Perhaps the best that can be said of Lowe is that he possessed distorted human intelligence. He was amiable when he pleased, a good business man, so it is said, and the domestic part of his life has never been assailed; but it would be a libel on all decency to say that he was suited to the delicate and responsible post he was sent to fulfil. In fact, all his actions prove him to have been without an atom of tact, judgment, or administrative quality, and his nature had a big unsympathetic flaw in it. The fact is, there are indications that his nature was warped from the beginning, and that he was just the very kind of man who ought never to have been sent to a post of such varied responsibilities. His appointment shows how appallingly ignorant or wicked the Government, or Bathurst, were in their selection of him.
He was a monomaniac pure and simple. If they thought him best suited to pursue a policy of vindictiveness, then their choice was perfect, though it was a violation of all moral law. If, on the other hand, they were not aware of his unsuitableness, they showed either carelessness or incapacity which will rank them beneath mediocrity, and by their act they stamped the English name with ignominy. And yet there is a pathos at the end of it all when he was brought to see the cold, inanimate form of the dead monarch. He was seized with fear, smitten with the dread of retribution, and exclaimed to Montholon, "His death is my ruin."[4]
Forsyth has done his utmost to justify the actions of Hudson Lowe, but no one can read his work without feeling that the historian was conscious all through of an abortive task. He reproduces in vain the instructions and correspondence between Lowe and his Government, and the letters and conversations with Napoleon and members of his household, and deduces from these that the Governor could not have acted otherwise than in the manner he did. It is easy to twist words used either in conversations or letters into meanings which they were never intended to convey, but there are too many evidences of cold-blooded outbursts of tyrannical intent to be set aside, and these make it impossible to regard Sir Hudson Lowe in any other light than that of a petty little despot.
He had ability of a kind. Napoleon said he was eminently suited to "command bandits or deserters," and tells him in that memorable verbal conversation which arose through Lowe requesting that 200,000 francs per annum should be found as a contribution towards the expenses at Longwood: "I have never heard your name mentioned except as a brigand chief. You never suffer a day to pass without torturing me with your insults." This undoubtedly was a bitter attack, and the plainspoken words used must have wounded Lowe intensely. Probably Napoleon himself, on reflection, thought them too severe, even though they may be presumed to be literally true, and it may be taken for granted that they would never have been uttered but for the spiteful provocation.
A more discerning man would have foreseen that he could not treat a great being like the late Emperor of the French as though he were a Corsican brigand without having to pay a severe penalty. An ordinary prisoner might have submitted with amiable resignation to the disciplinary methods which, to the oblique vision of Sir Hudson Lowe, seemed to be necessary, but to treat the Emperor as though he were in that category was a perversion of all decency, and no one but a Hudson Lowe would have attempted it. It is quite certain that the dethroned arbiter of Europe never, in his most exalted period, treated any of his subordinates with such airs of majesty as St. Helena's Governor adopted towards him.
Lowe seems to have had an inherent notion that the position in which he was placed entitled him to pursue a policy of unrelenting severity, and that homage should be paid as his reward. He thirsted for respect to be shown himself, and was amazed at the inordinate ingratitude of the French in not recognising his amiable qualities. It was his habit to remind them that but for his clemency in carrying out the instructions of Bathurst and those who acted with him, their condition could be made unendurable. He was incapable of grasping the lofty personality of the persecuted guest of England.
The popular, though erroneous, idea that Napoleon was, and ever had been, a beast of prey, fascinated him; his days were occupied in planning out schemes of closer supervision, and his nights were haunted with the vision of his charge smashing down every barrier he had racked his intellect to construct, and then vanishing from the benevolent custody of his saintly Government to again wage sanguinary war and spill rivers of blood. The awful presentiment of escape and the consequences of it were ever lacerating his uneasy spirit, and thus he never allowed himself to be forgotten; restrictions impishly vexatious were ordered with monotonous regularity. Napoleon aptly described Lowe as "being afflicted with an inveterate itch."
Montholon, in vol. i. p. 184, relates how Lowe would often leap out of bed in the middle of the night, after dreaming of the Emperor's flight, mount his horse and ride, like a man demented, to Longwood, only to be assured by the officer on duty that all was well and that the smitten hero was still his prisoner. When Napoleon was told of these nocturnal visitations, he was overcome with mirth, but at the same time filled with contempt, not alone for this amazing specimen, but for the creatures who had created him a dignitary.
The tragic farce of sending the Emperor to the poisonous plateau of Longwood, and giving Lowe Plantation House with its much more healthy climate to reside at, is a phenomenon which few people who have made themselves conversant with all the facts and circumstances will be able to understand. But the policy of this Government, of whom the Scottish bard sings so rapturously, is a problem that can never be solved.
To a wise body of men, and in view of the fact that the eyes of the world were fixed upon them and on the vanquished man, their prisoner, the primary thought would have been compassion, even to indulgence; instead of which they and their agents behaved as though they were devoid of humane feelings.
Lowe's ambition seems to have been to ignore propriety, and to force his way to the Emperor's privacy in order that he might assure himself that his charge had not escaped, but his ambition and his heroics were calmly and contemptuously ignored. "Tell my gaoler," said Napoleon to his valet Noverras, "that it is in his power to change his keys for the hatchet of the executioner, and that if he enters, it shall be over a corpse. Give me my pistols," and it is said by Montholon, to whom the Emperor was dictating at the time of the intrusion, that Sir Hudson heard this answer and retired confounded. The ultimatum dazed him, but he was forced to understand that beyond a certain limit, heroics, fooleries, and impertinences would not be tolerated by this terrible scavenger of European bureaucracy.[5] Lowe, in very truth, discerned the stern reality of the Emperor's piercing words, and he felt the need of greater caution bearing down on him. He pondered over these grave developments as he journeyed back to Plantation House, there to concoct and dispatch with all speed a tale that would chill his confederates at St. Stephen's with horror, and give them a further opportunity of showing how wise they were in their plan of banishment and rigid precautions, and in their selection of so distinguished and dauntless a person as Sir Hudson Lowe, on whom they implicitly relied to carry out their Christlike benefactions.
Cartoonists, pamphleteers, Bourbonites, treasonites, meteoric females, all were supplied with the requisite material for declamatory speeches to be hurled at the Emperor in the hope of being reaped to the glory of God and the British ministry. The story of the attempted invasion of Longwood and its sequel shocks the fine susceptibilities of the satellites by whom Lowe is surrounded. They bellow out frothy words of vengeance. Sir Thomas Reade, the noisiest filibuster of them all, indicates his method of settling matters at Longwood. This incident arose through Napoleon refusing to see Sir Thomas Strange, an Indian Judge. Las Cases had just been forcibly removed. The Emperor was feeling the cruelty of this act very keenly, so he sent the following reply to Lowe's request that he should see Sir Thomas: "Tell the Governor that those who have gone down to the tomb receive no visits, and take care that the Judge be made acquainted with my answer." This cutting reply caused Sir Hudson to give way to unrestrained anger, and now Sir Thomas Reade gets his chance of vapouring. Here is his plan: "If I were Governor, I would bring that dog of a Frenchman