1811, March 26 – June 2: (Henry, by God’s Grace: The Proclamation of the Kingdom): Until 1811, Henry Christophe had maintained very thinly the forms of repub…

1811, March 26 – June 2: (Henry, by God’s Grace: The Proclamation of the Kingdom): Until 1811, Henry Christophe had maintained very thinly the forms of republican government in the North, but when Bonnet visited the Cap — now renamed Cap Henry since July 1810 — he reported that one could hardly breathe for the atmosphere of aristocracy, as courtiers murmured “Monseigneur” with respect and submission. Once it was clear the West would never choose him to supersede Pétion, Christophe put aside his pretense: on March 26, 1811, a Council of State proclaimed the North a kingdom and Henry I its king, engrafting on the 1807 constitution appropriate borrowings from Dessalines’s imperial constitution of 1805. On April 5, Henry created his nobility: four princes, eight dukes, twenty-two counts, thirty-seven barons, and fourteen Chevaliers of the Royal and Military Order of St. Henry, while Corneille Brelle — the Capuchin who had anointed Dessalines six years earlier — was summarily raised to Archbishop and Grand Almoner of Haiti under the false claim of having been consecrated in Palermo. (11) In the Almanach Royal, Christophe promulgated detailed specifications for court dress and regimental uniforms, with princes and dukes wearing black cloaks faced with scarlet and gold over knee-length white tunics, white silk stockings, and red leather shoes with gold buckles — though the reality was sometimes less magnificent, as a visiting British officer in 1807 had described the officer of the guard at the Cap as wearing the remnant of a French uniform with neither shirt, shoes, waistcoat, and his trousers in tatters. On June 2, 1811, Henry Christophe — twenty-one years earlier scullion, cook, and headwaiter of a Cap Français inn called La Couronne — was crowned King of Haiti, Sovereign of La Tortue, Gonâve and other outlying Isles, Destroyer of Tyranny, Regenerator and Benefactor of the Haitian Nation, First Crowned Monarch of the New World.