Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume V.

by Walter Scott

We have already discussed the circumstances of Napoleon's surrender to the British, without reserve, qualification, or condition of any kind; and we have seen, that if he sustained any disappointment in being detained a prisoner, instead of being considered as a guest, or free inmate of Britain, it arose from the failure of hopes which he had adopted on his own calculation, without the slightest encouragement from Captain Maitland. We doubt greatly, indeed, if his most sanguine expectations ever seriously anticipated a reception very different from what he experienced; at least he testified little or no surprise when informed of his destiny. But, at any rate, he was a prisoner of war, having acquired by his surrender no right save to claim safety of life and limb. If the English nation had inveigled Napoleon into a capitulation, under conditions which they had subsequently broken, he would have been in the condition of Toussaint, whom, nevertheless, he immured in a dungeon. Or, if he had been invited to visit the Prince Regent of England in the character of an ally, had been at first received with courteous hospitality, and then committed to confinement as a prisoner, his case would have approached that of Prince Ferdinand of Spain, trepanned to Bayonne. But we should be ashamed to vindicate our country by quoting the evil example of our enemy. Truth and falsehood remain immutable and irreconcilable; and the worst criminal ought not to be proceeded against according to his own example, but according to the general rules of justice. Nevertheless, it greatly diminishes our interest in a complaint, if he who prefers it has himself been in the habit of meting to others with the same unfair weight and measure, which he complains of when used towards himself.

Napoleon, therefore, being a prisoner of war, and to be disposed of as such, (a point which admits of no dispute,) we have, we conceive, further proved, that his residence within the territories of Great Britain was what could hardly take place consistently with the safety of Europe. To have delivered him up to any of the other allied powers, whose government was of a character similar to his own, would certainly have been highly objectionable; since in doing so Britain would have so far broken faith with him, as to part with the power of protecting his personal safety, to which extent the country to which he surrendered himself stood undeniably pledged. It only remained to keep this important prisoner in such a state of restraint, as to ensure his not having the means of making a second escape, and again involving France and Europe in a bloody and doubtful war. St. Helena was selected as the place of his detention, and, we think, with much propriety; since the nature of that sequestered island afforded the means for the greatest certainty of security, with the least restriction on the personal liberty of the distinguished prisoner. Waves and rocks around its shores afforded the security of walls, ditches, bars, and bolts, in a citadel; and his hours of exercise might be safely extended over a space of many miles, instead of being restrained within the narrow and guarded limits of a fortress.

The right of imprisoning Napoleon being conceded, or at least proved, and the selection of St. Helena, as his place of residence, being vindicated, we have no hesitation in avowing the principle, that every thing possible ought to have been done to alleviate the painful feelings, to which, in every point of view, a person so distinguished as Napoleon must have been subjected by so heavy a change of fortune. We would not, at that moment, have remembered the lives lost, fortunes destroyed, and hopes blighted, of so many hundreds of our countrymen, civilians travelling in France, and detained there against every rule of civilized war; nor have thought ourselves entitled to avenge upon Napoleon, in his misfortunes, the cruel inflictions, which his policy, if not his inclination, prompted him to award against others. We would not have made his dungeon so wretched, as that of the unhappy Negro chief, starved to death amidst the Alpine snows. We would not have surrounded him, while a prisoner, with spies, as in the case of the Earl of Elgin; or, as in that of Prince Ferdinand, have spread a trap for him by means of an emissary like the false Baron Koli, who, in proffering to assist his escape, should have had it for an object to obtain a pretence for treating him more harshly. These things we would not then have remembered; or, if we could not banish them from our recollection, in considering how far fraud and ignoble violence can debase genius, and render power odious, we would have remembered them as examples, not to be followed, but shunned. To prevent the prisoner from resuming a power which he had used so fatally, we would have regarded as a duty not to Britain alone, but to Europe and to the world. To accompany his detention with every alleviation which attention to his safe custody would permit, was a debt due, if not to his personal deserts, at least to our own nobleness. With such feelings upon the subject in general, we proceed to consider the most prominent subjects of complaint, which Buonaparte and his advocates have brought against the Administration of Great Britain, for their treatment of the distinguished exile.

ALLEGED GRIEVANCES.

The first loud subject of complaint has been already touched upon, that the imperial title was not given to Napoleon, and that he was only addressed and treated with the respect due to a general officer of the highest rank. On this subject Napoleon was particularly tenacious. He was not of the number of those persons mentioned by the Latin poet, who, in poverty and exile, suited their titles and their language to their condition.[219] On the contrary, he contended with great obstinacy, from the time he came to Portsmouth, on his right to be treated as a crowned head; nor was there, as we have noticed, a more fertile source of discord betwixt him and the gentlemen of his suite on one side, and the Governor of St. Helena on the other, than the pertinacious claim, on Napoleon's part, for honours and forms of address, which the orders of the British Ministry had prohibited the governor from granting, and which, therefore, Napoleon's knowledge of a soldier's duty should have prevented his exacting. But, independently of the governor's instructions, Buonaparte's claim to the peculiar distinction of a sovereign prince was liable to question, both in respect of the party by whom it was insisted on, and in relation to the government from whom it was claimed.

