Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (10 page)

In truth, the loss of his wife seemed to trouble William far less that the contraction of the household he reigned over. In 1808 his son and namesake had died; his daughter Margaret, only seventeen, had passed away in 1811; and twelve-year-old Octavius soon followed. Marriage had taken others away: Robert Patterson had married his sweetheart, Marianne Caton, and
moved out of the family home. John, also married, now lived in Virginia. Joseph was in Europe, and Edward had virtually moved into the Smith home, as he was about to marry one of Sam’s daughters. Where once William had been the master of a household filled with children, only nineteen-year-old George and fourteen-year-old Henry remained. Far worse than the absence of sons and daughters was the fact that, with Dorcas’s death, the Patterson household was without a woman to oversee its domestic operations—and see to its patriarch’s needs.

It soon became clear that William expected his daughter Betsy to fill the position left empty by Dorcas’s death. Although Napoleon’s abortive effort to reclaim power failed in 1815 and peace finally came to Europe, and although the British blockade was lifted, William pressured Betsy to remain in Baltimore.

In early-nineteenth-century American society, bowing to a father’s wishes was more common than defying them. And in any respectable, genteel American family, unmarried women were expected to remain at home rather than take themselves off to foreign countries on their own. Respectable mothers did not abandon their children, even if they left them in the good hands of relatives or friends. Yet Betsy proved willing to break all these rules. Learning of Betsy’s decision to go abroad, one of her neighbors remarked: “
This scheme requires a decided character to go through with it.” Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte had just the character that was needed. On July 26, 1815, she arrived in Liverpool. She was thirty years old—and this was the first trip she had ever taken alone. It would not be her last.

When Betsy set sail for England, she left behind a furious father, a saddened son, and a collection of disappointed suitors. William’s insistence that she do her familial duty had fallen on deaf ears. Her young son’s tears had not shaken her resolve. And the lovesick poems of her most ardent suitor that year, William Johnson Jr., had not given her pause. Johnson’s pleas—“
O Turn thou lovely Eyes away / I cannot bear the melting Ray”—and his pleading letters—“What if I am not able to drive you from my thoughts? Or even my Dreams?”—so like those of Samuel Graves, could not persuade Betsy that her future lay in America as the proper wife of a solid citizen.

Betsy had prepared for her trip as carefully as she could. She had elicited letters of introduction from a number of Washington political figures, local businessmen, and old friends like Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson feared that he could be of little service; he reminded her that it had been twenty-five years since he had been to Paris, and all the important people he had known during his years as ambassador to France had been “swept away” by the violence of the last few decades.
But Betsy’s uncle, Samuel Smith, provided her with a letter of introduction to the Marquis de Lafayette.
Richard Gilmore sent notes to friends in the Netherlands, including the wife of the Dutch bureaucrat
who had permitted the
Erin
to be restocked in 1803, introducing Betsy as an amiable woman with an “interesting history.”
And Jan Willink, father of another of Betsy’s disappointed suitors, wrote to his brother William, urging him to assist Betsy in any way she requested.

William Patterson had also been busy writing friends and business associates in Europe, but his letters would be of no help to his daughter. In them, he portrayed Betsy as a mentally unbalanced young woman who had left home “contrary to the Wishes of her friends.” He asked London banker James McIlhiny to monitor her behavior and report her actions to her concerned father. McIlhiny revealed William’s request to Betsy, perhaps believing that the call for someone to spy on a daughter was a sign of paternal concern and affection. Betsy thought not. Fifty-two years later she would annotate McIlhiny’s letter with a cold fury that matched her father’s unkindness: she “
conceived a residence under [her father’s] Roof,” she wrote, “to be the hole of the asp & the den of the Cockatrix.” She still keenly felt her need to escape from William’s flaunting of mistresses a half century later. But it was her keen feeling of rejection, of holding second place in William’s affections, that still burned most brightly. His mistresses, she noted, “were more congenial company to the venerable Pater familias as well a bad Example to his daughter—He was delighted at her departure & had done Every thing in his power to get rid of her.”

