Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (14 page)

ments. Emma laughed him to scorn. The friend of the late Duchess and her friends could afford to flout insular opinion. But she laughed too soon: had she been wiser she might possibly have propitiated the Queen of England by discretion. It further happened that Greville's official friend and Emma's old acquaintance, Heneage Legge, met and spied on the happy pair at Naples, just before he and they left for Rome; he promptly reported progress to Greville, who had plainly asked for enlightenment. The unsuspecting Hamilton called on Legge immediately to proffer him every friendly service. Mrs. Legge was in delicate health, and Emma, too, kindly offered to act as her companion, or even nurse. Legge was embarrassed; his wife civilly declined Emma's attentions, " kindly intended," but owing to Emma's " former line of life " impossible to accept. These proprieties confirmed Sir William's determination, and aroused Emma's ire. The one was accustomed to observe that the " reformed rake " proverb applied fully as much to a woman as a man. The other felt herself mortified and insulted just when her virtues rang on every lip. If the frail Lady Craven, for instance, were good enough to touch the hem of Mrs. Legge's garments, why not Emma, who had rashly hastened to be kind? Legge must tell the rest himself: " Her influence over him exceeds all belief. . . . The language of both parties, who always spoke in the plural number—we, us, and ours—stagger'd me at first, but soon made me determined to speak openly to him on the subject, when he assur'd me, what I confess I was most happy to hear, that he was not married; but flung out some hints of doing justice to her good behaviour, if his public situation did not forbid him to consider himself an independent man. . . . She gives everybody to understand that he is now going to England to solicit

the K.'s consent to marry her. ... I am confident she will gain her point, against which it is the duty of every friend to strengthen his mind as much as possible; and she will be satisfied with no argument but the King's absolute refusal of his approbation. Her talents and powers of amusing are very wonder-full. Her voice is very fine, but she does not sing with great taste, and Aprili [sic] says she has not a good ear; her Attitudes are beyond description beau-tifull and striking, and I think you will find her figure much improved since you last saw her. They say they shall be in London by the latter end of May, that their stay in England will be as short as possible, and that, having settled his affairs, he is determined never to return. She is much visited here by ladies of the highest rank, and many of the corps diplomatique; does the honours of his house with great attention and desire to please, but wants a little refinement of manners in which ... I wonder she has not made greater progress. I have all along told her that she could never change her situation, and that she was a happier woman as Mrs. H. than she wou'd be as Lady H., when more reserved behaviour being necessary, she wou'd be depriv'd of half her amusements."

Sound sense enough, but most unlikely to convince Emma's self-confidence. Mrs. Legge, too, and afterwards Queen Charlotte, were justified in excommunicating Emma before her marriage; such decencies are concerns of precedent, the etiquette of morality. But it is surely a cruel and un-Christian precedent, to set up without exception that a girl who had raised and trained herself as Emma had done should be debarred from the possibility of legitimate retrieval. Such standards savour far more of the world than of 1 Morrison MS. 190; Legge to Greville, Naples, March 8, 1791.

Heaven. And, at all events, it must be conceded that at this period Emma, who had been beloved not only by the Duchesses of Argyll and Devonshire, but by such young ladies as Miss Carr, could not possibly have hurt or soiled the British matron. There may well have been quite as much unamiable envy as injured innocence in the blank refusal to let her show that she was a kind and helpful woman, even though she had not always been irreproachable.

London was reached at last, and the King's reluctant sanction obtained. They were feted and entertained by the Marquis of Abercorn, by Beckford at Fonthill, and by the Duke of Queensberry, who gave a brilliant concert at Richmond in their honour, where Emma herself performed. But her chief delight was her reunion with those art coteries where she had ever felt herself freest and most at home. One of her first visits was to Cavendish Square. On a June morning she surprised Romney—an apparition in " Turkish dress "—while he was ailing and melancholy. Neither his trip in the previous year, nor the warm friendship of Hayley, who had now fitted up a studio for him at Eartham, could exorcise the demon of dejection which brooded over him. The wonderful girl whose career he had watched afar, cheered him back to his former source of inspiration. His letters to Hayley of this date are full of her. She was eager that her old friend should recognise that she was " still the same Emma." She sat for him constantly, and besides his many other studies and portraits of her, he at once made her the model of his Joan of Arc, the idea of which his recent journey across the Channel had suggested. Both this and a " Magdalen " were commissioned by the Prince of Wales, who seems to have met her at the Duke of Queensberry's. He painted her as " Cassandra," he designed to paint her as " Con-

