Two Day Magazine

Breathing New Life into the Past

Meet Elizabeth “Betsey” Wynne. She was the young wife of a British naval officer who accompanied her husband during the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th century. Betsey was aboard her husband’s warship during the cataclysmic British assault on the Spanish Canary Islands. Centuries later, Elaine Chalus, a historian at Bath Spa University in England, has discovered 40 unpublished volumes of her diaries and will soon be writing a book detailing her amazing and unusual life at sea.

“They’ll (the diaries) give a richer sense of the cosmopolitanism and culture of the generation that spanned this incredible period of change,” states Chalus.

Wynne began writing in her diaries in 1789, when she was just 11 years old. This was a time of great unrest, for only weeks had gone by since the French Revolution had begun to vibrate through Europe. Wynne kept up with her journals until her death in 1857.

The early entries detail a life of Wynne living with her family in Switzerland along with one of King Louis XVI’s main political agents and others in positions of power who had retreated from the chaos and fighting in France. Her family escaped before Napoleon overran central Europe. They found refuge in the Italian port city of Livorno, where the British navy protected them.

As fate would have it, Wynne, 18, and her family, ended up boarding the ship captained by her future husband, Captain Thomas Francis Fremantle. After falling madly in love with one another, they enjoyed a dizzying romance and eventually married. They resided in Buckinghamshire, which is about an hour from modern-day London.

Her diaries have remained at the Cottesloe (Fremantle) family estate this whole time, although a few excerpts were published by a family member just before World War II. The Cottesloe family has given Chalus unrestricted access to the journals and family archives to further explore and understand the life of Wynne and her descendants.

Chalus told LiveScience, “The diaries that were published in 1935 are well-done. But they are extracts and not everything.”

The diaries reveal that Wynne would have joined the captains from across all of the fleets for aboard-ship dinners and Fremantle even brought a harpsichord aboard the ship for Wynne to entertain herself and the others on board.

Her incredible journey on the ship also describes how she home-nursed Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson, who lost his right arm during the battle. He would go on to become one of England’s greatest military heroes that ever lived. Nelson would later ruin Napoleon’s plan to invade England at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, but it would cost him his own life.

Interestingly enough, Wynne’s relationship with Fremantle seemed rather progressive, especially considering how long ago it was. Wynne handled all of the affairs of the household while her husband was at sea, and there seemed to be a great deal of mutual respect and understanding for one another.

“In the later years, Fremantle more or less turns everything over to her. It’s a testimony to a working partnership, and I think modern military families today are the same,” explains Chalus.

Betsey outlived Nelson and her husband, Fremantle, as her diaries reveal a hidden treasure of rich historical detail, lending insight from the time of the French Revolution all the way to the rise of Victorian England.

This discovery will breathe life into the exploration into how past romances and relationships compare to modern day couplings and what we can learn from our predecessors. We often times assume that we are so evolved, so different from our ancestors, but it seems, after reading a bit about Wynne, her life at sea, and her relationship with her husband, that we could actually learn quite a bit about love, commitment and partnership from this romantic saga that took place long, long ago.