Europe's Greatest General Died Painfully in Exile — The Tragic Final Days of Napoleon Bonaparte

On the fifth of May, eighteen twenty-one, Napoleon Bonaparte lay dying on a narrow iron campaign bed at Longwood House on St Helena, bringing up something black and grainy that his doctors said looked like coffee grounds. He was fifty-one, and he was convinced he was being murdered. This documentary follows how Napoleon really died, from the damp, rat-infested house the British chose because it was easy to guard, to the governor Sir Hudson Lowe, the doctors who lost their careers for writing down one word, and the huge dose of mercury given two days before the end. We go into the billiard room for the autopsy, where the governor's men argued over his liver while his heart was sealed in a silver vessel. Then we put every theory on trial, from stomach cancer like his father's to the arsenic found in his hair, the green wallpaper of Longwood and the man in the room who was left two million francs. Cancer, arsenic or his own doctors? Tell us in the comments what you think killed Napoleon, and subscribe to The Royal Deathbed for more history told from the records, with every rumour labelled as a rumour. Nineteen years after he died, his coffin was opened on St Helena and the men who had buried him recognised his face. His will had asked for his ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine, among the French people he had loved so much. In the end he got his wish, but the island chose how he died.