What Killed Napoleon?

“God…France…My son…Josephine.” These were the final words of Napoleon Bonaparte, spoken on May 5, 1821. The Corsican-born leader, who in less than two decades rose from humble artillery commander to Emperor of the French and conquered much of mainland Europe, died far from his beloved France – exiled to the remote, windswept island of Saint Helena. Napoleon’s cause of death was officially ruled as stomach cancer, which ran in his family and had killed his father and two sisters. But the former Emperor was not so sure, writing shortly before his death that:

“I will die before my time, killed by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.”

While no evidence of foul play was found at the time, nearly two centuries later, analysis of Napoleon’s hair has revealed dangerously high levels of arsenic, resurrecting old conspiracy theories that the former Emperor was poisoned by his British captors. But is this actually the case? Did Napoleon die of cancer as his doctors claimed, or was he secretly murdered? Or, as one surprising theory suggests, was he done in by a seemingly innocuous piece of home decor? Let’s find out as we examine the curious case of Napoleon’s death.

On July 15, 1815, a month after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon boarded the Royal Navy warship HMS Bellerophon in Rochefort Harbour and formally surrendered to the British, bringing 12 years of Napoleonic Wars to an end. From Rochefort, Bellerophon sailed to Plymouth, where she remained for two weeks while the British government decided what to do with the deposed Emperor. Napoleon, who had expected to settle peacefully in Britain or even the United States, was bitterly disappointed when, on July 31, he learned that he was to be exiled indefinitely to Saint Helena, along with a retinue of three officers, a surgeon, and twelve servants. On August 7, Napoleon and his entourage were transferred to HMS Northumberland for transport to the St. Helena, arriving on October 15, 1815.

For his first two months on St. Helena, Napoleon lived at Briars Pavilion, a small house on the estate of English merchant William Balcome. He was then moved to Longwood House, a 40-room wooden bungalow. Security around Napoleon was tight, the island being garrisoned by 2,100 British troops and continually patrolled by 10 Royal Navy warships. This was not as excessive as it might seem; after all, Napoleon had escaped British custody before. On March 20, 1815, the Emperor fled his first exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba and returned to France, taking command of the French Armies, overthrowing King Louis XVIII, and launching a final military campaign known as the Hundred Days, which culminated in his final defeat at Waterloo. However, while there were many rumours of plots to spring Napoleon from St. Helena, none ever materialized.

Napoleon soon settled into a life of dull routine. He awoke every morning at 9, breakfasted at 10, then spent most of the day dictating his memoirs to his secretary, Emmanuel, Comte de Las Cases. He ate dinner at 7 and read classics aloud until 11 before retiring to bed. It was a lonely and monotonous existence for one of the most dynamic figures in human history – made all the worse by the rapid decline in the former Emperor’s health. Napoleon was no stranger to ill health. Stomach cancer ran in his family, and he had long been troubled by ulcers and other stomach upsets as well as diarrhea and haemorrhoids, which may have affected his performance at Waterloo. None of this was helped by his accommodations on Saint Helena. The weather on the island was often cold, damp, and windy, while Longwood House – hastily converted from two cow sheds – was drafty and rat-infested – something Napoleon and his servants frequently complained about. As a result, throughout his exile Napoleon was beset by all manner of symptoms, including various bodily aches and pains, fever, insomnia, rashes, chills, nausea and vomiting, coughing fits, fainting spells, and oedema or swelling of the legs that frequently rendered him barely able to walk. As time went on, the Emperor spent more and more time soaking in the bath to relieve his various ailments.

Napoleon’s first doctor on Saint Helena was Dr. Barry O’Meara, the ship’s surgeon aboard HMS Northumberland, who was assigned to him by the Royal Navy upon his arrival on the island. Napoleon took a liking to O’Meara, the two maintaining a friendly relationship for the first two years of the Emperor’s exile. All this changed, however, in 1817, when British Army officer Sir Hudson Lowe became governor of the island. A staunch opponent of Bonapartism, Lowe had little sympathy for Napoleon and sought to make his exile as miserable as possible. Over the next four years, Lowe would confine Napoleon to the grounds of Longwood House, force him to pay for his imprisonment with Imperial silver, limit his supply of firewood, and expel several members of his entourage from the island on suspicion of conspiracy.

Lowe distrusted Dr. O’Meara, not only because of his close relationship with Napoleon and allegiance to the Royal Navy – the Army’s perpetual rival – but because he had diagnosed the Emperor with hepatitis and publicly decried his accommodations at Longwood as unhealthy. Lowe, convinced that Napoleon was malingering in order to engineer an escape, had O’Meara court-martialled on trumped-up charges of conspiring against the governorship and sent back to Britain in disgrace. In his place Lowe appointed Dr. John Vierling, an Army Surgeon, but Napoleon refused to be treated by him. Vierling was thus replaced by naval surgeon Dr. John Stokoe, who, to Lowe’s chagrin, confirmed O’Meara’s diagnosis of hepatitis. Medicine at the time was still dominated by the ancient theory of the four humours, which held that the body was governed by four fluids or humours – blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile – and that all diseases were caused by an imbalance of these fluids. Vierling thus prescribed a series of bloodlettings and purgings to re-balance Napoleon’s humours. But Napoleon, believing all British doctors to be agents of Governor Lowe, refused medical attention until September 1819, when his relatives in Corsica sent Dr. Antonio Antonmarchi to be his personal physician.

