Free Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte by Carol Berkin Page A

was led by considerations of high policy; that I am resolved to assure for her son a future that she desires.” All Napoleon demanded was that the affair “be quietly and secretly managed.”
    If “high policy” had motivated Napoleon’s annulment of Betsy’s marriage, it may have played an equally important role in the olive branch he now held out to Betsy. For the physical desire she had once aroused in Jérôme was now raging in two current suitors. And now as then, the courtship of the belle of Baltimore had political implications, for both of the men hoping to marry her were English.

Chapter Six
“I Intend to Be Governed by My Own Rules”
    Betsy had once enjoyed celebrity in America as the happy young bride of a Bonaparte. Now, the tragic tale of her abandonment and persecution at the hands of the Bonapartes drew public attention. The romance of her tragedy worked like an aphrodisiac on young men, and soon after she arrived home, suitors appeared at her doorstep. Although Betsy’s full attention was focused on her negotiations with Napoleon, she could not prevent these men from focusing their attention on her.
    Her beauty seemed to dazzle those who met her. The English ambassador considered her the “most beautiful woman in America,” and when she spent a few months in the nation’s capital, anonymous love notes were passed under her hotel door. Even men of the cloth fell under her spell. Reverend Horace Holley, on his way from Boston to Kentucky to take up the duties of a college president, admitted to walking up and down the main street of Baltimore, hoping to meet her. Nothing, not even her vocal hostility toward American culture, could prevent him from confessing to his wife, only half in jest, that in Betsy she had a rival for his affections.
    Perhaps if Betsy’s most serious admirers had been local Baltimore merchants or Washington officeholders, their pursuit ofher affections would only have prompted admiration or envious gossip. But two of her most persistent suitors, Samuel Graves and Charles Oakley, were highly placed Englishmen, and this made their success or failure a source of political anxiety and rumination.
    Such entanglement of romance and politics was not new in Betsy’s life, of course. Only a few years earlier her marriage to a Frenchman, and a Bonaparte at that, had spurred political speculation about a possible shift from neutrality to a pro-French policy on the part of the American president. Now that she had returned to America, a new set of questions arose: What were the international implications of a marriage between Betsy and one of her two prominent English suitors? Would the transfer of her affections from a French husband to an English one enrage the French? How would the British react? How would American voters respond to Betsy’s marriage to an Englishman? Betsy’s personal life once again seemed fraught with political implication, but this time her only thought was how to turn this to her own advantage.
    Although Betsy had done nothing to encourage him, Samuel Colleton Graves was undoubtedly in love with her. The twenty-year-old had traveled to America as a secretary to his father, Admiral Graves of the Royal Navy. Here he had caught sight of the beautiful Madame Bonaparte—and fallen immediately in love. On May 16, 1808, he confessed his devotion in a letter marked by an odd combination of boldness and insecurity, not to mention tortured sentence structure. “When I first saw you,” Graves gushed,
    your beauty won my admiration, & since that you have acquired most truly (to call it no other) my esteem & my regard, I regretted that seclusion and dereliction should be the lot of youth and beauty, and determined to require your hand in marriage, if your opinion do not operate against me, or your situation when explained, appear to be such as to preclude an object so strongly desired by me. In this preliminary I make only a simple proposition, to entertain an idea that it