The John Williamson Chronicles

Last weekend Endeavour republished The White Rajah.

The White Rajah was the first book I ever wrote. When I wrote it, I had no idea that it was going to turn out to be the first of a trilogy: the John Williamson Chronicles.

Like many people starting their first novel, I wanted to write something very serious – not, perhaps, the Great British Novel, but definitely a meaningful book. Whether I succeeded or not is really for you to judge, but publishers certainly told me that it was too serious for a first book. My agent urged me to go away and write something more commercial. The result was the Burke books, which Endeavour republished over the last few weeks and which I hope you are enjoying.

I was worried that people who had read The White Rajah would be a bit thrown by the change of tone that came with the move to James Burke. I wrote a blog piece about this, which I felt the time was amazingly self-indulgent and I did wonder if I should publish it. It turned out to be one of the more popular things I’ve posted. So now I’m reposting it although my concern this time is that after the relatively light-hearted (if bloody) adventures of James Burke the rather heavier themes of John Williamson might come as a shock.

Apples and oranges

Graham Greene divided his work into ‘entertainments’ and ‘novels’. Some people find this an unsatisfactory split. All fiction, they say, should entertain. Suggesting that some have a higher purpose and are ‘novels’ and not mere ‘entertainment’ is presumptious and unhelpful.

I think the separation can be useful. If we sit down to read a book by John Grisham, we have different expectations from if we are tackling John Updike. It helps to know what we might have coming. At the end of a long day, more people will want to turn to Wilbur Smith than Salman Rushdie. The problem comes when the same author writes two different kinds of books. Some use a pseudonym to separate the two sides of their output but, as J.K. Rowling has discovered, that doesn’t always work.

I must declare a personal interest. Accent are now publishing a new edition of The White Rajah to follow Burke in the Land of Silver and I wish I had some way to warn people not to expect the second book to be anything like the first.The White Rajah was the first book I wrote. Like all first novels, it has its flaws but, like, I suspect, many first novels, it was trying very hard to be a serious book. It’s based on the life of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak and the model for Conrad’s Lord Jim. Like Conrad’s protagonist, Brooke was a flawed hero. I’ve tried to use him and his personal relationships to say something about British colonial rule. Nowadays, we generally like heroes to be basically good people and we think colonialism was essentially bad. What I try to do in The White Rajah is to suggest that life is a bit more complicated than that. The result is a book that I hope people will find reasonably exciting (there’s battles and pirates and evil plots) but which is, I have to admit, hardly a bundle of laughs. I hope it’s entertaining but I don’t think of it as primarily an entertainment. Graham Greene might not have thought it a particularly good novel, but I think he would accept that a novel is what it set out to be.

I hope that by now you might have read Burke in the Land of Silver, so you can judge for yourself how far it succeeds in its primary intention, which was simply to entertain. James Burke (an unfortunately similar name to the Rajah’s) was also a real person, but his adventures are just that: intrigue and derring-do set in exciting places with wicked foes and beautiful women. I hope that the story is not without some more serious content, but my main aim was to send you away entertained.

There is, I hope, room for both kinds of book in the world. Indeed, I fervently hope that there’s room for both on your bookshelves (or, more likely, your Kindle). Please buy both, read them and, I hope, enjoy them. Just don’t expect them to be the same.

The truth about publishing then and now.

I’m still catching up with book reviews, so here is another of my Tuesday Book Blog specials. This week I’m combining a book review with a quick look at Victorian England as we discuss New Grub Street. It’s a wonderful insight into the world of writers and publishing at the end of the 19th century, with a surprising amount to say about that world today.

New Grub Street by George Gissing

In last week’s review of Ed Reardon’s Week, I mentioned New Grub Street. This week, having reviewed the light-hearted modern take on the subject, I’m going back to the 1891 original.

New Grub Street was written by George Gissing, a jobbing writer of his day, little appreciated for most of his life and largely forgotten now. The story tells the life of Edmund Reardon, a writer who, after one reasonably successful novel, is on the road to obscurity. The parallels between author and protagonist are so marked that the story often reads less like a novel than a memoir.

George Gissing

New Grub Street is a flawed book and one which, interestingly, makes it flaws part of its story. In order to make money from writing, Gissing had to produce ‘three volume novels’, the preferred choice of the publishers of his day. Yet many books really can’t justify three volumes. Gissing has his characters rage against the necessity of stretching work out to that extra volume: “A triple-headed monster, sucking the blood of English novelists.” The second volume, he points out, is usually weak “simply because a story which would have made a tolerable book… refuses to fill three books.”

