Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (18 page)

Nelson, anchored off Capri, remained on the Vanguard, contains this sentence: " I will not say how glad I shall be to see you. Indeed I cannot describe to you my feelings on your being so near us." A woman could not so express herself to a man unseen for five years unless the twelve days or so spent in his company had produced a deep effect. Every concern of his already enlisted her eagerness. His stepson, Josiah, then a young midshipman, was driven about by her and caressed. She laughingly called him her cavaliere servente. As yet it was only attraction, not love for Nelson. This very third anniversary of her wedding day had enabled her proudly to record that her husband and she were more inseparable than ever, and that he had never for one moment regretted the step of their union. But she did fall in love with the quickening force that Nelson represented. Infused by the ardour of her Queen, proud of the destiny of England as European deliverer, urged by her native ambition to shine on a bigger scale, she reflected every hue of the crisis and its leaders. If his hour struck, hers might strike also. He, she, and Sir William had for this short span already realised what the legend round Sir William's Order of the Bath signified, " Tria juncta in uno " —three persons linked together by one tie of differing affections.

The sole mentions of Emma by Nelson at this time are in a letter to his brother, and another to his wife, already noticed. But that her influence had already begun to work is proved by the fact that he carefully preserved the whole series of her letters of the summer and autumn of 1798. Three days only after he had started for Leghorn, he wrote as follows: " In my hurry of sailing I find I have brought away a butter-pan. Don't call me an ungrateful guest for it, for I assure you I have the highest sense of your and Lady

Hamilton's kindness, and shall rejoice in the opportunity of returning it. ... The sending off the prints adds to the kindness I have already received from you and Lady Hamilton." And when at the close of August in the next year he stayed at Leghorn once more, he assured Sir William how glad he would have been to have visited them again, " had the state of the Agamemnon allowed of it," but " her ship's crew are so totally worn out, that we were glad to get into the first port, . . . therefore for the present I am deprived of that pleasure."

When Nelson was not dining at court or concerting operations with the Ministers,, he was at the Embassy or Caserta, meeting the English visitors, who included the delicate Charles Beauclerk, whom the artistic Lady Diana had commended to Emma's (harge. All was joy, excitement, preparation. " I believe," wrote Nelson, " that the world is now convinced that no conquests of importance can be made without us." Nelson had aroused Naples from a long siesta, and henceforward Emma sings " God save the King " and calls for " Hip, hip, hurrah! " which she teaches the Queen, at every Neapolitan banquet. Naples is no more a hunting-ground for health or pleasure, but a focus of deliverance. It is as though in our own days the Riviera should suddenly wake up as a centre of patriotism and a rallying-ground for action. Within a few years Maria Carolina could write to Emma of singing the national anthem, and in the year of the Nile battle, of the " brave, loyal nation," and of the " magnanimous " English, whom she loves and for whose glory she has vowed to act. As for Nelson, he was in that year to be called her deliverer, her preserver, and her " hero."

On September 24th Nelson purposed a slight mark of gratitude for the hospitality and the substantial

reinforcements so liberally proffered. The Agamemnon was all flowers and festivity. He had invited the King, the Queen, the Hamiltons, Acton, and the Ministers to luncheon. The guests were awaiting the arrival of the court under a cloudless sky amid the flutter of gay bunting and all the careless chatter of southern mirth. Suddenly a despatch was handed to the captain. He was summoned to weigh anchor and pursue a French man-of-war with three vessels stationed off Sardinia. Not an instant was lost. The guests dispersed in excitement. When Ferdinand arrived in his barge, it was to find the company vanished, the decks cleared, and the captain buried in work. Within two hours Nelson had set sail for Leghorn, which he had immediately to quit for Toulon. Calvi and its further triumph awaited him afterwards.

