Tag Archives: Betsy Bonaparte

Eliza and the Bonapartes Land in Lisbon

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I was regaling friends at a dinner party last night with tales of Betsy and Eliza — and it reminded me that I’ve left my readers (whoever you may be) hanging. So, what kinds of adventures did Eliza encounter when she sailed across the Atlantic with Jerome and Betsy Bonaparte?

They left Baltimore in a merchant ship called the Erin, apparently chartered by Betsy’s wealthy father. As I’ve mentioned, keeping their departure a secret was of the utmost importance, given that the British were at war with France and would have liked nothing better than to capture Napoleon’s youngest brother. The captain of the Erin acknowledged in his journal that “The Embarkation of these persons on board the Erin was intended to be kept a secret, yet nothing was less so, each of the ladies protested their Innocence of divulging the Voyage, and one of them it is very possible may not have spoken of it. But certain it is the great secret was known in my family indirectly from the other one.”

Despite the lack of discretion, the ship somehow didn’t come under fire from the British, and the little party–which consisted of Betsy, Jerome, Eliza, Betsy’s brother William, and several other servants and hangers-on–made their way safely across the Atlantic in a mere three weeks. The only difficulty they encountered was seasickness. (Jerome, in his charmingly fractured English, wrote to Betsy’s father that Betsy had been “been very sick, but you know as well as anybody that seasick never has killed no body.” Jerome may have sounded like the old salt he affected to be, but, according to the captain, Jerome himself had been plenty seasick as well.) The captain reported that the ladies amused themselves by gossiping about people back in Baltimore: “The subjects of it could not had they known all that passed been the least offended, for … no one was spared.”

Their destination was Lisbon, presumably since it was technically not under Napoleon’s control. They had every reason to believe that Napoleon wouldn’t be exactly welcoming to Betsy, since he’d expressly forbidden Jerome from bringing her back to Europe with him. Still, even at Lisbon the Bonapartes used an assumed name. It apparently fooled no one (aside from the benighted Portuguese, who, according to the ship’s captain, were kept in “such a state of Ignorance that Napoleon himself might have been with us, without their knowing or caring about it, providing he had no troops with him”). Various “distinguished personages” came to call on the Bonapartes at their hotel, including the Spanish ambassador and the Papal Nuncio–who was described by the ship’s captain, apparently no lover of Catholics, as “a canting, whining priest.”

As planned, Jerome bade his wife farewell after a few days and set out overland to find his brother the Emperor and plead with him to recognize the marriage. The ship’s captain thought Jerome was headed to Paris, and it’s possible Betsy and the others thought so as well. But in fact, Jerome had found orders from Napoleon awaiting him in Lisbon: he was to go meet Napoleon in northern Italy, according to a specified route. If he deviated from it he would be arrested. The orders also said that Betsy would not be allowed to land in France or Holland, and that she should return to America immediately. It’s not clear that Jerome passed this information along either — in fact, given what happened next, it seems that he didn’t.

Eliza, Betsy, and Napoleon–Part 2

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So, as I was saying, Betsy and her husband Jerome Bonaparte decided to try once more to sail from Baltimore to Europe to try to convince Jerome’s brother–the Emperor Napoleon–to recognize the validity of their marriage.

On at least one of the previous abortive attempts at crossing the Atlantic–the one that ended in a shipwreck–Betsy had brought along an unmarried female relative of hers, Nancy Spear, as a companion. There’s no explanation of exactly why she brought Miss Spear along, but the couple may have anticipated some difficulty that would require them to be separated.

But when Jerome and Betsy decided, in March 1805, to attempt the voyage yet again, Betsy brought along not Miss Spear (who may have been reluctant to go to sea again after that shipwreck) but her brother William and her friend Eliza Anderson. At this point Betsy was several months pregnant, so a female companion who could hold her hand during a possible delivery may have seemed like a good idea.

The mention of a “Mrs. Anderson” on this voyage has led some of the many historical novelists who have taken a crack at Betsy’s story to conclude that she was an older “family friend”–“sour and efficient” as one author characterized her–with experience as a sort of midwife.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Eliza Anderson was 25 at the time, only five years older than Betsy, and the two had been friends from their youth. Although no letters between them survive from this time, later letters suggest that Eliza felt a partly maternal, partly sisterly interest in Betsy–sometimes urging her to read the “metaphysical writers” that Eliza herself found consoling in times of despair (she mentions works such as William Paley’s Moral Philosophy and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments), sometimes chiding her to curb her notoriously acid tongue.

We don’t know exactly why Betsy chose Eliza to accompany on her voyage, but at this point both of them held a somewhat marginal position in Baltimore’s elite society, which may have strengthened their bond. Betsy was the daughter of one of the state’s wealthiest men, William Patterson (second in wealth only to Charles Carroll of Carrollton, according to Thomas Jefferson). But her reputation had suffered as a result of her controversial marriage, her air of superiority, and her scandalous manner of dress (she favored the new French neoclassical style–no corset, thin material–leading Americans to complain that she was appearing in public nearly naked). Basically, a lot of people in Baltimore couldn’t stand her–just as she couldn’t stand them.