New Grub Street is a clear example of exactly what Gissing complains of. The second volume demonstrates exactly those faults which Reardon identifies in his own work. It consists “almost entirely of laborious padding”. In fairness, Gissing is being unduly critical: there is good stuff in the second volume, but you have to wade through an awful lot of superfluous dialogue to find it. Dialogue, as Gissing points out means “the space is filled so much more quickly, and at a pinch one can make people talk about the paltriest incidents of life.” It’s a shame because, particularly nowadays, people are unwilling to work their way through 550 pages of Penguin paperback to extract the 300 or so pages of excellence hidden therein.

Gissing has a sharp eye and if he makes Reardon sometimes rather cruel and cynical, that reflects Reardon’s increasing desperation as he moves further and further into poverty. Gissing was almost obsessed with poverty and its social implications, largely because he spent so much of his life poor himself. Gissing’s author characters starve in garrets not figuratively but literally. Even so, many of his observations on life read well in today’s world. One of his minor characters administers a charitable trust – “a charity whose moderate funds were largely devoted to the support of gentlemen engaged in administering it.” Another makes his living by private tutoring in a world where exam results are increasingly viewed as a path to what we would now call ‘upward social mobility’. “The teaching by which he partly lived was a kind quite unknown to the respectable tutorial world. In these days of examinations, numbers of men in a poor position – clerks chiefly – can see the hope that by ‘passing’ this, that, or the other formal test they may open for themselves new careers.”

Teaching “quite unknown to the respectable tutorial world” is now available online

Most of Gissing’s observations, though, are confined to the effects of poverty (Reardon lives close to a workhouse and is terrified he will die in there) and to the iniquities of the publishing world. It is his comments about publishing that might be expected most to touch a nerve with today’s writers, for they suggest that many of the issues that we see as being unique to the 21st-century have afflicted publishing since the 19th.

Reardon is writing in a world where the market is saturated with cheap books.

“The quantity [of literary work] turned out is so great that there’s no hope for the special attention of the public unless one can afford to advertise hugely.”

It’s a complaint I hear all the time from authors today and, like today, it leads publishers into arrangements for profit splitting which were relatively uncommon later in the 20th century but which, with the glut of e- books, have come back with a vengeance.

“[A publisher] offered to bring it out on the terms of half profits to the author. The book appeared, and was well spoken of in one or two papers; but profits there were none to divide.”

The secret, Gissing says, is to be well-connected in society so that your book is talked about by people who matter.

“Year by year, such influence grows of more account. A lucky man will still occasionally succeed by dint of his own honest perseverance, but the chances are dead against anyone who can’t make private interest with influential people.”

Nowadays, of course, we don’t need to invite influential people (or ‘influencers’ in 2018) into our homes. That’s what social media are for. Here’s Rachel Thompson (book marketing guru) on Twitter [https://bookmachine.org/2017/12/10/twitter-guide-will-make-see-youre-wrong-make-right-authors]:

“Twitter is a wonderful way to connect with readers, book bloggers, and book reviewers if you are connecting with them strategically. Many writers are completely flummoxed how to do that … I love Twitter because it’s the best way I know to connect with readers quickly and without having to write novels (hello, Facebook) to connect. My goal here is to help you change your paradigm from selling to connecting.”

So much of what Gissing says is relevant to publishing today, it’s almost uncanny, but the most uncanny of all is his understanding of the appeal of modern media like Twitter. Here one of Reardon’s friends comes up with the idea for a new magazine – one which eventually makes his fortune:

“I would have the paper address itself to … young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains and on ‘buses and trams.… What they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information – bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches.”

The idea for a typical modern media offering is worked out in immense detail – right down to the click-bait headlines. It’s a terrifying foresight into modern publishing.

Gissing also has a way with words. I particularly liked his description of Reardon trying and failing to extract the ideas from his brain and put them down onto paper – surely an experience all writers have had.

“Twice or thrice he rose from his chair, paced the room with a determined brow, and sat down again with a vigorous clutch of the pen; still he failed to its excogitate a single sentence that would serve his purpose.”

‘Excogitate’ is a word I would love to see in common currency.

There is a lot wrong with Gissing’s book. His love life was a miserable failure (he quite probably died from the effects of tertiary syphilis) and misogyny is a recurring theme. It’s too long, possibly too bitter and remorselessly cynical, but it remains a fascinating insight into writing and writers, just as true now as when it was written. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

New Grub Street is available free on Amazon.

