NAPOLEON BY SOULADREAM

NAPOLEON BEFORE THE CHARACTER ASSASSINATION

2019-05-27T14:59:00.002+01:00

Thousands of British people flock to see Napoleon on HMS Bellerophon

by John James Chalon 1816

The article below appeared in the British paper The Sunday Telegraph on May 5th 2019 and reveals how Napoleon was seen BEFORE the merciless character assassination that occurred after he became First Consul and as he was depicted by subsequent English 'historians' who amplified the lies and distortions even more.

LETTER GIVES SHORT SHRIFT TO THE 'NAPOLEON COMPLEX'

Irish nobleman's account of a meeting in 1803 belies the propaganda image of the French Emperor

by Dalya Alberge

Alfred Adler, the psychoanalyst, was inspired by Napoleon Bonaparte when he diagnosed a syndrome in the last century in which men overcompensate for their short stature through aggressive behaviour.

But it appears he may have been doing the French leader a great injustice, after a previously unpublished letter described the future Emperor as charm personified.

An Irish nobleman wrote of meeting Napoleon at the Tuileries Palace on January 8th 1803. Charles Vane, third Marquess of Londonderry - who, as a soldier in the British army, was to fight in the Napoleonic Wars - painted a portrait of a friendly, charismatic man who was then Consul, and soon to become Emperor.

In an 11 page letter to his father, he wrote of being presented to Napoleon: "I was excessively struck with Bonaparte's countenance and manners. He is very different from the idea I had formed of him. His face is broad and his forehead vast, cheek bones rather high and chin long. He has the fiercest eyes and most fascinating smile I ever witnessed. He seems to have been born for the honours of a Court. He has something new to say to everyone who is presented to him and there is always something pertinent and original in his remarks."

He did notice Napoleon's diminutive height: [He was actually 5'6" - the average height for a Frenchman of his day] "He is a stouter man than I had imagined, although he is short." Impressed by the Consul's dress "in crimson velvet embroidered with gold", he added: "After Bonaparte's military levee, he changes his dress and puts on the Consular uniform, goes into another suite of apartments with the other two consuls, receives all strangers."

He was flattered by Napoleon's interest in him, and irritated by fellow guest Lord Whitworth, then the British ambassador in Paris. "Bonaparte asked me where I had served - my regiment - the height of my new horses - and seemed pleased to get answers. Lord Whitworth, rather unkindly in my opinion, when Bonaparte asked him if I was a relation of Gen Stewert... did not say I was a brother of Lord Castlereagh, which he might have done and I should have been taken more notice of." He continued: "As to political intelligence, I can give you little... It is rumoured that [Bonaparte] is to be created Emperor of the Gauls. He has increased the Senate to 150 from 30."

On being shown the letter, Dr Mark Braude, author of The Invisible Emperor, about Napoleon's exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba, said: "Napoleon could be very charming. One to one, he had respect for the English and saw the political value in charming them on an individual level." But he added: "There was a disconnect between the person in the flesh and the propaganda. Napoleon was kind of short - 5ft 5in - but he was not tiny, compared to the average man at that time. This whole notion of Napoleon the Emperor as this small person is the direct result of British propaganda. The caricaturists could skewer him in that way... The Napoleon Complex harmed his image as well." [Napoleon was taller than Nelson and at 5' 6" - and average height - he was not 'kind of short' at all].

Castlereagh, he pointed out, became foreign minister - "a key person in fighting Napoleon and, barely weeks after the letter was written, Britain and France were at war".

The letter will be sold by Chiswick Auctions in London on May 30. The vendor had discovered it among family papers. Valentina Borghi, Chiswick Auction's specialist in printed books, autographs and manuscripts, spoke of the fascination of reading about Napoleon's personality and charisma "from someone on the ground face-to-face". She added: "This letter is probably one of the most authentic and detailed descriptions of Napoleon's appearance that we will ever read."

John Tarttelin M.A. History

A Souladream production

BOOK REVIEW - THIS DARK BUSINESS

2018-08-22T20:47:00.001+01:00

It is impossible to say just how much I welcome this book. For years, decades and even centuries, so-called 'historians' have repeated utter tosh, lies and misrepresentations about Napoleon. In this superb book, Tim Clayton raises the lies set in stone and shines a light on the illiterate lowlife that have carried on their propaganda for so long. The British Establishment in the late C18th and early C19th were determined to cast Napoleon as the devil incarnate. They accused him of being tyrannical, cruel, and evil - the very same things they were so obviously guilty of themselves. Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, Liverpool et al were little more than obnoxious gangsters dressed in silk and ermine and they put out a 'hit' on Napoleon to take the attention away from their own awful and nefarious deeds. They even paid for and encouraged assassins to kill the Emperor - and did not give a damn when innocent civilians were blown to pieces as a result. To pretend that Britain was a nation of laws, freedom and liberty during this period is nothing more than a revolting sick joke.

In 2008 I reviewed Ben Weider's book THE WARS AGAINST NAPOLEON. As a consequence he got in touch with me and invited me to join his International Napoleonic Society. I wrote some twenty articles for the INS and they formed the basis for my own book THE REAL NAPOLEON - THE UNTOLD STORY. Ben was no fan of Pitt or Napoleon's other detractors. It is a shame that he did not live long enough to read Tim Clayton's book.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. As the blurb states:

'Between two attempts in 1800 and 1804 to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte, the British government launched a campaign of black propaganda of unprecedented scope and intensity to persuade George III's reluctant subjects to fight the Napoleonic War, a war to the death against one man: the Corsican usurper and tyrant.

THIS DARK BUSINESS tells the story of the British government's determination to destroy Napoleon Bonaparte by any means possible. 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 of 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.

THIS DARK BUSINESS plunges the reade into the hidden underworld of Georgian politics. Faced with the terrifying prospect of revolution, bribery and coercion are the means to secure compliance in this ruthless world of spies, plots and lies.'

If you want the REAL history of this period - read this book.

I also recommend Tim Clayton's book WATERLOO which I have reviewed earlier on these pages. It is the very best book to be had on that subject.

C. John Tarttelin B.Ed., M.A. (History)

A Souladream Production

(2018)

WATERLOO - BOOK REVIEW

2018-07-25T19:58:00.000+01:00

This is one of the worst 'history' books I have ever read, and at the age of 63 I've read quite a few. To call this work a piece of consummate and unmitigated tosh is to praise it unduly. It is as balanced as the leaning tower of Pisa and full of errors of commission and omission. Black would be a great writer for Marvel comics because his two-dimensional cartoon Napoleon could not possibly exist in real life. Black by name and nature, his whole objective is to castigate and decry Napoleon from the first page to the last. This is not 'history' as I recognize it. He dedicates this 'work' to Charles Esdaile which is fitting because Esdaile's 'Napoleon's Wars' is of the same tainted ilk. Both these writers start with the premise that everything that Napoleon did and stood for was bad and evil, while saint Wellington and the Archangels in the British Cabinet could only grace the British population and the world by their benificent good graces. More utter rubbish. Black ends his diatribic screed with the following: "Waterloo is thus symbolic: of a key moment in history and of the struggle against the unreason of tyranny." (p.217) This would be little more than a sick joke if this man was not supposedly a 'Professor of history'.

Like many a poor historian he has to get in his Hitler slurs and comparisons: "Indeed, like Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany and Hitler, Napoleon was an aggressive imperialist within Europe." (p.204) Meanwhile of course, angelic British politicans were making daisy chains and writing poetry - THEY couldn't possible do any wrong... Well actually: In 1807 Canning sent Wellington (blessed be his name) and sundry other pacifists to attack neutral Copenhagen and sieze the Danish fleet. They murdered over 2,000 Danish civilians in the process - bombarding them with Congreve rockets in this jolly little jape - the first use of weapons of mass destruction in European history. Our illustrious Professor does not mention this. I wonder why? He castigates Napoleon for poor foreign policy, yet the result of this atrocity was that the Danes joined forces with Napoleon. What brilliant foreign policy that was! Canning then lied through his back teeth in Parliament about the whole affair.

The British Government also paid for innumerable assassination attempts against Napoleon's life - all in secret without any discussion in Parliament. British gold paid for the infamous 'infernal machine' which nearly killed Napoleon - then First Consul - on December 24th 1800. As Ben Weider states in his book 'The Wars Against Napoleon': "The barbaric attack in the Rue Saint-Nicaise... Twenty-Two dead and fifteen wounded were carried away... The material damage was considerable and several dozen houses were destroyed. The monstrosity of this terrorist act was unimaginable. The life of the First Consul hung by a thread." (p.25) The young girl left to look after the cart packed with explosives was blown to bits. Another woman had her breasts blown off and yet another was blinded - plus all the other victims. This hideous and merciless act was paid for by Pitt and his criminal cabal in the British Cabinet. No doubt Black would call this 'British fair play'. The British Government continued with these murder attempts even during the Peace of Amiens. This revolting hypocrisy is again not mentioned by Black. I wonder why?

To return to the Hitler slurs. Hitler gassed the Jews: Napoleon gave the Jews equal rights within his Empire and was the first person to suggest that they be given territory of their own in the Holy Land. Anyone of any religion could become an officer or general in Napoleon's Army because he believed in careers open to talent but in the British Army no Catholic could ever become a General - there was even a law against it. So where was the tyranny there?

Black's comic book scribblings do not even mention the infamous Press gangs. They seized members of the public who were forced to serve on British vessels. Many of them never saw their families again. Furthermore they were not allowed on land when their ship docked in case they had the temerity to 'desert'. The press gangs even took American citizens from ships on the high seas and that was one of the reasons America went to war against Britain in 1812 - more superb British foreign policy!

According to Black's Promised Land of Britain it would seem that everyone partook of milk and honey. Sadly that was not the case. The life for ordinary men and women was atrocious and they were treated like vermin by their own Government. During the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, innocent, peaceful protesters were hacked to death by their own militia. One British soldier who had fought at Waterloo lived just long enough to be killed by his own militia that day in Manchester! Castlereagh praised the local magistrates for this action - for murdering their own people. Black does not mention this. I wonder why? Unless this is wilfil ommission, his only excuse must be his sheer ignorance.

Black says: "Napoleonic power was a dead end," (p205). In fact, Napoleon ensured that the French peasantry were able to keep the lands they had gained during and after the Revolution; he made peace with the Catholic church - the religion of most French people - with his Concordat; he invited 200,000 emigres back to France (despite dozens of their fellow royalists still being intent on murdering him); he instituted his famous Code Napoleon; the Bank of France; he abolished the guillotine; he organized roads, bridges and water supplies; he decided to register house with odd numbers on one side of the street and even numbers on the other - the first to do this; he built orphanages and had state dowries for poor girls; he insisted that small denominations were made available so that the poor could get simple charity to pay for bread; he boosted ports and dockyards; and he was responsible for signing sixteen treaties and peace conventions between 1800 and 1803 alone. In Paris he was lauded as a peace-maker. As soon as he became Emperor - a title he chose after the failed Cadoudal Conspiracy of 1804 paid for by the Bank of London - he wrote to the British Government asking for peace in a very statesman-like letter. His peace feelers were rejected with utter contempt. The ultra arrogant British Goverment did not even deign to reply. Napoleon wrote to King George III again in early 1805 - months before Trafalgar requesting a peace deal. Again his letter was ignored. And in 1815 the first thing he did after his return to Paris from Elba was to write to all the powers asking to be left in peace to rule France. He was immensely more popular than the 230lb Louis XVIII who was twice forced upon the French public by those 'peaceful' allies. Napoleon was three times voted ruler by popular plebiscites /referenda. There was nothing like this show of democracy in the whole of contemporary Europe. Black tries to maintain that he had little popular support during the so-called Hundred Days - more utter drivel. And what right had the British and the Allies to 'force' France to accept a king she did not want?

Napoleon was attacked in most of the wars of the period. After the failed Peace of Amiens - it failed because the British would not evacuate Malta as they had promised to do - the British impounded all French vessels in British ports without even a declaration of war. The Austrians and Russians were paid by the British Cabinet to attack France in 1805. They were basically bankrupt countries and could not possibly have gone to war without lashings of British gold. Similarly, an arrogant Prussia attacked Napoleon in 1806 and was utterly crushed at Jena-Auerstadt. Napoleon then found out that his supposed 'ally' Spain was dallying with the Prussians behind his back. This is often forgotten as was the fact that both the Spanish King and his heir appealed to Napoleon for him to intercede in their family quarrel - long before he invaded Spain. Napoleon did invade Russia in 1812 but as Georges Lefebvre makes clear, the Tsar made preparations to attack Napoleon's ally the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1811. And everyone seems to forget that Russia tried to invade France via Switzerland under Suvarov as early as 1800 - a full decade and more before Napoleon returned the favour.

As the British writer and Peninsular War veteran Napier remarked in his account of that conflict - the war in Europe was until 1807 essentially a war to defend privilege. The European powers believed in divine right monarchy and their own god-given right to power and wealth as enshrined in their own aristocracies. They made war repeatedly against France to kill the Revolution stone dead and then later against Napoleon personally because a nascent democracy was growing via the careers open to talent and his use of plebiscites. Hence their illegal and merciless action in declaring war on Napoleon PERSONALLY after his peace feelers of early 1815. What rank arrogance and despicable natures they showed to the world. Then with the White Terror after Waterloo, Lord Liverpool the British Prime Minister encouraged Louis XVIII to murder hundreds of Napoleon's former supporters without trial or legal process. His evil Government encouraged the murderers of their own people at Peterloo so why should mere 'Frenchies' expect mercy...

To conclude: Black's whole thesis is riddled with errors, vituperation and bile and frankly his supposed 'history' does not even deserve a '1'.

John Tartellin B.Ed (History); M.A. (History); author of THE REAL NAPOLEON - THE UNTOLD STORY.

RUNCIMAN: NELSON AND NAPOLEON

2017-07-04T16:32:00.000+01:00

Walter Runciman: Nelson and Napoleon

‘Napoleon, when at the height of his fame, was looked upon by the European Powers as a man whose lust for conquest was a terrible menace to all constituted authority. The oligarchies thought themselves bound to combine against him in order to reseat the Bourbons on the throne of France and restore law and order to that distracted country. What a travesty of the actual facts!’1

This was the Big Lie told to generations of British children and to which most English historians have subscribed. Baptized in this polluted historical font they have drenched their pages with liberal drops of venom and bile - proclaiming Napoleon to be a veritable Anti-Christ. Thus initiated, they have continued to casually toss mistruths and misrepresentations between themselves until they have constructed a catechism of calumny they all endorse. It is an original sin that few contemporary historians can escape from. At its most basic it is Orwellian: England Good - Napoleon Bad.

The truth was very different: ‘The people of France had risen against the tyranny and oppression of the French Kings and nobles, and out of the welter of the Revolution Napoleon rose to power and, by his magnetic personality, welded the chaotic elements into unity, framed laws which are still in operation, and led his country to wonderful heights of glory.’2

Walter Runciman was born on July 6th 1847 in Dunbar, Scotland, little more than a quarter of a century after the death of Napoleon on the island of Saint Helena. It could be said that that the young Scotsman had salt water in his veins. In 1855 the family was visited by three sailors over six feet three inches tall, a grandfather and two great-uncles. These seadogs had fought at Aboukir Bay, Copenhagen and Trafalgar and each of them had boarded Spanish and French vessels brandishing cutlasses. How the small boy must have revelled in their tales of the death of Nelson, storms, seamanship and derring-do. Not surprisingly young Walter soon saw himself as a ‘powder monkey’ in the making. However, three of his mother’s brothers had drowned at sea and her own father had been ruined by the infamous pressgang, so she was far from happy when he left home at twelve to become an apprentice seaman.3

In his book Drake, Nelson and Napoleon written while the First World War was still raging in 1917,4 Runciman’s love of the sea is obvious. Of Drake, he remarks that: ‘Having smashed his antagonist, he regarded it as plain duty in the name of God to live on his beaten foe and seize their treasure of gold, silver, diamonds, works of art, etc., wherever these could be laid hold of,’5 and he says of Queen Elizabeth Ist: ‘She was never mentally disturbed by the moral side of the great deeds that brought her vast stores of plunder.’6 This should be borne in mind by British writers who castigate Napoleon for seizing art treasures in Italy in 1796 on the orders of The Directory.

Brought up to see Nelson as a hero and Napoleon as the enemy, Runciman was surprised to find that many British sailors had a lot of sympathy for the fallen Emperor - there were many songs and sea shanties written about him. Nevertheless, when he purchased a copy of Walter Scott’s Napoleon7 to while away a long voyage, he expected his then anti-Napoleon views to be substantiated. However, he was so struck by the one-sided nature of the biography that he came to the conclusion that it was little more than an Establishment stitch-up. Its dual aims were to absolve the British Government of any wrongdoing during the so-called Napoleonic Wars and to damn Napoleon in the eyes of contemporaries and posterity.

In regard to Nelson and Napoleon, Runciman states in the preface of his book that: ‘It would be futile to draw a comparison between the two men. The one was a colossal human genius, and the other, extraordinary in the art of his profession, was entirely without the faculty of understanding or appreciating the distinguished man he flippantly raged at from his quarterdeck.’8

Although he admires Nelson and sees him as a great national figure, Runciman is one of the few British historians to point out that he was a hero with feet of clay and a very flawed human being. In particular he describes the catastrophic effect that two women had upon him - Queen Caroline of Naples and his real femme fatale, Emma Hamilton. Nelson had an almost childlike need for adoration and approbation, especially from women. When his ego was flattered he became as putty in their hands. Their baleful influence led him to make terrible mistakes both as an individual and as a representative of his country. He was also incredibly self-obsessed. He might accept that the earth revolved around the sun, but he was convinced that the universe was centred upon him personally: ‘Nelson was always an attractive personality and by no means the type of man to allow himself to be forgotten. He believed he was a personage with a mission on earth, and never an opportunity was given him that did not confirm this belief in himself.’9

To his mighty arrogance and undoubted bravery was allied a real penchant for self-dramatizing, particularly when it came to his own physical health. To avoid a situation he did not like he would often plead illness, even when it was obvious to those around him that he was not really ill at all. At times this aspect of his behaviour made him appear a virtual hypochondriac. At the Battle of the Nile he received a head wound that caused a piece of skin to fall over his good eye. In panic he called out to Captain Berry: ‘I am killed, remember me to my wife.’10 Despite being reassured by the ship’s surgeon, he was convinced that it was a mortal blow. Ever since a gypsy had told him years before that he would die early, his mind was forever plagued by the idea. Perhaps that is why he always seemed to be in such a rush to meet his destiny.11

Although he momentarily lost his head at Aboukir Bay, his victory over the French was to cost him his heart and some might say, his very soul. For it was after this battle that Emma Hamilton wrote a letter to him gushing with praise and hero worship. As if being made a baron and a pension of £2,000 a year was not enough reward, he received the undying affection of the wife of the British Ambassador to Naples.

He had met the couple in September 1793 during a brief visit to the Kingdom. Runciman describes the missive that came out of the blue five years later: ‘Every line of the letter sends forth crackling sparks of fiery passion. She begins, “My dear, dear sir,” tells him she is delirious, that she fainted and fell on her side “and am hurt,’ when she heard the joyful news. She “would feel it a glory to die in such a cause,” but she cannot die until she has embraced “the Victor of the Nile.” Then she proceeds to describe the transports of Maria Caroline. “She fainted too, cried, kissed her husband, her children, walked, frantic with pleasure, about the room, cried, kissed and embraced everybody near her.” Then she continues, “Oh! brave Nelson! Oh! God bless and protect our brave deliverer! Oh! Nelson, Nelson! Oh! Victor! Oh! But my swollen heart could now tell him personally what we owe to him.” ’12

Nelson lapped all this up like a kitten does cream.

When his vessel the Vanguard arrived at Naples the Ambassador’s wife virtually threw herself at him and he was a lost man. He: ‘allowed himself to be flattered with refined delicacy into a liaison which became a fierce passion, and tested the loyalty of his closest friends to breaking-point. How infinitely pathetic is the story from beginning to end!’13 Nelson became Emma’s toy and she played with his emotions from then on. He could not resist her tsunami of affection and praise and amidst it all he found himself beached on the notoriously corrupt shores of the Kingdom of Naples and under the sway of a Queen who would also use him at every opportunity.

So smitten was Nelson that he even told his wife that Emma was the very best woman in the world and what an honour it was to have her as his friend. The poor chap was in love and he had to tell everybody about the object of his affections. In a letter to Lord St. Vincent he spoke of his ‘angel’ and how she was his personal go-between to the Queen. He oozes: ‘Our dear Lady Hamilton, whom to see is to admire, but to know are to be added honour and respect; her head and heart surpass her beauty, which cannot be equalled by anything I have seen.’14

And so the disasters began…

Emma was his intermediary with the Court of Naples and: ‘it was on the advice of the Queen and Emma that Naples entered into a war, the result of which was the complete defeat of the Neapolitans.’15 As a result the King and Queen and the whole Court had to flee to Palermo in Sicily. There, Nelson lived with Hamilton and his wife in a ménage à trios. The love struck Nelson provided a sea-taxi service via the Vanguard to save the royals and their £500,000 fortune.

Nelson had a mission, one that was very personal: ‘Nelson was a true descendant of a race of men who had never faltered in the traditional belief that the world should be governed and dominated by the British. His King, his country, and particularly the profession to which he belonged, were to him the supreme authorities whose destiny it was to direct the affairs of the universe.’16 Nelson put it succinctly in his own words: ‘I hate your pen-and-ink men. A fleet of British warships are the best negotiators in Europe.’17

His fellow countrymen - at least those in power - had a similarly blinkered view of reality: ‘The British were not only jealous and afraid of Napoleon’s genius and amazing rise to eminence… but they determined that his power should not only be acknowledged, but destroyed, and their policy after twenty years of bitter war was completely accomplished.’18

There were clear similarities between the two great contemporary British commanders by land and sea: ‘The Duke of Wellington, of whom it is said no dose of flattery was too strong for him to swallow,’19 only met Nelson once. While he was waiting to see the Secretary of State at the Colonial Office in Downing Street he was shown into a small room where he recognized the one-armed Nelson from portraits he had seen of him. He was initially far from impressed: ‘He could not know who I was, but he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it a conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself, and in, really, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me.’ When Nelson realized he was talking to someone of equal merit he changed his tone completely: ‘in fact, he talked like an officer and a statesman. The Secretary of State kept us long waiting, and certainly, for the last half or three-quarters of an hour, I don’t know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more.’20

Wellington was not used to being on the sidelines and he had a mighty opinion of himself. He: ‘showed it in a cold, haughty, unimaginative, repelling self-importance; fearful of unbending to his inferiors lest his dignity should be offended.’21 Although they both considered themselves the bee’s knees there was also a clear difference between the two men. Nelson believed in explaining his orders and tactics to his fellow officers and his personal generosity and enthusiasm motivated them and filled them with confidence.

Although he was a strict and harsh disciplinarian where others were concerned, Nelson thought that rules and regulations should apply to everyone but himself. At the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 he turned his famous ‘blind eye’ to a signal from his commanding officer: ‘He deliberately disobeyed orders, and saved England’s honour and fleet by doing so.’22 Furthermore, far from being hanged for ignoring a direct order in the presence of the enemy at a time of war, he was made a Viscount. To someone with an ego the size of Mars, this must have convinced him that he was a man apart - someone who could pick and choose which orders he should obey and dismiss those with which he disagreed. Similarly, with his infatuation with Emma Hamilton, he totally ignored the social conventions of his day. The couple flaunted their affair and Nelson even took personal affront if there was any criticism of his behaviour.

When he was back in England Emma Hamilton turned the house they shared with her husband into a shrine for Nelson. On March 22nd 1802, Lord Minto described a visit he made there in a letter to his wife:

‘I went to Lord Nelson’s (Merton) on Saturday. The whole establishment

and way of life makes me angry as well as melancholy… She goes on

cramming Nelson with trowels of flattery, which he takes as quietly as a

child does pap. The love she makes to him is ridiculous and disgusting.

The whole house, staircase and all, are covered with pictures of her and him

of all sorts and sizes. He is represented in naval actions, coats of arms, pieces

of plate in his honour, the flagstaff of the L’Orient. If it was Lady Hamilton’s

house, there might be pretence for it; but to make his own a mere looking-glass

to view himself all day is bad taste.’23

It should come as no surprise that George III turned his back on Nelson publicly on account of his dubious morals. This insult from his own King affected Nelson deeply. In like manner, when he and Emma visited the Duke of Marlborough’s estate to see the delights of Blenheim, they were virtually ignored as if they had been mere common interlopers, although the Duke condescendingly ordered some refreshments for them. Nelson was left boiling with rage, affronted personally and also maddened by the refusal of others to bend the knee to Emma - the goddess he himself worshipped. The self-aggrandizing temple to Nelson at Merton was their response. And these were the very privileged nobles and ‘betters’ that he would literally die for at Trafalgar, playing his part in upholding the vicious, corrupt and heartless hierarchy of his day.

As Runciman says: ‘There is always some fatal weakness about a great man that lures him into littleness, and this was an overwhelming tragedy in Nelson’s career. The approbation of men was gratefully received and even asked for, but the adoration of women reduced him to helplessness.’24

There was, of course, another woman in Nelson’s life - Caroline of Naples: ‘I declare to God, my whole study is how to best meet the approbation of the Queen.’25 He was under Emma’s spell and Caroline’s thumb: ‘He frankly avowed that he would prefer to resign if any distinction were to be drawn between loyalty to his rightful sovereign and that of his Sicilian Majesty [Ferdinand], who was the faithful ally of his King. The solemn audacity of this statement reveals a mind so far fallen to pieces by infatuation that it has lost the power of discrimination.’26

At Palermo, Nelson became totally wrapped up with the proceedings at Court. The capital was a gambling den and he was warned of the consequences of his lack of discernment by his friend and fellow British naval officer Troubridge: ‘I dread, My Lord, all the feasting etc., at Palermo. I am sure your health will be hurt. If so, all their saints will be damned by the navy.’27 Troubridge was based at Naples and saw things that Nelson either did not see or chose not to notice: ‘The King would be better employed digesting a good Government; everything gives way to their pleasures. The money spent at Palermo gives discontent here; fifty thousand people are unemployed, trade discouraged, manufactures at a stand. It is in the interest of many here to keep the King away; they all dread reform.’28

Troubridge was not only concerned about Nelson - he was a witness to the famine that was then raging in Naples. His appeals for succour from Palermo fell on deaf ears. His direct appeal to Nelson led to nothing. He wrote to Nelson begging him to intercede on behalf of the unfortunate population:

‘My Lord, we are dying off fast for want. I learn that Sir William Hamilton

says Prince Luzzi refused corn, some time ago, and Sir William does not

think it worth while making another application. If that be the case, I wish

he commanded this distressing scene, instead of me. Puglia had an immense

harvest: near thirty sail left Messina, before I did, to load corn. Will they let

us have any? If not, a short time will decide the business. The German

interest prevails. I wish I was at your Lordship’s elbow for an hour. All, all,

will be thrown on you: I will parry the blow as much as in my power, I foresee

much mischief brewing. God bless your Lordship! I am miserable, I cannot

assist your operations more… I am not very tender-hearted, but really the

distress here would even move a Neapolitan.’29

Troubridge wrote again soon after:

‘I have this day saved thirty thousand people from starvation, but with

this day my ability ceases. As the Government are bent on starving us,

I see no alternative but to leave these poor people to perish, without our

being witnesses of the disaster. I curse the day I ever served the Neapolitan

Govt. We have characters, My Lord, to lose; these people have none…

Girgenti is full of corn; the money is ready to pay for it; we do not ask it

as a gift. Oh! Could you see the horrid distress I daily experience, something

would be done.’30

But Nelson did absolutely nothing.

Troubridge goes on: ‘All I write is known at the Queen’s. For my own part, I

look upon the Neapolitans as the worst of intriguing enemies; every hour

shows me their infamy and duplicity. I pray Your Lordship be cautious;

your honest open manner of acting will be made a handle of. When I see

you and tell you of their infamous tricks, you will be as much surprised as

I am. The whole will fall on you.’31

When Nelson was told that the Court had withdrawn all restrictions on the export of corn he believed the lie completely. Instead, he moaned to the Duke of Clarence that his ‘constant thought was down, down with the damned French villains,’ and that his ‘blood boiled at the name of a Frenchman.’32 Meanwhile, the Queen he fawned upon did not care if her own people starved to death. At least her deceased relation Marie Antoinette had spoken of cake…

Nelson’s greatest act of moral turpitude concerned his treatment of Admiral Caracciolo. In 1798, Naples was in coalition with England, Russia, Austria, Turkey and Portugal against the French. The King of Naples, Ferdinand IV, urged on by his wife Queen Caroline and Emma Hamilton, struck before his allies were ready, attacking the Roman Republic held by the French in November. It was an utter debacle and in less than a month Nelson had to take the fleeing monarch and his court to Palermo in Sicily on his flagship as we have seen. The former Kingdom of Naples became the Parthenopean Republic in January 1799. By May, the tide had turned again and Cardinal Ruffo with his Sanfedisti peasant army along with Russian and Austrian soldiers, recaptured Naples for Ferdinand. Only three virtually impregnable forts remained in the hands of the French and their Neapolitan patriot allies, and the men behind the impressive walls hoped for rescue by French and Spanish ships.

Ruffo’s own troops were creating havoc in the city along with the lazzaroni, peasants who took advantage of the lawless situation to rob, murder and pillage, but an attack on the forts would lead to an even greater loss of life. As Ferdinand’s personal representative, Ruffo thought it wise to sign an armistice with his opponents before they could be rescued. As Tom Holmberg remarks: ‘The treaty gave the French and the patriots the full honors of war, with their persons and property guaranteed, and included that the garrisons of the forts could embark freely for France.’33 The Russian and Turkish representatives in Naples also signed, along with Captain Troubridge.

Nelson, back in Palermo was in a belligerent mood. He despised Ruffo and wrote to Troubridge: ‘Send me word some proper heads are taken off, this alone will comfort me.’34 He also wanted Ferdinand’s failed generals to be tried for cowardice, and ‘if found guilty… they shall be shot or hanged; should this be effected, I shall have some hopes that I have done good. I ever preach that rewards and punishments are the foundation of all good government.’35 In effect, Nelson saw himself as a one-man judge and jury.

As dozens of small vessels called polaccas were being readied as per the treaty to take away the republicans and former rebels, Nelson arrived at Naples with his squadron accompanied by Emma Hamilton and her husband, the English ambassador. Ruffo stood by his treaty and was backed by the Russians and the Turks, stating that if Nelson didn’t agree he could try and take the forts himself. Nelson was forced to back down and via Hamilton stated that he was resolved to do nothing that would break the armistice, nor would he prevent the embarkation of the rebels.

Then news came that Ferdinand and Caroline had discussed the treaty. The Queen wrote to Emma Hamilton urging ‘Lord Nelson to treat Naples as if it were a rebellious city in Ireland.’36 Thus: ‘Men, women and children were kept hungry, hot and disease-ravaged in the holds while their leaders were taken off and imprisoned on the English men-of-war.’37 At this terrible betrayal, Ruffo resigned, while Nelson wrote to his wife claiming ‘victory’ over the French: ‘Nelson came, the invincible Nelson, and they were all preserved and again made happy.’38

Over 8,000 people were tried for treason and dozens were executed. Lord Acton said 100 were executed, 222 condemned for life, 322 to shorter terms, 288 to deportation and 67 to exile. As Ferdinand destroyed the official records no one knows the real figures.39

The most famous victim was Admiral Francesco Caracciolo who had in the past fought alongside the British during the American War of Independence, helped control the Barbary pirates, and later distinguished himself alongside Admiral Hotham against the French at Genoa as recently as March 14th 1795. He had gone with the Royal Family to Palermo but as a personal friend of King Ferdinand he was allowed to return to Naples in January 1799 with the aim of protecting his own large estates. The French had seized his land because they saw him as a royalist. Caracciolo had to agree to command the Neapolitan fleet in order to have his property restored. He thus subsequently had to fight against the Royalist fleet under Admiral Thurn, a personal enemy. Hence when the French agreed to evacuate their forces from Naples he was left in a very invidious position. He tried to hide but was discovered and taken to HMS Foudroyant Nelson’s flagship with his hands tied. Runciman pulls no punches when he describes what happened next: ‘Nelson committed him for trial, which commenced at ten o’clock, and at twelve he was declared guilty. At five o’clock he was hanged at the yardarm of the Neapolitan frigate Minerva. This poor old man was tried solely by his enemies without being allowed to have counsel or call witnesses.’40 Thurn presided over the proceedings but it was Nelson who was in charge. So much for British justice.

Caracciolo had asked for a retrial but this was denied. Nelson also refused his request to be shot rather than hanged like a common criminal. He had also hoped that the wife of the British Ambassador, who he knew, might intercede for him, but she was nowhere to be seen. He had no idea that she was a party to the whole disgraceful episode. As his lifeless body dangled from the yardarm Emma said to Nelson: ‘Come, Bronte, come, let us take the barge and have another look at Caracciolo.’41 Nelson even refused to let the family have his body. Instead, he was given a common sailor’s send-of - weights were attached to his feet so that he would sink in an upright position. As Runciman says: ‘who can read the gruesome story of the trial and hanging of the aged Prince Caracciolo without feeling ashamed that a fellow-countryman in Nelson’s position should have stamped his career with so dark a crime?’42 He is equally scathing about his lover: ‘Neither did Emma Hamilton escape her just deserts for the vile part she played in one of the most abominable crimes ever committed.’43

As if in a story by Edgar Allan Poe, the Admiral took a post-mortem revenge. Not enough weight had been attached to his corpse so it resurfaced and was seen by the King and the pair of executioners from a boat, bobbing accusingly in the water. Ferdinand was horrified and he finally gave the body a Christian burial. Emma was likewise haunted by the event: ‘he had risen again to reproach her with the inhuman pleasure she had taken in watching the dreadful act. Nor did her shrieking avowal of repentance give the wretched Jezebel of a woman the assurance of forgiveness. She sought for distractions, and found most of them in wickedness, and passed into the presence of the Great Mystery with all her deeds of faithlessness, deceit, and uncontrollable revenge before her eyes.’44 And this was the woman Nelson adored and who, according to him, could do no wrong.

If Nelson assumed that by setting such a draconian example, peace would soon return to the benighted Kingdom of Naples, he was soon disabused of that notion: ‘No doubt Nelson thought, when he had the poor old Prince Caracciolo hung, that he would create a new earth by striking terror into the hearts of the Neapolitan race, but natural laws are not worked out by methods of this kind, and Nelson had the mortification of seeing his plan of regulating human affairs create a new and more ferocious little hell on earth. His judgment at this time was very much warped through the evil influence of the Court of Naples and more especially by his infatuation for Lady Hamilton.’45

Runciman makes a telling contrast in a footnote at the end of his book: ‘The terms of capitulation were agreed to and signed by Ruffo, the Russian and Turkish commanders, and by Captain Foote, representing the British Government. Thirty-six hours afterwards Nelson arrived in the Bay of Naples, and cancelled the treaty. Captain Foote was sent away and the shocking indefensible campaign of Nelson’s carried out. Nothing during the whole of Napoleon’s career can match this terrible act of Nelson’s ’46

Napoleon is a colossus compared to the diminutive British Admiral: ‘In every way he excels the Louis of France, the Georges of Great Britain and Hanover, the Fredericks of Prussia, and the Alexanders of Russia. The latter two he puts far in the shade, both as a statesman, a warrior, and a wise, humane ruler who saw far into futurity, and fought against the reactionary forces of Europe, which combined to put an end to what was called his ambition to dominate the whole of creation.’47

When the Government in London paid massive subsidies to their Allies to attack Napoleon - he fought back. Wasn’t that a wicked thing to do? It was even more ‘bad form’ when he usually licked his adversaries completely as at Austerlitz and Jena. What a bounder the chap was!

Another point made by Runciman was that England wasted an inordinate amount of time, effort, blood and gold in reseating useless selfish monarchs on their thrones - Ferdinand of Naples being a prime example: ‘No whitewasher, however brilliant and ingenious, can ever wipe out the fatal action of the British Government in embarking on so ill-conceived a policy as that of supporting the existence of a bloodsucking government, composed of a miscreant ruling class headed by an ignoble king, all living on the misery and blood of a semi-civilized population. It is a nauseous piece of history, with which, under sagacious administration, we should never have been connected.’48

Nelson helped perpetuate the rule of Ferdinand and Caroline who literally let their people starve. Naples did far better when Napoleon placed his older brother Joseph on its throne in February 1806: ‘Joseph ruled with marked moderation and distinction, sweeping away much of the foul canker of corruption and introducing many beneficent reforms during his two years of kingship.’49 This should be remembered when so many partial British historians claim again and again that Napoleon and his family were little better than the mafia or were all simply well-dressed Corsican bandits with a love of the vendetta and bent on feuding and revenge.

Even when a very reluctant Murat was put in charge of Naples he proved himself to be a better leader than the useless Bourbons: ‘His reign lasted from 1808 until 1815, and was no less distinguished than that of Joseph’s. The fall of the Napoleonic regime was followed by the fall of Murat, and the despicable and treacherous Ferdinand became again the king, and brought back with him the same tyrannical habits that had made his precious rule so disastrous to the kingdom and himself.’50

During all the sad and sorry saga of Nelson and Emma, our foremost sailor had made himself a laughing stock. The tolerance of his superior Admiral Keith was stretched to breaking point. Nelson had repeatedly disobeyed orders so that he could remain at the Court with the Queen and Emma. In a letter to her sister from Florence, Lady Minto wrote that Lord Keith had told Caroline that: ‘Lady Hamilton had had command of the fleet long enough,’ remarking of Nelson: ‘His zeal for the public service seems entirely lost in his love and vanity, and they all sit and flatter each other all day long.’51

However, the real blame lies with the politicians in London who supported such corrupt and reactionary rulers: ‘The benighted policy of keeping in power a mawkish Sicilian Court, saturated with the incurable vices of cowardice, falsehood, dishonesty, and treachery, failed; and the Government of the day was saddled with the crime of squandering human life, wealth, and energy without receiving any commensurate return.’52

The whole attitude of the British ruling class and government towards Napoleon and the French was rank with self-justification and hypocrisy: ‘We had no real grounds of quarrel with France nor with her rulers. The Revolution was their affair, and was no concern of ours, except in so far as it might harmfully reflect on us, and of this there was no likelihood if we left them alone. The plea of taking the balance of power under our benevolent care was a sickly exhibition of statesmanship, and the assumption of electing ourselves guardians of the rights of small nations mere cant. It was, in fact, the canker of jealousy and hatred on the part of the reactionary forces against a man, a principle, and a people.’53 Runciman adds: ‘Had we approached Napoleon in a friendly spirit and on equal terms, without haughty condescension, he would have reciprocated our cordiality and put proper value on our friendship.’54

He is absolutely frank when he turns to the leadership of Britain and the antics of politicians like Pitt, Castlereagh, Canning and their ilk: ‘we helped to impose on Europe twenty years of slaughter and devastation. Our dismal, plutocratic rulers, with solemn enthusiasm, plunged England with all her power and influence on the side of Prussia and her continental allies, and, in conjunction with the Holy Alliance, pledged themselves never to lay down arms until France was mutilated and the master-mind which ruled her beaten and dethroned.’55 He also thought their baleful influence was responsible for the First World War: ‘Their task was long, costly, and gruesome. What a ghastly legacy those aggressively righteous champions of international rights have bequeathed to the world! But for their folly and frenzy we should not be engaged in a European was to-day.’(1917)56

With another castigating reference to Naples and the consequences of our involvement, he says: ‘History is not altogether faithful to the truth in its honeyed records of the ministerial pashas who tranquilly increased the national debt, inflicted unspeakable horrors on the population, and smirched our dignity by entering into a costly bond of brotherhood with an inveterate swarm of hired bloodsucking weasels.’57

I think it fair to say that Runciman was not impressed.

