Nelson: The Essential Hero (42 page)

The door of his house is always crowded with people, and even the street, whenever his carriage is at the door; and when he went to the play he was applauded, a thing which rarely happens here. On the road it was the same. The common people brought their children to
touch
him. One he took up in his arms, and when he gave it back to the mother she cried for joy, and said it would be lucky through life. I don’t think him altered in the least. He has the same shock head, and the same honest simple manners; but he is devoted to
Emma
; he thinks her quite an
angel
, and talks of her as such to her face and behind her back, and she leads him about like a keeper with a bear. She must sit by him at dinner to cut his meat, and he carries her pocket-handkerchief - he is a gig from ribands, orders and stars, but he is just the same with us as ever he was.

Her husband, Lord Minto, writing to Lord Keith on 30 August, maintained a somewhat more objective view of his visitors:

Lord Nelson arrived here with Sir W. and Lady Hamilton a few days after the Queen of Naples having been detained at Trieste some time by Sir William’s illness. Sir W. has had a relapse here; and altho’ he has recovered a little yet he is so feeble and so much reduced that I cannot see how it is possible for him to reach England alive. Lord Nelson has been received here by all ranks with the admiration which his great actions deserve, and notwithstanding the disadvantage under which he presents himself at present to the public eye. They talk of proceeding in a few days towards England; and I who am a lover of naval merit and indeed a sincere friend of the man, hope we shall again hear of him on his proper element. . . .

Sir William did indeed nearly die in Vienna, and the party had to stay there for a month before he was well enough to travel further. Nelson’s expenses mounted with so much shore living, and an estimate of money drawn by him during the journey shows him as having spent well over £1000 during this period. He sat to the painter Heinrich Fuger and later, in Dresden, the pastel artist Johann Schmidt, who also produced a portrait of Emma looking very young and demure and wearing the Order of the Knights of Malta. This portrait, which Nelson called his ‘Guardian Angel’, was afterwards always to hang in his cabin. The impression made by the strange trio as they proceeded on what more or less amounted to a triumphal tour through Europe was vastly successful with the general public, but far less so with their hosts and the upper echelons of society. All, however, conceded Nelson’s immense merit - even if his slight and damaged frame gave little indication of the real quality of the man. Emma Hamilton, almost inevitably, came in for a good deal of adverse criticism from the ladies who met her. To have enslaved the Victor of the Nile was something that few could forgive in any case, but to be so obvious, so ostentatious, and so downright vulgar about it was intolerable. It was not only her own sex who saw her in unsympathetic terms. So, too, did many of the men who really cared about Nelson, and who could look ahead (which he seemed unable to do) to the situation that must inevitably confront him on his arrival in England. Lord Fitzharris, who had remarked, like Lady Minto, that Nelson appeared basically unchanged, and ‘open and honest’, could not bring himself to feel so kindly about Emma. ‘Lady Hamilton’, he wrote, ‘is without exception the most coarse, ill-mannered, disagreeable woman I ever met.’

Before leaving Vienna for Prague and Dresden, Nelson and the Hamiltons had taken their farewell of Queen Maria Carolina. The latter saw them go not without real emotion, for she well knew that she would never find again a friend so devoted to her cause as Emma had been, nor a man like Nelson the weight of whose renown could be (and had been) used to further the fortunes of the Kingdom of Naples. She did not forget how large a part Sir William had played in her life over the past years, and sent ‘a thousand compliments to the Chevalier’ as well as ‘to the hero’, but to Emma, whom she hoped to see yet again in Naples, she sent ‘everything’. Not all those of high rank, however, were prepared to tolerate this strange
menage a trois\
for what might be acceptable in the lax court of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina was not so in the more strait-laced kingdoms of the north. The Electress of Saxony refused to receive Lady Hamilton, something which should have suggested to Emma, to Sir William, and even to the hypnotised hero that they might find on their return that their situation was considered downright immoral at the Court of St James’s. King George III, while often despairing about the loose conduct of his sons, was himself an old-fashioned family man, who had no tolerance whatsoever in his immediate court for the sins of the flesh.

