Nelson's Lady Hamilton (13 page)

Into this whirlpool Emma Hamilton plunged

with all her light-hearted love of excitement. She

might tell Greville that against her will she had

I "got into politicks," but in reality she rejoiced

I in the stir and movement, the thrill of big events,

and her natural courage was exalted by the

suggestion of danger. To her a world without

excitement was indeed " flat, stale, unprofitable."

CHAPTER VIII ENTER NELSON

ON the loth of September, 1793, Nelson, in the sixty-four-gun ship Agamemnon, sailed into the Bay of Naples bearing great tidings. He had left the blockade before Toulon on the very eve of the surrender of the French arsenal and dockyard. Lord Hood had sent him to Naples to seek a reinforcement of troops to garrison and hold it. He left with a certain regret at the crowning moment of the blockade, which had proved not a blockade, but a conquest. "I should have liked/' he told his wife, " to have stayed one day longer with the fleet, when they entered the harbour, but service could not be neglected for any private gratification."

Nelson had come from a station where he and his ship's company had to subsist on a diet of " honour and salt beef." At Naples he was received not only with honour, but with feasting and rejoicing. The news he brought, the sight of an English sixty-four, lifted the Neapolitan Court from a state of fear and indecision to one

of joyous excitement. Nelson, as the emissary of England and the inveterate foe of the French, was called the " Saviour of Italy ; M Maria Carolina was ardent in her praises. Troops were promised—though there was no guarantee against them " running away!" In the satisfaction of the moment the Neapolitan Prime Minister called Captain Nelson " Admiral "—not a very serious mistake, for it was but anticipating events.

Nelson, at this time, was close upon thirty-five years old. His face, though worn by sea-weather, was not yet lined and drawn by the griefs and strain and glorious hardships of his later years. As yet he bore no scars of battle upon him, both the eye and the arm which he lost in the service of his country were still his. There is a portrait of him, painted thirteen years earlier when he was a young captain of twenty-two, which gives some idea of his appearance at this time, if allowance is made for the greater maturity and assurance of bearing which something over a decade had brought him. Rigaud painted the picture, and he stands, a slender determined figure, with both hands on his sword-hilt, his wide cocked hat worn low on his brows, his steady level eyes looking out with some marked quality of searchingness, the mobile mouth sweet in expression, but already tending towards that sensitive, half-pouting look so characteristic in later years.

Even at twenty-two Captain Nelson had the

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air and bearing of a man who was assured of himself, who knew his own qualities and feared nothing destiny might bring, save the lack of opportunity. Since that portrait was painted, and up to the year of his coming to Naples, destiny had not been particularly lavish. He had but escaped from five years of half-pay—Admiralty coldness and deafness to his appeals for a ship had lasted so long that when, on the outbreak of war in 1793, My Lords suddenly smiled upon him he declared himself as much surprised as when they frowned.

But now war had come, the map of his destiny was unrolled. The first rays of fame had not yet touched him, though his comrades and superiors in the service were already beginning to realize that he was a man of no common stuff. Unimpressive though he was in outward aspect, there was something arresting in his personality and bearing. His qualities instantly struck Sir William Hamilton, who determined to entertain him at his own house, and returning to his wife told her, " The captain I am about to introduce to you is a little man and far from handsome, but he will live to be a great man. I know it from the talk I have had with him."

And so Nelson and Lady Hamilton met for the first time. Nelson was too much taken up with war and affairs to spare any special thought to the British Ambassador's wife. He comments

LADY HAMILTON AS EMMA

GEORGE KOMNEY

on her in a cool and detached manner to his wife : " She is a young woman of amiable manners, and who does honour to the station to which she is raised." He mentions that she has been "wonderfully good and kind" to his stepson, Josiah Nisbet. Nothing more.

In return for the hospitality and kindness he had received during his visit, Nelson purposed to give a luncheon party on board the Agamemnon to the King, the Queen, the British Ambassador and his " amiable" wife, Sir John Acton, and the Neapolitan Ministers. The date of this festivity was the 24th of September. When the morning came all was in readiness, the Agamemnon gay with decorations, and the distinguished guests awaiting the arrival of the Sicilian sovereigns. But before the King appeared, came a messenger with an express for Nelson that a French man-of-war and three sail under convoy had anchored off Sardinia. Nelson did not hesitate. " Unfit as my ship was," he wrote, " I had nothing left for the honour of our country but to sail, which I did in two hours afterwards. It was necessary to show them what an English man-of-war would do."

Thus leaving both royalties and Emma Hamilton without a further thought, Nelson, in the Agamemnon, went stretching down the coast in pursuit of his duty and the French—he was apt to find the two together. When he was

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commissioning the Agamemnon at the beginning of the war, he told one of his midshipmen that the whole of his duty was to obey orders, honour the King, and "hate a Frenchman as you do the devil.' 1

And so Nelson left Naples, to return no more for five years—five years into which he crowded much of service and suffering, sieges on shore and fightings at sea. He lost an eye at Calvi, an arm at Teneriffe ; he wore out of the line at the Battle of St. Vincent and turned an indecisive engagement into a victory; he electrified the fleet with his "Patent Bridge for Boarding First-Rates;" and he won the Battle of the Nile—all this before he set his foot again in Naples.