When Nelson received his mortal wound on the Victory on October 21st 1805 at Trafalgar he asked Hardy for the famous kiss and told him to give ‘dear Lady Hamilton his hair and other belongings,’ and asked that his ‘body should not be thrown overboard.’ Just before he died he told Doctor Scott that ‘he had not been a great sinner.’58 All this contrasts very badly with his cruel treatment of Caracciolo whose family was denied the very corpse that Nelson dumped into the sea without a qualm. It was murder most foul. But then, the self-appointed elite in British society and the officers in the British Navy were utterly convinced that God was on their side.

Collingwood’s General Order of October 22nd written on the Eurylus off Cape Trafalgar stated that:

‘The Almighty God, whose arm is strength, having of his great

mercy been pleased to crown the exertions of his Majesty’s fleet

with success, in giving them a complete victory over their enemies,

on the 21st of this month; and that all praise and thanksgiving may

be offered up to the throne of grace, for the great benefit to our

country and to mankind, I have thought it proper that a day should

be appointed of general humiliation before God, and thanksgiving for

his merciful goodness, imploring forgiveness of sins, a continuation

of his divine mercy, and his constant aid to us, in defence of our

country’s liberties and laws, and without which the utmost efforts

of man are nought; and therefore that [blank] be appointed for this

holy purpose.’59

The British state was extremely generous to the memory of its dead hero. Nelson’s widow was given £2,000 a year for life; his brother was made an earl and given £6,000 a year; £15,000 was given to each of his sisters and £100,000 provided to enable an estate to go with the title.60 These colossal sums contrast with the terrible conditions that the ordinary people had to cope with as a result of the British Government’s wars against Napoleon. The ‘liberties and laws’ that Collingwood spoke of were of precious little use to them.

Of Collingwood, Runciman says: ‘I have already drawn attention to Nelson’s blind prejudice to and hatred of the French. Collingwood was tainted with the same one-sided views, but tempered them with more conventional language.’61 Pleased by a letter from his daughter written in French, Collingwood ‘exhorts the mother to see that she converses when she can in that language, and to remember that she is never to admire anything French but the language… “that it is the only thing French that she needs to acquire, because there is little else in connection with that country which he would wish her to love or imitate.” ’62

Surprisingly, Collingwood did have a few words of backhanded praise for his enemy Admiral Villeneuve: ‘he was a well-bred man, and a good officer, who had nothing of the offensive vapourings and boastings in his manner which were, perhaps too commonly attributed to the Frenchmen.’63

Of Nelson and Collingwood, Runciman adds: ‘Neither of them knew the character or purpose of the exalted man on whom their Government was making war. Like simple-minded, brave sailors as they were, knowing nothing of the mysteries of political jealousies and intrigue, and believing that the men constituting the Government must be of high mental and administrative ability, they assumed that they were carrying out a flawless patriotic duty, never doubting the wisdom of it…’64

Although Collingwood’s ‘naval qualities were quite equal to Nelson’s,’65 and he played a vital part at Trafalgar, he did not get the same reward. He wanted his title to go to his daughters because he did not have any sons. In a letter to Mr. Blackett he says: ‘I was exceedingly displeased at some of the language held in the House of Commons on the settlement of the pension upon my daughters; it was not of my asking, and if I had a favour to ask, money would be the last thing I would beg from an impoverished country. I am not a Jew, whose god is gold; nor a Swiss, whose services are to be counted against so much money. I have motives for my conduct which I would not give in exchange for a hundred pensions.’66 The prejudices and stereotypes of his day are obvious. Napoleon’s greatness is exemplified by the fact that he could see such attitudes in his own contemporaries yet he still gave Jews equal rights throughout his Empire.

Turning to the fate of Villeneuve himself there has long been controversy. In his book The Savage Storm the author David Andress makes a claim that Napoleon had him murdered. He gives no footnote and no source whatsoever for this assertion: ‘Captured in battle, Pierre-Charles Villeneuve was exchanged back to France in early 1806, and discovered, dead, in a Rennes hotel room that April. A total of seven stab wounds to his chest made the official announcement of suicide a subject of much grim humour in the British Press.’67 The Savage Storm is one of the most one-side books ever written and the prolonged diatribe proves that the author had made up his mind long before he put pen to paper. He admits in the preface that: ‘I do not like the Emperor Napoleon,’68 - only Esdaile’s The Wars of Napoleon exceeds it in terms of sheer partiality.69

Let us turn to what Walter Runciman has to say on the matter, he who spent many long hours in the British Archives and gives detailed references for every statement that he makes: ‘There is not the remotest foundation for the unworthy report that was spread that he was put to death by Napoleon’s orders. The Emperor was too big a man, occupied with human projects too vast, to waste a moment’s thought or to stain his name over an unfortunate admiral who had brought his fleet to grief by acting against his instructions. It is only little men who write, not that which is founded on fact but that which they imagine will appeal to the popular taste of the moment; and so it was with the French Emperor; a lot of scandal-mongers were always at work hawking hither and thither their poisonous fabrications.’70

The Savage Storm vanishes in a puff of wind - it amounts to little more.

Napoleon never once responded in kind to the many attempts of Pitt and select members of the British Cabinet to assassinate him. He forgave, dismissed or ignored the dozens of traitorous acts of political sharks like Talleyrand and Fouché. To think that he would stoop to crush a minnow like Villeneuve is ridiculous. This is what Napoleon said to Dr. O’Meara on Saint Helena:

‘Villeneuve when taken prisoner and brought to England, was so much grieved at his defeat, that he studied anatomy on purpose to destroy himself. For this purpose he bought some anatomical plates of the heart, and compared them with his own body, in order to ascertain the exact situation of that organ. On his arrival in France I ordered that he should remain at Rennes, and not proceed to Paris. Villeneuve, afraid of being tried by a court-martial for disobedience of orders, and consequently losing the fleet, for I had ordered him not to sail or to engage the English, determined to destroy himself, and accordingly took his plates of the heart, and compared them with his breast. Exactly in the centre of the plate he made a mark with a large pin, then fixed the pin as near as he could judge in the same spot in his own breast, shoved it in to the head, penetrated his heart and expired. When the room was opened he was found dead; the pin in his breast and a mark in the plate corresponding with the own in his breast. He need not have done it, as he was a brave man, though possessed of no talent.’71

Runciman is forthright in his defence of Napoleon: ‘I have given this communication in full as it appears in O’Meara’s book, because the scribes would have it that Villeneuve was destroyed by the Emperor’s orders. There was not at the time, nor has there ever appeared since, anything to justify such a calumny on a man who challenged the world to make the charge and prove that he had ever committed a crime during the whole of his public career.’72 He makes another telling point about Napoleon and his acts of magnanimity: ‘It is more likely that Napoleon wished to save him from the consequences of a court-martial, so ordered him to remain at Rennes. He rarely punished offenders according to their offences. After the first flush of anger was over, they were generally let down easily, and for the most part became traitors afterwards.’73

If he could forgive Talleyrand and Fouché - he could forgive anybody!

British writers who condemn Napoleon for his supposed treatment of Villeneuve forget that Admiral Sir John Byng was court-martialled and shot after an engagement with the French off Minorca on May 20th 1756 for a mere error of judgment, while Admiral Sir Robert Calder who was victorious at Finisterre against the French, was court-martialled and ruined because the victory was deemed not great enough! For his repeated disregard of orders and abandoning his post during a time of war, Nelson might have suffered the same fate had he not been so victorious at Aboukir Bay and Trafalgar and perhaps, even more, been such a favourite with the British public. So Collingwood’s remark about ‘our countries liberties and laws’ can be taken with a large pinch of sea salt. If this was how the British Establishment treated its admirals - God help ordinary members of the public.74

Another ‘crime’ often thrown in Napoleon’s face is the execution of the Duc d’Enghien: ‘it was murder for Napoleon or some of his ministers to have the Duc d’Enghien shot for having conspired with others for the overthrow of the established French Government, but it is the saintly enforcement of discipline to have a British admiral shot and another ruined for no other reason than an error of judgment on the one hand and an insufficient victory on the other. Sir Robert Calder’s heart was broken by cruelty.’75

In his The Duke of Enghien Affair: A Plot Against Napoleon,76 General Michel Franceschi says:

‘Nearly all the historical literature characterizes this unfortunate affair as a bloody stain on Napoleon’s memory. A historically correct, single way of thinking became the norm.

But anyone who looks into the event with a minimum of objectivity quickly realizes that Napoleon is the victim of serious defamation and History of a crude manipulation.’77

Indeed, d’Enghien ‘was found guilty of:

1) Bearing arms against the French Republic.

2) Offering his services to the government of England, the enemy of France.

3) Receiving and accrediting agents of the English government, procuring the means for them to gather intelligence in France and conspiring with them against the interior and exterior security of the State.

4) Leading a group of émigrés and others, in the pay of England, on the border with France in Freiburg and Bad-Wuttemberg.

5) Gathering intelligence in Strasbourg and attempting to foment an uprising in the surrounding departments to create a diversion favorable to England.

6) Being one of the ringleaders and accomplices of the conspiracy hatched by the English against the life of the First Consul and, in the event of the conspiracy’s success, bringing about the invasion of France.’78

He was an accomplice in the infamous Cadoudal plot and was ordered shot by Savary before Napoleon had the chance to offer the criminal a pardon: ‘Napoleon was dumbfounded when he heard about the execution. Suddenly aware of the extreme seriousness of this hasty conclusion, the First Consul felt the earth move beneath his feet. He was staggered. Due to a horrible combination of circumstances, a dreadful political mistake had just been made against his will. The precious possibility of a pardon had just evaporated.’79

Throughout his time as ruler of France Napoleon faced the bitter opposition of all the so-called legitimate rulers. They would never forgive him for being the usurper: ‘He was an interloper who had nothing in common with the galaxy of monarchs who ruled Europe at that time.’80 Furthermore: ‘It was a period of wild, uncontrollable passion, and the survivors of the old aristocracy hated the man of genius who had risen to power from the ranks of the people to take the place of the Bourbons. This was the canker that stimulated their enmity.’81 The vilest things were said and written about him because he was ‘not one of us’. Hence the death of d’Enghien was portrayed as the most wicked crime since the crucifixion. The privileged elites of Europe: ‘sedulously nursed the Press, published books and pamphlets in every language, and employed the most poisoned pen that could be bought to portray the future ruler of kings in terms of obloquy.’82

Runciman points to the reams written about the death of d’Enghien in contrast to how little has been said about Nelson’s actions in Naples. However: ‘Fox made a speech on it in the House of Commons which was, and will ever continue to be, an awful indictment. There is nothing in the French Revolution, or in the whole of Napoleon’s career, than can be compared with it for ferocity… There cannot be found a more astonishing revelation of perfidy or inhuman violence in the archives of Europe than that related by Mr. Fox.’83

Fox says:

‘When the right honourable gentleman speaks of the last campaign,

he does not mention the horrors by which some of these successes

were accompanied; Naples, for instance, has been, among others

(what is called) delivered; and yet, if I am rightly informed, it has

been stained and polluted by murders so ferocious, and cruelties so

abhorrent, that the heart shudders at the recital… They made terms

… under the sanction of the British name. It was agreed that their

persons and property should be safe, and that they should be conveyed

to Toulon. They were accordingly put on board a vessel, but before

they sailed, their property was confiscated, numbers of them taken

out, thrown into dungeons, and some of them, I understand, notwith-

standing the British guarantee, absolutely executed.’84

Here was an English politician condemning the actions of his own countryman yet it is never mentioned now in English history books of the period. By castigating Napoleon and accusing him of every crime under the sun, the British Establishment tried to hide their own violations of international law and common decency: ‘So much for the vaunted fairness and impartiality of our treatment of Napoleon!’85

Runciman also portrays a Napoleon we seldom see described in the biased and partial works of nationalistic historians today: ‘It is only when we come to study the life of this man that we realize how he towered above all his contemporaries in thought, word, and deed. Napoleon’s authentic doings and sayings are wonderful in their vast comprehensiveness and sparkling vision, combined with flawless wisdom. When we speak or think of him, it is generally of his military genius and achievements and of what we term his “gigantic ambition”; and in this latter conclusion the platitudinarians, with an air of originality, languidly affirm that this was the cause of his ruin, the grandeur of which we do not understand. But never a word is said or thought of our own terrible tragedies, nor of the victories we were compelled to buy in order to secure his downfall. His great gifts as lawgiver and statesman are little known or spoken of.’86

Runciman then gives the opinions of two men who actually met Napoleon, the Swiss historian Mueller and the writer Wieland. Mueller said: ‘Quite impartially and truly, as before God, I must say that the variety of his knowledge, the acuteness of his observations, the solidity of his understanding (not dazzling wit), his grand and comprehensive views, filled me with astonishment, and his manner of speaking to me with love for him. By his genius and disinterested goodness, he has also conquered me.’87 The German Wieland actually spoke to Napoleon on the battlefield of Jena so he was hardly likely to be impressed yet he said: ‘I have never beheld any one more calm, more simple, more mild or less ostentatious in appearance; nothing about him indicated the feeling of power in a great monarch.’ Napoleon spoke to him for an hour and a half, ‘to the great surprise of the whole assembly.’88

Yet what does Pitt say in a scrap of manuscript found amongst his papers: ‘I see various and opposite qualities - all the great and all the little passions unfavourable to public tranquillity united in the breast of one man, and of that man, unhappily, whose personal caprice can scarce fluctuate for an hour without affecting the destiny of Europe. I see the inward workings of fear struggling with pride in an ardent, enterprising, and tumultuous mind. I see all the captious jealousy of conscious usurpation, dreaded, detested, and obeyed, the giddiness and intoxication of splendid but unmerited success, the arrogance, the presumption, the selfwill of unlimited and idolized power, ad more dreadful than all in the plenitude of authority, the restless and incessant activity of guilt, but unsated ambition.’89

Pitt never met Napoleon and as a consequence he talks utter rot, gushing forth with childish inchoate ramblings that just demonstrate the feebleness of his own bigoted tiny mind. One wonders how many bottles of port he got through before he consigned his insane scribble to paper. As Runciman says: ‘This scrap of mere phrases indicates a mind that was far beneath the calibre of a real statesman. It was a terrible fate for Great Britain to have at the head of the Government a man whose public life was a perpetual danger to the state. Had Pitt been the genius his eloquence led his contemporaries to believe he was, he would have availed himself of the opportunities the Great Figure, who was making the world rock with his genius, afforded the British Government from time to time of making peace on equitable terms.’90

Pitt had no vision just a blinkered enmity for everything that Napoleon stood for: ‘The “usurper” must be subdued by force of arms, the squandering of British wealth, and the sanguinary sacrifice of human lives… Had Pitt been talented in matters of international diplomacy, as he was in other affairs of Government, he would have seized the opportunity of making the Peace of Amiens universal and durable. It is futile to contend that Napoleon was irreconcilable. His great ambition was to form a concrete friendship with our Government, which he foresaw could be fashioned into a continental arrangement…’91 After all without British gold there could have been no battles and no war.

The events of 1789, The Terror, and especially the execution of Louis XVI, haunted the British Establishment and their fear of similar upheavals at home never left them: ‘The ruling classes were seized with alarm lest the spirit of the French Revolution would become popular in this country, and that not only their possessions might be confiscated, but that their lives would be in peril if the doctrines he stood for were to take hold of the public imagination. They were afraid, as they are now (1917), of the despotism of democracy, and so they kept the conflict raging for over twenty years.’92

Their stubborn rejection of change and reform blighted the lives of their own people and millions of others living on the continent. Even when Napoleon returned to Paris to popular acclaim in 1814 and without a drop of blood being spilt, Britain and her allies did not flinch from resuming their own blatant war-mongering policies. Even worse they decided to make war on Napoleon personally - something utterly unprecedented. They claimed that only he was the disturber of the peace. In fact, the opposite was the truth: ‘It was they who were the disturbers of the peace, and especially Great Britain, who headed the Coalition which was to drench the continent with human blood. Napoleon offered to negotiate, and never was there a more humane opportunity given to the nations to settle their affairs in a way that would have assured a lasting peace, but here again the ruling classes, with their usual impudent assumption of power to use the populations for the purpose of killing each other and creating unspeakable suffering in all the hideous phases of warfare, refused to negotiate…’93

Very few English history books mention the fact that in 1805 Napoleon wrote a very measured and friendly letter to George III when he assumed Imperial power asking for peace. He did his very best to avert the cataclysm that he foresaw if no one did anything to avoid future conflict:

‘Sir and Brother,

Called to the throne of France by Providence, and the suffrages of the

Senate, the people, and the Army, my first sentiment is a wish for peace.

France and England abuse their prosperity. They may contend for ages,

but do their Governments well fulfil the most sacred of their duties, and

will not so much blood shed uselessly, and without a view to any end,

condemn them in their own consciences? I consider it no disgrace to

adopt the first step. I have, I hope, sufficiently proved to the world that

I fear none of the chances of war, which presents nothing I have need to

fear; peace is the wish of my heart, but war has never been inconsistent

with my glory. I conjure your Majesty not to deny yourself the happiness

of giving peace to the world, or leave the sweet satisfaction to your

children; for certainly there never was a more fortunate opportunity nor

a moment more favourable than the present, to silence all the passions

and listen only to the sentiments of humanity and reason. This moment

once lost, what bounds can be ascribed to a war which all my efforts will

not be able to terminate. Your Majesty has gained more in ten years, both

in territory and riches, than the whole extent of Europe. Your nation is at

the highest point of prosperity, what can it hope from war? To form a

coalition with some Powers on the Continent? The Continent will remain

tranquil; a coalition can only increase the preponderance and continental

greatness of France. To renew intestine troubles? The times are no longer

the same. To destroy our finances? Finances founded on a flourishing

agriculture can never be destroyed. To wrest from France her colonies?

The colonies are to France only a secondary object; and does not your

Majesty already possess more than you know how to preserve? If your

Majesty would but reflect, you must perceive that the war is without an

Object; or any presumable result to yourself. Alas! What a melancholy

Prospect; to fight merely for the sake of fighting. The world is sufficiently

wide for our two nations to live in, and reason sufficiently powerful to

discover the means of reconciling everything, when a wish for reconciliation

exists on both sides. I have however, fulfilled a sacred duty, and one that

is precious to my heart.

I trust your Majesty will believe the sincerity of my sentiments, and my

wish to give you every proof of the same, etc, Napoleon.’94

No wonder that Runciman adds: ‘This letter indicates the mind and heart of a great statesman… We do not find a single instance of Pitt or Castlereagh expressing an idea worthy of statesmanship. What did either of these men ever do to uplift the higher phases of humanity by grappling with the problem that had been brought into being by the French Revolution.’95

Runciman believes that had Fox been in charge, the whole political situation would have changed for the better especially for the poor who had to deal on a daily basis with hunger, unemployment and hardship. As it was, the ruling families did not give a damn about their social and political inferiors and just wanted to keep them in their place: ‘Our people as a whole (but especially the poorer classes) were treated in a manner akin to barbarism, while their rulers invoked them to bear like patriots the suffering they had bestowed upon them.’96 And for what: ‘We made war on the French without any real justification, and stained our high sense of justice by driving them to a frenzy, we bought soldiers and sailors to fight them from impecunious German and Hanoverian princes. We subsidized Russia, Prussia, Austria, Portugal, Spain, and that cesspool Naples, at the expense of the starvation of the poorest classes in our own country.’97 Why isn’t all this in English history text books?

It was also a collective disaster for the ‘allies’. Urged on by the British Government to declare war on Napoleon, or, indeed to attack him without declaring war - as they had a habit of doing themselves - they lost thousands of men in unnecessary battles like Austerlitz and Jena that simply confirmed Napoleon’s military genius: ‘It is all moonshine to say that he broke the friendship. The power of Russia, Prussia, and Austria were hopelessly wrecked more than once, and on each occasion they intrigued him into war again, and then they threw themselves at his feet, grovelling supplicants for mercy, which he never withheld.’98 What a despicable bunch they all were, Pitt Canning, Castlereagh, and George III on our side and the pathetic rulers of backward European countries like Alexander, Frederick-William, Francis and their creatures like Metternich. And then there were the twin traitors Talleyrand and Fouché - both evil incarnate - who stabbed Napoleon in the back. Yet he still forgave them time after time as he did the cringing kings. No wonder that in 1814 he said to Caulaincourt his ambassador: ‘These people will not treat; the position is reversed; they have forgotten my conduct to them at Tilsit. Then I could have crushed them; my clemency was simple folly.’99 And he was right.

The truth of what happened during those momentous years is the exact opposite of the lies and mistruths repeated by lazy and bigoted ‘historians’. Napoleon: ‘In spite of what biassed writers have thought it their duty to say of him, was an unparalleled warrior-statesman, and his motives and actions were all on the side of God’s humanity and good government. From the time he was found and made the head of the French nation, he was always obliged to be on the defensive, and, as he stated, never once declared war. The continental Great Powers always made war on him… You may search English state papers in any musty hole you like, and you will find no authoritative record that comes within miles of justifying the opinions or the charges that have been stated or written against him.’100

Time after time, when people, even his enemies, met him in the flesh, they were forced to change their opinion of him: ‘The mind of this remarkable man was a palatial storehouse of wise, impressive inspirations. Here is one of countless instances where a prejudiced adversary bears testimony to his power and wisdom. A few republican officers sought and were granted an audience, and the following is a frank admission of their own impotence and Napoleon’s greatness: “I do not know,” their spokesman says, “from whence or from whom he derives it, but there is a charm about that man indescribable and irresistible. I am no admirer of his.” ’101 Runciman also says: ‘I might give thousands of testimonies, showing the great power this superman had over other minds, from the highest monarchical potentate to the humblest of his subjects.’102

And what did we have? George III… Fox said of him: ‘It is intolerable to think that it should be in the power of one blockhead to do so much mischief.’103 Fox was treated with nothing less than adoration when he went to Paris in 1802. It is highly probably that had Fox had his way there would have been peace between England and France: ‘Had Fox been supported by sufficient strong men to counteract the baneful influence of the weeds who were a constant peril to the country over whose destinies George III and they ruled, we should have been saved the ghastly errors that were committed in the name of the British people.’104

The terrible and totally unjustified attack on Copenhagen in 1807 was one of the dire results of government by utterly inept politicians. It was Canning’s idea to divest the country of its fleet. Again - no declaration of war - made worse by the fact that Denmark was a neutral country. British bullyboy tactics were very much in evidence, and not for the first or last time. It certainly did not impress the Tsar of Russia: ‘The outrage of attacking a small State which was at peace and with which she had no quarrel was powerfully denounced by Alexander. He accused the British Government “of a monstrous violation of straight dealing, by ruining Denmark in the Baltic, which it knew was closed to foreign hostilities under a Russian guarantee.” ’105

Oh dear - another fine mess we had got ourselves into…

The Tsar was further angered by the fact that the British had repeatedly said they did not have the soldiers to attack Napoleon on the mainland: ‘This bad statesmanship was deplorable. It set the spirit of butchery raging. It made a new enemy for ourselves, and in an economic sense added hundreds of thousands to our national debt, without deriving a vestige of benefit from either a military or political point of view. It undoubtedly prolonged the war, as all those squint-eyed enterprises are certain to do. It made us unpopular and mistrusted, and had no effect in damaging Napoleon’s activities, not of taking a single ally from him.”106 And not surprisingly at Tilsit, having had more than enough of perfidious Albion, Alexander made peace with Napoleon.

Canning found himself in the proverbial hot water: ‘Canning, like all tricksters, read extracts from documents, authentic and otherwise, to prove that Denmark was hostile to Britain, but when a demand was made for their inspection, he impudently refused to allow the very documents he had based his case of justification on to be scrutinized, and in consequence no other conclusion could be arrived at than that he was unscrupulously misleading the country.’107 Ah yes, another example of British justice and fair play. His fellow politicians looked down on Canning because his mother was an actress and he was not of noble birth. With his attack on Copenhagen he showed just how low he could go.

Similarly the British blue bloods looked down their noses at Napoleon the ‘usurper’. As Fox asked, why were they: ‘making such a fuss about acknowledging the new Emperor. May not the people give their own Magistrate the name they choose?’ And he added: ‘On what logical grounds did we claim the right to revoke by force of arms the selection by the French people of a ruler on whom they wished to bestow the title of Emperor?’108 Yet mad King George would have none of it: ‘George III raged at Pitt for including Fox in his ministry when he was asked to form a Government. “Does Mr. Pitt not know that Mr. Fox was of all persons most offensive to him? Had not Fox always cheered the popular Government of France, and had he not always advocated peace with bloodstained rebels? And be it remembered the indecorous language he had frequently used against his sovereign, and consider his influence over the Prince of Wales. Bring who you like, Mr. Pitt, but Fox never.’109

The aristocrats of Europe blamed Napoleon personally for the French Revolution and its consequences as if it was all his doing. Such perverted intellectual gymnastics still goes on today - more the product of abject ignorance than anything else. In my own hometown of Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England an exhibition about French prisoners of war at the local Heritage Centre began by stating that Napoleon had executed Louis XVI!110 Such crass and infantile errors can be avoided by a ten second search on Google, but such are the fixed mental errors and prejudices that many people cannot be bothered to check their ‘facts’ or maybe they are simply bent on perpetuating lies and information they themselves have been spoon fed from birth. George III inferring that Napoleon was a ‘bloodstained rebel’ is also fatuous - it is so obviously not true: ‘To class Napoleon as a bloodstained rebel and to put him on a level with the Robespierres and Dantons is an historic outrage of the truth. He had nothing whatsoever to do with bringing about the Revolution, though his services saved it, and out of the terrible tumult and wreck superhumanly re-created France and made her the envy of the modern world… In 1805 he was raised to the Imperial dignity, and one of his first acts was to write with his own hand that famous letter… pleading, with majestic dignity, for the King of England, in the name of humanity, to co-operate with him in a way that will bring about friendly relations between the two Governments and the spilling of blood to an end. The King “by the grace of God” and his horde of bloodsucking, incompetent ministers insulted the French nation and the great captain who ruled over its destinies by sending through Lord Mulgrave an insolent, hypocritical reply to the French ministers.’111

Time and again England forced war upon Napoleon and professed the exact opposite intentions - blaming him for everything. What a bunch of liars and cheats the British Cabinet contained. Pitt was indeed ‘the pits’ as the late Ben Weider once said to me: ‘The rage of war continued for another decade. If George III yearned for peace as he and his ministers pretended, why did the King not write a courteous autography letter back to Napoleon, even though he regarded him as an inferior and a mere military adventurer? The nation had to pay a heavy toll in blood and money in order that the assumptions and dignity of this insensate monarch might be maintained, whose abhorrence of “bloodstained rebels” did not prevent him and his equally insensate advisers from plunging the American colonists into a bloody rebellion, which ended so gloriously for them and so disastrously for the motherland.’112

Whatever was touched by the gracious and royal hand of mad King George crumbled to dust and ashes. As Runciman says quite tellingly: ‘even in his saner periods his acts were frequently those of an idiot.’113 And this gibbering creature is the national figurehead and a hero of biased British historians who try to claim that Britannia’s cause was just and righteous when in actually she was a whore to justice and the truth. And her trident was imbued with the blood of countless thousands who died in her name.

A Souladream Production

Notes

1. Runciman Walter Drake, Nelson and Napoleon (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1919) 121 ( Project

Gutenberg ebook when printed off on A4.)

2. Ibid. 121

3. See Significant Scots - Sir Walter Runciman www.electricscotland.com/history

4. The book was published in 1919 just after World War One ended.

5. Runciman Ibid. 7

6. Ibid. 12

7. Scott Walter Napoleon (1827)

8. Runciman Ibid. 3

9. Ibid. 24

10. Ibid. 25

11. Ibid. 46 As a young man he had a reading done and the gypsy said: ‘I can see no further than

1805.’

12. Ibid. 29-30

13. Ibid. 30

14. Ibid. 30

15. Ibid. 30-31

16. Ibid. 26

17. Ibid. 35

18. Ibid. 27

19. Ibid. 46

20. Ibid. 46

21. Ibid. 47

22. Ibid. 36.

23. Ibid. 41

24. Ibid. 58

25. Ibid. 60

26. Ibid. 60

27. Ibid. 61

28. Ibid. 61

29. Ibid. 62

30. Ibid. 62

31. Ibid. 62

32. Ibid. 62

33. Holmberg Tom Nelson’s Honor article (1998)

34. Ibid. 1

35. Ibid. 1

36. Ibid 2

37. Ibid. 2

38. Ibid. 2

39. Ibid. 2

40. Runciman Ibid. 48 Runciman spelt the name Carraciolli. I have used Caracciolo throughout.

41. Ibid. 48

42. Ibid. 47-48

43. Ibid. 48

44. Ibid. 48

45. Ibid. 49

46. Ibid. 146 My italics

47. Ibid. 53-54

48. Ibid. 59

49. Ibid. 58

50. Ibid. 59

51. Ibid. 66

52. Ibid. 66-67

53. Ibid. 67

54. Ibid. 67

55. Ibid. 67

56. Ibid. 67

57. Ibid. 58

58. Ibid. 101

59. Ibid. 105-106

60. Ibid. 109.

61. Ibid. 110

62. Ibid. 110

63. Ibid. 111

64. Ibid. 111-112

65. Ibid. 112

66. Ibid. 112 My italics

67. Andress David The Savage Storm (London: Little Brown, 2012)

68. Ibid. Preface xiv

69. Esdaile Charles Napoleon’s Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2007)

70. Runciman Ibid. 113

71. Ibid. 113 My italics

72. Ibid. 113

73. Ibid. 114

74. Ibid. 114

75. Ibid. 114

76. Franceschi General Michel The Duke of Enghien Affair: A Plot Against Napoleon (Translated by

Glenn Naumovitz, International Napoleonic Society, 2005)

77. Ibid. 5

78. Ibid. 21-22

79. Ibid. 25

80. Runciman Ibid. 122

81. Ibid. 122

82. Ibid. 122

83. Ibid. 123-124

84. Ibid. 124

85. Ibid. 125

86. Ibid. 126

87. Ibid. 126

88. Ibid. 126

89. Ibid. 127

90. Ibid. 127

91. Ibid. 127

92. Ibid. 129

93. Ibid. 129

94. Ibid. 130 My italics throughout

95. Ibid. 131

96. Ibid. 134

97. Ibid. 134

98. Ibid. 136

99. Ibid. 136

100. Ibid. 138

101. Ibid. 139

102. Ibid. 139

103. Ibid. 140

104. Ibid. 140

105. Ibid. 142

106. Ibid. 142

107. Ibid. 143

108. Ibid. 144

109. Ibid. 144

110. Grimsby Heritage Centre, Lincolnshire, England, UK. The main French prisoners exhibition was

very good.

111. Runciman Ibid. 144

112. Ibid. 144

113. Ibid. 145

Bibliography

Andress David The Savage Storm (London: Little Brown, 2012)

Esdaile Charles Napoleon’s Wars (New York: Penguin Books 2007)

Franceschi General Michel The Duke Of Enghien Affair: A Plot Against Napoleon International

Napoleonic Society publication 2005

Holmberg Tom Nelson’s Honor 1998

Runciman Walter Drake, Nelson and Napoleon (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1919)

BONAPARTE AND BETSY BALCOMBE

2016-11-01T16:00:00.003+00:00

-->

Bonaparte and Betsy Balcombe

The Island of St Helena is a bleak storm-tossed rock in the South Atlantic some 1,200 miles west of the African coast. The Portuguese only discovered it in 1502 and the first British troops did not arrive there until 1658. The island is forty-seven square miles in extent and most of it is rugged and uninhabitable.1 After The Hundred Days and the Battle of Waterloo, the Allied powers were so terrified that Napoleon might rise to power yet again, they decided to banish him to this benighted place. As the veteran Bonapartist Colonel Santi de Odoards said: ‘It is only from this moment that [the Bourbons] now considered themselves firmly seated on the throne. For even when chained in the middle of the ocean, the giant who made them tremble for so long was still a bugbear and an endless nightmare.’2

The paranoia felt by the European powers was almost palpable. So nervous was the British Government in particular, they even went to the trouble of establishing garrisons on two other isolated outposts lost amidst the huge Atlantic Ocean, Ascension Island in 1815 and Tristan da Cunha: ‘the most remote inhabited island on the planet,’3 in 1816. This extraordinary policy was a testimony to their greatest fear - that even when trapped on St Helena and watched over night and day, Napoleon might yet be helped to escape from his forbidding prison.

Betsy describes the island in her book Napoleon & Betsy - Recollections of Napoleon on St Helena: ‘The appearance of St Helena, on viewing it from the sea, is different from that of any land I ever saw, and it is certainly but little calculated to make one fall in love with it at first sight. The rock, rising abruptly from the ocean, with its oblong shape and perpendicular sides, suggests to one’s mind more the idea of a huge dark-coloured ark lying at anchor, floating on the bosom of the Atlantic, than a land intended for the habitation and support of living beings; nor, on a nearer acquaintance, does its character become more amiable.’4

This was to be the place of Napoleon’s final exile, where he was buried alive in a desolate remote wilderness, as far away from civilization as it was possible to be.

Napoleon was very fortunate to have met the Balcombes early on during his incarceration on St Helena. Betsy, born on November 26th 1802, was the second daughter of William Balcombe, the superintendent of public sales to the East India Company and purveyor to their ships and other vessels docking at Jamestown, the capital of the island.5 During his time in power, the British authorities were forever claiming that Napoleon wanted to conquer the world, and Nelson virtually had apoplexy just at the mere thought of it. But just who was dominating the Indian sub-continent and the world’s oceans by 1815? It certainly wasn’t the French. And it never had been.

Napoleon arrived on the island just before Betsy’s thirteenth birthday. No one could possibly have foreseen the amazing friendship that developed between the forty-six-year old ex-Emperor and the lively, brash, hoydenish English ‘Mees Betsy.’6

While his official residence-to-be Longwood was supposedly being repaired, refurbished and upgraded, Napoleon was able to spend some delightful weeks with the Balcombe family at the Briars. They let him use a small ballroom that had a lawn in front where he also had installed a large marquee that housed his famous camp bed and variegated glittering detritus from his fallen empire.

As Alan Sutton remarks: ‘Napoleon’s fall from an unprecedented position of power to humiliating confinement must have been an impossible burden to have lived with and yet despite this - or possibly because of it - Napoleon befriended this child and held genuine affection for her.’7 Napoleon had many brothers and sisters and like a lot of people brought up in a large family, he loved children. He doted on his son, the exiled King of Rome, whose own fate was likewise tragic. The merciless so-called Allies never allowed Maria-Louise or his son to join him on St Helena. The Emperor of Austria, Francis II, a spineless nonentity who Napoleon had allowed to remain on his throne despite Austria attacking France in 1805 and 1809 and collaborating with the Russian enemy in 1812, was so cynical as to engage a titled male prostitute, Count von Neipperg, to seduce his own daughter and turn her away from Napoleon forever.

Francis was typical of the ‘legitimate’ rulers of the period: vain, useless, ignorant, arrogant beyond measure, the likes of the Prince Regent of England, Tsar Alexander of Russia, (who was implicated in the murder of his own father and slept with his sister), Frederick William of Prussia, and Francis himself, had no talent for ruling and precious few achievements of any kind between them. They exploited and overtaxed their poor benighted peasant populations and, with copious amounts of English gold, they cloaked them in uniforms in order to attack Napoleon and everything he stood for. To these overdressed mental weaklings, their greatest dread was that democratic ideas crystallized by the American and French Revolutions might undermine their divine right to rule. If there was a god in the early C19th – he must have had a weird sense of humour.

Before she met Napoleon, Betsy thought of him in apocalyptic terms: ‘The earliest idea I had of Napoleon was that of a huge ogre or giant, with one large flaming red eye in the middle of his forehead, and long teeth protruding from his mouth, with which he tore to pieces and devoured naughty little girls, especially those who did not know their lessons. I had rather grown out of this first opinion of Napoleon; but, if less childish, my terror of him was still hardly diminished. The name of Bonaparte was still associated, in my mind, with everything that was bad and horrible.’8 She goes on to explain why she had this opinion of him: ‘I had heard the most atrocious crimes imputed to him; and if I had learned to consider him as a human being, I yet still believed him to be the worst that had ever existed.’9

From their earliest days, British children were brought up to believe that Napoleon was evil incarnate, nothing less than a monster, for he had become the national bogeyman. The cartoons by Gilray and Rowlandson and the lies and propaganda spread by a nasty and scurrilous press only added to this impression. Hence as Betsy remarks: ‘Most of the newspapers of the day described him as a demon; and all those of his own country who lived in England were of course his bitterest enemies; and from these two sources alone we formed our opinion of him.’10

Many people even today have a stereotypical view of Napoleon as the short fat man who lost the Battle of Waterloo. They would be astonished with Betsy’s description of him upon their first meeting. He rode into her life on a magnificent jet black horse: ‘Napoleon’s position on horseback, by adding height to his figure, supplied all that was wanting to make me think him the most majestic person I had ever seen.’11 As to his physical presence, she adds: ‘He was deadly pale, and I thought his features, though cold and immovable, and somewhat stern, were exceedingly beautiful… When he began to speak, his fascinating smile and kind manner removed every vestige of the fear with which I had hitherto regarded him.’12

A strange and wonderful friendship would very quickly develop between these two people, a fallen Emperor and a young girl in the full flush of youth. Both of them liked to play crude practical jokes upon the other and each of them had a decidedly wicked sense of humour. As Napoleon sat on one of the cottage chairs at the Briars, Betsy studied him with wide-eyed fascination: ‘I have never seen anyone with so remarkable and striking a physiognomy. The portraits of him, give a good general idea of his features, but his smile, and the expression of his eye, could not be transmitted to canvas, and these constituted Napoleon’s chief charm. Hs hair was dark brown, and as fine and silky as a child’s, rather too much so indeed for a man, as its very softness caused it to look thin…’13 As for the ‘large flaming red eye in the middle of his forehead’ - there was no sign of it.

Betsy’s father had offered Sir George Cockburn - who presented Napoleon to the Balcombes - room at the Briars - but he was happy to consign his place to the Emperor.14 Napoleon liked and respected Sir George Cockburn and had he been the Governor of the island instead of the infamous Sir Hudson Lowe, his life in captivity might have been far more pleasant. But as he settled himself at the Briars, far from the gawping crowds that had greeted him at Jamestown harbour, Napoleon could have had no idea of the torments and horrors that lay in store for him, not could such a healthy man ever have conceived that he had less than six years to live. Yet, for some eight weeks, the friendship of a child restored and buoyed up his formerly depressed spirit.

Napoleon took and instant liking to the Briars with its fine views and pleasant gardens and he would have preferred to remain there rather than move to his official residence at Longwood. He was not to know that the moment he left the Balcombes he was facing a death sentence. But in the meantime, thanks to Betsy’s energy and mischief Napoleon got a new zest for life. The two of them delighted in playfully tormenting the other.

Not surprisingly, Napoleon soon picked up on what the English thought and said about him. Thus, when a prim young girl called Miss Legg visited the Briars, he decided to pull both her legs at the same time. Clinging to Betsy in terror when she heard Napoleon was crossing the lawn to greet her, she had no idea that Betsy had already revealed to him the horror she felt at the mere sound of his name. Forearmed as it were, Napoleon knew exactly what to do; ‘He walked up to her, and, brushing up his hair with his hand, shook his head, making horrible faces, and giving a sort of savage howl. The little girl screamed so violently, that mama was afraid she would go into hysterics… Napoleon laughed a good deal at the idea of him being such a bugbear…’15 When he tried his Cossack howl on Betsy, however, she just laughed at him.

