This book is the first full-scale biography of Sir Hudson Lowe, despite the fact that he left behind a mass of correspondence and papers accumulated over a fairly long life. Yet he is known only as the jailer of Napoleon Bonaparte during his exile on the island of St. Helena, a period that occupied only six of the forty years of Lowe's active life.

Lowe was a much better educated officer than most of his contemporaries - a brave, intelligent, and resourceful soldier who rapidly won the respect of such distinguished military commanders as Sir Charles Stuart and Sir John Moore.

Lowe served in the Mediterranean theater for much of the war against Napoleon and later served as British liaison officer to the Allied armies in Germany and France during the 1813-14 campaigns, where he enjoyed the admiration and friendship of Prussian commanders and the Russian Czar.

Lowe's talents - fluency in both Italian and French, a knowledge of the Corsican character derived from commanding a Corsican regiment enlisted under the British crown, and his proven ability to converse at the highest level with statesmen and marshals - were considered so favorably that he was chosen to be the guardian of the exiled Napoleon on St. Helena. It was an appointment that led to Lowe's downfall. He proved no match for the guile and mendacity of his devious captive and that captive's adherents.

Lowe's reputation has never recovered from the slanders and libels of the Bonapartists and their vocal Whig supporters, in spite of one or two attempts by historians to set the record straight.

Refused a pension and suitable recognition as governor of a colony by first the Tories and then the Whigs, out of fear of public opinion Lowe ended his career in anticlimax. Without attempting to disguise Lowe's personal faults and limitations, author Desmond Gregory has aimed at rehabilitating Lowe's reputation as a soldier and a writer who, as the record clearly shows, was something very much more substantial than the pseudovillain of St. Helena.