But Napoleon’s health soon took another turn for the worse. In early 1820 he began vomiting what looked like coffee grounds – clotted blood from a gastric haemorrhage – while by early 1821 he had become increasingly thin and frail, abandoning his habit of dictation and spending much of his time lying in bed or on the sofa. As one Captain Nichols, a British orderly at Longwood House, wrote in his memoirs:

“At his dressing room window with a red handkerchief round his head, he continued there a considerable time talking to Madame Montholon and the children. . .his countenance appeared cadaverous.”

By March of that year Napoleon was confined to bed, whereupon he finally consented to be treated by Dr. Archibald Arnott, a surgeon in the British 20th Regiment of Foot. Though Napoleon was now also suffering from amoebic dysentery and severely hydrated, Arnott subjected him to a punishing regimen of the purgative antimony potassium tartrate – known at the time as tartar emetic – dissolved in lemonade – a treatment which left Napoleon writhing on the floor in agony. Realizing the end was near, a frail and bedridden Napoleon dictated his last will and testament, bequeathing some six million Francs to various beneficiaries and requesting that:

“… my ashes [rest] on the banks of the seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have loved so well.”

On May 5, 1821, Dr. Arnott administered ten grains or 640 milligrams of the laxative calomel – AKA mercuric chloride – whereupon Napoleon slipped into unconsciousness. He never awoke, murmuring a few delirious words before finally expiring at 5:49 P.M. Napoleon Bonaparte, the “little corporal” who had set Europe ablaze, was dead at the age of 51.

As per his request, Napoleon’s head was shaved and locks of his hair distributed to members of his retinue as keepsakes. His body was then autopsied, the procedure being performed by Dr. Antommarchi and witnessed by Dr. Arnott and four other British doctors: Thomas Shortt, Charles Mitchell, Francis Burton, and Matthew Livingstone. The six doctors concluded that Napoleon had died of a gastric ulcer or tumour which had spread to his liver – just as the Emperor had always feared.

Yet despite his final wishes, Napoleon neither cremated nor sent home to France. Instead, his body was dressed in his green military uniform, placed in a triple-lined tinplate coffin, and, on May 7, 1821, buried in St. Helena’s Valley of Geraniums with full military honours. It was not until 1840 that the British Government gave King Louis-Philippe I permission to repatriate Napoleon’s remains. His coffin was exhumed and returned to Paris where, on December 15, 1840, he was given a state funeral attended by some 1 million mourners. The coffin sat in St. Jérôme’s Chapel until 1861, when Napoleon’s remains were finally interred in a red quartzite sarcophagus beneath the gilded dome of l’Hotel des Invalides. They remain there to this day, an imposing monument to one of the most consequential figures in modern history.

While rumours circulated for decades that Napoleon’s death had secretly been expedited by his British captors, it was not until the 20th century that any evidence of this emerged. In 1961, a Swedish dentist named Sten Forshufvud, Scottish doctor Hamilton Smith, and Swedish doctor Anders Wassen, subjected a lock of Napoleon’s hair collected just after his death to neutron activation analysis. The analysis revealed levels of arsenic 100x higher than normal, all of which had been absorbed within the last four months of Napoleon’s life. While it was impossible to tell if the arsenic had been absorbed continuously or all at once, the team concluded that it was contained within the hair follicles themselves and was not applied externally afterwards as a preservative or insecticide. These findings were independently verified by other teams analyzing other locks of hair, raising the tantalizing possibility that Napoleon had been poisoned.

Indeed, evidence that Napoleon had actually succumbed to arsenic poisoning had been uncovered all the way back in 1840. When his grave on Saint Helena was opened, his body was found to be remarkably well preserved, with few signs of decomposition after 20 years underground. As arsenic slows decomposition and was widely used in early embalming fluids, this is consistent with Napoleon having slowly been poisoned – as are many of Napoleon’s recorded symptoms prior to his death, including oedema in the legs and chronic diarrhea. Furthermore, until the development of the Marsh Test in 1836, arsenic was almost impossible to detect in a body after death, making it a popular instrument of murder; indeed, it was commonly known as “inheritance powder.”

But who, then, was Napoleon’s poisoner? While the British Government and especially Governor Lowe would seem to have motive to get rid of Napoleon, in fact the opposite is true. Despite his animosity, the one thing Lowe could not afford was to let Napoleon die on his watch, for this could potentially stir up Republican sentiment in France and endanger the recently restored French monarchy. If the French even suspected that Napoleon had been deliberately murdered, the political consequences would have been many times worse.

