Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (11 page)

doubts the saints. " No," replies her mistress in Italian, " it is quite the same if you pray to my own ' Loola.'' "... She look't at me, and said, to be sure, I read a great many books and must know more than her. But she says, ' Does not God favour you more than ous?' Says I, no. 'O God,' says she, ' your eccellenza is very ungrateful! He [h]as been so good as to make your face the same as he made the face of the Blessed Virgin's, and you don't esteem it a favour!' ' Why,' says I, ' did you ever see the Virgin? ' ' O yes,' says she, ' you are like every picture that there is of her, and you know the people at Iscea fel down on their knees to you, and beg'd you to grant them favours in her name.' And, Greville, it is true that they have all got it in their heads that I am like the Virgin, and—do come to beg favours of me. Last night there was two preists came to my house, and Sir William made me put a shawl over my head, and look up, and the preist burst into tears and kist my feet, and said God had sent me a purpose." Emma is in vein indeed. How buoyantly she swims and splashes on the rising tide! How exuberantly the whole breathes of " I always knew I could, if opportunity but walked towards me! " and of " I will show Greville what a pearl he has cast away! " Although she could be diffident when matched with genuine excellence or before those she loved, how the blare of her trumpet drowns all the still small voices! One is reminded of Woollett, the celebrated eighteenth century engraver, who was in the habit of firing off a small cannon from the roof of his house every time he had finished a successful plate. What a profuse medley of candour and contrivance, of simplicity and vanity, of commonness and elegance, of courtesy and challenge, of audacity and courage, of quick-wittedness and ignorance, of honest kindness and honest irrever-

ence! She is already a born actress of realities, and on no mimic stage. Yet many of her faults she fully felt, and held them curable. " Patienza," she sighs, and time may mend thean; in her own words of this very period, " I am a pretty woman, and one cannot be everything at once."

But a more delicate strain is audible when her heart is really touched.

At the convent whither she resorted for daily lessons during Sir William's absence, now transpired an idyl which must be repeated just as she describes it:—

" I had hardly time to thank you for your kind letter of this morning as I was buisy prepairing for to go on my visit to the Convent of Santa Romita; and endead I am glad I went, tho' it was a short visit. But to-morrow I dine with them in full assembly. I am quite charmed with Beatrice Acquaviva. Such is the name of the charming whoman I saw to-day. Oh Sir William, she is a pretty whoman. She is 29 years old. She took the veil at twenty; and does not repent to this day, though if I am a judge in physiognomy, her eyes does not look like the eyes of a nun. They are allways laughing, and something in them vastly alluring, and I wonder the men of Naples wou'd suffer the oneley pretty whoman who is realy pretty to be shut in a convent. But it is like the mean-spirited ill taste of the Neapolitans. I told her I wondered how she wou'd be lett to hide herself from the world, and I daresay thousands of tears was shed the day she deprived Naples of one of its greatest ornaments. She answered with a sigh, that endead numbers of tears was shed, and once or twice her resolution was allmost shook, but a pleasing comfort she felt at regaining her friends that she had been brought up with, and religious considerations strengthened her mind, and she parted with the world with pleasure. And since

that time one of her sisters had followed her example, and another—which I saw—was preparing to enter soon. But neither of her sisters is so beautiful as her, tho' the[y] are booth very agreable. But I think Beatrice is charming, and I realy feil for her an affection. Her eyes, Sir William, is I don't know how to describe them. I stopt one hour with them; and I had all the good things to eat, and I promise you they don't starve themselves. But there dress is very becoming, and she told me that she was allow'd to wear rings and mufs and any little thing she liked, and endead she display'd to-day a good deal of finery, for she had 4 or 5 dimond rings on her fingers, and seemed fond of her muff. She has excellent teeth, and shows them, for she is all-ways laughing. She kissed my lips, cheeks, and forehead, and every moment exclaimed ' Charming, fine creature,' admired my dress, said I looked like an angel, for I was in clear white dimity and a blue sash." (This, surely, is scarcely the seraphic garb as the great masters imaged it.) ". . . She said she had heard I was good to the poor, generous, and noble-minded. * Now/ she says, ' it wou'd be worth wile to live for such a one as you. Your good heart wou'd melt at any trouble that befel me, and partake of one's greef or be equaly happy at one's good fortune. But I never met with a freind yet, or I ever saw a person I cou'd love till now, and you shall have proofs of my love.' In short I sat and listened to her, and .the tears stood in my eyes, I don't know why; but I loved her at that moment. I thought what a charming wife she wou'd have made,, what a mother of a family, what a f reind, and the first good and amiable whoman I have seen since I came to Naples for to be lost to the world—how cruel! She give me a sattin pocket-book of her own work, and bid me think of her, when I saw it, and was many miles far of[f]; and years