As for Eliza, her father was a respected, but far from wealthy, doctor. Probably as a result of family connections and her father’s eminence, Eliza was friendly with the daughters of Baltimore’s leading families, including not only Betsy but the three Caton sisters, granddaughters of Charles Carroll. But her position in society was even more precarious than Betsy’s. At the age of 19 she had made an ill-advised marriage of her own, to a Henry Anderson. After about a year, during which he fathered a daughter, Henry abandoned his family, apparently after going bankrupt.

So in 1805, when Betsy asked Eliza to accompany her to Europe, Eliza was essentially a single mother, living a life of genteel poverty in the shadow of far wealthier friends and relatives. We can safely assume that her life lacked glamor and adventure. How could she resist Betsy’s invitation to sail to Europe and possibly be received at the court of the Emperor Napoleon, even if it meant leaving behind her four-year-old daughter and risking her life on the high seas, where there lurked not only natural disasters but also the British navy, on high alert for Jerome’s rumored crossing?

Well, actually, I probably would have said no myself. But Eliza was apparently made of stronger, and more adventurous, stuff.

And as we shall see, she got plenty of adventure.

Eliza, Betsy, and Napoleon

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And so, to pick up where I left off — alas, some weeks ago now — I decided to try to find out more about this woman Eliza Anderson, the author of these three delightful and intriguing letters to Betsy Bonaparte in 1808. Nothing much had been written about her in recent times, but the magazine of the Maryland Historical Society had published three articles about her: one in 1934, one in 1941, and one in 1957. Of these, only one focused exclusively on Eliza. The others were about her and her second husband, the French architect Maximilian Godefroy.

The more I read about her — and the more of her letters I came across — the more intrigued I became. I already knew from the three letters I had read that she was witty, intrepid, defiant of social conventions — and an excellent writer. Here are some other things I discovered:

In 1805, when she was about 25, Eliza accompanied her friend Betsy Patterson Bonaparte on a risky voyage across the Atlantic. Why so risky? Aside from the fact that all ocean travel was risky in that era, there was a war going on between the British and the French. And if the British figured out exactly who was in THIS ship, they would have found it a most attractive target.

Betsy’s last name is a clue to what the problem was: a little over a year before, at the age of 18, Betsy had impulsively married Napoleon Bonaparte’s 19-year-old brother. Betsy’s wealthy father had given his consent to the marriage with great reluctance — after doing everything he could to break up the romance — because he feared that Napoleon would object. And indeed, Napoleon, who became Emperor shortly after the marriage took place, was livid when he found out what Jerome had done. He had other plans for his siblings, namely using them to form alliances with the royal houses of Europe. And Jerome’s marriage had occurred during an unauthorized leave from his military duties in the West Indies. Napoleon ordered him back to France at one — without the “young person” he claimed to have married.

After some dithering, Jerome and Betsy resolved to head back to France together and plead their case before the Emperor. But because the British would have liked nothing better than to capture their enemy Napoleon’s brother, the young couple had to guard their plans with as much secrecy as they could. As it turned out, they weren’t capable of a whole lot of secrecy, and rumors of their attempted departures (some true, some false) kept showing up in the newspapers. Finally, they managed to embark, only to be shipwrecked rather spectacularly only a few hours later. Everyone was saved, but according to reports, when rescued the passengers were “nearly naked.”

This attempt was followed a few weeks later by another one that proved equally abortive: soon after sailing, the ship encountered an armed British frigate and turned back. Then it was winter, when an Atlantic crossing was too perilous to undertake. But finally, in March of 1805, Jerome and Betsy decided to try once more.

And this is where Eliza comes into the story…

Divorce, 19th-Century Style

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Okay, I think it’s time to say a few more words about Eliza Anderson Godefroy, the woman I mentioned a few blog posts back.

I stumbled across her while researching what I thought was going to be a historical novel about a woman named Betsy Bonaparte, a Baltimore heiress who married Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother, Jerome, in 1803 (she was 18, he was 19). Betsy’s correspondence and papers are housed in the library of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, and there are a daunting number of them. As I was going through the first of 20 boxes, I came across three letters written to Betsy in 1808 that stopped me in my tracks.

They were far better written and far more interesting than anything Betsy herself had produced (at least, from what I’ve read of her correspondence — and I’ve now read a lot). And they were all written by a woman named Eliza Anderson, who had gone off in pursuit of her ne’er-do-well husband. He had married Eliza some nine years before when she was 19, fathered a child with her, and then quickly abandoned the family.

Why was Eliza pursuing him now? Because she had fallen in love with another man, a French architect named Maximilian Godefroy, and she wanted a divorce. Divorce wasn’t easy in those days: you had to petition the legislature for a private law granting you a divorce, and you had to prove adultery. For some reason, Eliza had gone from Baltimore to Trenton, New Jersey, to get her divorce. After some time there, she decided that her lawyers weren’t doing enough to track down her errant husband and obtain proof of adultery (not an affair, as she remarked, “to which men usually call witnesses”). So she decided to go to Albany, where she thought he was, and track him down herself.