A word from our sponsor

Gissing identified the problem with getting your books seen at the end of the 19th century and that problem remains today. I write this blog because I enjoy it, but I’m also hoping that if you enjoy reading what you see here for free, you might consider buying some of my books. Have a look on the books page of this website.

Nowadays we don’t have many literary salons and I’m not about to invite you all over for afternoon tea and a discussion of the latest novels. But we do have a virtual equivalent and, just as having a circle of literary friends was essential for a successful writer in New Grub Street, so a virtual circle of friends is essential today. I tweet as TomCW99 and I have a Facebook author page at www.facebook.com/AuthorTomWilliams. I’d really appreciate it if you could ‘follow’ and ‘like’ these. And, almost invisible at the bottom of the page, there’s a sign-up box for a newsletter that I keep promising to start. Don’t worry about being overwhelmed with spam – with the blogs and the tweets and the Facebook posts, I wouldn’t have the energy even if I wanted to spam you.

Thanks for reading. Do feel free to comment, and I hope I’ll see you here again.

A Palace of Peace

If you regularly read my Friday posts on this blog, you will have noticed that last week I was a day late. This is because on Friday I was away visiting Den Haag (The Hague).

It’s a nice little town, quiet and pretty, but unless you are a fan of art galleries, there isn’t a great deal to interest the average tourist, so many visitors will end up visiting the famous model village at Madurodam. Personally, I wasn’t impressed (you can see my Trip Advisor review here) but it did feature quite a nice model of the Peace Palace. I recommend that model, because it’s the closest you are going to get to the real thing.

The Peace Palace is another of the attractions that the guide books recommend to visitors. It was designed as a temple to peace. It is a place of stunning beauty with artworks from all over the world so that countries could provide a concrete gesture of their support for the idea that disputes could be resolved by arbitration rather than through warfare. The walls are covered with decorative tiling and the ceilings are elaborately painted.

For anyone interested in the history of the place, the first suggestion that there might be a mismatch between its ideals and the practical realities of the world comes with the fact that it was opened in 1913. The next year, of course, the First World War started.

Nowadays the Peace Palace is home to the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Outside the gates is a little monument with stones from all the countries of the world that acknowledge the jurisdiction of these courts. There is an eternal flame – the flame of peace – that burns beside the road. It’s quite touching to see the way that people come to acknowledge the importance of peace at such a building.

I looked forward to seeing inside this beautiful place, which stood for something so important, or maybe exploring the gardens.

I was in Den Haag because my wife was attending a conference at the Peace Palace. I turned up with her that morning to see it. ‘Make sure you get there early,’ she’d been told. ‘The security can take a while.’ Guards looked at the underside of vehicles with mirrors; everything went through an x-ray machine. Her credentials and passport were checked – there was no question at all of my going in, even to get a glimpse of the entrance hall, but, still, there was always the visitor centre. ‘It opens at 11.00,’ a friendly guard told me.

So at 11.00 I was back and I went into the visitor centre, just outside the gates. There I saw photographs of the wonderful architecture and old film of Kaisers and Czars attending conferences there, negotiating peace for the world.

The route through the visitor centre leads to another entrance to the security gate I had been at earlier, but the door through was firmly locked. ‘There is no entrance to the Peace Palace or grounds,’ the notice said.

I trudged away through the snow (it had started snowing), past those optimistic shrines to peace. There was a peace tree, where people, ordinary people who had come, like me, to see the palace, had written their wishes for peace and attached them to the branches of a bare little tree just outside the gates.

The whole place is built for its symbolic impact, but the impact it had on me was not what the builders had intended. To me, it looked like a beautiful palace in which important men in big cars could meet in fantastic surroundings to talk about peace, though the world seems to be filled with war and rumours of war. Outside, ordinary people look through the gates, imagining the wonders of a place dedicated to peace and fastening their wishes to the peace tree – but they will never be allowed in. The wonders of the palace aren’t for them. They’re just the little people and the Palace of Peace can only be protected if walls and gates and security guards keep them safely outside. Peace, after all, is far too precious for everybody to have access to it.

I’ve heard that people can get in. My wife, for example, had presumably appreciated it. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Our conference was held in a little annex round the back.’ Obviously she wasn’t important enough to share the rulers’ dreams of peace either.

