I recently did a post on Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, a Baltimore lady who married Napoleon's brother. Her son and grandchildren shaped Maryland history for years to come. From LBV:
Bo had actually been born in London in 1805 but his mother took him to her country when the French emperor annulled the marriage with his younger brother to provide him with an ancestral wife and make him king of Westphalia. This meant the loss of the right to bear the surname, although decades later his cousin Napoleon III reversed that decision. Bo, who was assured of a comfortable life because his mother’s family owned prosperous commercial businesses in Baltimore, studied law at Harvard, although he never practiced as a lawyer.
He was president of the Maryland Agricultural Society and the Maryland Club, an exclusive entity founded in 1857 that four years later supported confederate cause and in the 20th century opposed Prohibition (the law outlawing alcohol). But earlier, in 1829, he married Susan May Williams, a wealthy heir to the growing railroad sector and also a Baltimore native, whose millionaire dowry was able to do more than the promises to connect with the European aristocracy she was offered.
After all, he considered himself an American, and in order to retain his citizenship he could not accept foreign nobility titles; this was required by an amendment to the Constitution proposed by Congress in 1810, which, although it was never approved, was dissuasive because it was supposedly his residence in the country that prompted its submission. The fact is that he stayed and with Susan he had two children: one, Jérôme Napoleón Bonaparte I, who would study at West Point; another, Charles Joseph Bonaparte, the real protagonist of this article. (Read more.)
Mary-Eileen Russell grew up in the countryside outside of Frederick, Maryland, "fair as the garden of the Lord" as the poet Whittier said of it. She graduated in 1984 from Hood College in Frederick with a BA in Psychology, and in 1985 from the State University of New York at Albany with an MA in Modern European History. She is the author of six books under the pen name of "Elena Maria Vidal." She lives in Talbot County, MD with her family.
