Betsy and the Emperor
The true story of Napoleon, a pretty girl, a Regency rake and an Australian colonial misadventure
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The little known story of how the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte ingratiated himself with an English family on the South Atlantic island of St Helena, and the devastating effect on them for the rest of their lives in England and Australia.
After Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, he was sent into exile on Saint Helena. He became an 'eagle in a cage', reduced from the most powerful figure in Europe to a prisoner on a rock in the South Atlantic. But the fallen emperor was charmed by the pretty teenage daughter of a local merchant, Betsy Balcombe.
Anne Whitehead brings to life Napoleon's last years on Saint Helena, revealing the central role of the Balcombe family. She also lays to rest two centuries of speculation about Betsy's relationship with Napoleon.
After Napoleon's death, Betsy travelled to Australia in 1823 with her father, who was appointed the first Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales. When the family lost their fortune, she returned to London and published a memoir that made her a celebrity.
With her extraordinary connections to royalty and high society, Betsy Balcombe led a life worthy of a Regency romance, but she was always fighting for her independence. This new account reveals Napoleon at his most vulnerable, human and reflective, and a woman caught in some of the most dramatic events of her time.
'Anne Whitehead deftly weaves a lively, poignant tale of Napoleon's last years on St Helena and the precocious teenager whose impudent charm briefly enlivened his exile. Her indefatigable pursuit of a tantalising archival trail takes her readers from St Helena to England, Scotland, France and New South Wales, uncovering a life curiously shadowed by its early brush with fame.' - Professor Penny Russell, University of Sydney
Author bio:
Anne Whitehead is an author, historian and former TV producer-director with the ABC. She is the author of Bluestocking in Patagonia and her book Paradise Mislaid was winner of the NSW Premier's Award for Australian History.
Category:
Other books
ISBN:
9781760112936
Table Of Contents:
Preface
PART ONE
1 The News
2 The Prisoner
3 Friends and Foes
4 The Briars
5 The Pavilion
6 Boney's Little Pages
7 The French Suite
8 The Admiral's Ball
9 Last Days at the Pavilion
10 Longwood House
11 The New Governor
12 Gold Lace and Nodding Plumes
13 This Accursed Place
14 The Thinning Ranks
15 The Sick Lion
16 Our Beautiful Island
17 The Company of a Green Parrot
18 At the Mercy of the English
19 Farewell to the Island
PART TWO
20 The Ties that Bind
21 The Embattled Surgeon
22 An Impending Tempest
23 The St Helena Plot
24 Official Disgrace
25 An Item of News
26 The One that Got Away
27 Marry in Haste . . .
28 'La Petite Angleterre'
29 The Clearing Fog
PART THREE
30 Sydney Town
31 'The Interesting Mrs Abell'
32 The Fashionables
33 A Fleeting Entente Cordiale
34 The Treasury Under the Bed
35 'Terrible Hollow'
36 A Fractured Family
37 Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Publisher:
Allen & Unwin
Imprint:
Allen & Unwin
Pub Date:
August 2015
Page Extent:
464
Format:
Paperback - C format
Age:
0 - 0
Subject:
Biography & True Stories