Another theory is that Napoleon was poisoned by his close friend and confidant Charles Tristan, Marquis de Montholon. His wife, Albine de Montholon, was rumoured to have been Napoleon’s mistress, while the Comte’s letters to his wife reveal that he was desperate to leave his post on Saint Helena and return to France. Furthermore, Napoleon bequeathed the Comte some 2 million francs in his will. Yet despite these plausible motives, there is little solid evidence to support any allegations against the Comte de Montholon – or any other member of Napoleon’s entourage. However, there is absolutely no evidence of this allegation. If Napoleon was deliberately poisoned, no-one seems to have had the motive or opportunity to do so – at least, not that we know of.

But how to explain the arsenic found in Napoleon’s hair? Surprisingly, this could have come from a whole host of sources, so widespread were arsenic and other toxins in the 19th century. Napoleon could have absorbed arsenic from the rat poison set out around Longwood House, or from eating fish caught around Saint Helena. Arsenic, along with strychnine, was also a popular recreational drug in the early 19th century, being taken in small doses to induce a brief sense of strength and vitality. Though it is not known if Napoleon engaged in his practice, it is certainly a possibility. Similarly, Napoleon was known to have been partial to a sweet apricot drink containing high levels of hydrocyanic acid, and would have absorbed high levels of heavy metals like antimony and mercury from the various purgatives prescribed by his doctors. In other words, Napoleon’s body, like those of many of his contemporaries, was already a wasteland of toxic substances – no foul play required.

But perhaps the strangest theory regarding Napoleon’s death is that he was poisoned….by his wallpaper. In the 1980s, a scrap of green-and-gold wallpaper from Longwood House, collected by a visitor in the 1820s, was discovered in a family scrapbook in Norfolk, England. The owner of the scrapbook, Shirley Bradley, contacted chemist Dr. David Jones, who analyzed the wallpaper using x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. This revealed the green dye to be copper arsenite, also known as Scheele’s Green or Schloss Green. Invented in 1775 by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele – most famous for discovering the element oxygen – Scheele’s Green soon became the most popular green dye of the 19th Century, being used in hundreds of different products from soap and candles to clothing, candy, and – yes – wallpaper. And given this widespread and unregulated use, it did not take long for Scheele’s Green to start poisoning people, with fashionable ladies and especially seamstresses suffering painful skin lesions and chronic health issues collectively known as Gosio’s Disease from constant exposure to arsenic-dyed cloth. Shirley Bradley’s wallpaper scrap from Longwood House was found to contain 0.12 grams of arsenic per square metre – nearly twenty times the concentration considered hazardous today. But if this was the source of the arsenic in Napoleon’s body, how did it get there? Was the Emperor so restless that he took up licking walls out of sheer boredom? Well, not quite; according to Dr. David Jones, the damp conditions at Longwood House would have been ideal for the growth of various moulds which, in process of digesting the wallpaper and the paste beneath, would have metabolized excreted the arsenic in the dye and excreted it in the form of arsine gas. Napoleon and his retinue may thus have been breathing arsenic vapours day in, day out for nearly 6 years. This would explain the fluctuating levels of arsenic found in Napoleon’s hair: the yearly cycle of wet and dry seasons on Saint Helena would have caused variations in the growth of mould and thus the concentration of arsenic in the air. Furthermore, wallpaper dyed with Scheele’s Green was also found in the bathroom where Napoleon spent many of his final days soaking in the bathtub – likely exposing him to even higher concentrations of arsenic.

That Napoleon absorbed the arsenic over time rather than in one lethal dose is further supported by a 2008 study conducted at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics, which analyzed strands of hair from four different periods of Napoleon’s life – childhood, early exile, the day of his death, and the day after – as well as from his son, Napoleon II; and his one time wife Empress Josephine. All showed similarly elevated levels of arsenic, indicating that the entire Bonaparte family were chronically exposed to this toxin throughout their lives.

So what, then, killed Napoleon? The simple answer is what Dr. Antommarchi concluded in 1821: ulcerating cancer of the stomach and liver. However, this and the other conditions plaguing Napoleon during his exile may have been aggravated by chronic exposure to arsenic and other environmental toxins – whether from rat poison, fish, wallpaper, or other sources. But while these conditions would inevitably have resulted in Napoleon’s death, the question “What killed Napoleon?” does have another, more shocking answer: his doctor. The ten grains of calomel administered by Dr. Arnott just prior Napoleon’s death was five times higher than the maximum recommended dose. According to a 2004 study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the extreme dehydration caused by amoebic dysentery and endless rounds of purgatives would have left Napoleon with a dangerous electrolyte imbalance. A high dose of calomel would have been more than enough to finish him off, inducing death by cardiac arrest. So in the end Napoleon probably was poisoned by his captors – just not intentionally. And while the toxic decor of Longwood House was probably not the primary cause of Napoleon’s untimely death, it does give new meaning to Oscar Wilde’s infamous last words, spoken 80 years later:

“This wallpaper and I are fighting duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”

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