The real Peace Palace: outside looking in

NOTE: I’ve checked and it seems that the Palace is sometimes open for guided tours, this weekend being one of those special dates. Tours are limited to 20 people at a time. I don’t think this really changes the point I’m making.

Ed Reardon's Week

Ed Reardon is the star of ‘Ed Reardon’s Week’ which, from time to time, gets the odd half hour on Radio 4. Back in 2005 his adventures were transformed into a book (also Ed Reardon’s Week) which I have somehow only now got round to reading.

Reardon is a brilliant comic character, though sadly unaware of how funny he is. His first novel, Who Would Fardels Bear?was a great literary success. As a fan of the radio series, I know that Reardon was tipped as a young man to watch in a Sunday magazine feature back in the 1960s. Sadly, despite penning one episode of Tenko, his career has since then failed to flourish and he has been reduced to ghost-writing for celebrity cooks, sportsmen, and, for all I know, Victoria Beckham (although he is far too professional to admit the last one).

His divorce exhausted whatever funds he may have acquired from his early success and he is now reduced to living in a flat over a hairdressing salon where he is becoming increasingly bitter about a world that has rejected his genius in favour of (in his view) the inane wittering of 12-year-old television executives.

Reardon’s persona allows the authors to express their trenchant views on everything from the state of modern publishing through the inadequacies of the railway system to the doubtful joys of living in Berkhamsted (“the fastest-growing property market in Europe”). The writers are thus able to enjoy the privilege offered to court jesters, through the ages: saying politically incorrect things to poke fun at the modern world, whilst simultaneously insisting that these aren’t their views, just those of the appalling old dinosaur, Reardon. It’s great fun, though, like most satire, increasingly difficult to keep up as the idiocies of the life today overtake anything that the writers’ imagination can produce.

Back in 2005 when the world was young and London buses had yet to tell you to hold on because they were “about to move” thirty seconds after they had already done so, Reardon’s acerbic comments were still simultaneously wildly exaggerated and bang on point. If you have ever enjoyed anything with “Grumpy Old” in the title, you’ll love Ed Reardon, the archetypal grumpy late middle-aged man.

For writers (and I believe that some of the people who read this blog may be writers) it is Reardon’s continual struggles to produce anything remotely worthwhile and to persuade his publishers to give him an advance on his latest idea that particularly resonates. Reardon’s orgies of self-pity are in part justified by the success of his friend Jaz Milvane who, having adapted Who Would Fardels Bear Into an appallingly saccharine Hollywood movie, has gone on to massive commercial success.

The characters of Ed and Jaz are stolen from George Gissing’s 1891 classic New Grub Street, which pokes less fun at the institutions of the day but concentrates its withering fire on publishing. Edmund is a genuine literary genius, but his books are not commercially successful. Jasper, on the other hand, is an appalling hack who turns out rubbish that he knows to be rubbish but which is carefully crafted to meet the market. Ed, inevitably, faces increasingly desperate hardship and literary obscurity, while Jasper grows rich and successful.

The modern Reardon is not averse to writing for the market either – he’s just not very good at it. He resents readers, publishers and, most of all, his terrible agent who long ago lost interest in him and who has now fobbed him off on Ping, a young woman whose Oxford education has left her, in Reardon’s view, unfitted for literary life, but who somehow seems richer, more assured and more successful than him.

The book could be a miserable wallow in grumpiness and self-pity (the original New Grub Street definitely veers in that direction), but, unlike Gissing’s novel, this is unremittingly funny, whether detailing Ed’s efforts to earn ten pounds by taking part in identity parades (“ the experience might furnish me with useful research material”) or his disastrous attempts at speed dating. But for writing friends, there is a particularly poignant humour in his increasingly desperate attempts to produce what his publishers demand.

“Basically the brief is: celeb cats and dogs grumbling about their owners. What does the Downing Street moggy really think about Cheri Blair?”

“Just cats and dogs?” I asked, out of politeness.

“No – rabbits, hamsters, whatever. You’re the author. Could even be a fun chapter by an Aussie insect about what it’s like to be eaten by Janet Street-Porter. It’s so you.”

Ed Reardon’s Week also avoids the tragic ending of New Grub Street. Ed [spoiler alert] does not die in a garret. Strictly speaking, if the authors were models of artistic integrity, he would. But his survival ensures that Radio 4 listeners will be able to laugh at him another day. And, until the next series, there’s always this book to keep us amused.