Far from being afraid of Napoleon, when he asked her why the English were so fond of roast beef, she retaliated by showing him a caricature of an open mouthed Frenchman in the process of shoving a frog down his throat. Napoleon laughed and pinched her ear. The Emperor then got his own back by making her stand still while the fourteen-year-old son of Las Cases kissed her, saying that the young couple ought to marry. Afterwards, Betsy boxed the lad’s ears and planned revenge upon Napoleon.16

When it was later decided to play whist, the party had to descend steep and narrow steps from Napoleon’s pavilion to the cottage. Perhaps the phantom of Wellington whispered: ‘Now’s your time,’ for, waiting until the Emperor set off followed by Las Cases, his son, and her sister Jane – Betsy ran pell-mell at her sister who collided with the boy who pushed his father, who then rammed into Napoleon’s back: ‘I was in ecstacies at the confusion I had created, and exulted in the revenge I had taken for the kiss…’ However, Las Cases was horrified at this breach of etiquette and shoved Betsy hard against a rock for her temerity. When she cried, Napoleon responded: ‘ne pleurs pas - I will hold him while you punish him.’17 Betsy boxed Las Cases ear - for England, it might be said. Napoleon thought that this was hilarious: ‘clapping his hands and laughing immoderately at our race round the lawn. Las Cases never liked me after this adventure, and used to call me a rude hoyden.’18

Betsy was amazed at Napoleon’s hands: ‘the fattest and prettiest in the world; his knuckles dimpled like those of a baby, his fingers taper and beautifully formed, and his nails perfect.’19 She was surprised that such delicate looking palms could ever wield a sword. Napoleon showed her an exquisite blade with a sheath of tortoise-shell decorated with golden bees. When he let her handle the weapon she cheekily brandished it in his face until she had pinned him into a corner. She continued her daredevilry by telling him so say his prayers because she was going to kill him. Only when the full weight of the sword told, did she lower her arm. Napoleon grabbed one of her ears, which had just been pierced, making her cry out and then pulled her nose, but he never once lost his temper with her.20

Betsy states that: ‘His manner was so unaffectedly kind and amiable, that in a few days I felt perfectly at ease in his society, and looked upon him more as a companion of my own age, than as the mighty warrior at whose name “the world grew pale.” His spirits were very good, and he was at times almost boyish in his love of mirth and glee, not unmixed sometimes with a tinge of malice.’21 She helped Napoleon with his English while he checked her French translations. From reading her memoirs it is clear that he understood the language of his captors much better than many historians seem to think.

Betsy pestered him to throw a ball in the Balcombe’s own small ballroom but he persistently declined. He had no wish to be gawped at again by the multitude. In the end he said he would agree to anything but a ball so Betsy suggested they play blind man’s buff. Napoleon had never heard of the game so she had to explain the rules to him. When he failed to convince her to choose something else, he acquiesced. The Emperor suggested lots should be drawn and he controlled the tickets. All were blank save for one with “la mort” written upon it. Betsy found herself being blindfolded first. After tying his own cambric handkerchief over her eyes, Napoleon asked her if she could still see. She fibbed that she could not even though some light was just visible. To make sure she could not see he wafted his famous hat right in front of her face. Startled by the shadow and the flurry of its motion, she recoiled: ‘Ah, leetle monkee, you can see pretty well,’22 Napoleon remarked. He wasn’t satisfied until a second hankie had been tied over the first and he proceeded to avoid all her attempts to catch him.

When she heard that Sir George Cockburn was going to give a ball, Betsy naturally wanted to attend. When her father said she was too young she pleaded with Napoleon who took her part and persuaded him to let her go. When the Emperor asked to see her first ball dress, Betsy showed him and then left it on the sofa while they played whist. Napoleon cheated at cards on purpose to irritate her and, when she complained, he teased her all the more. When she caught him red-handed: ‘He laughed until the tears ran out of his eyes… and catching up my ball dress from off the sofa, he ran out of the room, and up to the pavilion…’23 to his own quarters. Despite Betsy’s tearful pleas, Napoleon chuckled and refused to return the gown to her. Betsy was distraught and cried herself to sleep. The next day he again refused to relinquish his prize. Only when it was time to go to the ball did he relent: ‘to my great joy, I saw the emperor running down the lawn to the gate with my dress.’24 He then accompanied her a little way on foot as she continued on horseback along the bridle path to the ball.

On another occasion, Betsy more than got her own back. The Emperor had been writing in the garden of the Briars next to a goldfish pond. That same day Sir George Cockburn paid a visit along with his Newfoundland dog, Tom Pipes. The animal had a penchant for bathing in ponds and then having a good shake afterwards. Betsy called the dog and directed it towards the goldfish pond. Afterwards Tom Pipes ran to Napoleon and drenched him and all his papers. She says: ‘It was impossible to help laughing, although he was very angry, for Tom Pipes would not go away; he had been a shipmate of Napoleon’s on board the Northumberland, and was so glad to see him again, that he kept jumping on him with his wet paws, thereby adding mud to wet and dust.’25

It is interesting and instructive to set Betsy’s words alongside those of another English writer - H.G. Wells. This is what Wells wrote about Napoleon in 1920 in his The Outline of History Volume II: ‘The figure he makes in history is one of almost incredible self-conceit, of vanity, of greed, and cunning, of callous contempt and disregard of all who trusted him…’26 And: ‘It would be difficult to find a human being less likely to arouse affection. One reads in vain through the monstrous accumulations of Napoleonic literature for a single record of self-forgetfulness. Laughter is one great difference between man and the lower animals, and there is no evidence that Napoleon ever laughed… There is no proof that this unbrotherly, unhumorous egotist was ever sincerely loved by any human being… He had never even a dog to love him.’27

If one is generous to H.G.Wells we can accuse him of consummate ignorance. He was a great writer but a terrible historian. In fact, he wasn’t an historian at all. And it shows. However, his manufactured lies poisoned a whole generation of English readers against Napoleon, and the same calumnies have been repeated ad nauseam ever since. Even the reference to ‘monstrous Napoleonic literature’ is a dead give away. He literally cannot understand the greatness of the man he is writing about and he obviously resents his acclaim. It is to our shame as a nation that generations of British people have swallowed his malevolent spoon-fed tosh.

Napoleon’s sympathy and empathy for his fellow man was broad and wide-ranging. Tending the Balcombe’s gardens at the Briars was an old Malay slave called Toby. He was quite a character and ruled his small roost as if the turf belonged to him personally. Napoleon asked William Balcombe if he could purchase Toby’s freedom, but this was not allowed - presumably it would set an awkward precedent for all the other slaves on this British island. But Toby’s heart was full of wonder at this noble gesture: ‘The old man retained ever afterwards the most grateful sense of Napoleon’s kindness, and was never more gratified than when employed in gathering the choicest fruit, and arranging the most beautiful bouquets, to be sent to Longwood, to “that good man, Bony,” as he called the emperor.’28 Ever after, Napoleon repeatedly asked after the old man’s heath and when he finally left his enchanted garden at the Briars, he gave Toby twenty napoleons - 400 francs - a stupendous sum for a mere ‘slave’.

H.G. Wells, a slave to his own puerile nationalistic prejudices had either never read Betsy’s account or else he wilfully chose to ignore it. There must have been a reason why tens of thousands of his own soldiers and millions of French peasants loved Napoleon – and there are many more accounts of his generous and kindness to be found for those who are bothered enough to look. On the retreat from Moscow in 1812, the first thing Napoleon did was to give up his own carriage for the wounded. Furthermore, can anyone imagine a dry old stick like Wellington playing with a child or concerning himself with the future of a slave? He was a notoriously bad husband and father and so unpopular when he became Prime Minister that the crowds smashed the windows of Apsley house, his London residence.

Napoleon also liked to entertain Betsy’s brothers. He often sent his lamplighter who had a flare for invention to make toys to amuse the children. One day the servant attached four mice to a small carriage but neither he nor the two brothers could get the terrified creatures to move. Napoleon suggested tweaking their tails - and that did the trick: ‘to our great amusement, Napoleon enjoying the fun as much as any of us, and delighted with the extravagant glee of my two brothers.’29

As Napoleon’s ‘best friend’ Betsy allowed herself to take liberties with the questions she asked him and the subjects they talked about. On one such occasion she enquired about the supposed poisoning of his own troops at Jaffa during his Egyptian campaign. He told her that before leaving Jaffa he had been told that some men were far too dangerously ill to be moved from the hospital. As a consequence, he asked his medical team what could be done about this. Many of the sick had plague and most were not expected to live for more than twenty hours. For the Army to take them along would risk the lives of hundreds of others. Yet, if the very ill were left behind the cruel and merciless Turks would torture and kill them. Hence Napoleon suggested to Desgenettes that as an act of mercy they be given opium to ensure a pain free death. But the physician refused saying his job was not to kill but cure: ‘Accordingly I left a rear-guard to protect these unhappy men from the advancing enemy, and they remained until nature had paid her last debt and released the expiring soldiers from their agony.’ Napoleon added that had his own son be one of them he would have wished for the drug to be administered and had it been himself: ‘I would insist upon it…’30

Betsy also asked about the massacre of Turkish prisoners that had taken place at Jaffa some time before. She does not excuse him remarking that: ‘The execution of the Turkish prisoners at Jaffa was equal in cruelty, though not in extent, to the fusillades of the revolution. Besides which, it was unjustifiable by the usages of war, the Turks having given up their arms and surrendered themselves prisoners of war on condition of safety of life at least.’31 In this she is mistaken. It was customary for the attacker to demand surrender from a besieged fortress before an all out assault that would inevitably cause the death of many of the attackers - they were not called the forlorn hope for nothing. On March 3rd 1799, Napoleon sent an emissary to the enemy commander saying their lives would be spared if they surrendered immediately. In reply the head of the emissary was chopped off and brutally displayed on the battlements at Acre.32 After this bloodthirsty action all bets were off and the defenders had no right whatsoever under the accepted customs of the day.

Napoleon had never wanted to fight the Turks there in the first place - it was called The Egyptian Campaign after all. He initially had no intention of invading Syria. Talleyrand had promised him that he would personally lead a diplomatic mission to Constantinople to try and persuade the Sublime Porte to switch from his British alliance to one with the French. But Talleyrand, as so often, did the exact opposite of what he had said he would do and as a result Napoleon was left in the lurch.33

The fighting at Acre lasted two days and once inside the fortress the French soldiers gave no quarter - remembering how their friends had been massacred during the Cairo insurrection. Even French stragglers and soldiers lost in the desert had been tortured and murdered. As General Michel Franceschi says in his Bonaparte in Egypt: ‘Thus they were engaged against the garrison and against inhabitants captured with weapons in hand. In such circumstances, it was impossible to avoid excesses.’34 The officers tried to reign in the soldiers’ worst behaviour and General Robin even struck his own men with his sabre in an effort to restrain them. By this time, the survivors of the garrison were holed up in the citadel, their last place of refuge. It must be repeated, that by the conventions of the day these were dead men walking. They had no rights whatsoever after refusing to surrender before the walls were stormed.

In a terrible Irony, Napoleon then sent his own stepson Eugene de Beauharnais and another ADC Crozier: ‘ “to calm as much as possible the furor of the soldiers.” ’35They were meant to save women, children and the elderly from the ravages of war, but when their uniforms were recognized, the besieged soldiers asked to surrender to them on condition that they would spare their lives: ‘This was an appalling misunderstanding.’36 Here was yet another bitter irony. Out of the goodness of their hearts, the young French ADCs accepted their surrender and took them to the French camp!

This put Napoleon in a terribly invidious position. Accounts of the numbers who surrendered vary from about 2,000 to 3,500. Franceschi says there were 2,500 Turkish prisoners, most of whom were Albanians.37 Some 300 or so of them had already been set free once before under parole. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Turks and Egyptians were not au fait with the all the conventions of European warfare. These men had given their word not to fight the French but had been captured a second time. Nevertheless, if Napoleon freed them again, what was there to stop them fighting him for a third time? Another act of clemency on his part would clearly be seen as a sign of weakness by a merciless enemy. Not only that, there was already a shortage of food and water in the French Army. There was not enough of either to succour so many prisoners. To abandon the prisoners in the desert would consign them to death by dehydration or if they did survive they could once more join the ranks of the enemy. It was an impossible situation.

Not surprisingly a young general of twenty-nine in a situation not of his own making did not want to harbour the responsibility for such a moral dilemma alone. He held a council of war but it ended without agreement. Two more meetings met with the same result. Only after all the generals of division had debated the question was a decision made - the prisoners were to be executed.38 It was indeed a terrible outcome. Of course, had the situation been reversed, the Turks would have tortured their French prisoners before executing them. Whenever Napoleon’s career is discussed this incident should rightly be weighed in the scales of history. But why do all the British historians who damn Napoleon for his actions at Acre during a time of war never mention the fact that the British navy bombarded Copenhagen in neutral Denmark in 1807 in a sneak surprise attack at the dead of night and murdered some 2,500 civilians in their beds, in order that we could steal all their navy without even a declaration of war?39

The Bombardment of Copenhagen (Anon)

Considering what was to happen to him within a few short years, it is very interesting to read Betsy’s comments about Napoleon’s health when he first arrived at St Helena. When at the Briars he loved to go for long walks in the valley and on the nearby mountain.40 He was also a great horseman on one occasion spurring his mount up a very steep incline, its hooves scattering rocks in all directions and leaving his companions Bertrand, Montholon, Gourgaud and a British orderly floundering in his wake as none of them dare follow him.41 Betsy also witnessed him riding at speed around the lawn of the Briars, putting his black horse Hope through its paces and showing perfect control of the animal.42 He told her that he had once ridden 120 miles in a day to visit his sick mother. She adds: ‘I remember being much surprised at his powers of endurance. His great strength of constitution… enabling him to reach the pinnacles of his ambition… In how many periods of Napoleon’s life would not the illness of a week have been fatal to his future schemes of empire!’43 At the time, despite being overweight, he was fit and vigorous. It might appear that he could live for decades on his island prison, as long as he continued to exercise. Yet he would not even live to see his fifty-second birthday.

Too soon, the happy times at the Briars came to an end and he moved to Longwood. Initially, when the Northumberland docked at Jamestown, even Admiral Cockburn did not know where Napoleon was going to live. He supposed he would get Plantation House, the best residence on the island, but the then Governor Sir Mark Wilks wanted to remain there himself.44 In 1812 Longwood, a former cattle barn and storage shed, had been turned into a summer house by the simple expedient of putting floor boards over the mounds of muck and cow dung it contained.45 The place teemed with rats and was damp and unhygienic. This was the place the British Government thought fit for the former French Emperor. It was also isolated and uncomfortable but Lord Bathurst thought it made Napoleon’s chances of escaping from the island even more remote. Napoleon could sense that trouble was coming: ‘As the time drew near, for Napoleon’s removal from the Briars to Longwood, he would come into the drawing-room oftener, and stay longer. He would, he said, have preferred altogether remaining at the Briars; because he beguiled the hours with us better than he ever thought it possible he could have done on such a horrible rock as St Helena.’46

The scene had been set for the murder of Napoleon.

The Emperor was now well and truly isolated physically and watched over constantly by his former enemies. He had very little personal freedom and virtually none when it came to the harsh living conditions he was forced to accept at Longwood. Furthermore, in regard to his emotional state, his mind must have been in constant turmoil. Although he was a past master at hiding his feelings, even more so as a prisoner he would not wish to reveal his innermost thoughts to his captors, he must have had to fight continually to bolster his own spirits. Above all else, he had little or nothing to hope for. He might have half-persuaded himself that the British Government might relent and allow him to return to Europe eventually - even if under permanent house arrest in England itself, as he had envisaged when he boarded the Bellerophon. But in his heart of hearts, he must have known that he was doomed to die on that unforgiving island.

In his daily life, he also very much missed the company of those he held dear. Undermining Napoleon all the time were the vast distances that separated him from not only his wife and child but all the other members of his family. He was denied contact with all those that had been most close to him, to those whom he had loved and those who loved him. Josephine was dead and that knowledge alone must have been a terrible burden to him. Indeed, Betsy recalls a visit by the wives of Montholon and Bertrand when he was still at the Briars, when Madame Bertrand showed him a miniature of Josephine: ‘He gazed at it with the greatest emotion for a considerable time without speaking. At last, he exclaimed it was the most perfect likeness he had ever seen of her, and told Madame Bertrand he would keep it, which he did, until his death.’47 Betsy’s own mother reminded him a lot of Josephine and he was often caught staring at her in a wistful fashion: ‘Her memory appeared to be idolized by him, and he was never weary of excelling on her sweetness of disposition and the grace of her movements. He said she was the most truly feminine women he had ever known.’48 No wonder the ungainly and self-important Madame de Staël was never able to worm her way into Napoleon’s affections despite her crass and unwelcomed flirtatious behaviour. Then, as a result of her failure in the romantic sphere, this same woman who once sang paeans of praise about him as the greatness man living, having been well and truly rejected, turned her pen into one of the most poisonous ever to be used against him: hell hath no fury like a woman scorned - particularly an ugly one.

After Madame Bertrand had shown her miniature of Josephine, Napoleon displayed portraits of Marie Louise. He spoke warmly of her also and expressed his fondness for the younger Empress. He told Betsy she would have followed him to St Helena if she had been allowed to go. She had intended to rejoin him but, as we have seen, her own heartless father and the revolting predatory Neipperg made sure that she did not. As a consequence, Napoleon was also denied the company of his son The King of Rome whom he dearly loved. He brooded over the absence of his child daily. Betsy adds that she thought Marie Louise was not attractive unlike: ‘his own handsome and intellectual looking family.’49 However, all these reminders of what once had been and could never be again, played havoc with Napoleon’s emotions, churning up the depths: “he had been in low spirits since receiving his visitor, and after all the portraits of the empress Josephine and Maria Louisa (sic) had been produced, he appeared absorbed in mournful reflection, and was still more melancholy and dejected for the rest of the evening.’50

The world was closing in on Napoleon. Once he seemed to hold heaven in the palms of his hands; now there was only a hell of isolation and sorrow focussed with unbending malevolence on a tiny island, with himself at its centre. Things could only get worse and they did with the arrival of Sir Hudson Lowe in 1816.

The weather and climate of St Helena played havoc with the health of all its inhabitants, not only Napoleon and his entourage, but the indigenous population and with the British troops and sailors garrisoned there as well. Betsy makes a pointed reference to the Emperor’s own situation once he left the Briars: ‘Napoleon’s health and activity began to decline soon after his arrival at Longwood. In consequence of the unfortunate disputes with the governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, his health became visibly impaired.’51 When Napoleon left for Longwood, Mrs Balcombe was not there to see him off because she was ill in bed and, some months later, Betsy herself became seriously ill and Dr O’Meara feared for the worst. Here again, she records a side of him seldom mentioned by many writers - his sympathy for those that were ill: ‘The emperor’s kindness in making enquiries after me, and his other attentions, I can never forget.’52 Similarly, upon hearing that her mother was ill, he had insisted on going up to her, enquiring after her health, and presenting her with a gold snuffbox as a gift and mark of friendship for her husband.

Napoleon’s acts of mercy for his fallen foes, is another quality utterly absent from books by most British historians. One morning while walking in the gardens of Longwood, Betsy encountered him and he bade her come and see his new toys. In his billiard room was a superb set of chessmen, a present for a Mr Elphinstone. Every single piece was beautifully carved and an exquisite artistic item. These priceless gifts were given to him: ‘from the circumstance of the emperor having humanely attended to his brother, when severely wounded on the field of Waterloo - on which occasion Napoleon sent for his refreshment a goblet of wine from his own canteen, on hearing he was faint from the loss of blood.’53

More than once was he solicitous about the welfare of his former enemies. Captain Henry Meynell, Commander of HMS Newcastle, often accompanied Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm, Admiral Cockburn’s replacement, when he visited Longwood. On hearing that Meynell was dangerously ill and being cared for at the Briars, Napoleon sent his servant Cipriani to enquire after his health every day. Later, when he was moved to Plantation House, Meynell had a relapse and: ‘the emperor begged, when next we saw Lady Lowe, we would send him word how the brave Captain was.’54

What a contrast with his worthless highborn British jailors who never forgave him for being greater than all the so-called ‘legitimate’ divine right monarchs put together. Lord Bathurst, a fully paid up member of the real ‘scum of the earth’, did not have a drop of sympathy for his helpless victim.

Interestingly, Jean-Baptiste Cipriani, Napoleon’s much valued Corsican servant, was yet another person whose life was cut short on St Helena. He unexpectedly fell seriously ill on February 24th 1818, suffering from severe stomach pains and cold chills. Despite every attempt being made to save him, he died two days later.55 Up to then, like his master, he had hardly ever been ill in his life. He was immediately buried but it was rumoured that a post mortem was impossible because his body had disappeared! Perhaps with the telltale symptoms described above, he had been poisoned with arsenic, commonly used on the island as a rat poison. Was his probable murder a dummy run for that of Napoleon himself?

Sir Hudson Lowe soon began to get rid of people he did not like, especially those that seemed to have too much contact with his illustrious prisoner. The surgeon of the Conqueror John Stokoe attended Napoleon for three days in 1819 and because he did not follow the exact protocol ordained for such contact by the Governor, he found himself not only banished from the island and dismissed from the Navy on half-pay, he was also subsequently court-martialled. Lowe was a vindictive man and it was unwise to cross him.56

Betsy had cried bitterly when Napoleon left the Briars. He said to her: ‘You must not cry, Mademoiselle Betsee; you must come and see me next week, and very often.’57 As William Balcombe was the purveyor to Longwood, she was able to visit on a weekly basis: ‘… I remember being in a state of ecstasy at the prospect of again beholding my old playmate - the loss of whose society I had so deeply regretted.’58 However, she was not impressed on her first call at Longwood, describing the bedroom as small and cheerless, while the views from the house could only be called savage, wild and rugged. It was a relatively small soulless residence for a man who had once had the whole of Europe at his feet and must have been a big disappointment to Napoleon after his pleasant stay at the Briars.

One of the highlights of the St Helena social calendar were the Deadwood Races inaugurated by the Honourable Henry John Rous. Having been barred from attending them by her father due to her inattention to her studies, Betsy was downcast and miserable. Even her pony Tom had been given away for the day to make sure she stopped at home. However, when Napoleon heard of her distress from Dr O’Meara, he sent her a horse called Mameluke, the most docile animal in his stable, already equipped with a side-saddle. But as so often in life, a good deed does not go unpunished: ‘This simply good-natured act of the emperor occasioned no small disturbance on the island, and sufficiently punished me for acting contrary to my father’s wishes, by the pain it gave me to hear that he was considered to have committed a breach of discipline in permitting one of the family to ride a horse belonging to the Longwood establishment, and for which he was reprimanded by the governor.’59 Such pettiness and pedantry was typical of the man. Only the Governor could stoop so low. He even took umbrage when he discovered that Betsy’s birthday cake sent from England had been adorned with a large eagle. It is no wonder that when Madame Bertrand presented her newborn son Arthur to the Emperor she joked: ‘Allow me to present to your majesty a subject who has dared to enter the gates of Logwood without a pass from Sir Hudson Lowe.’60 On another occasion, when the piano at Longwood needed tuning, the only person able to perform that task was the bandmaster on the General Kid, Mr Guinness who was just about to set off when he got an order from the Governor preventing him from leaving the ship. No wonder that Napoleon and his entourage came to hate the very sound of his name.61

Despite being exiled by the British Government, Napoleon did have friends in England. Lady Holland sent him many books and gifts and he always called her ‘La bonne Lady Holland.’62 He also spoke to Betsy about his admiration for Charles James Fox: ‘He was sincere and honest in his intentions, and had he lived, England would not have been desolated by war; he was the only minister who knew the interests of his country.’63 He told her how welcome Fox had been when he visited France and how every town and city vied to do the greatest honour to him. When the famous Englishman visited St Cloud he found himself by error in Napoleon’s private apartments and there, to his surprise, along with busts of great men like Washington and Cicero, his wife noticed a bust of Fox.64

Shortly after Napoleon left for Longwood, a distinguished French lady visited the Briars and asked to see the rooms where he had stayed. When she saw the crown carved in the turf by members of his entourage she burst into a flood of tears and sank to the ground in despair. Betsy was shocked by this outburst of emotion: ‘She entreated me not to mention to anyone what had occurred, and proceeded to say that the memory of Napoleon was treasured in the hearts of the French people as it was in hers, and that they would all willingly die for him.’65

The longer Napoleon remained on St Helena, the worst he felt: ‘He constantly complained of illness from the exposed situation of Longwood, the wind continually beating in his face, or the sun scorching his brain; he used to observe, when at the Briars, that he never suffered any ailment, for there he had shady and sheltered walks.’66 Shortly before the Balcombes left the island for the last time, Betsy states that he had been very ill and that as Dr O’Meara felt that he might never recover, he was anxious for a second opinion. However, Napoleon would have none of it, saying that any other medical man would say the same thing, namely exercise, and that he would not do so when surrounded by sentries and being under constant surveillance.

Betsy describes how much he had changed in only a couple of years: ‘When we saw Napoleon after this illness, the havoc and change it had made in his appearance was sad to look upon. His face was literally the colour of yellow wax, and his cheeks had fallen in pouches on either side of his face. His ankles were so swollen that the flesh literally hung over his shoes; he was so weak, that without resting one hand on a table near him, and the other on the shoulder of an attendant, he could not have stood.’67 This remarkable decline is telling: is this just the result of not enough walks and horse riding? That is very hard to believe. Betsy could not restrain her tears at his terrible appearance and her mother said he had the look of death about him. Ironically, it was the fact that Mrs Balcombe herself was seriously ill that necessitated the family leaving for England on doctor’s advice.

Betsy went with her father and sister to visit him one last time. Napoleon saw his own future clearly: ‘Soon you will be sailing away towards England, leaving me to die on this miserable rock. Look at those dreadful mountains - they are my prison walls. You will soon hear that the Emperor Napoleon is dead.’68 They shared a final meal and he embraced them, saying he would never forget their kindness and friendship. Napoleon asked Betsy what she would like as a parting gift. She asked for a lock of his hair. Marchand cut four locks, one for Betsy and others for her father, mother and sister: ‘I still possess that lock of hair; it is all left me of the many tokens of remembrance of the Great Emperor.’69

Notes

1. Lucia Elizabeth Abell Napoleon and Betsy - Recollections of Napoleon on St Helena

(UK: Fonthill Media Limited, 2012) 12

2. Sam Llewellyn Small Parts in History (London: Sidgwick & Jackson Limited, 1985) 76

3. Roger Lovegrove Islands Beyond The Horizon (Oxford: OUP, 2012) 104

4. Abell op.cit. 43

5. Ibid. 7

6. Ibid. 7

7. Ibid. 18

8. Ibid. 46

9. Ibid. 46

10. Ibid. 47

11. Ibid. 49

12. Ibid. 49

13. Ibid. 49-50

14. Ibid. 50

15. Ibid. 53

16. Ibid. 54

17. Ibid. 55

18. Ibid. 55

19. Ibid. 56

20. Ibid. 57

21. Ibid. 52

22. Ibid. 68

23. Ibid. 59

24. Ibid. 60

25. Ibid. 110-111

26. H.G. Wells The Outline Of History Volume II (London: The Waverley Book Company Ltd, 1920) 490

27. Ibid. 499

28. Abell op.cit. 62

29. Ibid. 67

30. Ibid. 119

31. Ibid. 119-120

32. General Michel Franceschi Bonaparte in Egypt (Montreal: International Napoleonic Society, 2006) 45

33. Ibid. 43

34. Ibid. 45

35. Ibid. 46

36. Ibid. 46

37. Ibid. 46

38. Ibid. 46-47

39. Thomas Munch-Petersen Defying Napoleon (UK Stroud: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2007) Flyleaf:

‘Britain’s operation against neutral Denmark was prompted by fears that her navy might fall into the

hands of Napoleon and be turned against Britain… The operation is also the first example in modern

history of terror bombardment being used against a major European city. To gain quick possession of

the Danish fleet the British had to secure Copenhagen’s surrender, in the words of one of the staff

officers ‘by the sufferings of the inhabitants themselves’. The terrifying bombardment was the first

occasion on which rockets (the ‘Congreve rocket’) were employed on a large scale.’ See also Preface

page ix : ‘And there is no getting away from the fact that the operation, whether justified or not,

involved unprovoked aggression against a neutral state and the terror bombardment of a civilian

population.’

40. Abell op.cit. 53

41. Ibid. 63

42. Ibid. 99

43. Ibid. 65

44. Ibid. 7-8

45. Ibid. 9

46. Ibid. 73

47. Ibid. 71

48. Ibid. 71

49. Ibid. 72

50. Ibid. 72

51. Ibid. 74

52. Ibid. 75

53. Ibid. 87-88

54. Ibid. 94 and Note 57.142

55. Ibid. 134

56. Ibid. 112

57. Ibid. 73-74

58. Ibid. 76

59. Ibid. 81

60. Ibid. 83

61. Ibid. 87

62. Ibid. 102

63. Ibid. 102

64. Ibid. 103

65. Ibid. 126

66. Ibid. 106

67. Ibid. 107

68. Ibid. 122

69. Ibid. 123

Bibliography

Abell Elizabeth Lucia Napoleon and Betsy - Recollections of Napoleon on St Helena (UK: Fonthill

Media Limited, 2012)

Franceschi General Michel Bonaparte in Egypt (Montreal: International Napoleonic Society, 2006)

Llewellyn Sam Small Parts in History (London: Sidgwick & Jackson Limited, 1985)

Lovegrove Roger Islands Beyond the Horizon (Oxford: OUP, 2012)

Munch-Petersen Thomas Defying Napoleon (UK Stroud: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2007)

Wells H.G. The Outline of History Volume II (London: The Waverley Book Company Ltd, 1920)

A Souladream Production

NAPOLEON AT THE BEREZINA RIVER 1812 by R. CATON WOODVILLE

2016-10-22T12:40:00.001+01:00

WILLIAM HAZLITT AND NAPOLEON

2016-09-01T12:47:00.001+01:00

William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

William Hazlitt and Napoleon

To him, Napoleon’s defeat represented

‘the utter extinction of human liberty from the earth.’1

It is very difficult for the British people to discern their true history and what really happened in the past if they rely solely on English history books. Many accounts of Britain during the age of Napoleon and the so-called Napoleonic Wars (sic) pretend that our noble shires were the finest repositories of liberty and freedom in Europe and the World, that the Freeborn Englishman was the luckiest chap upon the Earth. The real truth, our real history, was very different. There was no truer friend of liberty than William Hazlitt, yet throughout his life he was persecuted and oppressed by a political Establishment that treated the rights of the individual with utter contempt. Hazlitt was there, he saw and heard it all, he was a witness to what actually took place upon these supposedly enlightened shores. William was acutely sensitive to what was going on around him; his intense perception and his thorough understanding of human psychology were put to the service of his fellow man. And no one wrote quite like he did. If anyone was proof of the axiom that the pen is mightier than the sword - it was William Hazlitt.

Napoleon died on May 5th 1821. It took weeks for the news to reach England and knowledge of this momentous event coincided with the release of the arrangements for the coronation of George IV. The sublime and the ridiculous coincided. William Hazlitt had recently been visiting his friend John Hunt who had been jailed in the notorious Coldbath Fields prison. His offence? As the editor of The Examiner he had described the House of Commons as full of ‘venal boroughmongers, grasping placemen, greedy adventurers, title-hunters, or the representatives of such worthies - a body, in short, containing a far greater portion of public criminals than public guardians.’2 Hunt paid the price for free speech. The Gagging Acts meant that no one could criticize the Government without risk of being jailed or worse. The mace of this much vaunted sceptred isle was only too ready to come crashing down on the heads of its critics.

Hazlitt and Hunt discussed the coronation. William was scathing: ‘What does it all amount to? A sham - a theatrical spectacle! What does it prove? That a King is crowned, that a King is dead! What is the moral to be drawn from it, that is likely to sink into the heart of the nation? That greatness consists in finery, and that supreme merit is the dower of birth and fortune!’3 The ceremony and the banquet to follow at Westminster Hall were expected to cost the taxpayer £250,000 - tens of millions in the pounds of today.4 All for a pot-bellied political pygmy who thought he was both God’s anointed and God’s gift to women. The great George IV put into Britain consisted of his girth only.

Meanwhile, a truly great man had died on the tiny island of St. Helena.

Together, Hazlitt and Hunt produced the Memorial of Napoléon with a black border and sporting five iconic images of their hero. Hazlitt wrote:

‘He put his foot upon the neck of Kings, who would have put their yoke

upon the necks of the People: he scattered before him with fiery execution,

millions of hired slaves, who came at the bidding of their masters to deny

the right of others to be free. The monument of greatness and of glory he

erected, was raised on ground forfeited again and again to humanity - it

reared its majestic front on the ruins of the shattered hopes and broken faith

of the common enemies of mankind. If he could not secure the freedom,

peace, and happiness of his country, he made her a terror to those, who by

sowing civil dissension and exciting foreign wars, would not let her

enjoy those blessings.’ (My italics)5

What Hazlitt detested most of all were former friends and acquaintances who, having once embraced revolution and reform, went over to the other side - men like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and his own brother-in-law Stoddart, who became tools and mouthpieces of the British Establishment. He continues:

‘They who had trampled upon Liberty could not at least triumph in her shame

and her despair, but themselves became objects of pity and derision. Their

determination to persist in extremity of wrong, only brought on themselves

repeated defeat, disaster, and dismay; the accumulated aggressions their

infuriated pride and disappointed malice meditated against others, returned

in just and aggravated punishment upon themselves… the destruction with

which they had threatened a people daring to call itself free, having suspended

over their heads, like a precipice, ready to fall upon and crush them.’6

Duncan Wu calls William Hazlitt the First Modern Man: ‘he hailed the coming of a new age when the French deposed their monarch, and wept when Napoleon abdicated. He foresaw a time when people would claim the right to speak on their own account, and determine the composition of their own government.’7

Hazlitt had freedom and liberty in his blood. His father William Senior believed in sticking up for the oppressed and as a devote Unitarian Christian he could not just walk by on the other side of the street. By the late C18th the Unitarians were a force to be reckoned with. William Senior’s own hero, Joseph Priestley became the ‘literary companion’ to the second earl of Shelburne, William Fitzmaurice-Petty, in 1772.8 Shelburne had supported a bill to release dissenting ministers from the straitjacket of the Thirty-Nine Articles of faith the year before. Shelburne ‘professed a warm regard to the Dissenters, as friends of liberty, and promised, if ever he came into power, to exert himself in supporting their rights, and placing them on the same footing with other Protestant subjects.’9 No wonder Priestley admired him.

William Hazlitt was born on April 10th 1778 and was brought up in a family that had a passion for religion and what, in today’s parlance, would be dubbed human rights. He was less than two when the family moved to Ireland. In Bandon, County Cork, they began a new life. Not surprisingly, when William Senior heard that American prisoners of war were being tortured in nearby Kinsale prison by British soldiers from the regiment of Colonel Fitzpatrick he decided to do something about it. He wrote to the War Office and to a newspaper highlighting the abuses and began a private action against the perpetrators. Death threats soon came his way and he appealed to Lord Shelburne, now Prime Minister. A court of inquiry was initiated and Shelburne had the regiment moved elsewhere in Ireland, indicating the power of William Senior’s words.10 As Duncan Wu states: ‘It was typical of Hazlitt Sr to stand up for the rights of the oppressed without regard to himself. His fidelity to his principles was absolute, and his son would be the same.’11 No wonder young William grew up to become the People’s Champion and he stood his ground even when the full power of the Establishment was lined up against him.

When the American War of Independence ended, the Hazlitts headed for the new beacon of liberty that was the New World. It was a time young William associated with happiness for the rest of his life. The family arrived at New York on May 26th 1783 on the Henry, the first vessel to reach the city since peace had been declared.12 The British officers in charge of the port were beside themselves with rage when they heard the news. Cursing and swearing, the soldiers wished that the conflict could have been continued. Fate had taken the bone away from the dogs of war. Added to the knowledge of the mistreatment of prisoners of war at Kinsale, which his father must have told William about, such scenes could have done little to engender respect for his own countrymen or what they appeared to stand for. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that he would later describe John Bull as someone who: ‘beats his wife, quarrels with his neighbours, damns his servants, and gets drunk to kill the time and keep up his spirits, and firmly believes himself the only exceptional, accomplished, moral and religious character in Christendom.’13 Ironically, the latter remarks aptly describe Prinny the Prince Regent and later George IV. Overweening arrogance was the jewel in the British Crown.

The widespread dismay felt by the Unitarian brotherhood at the harshness of Government policy was echoed elsewhere in the nation. Maclean says: ‘There was anger at the vicious cruelty with which the Government prosecuted many of those who opposed its policy. This was shared by all those of liberal sympathies, among them William Wordsworth, who until a short time previously had been by no means politically minded, but who now found himself in protest against the injustices which were being perpetrated in the name of justice:

    “Our Shepherds… at that time
      Thirsted to make the guardian crook of law
      A tool of Murder;…
       … in their weapons and their warfare base
      As vermin working out of reach, they leagu’d
      Their strength perfidiously, to undermine
      Justice, and make an end of Liberty.” ’14

Wordsworth was amongst illustrious company. Dr Price had written his Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution that Mirabeau admired so much he had it translated into French. However, Mirabeau died in April 1791 and Price a month later. Dr Priestley preached at the latter’s funeral at Hackney. Tom Paine’s Rights of Man caused quite a stir and even Mary Wollstonecraft had spoken in favour of liberty: ‘she who had not yet learned that Woman had no rights, and Man himself very few.’15 Yet in the Government’s corner stood Burke who with his Reflections passionately argued the Cabinet line. His powerful writing and his speeches were exceptional in their impact upon public opinion: ‘Drop by drop, the passion of anger, sorrow, fear and hatred in the soul of Burke is beginning to distil itself into the souls of others. There is no resisting its sullen potency. It is getting, not only into the soul, but into the blood of his fellow-countrymen.’16

Pauline Gregg calls the Reflections: ‘the classic of conservatism. Eloquent, forceful, rich in sonorous passages of rhetoric, passionately loyal to the ideals of chivalry and aristocracy, it lamented the passage of the French nobility and denounced the French Revolution.’17 In one passage Burke recalls seeing Marie-Antoinette when he was an impressionable youth and describes her as: ‘glittering like the morning star, full of life, of splendour, and joy.’18 With such effusiveness and sense of worship, it is eerily like reading of Princess Diana two hundred years before she was born. His fluffy verbal confection and gross sentimentality did not appeal to everyone. In his Rights of Man, Paine prefers to discuss the horrors of the Bastille and he retorts: ‘It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself… He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. Accustomed to kiss the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself, he degenerates into a composition of art, and the genuine soul of nature forsakes him.’19

In The Conservative Party, Sheila Moore calls the Reflections: ‘Burke’s most influential work… He saw human society as organic, not mechanistic, and thus counseled change by evolution not revolution.’20 Yet she points out that even Burke: ‘warned that “the greater the power, the greater the abuse.” ’21 However she also quotes his response to the reforming programme of the French revolutionaries in which he states that: ‘Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The state is all in all… The state has dominion and conquest for its sole objects - dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms.’22

In essence Burke is inferring that his own nation is a beacon of light and freedom in contrast with revolutionary France. As we shall see, this is little more than a sick joke. The individual had absolutely no rights in Pitt’s Britain - unless he was a rich aristocrat, and preferably a Member of Parliament as well. And Burke was an Irishman too. He obviously saw fit to ignore what happened to American prisoners of war in his version of paradise, leave alone trouble himself with the treatment of the Irish in general by the British. Burke was preaching to the converted from a pulpit of his own devising and only his Chosen People mattered - not the vast majority of ordinary men and women who knew from personal experience that ‘the state is all in all.’

On July 14th 1791, the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, Priestley’s home in Birmingham was attacked by a mob crying ‘Church and King.’23 Not only was the house burnt to the ground, his books and papers were also destroyed. Two Unitarian chapels and the homes of some of his friends also went up in flames. The Unitarians were now seen as traitors by many, but not of course by William Hazlitt.