hence when she peraps shou'd be no more, to look at it, and think the person that give it had not a bad heart. Did not she speak very pretty? But not one word of religion. But I shall be happy to-day, for I shall dine with them aU, and come home at night. There is sixty whomen and all well-looking, but not like the fair Beatrice. 'Oh Emma,' she says to me, 'the[y] brought here the Viene minister's wife, but I did not like the looks of her at first. She was little, short, pinch'd face, and I received her cooly. How different from you, and how surprised was I in seeing you tall in statu[r]e. We may read your heart in your countenance, your complexion; in short, your figure and features is rare, for you are like the marble statues I saw when I was in the world.' I think she flattered me up, but I was pleased." *

The convent cloisters bordered on those " royal " or " English" gardens which Sir William and she were afterwards so much to improve; and here, if the Marchesa di Solari's memory can be trusted—and it constantly trips in her Italian record—happened, it would seem, about this time, another incident typical of another side, more comic than pathetic. It sounds like some interlude by Beaumarchais, and recalls Rosina of Figaro. Intrigue belongs to Naples. The young Goethe observed of the Neapolitan atmosphere: " Naples is a paradise. Every one lives, after his manner, .intoxicated with self-forgetfulness. It is the same with me. I scarcely recognise myself, I seem an altered being. Yesterday I thought ' either you 'were or are mad.' " 2

The madcap belle's stratagem was this. Walking

1 Morrison MS. 160, January 10, 1787. It should here be commemorated that one of her first actions^at Naples was to procure a post for Robert White, a protege of Greville.

2 Goethe, Italienische Reise, March 16, 1787.

there one afternoon under the escort of her duenna, she was accosted by a personage whom she knew to be King Ferdinand. He solicited a private interview, and was peremptorily refused. He succeeded, however, in bribing her attendant, and followed her to a remote nook, where they would be unobserved. He pressed his promises with fervour, but Emma refused to listen to a word, unless everything was committed to paper. 1 The monarch complied, and thereupon Emma hastened to the palace and urgently entreated an audience with the Queen. Sobbing on her knees, she implored her to save her from persecutions so great that unless they were removed she had resolved to quit the world and find shelter with the nuns. The Queen, touched by such beauty in such distress, urged her to disclose the name of her unknown importuner. Thereupon Emma handed her the paper, was bidden by the Queen to rise, and comforted. So far there seems ground for the tale. The Marchesa says that Sir Will-• iam " partially " confirmed it; and this must allude to the sequel which represents Maria Carolina as urging the Ambassador to marry his Lucretia without delay. Whether it is true that the tears of affliction were caused by an onion, and that Emma was " on her marrow-bones " in the garden while the Queen was perusing the tell-tale document, depends upon the number of embellishments such a farce would probably receive. If true, it hardly redounds to Emma's credit. But from Emma we must now part awhile to con-

1 From indications in her letter. Cf. Morrison MS. 157, December 26, 1786 (Emma to Sir William) : " If I had the offer of crowns, I would refuse them and except you, and I don't care if all the world knows it. ... Certain it is I love you and sincerely." And cf. ibid. 153: "We are closely besieged by the King in a roundabout manner, but . . . we never give him any encouragement." In this very year the prima donna Banti was whisked off across the frontier by the Queen's orders for presuming to favour the amorous King's attentions.

sider the social and political conditions of the court of Naples, very different now from what they were to become a few years later under the new forces of the French Revolution, and, afterwards, of the meteoric Napoleon. It is a panorama which here can only be sketched in outline. It was to prove the theatre of Emma's best activities.