James Burke: the first three books

Since the beginning of the year Endeavour Press have republished all three of the existing books about James Burke. There are two more already planned in the series which will take us back to Burke's first experience as a British spy and will see him fighting with Wellington's army in Spain. 

Just in case you haven't met James Burke yet (though I can hardly believe any of my blog readers won't have bought at least one of the books by now), here's a summary of what you're missing. Last week saw the publication of 'Burke at Waterloo'. 

James Burke, was a real person and his first adventure ('Burke in the Land of Silver') was based on a true story. The other two are written around actual events, but Burke's role in them is entirely fictional. It's given me more of a free hand in developing James Burke as a sort of cross between Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe and Ian Fleming's James Bond. The stories aren't really written in order (there's quite a long time gap in the middle of the first book and the adventures in the second one fill that gap) and you don't have to read them in order. But I did realise the other day that if you buy all three on Kindle, you can get them for a whisker under £7.($10.97 in the US.) That's a quarter of a million words of Napoleonic adventure for £6.97. You'd be mad not to, really.

Anyway, her's what you get for your money.

Burke in the Land of Silver 

James Burke is sent to South America to prepare for a British invasion. (We're not that keen on the Spanish at the time.) All goes well until the British occupy Buenos Aires and, instead of allying with the locals, start treating them slightly worse than the Spaniards had. Burke's attempts to negotiate a British withdrawal end with him in front of a firing squad.

There's more double-dealing, wild women and political intrigue than you could ever make up. A thrilling tale from a time when the world was in turmoil and a few good men (or, I'm afraid, quite often bad men) could change the course of history.

Burke and the Bedouin 

In 1798, there were rumours that the French might be planning an expedition to Egypt. James Burke is despatched by the British Secret Service to see if there is any evidence of French activity in the country. Irritated by what he thinks will turn out a wild goose chase, Burke is far more interested in the fate of Bernadita, the Spanish girl he finds imprisoned as a slave in Cairo, than he is in improbable French agents. Then, fleeing with Bernadita, he stumbles across the French plot.

The race is on to stop Napoleon and Burke sets in motion a train of events that ends in one of the great naval battles of the Napoleonic Wars.

The Review described 'Burke and the Bedouin' as "an entertaining light read", which is good, because that's what I set out to write. The history is solid, though, (and the Historical Novel Society likes the battle scenes).

Burke at Waterloo

If you write stories set in the Napoleonic Wars, it's the law that you have to do Waterloo. 18 June is the 200th anniversary of the battle, so now seemed a good time to have Burke there at Napoleon's downfall.

Burke is sent to Paris where Bonapartists are plotting the assassination of the Duke of Wellington. (For some reason, the history books tend to neglect this, but they really were.) Having foiled their dastardly plans (spoiler: the Duke of Wellington survives), Burke pursues their leader to Brussels where people are far too busy celebrating the peace to think that Napoleon is still a threat to Europe.

Then the Corsican Tyrant flees Elba and everything changes.

As Wellington arrives in Brussels and Europe prepares once again for war, Burke is at the centre of affairs. And his own mission and the fight against Napoleon both come to a bloody climax on the field of Waterloo.

Paul Collard (author of the Jack Lark series) said of this book,"This really is historical fiction as it should be written."


What reviewers have said about James Burke

"James Bond in breeches, this novel (and others in the series) should satisfy fans of the era and the Sharpe novels." Laura Wilkinson on Amazon

"... exciting, clear, fast moving and so interesting about the history and geography of the time" on Amazon

"Tom Williams brings Burke and his adventures in South America to vivid life through telling but never intrusive detail" on Amazon

"Great swashbuckling fun!" on Amazon

The escape from Elba

Burke at Waterloo should be published this weekend.

At the start of the book Napoleon is safely in exile on Elba, Louis XVIII has been installed on the throne in Paris and the victorious Allies are planning the future of 19th-century Europe. Then, suddenly, Napoleon is back. Louis has fled and French armies are marching on Brussels.

How did it happen? How did Napoleon escape from Elba?

In my last post about Napoleon on Elba we saw that he was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with life there. He could probably have coped with the boredom – he had always been fascinated by detail and immersed himself in the various projects he had set up on the island – but he was not prepared to tolerate the French reneging on their promise to pay him a pension or the attempts to keep him from his son. He knew that he still had supporters in the army and in Paris and he decided it was time to leave Elba and join them.

