Losing Nelson (16 page)

This treaty, the heart of the dispute, has been signed not only by Ruffo but, in the name of George III, by Captain Foote, the senior British officer in Naples at the time, and by the representatives of the Russian and Turkish detachments—in other words, by the whole allied command. By its terms the castles are to be handed over to the allied troops and the people composing the garrisons are to take their choice of being carried with their property under safe conduct to Toulon or remaining unmolested in the city.

Neither will give way. Horatio works the stump of his arm—a habit of his when irritated or impatient. Ruffo displays an amazing virtuosity of gesture. Voices rise and tempers fray. Ruffo quits the ship in disgust. Horatio writes a declaration, which is handed in to the forts at daybreak on the twenty-sixth:
Rear-Admiral Lord Nelson, K.B., Commander of his Britannic Majesty’s Fleet in the Bay of Naples, acquaints the rebellious subjects of his Sicilian Majesty that he will not permit them to embark or quit those places. They must surrender themselves to His Majesty’s royal mercy
.

This they show no smallest sign of doing. Noteworthy, this use of the word
embark
. It seems here to mean depart, sail, leave for Toulon. Later it came to bear a more restricted meaning.

By now the situation is extremely dangerous. The English fleet is drawn up in line of battle in the bay, ready to bombard the forts. The guns of the French garrison in the Castle of St. Elmo are ready to reply. The republican rebels in their forts lack cannon and shot, but they are desperate, and there is enough explosive in the magazines to blow themselves sky high and half the city with them. Ruffo has made it clear that if Horatio breaks the armistice, he will give no assistance with either men or guns. Not only that: he will withdraw his
forces from the positions they have occupied, leaving the English to conquer the enemy with their own forces.

In spite of all this, Horatio sends in his declaration. Thereupon the cardinal, believing that the English are preparing an assault, sends in a note warning the garrisons that the allied troops will now retire to their original positions. This sudden withdrawal causes immediate consternation and terror in the city. People stream out of Naples in their thousands, fearing that a general bombardment is about to begin. Rumours circulate that the besieged Jacobins have torn up the steps over the powder magazines so as to be able, in the last extremity, to throw in a match. This seems to suggest, if it is true, that they were not thinking of surrender—not yet, at least.

Now, at this most critical of moments, there occurs that sudden change in Horatio’s attitude which no documents have yet been found to explain. By ten o’clock on the morning of the twenty-sixth, Ruffo had in his hands that hasty note of Sir William Hamilton’s to which Carola Oman so misleadingly refers. It is brought by two of Horatio’s captains, Troubridge and Ball. In the cardinal’s presence, these two either write or dictate a further declaration:
Captains Troubridge and Ball have authority on the part of Lord Nelson to declare to his Eminence that his Lordship will not oppose the embarkation of the rebels and of the people who compose the garrison of the Castles of Nuovo and dell’Ovo
.

There it is again:
embarkation
. They were embarked—so much is certain. That same afternoon they came out of their forts, carrying with them the personal effects they were intending to take to France. But they did not sail. They waited there in the harbour, under the eyes of the English ships, crowded together on the small transports, men, women, and children—for many of the men had been joined by their families. Then, on the morning of the twenty-eighth, the expected letters were received from Palermo: Horatio was officially authorized
to act. The transports were brought under the English guns and the people aboard them made prisoners.

You detested the French, that much is beyond doubt. I remembered your solemn words of advice to a young midshipman:
You must hate a Frenchman as if he were the devil
. You also detested rebels, and these were rebels doubly detestable: they had leagued themselves with the French. But you would never have allowed that to sway you from the path of honour. You, more than any other Englishman who ever lived, epitomize our great past, you are the standard-bearer to this more tarnished age, you gave your life, you cleared the seas of our enemies for a century to come. Was there a distinction in your mind between embarking and sailing? Could you have thought those people in the forts would come out only to be embarked and not to sail? That hasty note—it was written by Sir William Hamilton and sent by him to Ruffo. It was written in French, a language of which you were largely ignorant. Could this foxy diplomat have deliberately omitted something you intended him to include, something to make that crucial distinction clear? But if so, where was the proof? And how can one explain the subsequent declaration, made in your name by Captains Troubridge and Ball, in which you repeated the undertaking not to oppose the embarkation? Was it possible for Ruffo to take this document in any other sense than as an agreement on your part to allow the treaty to be put into effect?

