England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (38 page)

G
od onely knows what yet is to become of us, we are worn out,” lamented Emma to Greville after two days in damp and freezing Palermo. Overwhelmed by “anxiety & fatigue,” she was worried about Sir William, who “had 3 days a bilious attack,” and moreover, “my dear adorable Queen whom I love better
than any person in the world,
is allso unwell.” When the ship arrived, Maria Carolina could not bear to stay on the ship one moment longer, and she, Emma, the other women, and the sad bundle of Prince Albert's corpse were rowed ashore in secret before dawn. At nine that morning, the king ceremonially disembarked to a warm welcome from the Sicilian people, who had long resented his reluctance to visit the island. They expected him to live in the royal apartments in the city, but they were disappointed. Ferdinand was not about to sit about in dreary Palermo when there were crowds of wild boar to be killed. The royal carriage sped to his hunting grounds just outside the city, now in the Parco della Favorita, less than two miles north of the city center. His family and their entourage, the Hamiltons, and Nelson huddled together in the dilapidated buildings of his hunting lodge, battling to keep warm in a house without fireplaces.

Within a few days, Emma and Sir William moved to the Villa Bastioni, another summer house nearby, the last place the Hamiltons would live without Nelson. Plump cupids bounced in ornate frescoes over the ceilings and walls, but the furniture was dirty and cracked, and there were once more no fireplaces. Shivering among the peeling gilt and dusty stucco, Sir William took to his bed, fretting about the fate of his belongings
and distressed by stomach pain. Emma had to care for him and take over his duties with the royals and the hundreds of English who had fled, as well as thousands of Neapolitan nobles and loyalists.

Albert weighed heavily on Emma's mind. She was always on the brink of tears—much to the irritation of her husband—and when the queen gave her a mourning pendant with hair and the inscription “Prince Albert died in my arms, 25th Dec, 1798,” she refused to take it off. She spent every moment she could with the queen, who was wounded by Ferdinand's seeming indifference to Albert's death. “We weep together & now that is our onely comfort,” Emma mourned to Greville. But she could not lose herself in grief, for she had work to do. Maria Carolina had become utterly reliant on her as organizer, assistant, cheerleader, and friend. In the confusion of arrival, the queen had lost much of her luggage, and she sent Emma to find her court dresses before an official reception on Sunday afternoon. Then she needed her dear friend to find a way of hiding the treasure. The English visitors in Naples were no less demanding. Many were piqued that they had not been invited to travel with the royals, and Emma was expected to make up for the slight by procuring them good but cheap lodgings, a difficult job when every property owner in Palermo was profiting from the influx of wealthy refugees by raising rents.

Only Ferdinand was happy. The hunting was quite excellent, and he had decided that his first task on the island should be to transform his lodge into a palace fit for a king. He was intent on showing himself off as at the forefront of fashion and design. The Versailles look was passé, and Europe's most fashionable grandees were beginning to build homes in the oriental style. Ferdinand was not to be outdone. He employed Palermo's foremost architect, Giuseppe Venanzio Marvuglia, to rebuild his home as a fantastic bright orange and gold Chinese palace, peaked with fake pagodas, complete with brilliantly colored murals of oriental scenes and twinkling lights. He planned to spend thousands of pounds turning the overgrown land into graceful grounds of walks and fountains, a version of Caserta's garden with extra oriental trappings.

The new arrivals in Sicily were as eager to forget as Ferdinand. They dissipated their fears in balls, gambling, and infidelities. Looking more radiant than ever, Emma dazzled at the card table and on the dance floor, intoxicated by her feelings for Nelson. He sat at her side, wrapped up in her games of faro and hazard, putting up hundreds of pounds for her bets. They gambled long after Sir William had gone to bed. Nelson was wholly
absorbed in Emma. Too honorable to seduce a woman under her husband's roof, he began to hint that they might live together as they had in the Palazzo Sessa and share the bills.

