England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (36 page)

The Neapolitans are made with joy, and if you wos here now, you wou'd be killed with kindness. Sonets on sonets, illuminations, rejoicings; not a French dog dare shew his face. How I glory in the honner of my Country and my Countryman! I walk and tread in the air with pride, feiling I was born in the same land with the victor Nelson and his gallant band….

We are preparing your appartment against you come. I hope it will not be long, for Sir William and I are so impatient to embrace you. I wish you cou'd have seen our house the 3 nights of illumination. Tis, 'twas covered with your glorious name. Their were 3 thousand Lamps, and their shou'd have been 3 millions if we had time…. For God's sake come to Naples soon. We receive so many sonets and letters of congratulation…. I woul'd rather be an English powder monkey or a swab in that great victory than an Emperor out of it.

My dress from head to foot is alia Nelson. Ask Hoste. Even my shawl is in Blue with gold anchors all over. My earrings are Nelson's anchors; in short, we are be-Nelsoned all over. I send you some Sonets…. I am afraid you will not be able to read this scrawl.
⁵

After the Battle of the Nile, every woman in England and Naples wanted Nelson, but Emma made sure to get there first. Nelson was deeply gratified by her letter. Puffed with pride, he wrote to Fanny that on hearing the victory, Lady Hamilton "fell apparently dead and is not yet recovered from severe bruises."

CHAPTER 32
Falling into His Arms

N
elson arrived at Naples in the
Vanguard
on September 22, 1798. Five hundred boats spilling musicians and cheering courtiers flocked to meet him. Crowds lined the shore, and bands played “Rule Britannia” and “See the Conquering Hero.” Emma staged her own dramatic welcome. To the delight of the watching audience, she arrived on deck and flung herself against him, exclaiming in happiness and shedding sympathetic tears over his wounds. “Up flew her ladyship,” Nelson spluttered in excitement, “and exclaiming ‘Oh God is it possible’; fell into my arms more dead than alive.” Entranced by the display, he temporarily forgot he had only one arm.

Emma swept Nelson and also Josiah, now eighteen, back to the Palazzo Sessa. Nelson had bought Emma the present of a black maid, perhaps a Sudanese girl from a dealer who had set up shop on his ship after the Battle of the Nile. A black maid was a mark of extreme sophistication in England, kept by fine ladies to make their complexions look paler. Ecstatic about her new gift, Emma called her Fatima. Almost as soon as he arrived on shore, the battle-scarred hero collapsed with exhaustion. Emma devoted every hour to caring for him: serving him nourishing meals and warming drinks and helping him to sleep by soothing his brow. Hamilton had written to him before he arrived, promising that “Emma is looking out for the softest pillows, to repose the few wearied limbs you have left.” She plumped up the pillows and patted his hair.

While she had him prostrate before her, Emma exerted all her seductive powers to encourage Nelson to protect Maria Carolina and the kingdom of Naples. Nelson had other missions in the Mediterranean—namely, to
warn France away from Egypt and protect Malta—but Emma aimed to ensure he focused on her.
¹
She pulled out her glamorous muslin dresses from the closet, wearing every item that could be even vaguely "alia Nelson." When two of his captains had arrived in Naples with the news of the victory of the Nile, she accompanied them to the opera wearing a headband embroidered with "Nelson and Victory" in gold. Since then, she had turned herself into a living tribute.

Nelson had been excited to receive such an inviting letter from the famous sex bomb. Indeed, he had written to Sir William rather weakly offering to lodge in a hotel.
²
Now he could hardly believe that she was tending to him so closely in her home. He was soon wrapped around her little finger, dazzled by her warm attentions. Beautiful, flirtatious, sexy, witty, and young, as well as frank and not easily offended, she was a great contrast to the dreary, stiff wives of ambassadors and other superiors who usually dismissed him as a vulgar little man. "She is an honour to her sex," he wrote to Fanny, whom he had seen for seven months in the last seven years, and "one of the best women in this world." To Earl St. Vincent, his commander, he was more honest. "I am writing opposite Lady Hamilton, therefore you will not be surprised at the glorious jumble of this letter," he admitted, describing his heart as fluttering with confusion. "Naples is a dangerous place, and we must keep clear of it."