One of her letters describes the steamship journey up what must have been the Hudson — the crowd of passengers jammed tightly on board, the relentless sun, the “smoke & glowing delights which Lucifer prepares for his faithful followers.” She waxed lyrical about the mountains and the rising sun that shone on the clouds, so that they “looked like other & more distant hills bordered with silver.” And, moving on to her arrival in Albany, she expressed her disgust with her cad of a husband, who — in addition to his other faults — had now descended to working as a fisherman and “associating cheerfully with servants.” But she got what she came for: he not only confessed to adultery, but also ultimately provided the name of a witness of sorts, a Baltimore physician (perhaps the provider of an abortion?).

Who was this spirited woman whose writing was so engaging, I wondered? I had to know. And so I found myself getting sidetracked from my research into Betsy — who was, in addition to being a mediocre letter-writer, a pretty unpleasant person — and getting more and more intrigued by Eliza.

I’ll share some more of my discoveries about her in my next post.

Fame and Obscurity

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When I stumbled across one of the two main characters in the novel I’m currently working on–Betsy Patterson Bonaparte–at an exhibit of Gilbert Stuart portraits some years back, I was intrigued. Here was a clearly fascinating historical character languishing in obscurity.

Yes, her beauty and her marriage to Napoleon’s youngest brother in 1803 had catapulted her to celebrity status in the 19th century–a collection of her letters published shortly after her death in 1879 referred to her as “one of the most famous women in America,” a statement that was to me a sadly ironic comment on the fleeting nature of fame. Sure, she was the subject of numerous biographies and historical novels into the early 20th century, and during the same era there were two silent films and a Broadway play based on her life. But who really remembered her now?

Well, apparently, a lot of people–at least in the environs of her native Baltimore. The other day I was at the Maryland Historical Society’s library in that city, putting in a request for a box of her correspondence. A man standing next to me, who turned out to be a Historical Society staff member, asked me what I was researching. When I told him, he informed me that he himself had done a lot of research on Betsy, and that if there was anything I needed to know I should just ask him.

Okay, maybe that’s not so surprising–after all, the MdHS is where Betsy’s papers are housed, along with various personal items. They’re even having something of a Betsy Bonaparte festival in the fall of 2010. But a little later, I was giving a luncheon talk at a club in Baltimore called the Hamilton Club (among those present were several people from my Baltimore childhood and adolescence, including my high school English teacher, who must now be approaching 90). The talk was primarily about my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, but when I mentioned my work-in-progress, I was surprised to find that virtually everyone in the room seemed to know all about Betsy.

“I must be the only person who grew up in Baltimore who’d never heard of Betsy Patterson,” I remarked. (Baltimoreans, true to their conservative nature, seem to prefer to call her by her maiden name). I’ve even discovered that a bakery in downtown Baltimore I liked to frequent when I was a child was called “Betsy Patterson’s.” Somehow, I’d never noticed the name.

Well, all right–maybe everyone in Baltimore has heard of her. But what about the rest of the country? I now live in Washington, D.C., a city that has a lot of its own history to deal with; Betsy made a number of appearances here in the early 19th century (including a very high-profile one when she appeared at a party wearing an apparently see-through dress), but in relative terms she must still be pretty obscure. Or so I thought.

Yesterday I toured an old plantation house called Riversdale located in what is now a Washington suburb. It belonged to a remarkable woman named Rosalie Stier Calvert, who left behind a lot of letters (published in a book called Mistress of Riversdale). In several of these letters she mentions Betsy, and I’m about to write a scene that places Betsy on a visit there. So I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the place.

It’s a beautiful house, lovingly restored, and I had an extremely knowledgeable and personable gentleman as my docent for what turned out to be a private tour (at only $3 per adult admission, this place is a bargain – I urge those living in or visiting the DC area to check it out). I kept hinting that I was primarily interested in what the house would have looked like in 1803 or 1804, without mentioning exactly why. But then I started to explain that I was working on a historical novel.

“Betsy!” muttered my docent, somewhat wearily.

How did he know? Does he routinely get visitors working on historical novels about Betsy Bonaparte? How many of us are out there? I was too taken aback to ask.

Of course, it’s possible that writing about someone who’s reasonably well known could actually be an advantage; maybe more people will be willing to buy and read a book about someone who’s not that obscure. But for me, part of the appeal of writing historical novels is precisely to rescue my (real) characters from obscurity, to make a “discovery.” Clearly, Betsy has already been discovered.

But I can console myself with the thought that I have another character up my sleeve, one that only a very few people know about–even in Baltimore, which was also her hometown. Her name was Eliza Anderson Godefroy. And if you’re interested in knowing more about her (as well as in finding out some things about Betsy that may not be so well known), you’ll need to read my next book. Of course, first I’ll need to write it!