stance," he commenced a fresh " Bacchante." He dined with her and Sir William, and they both dined thrice with him, first in July and afterwards in August. He broke his rule of solitude in order that " several people of fashion " might behold the performances of one whom he declared " superior to all womankind." She in her turn begged him to let Hayley set about writing his life. All that she did or said fascinated him; and the fondest father, remarks his biographer, could not have taken a keener pleasure in the marriage of a favourite daughter than did Romney in her imminent wedding. Her acting and singing so transported him, that he was on the point of posting off near midnight to fetch Hayley from Eartham. " She performed both in the serious and comic to admiration : but her ' Nina ' "—a part two years later the especial delight of Maria Carolina—" surpasses everything I ever saw, and I believe, as a piece of acting, nothing ever surpassed it. The whole company were in an agony of sorrow. Her acting is simple, grand, terrible, and pathetic." It was this power of moving others that, according to a tradition often repeated by the late Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, once so worked on Nelson ten years afterwards, that he walked up

and down the crowded room muttering, " D

Mrs. Siddons! " with whom somebody had contrasted her. On the occasion just mentioned Gallini, the impresario, offered her £2000 a year and two benefits " if she would engage with him "; but, in Romney's words, " Sir William said pleasantly that he had engaged her for life."

For a few weeks Romney fancied her attitude towards him altered; the mere suspicion disquieted his nerves, but the cloud was soon dispelled. Meanwhile Hayley, who was to compose a fresh poem on her just before her wedding, indited the following:

"Gracious Cassandra! whose benign esteem

To my weak talent every aid supplied, Thy smile to me was inspiration's beam, Thy charms my model, and thy taste my guide.

But say! what cruel clouds have darkly chilled Thy favour, that to me was vital fire?

O let it shine again! or worse than killed, Thy soul-sunk artist feels his art expire."

On her very wedding day Emma sat for the last time to the great artist for that noble portrait of her as the " Ambassadress," and she and her husband " took a tender leave " of one inseverable from her for ever.

Hamilton and she were the talk of the town. When they drove out or went to parties, or entered the box at Drury Lane, every eye was upon them, and it was at Drury Lane that the acting of Jane Powell brought together the two former mates in servitude as the admired of all beholders.

All this must have nettled Greville, of whose feelings at this time there is no record. But his opposition does not seem to have been serious, for Sir William and Emma passed their time in a round of visits to the whole circle of his relations, who were mostly her keen partisans. Lord Abercorn, indeed, went so far as to protest that her personality had " made it impossible " for him " to see or hear without making comparisons "; and from this time forward Lord William Douglas also became Emma's lifelong upholder. The summer of 1791 was unusually hot, and from the latter part of July to mid-August they stayed with relatives in the country, including Beckford, when Emma for the first time beheld the Oriental and the Gothic glories, the mounting spire, the magic terraces, the fairy gardens, and all the bizarre splendours, including its owner, of Fonthill Abbey.

On the whole, this delicate experiment had sue-

ceeded, although Queen Charlotte's ban doubtless rankled in Emma's breast. 1 The King himself was more pained than offended, and had confirmed Hamilton in the security of his appointment.

Nor was it only grand folks or old friends that Emma had frequented. It is clear from allusions in shortly subsequent letters that both she and her mother visited that " poor little Emma " who had re-awakened the longings of motherhood in the old but unfor'got-ten days of Parkgate.

On September 6th Sir William and " Emy," or " Emily," Lyon were duly wedded at Marylebone Church, long associated with the Hamilton family. The marriage was solemnised by the Rev. Doctor Edward Barry, rector of Elsdon, Northumberland. The witnesses were Lord Abercorn and L. Dutens, secretary to the English Minister at Turin, with whom Emma long maintained a faithful friendship. Her heart was overflowing. She felt, as she told Rom-ney, so grateful to her husband, so glad in restored innocence and happiness, that she would " never be able to make " him " amends for his goodness." They started homeward by way of Paris, where they were to see for the first and last time that tortured Queen who was fast completing the tragedy of her doom. Henceforward the name of " Hart" is heard no more. Henceforward Emma is no longer obscure, but, as Lady Hamilton, passes into history.

