We have told the story of the lord who lived at Basking Ridge; now we
will tell the story of a much more exalted personage, one who had sat
upon a throne, and worn a crown and royal robes rich with diamonds and
precious stones, and who lived on a breezy hill on the banks of the
Delaware. What he was doing in New Jersey, and how he had come to wear a
crown and royal robes, we will now proceed to tell.
This exalted personage was not a king when he was living in New Jersey,
but he had been a king. In fact, if we may not say that he had been two
kings, we can say that he had been a king twice. He was Joseph
Bonaparte, the eldest brother of the great emperor, Napoleon, who, after
having conquered a great many nations of Europe, and having deposed
their kings, supplied them with new sovereigns out of his own family.
Joseph was sent to Italy to be King of Naples. He did not particularly
want to be king, and he knew that the people did not want him, and after
he had been in Naples some time, reigning under his brother's orders
with no great success, the emperor determined to transfer him to Spain,
whose throne had just been made vacant. Having been informed that he
was to go to Madrid, Joseph obeyed, but he did not like it.
Moreover, the people of Spain did not like it, and after a time they
rose up in rebellion, and were assisted by the English and Portuguese,
and forced the king to fly from Spain.
The ex-king of Naples and Spain had various adventures in France and
Switzerland; and when the power of the great Napoleon came to an end, he
was obliged to fly, or he also might have been sent to Elba or some
other place equally undesirable, so he determined to come to America. In
a little brig of two hundred tons, a very small vessel to sail on the
ocean, he crossed the Atlantic in disguise, not even the captain of the
vessel knowing who he was. He was accompanied by his secretary; and when
the two reached America and made themselves known, they were treated
with great respect and attention. In fact, America owed so much to
France, that she was very willing to show her gratitude.
Now that he was well out of Europe, Joseph Bonaparte gave up all idea of
returning, and in deciding to settle here it was not surprising that he
chose to make his home in New Jersey. He bought a place near Bordentown,
on a high wooded hill called Point Breeze, and built a house, which was
truly splendid for those days. It had grand halls and staircases and
banquet halls, and it must have been larger and more imposing than Lord
Stirling's. His estate, which covered more than a thousand acres, was
beautifully laid out in drives and gardens and lawns, and everything on
the place was arranged in a style of beauty and grandeur.
It was three years before this great house, with its surroundings, was
finished, and ready for the ex-king's residence; and when at last he
went there, he lived in ex-regal style. His wife was not with him,
having remained in Italy on account of ill health, and her physicians
would never allow her to come to America. But he had two daughters who
were with him during part of his residence in New Jersey, and there were
persons who asserted that he had also brought with him the crown of
Spain and the royal robes of Italy.
It generally happens, when a sovereign is obliged to abdicate and to fly
from his kingdom, that he arranges matters so that he shall not become a
pauper when he arrives at the place of refuge. If he is not able to
carry away anything more than a valise, he is much more likely to put
his royal jewels into it than to fill it up with night clothes and
hairbrushes; so when Bonaparte came to New Jersey, he came as a very
rich man.
When his kingly mansion was ready to be supplied with art treasures,
such as ornamented the palaces of Europe, the ex-king sent across the
ocean for costly paintings and beautiful sculpture with which to fill
his new house; and if any crowned heads had happened to visit him, he
would not have been ashamed to welcome them beneath his roof. People of
royal blood--that is, the same kind of royal blood that he had--did come
over to visit him. Louis Napoleon, afterward Emperor of France, came,
when a young man, and spent some weeks with his uncle. While there, it
is said, this young man went out shooting on the estate, and, finding
the birds near the house easier to hit than those at a distance, he
blazed away at any feathered creatures he saw in the garden, so that the
gardener made a complaint.
But even then this young Louis Napoleon had begun to have dreams in
regard to his succession to the imperial throne of France, and he did
not like to be snubbed and scolded by an uncle who had had all the regal
honors he was ever likely to get, and who therefore had no right to put
on airs in his dealings with the prospective wearer of a crown. So there
was a quarrel between the two, and there are reports to the effect that
Louis Napoleon took revenge upon his uncle by cutting his fruit trees
with a hatchet, without, however, imitating Washington in regard to
subsequent truthfulness.
Besides visitors from abroad, many distinguished Americans visited the
ex-king. Among these were Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy
Adams. General Lafayette, also, when he came to this country, was
received with great state by the Count de Survilliers, the title under
which Joseph Bonaparte lived at Bordentown.
This ex-king never became an American citizen by taking out
naturalization papers; but the Legislature of New Jersey treated him
very well, and passed a resolution which enabled him to hold property in
this State, and to thus become, in fact, a Jerseyman.
But although our ex-king was now established on the free soil of
America, he did not feel altogether safe. His family had come to grief;
and there was reason to fear, that, as a member of that family, England,
or France, or Spain, might demand him as a prisoner, to be taken across
the ocean to answer the charge of unlawful occupation of a throne.
It is quite possible that the people of the neighborhood imagined that
the ex-king was in greater fear of molestation from his former royal
brethren than was really the case. Their reasons for supposing that he
was anxious to defend himself against surprise and capture had some
ground, for there were some strange things about that ex-royal
estate,--things that were not known in any other part of New Jersey.