William’s tender conscience was activated very early in his life. At the age of eight whilst in America, he had written that the Indians would have been far better off if the white man had never stepped foot in their country.24 Whilst on a visit to Liverpool as a boy he had seen the notorious press gang in action. He told his mother in a letter that: ‘the world is not perfect yet.’25 It was obviously even further from perfection by 1791 and he was moved to write a letter to The Shrewsbury Chronicle after the paper had accused Priestley of ‘impious and erroneous doctrines’: ‘Religious persecution is the bane of all religion; and the friends of persecution are the worst enemies religion has; and of all persecutions, that of calumny is the most intolerable. Any other kind of persecution can affect our outward circumstances only, our properties, our lives; but this may affect out characters for ever. And this great man has not only had his goods spoiled, his habitation burned, and his life endangered, but is also calumniated, aspersed with the most malicious reflections, and charged with every thing bad, for which a misrepresentation of the truth and prejudice can give the least pretence.’26

This was an incredibly erudite and mature response from a boy of just thirteen. Liberty’s phoenix was rising from the flames of Priestley’s house. Hazlitt’s letter: ‘is his first known act in the long warfare against prejudice and injustice which was to be his portion throughout his life, and his first assertion of the need to appeal to principle rather than to force…’27

The Unitarians were now swimming against the tide. In 1792 when they tried to have the Test and Corporation Acts repealed with Fox’s support, Burke railed against them. He was particularly stinging and aggressive in his attitude towards the brotherhood. As well as personally attacking Dr Priestley and Dr Kippis, he pointedly distinguished between the Unitarians and older religious sects: ‘His finding was that while the older sects had more or less justified their existence, the Unitarians brought not “airs from heaven” into the life of the community but rather “blasts from hell.” ’28 Such was the frenzied political backdrop to the times at home, made even worse when news of the Terror crossed the Channel.

It was becoming increasingly harder to be a loyal Englishman and a supporter of the Revolution. Wordsworth was soon assailed by the maelstrom of political events swirling all around him. He had actually been to France and witnessed the poverty of the common people: ‘He held to his faith and his convictions, yet he was almost wrenched asunder by the conflict between his universal human sympathy and his deep inalterable love for his own country, whether it was in the right or the wrong.’29

When war was declared against France on February 11th 1793, the Unitarians were even more widely seen as the enemy within. On May 11th 1792, Burke had accused them of having: ‘a zeal for propagating’ and of being violent fanatics.30 Priestley had been nicknamed Gunpowder Joe even though his pacifism was such that he had refused to allow his friends to use violence in order to prevent his own house from being burnt down. Mud sticks, and the Unitarians as a whole were tarred with ridiculous assertions and accused of having dangerous proclivities, despite their actual pacifism. Not surprisingly, the weaker members of the flock went astray, anxious to avoid the limelight that might bring death and destruction upon them. All this took place in England - not revolutionary France.

It must have been particularly galling for renowned pacifists to be accused of fomenting violence and of being haters of their own country. They were seen as: ‘strangers to Burke’s acceptance of and even admiration of “the mode of civilized war which, more than anything else, has distinguished the Christian World.” ’31 One wonders what the American prisoners of war at Kinsale would have said about that. In fact, most Nonconformists believed that self-defence was the only justification for war. But their protests fell upon deaf ears. The Empire decided to strike back.

The Rev J. Jebb of St. John’s College, Cambridge was tried for sedition as was Rev W. Frend a former fellow of Jesus College. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a young undergraduate, was present at the trial of Frend and clapped heartily at points made in his favour. The authorities expelled Coleridge on May 30th.32 He would soon learn to suck up to the great and the good to maintain his own position. William Hazlitt, however, never learnt to bend the knee.

Perhaps one of the most heinous miscarriages of justice perpetrated by the Government was at the trial of Rev Thomas Fyshe Palmer for the dastardly crime of proof reading a handbill on behalf of Society of the Friends of Liberty at Dundee. Fyshe Palmer was transported for seven years and died before his sentence was completed. No wonder Robert Aspland said that Truth itself had become seditious.33 The arbitrary cruelty of the State was doled out liberally on every side.

Young Hazlitt must have been aghast at the news of such cases and the sad accounts of the fate of Unitarian ministers that animated the conversations in his father’s presbytery in Wem. As Maclean says, he was in a particularly awkward position: ‘Yet the difficulty of the conflict must have intensified in him about this time both his passionate hatred of injustice and that passionate sympathy with the forlorn hope which to some extent had always been his, and which never deserted him.’34

Hazlitt studied Divinity at New College Hackney between 1793 and 1795 and seemed destined for the Ministry himself. Now in London, he was closer to the malign beating heart of government. His college was renowned for being liberal, so much so that Burke made a point of attacking it. To him it was ‘ “an arsenal” for the fabrication of revolutionary weapons and a breeding place for revolutionary ideas, “a volcano of sedition,” “a nursery of riot” even “a slaughter-house of Christianity,” ’35 Writing later, Southey was decidedly unimpressed: ‘The dry-rot was in the foundation and the walls, as well as in the beams and rafters, and the unfortunate pupils came away believers in blind necessity and gross materialism - and in nothing else.’36 Southey’s comments in 1817 were a personal attack upon Hazlitt as much as they were attacking Unitarians in general.

In 1794 the shameful case of Thomas Fyshe Palmer was discussed in the House of Commons and its legality questioned. Fox appealed for justice but Pitt would have none of it. He was prepared to sink as low as necessary to support the Government line: ‘in what has been called “perhaps the worst speech of his whole career,” (he) denied that there had been any miscarriage of justice, condoned any irregularities that had characterized the trials, and defended even the packing of the jury in Muir’s trial, which had been presided over by Braxfield the notorious. The sentences were upheld and Palmer and Muir were transported.’37

No wonder Hazlitt had nothing but contempt for Pitt after this. His insouciance in regard to the heartlessness and cruelty of this decision ranks with that of Castlereagh who excused the militia for butchering civilians at Peterloo in 1819. The same benighted stripe ran through the British Government year after year, decade after decade. Its colour was of the lash. Priestley emigrated that same year. This land of freedom was anything but.

In glaring contrast whilst in America: ‘The Hazlitts had seen a land in which the people had liberated themselves from the fetters of a hereditary monarch and his corrupt, unrepresentative government.’38 However, in jolly old England the reign of terror continued. The Rev Jeremiah Joyce was arrested for ‘treasonable practices’ and on May 17th he was sent to the Tower. Joyce was a member of the London Corresponding Society and the Society for Promoting Constitutional Information - hardly the equivalent of al Queda. In October he was tried with Thomas Hardy, Horne Tooke, Thelwall and Holcroft, fellow members of the two societies. Troops were on hand at the Old Bailey to keep the crowd in order. Miraculously, for once, the accused were acquitted and discharged. Like many others, the sixteen-year-old William Hazlitt must have been overjoyed.39

Hazlitt had immersed himself in books and was reading widely. Like Coleridge, he was stunned and amazed when he came across a translation of Schiller’s The Robbers. But as he tried to formulate his own political creed he was also devouring the writing of Helvétius, Condillac, Mirabaud, Baron d’Holbach, La Rochefoucault and Condorcet.40 To add to this mental stimulus came an emotional awakening when he first saw Mrs Siddons on the stage. Through his brother John he also became acquainted with many popular artists of the day. London was at the heart of the vast British Empire and in the teeming city Hazlitt could slake his cultural thirst at galleries and theatres. Later he would enjoy many of the less salubrious venues in town. At the same time he was disturbed by the realization that he could not accept the faith of his father - a position as a Unitarian minister was out of the question so he left Hackney College in the summer of 1795.

As he honed his political ideas, hoping to devise a system that was optimistic in regard to human nature, he laboured long and hard in reaction to the widespread belief that Man was basically a selfish animal devoted to the immediate gratification of his desires. With his Unitarian upbringing he felt the need for a more positive outlook - that Man was redeemable and could progress towards something better. On this journey he came to know the enjoyment and pleasure of being a writer. He later described the feeling: ‘There are moments in the life of a solitary thinker which are to him what the evening of some great victory is to the conqueror and hero - milder triumphs long remembered with truer and deeper delight… indefatigable in the search for the truth, and a hope of survival in the thoughts and minds of men.’41

If nothing else, his time at Hackney College amongst liberal minded fellows and tutors had encouraged him to think for himself and to be prepared to embrace and cultivate unconventional thoughts, particularly in the political arena. He was also in London at a time when the capital contained many other original thinkers. He met Godwin and read his Political Justice. He became acquainted with Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rev Joseph Fawcett: ‘He was one of those who had hoped most from the Revolution in France, who had grieved when it had been tortured to excess, who had sorrowed over the outbreak of war with a people striving for their liberties.’42 Fawcett was a great reader and he shared his literary insights with young Hazlitt who was at this time shy, tongue-tied and very reserved in public.

In 1796 Edmund Burke had decried ‘ “the revolution harpies of France, sprung from night and hell,” who “flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.” ’43 When Hazlitt saw an extract from Burke’s A Letter to a Noble Lord in the St. James Chronicle, he soon got hold of the whole Letter. As he studied it he was overwhelmed by its power, its forcefulness and style. Even though he was totally opposed to Burke’s political views he could admire and praise him as a master of his craft - a true writer of genius. Hazlitt also discovered the writings of Rousseau and admired his insights into the human unconscious mind. Even more importantly, by now Hazlitt had met his own John the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness that seemed meant for him personally, the man who would influence him more than any other - Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

William Hazlitt had felt himself to be a lost soul, set apart and different from everybody else. His acute shyness made him seem strange even weird to many of his contemporaries. He had yet to formulate his own political creed or discover his own vocation in life. He needed someone to give him focus, someone to give his life meaning and purpose - that someone was Coleridge.

Nevertheless, Hazlitt enjoyed his years of ‘becoming’. He later described 1797 and 1798 as the happiest years of his life: ‘I cared for nothing; I wanted nothing. I took my time to consider whatever occurred to me, and was in no hurry to give a sophistical answer to a question - there was no printer’s devil waiting for me… If I was not a great author, I could read with ever fresh delight, ‘never ending, still beginning,’ and had no occasion to write a criticism when I was done… I had no relations to the state, no duty to perform, no ties to bind me to others: I had neither friend nor mistress, wife or child. I lived in a world of contemplation, and not of action. This sort of dreaming existence is the best.’44

News of a wonderful poet-preacher had spread amongst the Unitarian brotherhood and by 1798 Hazlitt was aware of him. So intrigued was he that he walked ten miles just to hear Coleridge give a sermon at Shrewsbury on Sunday January 14th. The preacher’s voice was ethereal and mesmerizing - Hazlitt was hooked. He walked the ten miles back to Wem in a spiritual daze.45 A few days later Coleridge called to pay his respects to old Mr Hazlitt. Young William hung on his every word. Coleridge had a new disciple who he invited to visit him in turn. When they met again they discussed Hume, Berkeley and Butler but William found he could not express his own theories clearly or intelligently and he left Coleridge somewhat bemused.46 This further spurred William to renew his attempt to write down his essay On the Disinterestedness of the Human Mind but once again he faced writer’s bloc.47

Plunging back into his reading, he devoured Rousseau’s The New Héloise and in particular the Confessions. It was an important staging post for his own political outlook: ‘It was Rousseau who brought the feeling of irreconcilable enmity to rank and privileges, above humanity, home to the bosom of every man, - identified it with all the pride of intellect, and with the deepest yearnings of the human heart. He was the founder of Jacobinism, which declares the division of the species into two classes, the one the property of the other.’48 Maclean adds: ‘Rousseau no less than Burke at this time helped to make him a writer.’49

On April 10th, 1798, his twentieth birthday, William set off on a roundabout jaunt of nearly two hundred miles to met his soulmate Coleridge in the Vale of Llangollen. When he arrived on May 20th he also met Sara Coleridge and Berkeley their newborn son. Coleridge read out the first version of Kubla Khan to his guest and admitted that he was not sure what to make of it himself as: ‘I composed it in a sort of reverie brought on by two grains of opium taken to check a dysentery.’50 Hazlitt was convinced that it was a work of genius and asked him to read it out again. He also heard Coleridge recite The Ancient Mariner. Duncan Wu states that their meeting was: ‘the defining experience of his life.’51

When Coleridge was young his cup had overflowed with youthful enthusiasm and passionate idealism. As a sixteen-year-old he had even written an ode celebrating the fall of the Bastille.52 As Simon Schama remarks: ‘Like so many of his generation Coleridge had fervently believed - at Cambridge University and afterwards - that the cause of the French Revolution, the cause of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, opened a new age in which mankind would live according to the rules of nature.’53 Despite this, Coleridge actually enlisted briefly in the 15th Dragoons under an assumed name, indicating that despite himself he could be swept along in the flood of public enthusiasm and patriotism that accompanied the war with France. Nevertheless, he showed his idealism when, along with Robert Southey, he dreamt of establishing a new utopia in America. Nothing came of that so in 1795 and 1796 he gave lectures and edited his own paper The Watchman.54

At this stage of his life Coleridge was a fan of Charles James Fox and he did not spare the British Establishment. Schama states that: ‘Throughout this period Coleridge remained a coruscating critic of Pitt and his government, referring to the prime minister as ‘the fiend’ and to his speeches as “Mystery concealing meanness as clouds envelope a dunghill”.’55 Schama adds: ‘Above all, the ex-trooper’s lectures and articles were full of hatred for the war itself, as a misery inflicted by the rich and powerful on the poor and helpless who paid for it with their taxes and their blood.’56

By 1798 however, Coleridge was undergoing a metamorphosis of his own. In his Ode to the Departing Year written less than five years before he had prophesied that war torn Europe would avenge itself upon England for fostering foreign wars whilst enjoying peace herself. Now with the imminent prospect of a French invasion he was having a change of heart:

‘Spare us yet awhile!

Father of God! O spare us yet awhile!’

Far from blaming his own people for war he continues:

‘Sons, brothers, husbands, all…

Stand forth! Be men! Repel an impious foe,

Render them back upon the insulted ocean,

And let them toss as idly on its waves

As the vile sea-weed, which some mountain-blast

Swept from our shores!’57

But Coleridge still accepted collective guilt for the current situation:

‘We have offended, Oh! My Countrymen!

We have offended very grievously,

And been most tyrannous.’58

Coleridge was on the turn, soon he would embrace the very opposite of what he had once stood for. In Hazlitt’s eyes he would go over to the dark side and be that most contemptible of creature’s - an apostate. As Hazlitt used his hero’s Ode to the Departing Year as his lodestone, Coleridge was in the process of rejecting everything he had written in it.

The catalyst was the French invasion of Switzerland which led Coleridge to publish The Recantation in The Morning Post in which: ‘he had stormed out his repudiation of all his previously expressed sympathy with France, and implored the forgiveness of Freedom for his blindness in once having mistaken her enemies for her champions.’59 On April 20th he consolidated his new approach in Fears in Solitude which was ‘a rediscovery of love for his country and a genuine rediscovery of his own personality

... He has discovered that he is primarily an Englishman.’60

Maclean felt that Coleridge was susceptible to the feeling of the moment and the mood of the many and unlike Hazlitt was far less inclined to swim against the tide. Patriotism was on the lips of Everyman and Coleridge ‘was Conformist rather than Nonconformist in temper…’61 His own youthful enthusiasm for liberty was warping into a cynical belief that it was not a case of government being innately corrupt but the very people they governed. With that outlook it was not a long step for Coleridge to take in becoming a spokesman for the Establishment.

Hazlitt was devastated to learn that his former hero had feet of clay. He later wrote that Coleridge was: ‘The only person from whom I ever learned anything in conversation,’ ‘the only person I ever knew who answered to my idea of a man of genius.’62 However, in his The Spirit of the Age Hazlitt sums up Coleridge’s career much more thoroughly and with acute insight: ‘It was not to be supposed that Mr. Coleridge could keep on at the rate he set off; he could not realize all he knew or thought, and less could not fix his desultory ambition; other stimulants supplied the place and kept up the intoxicating dream, the fever and the madness of his early impressions. Liberty (the philosopher’s and the poet’s bride) had fallen a victim, meanwhile, to the murderous practices of the hag, Legitimacy. Proscribed by court-hirelings, too romantic for the herd of vulgar politicians, our enthusiast stood at bay, and at last turned on the pivot of a subtle casuistry to the unclean side…’63

Wordsworth was another political shape-shifter. This lover of nature and self-appointed spokesman for the poor and downtrodden first went over to France in the summer of 1790 and celebrated the fall of the Bastille in person. He was there again in 1791-1792 and later admitted: ‘I went over to Paris at the time of the Revolution - in 92 or 93 - and was pretty hot in it.’64 Fiery politics was not his only passion. He fell in love with his royalist tutor Annette Vallon and had a child by her - Caroline, born in December 1792. Having slept with his political enemy as it were, he remained unconverted to her Royalist sympathies. However, he did befriend Michel Beaupuis who, shocked by the poverty all around him, had disowned his own aristocratic origins to become a child of the Revolution. Beaupuis was eventually to die for his country.65

Wordsworth not only spoke up for the poor, he pointed a finger at where the blame lay:

‘… a benignant spirit was abroad

Which might not be withstood, that poverty

Abject as this would in a little time

Be found no more… That legalized exclusion, empty pomp

Abolished, sensual state and cruel power,

Whether by edict of the one or few,

And finally, as sum and crown of all,

Should see the people having a strong hand

In framing their own laws, whence better days,

To all mankind.’66

Yet Wordsworth would eventually embrace the ‘cruel power’ in his homeland and actually support it. Meanwhile, the seething political atmosphere in France was just too much for him and he callously abandoned his mistress and daughter. Soon he would cast aside his former political views and try and pretend that he never had them.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Hazlitt says that: ‘Mr. Wordsworth’s genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age. Had he lived in any other period of the world, he would never have been heard of.’ But he adds that: ‘No one has shewn the same imagination in raising trifles into importance: no one has displayed the same pathos in treating the simplest feelings of the heart… to the author of the Lyrical Ballads, nature is a kind of home…’67

To a generation of city dwellers who have not known the agricultural fields and the plough for a century and whose experience of the outdoors might amount to little more than a Sunday drive in the country, it may be hard to identify with the sheer bliss felt by Hazlitt, Wordsworth and Coleridge in simply being amongst the mountains, trees and flowers of Nature’s wild beauty. We moderns live amidst a warren of concrete rat runs and suck up our daily ration of exhaust fumes and particulates, dying by the thousands yearly in cities like London. They breathed in the clean fresh air and thought nothing of a daily jaunt of twenty miles along country lanes or a hundred mile trek in a week. Every morning a living theatre greeted them and staged a banquet of natural delights. The athlete of today might get his runner’s high after extensive training when the endorphins course through his bloodstream, Hazlitt and his companions had the equivalent stimulus every day of their lives spent amongst the fields and hedgerows, with ample time to stop and stare and appreciate their surroundings. It should come as no surprise that men like Rousseau, Nietzsche, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romantics got some of their best ideas whilst walking. That is exactly what the human animal is designed to do.

The year 1798 also saw great events taking place in Ireland, the birthplace of Hazlitt’s father. The United Irishmen had been trying to wrest control of their country from the British. One of the founders of the organization was Henry Haslett who might have been a relative. Hazlitt senior knew William Drennan who had been tried for sedition in 1794. To the Hazlitts in Britain: ‘the hereditary monarchy by which they were governed was little other than a form of institutionalized tyranny.’68 Father and son waited anxiously for news from Ireland. The rebellion started on May 23rd and its genesis is reflected in the words of Wu who states: ‘In a matter of weeks over 30,000 people were slaughtered, peasants charging British cannon armed only with pitchforks. That such a multitude thought that sacrifice worthwhile testifies to the severity of British rule.’69

Whether it was rebellious colonists in America, seditious Unitarians in Britain or revolting peasants in Ireland, the British Government response was the same - overwhelming force wherever and whenever it was deemed necessary. To Pitt and his ilk, this policy was of little more consequence than putting down a ravening dog.

In The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt also slams the novelist Sir Walter Scott for being a tool of the government and a supporter of legitimacy. Scott: ‘… who, amiable, frank, friendly, manly in private life, was seized with the dotage of age and the fury of a woman, the instant politics were concerned - who reserved all his candour and comprehensiveness of view for history, and vented his littleness, pique, resentment, bigotry, and intolerance on is contemporaries - who took the wrong side, and defended it by unfair means… who, praised, admired by men of all parties alike, repaid the public liberality by striking a secret and envenomed blow at the reputation of everyone who was not the ready tool of power - who strewed the slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn over the bud and promise of genius, because it was not fostered in the hot-bed of corruption, or warped by the trammels of servility - who supported the worst abuses of authority in the worst spirit - who joined a gang of desperadoes to spread calumny, contempt, infamy, wherever they were merited by honesty or talent on a different side - who officiously undertook to decide public questions by private insinuations to prop the throne by nicknames, and the altar by lies…’70

Yes, the pen is mightier than the sword.

This was Hazlitt’s take not only on the creatures of government but on their spies and agent provocateurs who seemed to be everywhere. He was always mightily unimpressed by those who were happy to partake in the trappings of power while at the same time the disenfranchised poor were abused, starving and ignored.

It was in 1798 while staying with Coleridge at Nether Stowey that Hazlitt met Wordsworth at nearby Alfoxden. Having been disappointed by mere politicians and dismayed by the French Terror, the two poets were collaborating on the Lyrical Ballads: ‘a philosophical poem by which humanity would be re-educated to understand how love of nature led irresistibly to love of mankind. It would create a new kind of society in which there was no need for money, property or social class, and universal love would reign supreme.’71 At this stage their idealism was still apparent. Furthermore, when the topic of the duel between Tierney and Pitt came up Wordsworth exclaimed: ‘I wish Tierney had shot out Pitt’s tongue and put an end to his gift of the gab.’ At this time their political leanings were much more in line with Hazlitt’s own.72

Having tried his hand at writing down his own personal philosophy and having failed, Hazlitt decided to become an artist like his older brother John. In the autumn of that year he went to London with the intention of becoming a portrait painter. As Rys said: ‘he had a true love for art as for literature.’73 What really piqued his interest was an exhibition of Italian paintings in Pall Mall in the December of 1798, items mainly from the Orleans collection in Paris. The exhibition lasted until July 1799 and Hazlitt spent countless hours there admiring the paintings.74

In 1799 he also attended a series of lectures given by Sir James Mackintosh. Once an opponent of Burke - his Vindiciae Gallicae was a reply to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution - Mackintosh was another who recanted his earlier views: ‘It is my intention to profess publicly and unequivocally that I abhor, abjure and for ever renounce the French Revolution, with its sanguinary history, its abominable principles, and for ever execrable leaders.’75 In The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt puts Sir James’ change of heart down to a personal interview he had with Burke: ‘Mr. Mackintosh became a convert not merely to the graces and gravity of Mr. Burke’s style, but to the liberality of his views, and the solidity of his opinions. - The Lincoln’s-Inn Lectures were the fruit of this interview: such is the influence exercised by men of genius and imaginative power…’76

Another man who listened avidly to the illustrious turncoat was John Stoddart, who would eventually become Hazlitt’s brother-in-law. Maclean says he: ‘had been one of the noisiest revolutionaries a few years before,’77 and he made copious notes which he put to good use when he later became editor of The Times of London. Stoddart, who also knew Coleridge and Wordsworth, was from humble origins himself and had once cut his hair like a true sans-culotte. He had even gone so far as to suggest that a Napoleonic invasion would be ‘of more advantage than victory.’78 But he soon eschewed his former Jacobinism and became King’s Advocate in Malta. By the turn of the century former revolutionary idealists and reformers really did seem to be falling by the wayside.

With the Peace of Amiens in 1802, Hazlitt would get the chance to visit the Louvre. Ironically, around the same time Tom Paine was in the process of leaving France. Schama remarks that he: ‘had never really recovered from the typhus he had contracted in jail, but who was suffering even more from a clinical aversion to Napoleon (“the very butcher of Liberty and the greatest monster Nature ever spewed.”)’79 Paine lived up to his name when he finally got to America, causing a rumpus when he met Washington and Adams. One suspects that after a lifetime of trials and tribulations, Paine would not have cared much even for the Second Coming.

Schama contrasts Paine’s view of Napoleon with Hazlitt’s. He: ‘had become enthralled by the Napoleonic epic and would, in fact, never free himself of it,’80 as if implying that Napoleon himself was some kind of disease. Surprisingly, in his History of Britain Volume 3, Schama makes many references to how Jews suffered in England but there is no reference whatsoever to the benefits Jews got in Napoleonic France and under the Empire. Perhaps he has not read his Heine.

Schama also over-eggs the threat of the potential French invasion: ‘In these Boneyphobic year it was Coleridge, not Hazlitt, who was in tune with the vast majority of Britons. The threat was not, after all, imaginary.’81 He says there were over 100,000 French troops at Boulogne and 2,300 vessels - although he admits that many of them were small. What he does not say was that the French really had a navy in name only, especially after the Battle of the Nile. Most aristocratic French officers emigrated or were executed during the Terror. French ports had been blockaded for years, thus preventing French sailors getting any experience of life at sea, any practice at manoeuvring their vessels or even firing their guns. At Yorktown the French navy really did make a difference and their presence led to the British losing the American War of Independence. By 1805 it was amazing that the French and the Spaniards did as well as they did at Trafalgar, but the result was never really in doubt.

Schama adds that in the Louvre Hazlitt admired the paintings: ‘while conveniently overlooking the fact that the First Consul had accumulated the contents of the museum by plundering the churches and galleries of Europe.’82 However, in the Bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 the British Navy not only stole the whole of the Danish navy, they also murdered 2,000 civilians in the process. And Denmark was neutral at the time. Has Schama not heard of the Elgin Marbles - ‘acquired between 1801 and 1805’83 as it says on the British Museum website? And as for the Rosetta Stone - we stole that from the French…

It was not just the Unitarians who were persecuted by the Government; the common people were equally hounded if they dared to criticize their betters or threaten the status quo. The same repression faced them whether they were middle - or working -class. Stimulated by the French Revolution and despite the threat to their own liberty, people flocked to join the new radical societies that were set up throughout the country. Those who could afford two and a half guineas a year (a fortune in the late C18th) became members of The Friends of the People, a group urging political reform. The Society for Constitutional Information went further and backed the publication of a cheap edition of The Rights of Man. We have seen already what happened to some of its members - Horne Tooke, Holcroft and Thelwell. So-called corresponding societies also proliferated. The secretary of The London Corresponding Society whose members called each other citizen, was Thomas Hardy, a shoemaker. So passionate was he for reform that despite threats of physical violence from the London mob, he refused to put lights in his shop window if the French lost a battle.84

Most great English cities had their own organization. Manchester had its Constitutional Society while The Sheffield Association voiced its concern over ‘the enormous high price of provisions’ and ‘the waste… of the public property by placemen, pensioners, luxury and debauchery.’85 Hunger and unemployment were the ubiquitous catalysts for much of the public discontent. Bad harvests occurred in 1792 and 1794. Prices soared and there were bread riots. Hundreds marched through Birmingham in 1795 demanding bread. Riots took place in London and the windows of Downing Street were smashed in. That same year nearly 150,000 gathered in Copenhagen Fields for a meeting organized by the London Corresponding Society. Speakers denounced the war with France, demanding universal suffrage and annual parliaments. The King was booed on his way to the official opening of Parliament, the streets lined with angry crowds crying for peace and bread.86

Pitt responded with the Treasonable Practices Bill and the Seditious Meetings Bill that banned large public gatherings. The Corresponding Act followed in 1799 along with the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800. Pitt proved himself to be cruel, ruthless, repressive and incompetent. As Pauline Gregg remarks: ‘It is hard to excuse Pitt for repression so ruthless, so out of proportion to the moderate requests of the men he crushed. By social and political reform he could have removed the just grievances which made them rebels against his government.’87 Alluding to the actual reality of the times, she adds: ‘Nowhere and at no time during the Napoleonic wars was there a revolutionary situation; there was no protest which a moderate reform would not have converted into acclamation for the Government. At every turn it was the legislature which made the revolution out of its own fears, and which magnified the riots of hungry men into an incipient French Revolution.’88

For so many years, Pitt seemed to be at war with his own people.

Some months after the signing of the Treaty of Amiens on March 25th 1802, William got the opportunity of going to Paris to see the Old Masters in person. He intended to paint ten pictures for his patron Mr Railton for £105. There is no doubt that he enjoyed himself. To save money he walked from the port to the capital: ‘Calais was peopled with novelty and delight,’ while France itself possessed the very soil of freedom: ‘for the image of man was not cast down and chained to the foot of arbitrary thrones.’89

Almost immediately, he heard good words said about Napoleon. A fellow Englishman called Lovelace told him what happened when his nephew was presented to the First Consul. Rather than ask the usual mundane question about where the young officer had served Napoleon remarked: ‘I perceive your name, Sir, is the same as that of the hero of Richardson’s romance.’90 For Hazlitt, Napoleon was already living up to expectations, as Maclean says: ‘Hazlitt, who never could hear enough about Buonaparte, thought on hearing this: “Here was a Consul!” The story confirmed his belief which was growing in him, that Buonaparte, although a soldier by profession, was far more than a professional soldier.’91

However, he was very disappointed with the impression Paris initially made upon him. The filthy, narrow streets were hazardous to negotiate because of speeding traffic. There were no footpaths and the drivers of carriages appeared to take a perverse delight in targeting pedestrians. Hazlitt must have been very relieved when he arrived at his lodgings at the hotel Coq Heron, very near the Louvre, on October 15th 1802. The sight of beggars loitering in the capital also ended any remaining doubts he might have had about the streets being paved with gold.

This view of Parisian life from the bottom up, as it were, was not shared by all. Maclean states that: ‘for most of the English who visited France in this year were amazed by its air of prosperity, and some of them seemed almost scandalized by it.’92

When Wordsworth returned to Calais on August 1st 1802, he took a more jaundiced view of France. But that was Wordsworth - and perhaps his conscience might have been troubling him after abandoning his mistress and daughter all those years before.

When he finally got to the Louvre William was in his element. It took him a while to realize he had to bribe the doormen to be let into the galleries where the finest paintings were, but once inside those hallowed halls he existed in a state of bliss. He soon occupied himself copying pictures from 9-20 in the morning until 4 pm when the place closed. To add to his joy at seeing masterpieces by Titian, Poussin and Rubens, came a glimpse of the First Consul in the flesh. Napoleon liked to show himself to the populace as a true man of the people and Hazlitt was enraptured at the image he presented: ‘What a fine iron binding Buonaparte had round the face, as if it had been cased in steel! What sensibility around the mouth! What watchful penetration in the eye! What a smooth unruffled forehead.’93 That image of his hero would stay with him for the rest of his life.

A few years earlier, Napoleon had had the same effect on the artist David. After sketching him, David enthused to his pupils: ‘Oh my friends, what a fine head he has! It’s pure, it’s great, it’s as beautiful as the Antique! Here is a man to whom altars would have been erected in ancient times; yes, my friends, yes, my dear friends! Bonaparte is my hero!’94 The mystique of the man enabled him to conquer with a smile or a momentary glance. Jean Tulard might decry the myth of the saviour but to his contemporaries, Napoleon was truly something else - he was remarkable, he was unique.

On December 2nd 1805 Napoleon had his greatest military victory, crushing the combined Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz, an achievement he was unable to repeat when he faced a joint British and Prussian forces at Waterloo. Hazlitt was elated by the news for he and men like Godwin and Thelwall saw Napoleon as the Revolution personified and as democracy’s last hope. He thought that Britain would now be forced to sue for peace. The sun of Austerlitz appeared to him to be a golden dawn, heralding the rise of freedom and liberty for all.95 He recalled: ‘I walked out in the afternoon and, as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man’s cottage with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again. Oh for the revolution of the great Platonic year, that those times might come again!’96

Having failed to make his mark as a portrait painter and been unable to earn a living as a writer, Hazlitt eventually became a political commentator. His forceful, energetic and cultured allusions, his brilliant style and perception, were unprecedented and unique. As Wu says: ‘Hazlitt invented the political sketch as we know it today.’97 Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, his first political pamphlet, condemned the late Pitt’s foreign policy and expressed a wish that Fox and his Ministry of All the Talents would make peace with Napoleon. William thought that France under Napoleon was the best chance for a proper democracy to arise in Europe. But when Fox died the same year, his hopes were again dashed.

Hazlitt’s razor sharp wit was in evidence in April 1813 after he heard a very lacklustre speech by Richard Wellesley, Wellington’s brother, in support of the East India Company’s monopoly of trade with the subcontinent. Ironically, for once, William found himself on the Government side as the official policy was to open up that trade: ‘It was curious, though somewhat painful, to see this lively Nobleman always in the full career of his argument, and never advancing one jot nearer… soaring into mediocrity with adventurous enthusiasm…’98

There was definitely no such thing as free speech in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Leigh and John Hunt found this out when they criticized the Prince Regent in The Examiner in March 1812. Having described him as an ‘exciter of desire,’ they added a coruscating verdict upon his Royal Majesty: ‘a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without a single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.’99

No matter that all this was true, there was now a new law of libel that ensured that anyone who made derogatory comments about the government or the royals could be thrown into prison. The porky and prickly Prince was mortified by the Leighs’ assessment of his character and after a rigged trial, both the brothers found themselves in jail.

Hazlitt soon found himself crossing swords with one of the chief apostates - Robert Southey. He, like the other Lake poets, did not like William dredging up the past. When Southey became Poet Laureate, William could hardly restrain himself. Initially the two of them had got on very well, Southey speaking of his sympathy with the rebels in Ireland. We have see that he even planned to set up a colony in the New World with Coleridge. But that benign and radical young man had by now metamorphosed into a heartless creature of the government: ‘Southey had undergone one of the most extreme changes of heart of the Romantic period… he now opposed Catholic emancipation and wanted to ship refractory Irish to the colonies. As far as he was concerned the poor were a constant threat to the political stability of the country, and he supported the execution of insurrectionists.’100 As Laureate, Southey had to praise the King every year upon his birthday. This was grist to Hazlitt’s mill: ‘To have been the poet of the people may not render Mr Southey a court favourite, and one of his old Sonnets to Liberty must give a particular Zest to his new Birthday Odes.’101 Southey was incensed by Hazlitt’s ridicule hence his comment quoted earlier about New College Hackney.

By 1813 the tide had turned against Napoleon and he suffered a catastrophic defeat at Leipzig, the so-called Battle of the Nations. Despite this, he remained Hazlitt’s hero. But there were many other prominent people in this country who were still rooting for him, from the flashy Byron to more sober figures like William Hamilton Reid, Lord Wycombe, John Thelwall, William Godwin, William Cobbett, Lord Melbourne and Sir John Soane. Mary Russell Mitford wrote: ‘I am a very moderate person - very moderate indeed, neither Whig, nor Tory, nor Reformer - nothing but a Buonapartiste - a simple Buonapartiste.’102

The writer Edward Sterling aka Vetus attacked Napoleon vociferously in The Times. Vetus wanted the Allies to fight on, depose Napoleon and restore the Bourbons to the French throne.103 Hazlitt favoured a dialogue with Napoleon so that the advances already made by the Revolution could be kept. However, he found he had an even more powerful enemy, none other than John Stoddart, the editor of The Times and his own brother-in-law. Stoddart was another whose opinions had turned through one hundred and eighty degrees. The former shaven headed radical who had once espoused the belief that Britain might benefit from being conquered by Napoleon was now a reactionary of the first order. In his leading articles he jeered at William for his continued support of the Revolution and savagely criticized him for being stupidly attached to a lost cause.

On January 29th 1814, Stoddart wrote: ‘The Bank, the Institute, the Legion of Honour, the Emperor’s profound policy, his matchless skill, his irresistible heroism! Thus they went on - puff! puff! puff! - and our silly Dottrels, who profess and call themselves “The True Jacobins”… are of all men the most easily fooled…’104 William responded with ‘Dottrel-Catching’, in which he painted Stoddart as a traitor to his own former views: ‘for the smallest concession, (he) is prevailed upon to give up every principle, and to surrender himself, bound hand and foot, the slave of a party, who get all they want of him…’105

Hazlitt supported Napoleon to the bitter end. On March 1st he hoped the Emperor’s fortunes might still improve writing that: ‘The march to Paris has been tried and has failed… Alas! How chop-fallen the would-be heroes who with such big words called for nothing less than perpetual war, or the utter extermination of the BONAPARTEAN dynasty.’106 A few days later on April 3rd he wrote another piece damning the French royal family and the war, little knowing that by then the Allies were already in Paris and that Louis XVIII would very soon return to the capital in their baggage train. Stoddart, who as editor of The Times was on the massive salary of £1,400 a year, was cock-a-hoop at the news.107

Most of Hazlitt’s political commentaries were written for the Morning Chronicle, but its proprietor James Perry had had enough of his outspokenness and he was sacked.108 He turned to writing for The Examiner and The Champion and he soon found another target. In July 1814 Wordsworth’s Excursion was published. It was a poetical tome and the summation of his life’s work. Once, long before, Wordsworth and Coleridge had planned on changing the world with their poetry and they were men with a mission. They had both been radical in their youth and great supporters of the Revolution. By 1814 they were both Establishment figures. Indeed, the Excursion was dedicated to a Tory Peer, William Lowther, second Lord Lonsdale. So much for the grand poetic work that would appeal to Everyman and prove that even the commonest peasant deserved a voice.109

William was determined to make Wordsworth acknowledge his own past and face up to the fact that he had turned his back on optimism and the prospect of engendering radical change in society:

‘… yet we will never cease, nor be prevented from, returning on the wings of

imagination to that bright dream of our youth; that glad-dawn of the day-star of

liberty; that spring-time of the world, in which the hopes and expectations of

the human race seemed opening in the same gay career with our own; when

France called her children to partake her equal blessings under her laughing

skies… The dawn of that day was suddenly overcast: that season of hope is

past… To those hopes eternal regrets are due: to those who maliciously and

willfully blasted them, in the fear that they might be accomplished, we feel no

less what we owe - hatred and scorn as lasting.’110

With the fall of Napoleon Hazlitt had lost all hope of a better future for mankind. Although he had Wordsworth in the crosshairs of his verbal fusillade, he also wept for what might have been, had Wordsworth and Coleridge lived up to all their earlier promise.

It is not hard to imagine his relief and joy at the news that Napoleon had escaped from Elba and he could not contain his enthusiasm:

‘Those days were jocund and jubilant - full of heart’s ease and of allegresse.

Its footsteps had an audible echo through the earth. Laughed eyes, danced

hearts, clapped hands at it. It “loosened something at the chest”; and men

listened with delight and wonder (wherever such were found) to the unbarring

and unbolting of those doors of despotism which they thought had been closed

on them forever. All that was human rejoiced; the tyrant and the slave shrunk

back aghast, as the clash of arms was drowned in the shout of the multitude…

Therefore Buonaparte seemed from his first landing to bestride the country

like a Colossus…’111

Then came Waterloo - and the dream turned into a nightmare.

Thomas Noon Talfourd found William ‘staggering under the blow of Waterloo… as if he had sustained a personal wrong’.112 The artist Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote in his memoirs: ‘As for Hazlitt, it is not to be believed how the destruction of Napoleon affected him; he seemed prostrated in mind and body; he walked about, unwashed, unshaved, hardly sober by day, and always intoxicated by night, literally, without exaggeration, for weeks; until at length wakening as it were from his stupor, he at once left off all stimulating liquors, and never touched them after.’113

To Hazlitt, the fall of Napoleon was nothing less than ‘the utter extinction of human liberty from the earth’.114

In 1816, thanks to Byron putting in a good word for him with the publisher John Murray, Coleridge’s poems Christabel and Kubla Khan were published. Hazlitt now had the opportunity to put another apostate in the stocks. Once Coleridge had seemed to presage a revolution in himself: he was an excellent preacher, a very gifted poet and a leader of men. But then came his addiction to opium, obesity and a lassitude that prevented him from achieving anything of note. In 1816 Coleridge was a fallen star, his cold talent buried deep beneath his inadequacies as a human being. He was a has-been reliant on handouts from Sir George Beaumont, a man who detested republicanism. Hazlitt crucified Christabel in the Edinburgh Review: ‘The thing now before us is utterly destitute of value. It exhibits from beginning to end not a ray of genius…’115

William felt a deep and personal affront at having been duped by Coleridge, who had promised so much and delivered so little. It was nothing less than an act of betrayal. Hence he did not spare the rapier, attacking him in several publications. As Wu states: ‘Hazlitt’s attacks were well founded. When first he met the Lakers, their declared aim was to realize the objectives of the French Revolution by non-violent means. It had been abandoned at a time when ordinary people were more oppressed than ever.’116

Hazlitt also held forthright views on the subject of the repressive Liverpool administration: ‘The war has wasted the resources of the country in foolery, which the country has now to pay for in a load of taxes on its remaining resources, its actual produce and labour,’ and adds that:

‘The tax-gatherer is a government-machine that takes sixty-five millions-a-year

from the bankrupt pockets of the nation, to give to those who have brought it

into that situation; who takes so much from the necessaries of life belonging to

the poor, to add to the superfluities of the rich; who adds so much to the hard

labour of the working part of the community, to “relieve the killing languor

and over-laboured lassitude of those who have nothing to do”; who, in short,

out of the grinding poverty and ceaseless toil of those who pay the taxes,

enables those who receive them to live in luxury and idleness.’117

William was brave to nail his colours to the mast. The Prince Regent had been booed at the State Opening of Parliament on January 28th 1817 and stones were pelted at his coach, breaking a window. This demonstration of general disapproval was used as an excuse to suspend Habeas Corpus and ban public meetings unless approved by a magistrate. And, as if to emphasize how far Southey had travelled down the road to perdition, he wrote to the Prime Minister saying: ‘No means can be effectual for checking the intolerable license of the press but that of making transportation the punishment for its abuse.’118 The vindictive Poet Laureate had become nothing but a Government stooge.