Unlike sybaritic, rank-obsessed playboys at the Neapolitan court, Nelson's charisma inhered in his passion for his work and his serious ambition. He radiated blunt honesty, and he was probably the least cynical guest the palazzo had ever entertained. Unlike every other person in Emma's social circle, he was from a humble background, and his education was patchy. He was a man of action: he could not play music, sing, or dance, and he was a terrible dresser. Neapolitans and English aristocrats cut a dash in pastels, exotic pink suits, and gold shoes, but out of his impressive dress uniform, gaudy with medals, Nelson wore dull black, gray, and brown wool, and his hair was unstyled and unpowdered. He was smaller than most men, so thin as to seem emaciated, and he had a large bald patch where he had cut his head at Aboukir, which he tried to hide by combing over some of his unruly ginger hair. Covered with scars and wrinkles from sun exposure, he was neither attractive nor suave. Emma didn't care.

Emma worked hard to bring Josiah out of his shell. Rebellious and unhappy, convinced that others mocked him for not being up to his job, Josiah drank heavily and refused to obey his stepfather's commands. He
was sullen and defensive, and Nelson, who had no patience with depression or anxiety, was simply infuriated. But Emma was soon working wonders with her pimply-faced teenage guest. "He likes Lady Hamilton more than any female," boasted Nelson to Fanny. His bluster that Emma would "make more of Josiah than any woman" and that she would "fashion him in 6 months in spite of himself" was hardly calculated to win over his wife. Fanny was deeply worried about the tense relationship between father and stepson, and Emma's breezy promise that although she and Josiah might "quarrel sometimes, he loves me and does as I would have him" only twisted the knife. Fanny had to read lashings of praise about Emma. "How few could have made the turn she has," Nelson marveled to his wife, "proof that even reputation may be regained, but I own it requires a great soul." Nelson knew Emma's history—everyone did—and he hardly cared. Thanks to his humble upbringing, he was sympathetic toward women who had to make their own way, and aware that there were few choices for a poor girl but prostitution. He had worried that his sister Anne had been exposed to insult when she worked as a lacemaker's apprentice in London. Nelson's attitude toward prostitution was pragmatic. Whenever a ship came ashore, traders arrived to set up stalls on the deck, and hundreds of prostitutes flocked on board, rowed out in "bum boats" and then taken down by the men to their hammocks in the huge orlop deck where they all slept. The officers went onshore to meet expensive courtesans or local actresses. As Nelson knew, in the ranks of the men there was no dividing line between "virtuous woman" or wife and prostitute: many men married women who came on board ship or entered into alliances with the hundreds of prostitutes in Greenwich, who looked after their money, checked their lottery numbers, and cared for them when they returned.

Real life in the navy was nothing like the dignified oil paintings. Most of his men were no more than seventeen, while many were as young as thirteen, high on their rations of a gallon of beer a day, pimply adolescents starved of female company, unable to write home, their only possessions the clothes they were wearing when they had been seized by the press gang. They were often drunk, the ship resounded to the sound of the cows, sheep, and hens packed into cages, women dressed as men worked as sailors (without anyone guessing), men with a little money and seniority took prostitutes as "wives" for the journey, and sex was not always consensual: in the Caribbean, plantation owners sent out their slaves to work as prostitutes. Having ruled over a ship that was at times a floating brothel,
menagerie, pub, and shopping center, Nelson was less hypocritical than the average eighteenth-century man. When he had an affair with the singer Adelaide Correglia in the Italian port of Leghorn between 1794 and 1796, he demanded his superiors acknowledge the importance of the intelligence about ships' movements that she gave him. Rather than goggle at Emma as an ex-courtesan or joke about her background, he accepted her as he saw her: a woman who had made a great turn in life.

