If I now address your Lordship personally respecting what concerns me, it is because all the acts of which I have to complain have originated, and have been continued, in your department, and under your name; and if other hands have since oppressed me, I am indebted to your Lordship for being placed within their reach, and to your suggestions for the treatment which they have inflicted upon me.
My Lord, I am one of the four to which your orders at Plymouth had reduced the number of those who eagerly sought the happiness and glory of following the illustrious victim of the dreadful hospitality of the Bellerophon; I followed my sacred occupation at Longwood to the best of my power; all the faculties of my heart and soul were engaged in soothing the bitterest captivity ever known, when the Governor of St. Helena suddenly tore me away from that island. Perhaps he was right: I had infringed his regulations. But, after all, I was guilty of no other crime than that of using the right, which every prisoner possesses, of endeavouring without any scruple to deceive the vigilance of his gaoler; for between us nothing had been left to delicacy, confidence, or honour. I have not complained of the proceedings enforced against me. I was only grieved at the uncalled-for insult inflicted upon him from whom I was separated. It was almost by his side, almost under his eye, that I was arrested; on which occasion he wrote, what you no doubt will have read, that, seeing me from his windows hurried off on the plain, in the midst of waving plumes and horses prancing around me, he had fancied he saw the savages of the South Sea, who, in their ferocious joy, dance round the victim whom they are about to devour.
My Lord, it was natural for me to believe that the cause of what has happened to me, the confiding of secret documents to my servant at his own request, was but the result of a snare laid for me. The Governor himself agreed with me that appearances might justify my suspicion; but he gave me his word of honour that he had nothing to do in the business, and I believed him. It had originally been intended, however, that those secret documents should pass through the Governor’s hands; they would have been addressed to him, if he had not informed me, a short time before, that if I continued to write in the same style he would separate me from him to whom I devoted my existence. So true is this assertion, and so unimportant in themselves were the documents, that they have never since been mentioned; they have remained entirely unconnected with the event to which they gave rise.[[33]]
My Lord, my captivity in St. Helena was only voluntary. According to your own regulation, it was to cease at my pleasure. As soon, therefore, as I found myself separated from Longwood, I signified to Sir Hudson Lowe, that I, from that moment, withdrew from his personal control, and placed myself again under the protection of the civil and general laws; that if I had committed any offence, I required to be sent into the presence of my judges; that if he thought it necessary to submit to the inspection of Ministers my papers, which I had given him sufficient time to examine and to understand, I desired they might be sent to you, my Lord, and that I might be sent with them. And in order that he should have the less difficulty in taking this determination, I represented to him the dreadful state of my health, and the imminent danger of my son, which required our being sent to where we might procure the first medical advice; and I further added that I submitted willingly and unreservedly to every restriction, however illegal, that your Lordship might deem it necessary to impose upon me when I should have arrived in England. Sir Hudson Lowe did not think himself at liberty to take this step; and, after he had long hesitated, and had kept me a close prisoner in the Island for five or six weeks, he at last sent me off to the Cape of Good Hope, according to the letter of his instructions; a measure which he might and certainly ought to have adopted within a few days after my arrest. This Governor, at the same time, kept back such of my papers as he thought proper, without allowing me to affix my seal to them, or he would only allow me to do so under the derisive condition of my express consent to his breaking the seal in my absence if he thought proper, which was equivalent to a prohibition of sealing them at all.
By the aid of such subterfuges, Sir Hudson Lowe might likewise assert that it was in my power to return to Longwood; it is true, that, being urged by my arguments and by the delicacy of his position with respect to me, he offered to let me go back thither, because that would have released him from his embarrassment. But at the same time that he made the offer, he rendered it impossible for me to accept it: ‘You have disgraced me and dishonoured me,’ said I to him, ‘in arresting me in Napoleon’s presence; I could no longer be an object of consolation to him, but one rather that would bring painful and injurious recollections to his mind. I could not appear again at Longwood except at his express desire.’ I asked leave to write; I did even write to inquire whether there existed such a wish; but Sir Hudson Lowe insisted upon dictating or controlling the expressions of my letter, and I was bound to refuse. His advantages were by far too great already, placed as he was amongst close prisoners, whose actions he separately directed at his will. Besides, if I even went back, he did not consent to return me my papers. The very next day he might renew upon me, or upon my unfortunate companions, the example of such degrading acts of authority; I had the grief of having opened the door to such an abuse of power, and my return would give to it the sanction of precedent for the future: no alternative, was, therefore, left to me, but to quit the Island with an aching heart.
