Nelson's Lady Hamilton (21 page)

sea-officer his genius knows no dimming till his sun goes down in splendour off Cape Trafalgar; but as a man he is henceforth to know a moral struggle and a moral defeat to which he had hitherto been a stranger. Captain Mahan's verdict, if severe, is substantially just, and it is trifling with the truth to pretend otherwise. " The glory of the hero," he says, " brought a temptation which wrecked the happiness of the man. The loss of serenity, the dark evidences of inward conflict, of yielding against conviction, of consequent dissatisfaction with self and gradual deterioration, make between his past and future a break as clear as, and far sharper than, the startling increase of radiancy that attends the Battle of the Nile, and thenceforth shines with undiminished intensity to the end. The lustre of his well-deserved and worldwide renown, the consistency and ever-rising merit of his professional conduct, contrast painfully with the shadows of reprobation, the swerving, and the declension, which begin to attend a life heretofore conformed, in the general, to healthy normal standards of right and wrong."

Under the combined influence of Lady Hamilton and the Queen of Naples, Nelson consented to fetter himself with promises—a thing he would have scorned a year earlier—and in February, 1799, he wrote : " I have promised my flag shall not go out of the mole at Palermo

LADY HAMILTON

GEORGE KOMNEY From an engraving by J. Conde in the " European Magazine : '

THE FLIGHT FROM NAPLES 195

without the approbation of the Court, and that I never expect to get."

But it is clear, from his letters written during the early months at Palermo, that he suffered much conflict of spirit, which, as always, reacted on his bodily health. To Lady Parker he wrote, at the beginning of February—

" My health is such that without a great alteration, I will venture to say a very short space of time will send me to that bourne from whence none return; but God's will be done. After the Action I had nearly fell into a decline, but at Naples my invaluable friends Sir William and Lady Hamilton nursed and set me up again. I am worse than ever: my spirits have received such a shock that I think they cannot recover it, ... but who can see what I have and be well in health ? Kingdoms lost and a Royal Family in distress; but they are pleased to place confidence in me, and whilst I live and my services can be useful to them, I shall never leave this Country, although I know that nothing but the air of England, and peace and quietness, can perfectly restore me."

To Alexander Davison he wrote, at the end of the same month, in a still more melancholy strain—

" Believe me, my only wish is to sink with honour into the grave, and when that shall please God, I shall meet death with a smile.

196 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

Not that I am insensible to the honours and riches my King and Country have heaped upon me, so much more than any Officer could deserve ; yet I am ready to quit this world of trouble, and envy none but those of the estate six feet by two." But if Lady Hamilton and the feeling she aroused in his honourable heart were the real cause of all this inward conflict, owing to the irony of circumstances, it was to Lady Hamilton he turned for comfort in his depression. She was very skilful in comforting. And so the tangle grew, till nothing could cut the knot save flight from a dangerous atmosphere and an innocently dangerous woman—for there is nothing in Lady Hamilton's character to justify the belief that she deliberately set herself to entrap Nelson. But against the remedy of flight there was his promise to Maria Carolina that he would not desert her, as well as the Fourth Article of the Anglo-Sicilian Treaty, signed on the ist of December, 1798, which promised that Great Britain should keep a naval force in the Mediterranean " decidedly superior to that of the enemy, in order to provide by this means for the safety of the dominions of his Sicilian Majesty." All through the unhappy business at Palermo his duty as a British admiral and his inclination as a man seemed to point the same way. That was the fatal attack in front and rear before which he eventually went down. But in later years, when her influence over him

THE FLIGHT FROM NAPLES 197

•was supreme and undoubted, Emma Hamilton used to boast that she had never turned him from his duty to his country; and certain it is, as any impartial student of his letters and despatches at this period must admit, that, far from idling away his time in an Armida-garden, Nelson was very fully occupied with his professional duties and the affairs of his country and of the Two Sicilies. The danger lay in the fact that Emma was so much mixed up in these things. She interpreted and translated and copied, not only for her husband, but for Nelson. Sir William told Greville that " Lord Nelson, for want of language and experiences of this court and country, without Emma and me would be at the greatest loss every moment/' She claimed a part in big affairs ; she was the " Patroness of the Navy," the ambassadress of the Queen, and later (at this time she was inclined to put Sicily first) the ardent upholder of English glory. She could not be ignored or put on one side. When Lady Nelson inquired as to the admiral's return, he told her, " If I have the happiness of seeing their Sicilian Majesties safe on the throne again, it is probable I shall still be home in the summer. Good Sir William, Lady Hamilton and myself are the mainsprings of the machine which manages what is going on in this country. We are all bound to England, when we can quit our posts with propriety." It is probable that quiet and retiring

198 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

Frances Nelson would be puzzled to account for Lady Hamilton as a <( mainspring" in political matters. She had as yet no idea of the exuberant vitality of the British Minister's wife. At Palermo, as at Naples, Lady Hamilton was in the centre of the stage. Was it business and the fate of dynasties, Emma must be consulted; was it pleasure, no child there gayer than she; was it sickness, there was no nurse so kind. Nelson found her on every side. She could never have so won him had she been merely a beautiful woman, or merely a clever and capable one. It was the combination of her many qualities that stole away the heart of the great and simple admiral.

