7 - Napoleon on St Helena

Summary

Napoleon Bonaparte's dazzling military adventures in the European theatre seemed to have run their course with his defeat by the Allied forces and his abdication on 6 April 1814, followed by incarceration on the isle of Elba. It was perhaps characteristic of him that in less than a year the emperor's star once more flared into life with his escape from imprisonment and his dramatic (though short-lived) re-entry to the Tuileries Palace, but the prospect of his renewed domination of the Continent was finally extinguished with the crushing defeat at Waterloo. In the aftermath of the battle, Napoleon himself made hastily for Paris and then for Rochefort on the Atlantic coast, where a rendezvous had been arranged with a frigate that might carry him to freedom in America. An impregnable blockade by the Royal Navy put that prospect out of reach and – with Bourbon and Prussian forces closing in on him – on 15 July the fugitive emperor presented himself on board HMS Bellerophon, where he announced to the commander, Captain Frederick Maitland, that he had come to place himself ‘under the protection of the laws of England’. The courtesies with which the formalities were carried out were indeed more appropriate to a noble seeker of asylum rather than a prisoner of war: Maitland gave up his own cabin to Napoleon's use, while the members of his accompanying entourage were accommodated as best they could be; after a short delay, Bellerophon, with her extraordinary French complement, set sail for England, with an air of measured politeness prevailing on all sides.

At this point Napoleon evidently had every hope that his days might be lived out in congenial retirement in the comfort of a secluded country estate (preferably ‘ten or twelve leagues from London’). But in Whitehall the cabinet had already discussed his fate in the event of his recapture, with a primary concern that there should be no opportunity whatever for a repeat of the Elba fiasco: even before Bellerophon had left Rochefort, the prime minister of the day, Lord Liverpool, had informed his foreign secretary (then in Vienna) that it was the collective resolve of the cabinet that there could be no question of confinement on English soil.