I think, my Lord, I have stated to you every thing relating to my affairs at St. Helena; this account is proved and developed in my correspondence with Sir Hudson Lowe, all the documents of which, carefully arranged and put in order by myself, were seized in the Thames by your directions, and are at present in your possession.
My Lord, when I arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, I thought myself better situated for enjoying the protection of your laws. Away from the fatal island, where certain irregularities might perhaps find a colouring in the importance of the motive which had occasioned them, I found myself at a distance of five hundred leagues, in a quiet colony, governed by the uncontrolled operation of your excellent laws, so deservedly extolled. How great was my astonishment! Lord Charles Somerset found no difficulty in doing at the Cape what Sir Hudson Lowe had not dared to do at St. Helena—to detain me a prisoner. In vain I made the same entreaties, and urged the same arguments; in vain I offered the same concessions that I offered to Sir Hudson Lowe, in order that I might be sent to your Lordship in Europe; all was useless: he detained me. And this was an act of his own will and caprice, for Sir Hudson Lowe was not his superior, and could not therefore give him any orders. Lord Charles Somerset governed without controul; he held a discretionary power; he could and ought to have been a summary judge in my affair, but he constantly refused to listen to me, rejected all explanation, and, notwithstanding my warm and urgent representations, contented himself with coolly inquiring of my natural judges, at a distance of three thousand leagues, whether he should do right in sending me to them; thereby inflicting upon me, from that moment, the most dreadful sentence that any tribunal could ever have pronounced; an exile, and an imprisonment of seven or eight months’ duration, separated by three thousand leagues from my family, my private affairs, my country, my connexions, and all my affections.
My Lord, according to the sanctity of your laws, and to the principles which have been transmitted to you by your forefathers, Lord Charles Somerset has become guilty towards me of the greatest of crimes; a crime which in the eyes of many people is equal to that of homicide, and which, from the torments I have been made to endure, exceeds it in mine. I denounce it to you, and demand justice at your hands. There is not an Englishman, valuing his noble privileges, whose voice does not unite with mine, and who does not form to himself a correct idea of the torments I have suffered. In vain it will be alleged that the Cape is but a colony governed by a military power, and still, to a certain extent, by Dutch laws. My Lord, the justice and protection of the British laws ought to reign wherever the British name extends. What would be a crime on the banks of the Thames cannot be a matter of indifference in a part of Africa over which the British standard waves.
I was not a prisoner of war; I could only be a prisoner amenable to the tribunals. To have kept me eight months separate from my judges is a denial of justice that would make an Englishman shudder; to have punished me without either trial or sentence is an act of tyranny which is revolting to your legislation. What did I ask of Lord Charles Somerset? Did I demand my liberty? No; I only requested that I might be sent a prisoner to you, and undergo a trial, if there was cause for one. But he sported in this instance with that which reason holds most sacred, which is most pleasing to the heart, and dearest to man. What could be his motives? What excuses could he plead? He constantly and obstinately refused to give any. And here, my Lord, I desire it may be understood that indignation and grief do not carry me so far as not to distinguish in Lord Charles Somerset the private attentions with which he endeavoured to soften my captivity from the infamy of the public act by which he doomed me to it; although it is true that, towards the end of my residence, the warmth of my expressions, and no doubt the importunity of my appeals, exasperated him so far as to induce him to keep me confined in the country, in spite of my entreaties and of the deplorable state of my health, out of the daily reach of physicians and medicines.
At last, my Lord, after a captivity of seven months, it was signified to me, no doubt in consequence of orders arrived from your Lordship, that I had only to procure a vessel to carry me to England. In vain I asked that some opportunity might be selected, which would afford some of those comforts which the distressing state of my health, and that of my son, required; every suitable ship was refused me under some pretence or other; and the choice that was left to me was reduced to the only vessel on the eve of sailing; and even that was pointed out to me by the Governor himself. I was compelled to embark in it as a prisoner, and yet at my own expense; (this, by the way, appears a little contradictory;) and in this brig, of the burden of two hundred and thirty tons, and having a crew of twelve men, we had to endure a voyage of nearly one hundred days, without a physician, and subject to all the inconveniences, all the privations, all the evils, attendant upon so small a vessel.