But susceptible as he was by nature to feminine influence and feminine charm, Nelson was not lightly turned from the paths of honourable and upright dealing between man and man, and man and woman, which he had followed all his life. Within a few months of seeing Emma constantly it is evident that she had made a tremendous impression upon him, that she had begun to cause him a certain uneasiness and unrest of conscience. But for a considerable period he took her enthusiastic friendship, which was as welcome to his parched spirit as water in the desert, as one of the gifts the gods provide. In the sunny atmosphere of Sicily, amid an easy and kindly people, stern questionings as

THE FLIGHT FROM NAPLES 199

to the future seemed needless, and Nemesis far away.

So for a time neither Nelson nor Emma asked whither their growing admiration of each other, their growing desire for each other's presence, might be leading. Nelson might call her the "one rose" in a thorny and difficult situation, but for several months his thoughts and his time were far more taken up with the Neapolitan Jacobins, who were the thorns, than with the rose.

CHAPTER XI THE JACOBIN RISING

MEANWHILE much had happened in Naples. When the Court fled on the 23rd of December, 1798, the King had left Prince Francesco Pignatelli as regent in his absence. This was a post that in the threatening aspect of the time needed a very strong man; but Prince Pignatelli was weak, drifting from one side to the other, a tool in the hands of the self-elected, self-styled " Patriots"—even as a tool not a sound one, but apt to break in the hands of those who used him. He made treacherous advances to France—he who had been left to guard Naples— and then, in fear at the consequences, deserted both the French and the Neapolitans, and fled to Sicily.

The Lazzaroni were loyal, and had no dealings with traitors ; but with the Neapolitan government in the hands of the so-called " Patriots," and with the French in possession of the principal provincial fortresses, it was little they could do to oppose treachery within Naples and disciplined armies without. There were riots, seizure of

" patriot" arms, looting of the palaces of Jacobin nobles, but the end was inevitable. It must be remembered that throughout this Jacobin rising in Naples it was the upper classes, the educated and well-born, who were the Jacobins and " Patriots/' who cultivated French sympathies, and combined fine sentiments with traitorous deeds and oppressions. Some of them were really under the glamour of the early stages of the French Revolution, for as Carlyle says, " How beautiful is noble-sentiment: like gossamer gauze, beautiful and cheap; which will stand no tear and wear! Beautiful cheap gossamer gauze, thou film-shadow of a raw material of Virtue, which art not woven, nor likely to be, into Duty; thou art better than nothing, and also worse ! "

The Lazzaroni were not touched by " noble-sentiment ;" they were loyal, conservative, fierce when roused, good-humoured when let alone, contented with their easy, coarse-grained monarch; superstitious, under the thumb of the Catholic Church, regarding "Jacobin" as a word synonymous with "atheist," and showing all the intolerant violence of an uneducated and priest-ridden people. But the faithfulness of the Lazzaroni to their Church and sovereign—a faithfulness not of words merely—stands out in admirable solidity amid the shifting sands of passion, greed, self-interest, and treachery, which marked the rest of the Neapolitans at the beginning of 1799.

202 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

But Lazzaroni loyalty did not hold the reins of government. In January Naples was surrendered to the French General Championnet; and after the fashion of the Directory, with the planting of trees of liberty, and much talking of " noble-sentiment," the Parthenopean Republic was proclaimed—so for a time the Bourbon rule in Naples came to an abrupt conclusion.

These events naturally caused much distress to the self-exiled King and Queen at Palermo. England and the British fleet seemed the only help and the only hope. "Our country," said Nelson to St. Vincent, "is looked to as a resource for all the difficulties of this." And Acton wrote to Nelson in his own curious English that " remedyes to oppose so many evils depend and will principally raise and be employed by the forces under your command on whose assistance his Majesty places all his hopes and comforts."

In view of the expected and promised aids from Austria and Russia, the measures taken for the recovery of Naples and the expulsion of the French were two—one by land, and one by sea. When the loyalty of the lower classes and the insecure foundations of the Parthenopean Republic were realized at Palermo, the King appointed Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo to raise an army among the peasants, and all who would fight on the royalist side. The choice was a good one, for Ruffo was a man of considerable force and ability,

LADY HAMILTON AS A "SIBYL

GEORGE KOMNEY

J-/

owning great estates in Calabria, and great influence with the peasants of those estates, who, in themselves, as Mr. Gutteridge says in his invaluable " Nelson and the Neapolitan Jacobins," were "almost equal to an army." His influence, 'oo, as a Cardinal of the Roman Church, was a >*ry important consideration in raising the so-called " Christian Army "—an army which quickly attained formidable proportions, and in spite of its professed "Christian" character, was in many respects a ruffianly horde. But the Cardinal and his army were welcomed as deliverers by the people who flocked to his standard, and in spite >f raggedness and lack of discipline, the " Christian Army" drove the French from the outlying provinces till the Parthenopean Republic was shrunk to the city of Naples itself. King Ferdinand had invested Ruffo with almost unlimited powers, telling him in his commission, "You may adopt to any extent all means which loyalty to religion, desire to save property, life, and family honour, or the policy of rewarding those who distinguish themselves, may suggest to you, as well as the severest punishments. . . . You may make any proclamations you may consider likely to bring about the end you have been ordered to attain."