Nelson's Lady Hamilton (36 page)

360 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

resuscitation was short; in July, 1813, she was arrested for debt a second time, and had to return with Horatia to the narrow lodgings in Temple Place. Her confinement was not rigorous ; she could see her friends, and was allowed, for her health's sake, to drive out. But she was really ill, and her indomitable spirit was at last beginning to break under her accumulated troubles. The state of mind to which she was driven is shown by the way in which she attacked the innocent little girl, Horatia, to whom she was really devoted, and who was certainly more deserving of pity even than her unfortunate mother. On Easter Sunday of this year she wrote an extraordinary accusatory letter to her young daughter.

" Ah! Horatia," she cries, " if you had grown up as I wished you, what a joy, what a comfort might you have been to me ! For I have been constant to you, and willingly pleas'd for every manifestation you shew'd to learn and profitt of my lessons. ... I have weathered many a storm for your sake, but these frequent blows have kill'd me. Listen then from a mother, who speaks from the dead. Reform your conduct, or you will be detested by all the world, and when you shall no longer have my fostering arm to sheild you, woe betide you, you will sink to nothing." There is more in this strain, and she goes on, " I weep, and pray you may not be totally

lost; my fervent prayers are offered up to God for you. I hope you may become yet sensible of your eternal welfare. I shall go to join your father and my blessed mother, and may you on your deathbed have as little to reproach yourself as your once affectionate mother has."

There is something distinctly unbalanced in these reproaches to a child of twelve, and Emma was bewailing herself again in six months' time. "If my poor mother was living to take my part," she tells her young daughter, "broken as I am with greif and ill-health, I should be happy to breathe my last in her arms. I thank you for what you have done to-day. You have helped me nearer to God, and may God forgive you."

Poor Horatia! Poor Emma!

While she was still confined within the rules of King's Bench—her kind " City friend," Alderman Smith, eventually came to the rescue and bailed her out—a further trouble fell upon her. Some years earlier Nelson's letters to her had been stolen by some unfaithful servant or dependant, and in 1814, to her public discomfiture and private grief, they were published. Her last rag of reputation was torn from her, and the revelation of the Prince of Wales' episode, which so agitated Nelson in 1801, destroyed her last 1 chance of royal help. It is needless to inquire what were the comments of the scandal-mongers of the day. But as the criticism of Mrs. St.

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George—who had known both Nelson and th< Hamiltons at Dresden— is at once just and true it is worth transcribing. Of Nelson's letters sh< said—

"Though disgraceful to his principles ol morality on one subject, they do not appear t< me, as they do to most others, degrading to hii understanding. They are pretty much what evei man, deeply entangled, will express, when h< supposes but one pair of fine eyes will read hi< letters; and his sentiments on subjects uncoi nected with his fatal attachment are elevated-looking to his hearth and his home for futui happiness; liberal, charitable, candid, affectionate, indifferent to the common objects of pursuit, and clear-sighted in his general views of politics and life."

Before the publication of the "Nelson Letters," and while still residing within the rules of King's Bench Prison, Emma celebrated, for the last time on English soil, the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile. In inviting one or two of her remaining friends, she wrote—

"It is the first of August, do come, it is a day to me glorious, for I largely contributed to its success" [a characteristic Emma exaggeration!] " and at the same time it gives me pain and grief, thinking on the Dear lamented Chief, who so bravely won the day, and if you come we will drink to his immortal memory. He cou'd never

have thought that his Child and my self shou'd pass the anniversary of that victorious day were we shall pass it, but I shall be with a few sincere and valuable friends, all Hearts of Gold, not Pincheback."

It must have been a sorry celebration of a glorious anniversary—the shabby room, the harassed, debt-ridden woman, whose beauty had coarsened and whose fortunes had sunk to zero, yet who still raised her glass, defiant on the very edge of calamity, to the memory of the dead hero.

By the summer of the following year, Alderman Smith and other of her " City friends " had obtained her discharge and collected a sum of money for her immediate needs. She was free once more, and most of her creditors were paid; but some few were still unsatisfied, and were about to issue fresh writs against her. So with the assistance and advice of Alderman Smith and one or two others, she prepared to fly from England to Calais. She was most anxious that those who had helped her should not be injured by her flight. As she told George Rose, " I then begged Mr. Smith to withdraw his bail, for I wou'd have died in prison sooner than that good man should have suffered for me."