During the entire eighteenth century, from the War of Succession to the Treaty of Utrecht, from the Treaty of Utrecht to that of the Quadruple Alliance, from that again to those of Vienna and of Aix, the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs had been perpetually wrestling for the rich provinces of central and southern Italy—a prize which united the secular appeal to Catholic Europe with supremacy over the Mediterranean. The Bourbons, by a strange chain of coincidence, had prevailed in Spain, and in 1731 "Baby Carlos " solemnly entered on his Italian and Sicilian heritage, long so craftily and powerfully compassed by his ambitious mother, Elizabeth Farnese. The Hapsburgs, however, never relinquished their aim, though the weak and pompous Emperor, Charles VI., was reduced to spending his energies on the mere phantom of the " Pragmatic Sanction" by which he hoped to cement his incoherent Empire in the person of his masterful daughter; he died hugging, so to speak, that " Pragmatic Sanction " to his heart. Maria Theresa proved herself the heroine of Europe in her proud struggle with the Prussian aggressor who for a time forced her into an unnatural and lukewarm league with the French Bourbons, themselves covetous of the Italian Mediterranean. Even after the French Bourbons were quelled, France, in the person of Napoleon, succeeded to their ambitions. Second only to his hankering after Eastern Empire, was from the

first the persistent hankering after Naples and Sicily of the would-be dominator of the sea, whose coast had been his cradle.

Maria Theresa was therefore delighted when in April, 1768, her eldest daughter, Maria Charlotte, better known as " Maria Carolina," espoused, when barely sixteen years of age, Ferdinand, son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain, then only one year her senior, and already from his eighth year King of the Two Sicilies. Still more did she rejoice when two years later her other daughter, Marie Antoinette, married at the same age the Due de Berri, then heir-presumptive to the French throne, which he ascended four years afterwards. Both daughters were to fight manfully with a fate which worsted the one and extinguished the other, while the husbands of both were true Bourbons in their indecision and their love of the table; for of the Bourbons it was well said that their chapel was their kitchen.

" King " Maria Theresa educated all her children to believe in three things: their religion, their race, and their destiny. They were never to forget that they were Catholics, imperialists, and politicians. But she also taught them to be enlightened and benevolent, provided that their faithful subjects accepted the grace of these virtues unmurmuring from their hands. They were to be monopolists of reform. They were also to be monopolists of power; nor was husband or wife to dispute their sway. Indeed, the two daughters were schooled to believe that control over their consorts was an absolute duty, doubly important from the rival ascendency wielded by the Queens of the Spanish Bourbons, who for three generations had been mated with imbecile or half-imbecile sovereigns; they had a knack of calling their husbands cowards. And they were to be monopolists of religion even against

Memoirs—Vol. 11 1

the Pope if he unduly interfered. These lessons were graven on the hearts of all but Marie Antoinette, who shared the obstinacy but lacked the penetration of her sister and brothers.

Maria Theresa's son and successor, Joseph II. of Austria, showed to the full this union of bigotry and benevolence, both arbitrary yet both popular. He and his premier, Kaunitz, were strenuous in education and reform, but also strenuous in suppressing the Jesuits. His brothers were the same. Archduke Ferdinand played the benevolent despot in Bohemia, while Leopold, afterwards Grand Duke of the Tuscan dominions, was even more ostentatious in his highhanded well-doing. Never \vas a dynasty politer, more cultivated, more affable. But never also was one haughtier, more obstinate, or more formal. All were martyrs to etiquette, but all were also enthusiastic freemasons, and Queen Maria Carolina's family enthusiasm for the secret societies of '' Illuminati" sowed those misfortunes which were afterwards watered with blood, reaped in tears, and harvested by iron. In 1790 Leopold, for a space, succeeded to Joseph; and Maria Carolina was afterwards to see one of her sixteen children wedded to Francis, Leopold's successor on the Austrian throne, another to the King of Sardinia, a third, in the midst of her final calamities, united at Palermo to the future Louis Philippe. She thus became mother-in-law to an emperor of whom she was aunt, as well as to two monarchs; while already she had been sister to two successive emperors.

Her husband, Ferdinand IV., was a boor and bon vivant, good-natured on the surface, but with a strong spice of cruelty beneath it; suspicious of talent, but up to the fatal sequels of the French Revolution the darling of his people. As the little Prince of Asturias, he had been handed to the tutorship of the old Duke