The whole atmosphere of this extraordinary European tour, which provoked the comments of so many, is best conveyed in the journal of a Mrs St George, who was a friend of Hugh Elliot, Lord Minto’s brother and the British Minister in Dresden :

It is plain that Lord Nelson thinks of nothing but Lady Hamilton, who is totally occupied by the same object. Sir William is old and infirm, all admiration of his wife, and never spoke but to applaud her. Miss Cornelia Knight seems the decided flatterer of the two, and never opens her mouth but to show forth their praise; and Mrs Cadogan, Lady Hamilton’s mother is - what one might expect. After dinner we had several songs in honour of Lord Nelson, written by Miss Knight and sung by Lady Hamilton. She puffs the incense full in his face; but he receives it with pleasure and snuffs it up very cordially.

It was not until 31 October that the party finally embarked outside Hamburg for a passage across the North Sea - Nelson’s native environment, but one which he had forgotten amid the languors of the Mediterranean. He was back once more in the world of high tides, cold winds, and the mud-discoloured waters where he had first learned his trade. His long procession through Europe, which he was to describe in a letter to the Admiralty as ‘my necessary journey by land from the Mediterranean’, can only be seen as a pandering to Emma Hamilton’s wishes - and a desire on his part to put off facing the inevitable consequences of his involvement with her. The day of reckoning could not be pleasant (least of all for Fanny Nelson) and it is hardly surprising that he snuffed up the praise while it lasted, and on occasion took a glass or so of champagne more than his faithful servant Tom Allen reckoned was good for him. It is not insignificant that Nelson had written to the Admiralty asking for a frigate to take the party home - and that none was forthcoming. They travelled aboard the mailpacket
King George,
to land at Yarmouth after a stormy passage on 6 November 1800. It was two years and eight months since he had last seen England.

'I am a Norfolk man, and glory in being so.’ These words addressed to the cheering throng at Yarmouth proclaim the real Nelson. But a most unreal one, a hero beyond even the dreams of eighteenth-century romance, was to be feted about England during the weeks that followed his arrival. Nothing that had happened on the Continent could exceed the almost delirious reception that was now accorded to the Victor of the Nile. Then as now, people needed their heroes, needed - above all in a time of war to the death - the evocation of almost superhuman qualities. The wounded warrior, who had apparently transcended the fears and natural weaknesses of ordinary man, and who had set the seal on this by giving England a victory at sea that was without parallel in the country’s history, could hardly be expected to pass unacclaimed. No sooner had Nelson set foot ashore than crowds surrounded him and drew his carriage to the inn where he and the Hamiltons were to spend the night. It was significant that Fanny Nelson had been previously advised not to make the journey from Round Wood to Yarmouth, but to meet him in due course in London. It was Emma Hamilton who stood on the balcony of the inn next to Nelson and responded to the plaudits of the crowd.

The following day, after a triumphal procession from Yarmouth to Ipswich, where the crowd once again took the horses from between the shafts and dragged their travelling coach round the town, the party proceeded to Round Wood. It was Nelson’s first and last visit to the house where he never lived, to that country retreat which in the past he had so often promised to find for himself and Fanny, where they would retire in peace and quiet for the rest of their days. Symbolically enough the house was closed, for Fanny and Nelson’s father were waiting to receive him in London. The East Anglian dream was finally and forever over.

His reception in London the following day was reported in the
Morning Post
:

His Lordship arrived yesterday afternoon at three o’clock at Nerot’s Hotel King-street, St. James’s, in the German travelling coach of Sir William Hamilton. In the coach came with his Lordship Sir William and Lady Hamilton and a black female attendant. The noble Admiral, who was dressed in full uniform, with three stars on his breast and two gold medals, was welcomed by repeated huzzas from the crowd which the illustrious tar returned with a low bow. Lord Nelson looked extremely well, but in person is very thin: so is Sir William Hamilton: but Lady Hamilton looks charmingly, and is a very fine woman. . . .