In a beautiful twist of fate, Wat Tyler, a play written by a very much younger Southey then came into the public domain. It had been written to castigate Pitt’s government and was extremely embarrassing to the older man. Despite all his efforts the play was published over and over and became his best-selling piece. As he no longer held the copyright he earned absolutely nothing from this old play.119 But Hazlitt made sure he would never forget it. Comparing Wat Tyler to one of Southey’s diatribes in the Quarterly Review he states that:

‘The author of Wat Tyler was an Ultra-Jacobin; the author of Parliamentary

Reform is an Ultra-royalist; the one was a frantic demagogue; the other is

a court-tool… the one saw nothing but the abuses of power; the other sees

nothing but the horrors of resistance to those abuses: the one did not stop

short of general anarchy; the other goes the whole length of despotism:

the one vilified kings, priests, and nobles; the other vilifies the people: the

one was for universal suffrage and perfect equality; the other is for seat-

selling, and the increasing influence of the Crown: the one admired the

preaching of John Ball; the other recommends the Suspension of Habeas

Corpus, and the putting down of the Examiner by the sword, the dagger,

or the thumb-screw; for the pen, Mr Southey tells us, is not sufficient.’120

William Smith MP followed Hazlitt’s lead in Parliament, reading from Wat Tyler and the Quarterly Review saying that: ‘what he most detested, what most filled him with disgust, was the settled, determined malignity of a renagado.’121

So there, Southey.

When the Poet Laureate replied with A Letter to William Smith, Hazlitt savaged him again: ‘Once admit that Mr Southey is always in the right, and everyone else in the wrong, and all the rest follows… He is both judge and jury in his own cause… The crime of Mr William Smith and others, against whom this high-priest of impertinence levels his anathemas, is in not being Mr Southey.’122

Another renegade was waiting in the wings to take another bow - John Stoddart. He had called Napoleon ‘a Corsican upstart’ and ‘a monster redeemed from vice by no single virtue’123 - and had constantly denounced any talk of negotiations between Britain and France. He also lambasted his opponents and especially his own brother-in-law. Hazlitt responded in kind calling him: ‘a very weak and violent man… a very stupid, senseless, vulgar person’.124 He also had the satisfaction of seeing him being forced from his position as editor of The Times in 1816 by its owner John Walter II who had tired of his fanatical anti-republican copy. It was too one-sided for a supposed independent paper. And in a fine irony, Hazlitt soon found himself writing for the illustrious Times.125

On July 28th 1817 in a cringing outpouring of verbal diarrhoea, Coleridge wrote to Lord Liverpool saying: ‘the strong feeling of respect, the inward honor, which I have been so long in the habit of connecting with your name, [and] ‘support of those principles… of the measures and means, which have at length secured the gratitude and reverence of the wise and good to your Lordship and your Lordship’s fellow-combatants in the long agonizing contest’ [i.e. the suppression of dissidents] recommending that ‘the system ends as it began in “physical force”, as the sovereign people are sure to learn, where the minority happens to consist of a ruffian at the head of an army of ruffians’.126 Despite all this affected waffle - it was obvious whose side Coleridge was now on.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Stoddart and Southey were traitors to the republican cause and they berated their own former views with the passion and fanaticism of a convert. What they all did not like was being reminded by William Hazlitt of who they used to be, and of what they had once stood for. He was a constant mirror to their oversize egos, an ever-present reminder that they were not who they said they were, no matter how much they lied about their past.

The vile Establishment attacks upon its critics knew no bounds and many fell silent. In 1818 John Hunt published a new anti-government paper The Yellow Dwarf, which Hazlitt co-edited. On November 7th that year at Derby, three men set up by a government spy were hanged, drawn and beheaded in a hideous throwback to the Middle Ages. Was this what the British soldiers at Waterloo had been fighting for?127

William Hazlitt defended Napoleon whatever the occasion, at one time criticizing Byron for being both for and against the Emperor at the same time during his lecture On the Living Poets: ‘If my Lord Byron will do these things, he must take the consequences; the acts of Napoleon Buonaparte are subjects of history, not for the disparagement of the Muse.’128 And although William praised the artist Turner’s work - which mystified many critics - he vociferously disagreed with him when he criticized Napoleon. Meanwhile, in ‘What is the People,’ one of his essays for The Yellow Dwarf he stated that: ‘nothing rouses the people to resistance but extreme and aggravated injustice.’129 Hazlitt certainly knew the prevailing mood of the country better than most.

Hazlitt lectures helped keep his head above water financially when his newspaper copy was just too hot for the persecuted press. The architect John Soane was an admirer of them and invited William to his house in London which contained his own private museum.130 Hazlitt was especially entranced by a bust of Napoleon he saw there. Very few people, even today, realize just how popular the Emperor was in this country.

In 1819 William’s Political Essays were published by William Hone and dedicated to John Hunt. All three of them detested the reactionary government of Lord Liverpool and the addled institution of the monarchy.131 Hazlitt summed up his own political philosophy in these words:

‘I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man: but I have a

hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed

as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot sit quietly down under the claims

of barefaced power, and I have tried to express the little arts of sophistry by which

they are defended. I have no mind to have my person made a property of, nor

my understanding made a dupe of. I deny that liberty and slavery are convertible

terms, that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, plenty and famine, the comforts

or wretchedness of a people, are matters of perfect indifference…’132

On February 2nd 1819, the Government mouthpiece the Quarterly Review, slated Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets. This was not only a personal attack upon him, it was a conscious policy designed to make it as difficult as possible for him to make a living. The editor of the Quarterly Review was William Gifford who was one of the uglier creatures of power. William was not the sort of man to take this treatment lying down. In a brilliant and coruscating attack upon Gifford he said:

‘You are a little person, but a considerable cat’s-paw; and so worthy of notice.

Your clandestine connexion with persons high in office constantly influences

your opinions, and alone gives importance to them. You are the Government

Critic, a character nicely differing from that of a government spy - the invisible

link that connects literature with the police. It is your business to keep a strict

eye over all the writers who differ in opinion with his Majesty’s Ministers, and

to measure their talents and attainments by the standard of their servility and

meanness. For this office you are well qualified.’133

In the year 1819 occurred the infamous Peterloo Massacre. On August 16th at least 60,000 people had assembled at Saint Peters Fields Manchester to listen to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt speak on universal suffrage and reform. Manchester’s population had soared due to the Industrial Revolution but it did not have a Member of Parliament at that time. The men were dressed in their Sunday best, while the women wore their holiday clothes. The fact that there were many children present is indicative of the peaceful intentions of the crowd. There were even bands playing God Save the King. A member of the Times newspaper was also present at the meeting. Hunt had only just started speaking when a large group of riders from the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry appeared and brandished their swords. They were supported by the Cheshire Yeomanry, the 15th Hussars and over three hundred special constables. When a woman was knocked down by a horse the crowd panicked. The troops then surged forward, ploughing through the densely packed throng to get at Hunt and arrest him. The Times correspondent then heard them cry ‘Have at their flags!’ and they charged at anyone holding a banner, in the process ‘cutting most indiscriminatingly to the right and to the left in order to get at them.’ Eleven people were hacked to death and hundreds were seriously wounded.134

This act of sheer butchery was dubbed Peterloo because one of the crazed constables had shouted out: ‘This is Waterloo for you - this is Waterloo.’135 By another irony it also happened the day after Napoleon’s 50th birthday. He had been banished to Saint Helena in 1815 so for once the British authorities could not blame him personally for this tragedy. However, the savagery of the day was supported by the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, the Prince Regent and Lord Liverpool, while Southey to his eternal shame congratulated the magistrates for their decision to use the troops. The Government also used the massacre as an excuse to bring in the six Gagging Acts forbidding all such future gatherings. No wonder that on September 8th 1819 Frances Place told Thomas Hodgskin: ‘… we are really under the government of the Sword.’136

After the Emperor’s death in 1821, William Hazlitt decided to embark on the most important project of his literary career - a biography of Napoleon. He already knew that dozens of books about Napoleon had already been written since his demise and that Sir Walter Scott was planning a huge nine-volume study himself: ‘I felt pride,’ he said: ‘to think that there was one reputation in modern times equal to the ancients, and at seeing one man greater than the throne he sat upon.’137 The necessary research involved in such a mammoth undertaking gave William the chance to return to France. This time he went with his second wife Isabella. In France he discussed his great history with Marie-Henri Beyle aka Stendhal who had been part of Napoleon’s infamous 1812 invasion of Russia, the Marquis de Lafayette and Benjamin Constant.

Unfortunately for William, government stooges in the press had done their very best to blacken his name and there was also at that time a recession in the publishing business. Even Sir Walter Scott was declared bankrupt to the tune of £86,000.138 So things did not look propitious for yet another biography of Napoleon. However Scott sold 8,000 copies of his biography in June 1827, success Hazlitt could only dream of. William was also now very sickly with stomach trouble and at the same time living a hand to mouth existence. He was nearly always in debt, a situation that added yet more pressure to his lot. He began to worry that he might die before he finished his version of Napoleon’s life. Finally on February 11th 1828 the first two volumes of his Life of Napoleon Buonaparte went on sale for the not inconsiderable sum of 30 shillings.139 For all his pains and efforts it went down like a lead balloon.

In his Preface to the work he stated why he had such a high regard for Napoleon:

‘It is true, I admired the man; but what chiefly attached me to him was his

being, as he had been long ago designated, ‘the child and champion of the

Revolution.’ Of this character he could not divest himself, even though he

wished it. He was nothing, he could be nothing but what he owed to himself

and to his triumphs over those who claimed mankind as their inheritance by

divine right; and as long as he was a thorn in the side of kings and kept them

at bay, his cause rose out of the ruins and defeat of their pride and hopes of

revenge. He stood (and he alone stood) between them and their natural prey.

He kept off that last indignity and wrong offered to a whole people (and

through them to the rest of the world) of being handed over, like a herd of

cattle, to a particular family, and chained to the foot of a legitimate throne.

This was the chief point at issue - this was the great question, compared with

which all others were tame and insignificant - Whether mankind were, from

the beginning to the end of time, born slaves or not? As long as he remained,

his acts, his very existence gave a proud and full answer to this question.’140

In 1829 he found a publisher for the third and fourth volumes of his Napoleon biography. The Preface above was actually printed as part of volume three. He just managed to complete the great work before his health took a serious turn for the worst. He died on September 18th 1830, aged 52.141 In another strange twist of fate he had outlived his hero by a less than a year. His epitaph included this:

‘He lived to see... the downfall of the Bourbons,

And some prospect of good to mankind’

To leave some sterling work to the world’…

He was

The first (unanswered) metaphysician of the age.

A despiser of the merely Rich and Great:

A lover of the People, Poor and Oppressed:

A hater of the Pride and Power of the Few,

As opposed to the happiness of the Many;

A man of true moral courage,

Who sacrificed Profit and present Fame

To Principle,

And a yearning for the good of Human Nature.

Who was a burning wound to an Aristocracy…’142

He was Napoleon’s greatest champion and a constant fighter for freedom and fairness for all. And few in Britain today even know his name.

M.A. History

Notes

1. P.G.Patmore in Duncan Wu William Hazlitt The First Modern Man (Oxford: OUP 2008) 180

2. Ibid. 298-299

3. Ibid. 299

4. Ibid. 299

5. Ibid. 299-300

6. Ibid. 299-300

7. Ibid Preface xxiii

8. Ibid. 25

9. Ibid. 25

10. Catherine Macdonald Maclean Born Under Saturn (London and Glasgow: Collins 1943) 9-11

11. Wu op. cit. 25

12. Maclean op. cit. 9

13. Wu op.cit. 26

14. Maclean op.cit. 55

15. Ibid. 42

16. Ibid. 41-42

17. Pauline Gregg A Social and Economic History of Britain 1760-1965 (London: Harrap & Co. Ltd

1965) 79

18. Ibid. 80

19. Ibid. 80-81

20. Sheila Moore The Conservative Party The First 150 Years (Richmond Upon Thames: Country

Life Books 1980) 61

21. Ibid. 61

22. Ibid. 105

23. Maclean op. cit. 42

24. Wu op.cit. 36

25. Maclean op.cit. 34

26. Wu op.cit. 49

27. Maclean op.cit. 42

28. Ibid. 52

29. Ibid. 56

30. Ibid. 56

31. Ibid. 57

32. Ibid. 57

33. Ibid. 57-58

34. Ibid. 58

35. Ibid. 65

36. Ibid. 65-66

37. Ibid. 74

38. Wu op.cit. 42

39. Maclean op.cit. 74-75

40. Ibid. 78

41. Ibid. 83

42. Ibid. 88

43. Ibid. 92

44. Ibid. 96

45. Ibid. 99

46. Ibid. 102

47. Ibid. 103

48. Ibid. 104-105

49. Ibid. 106

50. Wu op.cit. 16

51. Ibid. 19

52. Simon Schama A History of Britain (London: BBC Books 2002) 99

53. Ibid. 98

54. Ibid. 99

55. Ibid. 99

56. Ibid. 100

57. Maclean op.cit. 110

58. Ibid. 110

59. Ibid. 111

60. Ibid. 111

61. Ibid. 112

62. Wu op.cit. 19

63. William Hazlitt The Spirit Of The Age (UK: Kessinger Publishing) www.kessinger.net

64. Schama op.cit 69

65. Ibid. 70

66. Ibid. 72

67. Hazlitt Spirit 94

68. Wu op.cit. 7

69. Ibid. 19

70. Hazlitt Spirit 61

71. Wu op.cit 10

72. Maclean op.cit. 121

73. Everyman’s Library Ed. Ernest Rhys Hazlitt’s Characters Of Shakespear’s Plays (London: J.M.

Dent 1921) vii

74. Maclean op.cit. 141

75. Ibid. 145

76. Hazlitt Spirit 88

77. Maclean op.cit. 145

78. Wu op.cit. 72

79. Schama op.cit. 108

80. Ibid. 108

81. Ibid. 109

82. Ibid. 108

83. See British Museum Website and The Daily Telegraph website - see article Why are the Elgin

Marbles so controversial - and everything else you need to know by Victoria Ward December

5th 2014

84. Gregg op.cit. 81

85. Ibid. 81-82

86. Ibid. 84-84

87. Ibid. 86

88. Ibid. 86

89. Wu op.cit. 79

90. Maclean op.cit 159

91. Ibid. 159

92. Ibid. 159

93. Wu op.cit. 82

94. Anita Bookner Jacques-Louis David (London: Chatto & Windus 1980) 142

95. Wu op.cit 105

96. Ibid. 105

97. Ibid. 150

98. Ibid. 150

99. Ibid. 155

100. Ibid. 156

101. Ibid. 156-157

102. Ibid. 159

103. Ibid. 160

104. Ibid. 160

105. Ibid. 160

106. Ibid. 163

107. Ibid. Footnote 46 Ch10 473

108. Ibid. 166

109. Ibid. 168-169

110. Ibid. 170

111. Ibid. 174

112. Ibid. 179

113. Ibid. 180

114. Ibid. 180

115. Ibid. 190

116. Ibid. 191-192

117. Ibid. 199-200

118. Ibid. 205

119. Ibid. 205

120. Ibid. 206.

121. Ibid. 206.

122. Ibid. 207

123. Ibid. 214

124. Ibid. 214

125. Ibid. 215-216

126. Ibid. 223

127. Ibid. 226

128. Ibid. 239

129. Ibid. 241

130. Ibid. 262

131. Ibid. 265

132. Ibid. 266

133. Ibid. 267

134. Maclean op.cit. 406-407

135. Ibid. 407

136. Wu op.cit. 265

137. Ibid. 386

138. Ibid. 386

139. Ibid. 404

140. Ibid. 405

141. Ibid. 431

142. Ibid. 435

Bibliography

Brookner Anita Jacques-Louis David (London: Chatto & Windus 1980)

Gregg Pauline A Social and Economic History of Britain (London: Harrap & Co. Ltd. 1965)

Hazlitt William The Spirit Of The Age (USA: Kessinger Publishing) www.kessinger.net

Hebron Stephen William Wordsworth (The British Library: writer’s lives)

Laws Bill Byways, Boots & Blisters (Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press 2009)

Maclean Catherine Macdonald Born Under Saturn (London: Collins 1943)

Moore Sheila The Conservative Party (Richmond upon Thames: Country Life 1980)

Rhys Ernest (Ed.) Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (London: Everyman’s Library 1921)

Schama Simon A History of Britain Volume 3 The Fate of Empire 1776-2000 (London: BBC 2002)

Wu Duncan William Hazlitt The First Modern Man (Oxford: OUP 2008)

M.A. History
A Souladream Production

Author of The Real Napoleon - The Untold Story

NAPOLEON'S LOST FLEET - REVIEW

2016-06-09T21:48:00.000+01:00

NAPOLEON’S LOST FLEET

Laura Foreman and Ellen Blue Phillips

Book Review

This book was written by two journalists - not historians - and it shows. I have been reading books about Napoleon for over 45 years and I have heard of neither of them. Now I know why. This book is a great disappointment. Despite the title they talk much more about Nelson than Napoleon. They are very hostile to Napoleon from the start - calling him ‘Bonaparte’ throughout (always a dead giveaway) and denouncing him and criticizing him at every opportunity, whereas they call Nelson ‘the hero’ and pretend right was always on his side. Belated they give Napoleon credit for his part in the growth of Egyptology but then they try to say even his part in that was limited.

This is terrible character assassination - the authors have no conception of the massive beneficial effect Napoleon had on the history of Europe and the history of the world. They fail to place him amongst his peers - never once comparing him to the other rulers of the period. From the beginning they accuse him of being little more than a warmonger bent on bathing his hands in blood. It is pathetic, asinine and puerile, a one-dimensional study of someone they simply cannot understand.

Even to put Nelson in the same strapline as Napoleon is ridiculous. Napoleon pacified France and stopped thousands of Frenchmen from killing each other; he made peace with the Catholic Church and let French peasants keep the land they gained after the Revolution; he allowed hundreds of exiled nobles to come home; he introduced a national school system; stabilized the finances; had countless roads and bridges made - and he gave equal rights to all the Jews in his Empire - something no other ruler in European history had ever done.

What did Nelson do for anyone else? Everything Nelson did he did for himself no matter how he tried to wrap himself in the British flag. He was one of the most egocentric people ever to have lived. Even the far from modest Wellington thought Nelson was a bighead. He whined when his career periodically nosedived, felt very sorry for himself and scandalized society with his love life. He even disobeyed orders to remain with Emma Hamilton and his infatuation with her was partly the cause of his massacre of French prisoners and his brutal hanging of Admiral Caracciolo in Naples in 1799. Nelson was guilty of mass murder and so heartless he would not even allow the family to have the Admiral’s body after he had hanged him from the yardarm. Even the two journalists have to admit that Trafalgar did not change the political situation the way it has often been claimed. It was gold from the Bank of England that got Austria and Russia to attack France in 1805. (They obviously know nothing of the fact that in early 1805 Napoleon wrote to the Prince Regent asking for peace). How many Jews did Nelson save? Nelson was psychologically incapable of moderation or compromise unlike Napoleon who even offered Cadoudal a place in his army - a man who had tried to murder him. And he allowed all those émigrés back - many who had clearly been his former enemies. There is just no comparison between the two. Billions have heard of Napoleon and Alexander, precious few of Horatio.

The blurb calls the two authors ‘gifted storytellers’. And how! They quote Bourrienne ad nauseam - a man who was twice sacked for embezzlement by Napoleon and who simply cannot be trusted with anything he says. General John Elting spent over twenty years researching his magisterial Swords Around A Throne. This is what he says on the subject: ‘In preparing this book I have used original sources whenever possible but have ignored the alleged memoirs of Louis Bourrienne, Paul Barras, Clare de Remusat, Laure Permon, and Miot de Melito, which are mendacious and worthless.’ (p. 735).

This is what our ladies say of 1798: ‘Although the rest of Europe was only beginning to be aware of him, an extraordinary man would come to embody the threat of France - and relentlessly magnify it… With Egypt behind him, he would wage a kind of world war for fifteen years… Only the island of Britain, mistress of the seas, would implacably defy him.’ (p.25). No taking side there then!

England and France had been at war for decades, long before Napoleon was even born and our American journalists would be well advised to remember that one of the things that bankrupted France and helped presage the Revolution was the support give by her to the revolting American Colonies as they strove for independence. Without French help - especially that of De Grasse’s navy - Washington would have never had become the first President. But then - everything is Napoleon’s fault.

When they mention Josephine they of course take her part against Napoleon. The reason she liked her lover Hippolyte Charles was because he was: ‘a dashing young Hussar with a happy nature, who - unlike her nearly humorless husband - made her laugh.’ (p.39) So it was obviously Napoleon’s fault that she committed adultery only days after her marriage. Napoleon was head over heels in love with Josephine, he was utterly besotted - it was far more than she deserved. No wonder he was devastated and jealous of her infidelities. But this also reminds me of what H.G. Wells wrote in his The Outline Of History Volume Two: ‘It would be difficult to find a human being less likely to arouse affection… Laughter is one great difference between man and the lower animals, one method of our brotherhood, and there is no evidence that Napoleon ever laughed.’ (p.499). Leaving aside the fact that this was written by a balding pot-bellied middle aged man with a squeaky voice who was cheating on his wife with Rebecca West - who he treated abysmally too, (and he was another ‘great storyteller’) here are some answers to the lie that Napoleon never laughed: ‘Some horse-grenadiers came by with twelve fat pigs they had found; we charged them with our sabers and took all their pigs. The Emperor laughed. He divided them; six for us and six for the horse-grenadiers.’ Captain Coignet (p.123). ‘From our bivouac I could see the Emperor distinctly and he saw all our movements. By the light of the pine logs I shaved those of my comrades who needed it most. They each sat down on the rump of a dead horse, which had been there long enough for the intense cold to freeze it as hard as stone… Perched on top of his bundles of straw, the Emperor watched this strange spectacle, and burst into peals of laughter. (p. 141).

After Waterloo Napoleon was sent to the hellhole of Saint Helena in the midst of the vast South Atlantic. He had lost everything: his freedom; his empire; his wife; his son - and he would soon lose his health affected by the dismal climate and slowly poisoned with arsenic by Montholon. Yet this is what young Betsy (Lucia Elizabeth Abell) said about him when she met him on the island. First her alarm: ‘Most of the newspapers of the day described him as a demon; and all those of his own country who lived in England were of course his bitter enemies; and from these two sources alone we formed out opinion of him.’(Napoleon and Betsy p.47). But this is her account of when she played a game with him: ‘Not knowing the French term (if there be any) for blindman’s buff, I had explained before to the emperor the nature of the operation to be gone thorough. He laughed at my choice, and tried to persuade me to choose something else, but I was inexorable; and seeing his fate inevitable, he resigned himself to it with a good grace, proposing we should begin at once… Whether accidently, or by Napoleon’s contrivance, I know not, but I was the first victim, and the emperor, taking a cambric handkerchief out of his pocket, tied it tightly over my eyes, asking me, is I could see. “I cannot see you,” I replied; but a faint gleam of light did certainly escape through one corner, making my darkness a little less visible. Napoleon then taking his hat, waved it suddenly before my eyes, and the shadow and the wind it made, startling me, I drew back my head: “Ah, leetle monkee,” he exclaimed in English, “you can see pretty well.” (ps.67-68).

Napoleon loved children and was always very tolerant with them. The young midshipman George Home mentions this when he saw the Emperor on the Bellerophon in 1815 with the children of his companions in exile. Betsy says that at times it was as if he was a child himself. Napoleon never forgot the human touch and could cast away the pretensions of emperor at the drop of his hat.

Our literary lasses than describe Napoleon: ‘Silent, sullen, small, with stringy hair and an unhealthy yellow pallor, he was hardly noticed at first’. He was actually five feet six according to Captain Maitland on HMS Bellerophon who actually met him in the flesh. He was five feet two in French feet. A French foot was three-quarters of an inch longer than its English equivalent. This aspect of size had always been used to demean and dismiss Napoleon. He was actually taller than their one-armed saviour Admiral Nelson. But they of course are completely ignorant of this as they are of so many things.

On the way to Egypt Napoleon’s fleet took Malta. Many years before Napoleon was even born Clive of India established the British in a powerful position in the subcontinent and the British with their massive navy took more islands than anybody. But, of course, this was okay because they were not Napoleon. They do begrudgingly admit that as well as ‘falsely claiming that his attack had been provoked because the knights had supported French émigrés… he also freed knights’ galley slaves and reorganized the government, hospitals, churches, and monasteries.’ (p.61) Every time they parade the negative and give it flags and a marching band before suffering a peep of any good he might have done.

But it is very different when they turn to Nelson. They say that when he was fifteen and suffering from malaria; ‘he had a feverish vision that altered his life forever. A “radiant orb” beckoned to him, he later wrote, and “a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and presented my King and Country as my Patron. ‘Well, then,’ I exclaimed, ‘I will be a hero and, confiding in Providence, I will brave every danger.’ ” (p.84) These are actually the ravings of a self-obsessed lunatic who put himself at the centre of the universe throughout his life. They then add that he was a ‘young man of no more than average height.’ Nelson was about 5 feet four to five feet six according to the latest research, slightly smaller than Napoleon but there have not been two hundred years of propaganda describing him as a dwarf.

When the authors talk about the pressgang in England they remark that; ‘France drafted her seamen, but mass conscription in England in Horatio Nelson’s day was unthinkable, so protective were Britons of the individual liberties they had acquired over the centuries.’ This is risible. There was virtually a caste system in England as rigid as that in India at the time. The ordinary man had very few ‘rights’ whatsoever. In Volume Two of his Britannia’s Realm, Richard Woodman describes how the Royal Navy repeatedly pressed merchant seamen even when they were not supposed to. It was pointless pressing men who were not sailors - it had precious little to do with their supposed ‘liberties’. The Unitarians, a nonconformist religious sect of which William Hazlitt was a member, were persecuted for their beliefs and in 1819 at Peterloo mounted militia hacked down ordinary members of the public with their swords - including an ex-soldier who had fought for his country at Waterloo. The British governments under Pitt and Liverpool were notoriously repressive. Only the aristocrats and royalty mattered in the minds of the British Cabinet and Wellington was dead set against extending the franchise to ordinary people.

Of Nelson’s disastrous failure in 1797 during the raid on Tenerife, where he lost many of his men and his own arm, the writers ooze: ‘But the British saw in his frail, battle-ravaged, but still erect frame their own national image: gallantry against all odds. He was the living symbol of their pride and hope, and they took him to their hearts as they had no other hero.’ (p.107) They completely fail to mention that for most of his time as general, First Consul and then as Emperor, Napoleon was idolized by French peasants and virtually worshipped by his soldiers. One is inclined to think they are trying to yank the wool over our eyes. Their partisanship is excruciating.

But there is more to come. In 1798 they claim; ‘Napoleon had assembled a huge armada… Now friendless in Europe but for the tepid support of Portugal, vulnerable England had to discover where the blow was aimed. Her very survival might depend on it.’ (p.115) More unmitigated and melodramatic tosh. Napoleon was going to Egypt because he knew it was virtually impossible to attack England via the Channel because of the might of the British navy. An indirect campaign was the only option open to him.

Their most egregious attack upon Napoleon personally is made on page 120. The journalists describe how the British and French fleets in the Mediterranean got to within 30 miles of each other: ‘Had he known this, Nelson could easily have overtaken it and had in his gunsights not only the French fleet but also a thirty-thousand army - and Napoleon himself. Within a few days a blood-drenched future might have changed for Europe.’ In other words our illustrious hacks are saying that the responsibility for the whole of the French Revolution, and the fevered reaction of the divine right courts of Europe to an attack upon their rights and privileges, rest solely upon Napoleon’s shoulders. This is puerile drivel.

Napier, who fought with Wellington against the French in Spain, states in his massive account of the campaign that the war was basically about ‘privilege’ - that the courts of Europe were terrified that the nascent ideas of democracy and human rights might spread to their own countries. This was why the British Government did not even deign to reply to Napoleon’s peace offerings in early 1805. And it was why the Allies ignored Napoleon’s plea for peace after his return to France from Elba. Napoleon did not want a war in 1815. The Allies not only wanted a war they wanted to blame Napoleon personally and so they proscribed him as an ogre and terror who had to be eliminated at all costs. Most of the so-called Napoleonic Wars were started by the British. France was attacked in 1805 by the Austrians and Russians in the pay of the Bank of England; Napoleon was attacked by the Prussians in 1806, the Russians in 1807, the Austrians in 1809 and the Allies in 1815 - in wars mostly funded by the British. Without the machinations of the ultra-reactionary, elitist, aristocratic, oligarchic and corrupt British Government - who repeatedly tried to assassinate Napoleon - there would have been a very good chance for peace once the land based monarchies had come to terms with the French Revolution. The English historian Walter Runciman states that had the arrogant British Cabinet reacted favorably to Napoleon’s peace-feelers there could have been peace between the two countries. But of course there could not be peace because the terrified divine right courts personalized the French Revolution in Napoleon himself.

But our two journalists have not the historical knowledge to see this.

In Egypt itself Napoleon found the situation much different to what he had expected. Talleyrand had assured him that the Turks in Constantinople could be won over - but then Talleyrand did absolutely nothing to bring this to fruition. Thus Napoleon decided to attack the Ottoman army in Syria before they attacked him. Then in 1799 occurred the event that is counted as the blackest mark against Napoleon. As General Michel Franceschi states: ‘On March 3 at Jaffa, matters began to become serious. Conforming to local custom, Bonaparte sent an emissary to the military commandant to offer to spare the lives of the garrison in exchange for its immediate surrender. In case of refusal, the French would not grant quarter. This was the merciless and unique rule in force during the war.’ (p.45) It was in fact standard practice throughout Europe at the time as it had been for centuries. However, instead of complying, the messenger’s head was cut off and displayed on the ramparts of the fortress. Franchesci adds: ‘This barbarous provocation was obviously not of a nature to encourage mercy. Matters were displayed in stark simplicity: there would be no quarter on either side.’

Recalling how French stragglers had been butchered and the hundreds of soldiers killed in the Cairo insurrection, the French responded in kind and there was awful slaughter. The same thing was later to happen in Spain - horrors on one side lead to horrors from the other. Francheschi says that: ‘At least the officers attempted to limit and block the more extreme actions, conforming to Bonaparte’s instructions. Among many others General Robin did not hesitate, at the risk of his life, to take his sabre to his own soldiers in order to halt such debaucheries.’ (ps. 45-46) He goes on: ‘The last to resist had taken refuge in the citadel, their fate already sealed by their previous refusal to capitulate. Just before they would have been destroyed, Bonaparte nonetheless sent Eugene de Beauharnais and another aide de camp, Crozier, “to calm as much as possible the furor of the soldiers.” As soon as these two were recognized by their distinctive insignia, the besieged asked to surrender to them, on condition that their lives should be spared. Listening only to their better nature, and in defiance of the death sentence implicitly pronounced against the combatants, these two officers accepted their surrender and conducted them to the French camp./ This was an appalling misunderstanding! Bonaparte had sent his aides solely to save the women, children, and old people and not to make an exception concerning combatants.’

An attempt to quell the slaughter had left Napoleon in an impossible situation. If he allowed the combatants to live it would be taken as a sign of weakness and encourage even more fanatical resistance in the future. And there was simply not enough food for the 2,500-3,000 mainly Albanian prisoners. Furthermore, about 300 of them had already been paroled once and yet rejoined the conflict in defiance of the usual convention. If he let them go they would either die in the desert or else rejoin the enemy army. It was a terrible dilemma. Under the circumstances Napoleon was extremely reluctant to decide their fate by himself so he held three councils of war with his senior officers before the final decision was made. Thus: ‘Bonaparte was forced to execute them in cold blood, fulfilling a death sentence that would have been applied without moral dilemma if it had occurred in the heat of action.’ (p. 46)

This is rightly discussed in every English history book - a bloody massacre in time of war. What is seldom even mentioned is that in 1807 the British navy attacked neutral Copenhagen and murdered 2,000 civilians in their beds, using Congreve rockets, weapons of mass destruction, for the first occasion against ordinary members of the public. And at the same time Wellington was slaughtering clog-wearing neutral Danish militia. Why is this unconscionable action, prompted by Canning, not likewise decried at every opportunity? If anything it was worse because it was a cold-blooded pre-planned atrocity against a neutral civilian population.

The journalists return to the attack on page 162 stating that: ‘Well aware of the value of status and income, he formed his own aristocracy as well. Leading it were his own quarrelsome and avaricious siblings, for in true Corsican fashion, Napoleon trusted only his family.’ In fact Napoleon allowed the émigrés to return as part of the healing process after the Revolution. He wanted to try and restore some sort of normality to the country and as already mentioned, aristocrats were the norm in the rest of Europe. As for his own brothers and sisters, as Walter Runciman has said, they were much better rulers than the appalling reactionary specimens in charge in England, Russia, Prussia, Austria and Naples. The Prince Regent for one was an womanizing alcoholic and drug addict who spent millions upon his own palaces and pleasures and held the ordinary British subject in utter contempt.

The hacks are in full flow on page 164 stating fallaciously that in 1812 the French army was abandoned: ‘Their emperor left them behind to dash for Paris, fearing for his throne.’ Bourgogne states that their were British spies amongst the retreating French army and that most of the men realized once they had returned to Vilna that there was little more Napoleon could do there and that it was in the best interests of everyone for him to return to the French capital. In the words of Sergeant Bourgogne: ‘Many of the foreigners took advantage of this circumstance to blame the Emperor, but the step he took was a perfectly natural one, as, owing to Malet’s conspiracy, his presence was necessary in France, not only for the administration, but to organize a new army.’ (p.159)

Despite their view that Nelson was virtually Christ’s Second Coming, on page 170 they are forced to mention his private little massacre at Naples in 1799: ‘Nelson annulled the terms of the truce. In so doing, he callously overrode a fellow officer’s word of honor and also opened the door for a grisly series of executions. The hangings went on for days.’ Unlike their treatment of Napoleon where they get their retaliation in first, criticizing him copiously before acknowledging that he did any good at all, with Nelson they wait 170 pages before describing his egomania and brutality. On page 172 they also admit people: ‘were even more disgusted by the cold disdain that he displayed, even in public, toward his wife, a woman who had never wronged him in any way.’ They are far more lenient in their account of Josephine who, despite being a good time had by all, was worshipped by a love struck Napoleon who treated her with kindness and gave her millions of francs even after he had divorced her. But of course they don’t mention that.

At the end of the book there are four full pages in a chapter entitled The Immortal Memory about Nelson’s funeral, two full pages about Emma Hamilton and a mere paragraph about Napoleon’s sad demise upon Saint Helena. Throughout this book the two journalists portray Napoleon in a bad light and try to make Nelson shine like some weird one-armed supernova with a halo to boot. Napoleon did do good things for other countries and for other people: Nelson did everything for himself. Their bibliography is also very sparse, especially in relation to Napoleon. The only saving grace about this book are the pictures and images, but the one thing it isn’t is objective history.

A Souladream Production

Bibliography

1. Abell Lucia Elizabeth Napoleon and Betsy (Fonthill Media Limited 2012 UK)

2. Bourgogne Adrien The Retreat From Moscow Translated by J.W. Fortescue (London The Folio Society 1985)

3. Coignet Jean-Roch Captain Coignet (Leonaur UK 2007)

4. Elting Colonel John R. Swords Around A Throne (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1989)

5. Foreman Laura and Phillips Ellen Blue Napoleon’s Lost Fleet (Discovery Books, London 1999)

6. Franceschi General Michel Bonaparte in Egypt (International Napoleonic Society, Montreal 2006)

7. Franceschi General Michel & Weider Ben The Wars Against Napoleon (Savas Beatie, New York 2008)

8. Home George Memoirs of an Aristocrat And Reminiscences of the Emperor Napoleon (Forgotten Books 2012)

9. Tarttelin John The Real Napoleon: The Untold Story (Amazon, Createspace 2013)

10. Woodman Richard Britannia’s Realm Volume Two In Support Of The State: 1763-1815 (The History Press, Stroud, Gloucestershire 2009)

HAIRSAY AND HERESY - THE MURDER OF NAPOLEON

2016-01-24T16:44:00.003+00:00

In March 1995 a single lock of human hair was sold to an American for £3,680.1 This was no ordinary relic. It came from the head of an exile who spent the last six years of his life upon a lonely speck of rock in the South Atlantic. For decades those frail strands of hair had kept a dark secret. Each contained minute traces of arsenic, a clear indication that the donor had been poisoned. The lock still exists today as mute testimony to the crime of the century – the murder of Napoleon.

History is written by the victors. During his time as First Consul, and then Emperor of the French, Napoleon was castigated by the British press and by its corrupt Establishment. He was the Corsican Ogre, the cause of all wars, an evil man who had to be destroyed at all costs. Mothers threatened their children with his name and his face appeared inside chamber pots.

Black propaganda has coloured innumerable subsequent histories written over a period of two hundred years and, as a result, errors, misinformation and downright lies have come to be accepted as fact. In England he has been dubbed a ‘monster genius’ by one historian and ‘a great, bad man’ by another. Many English writers dismiss him merely as the general who lost at Waterloo.2

In France, after his fall from power, the Royalists printed anything that might sully his name. During the so-called White Terror, officers and men who had fought for him were hunted down and executed without trial, at the express demand of Lord Liverpool, the British Prime Minister, who was determined to wreak a fanatical revenge upon those misguided French nationals who had dared to support Napoleon.

We know of Trafalgar and Waterloo, but how many British people know about this?

Napoleon embodied the principle that the individual mattered, that careers should be open to talent and should not just be the province of the highborn and the well-to-do. This was anathema to the British ruling class and their counterparts, the French aristocracy who clung to a belief in the divine right of kings. To them there was no such thing as the Rights of Man, only the Right of Might.

Following the spread of the doctrine of democracy after the American War of Independence, the French Revolution of 1789, the death knell of privilege, was bound to provoke a furious reaction from the courts of Europe. They would do anything to nip the concept of individual freedom in the bud. Hence common cause was made against the figurehead of the new ideas – Napoleon. The huge bribes secretly paid by the British Government to foreign powers to entice them into wars against France certainly helped this process along.

In Napoleonic France, advancement was possible for gifted people of all ranks. The Emperor was a pragmatist. He even allowed hundreds of former aristocrats back into France if they were prepared to serve him. In the process he unwittingly welcomed his would-be assassins.

The ordinary Frenchman did much better under Napoleon than they had ever done under the Bourbons. Napoleon restored peace within France; his Concordat with the Pope re-established Catholicism as the religion of the majority of the French people; his Napoleonic Code instituted a body of laws that confirmed the property rights of the millions of peasants who had gained land after the Revolution – it is still the basis of the French legal system today.

His soldiers worshipped him. One has only to read the memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne and Captain Coignet to see that. Under Napoleon, every soldier believed there was a baton in his knapsack. Anything was possible - they had seen it happen. Men of humble birth like Ney and Murat became marshals, princes, even kings. Napoleon’s personal charisma was almost magical. When he was a boy, Heine, the German poet, saw him: ‘high on horseback, the eternal eyes set in the marble of that imperial visage, looking on, calm as destiny, at his guards as they march past. He was sending them to Russia, and the old grenadiers glanced up at him with so anxious a devotion, such sympathy, such earnestness and lethal pride: Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant!’3

Napoleon supported French industry and provided political stability after the chaos of the Revolution. As a result, the peasants and the middle-classes prospered and France became a great nation once again. Compared to the days of the old monarchy, the French people had never had it so good. What else had Europe to offer?