But over the bright horizon was fast gathering a cloud no bigger than a man's hand. By the end of the year the Queen was again in the depths. Her sister had been executed with infamy. Buonaparte— whom Nelson heard described at Leghorn as an " ugly, unshaven little officer "—had shot into pre-eminence and had worked his wonders; Toulon was evacuated. At home fresh conspiracies were discovered, this time among the nobles. The best names were implicated. The Dukes of Canzano, Colonna, and Cassano, the Counts of Ruvo and Riario, Prince Caracciolo the elder were arrested. The whole political landscape was overcast. Next year was to be one of " public mourning and prayer," of plague, famine, and pestilence. The ragged remnant of the squadron, forwarded with such royal elation to Toulon, returned in shame for shelter; and with it the ship of Trogoff, whom the French had branded as traitor. Two hundred victims had been slaughtered, four hundred languished in French prisons. These fresh disasters were

heightened and shadowed by the terrible earthquake of June 12-16, when the sun was blotted out; and while the Archbishop, grasping the gilt image of St. Janu-arius, groped his way in solemn procession to the cathedral, the darkened sky bombarded the interceding city with emblematic bolts of relentless artillery.

CHAPTER VI

" STATESWOMAN " 1794-1797

TATES WOMAN" is Swift's term for Stella.

It fits better the Trilby of the political studio.

The muse as medium was already being transferred from attitude to affairs.

Since Nelson's brief sojourn and its keen impress, the Queen,.under growing troubles, leaned more and more on the English. The King's pro-Spanish faction was now defied; even the pro-Austrian group lost ground and flagged. Acton, save for a brief interval, remained her right hand— hie, hac, et hoc et omnia, as they now styled him. The Hamiltons' enthusiasm for the budding hero had communicated itself through Emma to her royal friend, who had hitherto cared little even for the English language. Maria Carolina clung more closely to a consoler not only responsive and diverting, but unversed enough in courts to be flattered by the intimacy and free in it. They were constantly together; by 1795 so often as every other day. It was " naturalness " and " sensibility " once more that prevailed. Doubtless, policy entered also into her motives. Notes to Emma would pass unsuspected where notes to Sir William might be watched. Verbal confidences to a frequenter of the palace would never excite the curiosity which Sir William's formal presence must arouse. But the bond of policy was mutual. Hamilton encouraged his wife to glean secret in-

formation for the British Government. What the Queen did not at first realise, though afterwards she recognised it to the full, was Lady Hamilton's " native energy of mind " which Hayley, comforting her after Nelson's death, recalled as one of her earliest characteristics; and for the work of life, as has been truly said, inborn vigour is apter than cultivated refinement.

Emma now definitely emerges as patriot and politician. Did she aspire thus early to help her country ? The field of controversy begins to open, and controversy is always irksome. It is necessary, however, at this juncture, to consider this first of Emma's " claims " in its context.

In her latest memorial for the recognition of her " services "—her petition to the Prince Regent of 1813 —she claimed to have responded to the then Sir John Jervis's appeals for help while employed upon the reduction of Corsica. In this statement, which is one of several, she makes some confusion between two names influential in two successive years. If such lapses as these stood alone, without substantial evidence beneath them, her censors might have been fairly justified in pressing them to the utmost. But since (as will be shown) there is strong corroboration of the substance of her services in 1796, considerable proof of her main service in 1798, with abundant new and historical evidence for her truthfulness in the account of the part played by her in the royal escape just before Christmas of the same year—they amount to little more than the immaterial inaccuracies which recur in several of her recitals. Her critics, in fixing on the memorial to the Prince Regent—framed in her declining years and her extremest need—have consistently ignored her other applications for relief, and especially that to King George III. in which she does not specify this claim

at all, but only implies it under " many inferior services."

In her " Prince Regent" memorial she urges that " In the year 1793, when Lord Hood had taken possession of Toulon, and Sir John Jervis was employ'd upon the reduction of Corsica, the latter kept writing to me for everything he wanted which I procured to be promptly provided him; and, as his letters to me prove, had considerably facilitated the reduction of that island. I had by this time induced the King through my influence with the Queen to become so zealous in the good cause, that both would often say I had de-Bour-boniz'd them and made them English."