After seeing and talking with Nelson, who in later years so signally embodied the might of England at sea to all the world, Maria Carolina was further strengthened in her hopes of Great Britain. By revolutions at home and the spreading terror abroad, she was driven more and more to look towards the Mistress of the Seas. Only by sea-power could the French be prevented from reaping the fruit of the dissensions sown with such assiduity by revolutionary agents in Naples. Maria Carolina's natural character, though despotic, was enlightened. In earlier years, before the coming of the revolutionary troubles, she had done much for learning and the arts, while

she was anxious to encourage the intellectual advancement of women. But when the students she had aided turned Jacobin, when her subjects hailed as God-sent the Revolution which had murdered her sister and her sister's husband, the Queen of Naples became almost distraught with anger. Clemency was out of court; ringleaders were executed without mercy, sometimes even being denied the final rites of their religion; Jacobins were thrown into prison and only released four years later under the pressure of outside events. Under the dictatorship of one of her ministers, the "white terror of Naples" became a word in the mouths of the people. "Death to the French" was a text for the churches.

Emma Hamilton saw all events at this time with the eyes of her "adored Queen." She was always a hot partisan, and though naturally tender-hearted could hardly bring herself to look upon the Jacobins as human beings. Four years later, a month or so before the Battle of the Nile, she wrote to Nelson with a fury which was really reflected from the Queen—

" The Jacobins have all been lately declared innocent after suffering four years imprisonment; and, I know, they all deserved to be hanged long ago; and, since Garrat has been here, and through his insolent letters to Gallo, these pretty gentlemen, that had planned the death

of their Majesties, are to be let out on society again."

The course of affairs in Europe drew the Queen still closer to Lady Hamilton in the five years which elapsed from Nelson's first visit to Naples till his return as the Hero of the Nile. Those five years saw many changes and shiftings of the European situation. The blows struck by France seemed to paralyze the Coalition, which gradually faltered and fell in pieces. Holland was forcibly wrested from the confederacy. Prussia and Sweden retired in the spring of 1795; Spain followed their example a few months later. It was not only the French armies but also mutual jealousies dissolved that watchful league against France which mutual interests had created. Europe was to pay dear for her lack of cohesion against the common enemy. Napoleon's star was rising over the Continent he was to turn into one vast battlefield—a star crimson as that of Mars. His Italian campaign visibly shook the Kingdom of Naples, while the tramp of his victorious armies was a sound of imminent doom and disruption to the Queen, who saw herself without soldiers and without a navy whereby to oppose this new Alexander "late upsprong;" with a populace, too, impregnated with revolutionary ideas, and as threatening as Vesuvius on the eve of eruption. Austria and England were her hope; but by the treaty

signed in October, 1797, at Campo Formio, she saw Austria overcome. There remained only England.

The pressure of war was heavy on England at this time. The state of affairs, the threatening dangers near at home, compelled her to withdraw her fleets from the Mediterranean. This evacuation filled the Queen of Naples with despair, for when the ships of England were hull down below the horizon on the Atlantic side of the gateway of Gibraltar, she saw herself and her kingdom abandoned to France the enemy. Nelson himself, like most of the naval officers of the period, was indignant at removing the white ensign from any sea where it had braved " the battle and the breeze." " I lament our present orders in sackcloth and ashes," he said, "so dishonourable to the dignity of England, whose fleets are equal to meet the world in arms." Writing from Bastia in December, 1796, he says: " Till this time it has been usual for the allies of England to fall from her, but till now she never was known to desert her friends whilst she had the power of supporting them."

A proud and justifiable boast. But consider the situation of England when the British fleets were withdrawn from the Mediterranean. The French had tried an invasion of Ireland, which had failed; but a junction of the French, Dutch, and Spanish fleets was planned, from which great

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events were expected—this threatening danger was only averted by the defeat of the Spanish contingent off St. Vincent on St. Valentine's Day, 1797.

Emma Hamilton persuaded herself—and later persuaded Nelson—that she had a direct share in making this victory of Sir John Jervis's possible, owing to the warning of Spain's defection from the Coalition in 1795, and alliance with France in 1796, which the British Ambassador at Naples was enabled to transmit to his own Government at home, through his wife's influence and intimacy with the Queen of Naples. It was a large claim for Lady Hamilton to make, and though early knowledge of Spain's intentions was very valuable, even Nelson did not consider that her information, though forming part of her " eminent services " to her country, led directly to Jervis's battle with the Spanish fleet.

At this time there were two influences pulling in different directions at the Court of Naples. Ferdinand's brother, King Charles of Spain, was doing all that in him lay to coax and bully the little Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into the arms of France. Ferdinand himself, with his pro-Spanish tendencies and a certain obstinate satisfaction in directing the affairs of his kingdom in his own way, and against the known wishes of his Austrian wife, was hesitating over the question. Naturally he was anxious to keep the

Spanish correspondence from the eyes of the Queen, of Acton, and of Sir William Hamilton. But the astute Maria Carolina was not so much in the dark as he imagined: she had her own methods and her own channels both of information and communication. The principal latter channel was Lady Hamilton. The habit she had fallen into of writing frequently to the British Ambassador's wife on matters of no moment, now proved of extreme value when she was dealing with matters of very considerable moment. It would not have been possible for her to confer constantly with Sir William Hamilton without arousing conjecture and suspicion. But Lady Hamilton was different. All the Court knew of her attachment to the beautiful English woman— if letters were constant was it not the way of women, even of Queens, to write much about trifles ? Here is one of Maria Carolina's simple little notes, written in April, 1795—

" MY VERY DEAR LADY, —My head is so confused, and my soul so shaken, that I know not what to do. I hope to see you to-morrow morning about ten o'clock. I send you a letter in cypher, come from Spain, from Galatone, which must be returned before twenty-four hours, in order that the King may find it again. There [are] some facts very interesting for the English Government, which I wish to communicate to them, to