In England, Old Farmer George, King George III, after losing the American colonies because of his asinine inability to compromise, went mad and spent his time shaking hands with trees and talking to them. His son Prinny, the Prince Regent, convinced himself he had actually led the charge at Waterloo, when the only charge he did lead was the one for the dinner table. Prinny was loathed by the British public because of the way he treated his estranged wife, Princess Caroline. The Royals lived in a world of their own, blind to the misery endured by ordinary Britons at a time of economic hardship and depression.

Wellington was short of cavalry at Waterloo because the politicians at Whitehall relied on mounted troops to keep the people down in Britain and Ireland. They were even more concerned with quelling internal dissent than they were in defeating France. Some 78,400 people were transported to Australia in only nine years, 1816-1825, many for merely daring to question the way the country was being governed.4

Napoleon was three times acclaimed by national plebiscite in France. No one ever voted for Louis XVIII who succeeded him. If Napoleon became the heart and soul of France, Louis can be said to have been its stomach. A political lightweight, he made up for it on the personal level, weighing in at 310 lbs. Twice he returned to Paris in the baggage train of the Allies – he needed it, no horse could carry him. Waddling along, limping, plagued by gout, and with his penchant for blond young men, he was yet mystified by the fact that the populace preferred Napoleon to himself.

It was Louis’ sinister brother and heir Charles, comte d’Artois, who began making plans for the murder of Napoleon. D’Artois could execute ‘traitors’ every day of the week and still go to Mass on a Sunday. He was a true scion of the Old School.

Comte d’Artois, brother of Louis XVIII – Bowes Museum, England © John Tarttelin

In 1792, with the blessing of Pitt’s government, d’Artois began planning the Bourbon restoration from a base on Jersey. Living there were 7,500 émigré priests and nobles, all eager to regain privileges and sinecures swept away by the Revolution. There, in the greatest secrecy, with the knowledge of just a few men in the British Cabinet, d’Artois set up his infamous Chevalier de la Foi. This nest of spies and death squads was given the task of restoring Louis to the throne. From Jersey, British vessels could easily land agents on the mainland at the dead of night.5

When Napoleon overthrew the French Directory in 1799, the issue became personalized. D’Artois’ pathological hatred of the Corsican Usurper knew no bounds. To him, Napoleon was evil incarnate, the Antichrist.

Royalist guerrillas fought in Brittany and Normandy and when his troops defeated them, Napoleon had the magnanimity to offer one of their leaders, Georges Cadoudal, a commission in the Army. Cadoudal fled to Jersey instead. Once there he organized a plot to kill Napoleon with a bomb.

On December 24th 1800, Cadoudal’s man, Saint-Regent, abandoned a wine cart in the rue Saint-Nicaise in Paris. A thirteen- year-old girl was left holding the horse’s reins. Napoleon was due to pass on his way to the opera. However, his coachman was suspicious. Whipping his horses on, he careered past the cart. The people in the carriages behind were not so lucky. The innocent girl was blown to bits, more than a dozen others were killed, and over 200 were wounded. Cadoudal slunk back to Britain.

D’Artois had backed the plot. His agent, d’Auvergne, who was also the British naval commander in Jersey, provided the gunpowder, the money for the operation, and the vessel necessary to land Cadoudal on the French coast – all on the orders of William Pitt. It was nothing less than state sponsored terrorism.

Two years later, during the Peace of Amiens, Captain d’Auvergne went to Paris to meet fellow agents. He wore his British uniform in case he was arrested as a spy. He was caught and imprisoned, but when the British Ambassador intervened, Napoleon had him released after thorough questioning.

Parliament was in uproar. Napoleon had dared to arrest a British officer with a valid passport at a time of peace. The French Ambassador in London leaked the real reason for d’Auvergne’s arrest to prominent political figures. With the possibility of Chants D’Auvergne ringing in their ears, the Cabinet panicked. The thought that the British public might find out about their illicit dealings with d’Artois, which were still continuing despite the peace, terrified them. Thus, with delicious irony, Lord Liverpool was forced to speak up in Parliament on Napoleon’s behalf. Perhaps that is why, after Waterloo, he was determined to have killed as many people as possible who had ever supported Napoleon.

Napoleon’s military career is well known. More than 300,000 books have been written about him, more than any other individual in history. After his final defeat, with misplaced trust, he threw himself upon British justice, seeking asylum upon these shores. There was precious little freedom and justice for ordinary Britons, still less was there to be for the fallen Emperor.

Betrayed by numerous Frenchmen he had elevated to prominence, Napoleon surrendered to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon – ‘Billy Ruffian’. He was taken to Torbay where crowds of people came from all over Britain just to catch a glimpse of him. However, it was imperative for the Cabinet that he did not land. The public, far more noble than their self-seeking politicians, had sympathy for Napoleon and would have allowed him to stay in England. On August 3rd 1815 an article appeared in The Times stating that an Act of Parliament was necessary to detain Napoleon and another would be necessary to intern him in a British colony.6 Frightened by this growing support for him, Lord Liverpool gave the order to have Napoleon transported to Saint Helena on board HMS Northumberland. With him was a certain comte de Montholon.

Montholon had attached himself to Napoleon after Waterloo and asked to share his exile. He was, in fact, d’Artois’ agent, and murder was on his mind.7

Napoleon’s death had to be seen as an accident. Any obvious action would have led to widespread insurrection in France and, at the very least, extremely awkward questions being raised in a Parliament that was already greatly concerned with the growing republican movement in Britain. So Montholon began to lace Napoleon’s wine with arsenic. The body’s natural reaction is to disperse the poison where it will do the least harm, hence it got into his hair.

Montholon arranged for the removal of most of Napoleon’s faithful companions after inveigling his way into the Emperor’s affections. Montholon was soon the only person Napoleon trusted. His fate was sealed. With his health failing rapidly, Napoleon stated in his will: ‘I die before my time, murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassin.’ To the very end, he never suspected Montholon. He died on May 5th 1821, leaving Montholon 2,000,000 francs in his will. For the final time, Napoleon had been betrayed by someone he trusted. A lock of hair was taken from his corpse and eventually found its way to Phillips’ Saleroom in London.

A French delegation arrived at Saint Helena to reclaim Napoleon’s body in 1840. When his grave was opened the onlookers were stunned. Napoleon’s sightless eyes stared back at them, for the arsenic which had poisoned the Emperor had also preserved his body. His remains now lie in a splendid mausoleum in Paris.

In June 1994 Professor Maury of Montpelier University announced that he had Montholon’s written confession to Napoleon’s murder. This corroborates the findings of Dr Sten Forshufvud, Ben Weider, and David Hamilton-Williams. Tests done on samples of Napoleon’s hair at Glasgow University have revealed traces of arsenic inside the hair follicles. There is no way that arsenic from wallpaper or hair pomades could get inside the hair. Furthermore, Sten Forshufvud, a trained toxicologist who had studied the Emperor’s mysterious symptoms for years, proved that the levels of arsenic inside the strands of hair, coincided with bouts of illness described in the memoir of Marchand, Napoleon’s trusted valet. Whenever the levels of arsenic reached critical levels, Napoleon became ill. The work of Sten Forshufvud and Ben Weider has proved beyond a doubt and with scientific certainty, that Napoleon was poisoned on Saint Helena.

Does Napoleon’s corpse continue with its victory over death even to this day? If a lock of hair was worth £3,680 in 1995, an intriguing question remains – what is his body worth? Napoleon’s signature alone fetched £150 back then and its value increases every year.8 His reputation meanwhile, needs to be reassessed and revalued.

M.A. History, FINS, Legion of Merit

A Souladream Production

This article forms one chapter of my book

THE REAL NAPOLEON – The Untold Story

Available as a paperback, on Amazon Kindle

and on Smashwords.

NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. The Sunday Times London March 26th 1995. It also reported that there were more than 100 other Napoleon lots up for auction in March 1995 alone. In the article by Peter Johnson it says: ‘In a multitude of forms from portrait miniatures to life-sized statues, from love letters to battlefield autographs, he is revered by collectors.’ He also adds: ‘by contrast a lock of hair from the Duke of Wellington’s (head) was a snip at £598.’

Napoleon’s popularity with collectors is phenomenal. On September 18th 1988 The Sunday Telegraph London reported a: ‘Brush with history – No plaque is expected to mark the spot, but Napoleon’s silver and gold-plated toothbrush goes under the hammer next month at the Munich auction house of Herman Historica.’

2. Napoleon was called a ‘monster genius’ by the English journalist Nigel Nicholson in an article in the Daily Telegraph London of September 3rd 1988. Nicolson’s twisted portrayal of Napoleon is far too ludicrous ever to be called ‘history’. Napoleon was called a ‘great bad man’, by David Chandler in the video series called The Great Commanders. Chandler, who was a great historian, shortly before his own death came to accept that Napoleon had been murdered by Montholon – for years he would not accept the fact.

3. Quoted in Paul Britten Austin 1812 The March On Moscow (1993) 29

4. David Hamilton-Williams The Fall Of Napoleon (1994) 330

5. Ibid. APPENDIX II The Royalist Underground and the Chevaliers de la Foi 302-308

6. Ibid. 271

7. Ibid. 273

8. Peter Johnson article in The Sunday Times March 26th 1995. See above.

Bibliography

1. Austin Paul Britten 1812 The March On Moscow (London: Greenhill Books, 1993)

2. Hamilton-Williams David The Fall Of Napoleon (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1994)

3. Nicolson Nigel 1812 (London: Weidenfeld And Nicolson, 1985)

4. Weider Ben And Hapgood David The Murder Of Napoleon (New York: Congdon And Lattès Inc. 1982)

DAN SNOW - UNDER THE WEATHER

2015-12-20T18:05:00.000+00:00

-->

Dan Snow – Under the Weather

Snow entitles his March 14th 2015 article for the Daily Telegraph:

‘The French should end their love affair with Napoleon – he was an utterly brutal and callous dictator.’

Snow writes as if he’s addressing teenagers in a history comic. His grasp of world events is superficial and his knowledge of Napoleon virtually non-existent. His copy reveals a naive exuberance from someone who can’t believe he is writing for a national newspaper, leave alone the fact he is the BBC’s latest ‘historian’.

He states that: ‘Americans annihilated a race of people as they forged a vast empire…’ No they didn’t, there are tens of thousands of Native Americans still alive and flourishing. What he should have said was - there was mass genocide of the natives by Spaniards and later by other white Europeans. Does he know what the word annihilate means? To help him out - the dictionary definition is ‘destroy completely’.

He then describes the Vikings ‘whose dragonships penetrated Europes’s great rivers like poison moving through arteries.’ Rather a derogatory comment for someone who presents programmes for the ultra PC BBC. He is trying to be clever with words and as a result he waves his own ignorance like a flag. The Vikings travelled to America; founded York and Dublin; started a colony in Greenland; formed part of the Byzantine Varangian Guard; conquered England and gave Alfred the Great a good run for his money. The Swedish Vikings – the Rus – gave their name to Russia. But none of this is hinted at in Young Snow’s phrase comparing them to ‘poison moving through arteries.’

He then turns his adolescent history awareness to Napoleon and says with complete impartiality: ‘Two hundred years ago this month, the deposed Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was rampaging north of Paris, intent on seizing back power.’ Wrong on all counts. Napoleon was not deposed, he had abdicated in 1814, and he already had power in 1815 after his triumphal return to Paris without a shot being fired. Napoleon was immeasurably more popular than the twenty stone Bungy Louis XVIII who had never been voted for by anyone – unlike Napoleon with his plebiscites – and still thought he had a divine right to rule because his porky majesty just happened to be dubbed a Bourbon.

What Snow really deserves to be taken to task for is not even mentioning that Napoleon wrote personally to all the main rulers in Europe asking for peace after his return to France – the exact opposite of ‘rampaging’. His letter to the Prince Regent was never even given to that obese alcoholic opium addict who spent thousands of pounds on his clothes and palaces while millions of ordinary British people didn’t even have enough to eat. The reason taxes in England were sky high was because the corrupt British Cabinet was hell bent on fomenting war with Napoleon with every chance they could get. Pitt and his cabal of ultra-rich aristocratic accomplices paid for numerous attempts to kill Napoleon. These assassination attempts were nothing less than state-sponsored terrorism. Napoleon believed it beneath his dignity to respond in kind.

Britain paid for Austria and Russia to attack France in 1805 and for most of the other so-call Coalitions; Prussia declared war on France in 1806; the Russians attacked first in 1807; the Austrians invaded Bavaria, Napoleon’s ally in 1809 without a declaration of war thinking Napoleon too preoccupied in Spain; Russia hoped to attack Napoleon’s ally the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1811 but could get no support from the usual suspects. Then, in 1815 the Allies having illegally proscribed Napoleon personally as an outlaw (thereby encouraging yet more assassination attempts), declared war on him as an individual. They would never have dreamt of treating a member of the old Royalty in such a cruel and offhand manner. Their hatred of the French Revolution and their fear of universal human rights spreading to their own backward and repressive countries were so great that they wanted to destroy the one man who freed all Jews in his Empire and gave them equal rights and who allowed people to rise on their own merits unlike the petrified feudal systems that prevailed everywhere else on the Continent.

Young Snow is wrong in nearly everything he says.

He thus compounds his ignorance when he states that in 1815 soldiers faced: ‘a fate… condemned by his ambition.’ Was it Napoleon’s ambition that led Canning to order an attack on neutral Copenhagen in 1807? The British Navy bombarded the benighted civilians of Denmark with Congreve Rockets, the first occasion when Weapons of Mass Destruction were ever used on a civilian population. Criminal British politicians and WMD have a long history. The British forces then stole the Danish navy or burnt the remaining vessels they were unable to seize. During the same campaign Wellington had a great victory over clog wearing civilian militia. What a stirring military victory that was for Britannia!

Was it Napoleon’s ambition that led Nelson to execute Admiral Caraccioli and dozens of unarmed Neapolitan rebels in 1799 who had been promised freedom after they had surrendered? Coming late to the scene Nelson persuaded the Bourbon rulers – at Emma Hamilton’s insistence – to renege on the previous agreement and execute the poor souls who were rotting alive on ships in Naples’ harbour. Ah yes - another British triumph! Nelson actually was a titch unlike Napoleon. Our odious midget admiral stood 5 feet two inches tall as opposed to Napoleon’s 5 feet six. But Emma Hamilton loved him despite the fact he had precious few teeth, one arm and only one eye. She loved him to bits.

For this massacre Nelson was given £3,000 a year and the Duchy of Bronte by his Bourbon hosts. He was condemned for his actions even by Robert Southey his first biographer and a creature of the Establishment: ‘a faithful historian is called upon to pronounce a severe and unqualified condemnation of Nelson’s conduct.’ (page 195 Life of Nelson). However, Nelson himself gushed to Emma Hamilton: ‘I am now perfectly the great man – not a creature near me.’ In bald truth – Nelson was a murderer.

Don’t we all just love British fair play? But we certainly don’t get it with Young Snow.

Was it Napoleon’s ambition that led the United States to declare war on England in 1812 because the Royal Navy claimed the right to board every neutral vessel and seize cargoes that might help the French? No the overweening arrogance of those in power in this country led them to believe they could do whatever they wanted. In fact, believing in might is right, they often could. Britain was the great oppressor in those days – starting at home with its own people, who were imprisoned or transported to Australia, merely for asking for the vote and a few human rights of their own. Some were even massacred by mounted thugs working for the local magistrates, like at Peterloo in 1819. How ironic that one soldier who fought against Napoleon at Waterloo was scythed down by his own militia back in Manchester!

Yes, everything is Napoleon’s fault!

Snow ought to read a little more, or indeed anything, about what happened to the Unitarians during the time of those he lauds so much. William Hazlitt has eloquently described the torments and terrors inflicted upon its own population by the self-serving creatures in Parliament at the time of Napoleon. Hazlitt wept when Napoleon died. Snow’s whitewashing of British history provokes tears of laughter from this historian.

Snow claims that Napoleon: ‘abandoned his army in the depths of a Russian winter.’ Wrong again. As Bourgogne describes in his superb account of the retreat from Russia, Napoleon had heard of the Malet conspiracy back in Paris and his senior officers knew that his place was back in the capital where he could restore order and try and recoup from a disastrous campaign. Bourgogne also mentions British spies at work in Poland. One would expect them to twist the facts at a time of war – there is no excuse for Snow to do the same now.

Snow says: ‘Napoleon, Caesar, Clive, perhaps even Churchill, are heroes for an age that is past.’ Isn’t it a tad arrogant for a 37-year-old who has never lived through a major war, certainly one with such a poor grasp of history, to tell the rest of us what we should think? To my father’s generation Churchill will always be a hero because of the morale effect of his radio speeches during the War. Caesar boasted of being personally responsible for the death of a million Gauls. Caesar was only a hero to himself. Clive of India is unknown to most British people today. Indeed, the general state of historical knowledge in this country is dire. And Snow went to Balliol – rather proving the point. History as a subject has not been taught well, if at all, in our schools for years.

Then we come to a real Snowism: ‘Napoleon was a brilliant commander, an able administrator, a man who bent to the arc of history with the heat of his desire.’ Just what exactly is that supposed to mean? Don’t they teach English at Oxford? And what does it say for the linguistic appreciation of the Daily Telegraph when they print such asinine drivel?

Snow continues with his character assassination, saying that Napoleon was ‘a man who made legions of widows, orphans and invalids as he pursued his version of destiny.’ As if all those Danish civilians were blaming Napoleon in 1807! Napoleon was on Saint Helena being poisoned by Montholon in 1819 when the Manchester militia cut down peaceful, unarmed men, women and children who had come together merely to discuss the future of their country. Hasn’t Snow read anything?

Napoleon wrote to the Prince Regent asking for peace in early 1805 – months before Trafalgar. The historian Walter Runciman has described how the British Government arrogantly refused even to respond to Napoleon’s attempt to make peace. Snow began his diatribe by claiming that Napoleon was ‘a brutal and callous dictator.’ Runciman states that had that been so, Napoleon would have executed the duplicitous Monarchs whose armies constantly attacked him and which were usually defeated by him, but instead he forgave them time after time, even marrying Marie Louise the daughter of his longtime enemy Austria. Napoleon repeatedly tried to engage with the old aristocratic families of Europe. He let émigrés return to France and with his own Legion of Honour he tried to install a deserving meritocracy in place of the old traditional aristocracy.

As to being ‘callous’ – the first thing Napoleon did at the start of the retreat from Russia was to give up his own coach for the wounded. In Coignet’s biography we see him repeatedly describing the Emperor’s efforts to care for the wounded. With Jean Larrey, Napoleon had the best surgeon in Europe at that time and Larrey made sure the French Army was the first to have a proper ambulance chain. When one of his mounted officers disturbed a wounded Russian soldier after the battle of Borodino, the man cried out, the French officer saying that it was only a Russian. Napoleon reproached him and added: ‘After a victory there are only men.’

When did Wellington ever give up his coach for a mere soldier? He notoriously called his men ‘scum’. The only useful thing that arrogant Irishman left for posterity was a name for his boots. To him, the common soldier was something to be scraped from the bottom of them. Napier, another Irishman, writer of the monumental History of the Peninsula War and on Wellington’s side during England’s wars against Napoleon lamented that ordinary British soldiers were never even ‘seen’ by their leaders. Their heroic acts were always anonymous and went unrewarded. The ordinary British footslogger was never given a medal and if he was a Catholic he could never become a general. There was no religious discrimination in Napoleon’s Army. Napier compared this blatantly hierarchical system to that of the French under Napoleon and very much preferred the latter.

To Goethe Napoleon was the greatest man of the C19th. To the German Jew Heine he was the greatest man who ever lived. Nietzsche admired him. Napoleon has given his name to over a dozen settlements in the United States. Around 1,000 books a year are written about him – including my own The Real Napoleon – The Untold Story: over 250,000 now in total. He died in 1821, less than two hundred years ago. Two of my grandparents were born in 1881 and 1890. That is how recent he was alive. And most educated people today have heard of Napoleon – even though his name is often traduced and scorned and manifest lies and misrepresentations are constantly made about him.

I shall finish with another Snowism - a whole paragraph this time. Our young ‘historian’ in full flow says: ‘Many people, understandably, are sympathetic to anyone, even Napoleon, who threatened the continued domination of Europe by a caste of befeathered Emperors and Prince Bishops. However, as 1918 was to show, the violent removal of this anachronistic vestige did not lead to fully fledged Lockean liberal states springing like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.’

Don’t you just wish you could write like that? Alas our cub historian tries too hard to impress and instead just spouts a load of drivel. And who is Dan Snow to say that what happened in 1918 has absolutely anything to do with Napoleon? It beggars believe that such a pathetically one-sided piece can actually get published in one of our national papers. And what’s more there’s more Snow on the BBC than on the winter steppes of Russia - and paid for by compulsory licence fee!

As Napoleon would say: ‘Bah!’

B.Ed., M.A. (History), Fellow of the International Napoleonic Association (Legion of Merit) Author of The Real Napoleon – The Untold Story (Now writing England’s Wars Against Napoleon) and 45 years reading about Napoleon.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ANTI-NAPOLEON BIAS

2015-12-11T17:16:00.002+00:00

Covering Letter sent with earlier Critique

johntarttelin@msn.com

Souladream Productions

December 11th 2015

Dear Sir,

The enclosed critique is self-explanatory. I have been a member of the National Geographic Society for about 25 of the last 30 years. In recent years it has been impossible to ignore your extreme and unwarranted bias. You have persisted in portraying Napoleon in a malignant light and in a highly cavalier and arbitrary manner. Your writers obviously know nothing about the French Emperor or his times and I resent the fact that my financial contributions are blatantly misused for their repeatedly negative and hostile character assassinations.

In the interest of natural justice and fair play I demand that you refrain from this odious practice immediately.

Save the tiger, save the whale, save the planet indeed, but do not use funds donated for charitable purposes to malign an historical figure who has no chance of a right of reply. Malicious and mendacious myths should be left to amateurs and social media and not propagated by the Society that I joined to help encourage archeological excavations, conservation and other worthwhile measures designed to aid our planet.

C. 2015

A Souladream Production

CRITIQUE OF GREAT EMPIRES by NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

2015-12-10T21:24:00.000+00:00

-->

GREAT EMPIRES

An Illustrated Atlas

National Geographic

(2013 Edition)

Dear Sir,

I have just read your Atlas that purports to be an accurate account of World history. There is throughout this book a blatantly biased and dismissive account of Napoleon and an utter disregard for his empire.

Modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years and today there are about 7.3 billion people. Some 7.5 billion individuals have lived on this planet. In all that time and amidst all those numbers only three historical personages have been known widely by their first names. They are, in chronological order: Alexander, Jesus and Napoleon.

After the Bible and its references to Christ, there have been more books written about Napoleon than any other person who has ever lived. He died less than 200 years ago yet there are now at least 250,000 books on Napoleon and 1,000 more are added every year. In your own country more than a dozen settlements have been named ‘Napoleon’ in many different states.

The renowned German writer Goethe called Napoleon: ‘The greatest man of the C19th.’ He was the hero of the German Jew Heine. And he was William Hazlitt’s hero in contemporary England. Yet your Atlas virtually ignores him. Worse than that, your writers choose to slander his name and vilify him at every opportunity. This is what your hacks write:

‘In truth, he was one of the many meteoric conquerors with supersize egos throughout history who dazzled the world briefly before they came crashing down, achieving little of lasting significance compared with those who built enduring empires.’ (Page 271)

This statement is absolute tosh, and a consummate travesty of history. Your writers are certainly not historians and if that is the best they can do they should stick to fiction.

Napoleon gave Jews equal rights in his empire. If he had done nothing else, his memory would have been worth preserving for this act alone. He was also the first person to suggest that Jews be given a homeland in the Holy Land. No wonder he was Heine’s hero. And no wonder that 150 years after his death the Jewish historian Ben Weider set up the International Napoleonic Society to honour his memory and to counteract all the lies and misinformation spread about him over the past two centuries.

Ben Weider studied Napoleon and his times for over fifty years. I have been studying Napoleon and his times for over forty years. I simply do not recognize the cartoon character referred to by your jejune and unqualified writers. What academic qualifications have they? And what peer reviewed historical papers or books have they produced? I have read over two hundred books about Napoleon and I have never in over forty years heard of your lamentably informed staff.

Without Napoleon the discipline of Egyptology would not exist. He took 177 savants to Egypt and they produced the brilliant Description De L’Egypte - a work of the utmost importance and a cultural icon. Any nation would be proud of such a monumental work of impeccable scholarship. From the start, Napoleon wanted his Egyptian enterprise to be more than a military conquest. What other general in human history has ever undertaken such a venture that redounded to the intellectual benefit and glory of all Mankind? Yet what do your hacks write:

‘… imperial glory seekers such as Napoleon, who invaded Egypt and marveled at monuments that would continue to dazzle onlookers long after the sun set on his ambitions.’ (Page 55)

Napoleon’s Description De L’Egypte will last as long as there are people who actually know a little bit about history – it will last forever.

Because of Napoleon’s own insatiable intellect, Egypt became the magnet for countless archeologists, writers, painters and historians. And without Napoleon there would have been no Howard Carter, no Tutankhamun’s tomb and no Rosetta stone. Discovered by a French officer during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign this tri-lingual stone led to the unraveling of the mystery of Hieroglyphics by another great Frenchman - Champollion. There is more extant carving in Egypt than all the other countries in the world put together. Recent satellite imagery has indicated that 97% of Egyptian ruins remain to be unearthed. Without Napoleon’s own intellectual passion that launched the study of Egyptology none of this would even be known.

The only other major reference to Napoleon in the Atlas is also on Page 271: ‘Despite Napoleon’s smashing victories on the Continent, he remained hemmed in by the British navy, which shattered his fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. When Russia joined the British in opposing him, he launched a disastrous invasion of that country in 1812 and was forced into exile. Attempting to return to power, he was crushed at Waterloo in 1815 by Britain’s Duke of Wellington.’

There is simply no context to this threadbare account of Napoleon’s time in power. He brought peace to France after the Revolution, signed the Concordat with the Pope, instituted the Bank of France, built roads, canals and bridges and beautified cities and had not Britain paid millions to persuade other countries to attack him who knows what else he might have achieved? It was due to Prime Minister Pitt’s malign influence that war in Europe became endemic. Millions from the Bank of England poured into the impoverished coffers of Austria and Russia. They were bankrupt and without this financial aid would never have been able to attack Napoleon in 1805.

The British reneged on the treaty of Amiens in 1803, Napoleon was attacked in 1805, in 1806 by Prussia, in 1807 by Russia, in 1809 by Austria and in 1815 the so-called Allies declared war on him despite his plea for peace sent to all the European monarchs who had opposed him in the past. In 1811 Tsar Alexander hoped to attack France but found that nobody else was interested. In 1812, driven to distraction by the Tsar’s treachery (he who was implicit in the murder of his own father and who slept with his own sister), Napoleon launched his ill-fated 1812 campaign. He hoped for one decisive battle - like Austerlitz in 1805 - that would sway the duplicitous Russians back into the fold, but the coldest Russian winter for 100 years doomed the enterprise from the very beginning.

The hacks mention Waterloo without any reference whatsoever to the Prussian involvement in the battle. More Germans fought that day than either French or British. Of Wellington’s 69,000 troops less than 24,000 were British. It was a great German victory. Tim Clayton’s excellent recent book Waterloo shows how Wellington’s decimated troops were pushed way back on the ridge of Mont Saint-Jean and without the arrival of Blucher and the Prussians there would have been no Allied victory.

As all proper historians know, Napoleon was attacked because he was anathema to the Divine Right monarchs of his day who dreaded that France might export the Revolution to their countries. Napier, the great British historian of the Peninsula Wars says so at the start of his monumental work. And the English historian Walter Runciman stated that if Great Britain had left Napoleon alone and not rejected his calls in early 1805 for peace with such overweening arrogance, then the two countries could have co-existed in peace. But the National Geographic hacks obviously know nothing about all this.

In the timeline at the back of the Atlas there is only one tiny reference to Napoleon – again derogatory: ‘1812 Tsar Alexander I withstands invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte.’ (Page 355)

The Atlas does not mention Catherine the Great’s hatred of the Revolution, nor Russia’s attacks on France by Suvarov, Tsar Paul and Alexander himself in 1805, 1807, the putative attack in 1811, or the 1815 Coalition against Napoleon.

There are many more omissions in this book supposedly about great empires. There is no mention of the Anglo-Saxon empire of Athelstan - the grandson of Alfred the Great - who after the Battle of Brunanburgh in AD 937 affectively created the English nation. He was dubbed the Emperor of the whole world of Britain at the time because of his great victory over the Northern Coalition. England has been a nation for nearly 1100 years but the National Geographic doesn’t seem to realize the fact. There is also no mention of the great Viking Dark Age empires. Without the Vikings who had a settlement in Greenland as late as AD1450, Columbus would have known little of what lay across the Atlantic.

According to the hacks, Napoleon was an inconsequential nobody – even though 1,000 books are written about him every year! Yet the Atlas has pages on the so-called Comanche empire and the like and it enthuses about the Dominians of the Mali and Songhai and other household names like the Asante Osei Tutu Opemsoo – what a consummate dude he was. I can’t see a brandy being named after him for quite a while…

Throughout, the Atlas reeks of Political Correctness – which is anathema and poison to a genuine historian. It is interesting that Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic copied Napoleon’s coronation ceremony exactly when he crowned himself emperor in 1977. This homage to Napoleon nearly bankrupted his country. He did not bend over backwards to emulate our friend Osei Tutu Opemsoo. Didn’t Bokassa know that Napoleon was a ‘nobody’? Perhaps the National Geographic forgot to tell him.

The job of an historian is to tell it all as it really was, without fear or favour. Even though I am English, I believe the rule of Napoleon was far better than that of the corrupt and unrepresentative oligarchy that controlled Britain in the late C18th and early C19th. The English politician Canning ordered the British Navy to bombard neutral Copenhagen in 1807 killing 2,000 unarmed civilians – and they also stole or destroyed the whole of the Danish fleet. Nelson had dozens of Neapolitan rebels executed on his own orders in 1799 – murdered in effect. And he was rewarded with the Dukedom of Bronte by the Bourbons for his pains. The British invented concentration camps during the Boer War and hundreds of Boer women and children starved to death in them.

There is enough shame and horror to go around. The Germans inaugurated The Final Solution and gassed millions of Jews during the Second World War. That ‘nobody’ Napoleon gave them equal rights. The American empire gave us the My Lai massacre, Agent Orange, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo – and the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis in the search for non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Finally, a look today on Google led to 73,100,000 references to Napoleon. The National Geographic has blown both its feet off with its misleading and untruthful caricature of Napoleon. Unfortunately it has a ‘history’ of such things. I add a review I did of its take on Waterloo, a programme entitled Napoleon’s Last Battle shown on British television on March 11th 2009. It was almost physically painful to watch such an embarrassing excuse for proper history.

John Tarttelin Teaching Certificate (history and geography), B.Ed., (history), M.A. (history), FINS (Legion of Merit) author of the Real Napoleon - The Untold Story and 45 years of reading about Napoleon.

NAPOLEON'S LAST BATTLE
ON NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TELEVISION
MARCH 11TH, 2009, UK

I have just watched an appalling programme about Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo on the National Geographic Channel. It was replete with all the usual lies and misrepresentations that are made about him. I was so moved by its one-sidedness that I immediately sent the email below in protest. As Ben used to say, the same untruths are constantly repeated - but one expects better from the National Geographic!

Members of the INS might be surprised at just how high some of the same old nonsense comes from.

Dear Sir,

I have just watched your programme about Napoleon. It was a bigger disaster than Waterloo! This one-sided travesty of a programme is unworthy of the high standards that the National Geographic normally stands for. It was a truly awful production, full of mistakes and factual errors. And there were massive and glaring omissions.

The final comment: ‘A life written in blood’ is absolutely pathetic and woefully biased against Napoleon. Your programme is an exercise in character assassination - whatever it is - it certainly isn't objective history as I understand the term. Your revolting portrayal of the French Emperor cries out for a reply. It is easy to slander the dead who cannot fight back.

Your partisan film is worthy of the worst of English High Tory arrogance and nationalism. I expect better from a nation that owed its very existence to the French navy at Yorktown. Without the money given to the Americans by French officers, and the support of De Grasse's navy, Washington, would never have taken Yorktown. (Source: Jay Luvaas P. 152 Clues to America's Past (1976) - National Geographic books).

Not once in your 'programme' did you mention the fact that Napoleon was nearly always attacked first by the Allies. It was the British that broke the Treaty of Amiens by refusing to evacuate Malta, and it was the British Cabinet and Pitt who paid for the terrorist attacks upon Napoleon perpetrated by the Comte d'Artois the evil younger brother of Louis XVIII, and his infamous group the Chevalier de la Foi. Many innocent French civilians were murdered in these assassination attempts - but absolutely no mention in your dreadful programme.

You did not mention the fact that the British paid millions of pounds in subsidies to the Austrians and Russians to encourage them to ATTACK Napoleon in 1805. Your coverage of the Battle of Austerlitz was very vague - no mention of the Pratzen Heights. It was because the Russians and Austrians took control of these that they were convinced that Napoleon was planning a retreat. That led to their overconfidence and their subsequent drubbing.

After Napoleon's victory, Emperor Francis of Austria said: ‘The English are traders in human flesh’. By then he realized he had been duped into fighting by the British. You say nothing about this.

There was no mention of the fact that Prussia ATTACKED Napoleon in 1806 - no mention of Prussia at all until 1815.

You skate over the plebiscite that gave Napoleon the position of Consul for life by 3,000,0000 votes to 8,000. Why did you not mention that no other country in Europe had any elections whatsoever? The most glaring error in your film was that there was not one mention of divine right believed in by all the monarchs of the period. They believed their right to rule came from God himself! THAT is why they were fighting Napoleon and constantly attacking him. The last thing they wanted was for the French to have a Republic (like the one those French officers helped bequeath to you Americans).

You did not mention that Austria ATTACKED Napoleon again in 1809, thinking that he was preoccupied in Spain. You do not say a single word about Spain - another glaring omission.

Talleyrand virtually handed Paris over to the Allies in 1814. Napoleon lost power in 1814 because he was betrayed. He was not defeated militarily, and he was not technically a 'prisoner'. He voluntarily gave up the throne after several of his Marshals betrayed him as well, notably Marmont, the Duke of Raguser. That very word in French today means traitor.

When Napoleon landed in France, you rightly say it was a 'gamble' but you made little mention of the sheer elation felt by millions of French people at his return. Louis XVIII was loathed by the French - and unlike Napoleon, nobody had ever voted for him.

You say the Allies flocked to Belgium - palpable nonsense. Only the Anglo-Dutch-German and Prussian armies where anywhere near the crucial fighting zone. The reason Napoleon attacked was precisely because he hoped to defeat these two armies in turn before any other of the divine right monarchist armies could enter the fray.

Why did you not mention the fact that the first thing Napoleon did on his arrival in Paris in 1815 was to write to the Prince Regent in England and the other Allies requesting peace? Were you trying to blacken his name on purpose? He wanted peace - he needed peace. France was a basket case under the Bourbons - they who learnt nothing and forgot nothing.

You then make a terrible conflation of two battles. You go on about Ney and the cavalry and then talk of Marshal Grouchy going after the Prussians. Hopeless! In fact, despite having a hangover on the day of Quatre Bras, and being slow to get his men to the vital crossroads, Ney held his own. Wellington was lucky that one of his commanders disobeyed a direct order and reinforced Quatre Bras with Allied troops. Wellington hadn't a clue what was going on until the fighting for the crossroads was well underway, and then he had the sense to reinforce those men established there in contravention to his earlier direct order.

You stated several times that Napoleon hoped to re-establish his Empire when he returned to France in 1815. The fact is he was fighting for his very survival having been proscribed by the Allies at the Congress of Vienna. He had no other option than to fight because they were going to ATTACK him. This international proscription was illegal even in 1815 and Wellington later had the grace to say it should not have been done.

You state that Napoleon was the 'cause' of six million dead in battle. That is demonstrably a lie. As I have detailed above. MOST of the time, he was the one attacked!

Your utterly biased, prejudiced and one-sided character assassination is unworthy of the National Geographic. It plays like a rather evil Walt Disney production - bearing little reality to what actually happened during those momentous years. You ought to be ashamed of this 'programme' of defamation. It is an utterly appalling waste of the money given in magazine subscriptions by people such as I. Shame on you!

P.S. I have read nearly two hundred books about Napoleon and yet I have never come across any of your 'contributors' in the thirty-five years that I have been researching the period.

Yours sincerely,

John Tarttelin (M.A History) Sheffield, England. FINS.

A Souladream Production

THE BBC Propaganda Website: NAPOLEON VERSUS EUROPE

2015-06-18T22:10:00.000+01:00

Napoleon at Toulon by Detaille

There are lies, damned lies - and the BBC website. This supposed bastion of truth and knowledge makes Goebbels look like an amateur. This is its take on Napoleon. The piece is entitled Napoleon versus Europe as if to state by definition that all of Europe was against Napoleon and all of Europe disagreed with him. It then goes on:

'To understand Waterloo, it's important to know Napoleon had

been trying to establish a European empire under his military dictatorship since 1804.'

Obviously, no hint of any bias there whatsoever.

'The British defeated him at Trafalgar in 1805, but Napoleon went on to invade

countries across Europe before being forced to abdicate. He returned to Paris in

March 1815, prompting Britain, Prussia, Russia and Austria to declare war.'

So says the BBC in its sacred scrolls. Oh, so it must be true then...

Above is a picture of a young Napoleon at Toulon. The British Navy had been invited into harbour by Royalist rebels. After all, the British would not have minded if the French navy invaded Portsmouth would they? Napoleon personally placed the French guns under intense fire and braved the hazards his men faced - unlike the British politicians who repeatedly paid for Austrian and Russian soldiers to attack France. The British paid - the foreigners died. The British Navy had no right to be in French waters - but then the navy of his Britannic Majesty arrogantly believed that even a duckpond should be served by a British vessel.

It was this consummate arrogance that led the Americans to declare war in 1812. The British impressed American sailors claiming they were still really 'British' despite the American Revolution. Incidently, at the battle of New Orleans on January 8th 1815, the same year as Waterloo, his Majesty's forces were utterly destoyed by Andrew Jackson and his "dirty shirts" - 2,000 redcoats killed for only seven American dead and six wounded. Why was I never taught this in my English grammar school? I wonder if this battle is covered on the BBC website... It was a victory on a par with Waterloo which the British try to pretend never happened.

As the English historian Walter Runciman has said, when the British Government rejected Napoleon's peace feelers in early 1805 - we had no cause to insult him treat him like an imposter and an inferior which is what we did. Runciman believes that had we treated with Napoleon honestly there need never have been war between the two countries.

But it was war that the British wanted. Pitt and his ilk could never accept the French Revolution. What - equal rights for the common people? Heaven forfend! So hierarchical was British Society, they could have taught the Indian caste system a thing or two. The Royal Family were literally a breed apart - like the Bourbons they believed God had put them in their illustrious stations and sanctioned their every utterance with gospel-like authority. This First Family consisted of a stammering nutter and a sex-crazed obese drunk and opium addict who believed he had fought at Waterloo himself. Like father - like son... 'Prinny' was a sexually incontinent imbecile who thought he was the bees' knees. God help poor Britannia!

So strict were the social conventions of the day that when Nelson wanted to sport Lady Hamilton on his one good arm at posh parties, the aristocratic toffs would have none of it. This pissed Nelson off no end. Nelson callously ignored his wife just like that other 'hero' Wellington, who treated his wife abominably. His descendant Lady Jane Welesley has said he was : 'A bad husband and an inadequate father.' At their only ever meeting, Wellington was shocked to discover that Nelson thought even more of himself than the Duke did of himself! Wellington was a snob, who treated his inferiors badly and sucked up to his superiors. No wonder he called his men 'scum'. They fought heroically for him and admired him as a general, but they didn't love him as Napoleon's soldiers loved him. In Tim Clayton's book Waterloo there are many accounts of British surgeons amputating the limbs of French soldiers who subsequently died with Napoleon's name upon their lips. The word 'Emperor' was often the very last breathed by many a French soldier.