Sir William was worried about his finances. He had lost his home and his belongings, and his money was being squandered on Emma's entertainments and on the English hangers-on who streamed through his doors expecting food and amusement. Nelson, he thought, should fund more of Emma's extravagant lifestyle than her losses at faro. The gossips were whispering about the late-night visits of their "dear friend" and about Emma's carriage rides to his residence. Sir William thought that if the three of them lived together, they could split expenses and quell the talk. He accepted that the relationship between his wife and his friend had become deeper in Palermo, and he knew that he was powerless to end it, for the royal family was dependent on Nelson and would ostracize anyone who upset the great hero. If Nelson lived with them, he hoped, Emma might rest at home some evenings to keep him company. It seemed a perfect arrangement: no scandal, profit, and happiness all round. Emma was soon eagerly searching for new lodgings.

Within a few months, the pair moved with Nelson to the Palazzo Pala-gonia, a vast palace of nearly fifty rooms in deep countryside to the east of the city, now in the pleasant, bustling town of Bagheria. Despite years of neglect, the palazzo is still breathtakingly bizarre—a huge stone double-fronted mansion adorned with a sweeping staircase to the front door, covered in gargoyles and strange statues. The walls are a riot of statues of hybrid monsters, half gods and half goats, half sea monsters and half mermaids, and the interior is no less ornate, entirely covered in colored marble and jewels. The bedroom apartments were particularly spectacular, covered in erotic murals of Venus and Leda loving Zeus when he was disguised as a swan. The place was even more amazing, for its owner, the Prince of Palagonia, had adorned it with bulky furniture in dashing colors, a chandelier made from cups and saucers, and secret spikes under the cushions of the chairs. The villa was one of the "must-sees" of Palermo, and when Goethe had visited, he had felt quite faint at its rambling excess.

Nelson, Emma, and Sir William were showing they had arrived in style by choosing the most extravagant and costly house on the whole island after the royal palace, awing their friends with grand rooms and eye-popping decor. They moved into the Palazzo Palagonia along with Mrs. Cadogan and Josiah; Maria Carolina's gardener, John Graefer, and his family; various other English dependents; two English bankers (handy to
have on call during gambling parties); and secretaries, musicians, and staff The rental was wildly expensive, as was supporting this newly expanded household, but the
Tria
were living for the moment, convinced that the government would heap rewards on them. At the Palazzo Palagonia, Emma threw even more lavish entertainments and gambled recklessly, captivating her new Sicilian friends and Neapolitan visitors. Nelson's men declared themselves equally bewitched. One of Nelson's captains dubbed her “Patroness of the Navy,” trilling, “You fascinate all the Navy as much at Palermo as you did at Naples.” Only Josiah was miserable, confused by his affection and admiration for Emma and his loyalty to his mother.

Sir William tried to ignore Emma's growing intimacy with Nelson. His relations with her had been fraternal for some time, and they had long slept in separate apartments, so he could shield himself from the evidence that—as everybody knew—his wife was on the brink of having an affair. He focused his resentment on Maria Carolina for encouraging her friend to charm the hero, and most of all on his ill health. As he grumbled to Joseph Banks, everybody suffered from the “thick air” of Palermo and had frequent bilious attacks, but “owing to my age, I do not recover as soon as they do.” Suffering from a “shattered constitution,” he informed the Foreign Office that the “whole confidence” of the king and queen “entirely reposes on… Lord Nelson.”
¹
Sir William was devastated when he heard in early March that the ship carrying his collection to England had been wrecked near the Isles of Scilly in December, off England's southwest coast. Although some good pieces and his best paintings were on another ship, the collection, into which he had poured so much devotion and money, had sunk to the bottom of the sea. As his ill health worsened under the weight of depression, he lost his influence over Ferdinand. Leaving the entertaining and political caballing to his wife, he tried to retain some semblance of authority at court by implying that he influenced Nelson, which living with him suggested. He boasted that he had the “temper to stem the torrent of his impetuosity, even against his best Friends, and in that respect he is just enough to own that I have been of infinite use to him.”
²
He lied. As one shrewd visitor reported, “the little consequence he retained as ambassador was derived from his wife's intrigues; but as long as he could keep his situation, draw his salary, and collect vases, he cared little about politics; he left the management of them to her Ladyship.”