There was a tall building called a belvedere, from which the country and
the river might be surveyed for a long distance in every direction; but,
stranger far than that, there were subterranean passages which led from
the house to unfrequented parts of the grounds. These passages were well
built, arched with brick, and high enough for people to walk upright in
them; and although persons of quiet and unimaginative minds thought
that they were constructed for the purpose of allowing the occupants to
go down to the lake or to the other portions of the grounds without
getting wet if it should happen to be raining, there were many people
who believed that for sudden showers a good stock of umbrellas would be
cheaper and quite as useful, and that these costly passages could be
meant for nothing else than to give opportunity for escape, in case
foreign emissaries or officers of the law should come in search of an
ex-king who was wanted on the other side of the Atlantic.
For whatever reason these passages were built, the spectacle of an
ex-king, carrying a crown and his royal robes in a hand bag, slipping
out from among some bushes to tramp along the dusty road to Trenton or
Burlington, was never seen. Nobody ever thought it worth while to come
to New Jersey to demand him or his property.
During his residence at Bordentown, which continued for about fourteen
years, Joseph Bonaparte was very popular with the people of the
neighborhood. They looked upon him as a friend and neighbor; but at the
same time they did not lose sight of the fact, that although he was now
a country gentleman of New Jersey, with his lawn and his flower garden
to look after, he had sat upon two thrones, and had been a sovereign of
Naples and Spain. They called him "king," and his house was known as the
"palace;" and for this reason the people of other States made some mild
fun of New Jersey, calling it a foreign country.
But if this ex-king had been a rich country gentleman of the
neighborhood, he could not have made himself more popular. He was
hospitable, and frequently gave entertainments, and he sent flowers and
fruits from his gardens to his friends and neighbors. He made roads, and
contributed in many ways to the improvement of the country round about
his home. In winter time the boys of Bordentown came to skate upon his
ponds; and at such times he nearly always offered them refreshments,
which consisted of quantities of chestnuts, which he scattered on the
ice so that the youngsters might scramble for them.
In many ways his kind and sociable disposition made him so much liked,
that it is very probable that if the officers of the law had come to
take him back to Europe, he would have received such timely notice of
their approach that it would not have been necessary for him to hurry
away through his underground passages. New Jersey is a reasonable and
hospitable State, and when an ex-king comes to reside within her
borders, he will be as well treated, so long as he behaves himself, as
if he were a poor immigrant from Europe, coming with his wife and family
to clear away the forest, and make himself a home.
Just before Joseph started for America, the affairs of his family were
at their lowest ebb. His great brother, the emperor, had fallen from his
high state, and could look forward to nothing but imprisonment by the
European countries, whose thrones he had for so long been in the habit
of upsetting or threatening. In his last interview with Napoleon, when
on his way to the ship which was to take him to America, Joseph
generously offered to change places with his brother, and to let the
ex-emperor fly to America instead of the ex-king. It was very difficult
for any one of the Napoleon family to get away from France at that time;
but Joseph had made a very excellent plan by which passports were
provided for two persons coming to America on business, and his brother
could have used one of those as well as himself.
But the great Napoleon declined to run away in this manner. He remained,
and was sent to St. Helena. What would have occurred in the neighborhood
of Bordentown, N.J., had Napoleon Bonaparte, conqueror of Europe, ruler
of nations, and disposer of crowns, the hero of Austerlitz, Marengo,
and Wagram, taken up his residence at Point Breeze, and established
himself as a citizen of the State, cannot easily be imagined. The
geniality, sociability, and hospitality of the ex-king could hardly have
been expected from the ex-emperor; and, surrounded as he would have been
in time by devoted followers who would have exiled themselves from their
country for his sake, there might have been a little empire in New
Jersey which would have been exceedingly interesting to tourists.
Moreover, if the allied powers of Europe had sent over a fleet to bring
back their great enemy, who knows but that they might have found, when
they reached Bordentown, not a tall lookout tower and underground
passages for escape, but a fort with ramparts, redoubts, a moat, a
drawbridge, and mounted cannon ready to sweep the Delaware and the
surrounding country? However this might have been, it is certain that
Napoleon's refusal to take his brother's place must ever be a source of
satisfaction to the people of Bordentown and the rest of the country.
As a proof that Joseph Bonaparte had had enough of royalty, and not
enough of New Jersey, it is stated that a delegation of prominent men
from Mexico, which country was then in a very disturbed condition, came
to him during his residence at Bordentown, and offered him the throne of
Mexico. In making answer to this proposition, our ex-king did not
hesitate a moment. He told the delegation, that, having already worn two
crowns, he desired never again to wear another. The old fable of the fox
which had lost its tail did not probably come into his mind; but if it
had, he might well have spoken of it to his Mexican visitors.
After years had elapsed without any attempt on the part of European
powers to arrest him, our ex-king, Joseph, began to feel safe, and he
made a visit to England. He returned to America, but went back again,
and died in Italy in 1844, having given to New Jersey the peculiar and
unique position of being the only State in the Union which ever numbered
among her citizens the owner of a royal crown and regal robes.
To be sure, there is nothing in this for the people of a republican
State to be proud of; but New Jersey may be allowed to say that there
never was a royal person who was of less injury to the people among whom
he dwelt than her ex-king at Bordentown, and she may add that there have
been very few of his class who have been of as much advantage to his
neighbors.