At the end of June, 1814, she and Horatia embarked at the Tower, and, sailing down the Thames, Emma Hamilton looked her last upon

the country where she was born—the countn for which Nelson had lived and died. There i; reason to imagine from her letters that her owi susceptibilities were somewhat blunted; that hei emotions, which in earlier years had been expended upon large affairs, were now limited her own and Horatia's fortunes and comfort The sadness of her exile from her native lam seemed counterbalanced by the fact that in France people were kind, that turkeys and partridges were cheap, and Bordeaux wine, fifteenpence a bottle. Perhaps after all her unhappy experiences since Trafalgar she did not feel exile from England so bitter—she may have felt that England had treated her but ill. All her life she cherished loyalties for persons, not causes. It was Nelson she loved, not England. England was included during his lifetime because the two could not be separated, because it pleased her to play the patriot before his admiring eyes. But England without Nelson she found cold—the abstract passion of country was not in her. As the fires of life sank down, she, like many another, ceased to care for " lost causes and impossible loyalties," but craved a little comfort to end her storm-tossed days.

This at first she found in France, living for a time at Dessein's hotel, with her usual disregard of cost. Then she moved to another and cheaper hostelry, and from there to a comfort-

able farmhouse kept by two French ladies. She seems for a time to have been fairly contented, unhaunted by the thought of what she once called her " former splendours." Writing to George Rose at this time, she tells him—

"Everybody is pleased with Horatia. The General and his good old wife are very good to us; but our little world of happiness is ourselves. If, my dear Sir, Lord Sidmouth would do something for dear Horatia, so that I can be enabled to give her an education, and also for her dress, it would ease me, and make me very happy. Surely he owes this to Nelson."

To what a small petition was Emma Hamilton reduced after all her large Memorials! Her chief anxiety was now for Horatia. Within a few months of her death she wrote to Sir William Scott, " If my dear Horatia was provided for I should dye happy, and if I could only now be enabled to make her more comfortable and finish her Education, ah, God, how I would bless them that enabled me to do it!" She vows she has " seen enough of grandeur not to regret it," but she is distressed at the strait-ness of her means. She had asked Earl Nelson to let her have her Bronte pension quarterly instead of half yearly, but he had refused, " saying he was too poor." "Think what I must feel," she cries, "who was used to give God only knows, and now to ask!"

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The farmhouse became too expensive for her meagre purse, and she had to betake herself and Horatia to humble lodgings in Calais, in the Rue Franchise. The winter was upon them, and though the stories told of Emma and her daughter being upon the verge of starvation in these last months are not true, yet they lacked all save the bare necessaries of life—these two stranded creatures, one of whom was the only child of Lord Nelson, and the other who had been Romney's "divine lady" and the pride of the Neapolitan Court.

" My Broken Heart does not leave me," Emma had written a little while before, and her health was now finally broken also. In the course of her life she had met and escaped from disgrace and danger and debt; but death she could not elude, and she had no further spirit left to try. The winter was severe, she caught a chill that settled on her chest; she was short of comforts, and her courage was exhausted. Worry and protracted disappointment had broken her down. By mid-January of 1815 the end came: she died shrived and consoled by a priest of the Roman Church—long before, while at Naples, she had professed the Catholic faith. In one of her recently discovered letters to Sir Harris Nicolas, Horatia gives a distressing account of the closing scene: the somewhat unsympathetic detachment of her tone is due to

the fact that she never believed Lady Hamilton was her mother :—

" At the time of her death she was in great distress, and had I not, unknown to her, written to Lord Nelson to ask the loan of £10, and to another kind friend of hers who immediately sent her £20, she would not literally have had one shilling till her next allowance became due. Latterly, she was hardly sensible. I imagine that her illness originally began by being bled, whilst labouring under an attack of jaundice, whilst she lived at Richmond. From that time she never was well, and added to this the baneful habit she had of taking spirits and wine to a fearful degree, brought on water on the chest. She died in January, 1815, anc ^ was buried in the bury ing-ground attached to the town. That was a sad, miserable time to me. Latterly her mind became so irritable by drinking, that I had written to Mr. Matcham, and he had desired that I would lose no time in getting some respectable person to take me over, and that I was to come to them, where I should always find a home. After her death, as soon as he heard of it, he came to Dover to fetch me. With all Lady Hamilton's faults, and she had many, she had many fine qualities."