But none of this is on the BBC website...

To return to the gospel according to the BBC - and Napoleon versus Europe - the British and French had been fighting each other for decades - long before Napoleon was born. Without French help, the Americans would never had gained their independence, a temporary mastery of the sea by the French Navy being particularly helpful. The French under Louis XVI bankrupted their nation to free the Colonists from British bondage. And incidently, Napoleon's 'right arm' Berthier got experience of warfare fighting in America.

Napoleon wanted to recreate France as a great nation. His Code Napoleon; his forming of the Bank of France; his Civil Code; his Concordat with the papacy; and his reorganization of the French school sytem were laudable achievements which benefited all of France. What did the aristocratic elite in London ever do for the common British man or woman? If the common man dared to ask for more bread, or for increased wages, or if they dared to question the God-Almighty Government, they risked a hanging or being transported to Australia for life. So cruel was this British 'system' that a Unitarian minister was exiled to Australia just for proof reading a protest banner!

But that isn't on the BBC website either...

Today's Times newspaper has a leader that oozes this unctious sense of pride and self-importance. It is an Orwellian: 'British good - Napoleon bad.' And the irony is that it was the poor Englishman who was labouring under the cosh of Big Brother Aristocrats and the 'Prinny' police state.

... No, it's not even worth looking...

The blessed BBC would have us believe that Napoleon was red in tooth and claw and that he was a Corsican bandit who certainly wouldn't be allowed at those high class royal parties. They state that he had 'his military dictatorship since 1804.' What they don't say is that there were so many assassination attempts upon his life, organised by the hideous Comte D'Artois (Mon-sewer) and paid for by the British, that he felt constrianed to make himself Emperor and see to his succession for the benefit of France. As Cadoudal said, after his failed plot on Napoleon's life - they had tried to kill a First Consul and had made an Emperor instead. So merciful was Napoleon, that he even invited Cadoudal to join his army as an officer. Similarly, Napoleon allowed the exiled French nobles to return to France.

The BBC website states that: 'The British defeated him at Trafalgar.' Napoleon wasn't at the Battle of Trafalgar - does the BBC realize this was a sea battle? In fact, Napoleon had given up on his cowardly naval commander Villeneuve and ordered him to sail to Naples. Only when he heard he had been sacked by Napoleon did he take the combined fleet out to sea. And despite all the British mythology about the 'Nelson touch' - Villeneuve predicted that Nelson would try to split the French and Spanish navies in the exact way he did.

The British Navy bombarded neutral Copenhagen in 1807 and murdered 2,000 innocent Danish men, women and children. This was the first time that weapons of mass destruction - aka Congreve rockets - were used on a civilian population. I wasn't taught this at grammar school either. Neither was I taught that the British invented concentration camps during the Boer War and had a great victory starving Boer women and children to death. Even Kaiser Wilhelm complained about this despicable way of making war. But where British history is concerned so often it is a case of: Might equals Right. The British ruled the waves and waived the rules. Time after time. We have our heroes - like Churchill's favourite Alfred the Great. We don't need to look for them in the dregs of aristocratic society in London at the time of Prinny and his gang.

The British reneged on the Treaty of Amiens by refusing to leave Malta. They then confiscated all French vessels without a declaration of war. This is commonly known as 'British fair play.' They then paid Austria and Russia to attack France - their own people safe across the Channel and behind that wooden fortress the British Navy. Pitt died after he heard the news of Austerlitz - it was the best thing he ever did. He had been trying to drink himself to death for years, as well as taxing the native population to within an inch of their lives. Pitt's epitaph? Any port in a storm... and lots of it.

What a bounder that chap Napoleon was - he kept defeating those Coalitions that attacked him! He was, in fact, far too trusting - whether it concerned his notorious brothers and sisters - or his dubious friends and allies like the starry-eyed mystic patricidal incestous Tsar Alexander of Russia. 'If I was a woman, I'd be his mistress,' Napoleon joked, taken in by the naive Russian blond bombshell. In the end (where else...) he was well and truly screwed by Alexander. Russia was a primitive country reliant on Gogol's Dead Souls - the poor peasants. Peasant soldiers never expected to see their families again. Prussia also had serfs. That wicked Napoleon abolished serfdom in all the territories he controlled. Wasn't that just too much!

Ah the BBC... Like all licence payers, I have to pay £145-50 a year to receive their pearls of wisdom. Why do they have to lie and deceive and misinform - with my money?!

Napoleon was the greatest man of the C19th as Goethe said. He deserves to be Heine's hero. He was Hazlitt's hero too - and Byron's. He touched the hearts and souls of millions and benefitted common humanity with his enlightened rule and policies. After Waterloo came the Reaction when the Undead Aristocrats from all across Europe rose again like an army of rapacious zombies - feeding off the corpses of the common man. Come back Napoleon - all is forgiven!

C. JohnTarttelin 2015

A Souladream Production

PROTEST LETTER T0 THE TIMES - THEIR VERY BIASED WATERLOO LEADER

2015-06-18T19:36:00.002+01:00

-->

Napoleon grants freedom to the Jews

POX BRITANNICA

Dear Sir,

I have just read your puerile, jingoistic and highly inaccurate view of the Battle of Waterloo and its legacy. Such trite revisionism cannot go unchallenged. As you yourself say: ‘The Times of 1815 was highly partisan’ – so are you. As you yourself say: ‘the Times of 1815 observed no very clear distinction between news and comment’ – neither do you.

You laud the tiny fraction of English soldiers at this battle as if they saved the world – hence your Pax Britannica. Your lack of historical context is breathtaking. Who are the office boys who compiled and wrote your inane tub-thumping twaddle?

Firstly, the much vaunted grail of Hougoumont. You blow it up out of all proportion to its true importance on June 18th 1815. Napoleon’s initial plan was basically to ‘fix ‘ Hougoumont on his left with a decoy attack so that Wellington would not run again as he had after Quatre Bras. The first French attack was made by d’Erlon’s Corps on the Allied Centre. (D’Erlon’s 20,000 men had marched between Quatre Bras and Ligny on June 16th without fighting at either battle - in a real sense losing the whole Campaign for Napoleon that very same day. Even so, 65,000 French defeated 80,000 Prussians at Ligny.)

D’Erlon’s attack was repulsed by British cavalry acting without direct orders from Wellington. However, the ill-trained riders galloped on regardless until their horses were blown and they were virtually annihilated. By now, the massive French artillery barrage was causing havoc amongst the Allied lines on the ridge at Mont St. Jean.

Hougoumont on the French left was meant to be a decoy. As Tim Clayton shows in his book Waterloo, all the French had to do was bottle-up the troops in Hougoumont and this they could have done merely by manning the woods in front of the farm complex without attacking. French bravado and Jerome Bonaparte’s misplaced zeal led to hundreds of French troops being drawn into an unnecessary conflict.

Have any of your staff actually read anything bout the Battle?

Secondly, the Prussians were not latecomers to the field. Clayton’s Chapter 4 (p. 378) is entitled The Prussians Detected Rossomme, 12-30-2p.m. And Chapter 61 (p. 465) is entitled Lobau and the Prussians Eastern flank 4.30-5.30p.m. By five o’clock, Wellington’s Army, left and centre, had been decimated, the French artillery in particular wreaking havoc. This was Napoleon’s chance. Clayton states (p. 465 ): ‘While the cavalry charged, 7000 fresh infantry commanded by George Mouton, comte de Lobau, were advancing to deliver the knockout blow east of La Haye Sainte.’ (Proving Hougoumont was a sideshow.)

It was the pressure exerted by Bülow’s Prussians in the French right rear at Plancenoit that led to Lobau’s men being reassigned positions to the right of the French Army to repulse this new threat. All Napoleon’s reserves, including some of the Young Guard and the Old Guard were used up fighting the Prussians. The late attack by the Middle Guard on the British at 7-30 was also reduced as a result: ‘the Old Guard consisting of fifteen battalions, five of which were engaged or drawn up in support near Plancenoit. There remained therefore only ten battalions for a strike force, fewer than 6000 men.’ (P.530). Hence the importance of the early arrival of the Prussians to the Battle.

Thirdly, the legacy of Waterloo. You state Waterloo was: ‘the triumph of the nation state over autocracy as the natural focus of the citizens’ allegiance. It is a triumph that has endured ever since…’ Napoleon returned from Elba without a shot being fired or a drop of blood having been spilt, and resumed power. He was much more popular than Louis XVIII who had returned to Paris ‘in the baggage train of the Allies.’ What right had Wellington and Blücher to impose an unwanted King on the French people? Absolutely none! The Allies denied the French people the leader of their choice.

It is seldom mentioned that the Bourbons refused to pay Napoleon the two million francs agreed by treaty for the upkeep of his staff and small army at Elba. They didn’t pay his sister Pauline the 300,000 francs she was entitled to or the other monies supposed to go to the wider Bonaparte family. As Walter Runciman has said, Napoleon repeatedly spared the lives of the defeated sovereigns who grovelled at his feet and who had attacked him in the first place, financed by the British. He could easily have disposed of them. They had no such sense of honour and mercy. Francis of Austria even denied Napoleon access to his wife and child in Elba. Napoleon was never to see his son again.

Napoleon was an enlightened ruler who was far more popular than the useless and discredited monarchs of the day. Tsar Alexander acquiesced in the murder of his own father, and slept with his sister Catherine. George III was mad, and when he wasn’t he was so pig-headed and reluctant to compromise that he lost the American Colonies. The Prince Regent was a drunk opium addict who squandered tens of millions on his own pleasure at a time when ordinary people were in dire want. Russia and Prussia still had serfdom, in effect slavery, which Napoleon outlawed in his empire.

Napoleon believed in religious toleration. Jews had equal rights in his territories. After Waterloo Jews were again persecuted, especially in Russia and Germany – and we know what that led to. To Heine, the great German Jewish poet and writer, Napoleon was his hero. The internationally renowned German author Goethe thought that Napoleon was the greatest man of the C19th.

Napier, in his history of the Peninsula War, begins by saying that the Wars Against Napoleon were the result of privilege – the nobles and Kings fought against France and then Napoleon to defend the rights entrenched in the old feudal systems that still prevailed in most of monarchical Europe. The French Revolution cast a dark shadow over the Continent as far as they were concerned and Napoleon embodied the revolutionary changes. No wonder they had a pathological hatred for him – he was also a much better ruler that they were.

In 1815 Britain had a virtual caste system like India – a country we invaded and then milked for profit for centuries. Wellington’s older brother was an expert at this. Napier laments the fact that however brave, no ordinary British soldier would be given credit for his heroic actions under fire. Only officers got medals. And no Catholic could be a General in the British Army. Most ranks were bought. Compare that with Napoleon’s Army – nearly all his Marshals were of humble birth. Anyone, through talent, bravery or hard work could earn a Legion of Honour under the Emperor. All had equal opportunity – it was a meritocracy, unlike oligarchic autocratic aristocratic England.

Napoleon was far more tolerant and forgiving than the merciless Allies. After Cadoudal tried to murder him – in a plot sanctioned by the British Cabinet and paid for by the Bank of England – Napoleon offered him a commission in the French Army! Despite all the assassination plots upon his life financed by Pitt and the British Cabinet, Napoleon refused to respond in kind. He was far more noble than the self-serving, self-satisfied, self-seeking creatures in charge of politics in Britain. This was a time when the poor were crippled by forced land removals sanctioned by the Enclosure Acts and the criminal Highland Clearances: a time when the leaders of starving strikers and the destitute were hanged as revolutionaries and rebels or transported to Australia for life. One clergyman was transported for merely proof reading a protest letter.

In 1819 at Peterloo fields peaceful protesters gathered to discuss the way this country was governed. Alarmed local magistrates sent in the militia who sabred and butchered men, women and children who were no threat to anybody. Castlereagh lauded the magistrates with praise in Parliament. Wellington likewise believed in keeping the people down and he became a very reactionary Prime Minister. Ironically, as Clayton mentions, a surviving Waterloo soldier died at Peterloo! A victim of the times – an unknown victim to The Times – then and now.

England in 1815 was mired in poverty and inequality and real class warfare. To the powers-that-be the poor were by definition - revolting. No wonder that Hazlitt and Byron and many other Englishmen preferred Napoleon to the rapacious heartless oligarchs in London.

So – the Times may not be a-changing – but the drivel it writes will be answered by those in the know. The Tabloid Times of 2015 is little better than the gutter press of 1815. It persists in uttering unmitigated tosh in the guise of English history. A pox be upon it!

John Tarttelin M.A. History; Fellow of the international Napoleonic Society, (Legion of Merit); author of The Real Napoleon – The Untold Story.

A Souladream Production

WATERLOO by Tim Clayton

2015-06-15T15:10:00.000+01:00

I have just finished Tim Clayton's book which I much enjoyed. His narrative is fast paced and fair to all sides. In fact, he shows just how little Wellington deserves sole praise and the massive accolades given to him over the years by British writers for 'his' victory. Clayton says there were 26,000 English in Wellington's army and 30,000 Germans. And 45,000 Prussians fought at the battle. It was a battle 'the Germans won'. Basically, Wellington and the Allies hung on by the skin of their teeth and the smoke and confusion of battle was such that Wellington really did not know what was happening a lot of the time, especially on his weak left wing where he hoped and expected the Prussians to arrive. The losses that the British Army suffered at Quatre Bras meant that he did not really have much option but to hold on as best he could. He deserves credit for the foresight in having chosen the field at Mont St. Jean to fight a defensive battle and for his fortitude on the day - although the quote that he was in such despair before the Prussians attacked in force that he had tears in his eyes was interesting.
   The Prussians were beaten at Ligny - 65,000 French against 80,000 Prussians! Had D'Erlon's 20,000 men fought at either Quatre Bras or Ligny there would have been no Waterloo. And had Blucher, unhorsed and feared lost on June 16th, not had such an inveterate hatred of Napoleon and the French, Gneisenau would had led the Prussian army away from the British not towards them after Ligny. When the Prussians began arriving in force on the afternoon of June 18th Lobau's men and others who were preparing to attack the weakened Allied left and centre, were diverted and the day was 'saved' hours before the battle actually ended.
   Clayton pays due attention to the terrible weather - what he does not know was that the eruption of Tambora in April 1815 was very likely the reason for the very unusual weather that summer. It also led to the year 'without a summer' in 1816 when the weather was so atrocious that Mary Shelley, Byron et al were stuck indoors and decided to tell each other ghost stories - Frankenstein was the result.
   I was pleased to see that Clayton absolves Napoleon of the accusation that he lied to his own men when the Prussians attacked, saying it was Grouchy. Napoleon, he states, wanted and needed the 'new arrivals' to be Grouchy so much that he was only too pleased to latch onto his own hope. The author quotes several pro-Napoleonic British soldiers and surgeons etc, who say that the Bourbon restoration was hated by the French people and that Louis XVIII was only restored by British bayonets. However, Clayton also says: "Most Frenchmen were heartily sick of Bonaparte after Waterloo," mentioning a cartoon printed in August 1815 as proof - a cartoon published to please the Bourbons obviously. I think it safe to say that most Frenchmen and women preferred Napoleon to old Bungy!
   He mentions too, that the treaty of capitulation negotiated by Davout after Waterloo was ignored by the Bourbons who instituted The White Terror - and that Wellington lamely said that the treaty: "was not binding on the new royalist government." In fact, Lord Liverpool insisted that the French persecute former Bonapartists and many were murdered without trial.
   Above all, this book shows how sheer luck can have such an important affect on the affairs of men. Waterloo was not the great British 'victory' acclaimed over the years. So weak and decimated were the British and the Allies at the end of the battle that only the Prussians could pursue the retreating French. Clayton even infers that Wellington lost more men than Napoleon on the battlefield on June 18th.
   Napoleon never wanted to fight this campaign and having marched to Paris earlier that year without a shot being fired, and enthusiastically welcomed back by most Frenchmen, he should have been allowed to govern France accordingly. But the privileged European aristocratic elites who were still terrified by the Revolution were never going to allow that. And as an ironic footnote - at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, when ordinary people were attacked by the militia for merely discussing how their own country should be governed, a Waterloo veteran was killed by his own British cavalry. They can't blame Napoleon for that...
   Well deserving of four stars.

C. John Tarttelin 2015

A Souladream Production

THE NAPOLEONIC WARS - REVIEW

2015-05-30T12:24:00.000+01:00

One of the worst books I have ever read - biased, bigoted and totally one-sided. According to Holmes, Napoleon was responsible for everything, even Prussia's attack on France in 1806 and the American war with England in 1812. He writes as a pseudo-historian of the Esdaille stripe with 'hater of Napoleon' stamped through every one of his inaccurate historical vignettes. To him and his ilk who class Napoleon as inherently evil and Great Britain as the font of all justice and mercy, there can be precious few redeeming features for the French Emperor. I read it in one day - all the better to swallow the unpalatable tosh it contains and get it over with. What a massive disappointment this book is. His mistakes are legion - he even describes the Battle of Waterloo as being fought at 1-30 a.m and 6.00 a.m on page 145! This book hasn't even been proof read!

He talks of Nelson being made a duke by the King of Naples for his recapture of the territory without the merest mention of that one-armed bandit's murder of dozens of so-called rebels in Naples in 1798 who had surrendered in expectation of being shipped home. Nelson turned up after the surrender had been arranged and took it upon himself to execute the prisoners instead. No one knows how many he killed because the King had relevant papers burnt. Holmes mentions the Cadoudal plot without any reference to the British gold that financed it - one of many attempts on Napoleon's life financed by London even during the Peace of Amiens!

He concludes his diatribe and character assassination with: "We too easily forget his overweening egotism and his shocking cynicism, his destructive wars and vain conquests..." having titled one passage "The 100 days: Return And Attack". There is no mention of the fact that Napoleon returned to Paris in 1815 without a drop of blood being spilt; that he was much more popular than the useless Bourbons; and that he personal wrote to all the European leaders requesting peace - letters that were ignored by the reactionary elites who proscribed him as a villain deserving of being murdered only. Oh what peace lovers were these Coalition members!

Napoleon had sought peace with England in early 1805 long before Trafalgar and long before the British bribes that coaxed Austria and Russia to attack France. Britain instigated most of the so-called 'Napoleonic Wars'. Britain massacred 2,000 Danes, men, women and children, as they slept in Copenhagen when their navy bombarded this neutral country without a declaration of war in 1807 just in case Napoleon siezed the Danish navy before they did.

The policy of the corrupt warmongering British Cabinet was usually to pay other countries to do their dirty work for them. As Colonel John Elting has written - without British gold there could have been no European wars because Austria and Russia were basically bankrupt. Napoleon was attacked in 1805, 1806, 1807, and 1809, and only after his letters of peace were ignored in 1815 did he very reluctantly go to war. As an Englishman and historian myself, I despise fellow so-called historians who lie and misrepresent what REALLY happened merely to put their own nation or their own national heroes in the best light. In colloquial parlance - this book sucks.

C. 2015 John Tarttelin

A Souladream Production

HOME TRUTHS ABOUT NAPOLEON

2014-10-28T15:44:00.002+00:00

Eastlake – Napoleon on the Bellerophon

HOME TRUTHS ABOUT NAPOLEON

For Ben Weider – in fond memory

JOHN TARTTELIN FINS – Legion of Merit

‘It was the infatuate resistance that England made from the beginning to Napoleon that raised him to the mighty pitch of power he attained. No sooner were the foreign powers humbled and exhausted by the arm of his power, than fresh out-pourings of our gold stimulated them to new resistance.’1

As the two hundreth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo rapidly approaches we can expect the usual vitriolic attacks upon Napoleon and misrepresentations of his achievements and legacy, especially here in Britain. One book published recently calls him a ‘monster’. Such language belongs to fairy stories and whenever a supposed historian uses such terminology he is undermining his own work by exhibiting naked and nationalistic prejudice of the most blatant kind.

I have news for such writers. Not only are they often wrong in terms of historical fact, people were saying the exact opposite long before they were even born. George Home was one such person. A British sailor who actually fought against the French, Home was a midshipman on the Bellerophon when Napoleon sought asylum upon the vessel after Waterloo. He met Napoleon in person and therefore his words and views count for much more than the splenetic utterances of latter day historians who have obviously not done their Home work.

George Home was born on December 8th 1794 in a poverty stricken cottage lost amidst the wild moors of Scotland and was lucky to survive his first winter. His humble origins belie the fact that his father was ‘the heir-male and representative of one of the most ancient families in the annals of Border history.’2 Hence George entitled his life story Memoirs Of An Aristocrat And Reminiscences of the Emperor Napoleon.3 Throughout his life he would try in vain to regain his noble title in a Dickensian legal battle with another branch of his family.

Listening to the stories told by his half-blind father – the old Commodore – of ‘the swarthy beauties of Tongataboo’4 and his circumnavigation of the globe with Captain Cook must have fired the boy’s imagination. Indeed, the Commodore had been with the great explorer when he was killed at Owyhee (Hawaii) and had a host of tales from that intrepid voyage alone. So it comes as no surprise that George decided to go to sea himself.

Born a Scot, Home fought for England against a Corsican who had become the Emperor of France. But unlike many of his fellow sailors, George would get to meet Napoleon in person and spend three weeks with him aboard the Bellerophon in 1815. It was a topsy-turvy time of changing allegiances and swapping sides for countries and individuals. The young Napoleon had even applied to join the British Navy! Many professional soldiers and sailors fought for nations that were not their own. The Captain of the Bellerophon, Maitland, was also a Scot, while the brutal captain of Home’s previous vessel had been Irish: ‘a more pestilential pigmy, and engrained petty tyrant never trode a quarter-deck.’5 Well might Churchill encapsulate the British Navy with the phrase ‘rum, sodomy and the lash.’ It was a harsh environment where many men were pressed into service much against their will. Although the British Admiralty might claim that they were fighting for the freedom of the seas, many of their own vessels were full of pressed men, little more than slaves forbidden to set foot ashore for months, or even years on end, in case they ‘deserted’.

Despite such a background, George Home was a thoughtful and humane man who could clearly see the big picture. His empathy for Napoleon and his psychological awareness of the history being made around him makes for a remarkable account by an exceedingly perceptive eyewitness. Meeting Napoleon in the flesh was obviously the greatest event in his life: ‘How distinct is every feature, every trait, every line of that majestic countenance in my mind’s eye at this moment, now that two-and-twenty years have passed away: but who could witness such a scene and ever forget it.’6 Home wrote his memoir in 1838.

It is worth repeating, that George Home had fought against Napoleon and was his enemy. All he would have heard from his superiors would have been negative and hostile references to the Emperor of France. Yet he describes how, on the Bellerophon: ‘us young gentlemen took up our station on the poop to feast our eyes with a sight of the great man whose name had been sounded in our ears since we drew our first breath, and become, like a second nature to us, - a name of fear.’7

In his Napoleon’s Wars (sic), Charles Esdaile mentions none of the following historians and military men in either his index or bibliography: Bourgogne; Home; Maitland; Napier; Runciman; or a single line from any of the many books by Ben Weider. Of sources in general, the great American historian Colonel John Elting states at the opening of his bibliography in Swords Around A Throne : ‘In preparing this book I have used original sources whenever possible but have ignored the alleged memoirs of Louis Bourrienne, Paul Barras, Clare de Remusat, Laure Permon, and Miot de Melito, which are mendacious and worthless.’8 In contrast, Esdaile quotes Bourrienne eight times; Barras six; Remusat seven; Permon five times; and Miot de Melito twice.9 One is tempted to see a pattern here. It is strange how sources generally accepted to be more favorable to Napoleon are never even alluded to, yet alone quoted from. And Esdaile does not mention Colonel John Elting either…

What George Home wrote in 1838 drives a coach and horses through Esdaile’s contrived thesis. And let us remember, Home was there, he was not writing nearly two hundred years after the events in question. He literally knew what he was talking about, having lived through it and experienced it. Home is an excellent primary source on Napoleonic history. As an enemy of Napoleon his testament is even more revealing.

Home also warns us about Bourrienne: ‘No one who has lifted the pen has done anything like justice to the French Emperor save Bourrienne, and even he is often carried away by prejudice and envy.’10 He goes on to explain why he is not to be trusted. Napoleon’s ‘old school-fellow and worthy secretary was troubled with a small itching for the pecunia, which sometimes overran discretion and exceeded the bounds prescribed by the economical Napoleon; and in one or two instances we find, by his own confession, though under the head of complaint, that he is very unceremoniously stripped of his ill-gotten gains by his lynx-eyed schoolmate of Brienne…’11 Yet Esdaile appears to trust his doubtful scribblings and believes what he says.

Similarly, Home warns us about Sir Walter Scott, the famous novelist in regard to his biography of Napoleon: ‘really from him I expected something good; but it proved a complete failure… Sir Walter Scott has too much of the old school about him, and too much of the politician, I mean that petty policy, a fear of offending the powers that be… to do justice to the character of Napoleon.’ And Home adds: ‘The proper historian of that wonderful man is probably still unborn.’12

Home’s description of Napoleon’s arrival on the Bellerophon mark the situation and the man as something truly exceptional: ‘when Admiral Hotham and the officers of the Bellerophon uncovered in the presence of Napoleon, they treated him with the respect due to the man himself, to his innate greatness, which did not lie in the crown of France, or the iron crown of Italy, but the actual superiority of the man to the rest of his species.’13 From the moment he appeared on the deck of the Billy Ruffian, Napoleon electrified the whole crew, all the officers and especially the men.

From the very start, George Home had a great deal of sympathy for the fallen Emperor’s plight: ‘Most certainly, had he once imagined that we were capable of treating him the way we did, he would surely have made a desperate effort for personal liberty; but such a thought, I am convinced, never struck him. We had never before refused the protection of our shores to a fallen foe, or to anyone who claimed our protection.’14

One of Home’s shipmates could barely contain himself as Napoleon’s barge approached the Bellerophon: ‘While in this state of eager anticipation, a young midshipman, one of the Bruce’s of Kennet, I think, walked very demurely up to Manning, the boatswain… (and) gently laid hold of one of his whiskers, to which the boatswain good-naturedly submitted, as the youngster was a great favourite with him. “Manning” says he, most sentimentally, “this is the proudest day of your life; you are this day to do the honours of this side to the greatest man the world ever produced, or ever will produce… and along with the great Napoleon, the name of Manning, the boatswain of the Bellerophon, will go down to the latest posterity; and, as a relict of that great man, permit me, my dear Manning, to preserve a lock of your hair”.’15

Grabbing a handful of his friend’s whiskers, the young midshipman ran off howling with laughter. Even in a jest, the common English sailor knew greatness when he saw it. Meanwhile, such an epoch making occasion was not even lost on the very youngest of the Bellerophon’s crew.

After initially being greeted as a general officer by Captain Maitland – and not with the full honours due to him in Home’s eye – Napoleon asked for a tour of the ship. As he followed the Captain: ‘a young middy who, boy-like, had got before the Emperor, and was gazing up in his face, he honoured with a tap on the head, and a pinch by the ear, and, smiling, put him to a side, which the youngster declared was the highest honour he had ever received in his life, viz. to have his ears pinched by the great Napoleon!!!’16

So overwhelming was the effect of the Emperor’s presence that, when he was invited aboard Admiral Hotham’s ship the Superb, a rumour swept the Bellerophon that Hotham’s men were going to have the honour of carrying Napoleon back to Blighty: ‘so that our man thought we would try the effect of our ten rounds upon the Superb, sooner than quit Boney; and so much alarmed was our ship’s company that this would really be attempted, that they came aft in a body to Captain Maitland, to state their intention of resisting by force any attempt of Admiral Hotham to detain the person of Napoleon…’17

And how many bigoted and biased British historians have told us that Napoleon was hated and loathed by everyone in England? Here were the men of one of His Majesty’s vessels so besotted with their new guest that they were tempted to fire on their own Admiral rather than give him up prematurely.

Furthermore, Home speaks at length on the underhand method of Napoleon’s capture in the first place and his admiration for: ‘the calm majesty of his deportment, through this most trying and truly tragic scene. I think, in saying tragic, I do not use an expression too strong. Castlereagh did not certainly imbrue his hands in the blood of Napoleon, but, beyond all question, the plot for his destruction was concerted between our minister and the Allies, even before this voluntary surrender, destined to commence on the deck of the Bellerophon, and to end on the scorching peak of St. Helena.’18

George Home knew in his heart of hearts, that this was not British justice nor was it so-called English fair play.

He had his own view of what should have happened that summer of 1815: ‘…Napoleon, instead of receiving that protection which it would have been the proudest page of our history to record, found a barren rock, a vertical sun, a tyrant of a governor, and a grave at Longwood.’19

Home also describes a telling incident that would certainly never appear in a book by Esdaile, Black, Nicolson, Geyl, Strawson, Fregosi, or the myriad other detractors of Napoleon. During the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon: ‘observed a young British officer lying on the ground severely wounded, and likely to be crushed to death by the cavalry. Upon which he ordered him to be carried to the rear and duly attended by his own medical staff. The young man’s life was saved; - the battle was lost…’20

The victim in question was a relative of Admiral Keith who, as fate would have it, became Napoleon’s jailor when the Bellerophon arrived at Plymouth. A letter of thanks from the Admiral to Napoleon led to Home asking some questions of the French party on board and thus he heard of this life-saving intervention. And if there was ever a riposte to those legions of ‘Napoleon-haters’, here it is in Home’s words: ‘Such an act as this, even in the plenitude of his power, when victory and his name seemed inseperable, would have redounded more to his praise than a battle won; but when one thinks of him exercising such acts of humanity, at a moment when his whole soul, great as it was, must have been absorbed in the death-struggle he was now in the midst of, where empire, name, fame, life, and liberty, hung on the slightest turn of the balance, I say, that no language can express the greatness and intrinsic humanity of that man’s character…’21

A Home truth indeed.

So next time you read how Napoleon supposedly covered the Continent in blood and never cared for the millions of individual soldiers who died, remember it was British gold that paid for those armies to attack him, and British politicians, safe across the Channel, who goaded their often reluctant allies to once more attack France. Yet, despite all that, here we have Napoleon himself, saving the life of a British soldier. Britannia should be hiding her face in shame.

Home was also impressed by Napoleon’s personal manner and his attitude to the crew in general: ‘Nothing seemed so much to surprise him as the slowness of promotion in our service, and that men from before the mast, or soldiers from the ranks, were rarely promoted, be their services what they might.’22 The last thing the so-called aristocratic elite in power in Britain wanted was promotion on merit or careers open to talent. Heaven forfend! Officers bought their rank and the common soldier was brutally flogged at the drop of a hat. Whereas in France such punishment had been banned. As Home well knew: ‘With the French army, it was totally different; the most of Napoleon’s officers had been private soldiers, and owed their promotion entirely to their own merit and bravery. In his army, as well as in every other department of the state, the door was open to the humblest individual and promotion certain if the person possessed integrity and courage. With us it has been notoriously the reverse…’23

As he studied Napoleon, Home felt that likenesses he had seen of the Emperor were accurate. He often put his hands in his breeches pocket rather than pose with his hands folded across his chest, or stood with one hand in his waistcoat while in the other his held his snuff-box. Accentuating the status of the Bellerophon’s guest even more Home adds: ‘But these are trifling matters, only worth recording of one man in a thousand years, and Napoleon being the most remarkable of the last four thousand, being thus particular in such trifles may be pardoned.’24

When introduced to the officers of the Billy Ruffian, Napoleon had bowed slightly and smiled at each of them. Similarly, he knew how to appeal to the common man. One of the lieutenants of the marines suggested a play to while away the time: ‘What the piece was I do not recall, but when it was announced to the Emperor, by Captain Maitland, and the immortal honour of his imperial presence begged, for a few minutes, he laughed very heartily, consented instantly… Napoleon and his whole suite attended. He was much amused with those who took the female parts… after good-naturedly sitting for nearly twenty minutes, he rose, smiled to the actors, and retired.’25 There was no divine right hauteur with Napoleon. Can anyone imagine Louis XVIII, D’Artois, or even Wellington, deigning to pass the time with ‘the scum of the earth’?

In one very moving passage, George Home shows both his sympathy and profound empathy with Napoleon. The occasion was the Emperor’s last sighting of Ushant – the very last glimpse of his beloved France. By sheer chance, Home had the morning watch: ‘I shall never forget that morning we made Ushant. I had come on deck at four in the morning… when, to my astonishment, I saw the Emperor come out of the cabin at that early hour, and make for the poop-ladder. Had I known what human misery is as well as I do now, when I have myself experienced the most cruel injustice and persecution on a lesser scale, the restlessness of Napoleon, or his being unable to close an eye, would have in no way surprised me. If a petty care can break our sleep, what must have been his feeling who had lost the fairest empire on the face of the globe; nay, who had lost a world?’26

Anxious for the illustrious passenger’s safety on the slippery newly washed deck, Home offered him his arm and helped Napoleon up the ladder to the poop deck: ‘nodding and smiling thanks, for my attention, and pointing to the land he said, “Ushant, Cape Ushant.” I replied, “yes, sire,” and withdrew.’27 Once again, how many royals or members of the privileged elite of any of the European powers would have thanked a mere commoner for anything?

Home could only imagine what Napoleon was thinking, but in his heartfelt sympathy he demonstrated a depth of humanity and feeling light years ahead of his ‘betters’ in London. Pocket-glass in hand, Napoleon stared at the shore, for hour, after hour, after hour: ‘In this position, he remained from five in the morning to nearly mid-day, without paying any attention to what was passing around him, or speaking to one of his suite, who had been standing behind him for several hours.’28

Home continues: ‘No wonder he thus gazed, it was the last look of the land of his glory, and I am convinced he felt it such. What must have been his feelings in those few hours, how painful the retrospect, and how awful the look forward! – there still lay before him that land which he had made so famous, where his proud name had risen until it “o’er-shadowed the earth with his fame;” there had he been worshipped almost as a god, and bowed to by every servile knee, that now, in the hour of bitter adversity, had basely deserted and betrayed him.’29

Napoleon had lost everything, his empire, all his power and influence, all those he had ever loved. They were gone forever, forever… It was enough to crush the soul of a stoic, yet Home admired the way Napoleon faced his fate. He said absolutely nothing: ‘his emotion was visible, he hung upon the land until it looked only a speck in the distance… He uttered not a word as he tottered down the poop ladder, his head hung forward, so as to render his countenance scarcely visible…’30

Yet, on his daily walks upon the quarter-deck: ‘when the five children of Lady Bertrand were sure to find their way to the Emperor’s side, and, by touching his hand or taking hold of the skirts of his coat, endeavoured to attract his attention, looking imploringly up at him to be honoured with a smile or a tap on the head; this was never denied the tiny supplicant

…’31

Napoleon had lost all his power and prestige, yet he had always had the time for a wounded British soldier or a simple child. So much for the puerile espousers of vitriol who called him an ‘ogre’; so much for Esdaile branding him the ‘ubiquitous brigand’; so much for Robert Harvey or Nigel Nicolson calling him a ‘monster’.32 So much tosh.

Such verbal chaff had been common currency for years back in Blighty as the British Establishment scythed through Napoleon’s reputation and achievements and denigrated him as a man and as a ruler in any way they could. The result was apparent to George Home when the Bellerophon docked at Torbay. Captain Maitland sent dispatches to Lord Keith via a first lieutenant who was conveyed to the shore by Home. Almost immediately the small boat was besieged by a bevy of young ladies who had heard that Napoleon was on the ship. This is the sort of nonsense he heard: ‘What like was he – was he really a man? Were his hands and clothes all over blood when he came on board?... Were we not all frightened of him? Was his voice like thunder? Could I possibly get them a sight of the monster…’33

Cartoons by Gilray depicting Napoleon as a malignant dwarf had also fed into the mix of slander and mockery flying in the Emperor’s direction. Home replied: ‘that the reports they had heard were all nonsense; that the Emperor was not only a man, but a very handsome man too; young withal, had no more blood upon his hands and clothes than was now upon their pure white dresses; that if by chance they got a look of him at the gangway, they would fall in love with him directly; that so far from his hands being red with blood, they were as small, white, and soft as their own charming fingers, and his voice, instead of resembling thunder, was as sweet and musical as their own. This account of the Emperor’s beauty perfectly astonished the recluses of Torbay; some misbelieved altogether, while the curiosity of others was excited beyond all bounds.’34

The most famous man on Earth was soon at Plymouth Sound, the Bellerophon riding at anchor. No wonder thousands of small vessels all crowded around the ship, their occupants eager to catch the merest glimpse of the fallen Emperor. Napoleon had become ‘Enemy Mine’ and everyone wanted a piece of him. Home speaks of ‘the enormous rush that was made from every part of the country to Plymouth Sound, to get a single glance of the hero of Marengo and Lodi Bridge, he must have conceived that he was as much admired by the English, as by his own beloved French. The Sound was literally covered with boats; the weather was delightful; the ladies looked as gay as butterflies; bands of music in several of the boats played favourite French airs, to attract, if possible, the Emperor’s attention, that they might get a sight of him, which, when effected, they went off, blessing themselves that they had been so fortunate.’35 A strange reception for a monster and an ogre that…

Then came the terrible news that the famous prisoner was to be banished to Saint Helena, a tiny speck of rock lost in the wilderness of the southern Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon was stunned and horrified. To rub salt into the wound, news came from the Admiralty saying that from henceforth he was to be addressed only as ‘general’ and not as Emperor. George Home was disgusted: ‘How ridiculous and contemptible was this conduct in or ministry. We had exchanged prisoners with him repeatedly as Emperor of France, and we had made peace with him as First Consul of the French Republic; but Castlereagh took his cue from the holy allies, who grudged him a mouthful of air, far less the title of Emperor…’36 He goes much further in denouncing the policy of his own government: ‘I never think of the proceedings which I then witnessed, without feeling my blood boil with indignation, and my face blushing crimson for my degraded country.’37 Home was as psychologically perceptive as ever: ‘Then why display such a mean fear of him, for our very cruelty bespoke our terror.’38

Home compares Napoleon with Socrates: ‘both done to death by petty tyrants who feared and hated them.’39 Of England’s many wars with the French, he is equally forthright. In the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, Napoleon ‘lost the most numerous, best disciplined, best appointed, and most heroic army that ever the world witnessed, in the trackless regions of the frozen north. His invincible courage and perseverance, however, had re-assembled a second army, nearly as numerous as the first… even with those green troops, so mighty was the genius of the man, and so terrible his name, even in adversity, that the scales hung long nearly equally balanced between him and combined Europe.’40 And when France was invaded in 1814: ‘Still, I think, at that moment, Napoleon appeared greater than at any former period of his unparalleled career… Treachery, however, did what numbers could not effect.’41

Home is scathing about the resultant peace and of how ‘most beneficial it might have been to this country, had the conclusion of the treaty fallen into the hands of a man of sense, or in his senses, or one who had the good of his country at heart; but Castlereagh sacrificed the best interests of the nation to a vain feeling of disinterested glory, instead if making those continental despots, into whose countries we had been pouring our money, as if our hordes were inexhaustible, for the previous twenty years, relinquish their mercantile advantages to us, who had saved them from destruction…’42 He calls it ‘a useless and unprofitable war, which, but for the catastrophe of Napoleon’s grand army in Russia, must have terminated in the complete subjugation of Europe to the French yoke and the downfall of this country.’43

Notwithstanding his admiration for Napoleon, George Home was a patriot.

He further decries all the poverty and misery suffered by the British people after the war ended as the country was virtually bankrupt after all the colossal subsidies it had given to its continental allies.

Of Napoleon’s final campaign in 1815 Home says: ‘Thus, not unprepared for war, he asked for peace, which was indignantly rejected, and, of course, he had nothing for it but to submit his fate to the chance of arms, which ended in a wanton sacrifice of the lives of fifty thousand of the flower of Europe.’44 Yes, Esdaile, Black, Nicolson et al – Home blames the British Government for this unnecessary bout of renewed carnage.

