The War of Wars (126 page)

Napoleon, realizing he had too little support, abdicated in favour of the infant King of Rome and left for Josephine’s old palace at Malmaison, which had been lived in by Hortense, her daughter. Marie Walewska was faithfully waiting for him there, as was his mother, the aged Letizia. There he decided to flee to the United States. He disguised himself as a secretary and set off for Rochefort on 29 June.

With the Prussians approaching Paris bent on revenge, his escape was a matter of urgency. He had been led to believe there would be two American frigates ready to carry him away, but the British were closely guarding French shores, with as many as thirty ships in the Bay of Biscay under Lord Keith. The
Bellerophon
, a 74-gun line-of-battle ship under Captain Maitland, was waiting off Rochefort, supported by four corvettes. Two more ships of the line were despatched to prevent Napoleon escaping. After considering no fewer than four means of escape from France, Napoleon decided to throw himself upon the
mercy of his oldest enemy, the British, writing to the Prince Regent: ‘Your Royal Highness, exposed to the factions which distract my country and to the enmity of the greatest powers of Europe, I have ended my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to throw myself on the hospitality of the English people; I put myself under the protection of their laws, which I claim from Your Royal Highness as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my enemies. Napoleon.’

Maitland, however, had been corresponding with the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, who had declared: ‘We wish that the King of France would hang or shoot Bonaparte, as the best termination of the business . . . if the King of France does not feel himself sufficiently strong to treat him as a rebel, we are ready to take upon ourselves the custody of his person.’

The British offered Napoleon no guarantees: Admiral Hotham, who had arrived on board the
Superb
on 15 July, wrote to a British envoy in Paris:

You may, if you please, assure Lord Castlereagh that no terms, nor promises, nor expectations of any kind were made, or held out, to Bonaparte either by Captain Maitland or by me: and he was distinctly told through the Count Lascasse, who was sent with the proposal for his embarking, that all Captain Maitland could do was to carry him and his suite to England, to be received in such a manner as his Royal Highness might deem expedient. He [Napoleon] appeared extremely anxious to learn how I thought he would be disposed of, but equally confident in the generosity and magnanimity of the Prince Regent and the English nation . . .

He was taken with great courtesy by ship to the spectacular Torbay in Devon, eventually reaching Start Point near Plymouth. There Lord Keith was deeply apprehensive.

It is become necessary that I am most careful; for the general and many of his suite have an idea that if they could but put foot on shore no power could remove them, and they are determined to
make the attempt if at all possible; they are becoming most refractory, and talk of resisting the Emperor being taken out of the ship. I desired Captain Maitland to inform those gentlemen that if such language was continued I should feel obliged to have recourse to a more rigorous mode of confinement.

A thousand small boats circled the ship every day for a glimpse of the Ogre of Europe. On one occasion, reported the
Morning Post
, ‘we regret to say a large portion of the spectators not only took off their hats but cheered him.’

Meanwhile Wellington had painfully reassembled and disciplined his army for the march on Paris in two columns, one British, the other Prussian under Blücher. The Duke was in contact with his close political ally Castlereagh, as well as with Talleyrand and Metternich. Wellington officially told Louis XVIII to fall in with the march of his victorious army, something Talleyrand unsuccessfully advised him not to do for fear of being seen as a puppet of foreign powers by the French people. The Prussians went on a rampage against the French. A private of the 11th Light Dragoons wrote of a village that had been visited by the Prussians: ‘The work of devastation I have no language to describe. In the chateau there was not one article of furniture, from the costly pier glass down to the common coffee-cup, which they had not smashed to atoms. The flour-mill, likewise, was all gutted . . . And as to living things, there was none – not so much as a half-starved pigeon.’

Paris soon capitulated and the hugely fat King followed Wellington’s army of occupation to be greeted by Fouché and Talleyrand. Chateaubriand captured the irony of this scene. ‘Suddenly a door opens; silently there enters vice leaning on the arm of crime, M. de Talleyrand walking supported by Fouché; the infernal vision passes slowly in front of me, reaches the King’s study and disappears. Fouché had come to swear allegiance to his lord; on bended knee the loyal regicide placed the hands which had caused the death of Louis XVI between the hands of the brother of the royal martyr; the apostate bishop stood surety for the oath.’