Although the British kept a representative, Sir Neil Campbell, on the island to keep a discreet eye on Napoleon’s activities, the Emperor was quietly able to buy military supplies. He had these put aboard the ships of his little navy (generally used to bring supplies to the island or to move him to the adjacent islands of the archipelago of which Elba is a part). The horses of his Polish Lancers were prepared for immediate movement and the saddlers were kept busy ensuring that all their harness was in good order. The troops were inspected and new NCOs were appointed.

It’s remarkable that, given all these clear military preparations, the secret of Napoleon’s planned escape seems to have been well kept. The only person who knew for sure was Princess Pauline, who wormed the secret out of General Bertrand, one of the two men Napoleon had entrusted with his plans. She had her silver shipped to Livorno in Italy for safe-keeping a few days before the escape, but even then no one seems to have appreciated the significance of this.

Neil Campbell was so blissfully unaware that there might be anything amiss that on 16 February he left Elba to visit the Italian mainland. Such visits were a frequent occurrence, ostensibly to liaise with officers in Italy, but in fact to visit his mistress, Countess Miniacci, in Florence. (There are even suggestions that she was a Napoleonic agent.)

Campbell’s own account of his unfortunate decision to leave the island appears in his published journal:

On February 16, I quitted Elba in HMS “Partridge”… upon a short excursion to the Continent for my health… I was anxious also to consult some medical man at Florence on account of the increasing deafness, supposed to arise from my wounds with which I have been lately affected.

Campbell’s position was made worse when his captain let fall to the French that the Partridge was to return to the mainland to pick him up ten days later. Napoleon thus knew he had ten clear days to make his preparations and escape before Campbell or the Partridge were in a position to stop him.

With Campbell away, Napoleon was able to order that no ships were to sail from Elba, so that, even if there were suspicions about his plans on the island, there was no way to get news to possible enemies.

As part of the pretence that all was normal, on 25th of February Napoleon and his officers all attended a ball given by Princess Pauline, but the next day at about one o’clock in the afternoon the gates of the town were closed and Napoleon’s army received its orders for departure. Even at this stage nobody was told where they were going. If the British had had an inkling of Napoleon’s plans to escape, they would almost certainly have assumed that he was heading for Italy. There were even suggestions that Elba had been chosen for his exile in part because it suited the Russians to have the Austrians permanently needing to keep up their guard up against potential Napoleonic interference with their Italian possessions.

Napoleon leaves Elba – Joseph Beaume 1885

By mid-afternoon, Napoleon’s fleet was ready to sail. At eight o’clock Napoleon himself boarded his brig, the Inconstant. Extra cannon had been mounted aboard and her hull had been painted in the colours usually used by British ships, to improve her chances of escaping any blockade. She was accompanied by the Stella, the other ship of Napoleon’s navy, the Caroline, a French merchant brig, the St Esprit, which had been chartered for the occasion and three other small vessels. He probably had around a thousand men with him.

When the fleet left Elba, it was carried by a good southerly wind, but the next day the wind dropped. It must have been a nerve wracking time for Napoleon. The Mediterranean was patrolled by French and English fleets and every British ship had a portrait of Napoleon in the captain’s cabin, so that he could be easily identified if intercepted on the high seas. The calm did affect the enemy as well as him, though. Because of the lack of wind Campbell did not arrive back on Elba until the 28th, so the alarm was not raised until two days after Napoleon’s escape.

The winds picked up again on the 27th, but the Inconstant was hailed by a French naval ship, the Zephyr. Its master, realising that the Inconstant had sailed from Elba, asked how Napoleon was. “Marvellously well,” came the reply – supposedly dictated by the Emperor himself. With no reason for suspicion, the Zephyr allowed Napoleon’s vessel to pass.

Napoleon landed in France near Antibes on March 1, 1815. He had, as the Bonapartists had always believed, returned as the violets bloomed in the spring. The events that led to Waterloo were under way.

FURTHER READING

Peter Hicks (2014). Napoleon On Elba – An Exile Of Consent. Napoleonica. La Revue, 19,(1), 53-67. doi:10.3917/napo.141.0053.

Katherine Macdonogh (1994) ‘A sympathetic ear: Napoleon, Elba and the British’ History Today, vol. 44

Campbell’s journal was published by his nephew under the title Napoleon at Fontainebleau and Elba (John Murray 1869)

For a detailed account of Napoleon’s time on Elba and his escape, see The Island Empire by the anonymous ‘author of Blondelle’, published by T Bosworth in 1855 and available in Google Books.