I was now at the heart of the problem that had held up my book and exhausted my mind for more than two months by that time. And I was no nearer a solution that March evening than I had been at the outset. I was beginning to feel the usual nausea of defeat, that slackening and slipping away of the mind which seemed like a foretaste of death. Always worse, compounded by all the previous failures … Quite suddenly I remembered Miss Lily’s words:
It was a show, they were stars
. Ludicrously inappropriate to talk about Horatio in that
way. But perhaps, in the absence of any other sort of evidence, some clue to the truth of those June days could be found in the personages involved, in the interplay of character. A cast of six: the two protagonists in conflict, Horatio and Ruffo; the diplomatic go-between, Hamilton; the confidante and messenger of the queen, Emma; and their Sicilian majesties, Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina, in whose names these actions were taken. I could make a brief sketch of each in turn and see what light was cast, if any. Not a course of events, a maze of personality. There can be more than one way into a maze, and which you have chosen doesn’t matter once you are in it. I started with the diplomat.

Sir William Hamilton. Sixty-eight-years old at this time, tall and lean, slightly stooped, from either scholarly activities or the many years of elaborate courtesies at the Neapolitan court; a man of distinguished appearance, with an aquiline nose and an air of intelligence and refinement. Son of Lord Archibald Hamilton, grandson of the third Duke of Hamilton, he had served for some years as an officer in the Third Foot Guards and had been—very briefly—member of Parliament for Midhurst. Younger son of a younger son, he had no money of his own, a state of things he remedied in 1758 by marrying an heiress, through whom he obtained an estate in Wales worth about £8000 a year. In 1764 he joined the Diplomatic Service, a career for which by background and manners he was well fitted. The delicate state of his wife’s health made Naples, with its sea air and warm climate, a natural choice. The marriage by all accounts was happy. The first Lady Hamilton died in 1782, and in the following year, returning to England with her embalmed body for burial, he met the extremely beautiful young woman who was his nephew’s mistress. She called herself Emma Hart at this time and was to become the second Lady Hamilton and Horatio’s great love
. (I had been fascinated to learn that he met her at the same hotel, Nerot’s in St. James’s, where eighteen
years later Fanny and Emma were to endure the mutual dislike of their first encounter.)

That September of 1798, when Horatio, the victor of the Nile, came sailing into the bay, Hamilton had been British envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the court of Naples for thirty-six years. A man of elegant manners, all were agreed. A keen sportsman, hunting companion of King Ferdinand—they slaughtered thousands of quail and woodcocks together. A more than competent musician. He played the cello and kept his own band of musicians. He made experiments with electricity, kept a tame monkey, and planted an English garden in the grounds of the royal palace at Caserta. William Beckford said of him:
“The first of connoisseurs—not only in the fine arts, but in the science of human felicity.”
The best dancer at the Neapolitan court, it was said, though his dancing days were drawing to a close by then, must have been—he was feeling his age, his liver was in bad shape. Too many banquets. The wild and voluptuous Sicilian dance, the tarantella, which was all the rage, was probably beyond him. Emma, still only thirty-three, danced it wonderfully well … From February of the following year, the year of the Jacobins, Horatio and Emma were sleeping together, as regularly as Horatio’s duties would allow
.

