Napoleon Bonaparte

"My political life is over, and I proclaim my son Emperor of the French under the title of Napoleon II." It was not to be. Napoleon's hopes, expressed in a declaration to the French people after his defeat at Waterloo, were to be dashed by his enemies. On 13 July 1815, a few weeks after the great battle, Napoleon dictated his famous letter to the Prince Regent from a French frigate lying off Rochefort. Carefully avoiding any hint of surrender, still less any acceptance of responsibility for the defeat of France, he said he came "like Themistocles to throw myself upon the hospitality of the British people -- I put myself under the protection of their laws, which I claim from Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most constant and the most generous of my enemies". Napoleon's idea of living peacefully in the English countryside could never have been anything but laughable. The island of St. Helena, his ultimate destination to which the Royal Navy conveyed him, was a desolate and unappealing place. The respect accorded him by the officers and men of the Navy revealed, however, his sure touch with fighting men, and the magnetism he still exerted on his fellow beings even after his defeat. Once arrived at his "prison" Longwood, Napoleon came under the command and supervision of its Governor Sir Hudson Lowe. What really happened in there? Was the fallen Emperor well or badly treated -- perhaps even poisoned? Speculation has been rife for many years. Lowe has been reviled by some historians, but looking afresh at a great deal of the evidence, Frank Giles portrays him, unattractive though he was in many ways, in a more favorable light. This fascinating book will spark off renewed controversy about Napoleon's life in St. Helena from 1816 to his death in 1821, and about British reactions both at the time and later, to Bonaparte's captivity. Was he a martyr or a menace, should he have been treated differently or did he richly deserve to be put out of harm's way? And why did Queen Victoria, only 40 years after Waterloo, pay a personal tribute to the Emperor's mortal remains? - Jacket flap.