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.