There was no doubt about who the real masters of the city were: Wellington was head of an army of occupation of more than 1.2
million troops altogether in France, occupying sixty-one departments. The
Grande Armée
was exiled to the provinces and demobilized. Louis was treated as a powerless figurehead while Wellington issued Talleyrand and Fouché with their instructions. The Duke also set about stripping Paris of the art treasures, including the famous Venetian horses of San Marco, which had been plundered by Napoleon from all over Europe, and restoring them to their former owners.

Louis was utterly humiliated and began to intrigue with the Tsar who resented British control of France. The reactionary royalists, the ultras, intent on a reign of terror against republicans and supporters of Napoleon, flooded Paris and secured control of the new Assembly, causing the downfall of the moderate Talleyrand and the intriguing Fouché. A new cabinet was set up under a royalist, although not an extreme one, the Duc de Richelieu, supported by the King’s moderate favourite, Decazes.

The ultras were not slow to bare their fangs: in Marseilles, Avignon and Nice pogroms took place against former Bonapartists. Some 6,000 were imprisoned for sedition and political crimes. Seven senior Bonapartists were condemned to death immediately, including, most tragically, the heroic Ney who was shot on 7 December. The implacable Louis would not pardon him, fearing perhaps that he would become a rallying point for opposition. Wellington, shamefully, did nothing to save him. It was, an indelible stain on the reputations of both men. Some 30,000 civil servants, a third of the total, were purged from their jobs.

Under the Second Treaty of Paris, the army of occupation was to be reduced to 150,000 and remain for five years, while France was required to pay 700 million francs in reparations. The country’s frontiers were restored to those of 1790. Napoleon’s second defeat had achieved the humiliation France had been spared on the occasion of the first.

Wellington remained as proconsul with his usual indifference to what people thought of him. An attempt was made to blow up his house and then to shoot him in the Champs Elysées in 1816. He dallied with his girlfriends, in particular the devoted Lady Shelley, Lady Webster, Lady Caroline Lamb and the Caton sisters.

A witness gives this portrait of the victor of Waterloo and now proconsul of France.

Middle height, neither stout nor thin; erect figure, not stiff; not very lively, though more than I expected. Black hair, simply cut, strongly mixed with grey; not a very high forehead, immense hawk’s nose, tightly compressed lips, strong, massive under jaw. After he had talked for some time in the ante-room he came straight to the Royal Family, with whom he spoke in a very friendly manner, and then, going round the circle, shook hands with all his acquaintances. He was dressed entirely in black with the star of the Order of the Garter and the Maria Theresa cross. He spoke to all the officers present in an open, friendly way, though but briefly. At table he sat next to the Princess. He ate and drank moderately, and laughed at times most heartily, and whispered many things in the Princess’s ear which made her blush and laugh.

He remained attractively outspoken, as befitted a man who needed no favours from anyone else. Of the Prince Regent he declared: ‘By God, you never saw such a figure in your life as he is. He speaks and swears so like old Falstaff, that damme, if I was not ashamed to walk into a room with him.’ Of Napoleon’s exile he remarked: ‘Buonaparte is so damned intractable a fellow there is no knowing how to deal with him.’

Only in November 1818 did the only Englishman ever to have ruled France resign his post and return to join a British cabinet, having left behind a weak French administration which ruled until 1820, when the country returned to more reactionary rule.

As for the ex-Emperor, on 31 July he was informed that he was to be exiled to St Helena. It was worse than a death sentence. Napoleon, according to Lord Keith:

received the paper, laid it on the table, and after a pause he began with declaring his solemn protest against this proceeding of the British government, that they had not the right to dispose of him in
this manner, and that he appealed to the British people and to the laws of this country. He then asked what was the tribunal, or if there was not a tribunal, where he might prefer his appeal against the illegality and injustice of this decision. ‘I am come here voluntarily,’ said he, ‘to place myself on the hearth of your nation, and to claim the rights of hospitality. I am not even a prisoner of war. If I were a prisoner of war, you would be bound to treat me according to the law of nations . . .

