Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (7 page)

The king, who owed his title to Napoleon, had the temerity to express his concern that Jérôme was, in fact, already married in the eyes of the church. Napoleon acted quickly to remedy the problem. He appealed to Pope Pius VII to annul his brother’s marriage, claiming that there was danger in having a Protestant in close proximity to a Catholic emperor.
The pope was not persuaded that a young woman posed a serious threat. When Pius refused Napoleon’s request, the French ruler took matters into his own hands. He pressured the Parisian ecclesiastical court to do what the pope would not. By October 1806, the marriage of Jérôme Bonaparte and Elizabeth Patterson had been invalidated.

All was thus in readiness when Jérôme arrived from his string of successful naval missions in the Atlantic. The former deserter was now pronounced a national hero, and Napoleon heaped rewards on him. Jérôme was made a rear admiral and a prince of the realm, a man to be addressed as “royal highness.” Jérôme’s elation was only slightly diminished when Napoleon broke the news to him that he was to be a husband once again.

While Jérôme reveled in his newfound prestige, Betsy was in Washington, visiting her aunt and reestablishing social connections with Dolley Madison. Dolley, who shared Betsy’s love of fashionable clothes and sparkling dinner conversation, served as the widowed Thomas Jefferson’s hostess at all presidential social events. This made her the undisputed leader of Washington society. Like so many of Betsy’s personal decisions, her close association with Dolley seemed to carry political implications. Jefferson’s pro-French—or more accurately, his anti-British—sentiments were well known; did the two women’s friendship suggest that Betsy, too, had cast her lot with the French? The Federalists were appalled; how could she ignore the implicit insult to American honor contained in the emperor’s dissolution of her marriage? But it was Betsy’s refusal to condemn Napoleon, whose power and ambition she would admire for the rest of her life, that ensured her private crisis would continue to have political overtones.

It was in Washington that Betsy began to hear the rumors of Jérôme’s proposed marriage to the princess of Württemberg. Soon enough she also heard rumors that her own marriage had been annulled; although it was not unexpected, the news, if true, was a terrible blow. Both rumors, of course, proved correct. On July 7, 1807, Napoleon rewarded Jérôme’s loyalty with a kingship. The emperor had been revising the map of Europe, carving new countries out of conquered areas of Prussia and Germany. One of the new kingdoms was tiny Westphalia, lying to the east of Belgium. Jérôme would wear the Westphalian crown. His queen would be Princess Catherine Fredericka Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg.

Jérôme was unlikely to feel the rush of desire to possess his queen-to-be that he had once felt for Betsy Patterson. Nineteen-year-old Catherine was neither pretty nor charming, although she proved herself to be kind and caring during their long marriage. She was short, without the long neck that signaled grace and beauty in the Napoleonic era, and she rarely smiled. The Duchesse d’Abrantès, who believed Jérôme regretted his divorce but simply did not have the “strength of mind” to resist the pressures put upon him, described the poor impression Catherine made on her first meeting with him. The
duchesse,
who was present at the first meeting of the young couple, expressed regret
“that no one had the courage to recommend her a different style of dress.” Instead, Catherine wore a gown “in a style which had … been forgotten … with a train exactly resembling the round tail of the beaver.” The meeting was brief; after a short conversation, Jérôme announced, “My brother is waiting for us,” and left the room. Catherine realized the meeting had gone badly. “The colour in her cheeks increased so violently,” the
duchesse
wrote, “that I feared the bursting of a blood-vessel.” Then Catherine fainted. Despite Jérôme’s lack of enthusiasm for his future wife, their wedding took place on August 12, 1807.

Jérôme filled the weeks and months that followed running up bills that quickly drained the Westphalian treasury. In addition to his own dazzlingly extravagant wardrobe—including satin suits embroidered with gold—he dressed members of his palace staff in velvet capes. He was soon borrowing money to cover his debts. Napoleon watched with disgust. Although he spoke bluntly to Jérôme, declaring,
“I have seldom seen anyone with so little sense of proportion as yourself,” he knew the censure
fell on deaf ears. His younger brother was simply beyond reform. “Jérôme,” Napoleon told a confidant,
“cares for nothing but pageantry, women, plays, and fetes.” But no matter how harshly Napoleon criticized him, Jérôme remained confident that he would eventually be forgiven. In the end, it was Catherine who did most of the forgiving, for Jérôme was regularly, and flagrantly, unfaithful to his wife.