"Ten thousand most grateful thanks are due to your ladyship for restoring the health of our invaluable friend," St. Vincent wrote skittishly to Emma. "Pray do not let your fascinating Neapolitan dames approach too near him, for he is made of flesh & blood & cannot resist their temptation." Emma did not need any warnings. She was determined to monopolize Nelson's attentions.

While Nelson recovered his health, Emma planned her most spectacular party ever to celebrate his fortieth birthday. She spent thousands of pounds on food, decoration, and entertainment so opulent that even Nelson worried it might make him vain. On September 29, the Palazzo Sessa played host to eight hundred Neapolitan dignitaries and select English guests, and nearly a thousand more joined them for dancing. "Such a style of elegance as I never saw, or shall again probably," wrote an utterly impressed Nelson to his wife. Emma adorned the courtyard with elaborate arrangements of flowers, lights, and candles and a column inscribed with "Veni, vidi, vici." Every ribbon and button bore a picture of Nelson, and one of the English travelers composed a new verse to be added to "God Save the King," which began "Join we great Nelson's name/First on the roll of fame."

Under the twinkling lights in the courtyard, Nelson and Emma were obviously absorbed in each other. Josiah began to suspect that Lady Hamilton had been kind to him only in order to win his stepfather. He was equally horrified that nobody seemed to object to his stepfather's obvious infatuation. Used to the culture of the
cicisbeo,
in which young married women had platonic male friends to squire them around, the Neapolitans thought Nelson just another of Emma's
cicisbeo
and quite naturally so, since he was a British naval captain and she was the wife of the British envoy. Sir William was equally sanguine, believing it was yet another of his wife's passing flirtations with a powerful man. He trusted
Emma, for she had always been faithful to him. If she had resisted some of England's wealthiest aristocrats, why would she want a grubby, half-blind, one-armed little sailor? Eighteen months short of his eightieth birthday and doggedly hanging on to influence, he knew that if he was seen as manipulating the great naval hero, his own position at the Neapolitan court would be unassailable. He showered his new friend with compliments, hailing him as the kingdom's "Guardian Angel from the Ruin with which it has been long menaced."
³
Nelson, Emma, and Sir William described themselves as the
tria luneta in uno
(shortened from
tria coniuncta in uno,
or three joined together as one). Sir William plotted for Naples, while Emma and Nelson wallowed in flirtation—and stardom. Every time Nelson went outside, he attracted a mob of tearful, grateful Neapolitans, wearing their Nelson shawls and crying, "Viva Nelson!"
⁴
Nelson was soon intoxicated by Naples and completely obsessed with Emma.

After the party, Emma became Nelson's secretary and political facilitator. She translated from French and Italian for him, guided him around the court, and escorted him to the queen. "Lady Hamilton is an angel," he wrote to St. Vincent, describing her as "my Ambassadress to the Queen." She had been his nurse, companion, and social hostess, and now she was his assistant. When they were not working, they were confessing all to each other. Emma confided her fears about invasion and her sadness at not having children with her husband. She and Nelson had shared aims, they were no longer deeply in love with their partners, and they were both susceptible to romantic attachment. They were soon hopelessly in love with each other.

Hints about the relationship between the glamorous celebrity mistress-ambassadress and the hero of the Nile began to appear in the English newspapers. By November 1798, less than two months after his arrival in Naples, everybody was gossiping that the two biggest sex symbols of their day were having an affair. Female figures who closely resembled Emma soon began to feature on the commemorative Nelsonia—boxes, pendants, pictures, and ribbons. The phrase
tria iuncta in uno
began to appear in caricatures and pictures, with sly puns turning "joined" into a sexual innuendo. In lonely Roundwood, Lady Nelson stared at the gossip in the newspapers and read her husband's letters overflowing with extravagant praise for the Hamiltons and reports of glamorous balls and the adulation he had received. "Lord Hood always expressed his fear that Sir W and Lady Hamilton would use their influence to keep Lord Nelson with
them: they have succeeded," she lamented.
⁵
She laid much of the blame on Josiah, believing his truculence had finally infuriated his stepfather enough to push him into the arms of Emma and Sir William.