From this position Napoleon never swerved. The annuity was paid to Elizabeth after her return to America until the fall of the Empire, and formed the basis of the fortune of one and a half million dollars, accumulated through a long life of frugality and cautious investment, of which she died possessed.
The reply of Pope Pius, to whom Napoleon appealed for the annulment of the marriage, accompanying his request with a costly gold tiara, to the effect that after mature deliberation he had been able to discover no grounds on which the marriage could be cancelled, though it chagrined the Emperor to an extent which he never forgave, did not yet alter the stand he had taken. When Jerome was finally admitted to his presence, he greeted him with that magnetic smile whose potency swayed men and women alike.
"So, sir, you are the first of the family," he said, "who has shamefully abandoned his post. It will require many splendid actions to wipe off that stain from your reputation. As to your love-affair with your little girl, I pay no attention to it."
The "Erin," meanwhile, arrived in the Texel Roads, where, though flying the flag of a friendly power, and a merchant vessel whose clearance from Baltimore showed that she carried no guns, she was placed under guard of two French men-of-war and all communication with the shore prohibited. Through the intercession of Sylvanus Bourne, our Consul at Amsterdam, she was permitted at the expiration of a week to depart, and, bearing her full measure of human desolation, she headed towards the shores of England. The fame of her fair passenger had preceded her, and so large a concourse of people had gathered at Dover to witness the landing of Madame Jerome Bonaparte that Mr. Pitt, then Prime Minister of England, sent a military escort to protect her from possible annoyance of a sympathetic though curious throng.
At Camberwell, near London, her son was born on the 7th of July, 1805, and named Jerome Napoleon.
In June of that year, two months after his return, Jerome had been restored to his rank in the navy and was cruising off Genoa, whence he wrote, through his secretary, Alexander le Camus, to Mr. William Patterson, of Baltimore, expressing his dissatisfaction at Elizabeth's having gone to England, that country being at the time at war with France. The tone of the letter betrays the change that was already working in Jerome's feelings, though he was at that time sending Elizabeth by every available opportunity messages and pledges of his unswerving love for her.
When we judge him, let us bear in mind not only his youth and all the circumstances of his life, but, above all, that soul-crushing will which he, weakly enough it seems to us, was striving to stand against.
In a subsequent letter to Mr. Patterson, written also by Mr. le Camus, in the course of which Jerome expressed the desire that Elizabeth should return to America and wait there in her own home till he obtained her recall from the Emperor, one feels instinctively that between the lines is written the finale to the short chapter of the romance of Elizabeth Patterson and Jerome Bonaparte.
She returned to her father's home in the fall, though she had written shortly before that she was glad to be among strangers, because "in Baltimore, where people are always on the watch," she would be more observed.
On August 12, 1807, Jerome married Princess Frederika Catherine, daughter of the King of Wurtemburg. As King of Westphalia he offered Elizabeth a home within his dominions, with the title of Princess of Smalcalden and a pension of two hundred thousand francs per year. In regard to the former, she replied that Westphalia was a large kingdom, but not quite large enough for two queens, and with regard to the pension, having already accepted Napoleon's annuity of sixty thousand francs, she made the oft-quoted response that she preferred "being sheltered under the wing of an eagle to being suspended from the bill of a goose."