While Jérôme was refurbishing royal buildings and appointing incompetent friends to positions of responsibility, Betsy was rebuilding her own life. What might have seemed an ending for an early-nineteenth-century American woman abandoned with a small child was, for Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, only the beginning. Her prince charming had failed her, but she was now ready to create a fairy-tale life for herself.

Although at twenty, Betsy was still young and beautiful, by 1805 she was no longer naïve. She had grown cynical, and over the coming years, she would come to share with her father that distrust of other people’s motives that was the darker side of self-reliance. For the moment, however, it was enough that she was determined to find her own voice, to make her own decisions. She would no longer rely on her father or brothers to protect her interests, and thus she would no longer have to justify her choices. She would choose her own path and negotiate, if need be, with emperors, kings, ambassadors, and congressmen for what she wanted.

She grew quickly adept at reading the motives of her enemies and allies alike, and she now clearly understood that men with power operated in their own best interest. She would do the same. She knew what she wanted: to secure a future for her son and to find a way out of Baltimore. The question was, How to achieve both?

In 1807 Bo, as the three-year-old Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte was called, was a handsome, healthy child with an uncertain legal and social status. In Europe he was the illegitimate son of the king of Westphalia. In America he was the sole offspring of a marriage still recognized as legal in Maryland. He was the
grandson of one of America’s wealthiest citizens and the natural nephew of the emperor of France. Above all, he carried the surname Bonaparte, and this alone made him an object of considerable interest on both continents. Perhaps most significant, he would become a pawn in a struggle between William Patterson and Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, for each believed his choice of loyalty would vindicate their respective actions.

Betsy might have pursued a course of action that reduced, if not resolved, the importance of her son’s paternity. She could have quickly filed for a divorce in her home state and just as quickly remarried, giving Bo a father figure and a refuge from political intrigue and social notoriety. This was a choice William Patterson would surely have approved. It was true that Betsy was not a widow, the most respectable status for remarriage; but a dowry from her father could have swept away any concerns about this. Her family wealth, her beauty, and what many saw as her tragic betrayal combined to make her desirable to several eligible bachelors. But Betsy had no intention of remarrying. She meant instead to fight for recognition of her son as a full member of the French imperial family. She meant to see him ranked among the successors to the throne of France. She had once thrown down a challenge to Napoleon—“Tell him that Madame Bonaparte is ambitious and demands her rights as a member of the imperial family.” Now it was Bo’s rights that consumed her thoughts and that would shape many of her actions for the rest of her life. It seemed not to occur to her, until it was too late, that Bo did not value those “rights” as much as his mother did.

Betsy’s attention was no longer focused on her former husband,
the king of Westphalia. She dismissed him, and his excuses for abandoning her, with contempt. In November 1807, when an American visitor to Jérôme’s court wrote to Betsy that the king “
speaks of you as the only woman he ever loved or ever shall love tho’ united to another much against his Inclination which the Emperor his Brother cruelly imposed on him,” Betsy was unimpressed. On the margin of the letter, she later wrote her own commentary: “The Kindness of my ExHusband the King was ever of the unremitting kind as no money accompanied it.”

It was Napoleon, not Jérôme, who she believed could provide Bo with the recognition she desired so intensely for him. And there were many who believed the emperor would do just that. Eliza Anderson, who had accompanied Betsy on the
Erin,
wrote to her at the end of May 1808 with news she had received from France. The emperor, Eliza declared, intended to make Betsy duchess regent of someplace or another. The news was little more than rumor, Eliza admitted, but she was convinced it reflected Napoleon’s softened attitude toward the woman he had once dismissed as “that little girl.” “
It is a sign that you are thought of,” Eliza noted, “which gives some hope.” A few days later Eliza sent a second letter from her home in Trenton, New Jersey. After telling Betsy that everyone admires the “
dignity which I tell them characterizes you in your present Situation,” she assured her friend that “a brilliant destiny awaits you and the dear little Bo.” On June 8 she wrote once more, promising Betsy that Bo would be “
splendidly provided for” and that his mother would surely receive generous support from Napoleon.

