the governor, the hated Hudson Lowe – resplendent in full-dress uniform – and a retinue of British staff and army personnel.
Amid the peace of Geranium Valley Napoleon’s body was laid to rest beneath huge flat stones. Honour, it seemed, had been upheld, but there would be one last spat with the British over the inscription on Napoleon’s tomb. The French wanted to commemorate him simply as Napoleon, his name when he was emperor; whereas the British, ever sensitive to the dangers of granting his Empire any vestige of legitimacy, insisted on Napoleon Bonaparte. And there the squabble rested. Rather than give ground on what they saw as a matter of principle, the French preferred to leave their former Emperor in an unmarked grave.33