These precautions early provoked protests from the exiles.  Bertrand had no wish to draw them up in the trenchant style that the ex-Emperor desired; but Gourgaud’s “Journal” shows that he was driven on to the task (November 5th).  It only led to a lofty rejoinder from Cockburn, in which he declined to relax his system, but expressed the wish to render their situation “as little disagreeable as possible.”  On December 21st, Montholon returned to the charge with a letter dictated by Napoleon, complaining that Longwood was the most barren spot on the island, always deluged with rain or swathed in mist; that O’Meara was not to count as a British officer when they went beyond the limits, and had been reprimanded by the Admiral for thus acting; and that the treatment of the exiles would excite the indignation of all times and all people.  To this the Admiral sent a crushing rejoinder, declining to explain why he had censured O’Meara or any other British subject:  he asserted that Longwood was “the most pleasant as well as the most healthy spot of this most healthful island,” expressed the hope that, when the rains had ceased, the party would change their opinion of Longwood, and declared that the treatment of the party would “obtain the admiration of future ages, as well as of every unprejudiced person of the present.”

We now know that the Admiral’s trust in the judicial impartiality of future ages was a piece of touching credulity, and that the next generation, like his own, was greedily to swallow sensational slander and to neglect the prosaic truth.  But, arguing from present signs, he might well believe that Montholon’s letter was a tissue of falsehoods; for that officer soon confessed to him that “it was written in a moment of petulance of the General [Bonaparte] ... and that he [Montholon] considered the party to be in point of fact vastly well off and to have everything necessary for them, though anxious that there should be no restrictions as to the General going unattended by an officer wherever he pleased throughout the island."[558] On the last point Cockburn was inflexible.

The Admiral’s responsibility was now nearly at an end.  On April 14th, 1816, there landed at St. Helena Sir Hudson Lowe, the new Governor, who was to take over the powers wielded both by Cockburn and Wilks.  The new arrival, on whom the storms of calumny were thenceforth persistently to beat, had served with distinction in many parts.  Born in 1769, within one month of Napoleon, he early entered our army, and won his commission by service in Corsica and Elba, his linguistic and military gifts soon raising him to the command of a corps of Corsican exiles who after 1795 enlisted in our service.  With these “Corsican Rangers” Lowe campaigned in Egypt and finally at Capri, their devotion to him nerving them to a gallant but unavailing defence of this islet against a superior force of Murat’s troops in 1808.[559] In 1810 Lowe and his Corsicans captured the Isle of Santa Maura, which he thereafter