Yet not even William’s cruel characterization of Betsy as mentally unbalanced could diminish her joy at being in England again. That nation, still celebrating its victory over Napoleon,
proved more than ready to welcome the woman who exemplified in 1815, as she had in 1803, the callousness of the former emperor. The English were ready to overlook her disregard for those social conventions that prevented a woman, and a mother, from traveling without a male guardian. Members of the nobility and prominent families flooded her with invitations, eager to provide the hospitality that Napoleon had denied her.

Betsy threw herself into the social life they offered. She rented a small cottage in the fashionable spa town of Cheltenham, insisting that her health had been so damaged by the tensions of life in Baltimore that taking the waters at Cheltenham was essential to her recovery. Whether this was true or not, it provided her with a reason to quit the company of the American couple who had chaperoned her on the Atlantic crossing. Soon after she settled in, she could be seen attending rounds of dinner parties and musical concerts with new friends like Sir Arthur and Lady Brooke Falkener. The Falkeners’ friendship was invaluable, for as Betsy noted, England was a country “
so particular about social position that relations with persons of obscure background, however honorable and respectable they may be, are not tolerated.” Safely under the wing of the Falkeners, Betsy could report to her father her many invitations to balls hosted by the nobility. Here as in Washington, Betsy’s beauty impressed all who saw her. When she appeared at a ball, dressed in an “embroidered high-waisted muslin dress, ermine-lined cloak, diamond studded tiara in her … hair” and wearing an emerald necklace given to her by Jérôme, men hurried to her side. By August she had reached the pinnacle of social
acceptance: she received an invitation to a garden party to be held at the pavilion of the Prince of Wales. Here she mingled with Lord Castlereagh and two of the prince’s former mistresses, Lady Melbourne and Lady Hertford. All doors seemed open to her now. She was invited to exclusive gambling clubs like Almack’s, where she saw Beau Brummel himself, and she whiled away afternoons playing whist and faro at the homes of Lady Archer and Lady Buckingham.

Her delight and her relief at her own success were obvious: three thousand miles from home, she at last felt “
cherished, visited, respected, and admired.” Betsy took pains to explain the happiness she felt to her father. “
Europe more than meets the brilliant and vivid colors in which my imagination portrayed it. Its resources are infinite, much beyond those which can be offered us in a new country. The purposes of life are all fulfilled, activity and repose without monotony. Beauty commands homage, talents secure admiration, misfortune meets with respect.”

But William was not impressed by his daughter’s social success. His only response to Betsy’s accounts of her crowded social calendar was to write: “
I am convinced that the happiness you are seeking is not true happiness; I pray to God that you will see your error.” Surely his cruelest comment followed. “As for your letters,” he told his daughter, “I am so ashamed of them that I do not dare show them to anybody.”

William’s disapproval hung like a cloud over Betsy. He was, and he would ever remain, the true audience for her social success, and he would forever refuse to admire or respect it. His criticism was echoed in the letters of James McIlhiny, who
adopted a paternal tone that was chillingly familiar to Betsy. Like William, McIlhiny disapproved of her independent behavior. He wrote to her from London on September 5, 1815, chiding her for parting company with her chaperones. She was, he said, inviting scandal. “
I fear it may give room for ill-natured things to be said of you and you must know the world full well enough to find that the Natural Disposition of Mankind is prone to Evil and Consequently Censorious.” He urged her not to go out in public so much and seemed convinced that everyone at home was shocked at her departure from America. As he understood it, she had simply run away, “without any of your Family being apprised of your Intentions.” Far worse, even her “poor Dear Boy” had known nothing of her intentions to abandon him.

Betsy did her best to assure McIlhiny that she had neither stolen off in the night nor abandoned her child. She had left him in the capable and affectionate care of her brother Robert and his wife. He was never far from her thoughts, she assured McIlhiny, and she was eager to investigate European schools for Bo. But the rumors that she was a runaway mother persisted, spread, it seemed, by her own relatives. Betsy’s brother Edward, one of her few family allies, was appalled when she told him that members of their extended family had criticized her departure. “
It was with the most mortifying indignation that I read of the conduct of our relations in London. What could have prompted this behavior is inconceivable had you not recieved [
sic
] your information from an undoubted source I could not but be incredulous.” Edward knew the truth and stated it simply: “We all knew you were going.”

