Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (8 page)

Despite Jérôme’s assurances, she told Monroe in October 1808 that she worried that Bo might in reality “
be consigned to obscurity by being probably educated in an inferior condition & in ignorance of his birth & name.” She was ready to sacrifice herself for her son: “My maternal duties certainly prescribe a total dereliction of all self interested motives & I possess sufficient energy to submit implicitly to any privation how painful
soever which the interest of my son dictate.” But, Betsy asked, were Jérôme’s promises real? She did not need to remind James Monroe, or herself, how empty Jérôme’s promises to her had proven to be.

Monroe replied in early November. He knew the “
hard destiny which has attended you” and admired her response to it. She had behaved perfectly and with great dignity. In his judgment, Napoleon was smart enough to realize that, if anything bad happened to Bo in Westphalia, it would be a stain on his own reputation. The real danger, he thought, would come from Queen Catherine, especially if she produced a family. To Monroe, the matter boiled down to this: Would Bo be better off with his father or in the circle of his maternal relatives?

The following spring Betsy reached out to General John Armstrong, the current American minister at Paris. By this time, negotiations with “the eagle,” Napoleon, had been going on for almost a year, and Betsy knew that a “necessary provision” for herself was now on the table. She did not want Armstrong to carry on the negotiations without consulting her first. She would not agree to Bo going to France without her. But she was flexible as to the terms of her own settlement. She was resolved, she said, “
to accede to any offer which guarantees to me an independent & respectable Situation in life.… Should I be offered a title & Pension I will certainly accept them. I prefer infinitely a residence in France to one here.” In short, Napoleon’s largesse could satisfy her most urgent personal goal: escape from Baltimore.

Betsy’s expectations and demands appeared likely to be met.
Napoleon, busy campaigning in Spain, had nevertheless taken the time to comment on the matter in November 1808, although Turreau did not receive his instructions until the spring of 1809. The emperor seemed willing to give Betsy everything she desired—and more. “
Tell Turreau that he is to inform her that I will receive with pleasure her son and will be responsible for him if she wishes to send him to France; as for her, whatever she may desire will be granted; that she may count on my esteem and my wish to be agreeable to her; that, when I refused to recognize her, I was led by considerations of high policy; that I am resolved to assure for her son a future that she desires.” All Napoleon demanded was that the affair “be quietly and secretly managed.”

If “high policy” had motivated Napoleon’s annulment of Betsy’s marriage, it may have played an equally important role in the olive branch he now held out to Betsy. For the physical desire she had once aroused in Jérôme was now raging in two current suitors. And now as then, the courtship of the belle of Baltimore had political implications, for both of the men hoping to marry her were English.

Betsy had once enjoyed celebrity in America as the happy young bride of a Bonaparte. Now, the tragic tale of her abandonment and persecution at the hands of the Bonapartes drew public attention. The romance of her tragedy worked like an aphrodisiac on young men, and soon after she arrived home, suitors appeared at her doorstep. Although Betsy’s full attention was focused on her negotiations with Napoleon, she could not prevent these men from focusing their attention on her.

Her beauty seemed to dazzle those who met her. The English ambassador considered her the “
most beautiful woman in America,” and when she spent a few months in the nation’s capital, anonymous love notes were passed under her hotel door. Even men of the cloth fell under her spell. Reverend Horace Holley, on his way from Boston to Kentucky to take up the duties of a college president, admitted to walking up and down the main street of Baltimore, hoping to meet her. Nothing, not even her vocal hostility toward American culture, could prevent him from confessing to his wife, only half in jest, that in Betsy she had a rival for his affections.

Perhaps if Betsy’s most serious admirers had been local Baltimore merchants or Washington officeholders, their pursuit of
her affections would only have prompted admiration or envious gossip. But two of her most persistent suitors, Samuel Graves and Charles Oakley, were highly placed Englishmen, and this made their success or failure a source of political anxiety and rumination.

Such entanglement of romance and politics was not new in Betsy’s life, of course. Only a few years earlier her marriage to a Frenchman, and a Bonaparte at that, had spurred political speculation about a possible shift from neutrality to a pro-French policy on the part of the American president. Now that she had returned to America, a new set of questions arose: What were the international implications of a marriage between Betsy and one of her two prominent English suitors? Would the transfer of her affections from a French husband to an English one enrage the French? How would the British react? How would American voters respond to Betsy’s marriage to an Englishman? Betsy’s personal life once again seemed fraught with political implication, but this time her only thought was how to turn this to her own advantage.

Although Betsy had done nothing to encourage him, Samuel Colleton Graves was undoubtedly in love with her. The twenty-year-old had traveled to America as a secretary to his father, Admiral Graves of the Royal Navy. Here he had caught sight of the beautiful Madame Bonaparte—and fallen immediately in love. On May 16, 1808, he confessed his devotion in a letter marked by an odd combination of boldness and insecurity, not to mention tortured sentence structure. “
When I first saw you,” Graves gushed,

In short, Graves was ready to marry her immediately but would settle for her willingness to begin a courtship.

Betsy might have found Samuel’s adoration flattering, but she showed no signs that his passion was—or would ever be—returned. She had no interest in marrying him, or anyone, especially in 1808, when her only concern was securing her son’s “brilliant destiny” and achieving a successful escape from her father’s household. She had no intention of repeating past mistakes; she would not rely on a callow youth to rescue her. Napoleon, not the young Mr. Graves, held her future in his hands. Yet she sympathized with her suitor, for she knew what it was like to be young and madly in love. Because of this she made every effort to avoid crushing the spirit of her overzealous suitor.

Graves proved persistent if not perceptive. A year after his
opening salvo, he was writing to her once again from Philadelphia. He was, he said, headed home to England but intended to return to America as soon as possible to press his suit once again.
“In returning,” he wrote, “I have but one object, that one is but too powerful.”