All the best of Emma Hamilton's life had really died ten years before at Trafalgar, and in the year of Waterloo the flame which had burnt

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high and brilliantly was extinguished. The span of her life covered the great era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars; she had lived through them all, from the " Glorious First of June" to the Nile, the Baltic, and Trafalgar; from Ulm and Austerlitz to Talavera and Vit-toria; Borodino and Napoleon's retreat from Moscow came within the scope of her lifetime, as did the American War of 1812; and she died only six months before Waterloo was fought. Amid many of these high events, in that scene of the world's activities, the Mediterranean, Emma Hamilton had played her part and played it well — with courage, with resource, with infinite ardour. She began life as an outcast, and she ended it as one; but between her troubled youth and her desolate death she had crowded a breathless age of living —she had known power and used it; she had lived in hundreds of eyes as the beauty of her time; and she had been the single passion of Nelson's life. Her career is full of dazzling events, just as her character, in spite of many and most glaring faults, is rich, and human, and lovable. But "the years that bring the philosophic mind" never came to Emma; instead, her years were full of restless excitements and ambitions. To the end the lessons of life were unlearned ; she had a heart defiant but not strong, and a temper impatient to the last of all

ut prosperity. She was not made of that finer mettle which is tempered in the fire of affliction. In the final event it is neither beauty, nor power, nor fame that counts, but the spirit—and that only. There was something prophetic in the words she wrote in a shaken hand on the back of Nelson's last letter to her—the letter which was found open on his desk after Trafalgar was fought and the hero was dead—" Oh, miserable, wretched Emma! Oh, glorious and happy Nelson!"

It might well stand for the epitaph of them both—and Emma Hamilton has no other, for the very place of her grave in the Calais cemetery is obliterated. There is a sad and curious irony Jin the fact that she who was Nelson's last charge and legacy to the English people—Nelson, whose whole life was given to fighting the French, and who died by a French bullet—should lie buried in a " little, little grave, an obscure grave," in France.

2 B

ACTON, GENERAL SIR JOHN, 97, 98, 117, 127, 135, 137, 141, 183, 202, 217, 218

Albert, Prince [of Naples], 189 "Ambassadress," the, 89 Arethusa, fountain of, 147, 258 Argyll, Duchess of [Elizabeth Gunning], 82, 83

"Attitudes," the, 2, 22, 67, loo, 264, 265

Ball, Captain, 155, 205, 213, 253 Battles—St. Vincent, 118, 122;

the Nile, 149, 150; the Baltic,

302 ; Trafalgar, 345 ; Waterloo,

368

Beckford, William, 93,281, 282,295 Buonaparte, Napoleon, 105, 106,

120, 146, 150, 328, 339, 340

Cadogan, Mrs. [Lady Hamilton's mother], 3-5, 21, 29, 54, 102, 209, 287-289, 348, 358, 359

Caracciolo, Prince Francesco, 73, 224-228

Carlyle [quoted], 201, 248

Chatham, Earl of, 169

"Christian Army," 203

Danton, in

Davison, Alexander, 195, 240, 272 Duckworth, Commodore, 176, 213, 241

Edgware Row, 21, 318 Elliot, Sir Gilbert, 99, 100 Emma " Carew " [Lady Hamilton's first child], 12, 13, 37, 39, 42,

Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, 68, 96, 97, 101, 102, 108, 122, 157, 158, 177, 236, 244, 245

Fetherstonehaugh, Sir Harry, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16-18, 25, 48, 57, 70

Foote, Captain, 208, 216, 222

Graham, Dr., 7

Greville, the Hon. Charles, antecedents and appearance, 13 ; meets Emma, 14 ; writes to her, 16-19; his house in Edgware Row, 21 ; his collection, 22 ; satisfaction with Emma, 25 ; " Pliny the Younger," 36 ; wishes to transfer Emma to his uncle's care, 48-51 ; callous behaviour, 59-62 ; Emma resumes her letters to, 76, 85, 104, 108, 109, 176, 230, 231, 246, 292, 319, 325; Goethe, description of the "Attitudes," 66, 67