‘Let me be put in a country house in the centre of [Britain], thirty leagues from any sea. Place a commissioner about me to examine my correspondence and to report my actions, and if the Prince Regent should require my parole, perhaps I would give it. There I could have a certain degree of personal liberty, and I could enjoy the liberty of literature. In St Helena I should not live three months. With my habits and constitution, it would be immediate death. I am used to ride twenty leagues a day. What am I to do on that little rock at the end of the world? The climate is too hot for me. No, I will not go to St Helena. Botany Bay is better than St Helena. If your government wishes to put me to death, they may kill me here. It is not worth while to send me to St Helena. I prefer death to St Helena.’

In fact St Helena had been chosen expressly as a prison island from which there was no escape: as its former governor General Beatson wrote grimly:

There are undoubtedly several local circumstances peculiar to the island of St Helena which seem to render it pre-eminently suitable to the purpose of confining a state prisoner. Its remote situation from all parts of the globe, its compact form and size, the small numbers of its inhabitants, amongst whom no stranger can introduce himself without immediate detection, together with the extraordinary formation of the island, being encompassed on all sides by stupendous and almost perpendicular cliffs rising to the height of from six to more than twelve hundred feet, and through which there are but few inlets to the interior, are collectively such a
variety of natural advantages that perhaps they are not to be equalled . . .

The only accessible landing-places are James Town, Rupert’s Bay, and Lemon Valley on the north, and Sandy Bay on the south. All these points are well fortified by fleur d’eau [between wind and water] batteries, furnished (except Sandy Bay) with furnaces for heating shot, and as cannon are also placed upon the cliffs in their vicinity, far above the reach of ships, it may readily be imagined that if a Martello Tower with one gun could beat off a 74-gun ship in the Mediterranean, how much more efficacious would be those preparations for defence in the island of St Helena. In short, it appeared to be the opinion of several experienced naval officers, who have recently visited that island, that no ships could possibly stand the fire of the defences which protect the anchorage and the whole of the northern coast . . . and the southern is equally secure against a naval attack . . . The precipitous pathways should, of course, be attended to and guarded, and they might easily be defended by rolling stones from the heights . . .

A great acquisition has lately resulted from an admirable establishment of telegraphs. These are placed upon the most commanding heights, and are so connected and so spread all over the island that no vessel can approach without being described at the distance of sixty miles. Nothing can pass in any part, or even in sight of the Island, without being instantly known to the governor . . . In short, the whole island can be under arms at a moment’s waiting.

The reality of Napoleon’s incarceration proved even worse than he feared: ‘Accursed island, one cannot see the sun or the moon for the greater part of the year: always rain or fog. One can’t ride a mile without being soaked.’ It was a truly terrible fate for a man who once bestrode the world like a colossus to be condemned to this bleak, windswept rock in the middle of nowhere under constant guard. His gaoler was a dull pedant, Sir Hudson Lowe, who was meticulous in his restrictions upon the ex-Emperor, although not actually an unkind man. There were a few desultory plots by exiled Bonapartists in the United States to free him, in one of which also implicated the dashing
but now disgraced victor of Aix Roads, Thomas, Lord Cochrane, who wished to set him up on a Latin American throne alongside Simon Bolivar.

On 14 June 1816 a secret flotilla of small boats equipped with artillery set out from Baltimore with around 300 men under the command of an officer called Fournier. T; the plan was to stay out of sight of the island, but to land a man disguised as a British soldier who would give Napoleon notice of the plot, along with a series of rendezvous points on different nights where he would be picked up by a boat after dark. It appeared that certain inhabitants of the island were in on the plot. In the event Lowe posted sentries at dusk, instead of at 9 p.m. as previously, to Napoleon’s intense annoyance. No attempt was made.