Two days later Betsy sent a letter addressed to Samuel and included with it a note to his father, the admiral. She clearly intended the older man to read what she had to say to his son. Her rejection was put as tactfully but as firmly as possible:
“I should extremely regret that a sentiment more painful to yourself should impel a voyage, the result of which can only be disappointment. My time & attachment must be devoted exclusively to my Son from whose destiny whether inauspicious or the reverse I can never divide myself. The resolution of consecrating to him every sentiment & action of my life, is irrevocable—which with other Circumstances peculiar to myself, will ever preclude a change of my Situation.”

The admiral should have recognized that Samuel had been politely rejected. But affection for his son, who was clearly in agony, prompted him to support a second effort to change Betsy’s mind. On July 27, 1809, the younger Graves wrote to her once again from England.
“After the letter I received from you last May … I should not have again addressed you, were not my affection stronger than my hope.” Despite all efforts to forget her, “the warmth of my attachment is unchilled by absence, is unabated by time and distance.” Because of this, he confessed, he had enlisted his parents in the effort to change her mind. “The enclosed,” he declared, “is the expression of their
sentiments.” And indeed, enclosed with his own declaration that his “love will be as lasting as my recollection” were letters from his mother and father.

Mrs. Graves addressed Betsy as one mother to another: your maternal devotion is admirable, she wrote, but surely your son would be better off with his paternal relatives; why not turn him over to the Bonapartes and thus free yourself to marry my son? The advice regarding Bo’s future was both unwelcome and presumptuous, and what followed it was a burst of English patriotism. If Betsy would consent to marry Samuel, Mrs. Graves declared,
“My husband & myself will accompany our Son to meet you at Paris to celebrate Nuptials.” There was, of course, no possibility of Betsy entering Europe, let alone marrying an Englishman in the capital of France, as long as Napoleon remained emperor. And in 1809 Mrs. Graves’s assumption of a speedy victory by Britain in its efforts to unseat the French emperor might well be seen as folly.

Betsy felt compelled to reply: on December 1, 1809, she wrote to Mrs. Graves. She had no intention of turning Bo over to the Bonapartes, she said, and no intention of marrying Samuel. Once again she phrased her rejection as gently but firmly as possible, assuring Samuel’s doting if impolitic mother that her son was thoroughly admirable.
“I feel regret at having inspired an attachment in Mr. Graves to whose superiority of talent & acquirements I render justice.”

Betsy’s rejection transformed Samuel’s eager optimism into melancholy. He fled to Germany in an effort, once more, to forget her, he said in July 1810, but alas, he feared he could
not. His lovelorn condition persisted for at least one more year, but his heart proved resilient. When he died suddenly in 1823, the thirty-five-year-old Graves would leave an
“affectionate and devoted wife” and an infant child.

While Samuel Graves was not a member of the royal family, his father held high rank in the Royal Navy. Thus a marriage between the young man and Betsy might have created some embarrassment for the American government. Napoleon might read it as an American shift away from the policy of neutrality, just as Anthony Merry had done in 1803, when Jefferson entertained Jérôme and Betsy in Washington. Public opinion might have opposed such a marriage as well, for anti-British feelings were running high in 1808 because of the
Chesapeake
affair.

Only a year before, in June 1807, British naval officers from the HMS
Leopard
had boarded the USS
Chesapeake
and demanded that the American commander deliver to them four of his sailors, believed to be British subjects. When the commander refused, the British officers returned to their ship, and immediately afterward the
Leopard
’s guns fired on the American vessel. The
Chesapeake
was forced to surrender. Insult was added to injury when the British commander refused to honor the code of battle between two sovereign nations and rejected the American ship as a prize of war; instead he took the four alleged British subjects and sailed away. This slap in the face to American pride stirred anti-British feelings. On the other hand, rage had been building among American shippers as President Jefferson’s 1807 Embargo Act began to cripple the shipping industry. The ban on trade with the two central protagonists,
Britain and France, had already driven former Jeffersonian supporters like William Patterson into the opposition camp. With tensions running high, it was not unreasonable to worry that any incident, even the marriage of a Baltimore matron, might add to the diplomatic crisis that was clearly brewing.

These concerns proved even greater when rumors spread that Sir Charles Oakley had emerged as Betsy’s other serious suitor. Local gossips in Baltimore were betting that Oakley, secretary to the British ambassador in America, would be the man to win her hand. “
Madame Bonaparte makes our streets quite gay,” observed one local resident. “Oakley the secretary of the legation to his British Majesty is devoted to her, every evening that he is here, and, he is very little at Washington, he takes tea and is with her until ten at night. Bets are made whether he will offer; if so, whether she will accept or decline.” Although Betsy left no record of her feelings about Oakley, it was obvious to this observer at least that Betsy was interested: “Betsy is dressed with care every visit he pays, and will make a conquest if she can, how far beyond, no one knows.”

Local gossips were not the only ones keeping a close eye on Betsy’s romantic opportunities. The British ambassador, trying to stave off war with America following the
Chesapeake
incident, was beside himself over Oakley’s lovesick behavior. Try as he might, he could not get Oakley to leave her side and fulfill his duty to carry critical correspondence back to England. The ambassador commented in ungentlemanly fashion that his stubborn underling was “
desperately in love … with the cast-off wife of Jerome Bonaparte” and would not set sail for
home until Betsy made up her mind. The French ambassador was equally disturbed. The possibility that the mother of Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew might marry an Englishman troubled Louis-Marie Turreau. The emperor, negotiating with Betsy through Turreau, would not be pleased to see the English press gloat once again that their country had rescued a wronged American woman from the fate that the French ruler had cruelly imposed upon her.