'The Queen would never receive Lady Hamilton even after the return of the Hamiltons to England, and Nelson will be found angry that Sir William would go to court alone; cf. post, chap. xii.

CHAPTER V

TILL THE FIRST MEETING I79I-I793

EDY HAMILTON returned to bask in social favour. It was not only the Neapolitan noblesse and the English wives that courted and caressed her. Their young- daughters also vied with each other in attentions, and vowed that never was any one so amiable and accomplished as this eighth wonder. Among these was a Miss Carr, who not long afterwards married General Cheney, an Aide-de-Camp to the Duke of York, during the next few years more than once a visitor at Naples. The writer possesses a miniature in water-colour, drawn by this young lady, of the friend to whom she long remained attached. Emma sits, clad all in white, with an air of sweetness and repose. At the back of this memento she has herself recorded: "Emma Hamilton, Naples, Feb. n, 1792. I had the happiness of my dear Miss Carr's company all day; but, alas, the day was too short."

There is nothing in this likeness to betoken the purpose and ambition which she was shortly to display in the side-scenes of history. Horace Walpole had written, " So Sir William has married his gallery of statues." Emma soon ceases to be a statue, and becomes prominent in the labyrinth of Neapolitan intrigue; her role as patriot begins to be foreshadowed.

Throughout these three critical years of stress and shock momentous issues were brewing, destined to

bring into sharp relief and typical collision the two giants of France and England, Napoleon and Nelson; while all the time, under fate's invisible hand, Nelson was as surely tending towards Naples and Emma, as Emma was being drawn towards Nelson. From the moment of her return in the late autumn of 1791 she began, at first under Hamilton's tuition, to study and understand the political landscape.

Nowhere outside France did the Revolution bode omens more sinister than at the Neapolitan court. The Queen clearly discerned that her French sister and brother-in-law trembled on the brink of destruction. She knew that the epidemic of anarchy must endanger Naples among the first, and might involve the possible extinction of its dynasty. She was not deceived by the many false prophets crying peace where no peace was; still less by the wild schemes for hairbreadth escapes which sent visionary deliverers scouring through Europe. Her one hope—soon rudely shattered—lay in Austria's power to effect a coalition of great powers and strong armies. She had just quitted the family council in Vienna, following on the death of her brother Joseph the Second, and the shortlived accession to the throne of her other brother Leopold, the pedantic philanthropist. Its object had been, in Horace Walpole's phrase, to " Austriacise " the position of the Italian Bourbons, by family intermarriages and a betrothal. Her efforts were bent on a league against France, and it was for this that on her way home she had contrived a surprise meeting with the weak Pope Pius VI., penetrated the Vatican, abjured her anti-papal policy, and humiliated herself in the dust. And yet Louis XVI. besought her to suspend efforts which might rescue him, and shrank from embittering his false friends. Austria, too, was for seven years to prove a broken reed. Spain was never a

whole-hearted enemy of France,, and within three years was to become her ally. The Queen awoke to a fury of indignation and hopelessness. Her foes were those of her own household—her nobles, her husband, his Spanish brother and sister,—and herself. Hitherto she had been reckoned an enlightened patroness, compassing the equality and fraternity of subjects who had never required political liberty. She had stubbornly resisted the Spanish Machiavellianism which had manoeuvred to undermine those very f reemasonries which Maria Carolina had founded and forwarded. Spain was, in truth, the key of the present position. Spain was befooling Ferdinand and spiting his wife at every turn. The Spanish queen coveted Naples for her own offspring, and the two queens abominated each other. She was quite aware that the pro-Spanish party, abetted by her blockhead of a husband, covertly designed the transference of the Crown of the Two Sicilies to the Duke of Parma, while many of the Neapolitan nobles, affronted at the abolition of their feudal rights, were in secret confederation with it. She sprang from a house glorying in its despotic monopoly of popular principles, yet it was to such fatalities that these very principles were leading. Stability and authority had been her aims, yet the ground was fast slipping from beneath her feet. She was a true scion of the casuist Hapsburgs, who had always considered pride cs a sacred duty, and who, if their system were imperilled, would be ready to defend it by conscientious crimes. In the refrain of her own subsequent letters, "II faut faire son devoir fusqu'au fombeau"