Betsy had no intention of sitting back and waiting for the
good fortune that Eliza was confident would come her way.
On July 9 she wrote to the current French minister to the United States asking for his assistance in communicating to Napoleon about his nephew. She was careful to place no blame on the emperor; she saw herself, she told General Louis-Marie Turreau, simply as a victim of circumstances outside her control. But if political necessities trumped individual needs or desires, and if the rights of a society superseded the rights of an individual, as they did in her case, surely Napoleon must see Bo in a different light. Bo was no ordinary individual like herself; Bonaparte blood ran in his veins, and thus he was “worthy of interest.” As Bo’s mother, she found Napoleon’s insistence that she call herself Miss Patterson rather than Madame Bonaparte a social embarrassment for them both.

Minister Turreau did not dismiss her appeal out of hand. Instead, he sent her a series of questions meant to test her willingness to bow to any conditions Napoleon might impose. Although these questions were, on the surface, personal, it was clear that Napoleon’s motives were political. He wished to prevent any further diplomatic advantage to his archenemy, Britain. His goal was to neutralize this troublesome woman, to ensure that her “plight” would never again be grist for the English propaganda mill. Would she, the emperor’s surrogate asked, promise never to marry without the consent of the French government if the emperor gave her a title and a pension? Would she renounce forever any idea of going to England? Would she renounce the United States and go to Europe? If she moved to Europe, would she consent not to leave the town chosen by the
emperor for her residence without first informing the prefect of the place? If Betsy agreed to these restrictions, she would, in effect, cede control over where and with whom she lived to Napoleon. This she seemed willing to do. But the last question gave her pause: Do you demand that your son should remain with you until the age of seven? This was itself a demand that she turn over her son at that point, to Napoleon or someone of his choosing.

By September it was clear that her former husband, Jérôme, might be the “someone” who planned to take Bo away. That month Alexandre Le Camus arrived in New York and forwarded to Betsy two letters written in May by Jérôme, one addressed to her and one to William Patterson. Addressing her once again as “beloved Elisa,” he asked that she give up her son to him. “
Do not give in to grief, my good Elisa,” he added, “be hopeful, and count on a happier future.” He failed, of course, to provide details of what this happier future might be for a mother who sacrificed her son. In his letter to William,
Jérôme was blunt: he wanted to bring up his son in Westphalia and, he claimed, Napoleon had approved of the plan.

Jérôme’s conciliatory tone vanished in his next letter. Perhaps he had gotten wind of Betsy’s negotiations with Turreau; perhaps he had simply heard rumors that she was attempting to communicate directly with his older brother. Whether it was gossip or fact, Jérôme was offended by the possibility that she would not rely exclusively upon him for assistance. I am a king, he reminded her, and I can provide for you and our son. He clearly thought he was making a magnanimous gesture when
he told Betsy that she could come to Westphalia and keep Bo with her until the boy turned twelve. He promised more. He would make her the princess of Smalkalden, a small town that lay thirty leagues from the capital city, Cassel, and provide her with a beautiful home and 200,000 francs a year.

Betsy’s reply is lost, but at some point she wrote comments on the margins of his letter. She owed him nothing, she observed, and the only rights he had over her were the “
right to be despised and hated.” She dismissed the offer of a title as princess of Smalkalden, writing, “Westphalia [is] not large enough for two queens.” But her contempt for Jérôme came through most clearly when she contemplated choosing between Napoleon’s assistance and Jérôme’s: “
I would rather be sheltered under the wings of an eagle than dangle from the beak of a goose.”

It may have been satisfying to vent her anger and show her contempt for this “goose,” but Betsy’s first consideration was, after all, Bo’s future. What if Jérôme’s new wife had no sons? Would Bo then be heir to his father’s throne? Was she indeed being selfish? Was she letting her feelings toward Jérôme cloud her judgment? She did not know. She decided to write to the former ambassador to France, James Monroe, for advice.