Napoleon Bonaparte

by Frank Giles

"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