Emma had remained faithful to Sir William to this point, but she could no longer resist her feelings. Nelson had been true to Fanny in the way that his contemporaries defined male fidelity: he had used only courtesans
and prostitutes. Although we have definite proof that the relationship between Nelson and Emma had become physical by early 1800, the affair must have begun in the Palazzo Palagonia. Sir William would never have allowed Nelson to pay Emma's expenses unless they were having an affair. At some point early in 1799, Emma and Nelson began a full-blown sexual affair. They were so close that he began to address Mrs. Cadogan as "Sig-nora Madre" (pleasing Emma greatly, for Sir William had never been able to treat her as a mother-in-law). The exhilaration of having survived the journey to Palermo, the anxiety induced by the fraught political situation, the long nights of gambling and drinking, and the close living arrangements transformed a mutual sexual obsession into love. They were hopelessly caught up in each other, swept away by a passion neither of them had ever felt before. They were like two lovers who had lost their virginity to each other, constantly touching and staring at each other, swapping pet names and secret anecdotes, talking endlessly, desperately seizing every chance to be together.

In the warm Sicilian spring, the royal gardens sprang into bloom and men, women, and children came to Palermo from all over Sicily to sell handicrafts, perfumes, and fine foods to the flocks of rich, leisured refugees from Naples. Emma was the center of attention, pursuing what a traveling Scotsman dubbed her "attitudinal celebrity." She welcomed him by a display after dinner in which, as he wrote, she "dropped from her chair on the carpet" after having removed the "comb which fastened her superabundant locks." He decided "nothing could have been more classical or imposing than this prostrate position." Another guest was so convinced by Emma's faint that he dashed to douse her with water. The Scotsman judged their "introduction to the fascinating Lady Hamilton" was "got up with considerable stage effect." When he saw Sir William again later in the evening, "on his shoulder was leaning the interesting Melopomene, her raven tresses floating round her expansive form and full bosom." Emma declared to her startled guests that she was "dying" of sorrow for her "beloved Naples." On another occasion, the Turkish envoy of Emperor Paul of Russia, who was seated by Emma at a dinner held in his honor, held up his sword and claimed he had used it to execute twenty French prisoners in one day. Emma took the sword, kissed it, and handed it to Nelson.
³
Her guests cringed at her dramatic displays of devotion to him, but Nelson adored her for them. He soon added a codicil to his will leaving Emma a rare gold box covered with diamonds as a "token of respect for her every eminent virtue."

It seemed to everyone that Emma had the power. “Sir William, Lady Hamilton, and myself, are the mainsprings of the machine which manages what is going on in this country,” boasted Nelson. Since the queen took care of the details of government while the king hunted, the only way to gain some influence was to address her, and Emma was besieged by those begging favors. Her old admirer Lord Hervey described to her the French maneuvers around Venice in the hope that his information would be passed on to the Neapolitan royal family, and he begged her to inveigle an introduction to Prince Charles, commander of Austrian forces in the area.
⁴
Everybody was equally intimidated by her influence over Nelson, believing, in the words of one visitor, “never was a man so mystified and deluded.”
⁵

In Sicily and England, the trend for “à la Emma” fashions hit a new high. Fanny, alone in her chill Suffolk home, pined for a letter from her husband. The Admiralty bigwigs despaired of their errant genius, groaning how “the world says he is making himself ridiculous with Lady Hamilton and idling his time in Palermo when he should have been elsewhere.”
⁶
In April, Nelson received the letter from Alexander Davison in which his agent passed on Fanny's wish to come to Naples. Her attempt to win back her husband finally got her the letter from him she'd long desired. But it wasn't at all what she had hoped. Nelson furiously scribbled to her that he would find her visit “unpleasant” and that the minute she arrived, he would have immediately sent her home, “for it would have been impossible to have set up an establishment at either Naples or Palermo.” By then it was too late: Nelson was Emma's lover. As he wrote later, “I want not to conquer any heart, if that which I have conquered is happy in its lot: I am confident for the Conqueror is become the Conquered.”

CHAPTER 34
Neapolitan Rebellion