By November, letters of denial and assertions of innocence came pouring in to Betsy from the offending family members. John Spear Smith wrote from Baltimore that he was certain none of her relatives had expressed the slightest opposition to her trip abroad. A hint of envy at her situation crept into his note as he added that life in Baltimore was “
the same old and dull … nothing but eating drinking and sleeping indeed since the war we are more flat than ever.” Ann Spear’s denial was more emphatic. We never said such things, she insisted, but she could not refrain from adding, “
I think it both wicked & ridiculous to make such a groaning about it even if it were true.” In her view, Betsy was guilty of overreacting. “I am sure,” she declared, “if you had lost an eye or a leg you could not have grieved more.” And, on December 27, Betsy’s cousin Mary Mansfield attempted to dismiss the matter as an unfortunate misunderstanding. She had learned, she said, that Betsy was angry about “
tales allegedly spread by me about you.”

Betsy knew that the main source of the problem was not her cousins but her own father. Years later, as she annotated the correspondence she had saved for half a century, she wrote on the back of McIlhiny’s September 5 letter: “
Health Character attention what were they to the insane miser who desired only an excuse to blot all out respecting his Conduct so dastardly to a poor & defenceless woman.”

Among Betsy’s family correspondents that year, only her brother Edward sent genuine good wishes. “
This will find you, I hope enjoying all the fashionable amusements of London—we go on in the same old train, just as dull as ever no public amusements
& precious few private ones—what a contrast there must be between London & Baltimore!” What John Spear Smith envied, Edward took vicarious delight in.

For Betsy, the contrast between life at home and life abroad was tangible. While her Baltimore family went on “in the same old train,” Betsy dined at the home of the Duke of Wellington, hero of Waterloo. She was introduced to men of talent, like the painter Benjamin West, and to women of noble breeding, like Lady Godfrey Webster. Reveling in her social success, Betsy soon forgave her relatives for their criticisms. But she could not resist writing a sharp rebuke to her father. “
It appears to me,” she wrote, “that, if I have friends in America, their friendship might have been shown in a more agreeable mode than finding fault with me for being miserable in a country where I never was appreciated, and where I can never be contented.”

As this letter reveals, Betsy could not and would never understand why she was criticized simply because she believed life in Europe suited her better than life in America. She was not proselytizing; she made no effort to convert others to her views of the relative value of life abroad and at home. She knew, as she told John Spear Smith months later in August 1816, that Americans “
consider me an apostate from the Republic, an impudent & successful imitator of high life, which they profess to despise in short a bad Citizen”; yet Betsy believed she had had no choice but to leave her native country. She asked only that friends and family—and above all, her father—accept what she was certain was true: that she had been born in the wrong place, in a culture that did not suit her interests or talents, and in a world in
which she would always feel a misfit and an outsider. Her wit, her intelligence, and her love of cultured life meant that she did not belong in a society of practical, business-oriented men and docile, domestic women whose conversation centered on either money or children and for whom routine was more desirable than novelty of experience. She required a public life that carried with it the chance to mingle with men and women who were her equals in intellect and in the art of social intercourse. In Baltimore, she suffocated; in London and in the capitals of Europe, she was able to breathe at last.

William did not understand the attraction public life held for his daughter. It surely held no charm for him. In his mind, social interactions were necessary only to accomplish other goals; they were never ends in themselves. Nor could he understand the desire of a woman to carve out a place in the public sphere. In a proper society, that sphere was—and ought to be—a masculine domain. An eccentric spinster like Betsy’s aunt Nancy Spear, avidly following the debates on the floor of Congress, was bad enough, but his own daughter, traipsing off to Europe alone, abandoning her duties to her child and her father—this was a rejection of woman’s essentially submissive nature and her proper destiny that he could neither fathom nor tolerate. He could only conclude that his daughter was a fool, and a willful fool at that. No matter how hard she tried to show that she was “prudent and wise,” guilty only of making choices he would not have made, he clung to the notion that her life was a fool’s errand. Small wonder that, until death separated them, father and daughter would remain bitterly at odds.