To Home, Napoleon’s legacy is obvious: ‘ He shewed us what one little human creature like ourselves could accomplish in a span so short. The fire of his intellect communicated like electricity to all around him and while under its influence, men performed actions quite beyond themselves.’45

When Napoleon left the Bellerophon: ‘Here, indeed, was adversity, and here was true greatness struggling against it; but to a mere mortal it was a heart-rending scene.’46 When the moment came for the Emperor to disembark, it was a scene much more dramatic than any of Shakespeare’s plays: ‘What a horrid gloom overhung the ship: had his execution been about to take place there could not have prevailed a more dead silence, so much so, that had a pin fallen from one of the tops on the deck, I am convinced it would have been heard; and to any one who has known the general buz of our seventy-fours, even at the quietest hour, it is a proof how deeply the attention of every man on board must have been riveted.’47

Quoting Gibbon, Home says: ‘when a nation loses its generosity, it is a proof of its being on the decline,’48 and adds: ‘we must only attribute the barbarous treatment of Napoleon to the vile faction by which the country was then governed, and not the absolute degradation of principle in the nation at large.’49 Home continues: ‘It will, however, be a vile stain upon our name to the latest ages; and the more the character of Napoleon gains its true place in the page of history, the more dastardly will appear our conduct. Could only Castlereagh and the Holy Allies feel the odium of indignant posterity, it would be well; but it is England, upon England will the odium fall…’50

Thus does a true patriot describe the treatment of his Great Enemy.

Home struggles to understand how ‘England’s great name was so degraded,’51 and how his own country could be so much in the wrong: ‘I have often asked what had we to do with the French and Napoleon. To drive him within his own frontier, I confess, our right extended, but no farther.’52 As for Napoleon’s return to France and the Hundred Days, Home describes how the French: ‘with shouts of love, almost amounting to adoration, they received in their bosom their glorious chief, covered with the laurels of a hundred victories…. But I still say, what had we to do with Napoleon and the French people? They hailed him to a man… yet nothing would serve England and the Allies, but they must depose Napoleon, and thrust a hated Bourbon upon France, even in the final struggle, at the expense of fifty thousands souls, the choicest in Europe.’53

There are few things more noble in life than to offer succour to a vanquished foe. George Home’s attitude and behaviour is eminently worthy of respect and praise. As a great Briton, I salute him. Home’s disgust and revulsion with the political posturing and flagrant warmongering of his own government is still ringing down the years. After apportioning blame, his conclusion regarding England’s wars against Napoleon is stark and unforgiving: ‘Our very resistance had made him the great man he became.’54 The very last thing that loathsome politicians like Castlereagh, Canning, Liverpool and Pitt wanted to do, was to give peace a chance.

A Souladream Production

Notes

1. Home George Memoirs Of An Aristocrat And Reminiscences of the Emperor Napoleon (London: Whittaker & Co., 1838) Republished by Forgotten Books 2012 www.forgottenbooks.org 257

2. Ibid. 3

3. He also adds: By A Midshipman of the Bellerophon

4. Ibid. 4

5. Ibid. 171

6. Ibid. 252

7. Ibid. 237

8. Elting Colonel John R. Swords Around A Throne (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989) 735

9. Esdaile Charles Napoleon’s Wars (London: Penguin Books Ltd 2007) He quotes :-

Barras, Paul de 27, 29, 33-7, 39, 49, 56

Bourrienne, Louis de 19-20, 28, 31, 55-6, 62, 93, 112, 192

Permon, Laure 22, 31, 57, 150, 152

Miot de Melito, André 50, 55-6

Rémusat, Claire de 63, 127, 129, 142, 192, 207, 358

10. Home op. cit. 220

11. Ibid. 221

12. Ibid. 223

13. Ibid. 226-227

14. Ibid. 212

15. Ibid. 218

16, Ibid. 225.

17. Ibid. 230

18. Ibid. 231

19. Ibid. 236

20. Ibid. 241-242

21. Ibid. 242

22. Ibid. 232

23. Ibid. 232

24. Ibid. 238

25. Ibid. 238-239

26. Ibid. 233

27. Ibid. 233

28. Ibid. 234

29. Ibid. 234

30 Ibid. 234-235

31. Ibid. 236

32. Esdaile describes him thus on the back cover of Michael Broers’ new book Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny. Robert Harvey and Nigel Nicolson call him a ‘monster’ in their books The War of Wars: The Great European conflict 1793-1815 and Napoleon 1812.

33. Home op. cit. 239

34. Ibid. 240

35. Ibid. 243

36. Ibid. 246

37. Ibid. 246

38, Ibid. 246

39. Ibid. 96

40. Ibid. 145-146

41. Ibid. 146

42. Ibid. 147

43. Ibid. 147

44. Ibid. 211

45. Ibid. 223

46. Ibid. 252

47. Ibid. 253

48. Ibid. 254

49. Ibid. 254

50. Ibid. 254

51. Ibid. 255

52. Ibid. 255

53. Ibid. 256

54. Ibid. 258

Bibliography

Elting Colonel John R. Swords Around A Throne (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989)

Esdaile Charles Napoleon’s Wars (London: Penguin Books Ltd 2007)

Home George Memoirs Of An Aristocrat And Reminiscences of the Emperor Napoleon (London: Whittaker & Co., 1838) Published by Forgotten Books 2012 www.forgottenbooks.org

A Must Read for all serious Napoleonic Scholars

ASSASSINATION AT ST. HELENA REVISITED - Book Review

2014-04-04T15:55:00.000+01:00

Book Review

Assassination At St. Helena Revisited

Ben Weider and Sten Forshufvud (1995)

A masterful account of one of the most nefarious deeds of the C19th. This book has all the gripping suspense of a Sherlock Holmes story, the mystery of an episode of CSI and the human interest of an episode of House.

Trapped on a tiny island, an isolated speck in the southern ocean, a man is befriended by someone who is intent on killing him - slowly. The tragic figure whose agonizing final months were spent on Saint Helena in the South Atlantic was Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French by the will of the French people and a ruler who had been crowned by the Pope. But that was not how the dethroned Bourbons saw him.

For years, assassins working on behalf of d'Artois, next in line to Louis XVIII the 'legitimate' King of France, aka Monsieur, had been trying to kill Napoleon. Ever since the First Consul had refused to help restore the incredibly obese Louis to the throne, the Bourbons had been out to get him.

In his memoirs Jean-Roch Coignet the first soldier to receive a Legion of Honour described how his coffee had been laced with poison by a potential royalist assassin who was not able to get to Napoleon himself. Thanks to the care of Napoleon's own doctor, the famous Larrey, he recovered. Coignet was just one of the many innocent victims of state sponsored terrorism organized by d'Artois and paid for by the Bank of England. Various assassination plots were backed by Prime Minister Pitt in London and a small clique of insiders in the British Cabinet. Parliament was never told about these criminal proceedings that continued even when England was supposed to be at peace with France during the short-lived Peace of Amiens.

The method of choice for those wishing to rid themselves of the 'unwanted' during the late C18th and early C19th was arsenic. Colourless and tasteless, it could be administered in small doses over a period of time to alleviate any suspicion while it steadily broke down the victim's powers of resistance and disrupted normal bodily functions. This is what happened to Napoleon from 1815 to his sad and painful death in May 1821. Thanks to the memoirs of his trusty and loyal valet Marchand and those of the Grand Marshal Bertrand, the victim’s symptoms can be plotted day by day and month by month. Repeated tests on genuine hair samples from Napoleon scientifically confirm the presence of arsenic deep inside the hairs and demonstrate with startling clarity how the former Emperor was given 40 doses of arsenic during his last few months of life.

Just as fascinating and revealing as the reason for his final demise, the author Ben Weider with the help of immense and penetrating research by Swedish toxicologist Sten Forshufvud, makes a very convincing case for repeated earlier poisonings by arsenic at critical times during Napoleon's life - especially during the battles of Borodino, Leipzig and Waterloo. It has always puzzled historians why Napoleon was 'off form' on such momentous occasions.

The dealer of death on Saint Helena was none other than the comte de Montholon who suddenly appeared out of the blue after Waterloo when Napoleon was at the nadir of his fortune. Montholon was a rogue who falsely claimed he had fought in many battles yet had never seen a shot fired in anger. He was also guilty of the embezzlement of funds that should have been paid to men under his command. Furthermore in 1814 he had sought a position with the newly restored Louis XVIII. Napoleon had a lot on his mind. Would he be able to escape to America? Would the British grant him asylum? What would happen to those who had rallied to his cause? He was so preoccupied that he made one of the worst mistakes of his life and allowed Montholon, a feckless criminal arriviste, and would-be assassin to accompany him into exile.

Montholon was under orders from d'Artois and on Saint Helena he was the person in sole charge of Napoleon's wine. Several other people got violently ill between 1815 and 1821. Cipriani, Napoleon's servant and friend from his Corsican days, died suddenly and mysteriously while Gourgaud and the Bertrands succumbed periodically to some strange malady. Madame Bertrand had several miscarriages while on the island. One by one people disappeared or like Las Cases, father and son, left in fear of their lives - at the time these illnesses were put down to liver disease or the 'hostile climate'. Every one of the victims had partaken of the wine from the Emperor's wine cellar. Gourgaud even suspected poison but no one could fathom out the real cause of all these weird ailments.

Soon, the only person the sickly Napoleon seemed to trust was Montholon, even though his nickname given him by the other French exiles was 'the liar'- il bugiardo. It was with Montholon’s help and assistance that Napoleon dictated his final will and it was Montholon who was the biggest gainer of all, a bequest of no less than two million francs. Montholon's later memoirs were a tissue of lies and amongst the myths he perpetrated was that Napoleon had contemplated suicide on many occasions and, above all else, that Napoleon had died of cancer.

The autopsy carried out by Antommarchi revealed no cancerous tumour and instead it showed the Emperor had become very obese. How many fat people die of cancer? Cancer is a wasting disease. Obesity is a symptom of arsenic poisoning. Furthermore, when Napoleon's coffin was opened in 1840 prior to his remains being returned to France, the corpse showed hardly any sign of decomposition, it looked to the observers as if the Emperor was just asleep! The preservation of tissue is yet another by-product of arsenic poisoning.

This superb book with its scrupulous and meticulous scientific detail proves without a shadow of a doubt that Napoleon Bonaparte was poisoned by a Frenchman - a Bourbon assassin acting on the orders of d'Artois. No one worthy of the name of historian can doubt all the evidence of murder shown in this volume. But to this day, many in France and elsewhere refuse to acknowledge the great achievement of Sten Forshufvud and Ben Weider in finally explaining the real cause of Napoleon's demise. Anyone who has eyes to see, and the courage to dispassionately review all the evidence will surely come to the same conclusion.

(Fellow of the International Napoleonic Society - Legion of Merit)

A SOULADREAM PRODUCTION

BOOK REVIEW - NAPOLEON'S WARS

2014-01-27T15:30:00.000+00:00

NAPOLEON'S WARS (2007)

By Charles Esdaile

One of the most biased and one-sided books I have ever read in my life. This diatribe is as balanced as a one-legged stool. Esdaile starts with the arbitrary date of 1803 - as if France and Britain had not been fighting each other for decades. It was French support for American Independence from an imperial, dominating and arrogant British government that helped bankrupt France and bring on the Revolution of 1789. There was a British fleet under Admiral Hood actually in Toulon harbour in 1793 aiding Royalist rebels - interfering in a conflict that was no business of the British. And it was a young Napoleon who responded to this British aggression by siting his cannon so that the Royal Navy had no option but to evacuate the French town. One wonders what the corrupt aristocratic and oligarchic British government of the day would have said about French vessels suddenly appearing at Portsmouth or the Pool of London and sticking their oar into British internal affairs?

Esdaile quotes copiously from the likes of Fouché, Talleyrand, Bourrienne and Remusat - all hostile witnesses, despite himself saying their views are open to question. General John Elting in his masterly book Swords Around a Throne (1988) refused to use Bourrienne and Remusat at all because their 'memoirs' are so notoriously unreliable. He stated that: 'In preparing this book I have used original sources whenever possible but have ignored the alleged memoirs of Louis Bourrienne, Paul Barras, Clare de Remusat, Laure Permon, and Miot de Melito, which are mendacious and worthless' (P. 735). Indeed, most of them were written for a Bourbon and royalist audience.

Fouché and Talleyrand were serial traitors who betrayed Napoleon and France on innumerable occasions. No wonder a contemporary called them 'vice' and 'crime'. Bourrienne was caught with his hand in the till, Napoleon forgave him and he was given another lucrative post until he repeated his crime. Are we to trust the words of a criminal against the man who forgave him and gave him a second chance?

Esdaile is constantly contradicting himself and every thing he mentions is given a hostile spin. He even endeavours to blame Napoleon for the worst Russian winter in 100 years in 1812. Esdaile obviously knows nothing about the spate of volcanic eruptions that affected the weather of the period. The decade 1810-1820 was the coldest decade of the C19th due to those eruptions filling the atmosphere with dust - leading to widespread climate change - an El Nino event which affected world temperatures, and a low sunspot count which is also indicative of low temperatures.

According to Esdaile, Napoleon repeatedly 'forced' other countries to attack him. Everything was his fault and his fault alone. Esdaile's Napoleon is like a James Bond villain who gets up every morning with the thought of dominating the world before he has had his breakfast. It would be amusing if it wasn't so pathetic. And of course, he quotes British politicians who decry Napoleon for wanting world domination, when the British Navy was dominating the seas and forcing every other nation to bow to their will. And as for England being the 'land of the free’, yes it did abolish slavery in 1807 but this did not stop it impressing seamen from other nations and refusing thereafter to ever give them shore leave in case they 'deserted' . This insufferable arrogance led to America declaring war on Britain in 1812. No doubt, that was all Napoleon's fault too?

This isn't history - it's propaganda!

M.A. (History) F.I.N.S (Legion of Merit)

A Souladream Production

ENGLAND'S WARS V. NAPOLEON

2014-01-24T17:20:00.000+00:00

My statue of Napoleon purchased in Sheffield, England in 1977

I have now started preparing my follow up book to The Real Napoleon - The Untold Story. It will be entitled England's Wars Against Napoleon and will be a direct riposte to those 'historians' who blame just about every single conflict between the European powers in the early C19th on Napoleon personally. To many British writers he appears to be little more than a James Bond villain direct from central casting who woke up every morning with the sole purpose of conquering the whole world before breakfast. This position - still maintained by many current writers from the British stable who also extol the virtues of their own empire upon which the sun supposedly never set - is ludicrous and I shall aim to prove it. Many English historians in particular are about as balanced as a one-legged stool and regurgitate the same misinformation and repackaged falsehoods ad nauseum. And they use the same discredited sources repeatedly, many of whom wrote their memoirs after Napoleon's death and were produced with the express aim of flattering Louis XVIII and his odious brother d'Artois aka 'Monsieur' who became Charles X.

Napoleon c. 1798 by Andrea Appiani )1754-1817)

C. John Tarttelin

A SOULADREAM PRODUCTION

THE REAL NAPOLEON IN MILITARY HERITAGE

2013-12-21T16:03:00.001+00:00

A newly edited version of THE REAL NAPOLEON - THE UNTOLD STORY is currently being advertised in the January 2014 issue of Military Heritage magazine which has 108,000 readers in the US and Canada.

C. John Tarttelin December 2013

A SOULADREAM PRODUCTION

THE REAL NAPOLEON in ARMCHAIR GENERAL

2013-07-16T17:01:00.001+01:00

September 2013 Issue

C. 2013 John Tarttelin

A SOULADREAM PRODUCTION

FRENCH REVIEW OF THE REAL NAPOLEON - The Untold Story by JEAN-CLAUDE DAMAMME

2013-07-05T16:41:00.001+01:00

“The Real Napoleon”

“The Untold Story”

le livre-choc de John Tarttelin, F. I. N. S.

Jean-Claude Damamme

ReprÉsentant pour la France de la

SociÉtÉ NapolÉonienne Internationale de MontrÉal

es « soldats de Napoléon », à la S.N.I., j’en connais personnellement quelques-uns et des plus valeureux, mais, sans vouloir offenser les autres, je pense que celui-ci fait montre d’un mérite tout particulier.

En effet, John Tarttelin est un « soldat de Napoléon » isolé en territoire ennemi, c’est-à-dire, dans ce contexte particulier, en Angleterre – ce qui ne facilite pas sa tâche – et il appartient à la petite cohorte des membres les plus actifs de la S.N.I., dont il est, à ce titre, membre d’honneur.

Les visiteurs anglophones de notre site (mais on peut lire certains de ses textes, traduits, sur notre version française), connaissent bien ses articles, tout à la fois érudits et mordants, mais toujours solidement argumentés. Ce qui les rend redoutables. Et inacceptables par certains. Et ces « certains » sont nombreux.

Comme mentionné plus haut, John exerce ses talents d’historien, ô combien contestataire, dans son pays.

En France, déjà, donner de Napoléon une image autre que celle communément admise du tyran sanguinaire, etc. est une gageure, un geste « inconsidéré » qui vous vaut d’être vite taxé de « napoléonatrie »[1]. Imaginez alors l’énergie que John a dû déployer pour tenter de faire publier son travail, et je ne pense pas le trahir en évoquant brièvement ici son long « bras de fer » avec un éditeur, car, ce faisant, je souhaite rendre hommage à sa persévérance dans une longue « traque » au cours de laquelle il a été « mené en bateau ».

Un Éditeur-censeur

Deux exemples : John, qui a pour Ben Weider la même vénération que moi – il lui a d’ailleurs dédicacé son travail – découvrit que son éditeur, avait, sans l’en aviser, rajouté un appendice à son texte. Et pas sur n’importe quoi, mais sur la célébrissime « découverte » des sommités scientifiques suisses, qui avaient conclu, en prenant la mesure de ses pantalons, que le déporté de Sainte-Hélène était bien décédé de son emblématique cancer de l’estomac.

Comment John eût-il pu accepter pareille déshonorante compromission ?

Deuxième exemple : au bout de huit mois de tergiversations, il eut une autre surprise. Mauvaise, comme on peut s’en douter : lorsqu’il reçut les épreuves pour relecture, il découvrit que ce même trafiquant de l’édition avait, de son propre chef, retranché 3 000 mots du texte original, et – hasard ? – tout ce qui était favorable à Napoléon, toutes les mentions relatives à la S.N.I, et les articles évoquant « l’affaire » – entendez l’empoisonnement de Napoléon.

Qui pourrait encore douter que, de l’autre côte de la Manche aussi, ce sujet doive être étouffé ?

« Allez donc voir ailleurs »

Il faudrait évidemment avoir l’esprit bien mal tourné pour soupçonner une seconde qu’il ait pu exister le moindre contact entre l’éditeur en question et la Fondation Napoléon, où, sauf erreur de ma part, officient deux… Anglais.

Il faudrait également avoir l’esprit mal tourné pour soupçonner une possible collusion entre cet éditeur britannique, affolé de voir une affaire aussi « sulfureuse » porter son label, et les instances napoléoniennes françaises, dont on connaît la grande honnêteté sur ce sujet et son acharnement à faire régner un silence de plomb en utilisant tous les moyens – et ils sont nombreux – dont elles disposent ?

Pour comble de malhonnêteté, l’éditeur – sans avertir l’auteur ; on croit rêver devant un tel mépris ! – avait commencé de faire la publicité de ce manuscrit frelaté sur un très grand site de vente en ligne, Amazon US et UK, pour ne pas le nommer.

On croyait la censure disparue ! Elle continue de prospérer lorsqu’il s’agit de Napoléon. Cela est d’ailleurs vrai également en France[2].

John mit son interlocuteur en demeure de publier son manuscrit tel que prévu par les termes du contrat. La seule réponse de l’éditeur, déconcerté de la résistance de l’auteur à ses diktats, fut : « Allez donc voir ailleurs » !

Si, comme cela se passe souvent en France, où nombre d’auteurs plus ou moins amateurs sont prêts à accepter n’importe quelles conditions pour être édités, John se fût incliné, son livre eût été publié, mais complètement dénaturé. Aussi se résolut-il in fine à faire appel à la plate-forme d’édition d’Amazon qui, peu soucieuse de ces absurdes et malhonnêtes querelles, édita le livre dont vous voyez la couverture.

Un plaidoyer pour la vÉritÉ

Plus qu’un livre au sens ordinaire du terme, « The Real Napoleon - The Untold Story » est avant tout une réfutation, à la fois factuelle et passionnée, écrite pour jeter à la poubelle – où elles trouveront leur juste place – toutes les ignominies déversées sur la mémoire de Napoléon depuis son décès en 1821.

Je ne m’étendrai pas sur ce que John Tarttelin écrit sur la carrière de l’Empereur, mais il convient de souligner la manière originale adoptée pour traiter certains grands épisodes de ce que nous nommons à juste titre « l’Épopée » : il a fait appel aux récits de deux icônes de la Grande Armée, Coignet, et l’attachant et intelligent sergent Bourgogne de la Garde Impériale, « grand reporter » de la campagne de Russie.

Mais ses « coups de gueule », quel punch !

Coups de gueule contre la mauvaise foi et la malhonnêteté de nombre d’historiens, auteurs et journalistes anglais, qui, dans la lignée des caricaturistes et polémistes de l’époque, ont abreuvé Napoléon d’insultes, que nous, Français, avons l’imbécillité et la lâcheté de prendre pour argent comptant, sans jamais les remettre en question, ni les réfuter, voire simplement, protester.

Ainsi, Tarttelin s’insurge contre les allégations de barbarie – n’ayons pas peur du mot, il est d’emploi courant – dont Napoléon se serait rendu coupable. Je ne vais pas y revenir, nous connaissons tous la chanson et ses paroles. Alors, l’auteur contre-attaque là où ça fait mal : ces incontournables « stars » de l’Angleterre que sont Nelson et Wellington.

Il rappelle opportunément ce qu’il faut bien appeler le massacre de Copenhague en 1807 : le Danemark ne voulant pas se joindre à la croisade anti française, sa capitale fut attaquée sans sommation ni déclaration de guerre par des forces combinées de l’armée et de la Royal Navy, à la tête desquelles nous relevons les noms de Wellington et de Nelson.

Un acte de piraterie sans précédent dans les usages de l’époque qui fit quelque deux mille victimes civiles et réduisit en cendres plus de la moitié de la ville.

Napoléon s’est-il jamais rendu coupable d’un tel forfait – un tel crime pour mieux dire ?

Et à propos de Wellington plus précisément, John Tarttelin démonte très clairement cette adroite manipulation qui a toujours contribué à faire passer la défaite de Napoléon à Waterloo pour une victoire du héros emblématique de l’Angleterre. Oublié ce détestable soudard de Blücher, qui lui « sauva la mise » !

En ce qui concerne Nelson, John nous rappelle un fait peu connu, ou plutôt soigneusement dissimulé : en 1799, dans le royaume de Naples, il fit pendre – je dis bien pendre – à une vergue de la frégate la Minerve, comme un malandrin, l’amiral napolitain Francesco Caracciolo, duc de Brienza. Un frère d’armes, puisque tous deux avaient combattu les Français sous les ordres de l’amiral Hood !

La vÉritÉ ? « Une victime sans importance

De la guerre de propagande »

Le chapitre 13 s’ouvre sur une phrase que je crois utile de citer :

« Pendant toute sa vie, Napoléon a été confronté à toutes sortes d’attaques venimeuses et indécentes, tant de la part de la presse britannique que du pouvoir. Aucun mensonge n’était trop gros, aucune exagération trop scandaleuse, aucune diffamation n’était interdite. L’or anglais versé à profusion dans les mains de ses assassins en puissance n’étant pas suffisant, le Cabinet et les va-t-en-guerre du Parlement décidèrent, pour faire bonne mesure, de l’assassiner politiquement. Aujourd’hui, cette pitoyable partialité continue – et cela de la part même de gens qui se prétendent historiens. Des journalistes et des universitaires, certains avec diplômes d’autres sans, semblent écrire comme s’ils vivaient encore au 19ème siècle, et comme si l’empire britannique existait encore. Pour beaucoup, la vérité n’est rien d’autre qu’une victime sans importance de la poursuite de la guerre de propagande. »

Phrase d’une cruelle pertinence lorsque l’on prend connaissance des scandaleuses bassesses qui ont émaillé – et continuent d’émailler – la presse anglaise, et pas uniquement la bien nommée « presse de caniveau ».

Des comparaisons sordides

Quelques échantillons représentatifs.

Voici une comparaison abjecte avec « l’empereur » de la République centrafricaine, Bokassa 1er, décrit par le Daily Mail comme le « clown impérial » marchant sur les traces de son « héros ».

Devinez qui est le héros !

Dans le Daily Telegraph, le commentaire d’un livre consacré à Napoléon et ses parents est titré comme suit par Nigel Nicholson – c’est le nom du journaliste (sic) : « L’enfance d’un monstre ».

Le même personnage n’hésite pas à affirmer doctement que « Napoléon n’a rien vu de la retraite de Russie ».

Un autre journaliste (toujours sic) nommé Peter Vansittart jette à la figure des lecteurs du Sunday Telegraph, cette insulte suprême faite à Napoléon, celle dont Claude Ribbe se pourlèche, et dont il a fait son fonds de commerce :

« Il n’y a pas loin de Napoléon à Hitler ».

Répugnant.

Notre ami Tarttelin en profite alors pour rappeler fort opportunément que les « inventeurs » des sinistres camps de concentration ne sont pas les nazis mais les… Anglais au cours de la guerre du Transvaal (ou guerre des Boers, 1899-1902), et que cet autre héros de l’Angleterre, Lord Kitchener, fit ainsi enfermer dans des camps quelque deux cent mille personnes pour briser la résistance du peuple Boer.

Une bonne vingtaine de milliers de femmes, d’enfants et de vieillards y périrent misérablement de faim et de maladie. Le brave homme ! Mais lui n’est pas un « ogre » comme ce Napoléon 1er honni.

Un livre courageux contre la malhonnÊtetÉ

J’arrête ici mon échantillonnage, laissant aux lecteurs le soin de découvrir, grâce à cet ouvrage sans concession, la liste de toutes les ignominies – sans exemple dans l’Histoire – par lesquelles le gouvernement anglais a voulu – et veut toujours – détruire un homme de bien en crachant sur sa mémoire, tout en l’accusant d’être coupable de tous les maux que ce gouvernement a lui-même provoqués. Honte à lui et à ses ministres !

Cependant, ne nous méprenons pas, « The Real Napoléon - The Untold Story » n’est pas un livre contre l’Angleterre – ce qui serait déplaisant de la part d’un auteur anglais – c’est un livre contre la malhonnêteté, contre la désinformation, contre la bassesse, le cynisme, et les manipulations en tous genres.

On pourrait d’ailleurs écrire le même, et sans doute en pire, en France.

Non, ce livre courageux est l’ouvrage d’un homme d’honneur, désolé de voir son pays se compromettre dans une dégradante manœuvre visant à discréditer le personnage le plus illustre de l’histoire, non seulement de la France, mais de l’Europe.

C’est un livre salutaire à l’histoire en général, et, plus particulièrement, à celle de l’homme à qui Ben Weider a dédié ce site : Napoléon.

Un livre qu’il faut lire.

On peut se procurer l’ouvrage sur Internet en cliquant sur le lien suivant : http://www.amazon.com/The-Real-Napoleon-Untold-Story/dp/1481980513/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1370017084&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=real+napoleon+untold+story

Son prix : 8,99 $

[1] Petite expérience personnelle qui va dans le même sens : par l’intermédiaire d’une relation professionnelle, j’avais adressé mon livre sur la campagne de 1812 en Russie à un grand agent littéraire londonien très connu : Andrew Nurnberg. Je cherchais un débouché à l’étranger, mais surtout pas en Angleterre. Après m’avoir fait part de son appréciation sur l’ouvrage, sa réponse fut que le livre était « trop favorable à Napoléon et trop hostile à l’Angleterre. » No comment !

[2] En revanche, le pamphlet sordide dans lequel Claude Ribbe bave joyeusement sur Napoléon n’a eu, lui, aucun mal à se faire rééditer.

C. 2013 Jean-Claude Damamme

in association with

SOULADREAM PRODUCTIONS

A REVIEW OF THE REAL NAPOLEON BY JEAN-CLAUDE DAMAMME

2013-06-28T12:06:00.002+01:00

JEAN-CLAUDE DAMAMME

REPRESENTATIVE FOR FRANCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL NAPOLEONIC SOCIETY OF MONTREAL

Reviews THE REAL NAPOLEON: The Untold Story

At the I.N.S., I personally know a good number of “Napoleon’s soldiers” and valiant are they all, but without wishing offence to the others, I think there is one who has demonstrated exceptional merit.

In fact, John Tarttelin is a "Soldier of Napoleon" cut off in enemy territory, that is to say in this particular context, England – not an easy task – and he belongs to that select cohort of the most active members of the I.N.S., and as such is an honorary member.

English-speaking visitors to our site (not forgetting that you can read some of his writings translated on our French site) are familiar with his articles that are in equal measure erudite and scathing, and always solidly argued. This makes them a formidable challenge. And unacceptable to some. And those “some” are numerous.

John practices the profession of historian, and how controversial he is in his own country, as mentioned earlier!

In France, just giving Napoleon an image different from the stereotype of bloodthirsty tyrant, etc. is a herculean challenge, a “rash” act that immediately arouses accusations of “Napoleonatry."1 So, imagine the energy that John had to deploy to try to have his work published and I do not think that I am betraying any confidences by here briefly mentioning his endless “arm wrestling” with his publisher, because in so doing, I merely wish to pay tribute to his perseverance during a long “manhunt" in which he was “taken for a ride.”

1 A small experience of my own along the same lines: through a professional contact, I sent my book on the 1812 campaign in Russia to a well-known, major London literary agent, Andrew Nurnberg. I was looking for an opening abroad, but definitely not in England. After expressing his appreciation of the work, his verdict was that my book was “too favourable to Napoleon and too hostile to England.” No comment needed!

A PUBLISHER-CENSOR

Two examples: John, who reveres Ben Weider as much as I do and in fact dedicated his work to him, discovered that his publisher had, without consulting him, added an appendix to his text. And not just about some detail, but about the famed “discovery” of eminent Swiss scientists, who concluded, after measuring his pants, that the Prisoner of Saint Helena had indeed died from his iconic stomach cancer.

How could John possibly accept such a dishonest and dishonourable compromise? A second example: after eight months of procrastination, he had another surprise, an unpleasant one as you might suspect. When he received the proofs for correction, he found that this same publishing wheeler-dealer had of his own accord cut 3,000 words from the original text, and – coincidence? – including everything that was favourable to Napoleon, all references to the I.N.S., and all articles citing the “affair” – meaning the poisoning of Napoleon.

Who could still doubt that on the other side of the Channel also, this is a topic that must be suppressed?

“GO LOOK ELSEWHERE!”

Obviously it would take a very cynically minded person to suspect for an instant that there may have been the slightest connection between the publisher in question and the Fondation Napoléon, where, unless I am very much mistaken, two of the officials are... English.

You should also have a dirty mind to suspect any possible collusion between this British publisher, panic-stricken to see such “heretical” material bear his imprint, and the reigning authorities of Napoleonic studies in France, who are known for their great honesty on this subject, together with their relentless efforts to impose a stony silence using all means at their disposal – and I assure you, they are many.

For the last straw in dishonesty, the publisher, without informing the author – the mind boggles at such contempt! – began to advertise this adulterated manuscript on a major online site, Amazon US and UK, not that I wish to mention any names.

And we thought censorship was a thing of the past! It continues to thrive where

Napoleon is concerned. And this is just as true in France.1

1 In contrast, the sordid pamphlet in which Claude Ribbe gleefully spews his venom over Napoleon has

had no difficulty in being republished.

John gave instructions that his manuscript be published as provided for under the terms of the contract. The only response from the publisher, taken aback by the author’s resistance to his dictates, was, “Go look elsewhere!”

If, as often happens in France, where many more or less amateur authors are willing to accept any conditions in order to get published, John had indeed given way, his book would had been published, but in a completely emasculated form. Ultimately, he decided to appeal to Amazon’s publishing platform that, not much bothered with these absurd and dishonest disputes, published the book whose cover you see below.

A PLEA FOR THE TRUTH

More than a book in the ordinary sense of the term, “The Real Napoleon - The Untold Story” is above all a passionately argued, factual refutation that consigns to the trash, where it rightly belongs, all the dishonour heaped on the memory of Napoleon since his death in 1821.

I shall not dwell on what John Tarttelin has written on the career of the Emperor, but I do note his original approach in recounting some major episodes of what we justly term the “Epic” of Napoleon’s life. He draws upon the accounts of two icons of the Grande Armée, Coignet and the endearing and intelligent Sergeant Bourgogne of the Imperial Guard, the great “reporter” of the Russian campaign.

And John’s tirades, what verve!

Tirades against the bad faith and dishonesty of so many English historians, authors and journalists, who, in the tradition of the cartoonists and polemicists of the time, heap insults on Napoleon that we French have the imbecility and cowardice to take for granted, without ever questioning or refuting or even protesting the attack. So Tarttelin rejects the alleged atrocities – don’t be afraid of the word, it’s in common use – which Napoleon was supposed to be guilty of. I shan’t go over it again, we all know how that tune goes. So the author counterattacks where it hurts and takes on England’s two “superstars” – Nelson and Wellington.

The author gives us a timely reminder of what can only be called the Massacre of Copenhagen in 1807. Since Denmark did not want to join in the anti-French crusade, its capital was attacked without any warning or declaration of war by the combined forces of the army and the Royal Navy, at the head of which we find the names Wellington and Nelson. This constituted an act of piracy that was unprecedented in the ethos of the time, which caused some two thousand civilian casualties and reduced to ashes over half of the city.

Was Napoleon ever guilty of such a violation, or such a crime, to be more precise?

And on the question of Wellington, John Tarttelin clearly demolishes the clever manipulation that has always tried to pass off the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo as a victory for England’s symbolic hero. Completely overlooked is that detestable thug Blucher, who “saved his skin!”

Regarding Nelson, John recounts a little known, or rather, carefully concealed fact: in 1799, in the kingdom of Naples, he hanged – yes, I say hanged like a bandit – the Neapolitan Admiral Francesco Caracciolo, Duke of Brienza, off the yardarm of the frigate Minerva. They were brothers in arms, since both had fought the French under the command of Admiral Hood!

THE TRUTH? “A CASUALTY OF THE PROPAGANDA WAR”

Chapter 13 opens with a statement that I think deserves to be quoted:

“In his lifetime, Napoleon faced the most vitriolic and scabrous attacks imaginable from the British press and Establishment. No lie was too big, no exaggeration too outrageous, no defamation was beyond the pale. English gold for the sweaty palms of his would-be assassins was not enough, the Cabinet and the warmongers in parliament wanted to ensure his political assassination as well. Even today, this pathetic one-sidedness continues – and from people who consider themselves historians. Correspondents and academics, some with titles and others without, seem to be writing as if they still lived in the C19th. To them it is as if the British Empire still exists. To many, truth is a mere casualty of a continuing propaganda war.”

The quotation has a painful relevance when one knows the appalling vileness that has always characterized, and continues to typify, the British press, and not just the aptly named “gutter press”.

SORDID COMPARISONS

A few representative examples.

Here is a contemptible comparison with the "Emperor" of the Central African

Republic, Bokassa the First, described by the Daily Mail as an “imperial clown” following in the footsteps of his “hero.”

And guess who that hero is!

In the Daily Telegraph, a review of a book on Napoleon and his family was titled as follows by Nigel Nicholson, the name of the journalist (sic): “Childhood of a Monster.”

The same individual does not hesitate to state pedantically that “Napoleon saw nothing of the retreat from Russia.”

Another journalist (still sic) named Peter Vansittart of the Sunday Telegraph flings in his readers’ faces the supreme insult to Napoleon, the one that gets Claude Ribbe licking his lips and on which he bases his business:

“It’s not a great distance from Napoleon to Hitler.”

Utterly repugnant.

Our friend Tarttelin also takes the opportunity to issue a timely reminder that the real “inventors” of the evil of concentration camps were not the Nazis but... the English during the Boer War (1899-1902), and that another English hero, Lord Kitchener, interned some two hundred thousand people in camps in order to break the resistance of the Boer people.

At least twenty thousand women, children and old people perished miserably of hunger and disease. The brave fellow! But he is not an “ogre” like the detested Napoleon I.

A COURAGEOUS BOOK AGAINST DISHONESTY

I shall cease quoting examples and leave readers to discover in this uncompromising work all the charges of infamy – unparalleled in history – by means of which the British government wanted – and still wants – to destroy a good man by spitting on his memory, while accusing him of being guilty of all the evils that England itself had wrought. Shame on it and its ministers!

However, make no mistake, “The Real Napoleon - The Untold Story” is not a book against England – which would be rather unpalatable from an English writer – this is a book against dishonesty, against misinformation, and against meanness, cynicism and manipulation of all kinds.

One could also write the same, and doubtless worse, about France.

No, this courageous book is the work of a man of honour, saddened to see his country compromised in a degrading plot to discredit the most famous person in history, not only in France, but in all of Europe.

This is a salutary volume for history in general and, more specifically, for the man to whom Ben Weider dedicated this site: Napoleon.

A book you must read.

in association with

SOULADREAM PRODUCTIONS

THE REAL NAPOLEON by PASCAL CAZOTTES FINS (Legion of Merit)

2013-05-21T20:42:00.003+01:00

PASCAL’S REVIEW

THE REAL NAPOLEON

Comme chacun sait, les livres sur Napoléon sont si nombreux qu’il est difficile de séparer le bon grain de l’ivraie, certains auteurs, que nous ne nommerons pas, n’hésitant pas à faire du « Napoléon » parce que le sujet est tout simplement porteur.

Ce début d’année 2013 nous aura pourtant offert une belle surprise avec la parution de « THE REAL NAPOLEON, The Untold Story » (« Le Véritable Napoléon, l’histoire jamais racontée »). Œuvre de notre ami John Tarttelin, cet ouvrage, politiquement incorrect puisque révélant un Napoléon tel qu’il était, c’est-à-dire un homme foncièrement bon, magnanime, généreux, intelligent, courageux et amoureux de son pays, risque de faire grincer des dents à bien des ennemis déclarés de l’Empereur, même en France ! Pour reprendre les mots de l’auteur : « Dans ce livre, il (Napoléon) est montré pour ce qu’il était, non pas comme ses ennemis le dépeignaient sans cesse ».

John Tarttelin est d’autant plus courageux qu’il est membre de cette nation qui a œuvré le plus à la perte de Napoléon : le Royaume-Uni ! Dans ce pays, encore intoxiqué par une propagande anti-napoléonienne vieille de deux cents ans, il faut être un véritable « Don Quichotte » pour oser aller, ainsi, à contre-courant du mode de pensée unique. Mais connaissant l’âme chevaleresque de notre fier ami, on n’est nullement surpris.

Tout au long de son livre, John nous amène sur les traces de l’Empereur, notamment à travers les souvenirs d’un de ses plus fidèles soldats, le capitaine Coignet. Il n’oublie pas, non plus, de confronter le lecteur à des faits nouvellement révélés, comme le rôle joué par un volcan dans la bataille de Waterloo. Enfin, il revient, naturellement, sur le meurtre de l’Empereur, sur ce crime odieux que l’on s’évertue, encore de nos jours, à vouloir nous cacher.

Bien entendu, « THE REAL NAPOLEON » est écrit dans la langue de Shakespeare, et ne devrait donc s’adresser qu’à des anglophones. J’invite cependant tous les véritables fidèles de Napoléon à se procurer cet ouvrage (notamment disponible sur le site internet Amazon.fr au prix de 12,19 €), ne serait-ce que pour montrer que nous entendons soutenir cette initiative hors du commun, respectueuse d’une Histoire non censurée.

Et, pour reprendre encore une fois les mots de John : « j’espère qu’une nouvelle génération de lecteurs regardera autrement l’histoire de Napoléon Bonaparte, débarrassée de cette tradition sectaire qui dissimule ses exploits et sa juste revendication à la grandeur. »

Pascal Cazottes

A SOULADREAM PRODUCTION