I paused at this point to pace about the room for a while. No clue in the bare facts of anyone’s life. A typical product of his time and class. He seems not to have believed in anything much. Prejudices and opinions, yes, but no very firm principles. He wanted to pass his days agreeably. And yet in one or two important ways he wasn’t typical at all. What really distinguished him was his very refined taste. Connoisseur, collector of classical antiquities, expert vulcanologist … He had one of the best collections of antique vases in private hands. And he was tolerant to an extraordinary degree. Victorian biographers deny that he knew of the adultery, deny that there was any adultery.
But all the evidence goes to show that there was and he did. Not only knew, but fully accepted it, lived in the knowledge of it, unruffled and benign. All three lived under the same roof, they saw each other every day. Emma had been passed on to him; perhaps he was ready to pass her on in his turn, feeling himself too old, too tired? A woman, of whatever class, was always a commodity. And for a collector, of course, anything could be passed on, people as well as objects. Just a matter of rearrangement. I remembered reading somewhere that when he returned to London in 1800, his days of foreign service over forever, the house he took in Piccadilly had garden statuary that outraged his taste. It gave him a headache just to look at it. He could not live in the house until he had got rid of it all and put there in its place an antique statue of the Nile.

Nowhere any evidence that this exquisite sensibility suffered through thirty-six years at the corrupt and devious court of Naples. Presumably there was nothing in this to outrage him—moral outrage was probably not much in his line. A collector acquires things, sets them out, finds the right arrangement. If it doesn’t look good here, we shift it there. I had quoted in my book some lines from a letter of his that very well illustrated this readiness to shift things. Written to Sir John Acton, prime minister in the Neapolitan court, the queen’s adviser and rumoured former lover, perhaps the most powerful man in the kingdom:
However, after good reflection, Lord Nelson authorized me to write to his Eminence yesterday morning early to certify to him that he would do nothing to break the Armistice … That produced the best possible effect … If one can’t do exactly what one wishes, one must act for the best; and that is what Lord Nelson has done; I hope therefore that the result will be approved by their Sicilian Majesties
 …

That is a shifty letter. What does it mean? Acton would have known, presumably. This was June 27, when the rebels had already been embarked.
If one can’t do exactly what one wishes, one must act for
the best
. In what way did you act for the best? What you wanted is clear enough: you wanted unconditional surrender. And all the rest of your life you maintained that that was what it had been. What can Hamilton be talking about? The assurance was given, Naples was restored to calm, the Jacobins came out and embarked on their transports. Two days later they were seized; the transports were converted into floating prisons.

Yes, there is no doubt that Hamilton was shifty. Highly diplomatic, to call it by a gentler name. He even, in a later despatch to Lord Grenville at the Foreign Office, says that the Jacobins were already on the transports on June 14, already there before you arrived, and that there was an urgent need to arrest them because they were about to set sail! No question of subterfuge, no question of what the garrisons were led to believe. So he became the first in that long line of obfuscators that extends to the present day, those who have smirched you, who were all truth, by their lack of it. Grenville could not have believed it, in any case. His view of Hamilton’s conduct comes out clearly enough in his letter to the new ambassador in Palermo, asking him to explain to Sir William,
without reserve
, the utter impossibility of his going back to Naples in any public situation. Though this, of course, may be due more to disapproval of an ambassador’s sharing his wife with an admiral at a foreign court.

In the stress of these thoughts, I fell to pacing from bookshelf to wall. Approach the bookshelf, choose a book. This evening it was Harold Acton’s
The Bourbons of Naples
. Choose a word in the title. You can choose any word, but once you have chosen, you must keep to it. I chose
Bourbons
. Forefinger of the right hand, touch the word, then straight across, six paces, touch the wall with both palms flat against it, thumbs horizontal but they mustn’t touch. Then six paces back to the shelves, touch the word again. Very soothing. The only other thing about Hamilton that came to my mind that evening, as I
went through my paces, was the fact that he had recently suffered a grievous loss. Earlier that year he had heard that the
Colossus
, bound for England with his entire collection of classical treasures aboard her, the cherished hoard of a long career, had been wrecked off the Scilly Isles. Nothing of the cargo was saved but the corpse of Admiral Lord Shouldham, preserved in spirits. The kind of thing to break the heart of an elderly aesthete—a dead admiral pointlessly rescued, his precious collection lost in the depths. Did he somehow hold the Jacobins responsible? Habitual cynicism, embittered by such a loss, might have made him vindictive …