Holland House and the many other powerful Bonaparte supporters in
England. In March 1817 articles appeared in The Times, clearly
insinuating that the British government was trying to hasten Napoleon to
an early death. A censure was moved in the House of Lords, when Lord
Holland signally got the better of Bathurst in debate. Although the
government easily defeated the motion in the Lords, they were rattled by
the adverse publicity. Bathurst was forced to instruct Lowe that the
allowance at Longwood was to be restored to the fu ll £12,000.
Another bone of contention was Lowe's refusal to address Napoleon as
Emperor and his continuing use of the title 'General Bonaparte' which
was calculated to turn the person referred to splenetic. Lowe invited
'General Bonaparte' to dine at Plantation House and meet the Countess
of Loudon and seemed surprised and put out when he received no reply.
Apparently unable to take a hint, he persisted in his asinine conduct with
another invitation to the 'General' to attend a party at Plantation House
fo r the Prince Regent's birthday. Napoleon suggested that since
recognition of the historical reality that he actually had been an Emperor
appeared to stick in Lowe's craw, a solution might be for him to go under
an alias; he suggested Colonel Muiron or Baron Duroc, after two of his
beloved officers. Lowe refused, on the grounds that an assumed name
was the prerogative only of sovereigns; evidently in his time with the
Corsica Rangers he had never heard of a nom de guerre.
When in doubt, Lowe always did the wrong thing. A Bonaparte
admirer tried to get round the problem of nomenclature by inscribing a
book to 'Imperatori Napoleoni', since the golden age Latin translation of
this would be 'General Napoleon'; Lowe, however, learned from the
pedants on his staff that in silver Latin this could be translated as
'Emperor Napoleon' and confiscated the book. Such was Lowe's paranoia
that he suspected a code or cipher in the most unlikely places. When
Montholon gave the French Commissioner, Montchenu, some white and
green beans to plant in his garden, Lowe suspected that the different
colours of the beans had a semiotic significance. Even more fatuously,
when Napoleon tried to order a new pair of shoes from the cobblers,
Lowe intervened to say that the old pair of shoes had first to be sent to
him and he would commission their replacement.
From time to time certain English 'my country right or wrong'
Bonapartophobes have tried to rehabilitate Lowe's reputation and assert
that he was simply a rather naive dupe of Napoleon's well-oiled
propaganda machine. Unfortunately this argument falls foul of all the
extant independent evidence. When the three Allied Commissioners,
charged with observing that the treaty relating to Bonaparte was being
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