Napoleon, it cannot be denied, had been not only an Emperor, but perhaps the most powerful that has ever existed; and he had been acknowledged as such by all the continental sovereigns. But he had been compelled, in 1814, to lay aside and abdicate the empire of France, and to receive in exchange the title of Emperor of Elba. His breach of the treaty of Paris was in essence a renunciation of the empire of Elba; and the reassumption of that of France was so far from being admitted by the allies, that he was declared an outlaw by the Congress at Vienna. Indeed, if this second occupation of the French throne were even to be admitted as in any respect re-establishing his forfeited claim to the Imperial dignity, it must be remembered that he himself a second time abdicated, and formally renounced a second time the dignity he had in an unhappy hour reassumed. But if Napoleon had no just pretension to the Imperial title or honours after his second abdication, even from those who had before acknowledged him as Emperor of France, still less had he any right to a title which he had laid down, from a nation who had never acquiesced in his taking it up. At no time had Great Britain recognised him as Emperor of France; and Lord Castlereagh had expressly declined to accede to the treaty of Paris, by which he was acknowledged as Emperor of Elba.[220] Napoleon, indeed, founded, or attempted to found, an argument upon the treaty of Amiens having been concluded with him, when he held the capacity of First Consul of France. But he had himself destroyed the Consular Government, of which he then constituted the head; and his having been once First Consul gave him no more title to the dignity of Emperor, than the Directorship of Barras invested him with the same title. On no occasion whatever, whether directly or by implication, had Great Britain recognised the title of her prisoner to be considered as a sovereign prince; and it was surely too late to expect acquiescence in claims in his present situation, which had not been allowed when he was actually master of half the world.

But it may be urged that, admitting that Napoleon's claim to be treated with royal ceremonial was in itself groundless, yet since he had actually enjoyed the throne for so many years, the British ministers ought to have allowed to him that rank which he had certainly possessed de facto, though not de jure. The trifling points of rank and ceremonial ought, it may be thought, according to the principles which we have endeavoured to express, to have been conceded to eclipsed sovereignty and down-fallen greatness.

To this it may be replied, that if the concession recommended could have had no further consequences than to mitigate the repinings of Napoleon—if he could have found comfort in the empty sound of titles, or if the observance of formal etiquette could have reconciled his feelings to his melancholy and dethroned condition, without altering the relative state of the question in other respects—such concession ought not to have been refused to him.

But the real cause of his desiring to have, and of the British Government's persisting in refusing to him, the name and honours of a sovereign, lay a great deal deeper. It is true, that it was a foible of Buonaparte, incident, perhaps, to his situation as a parvenu amongst the crowned heads of Europe, to be at all times peculiarly and anxiously solicitous that the most strict etiquette and form should be observed about his person and court. But granting that his vanity, as well as his policy, was concerned in insisting upon such rigid ceremonial as is frequently dispensed with by sovereigns of ancient descent, and whose title is unquestionable, it will not follow that a person of his sense and capacity could have been gratified, even if indulged in all the marks of external influence paid to the Great Mogul, on condition that, like the later descendants of Timur, he was still to remain a close prisoner. His purpose in tenaciously claiming the name of a sovereign, was to establish his claim to the immunities belonging to that title. He had already experienced at Elba the use to be derived from erecting a barrier of etiquette betwixt his person and any inconvenient visitor. Once acknowledged as Emperor, it followed, of course, that he was to be treated as such in every particular; and thus it would have become impossible to enforce such regulations as were absolutely demanded for his safe custody. Such a status, once granted, would have furnished Napoleon with a general argument against every precaution which might be taken to prevent his escape. Who ever heard of an emperor restricted in his promenades, or subjected, in certain cases, to the surveillance of an officer, and the restraint of sentinels? Or how could these precautions against escape have been taken, without irreverence to the person of a crowned head, which, in the circumstances of Napoleon Buonaparte, were indispensably necessary? Those readers, therefore, who may be of opinion that it was necessary that Napoleon should be restrained of his liberty, must also allow that the British Government would have acted imprudently if they had gratuitously invested him with a character which they had hitherto refused him, and that at the very moment when their doing so was to add to the difficulties attending his safe custody.

The question, however, does not terminate even here; for not only was Great Britain at full liberty to refuse to Buonaparte a title which she had never recognised as his due—not only would her granting it have been attended with great practical inconvenience, but farther, she could not have complied with his wishes, without affording the most serious cause of complaint to her ally the King of France. If Napoleon was called emperor, his title could apply to France alone; and if he was acknowledged as Emperor of France, of what country was Louis XVIII. King? Many wars have arisen from no other cause than that the government of one country has given the title and ceremonial due to a sovereign, to a person pretending to the throne of the other, and it is a ground of quarrel recognised by the law of nations. It is true, circumstances might have prevented Louis from resenting the supposed recognition of a royal character in his rival, as severely as Britain did the acknowledgment of the exiled Stuarts by Louis XIV., yet it must have been the subject of serious complaint; the rather that a conduct tending to indicate England's acquiescence in the imperial title claimed by Napoleon, could not but keep alive dangerous recollections, and encourage a dangerous faction in the bosom of France.