The regular reader of the
Morning Post
would have been familiar enough with the whole situation, for the paper had several times earlier that year featured accounts of Nelson. As early as 1 April, it had published the ironic comment: ‘Of all the seeds lately sent home by Lord Nelson, that of “Love lays bleeding” was sown and gathered at Naples’, while it commented less than obliquely during his visit to Vienna : ‘The German State Painter, we are assured, is drawing Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson at
full length together
. An Irish correspondent hopes the artist will have delicacy enough to put Sir William
between
them.’

The first meeting between Nelson and Fanny did no more than set the seal on what had clearly become a faded pile of long-dead correspondence, of early love letters and of hundreds of domestic letters between man and wife where mutual affection had once glowed, now tied up in a neat bundle for relegation to the bottom drawer of a desk. All was over now and, though Fanny for some time was very naturally unwilling to concede defeat at the hands of this large and loud lady, the antipathy which before had only existed in the imagination, based on gossip and on the scurrilous comments in newspapers, now flowered in actuality. Both women felt the same instinctive dislike of one another. Emma’s was based very largely on a knowledge that she could never compete with this quiet, well-spoken, well-bred lady, who had not committed a single act that could be construed as in the slightest degree detrimental towards her husband or his career. Emma by nature was probably quite incapable of feeling any conscious guilt towards the forty-two-year-old impeccable wife, but she loathed her just the same, and felt ‘an antipathy not to be described’. She had in any case triumphed in the most female way of all over her rival, for she was carrying her lover’s child. She was deeply conscious of how much that meant to Nelson, whereas this delicate figure that confronted her - even though she was legitimately Lady Nelson and accepted throughout the land as the wife of the great Admiral - was no more than a barren woman.

It was very soon clear enough that Nelson considered his marriage to Fanny at an end, and it was also soon made clear to him that his liaison with Emma was viewed with the gravest disfavour at Court. On the morning after attending the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, where he had been presented with the sword that had been voted him by the City of London, Nelson made his way to St James’s Palace to attend a levee, as was natural after his return on striking his flag in the Mediterranean. Sir William Hamilton was also present, for the reason that he too had returned after his long service at the Court of Naples. His wife had not been invited. The royal family had never countenanced his marriage to a woman of Emma’s reputation and there could be no possibility under present circumstances that they would now change their minds as to receiving her at court. The saddened husband and the embittered lover made their way into the royal presence while the pregnant Emma languished out of sight in the London house that had been loaned to the Hamiltons by the millionaire William Beckford. The King, who had been talking to a number of courtiers, viewed Nelson with a cold eye and inquired abruptly as to the state of his health. Then, without waiting for an answer, he turned to engage a nearby military officer in a conversation that lasted half an hour. The dismissal was as clear as it was heavyhanded. Later the same evening Nelson and Fanny attended a dinner party at Admiralty House where his sullen humour and almost undisguised dislike of his wife was such that Lady Spencer was later moved to comment that she had never seen such a change in a man. On the last occasion when he and Fanny had dined with her he had shown his complete dependence upon her and the deepest affection.

What had been an open secret amongst those in the know was already public property. If the Victor of the Nile sat just as firmly in the popular heart, it was not for lack of cartoons and lampoons which showed the one-armed hero and the vast Emma and the emaciated Sir William as figures of fun caught in a comic eternal triangle. The ingenuous Miss Cornelia Knight, who had been with them for so long and had never been able to detect any impropriety in the relationship between Nelson and Emma, was at last disabused of her illusions by none other than Nelson’s close friend Sir Thomas Troubridge. He advised her to keep other company while she was in London.

Little indeed did Miss Knight know that the very verses which she had added to the National Anthem in honour of Nelson had already suffered a strange sea-change at the hands of some anonymous parodist. The new verses now read :

Also huge Emma’s name

First on the role of fame,

And let us sing.

Loud as her voice, let’s sound

Her faded charms around

Which in the sheets were found,

God save the King.

Nelson, thy flag haul down,