On April 11, 1821, Lowe writes to Bathurst:—"The enclosed extract of a letter from Count Montholon may merit, as usual, your lordship's perusal." (This, of course, is intended as wit.) "It may be regarded as a bulletin of General Bonaparte's health, meant for circulation at Paris."
Dr. Antommarchi, in writing to Signor Simeon Colonna on March 17, 1821, after dilating on his master's health, the climate, &c., bursts out in a paragraph: "Dear friend, the medical art can do nothing against the influence of climate, and if the English Government does not hasten to remove him from this destructive atmosphere, His Majesty soon, with anguish I say it, will pay the last tribute to the earth"; and in a postscript he adds: "I offer the undoubted facts stated above, in opposition to the gratuitous assertions in the English newspapers relative to the good health which His Majesty is stated to enjoy here."
On March 17, 1821, Montholon writes to Princess Pauline Borghesi: "The Emperor reckons upon your Highness to make his real situation known to some English of influence. He dies without succour upon this frightful rock; his agonies are frightful." At the time Napoleon was suffering thus, letters were published in some of the Ministerial newspapers purporting to have come from St. Helena and representing him to be in perfect health.
On May 6, 1821, Lowe writes to Bathurst announcing the death of the Emperor. It is a long rigmarole not worth quoting, except that he condescends to allow the body to be interred with the honours due to a general officer of the highest rank. Then follows the majestic reply of Bathurst. He says, "I am happy to assure you that your conduct, as detailed in those despatches, has received His Majesty's approbation"; which indicates that Lowe did not feel quite happy himself as to how the effusions would be regarded by his employers, now that the Emperor had succumbed to their and his own wicked treatment. In his despatches of February and April, 1821, he had mockingly referred to Napoleon's indisposition as being faked, and in May he is obliged to write himself as an unscrupulous liar, but notwithstanding this, his action meets with the approval of the chief of the executioners, which is very natural, seeing that this person was regarded as one of the most prominent scoundrels in Europe. But Sir Hudson Lowe craved for approbation, and was so mentally constituted that he believed he deserved it by committing offences against God and man.
"Every good servant does not all commands, no bond but to do just ones," but Lowe, in his anxiety to please his employers, went to the furthest limits of injustice. How void of human understanding and what Mrs. Carlyle called "that damned thing, human kindness" this wretched man was!
As will be hereafter shown, he had not long to wait after Napoleon's death and the receipt of tokens of friendliness that had been sent to him through the Colonial Secretary, before he was made to feel that the Government was not disposed to carry any part of his public unpopularity on its shoulders. He had done his best or worst to make that portion of the earth on which he lived miserable to those he might have made tolerably happy, without infringing the loutish instructions of a notoriously stupid Government. Instead of this he made himself so despised that the Emperor, almost with his last breath, called all good spirits to bear witness against him and his murderous confederates.
The great soldier had slipped his moorings on May 6, 1821, and on the 7th or 8th, after much ado with the Governor, a post-mortem examination was held by Dr. François Antommarchi in the presence of Drs. Short, Arnott, Burton, and Livingstone. Lowe was represented by the Chief of Staff. The examination disclosed an ulcerous growth and an unnaturally enlarged liver, which may be assumed as the ultimate cause of death, though Antommarchi's report assuredly points to the fatal nature of the climatic conditions.
The French were anxious to have the body of their Emperor embalmed, but Hudson Lowe insisted that his instructions forbade this. Napoleon had commanded that his heart should be put in a silver vase filled with spirits of wine and sent to Marie Louise. When Sir Hudson Lowe heard that this was being done, he sent a peremptory order forbidding it, stating that no part should be preserved but the stomach, which would be sent to England. Naturally such wanton disregard of the Emperor's wish was violently resented by the French, and by the best of the English who were there. A long and heated discussion seems to have ensued on this question, which ended in the Governor having to give way—not altogether—but he was compelled to a compromise, viz., that the heart and stomach should be preserved and put into the coffin.
The Governor was then confronted with what to him was another knotty point. The Emperor had desired that a few gold coins struck during his reign should be buried with him. After serious consideration this was graciously allowed, but not without forebodings of trouble arising therefrom! What the British Government or their idiotic Governor wanted with Napoleon's stomach, or why they refused to allow his body to be embalmed, or his heart preserved and sent to his wife, Heaven only knows. They had monstrously violated all human feeling by ignoring appeals made to them from all parts of the world to be merciful to a much afflicted man. They were well informed by the best medical authorities on the island that the climate was deadly to a constitution such as his. They ignored reports of his declining health even up to a few weeks of his death, and then when the Arch-enemy claimed him, they flooded Europe with the intelligence that he had succumbed to the malady from which his father died, and that their tender and benevolent care for him was unavailing. The progress of his inherited disease could not be checked.
The world is fast beginning to realise the infamy of it all. Not a thought ever entered their heads but that of torture, veiled or open, and the appalling clumsiness of their endeavours to conceal their Satanic designs, so that they might appear in the light of beneficent hosts, shows that they cowered at the possibility of public vengeance. Happily for them, Napoleon's death came too near to the terrific commotion caused by the French Revolution.