In the same " memorial " she mentions a side-circumstance which can now be fully substantiated. She there asserts that Sir William in his " latter moments, in deputing Mr. Greville to deliver the Order of the Bath to the King, desired that he would tell His Majesty that he died in the confident hope that his pension would be continued to me for my zeal and service." Greville's letter of 1803 more than bears out her veracity in this trifle. Greville himself, the precisest of officials, and just after his uncle's death by no means on the best of terms with Lady Hamilton, added that he knew that the public " records" confirmed " the testimony of their Sicilian Majesties by letter as well as by their ministers, of circumstances peculiarly distinguished and honourable to her, and at the same time of high importance to the public service." Hamilton's own share in the many transactions which are to follow passed equally disregarded with his widow's. And with regard to the preliminary " service " which we must now discuss, she repeats her asseveration in al-'most the last letter that she ever wrote, adding that in this case, as in the others, she paid " often and often out of her own pocket at Naples."

As has been recounted, Hood took Toulon in August, 1793. It had to be evacuated on December i/th of that year; and it was Lord Hood, not the future Lord St. Vincent, who superintended the Cor-sican operations from the December of 1793 to their issue in Nelson's heroism at Calvi in July, 1794. Sir John Jervis, on the other hand, was in command of the West Indian expedition of 1794. He does not, it is true, figure as corresponding with the Hamiltons on naval affairs until 1798, when, in an interesting correspondence, he thanks her for services as " patroness of the navy," protests his " unfeigned affectionate regard," and signs himself her " faithful and devoted knight." But none the less he was (and this has eluded notice) in close correspondence with Acton throughout the early portion of 1796.

Such, then, in this instance, are the material discrepancies. In dwelling long afterwards on her first endeavours for her country, she transposed the sequence of two successive years, while she confounded Lord Hood and the future Lord St. Vincent together. Little sagacity, however, is needed to perceive that these very confusions point to her sincerity. Had she been forging claims, imperatively raised in the extremities of her fate, nothing would have been easier than to have verified these trifles, especially as many of Nelson's friends remained staunch to her till the close. Wilful liars do not concoct and elaborate evidence manifestly against themselves. For the truth of this, the least important and most general of her services, Acton's manuscript correspondence of these years with Hamilton supplies a new presumption. What England wanted during these two years from the Neapolitan premier was something outside and beyond what her treaty with Sicily enabled her, as a fact, to receive, and it was just these extras that Emma's

rising ascendency with the Queen and her own ambition may have prompted her to procure.

The real pretexts for refusal, as we shall find in their proper place, were not scepticism, but royal disfavour, technical precedent, lapse of time, private pique^ and party interest. Canning thought her " richly entitled " to compensation. Grenville himself did not deny the performance of her services. Addington grounded his refusal mainly on the multiplicity of other claims on the Government.

The year 1794 at Naples was one of continuous calamity; while successive catastrophes were heightened by the undoubted tyrannies of the Queen. France, by fomenting the Neapolitan ferment, was deliberately inveigling the two Sicilies. No quarter would Maria Carolina give to the French assassins or to the Neapolitan republicans. Hitherto, in the main, her old clemency had found vent, and she had striven to be just. She still deemed justice her motive, but she deceived herself. While the King always remained optimist, her pessimism verged on madness. She treated affairs of State just as if they had been affairs of the heart. Her mistrust both of the conspiring nobles and the thankless students, now, from changed incentives, in attempted combination, showed signs of yielding to a paroxysm of revenge disguised by an inscrutable face. Robespierre was branded on her brain. Her word for every rebellious aristocrat was " We will not give him time to become a Robespierre." The close of the year witnessed Robespierre's doom, and a false lull brought with it a film of security. Yet the signal baseness now confronting her would have justified a moderate severity. Disaffection was not native but imported. The great mass of the people never wavered in allegiance to the King of the Lazzaroni, and agitation was bought

and manipulated by France. The rest of Europe recognised the real significance of these insurrections. " God knows," wrote Nelson to the Hamiltons in 1796, " I only feel for the King of Naples, as I am confident the change in his Government would be subversive of the interest of all Europe." The English Government, the Russian, even the Prussian, felt the same. The Queen, who had really done so much in the teeth of sharp difficulties for the " Intellectuels," was beside herself. Jacobinism, at first narrowed to a faction, afterwards, at the worst, diffused as a leaven, was by this time hydra-headed. Its disorders had spread to Sicily, where their suppression had been signalised by the execution of the ringleaders and the imprisonment of three hundred. By the spring of 1795 the French had divulged their determination of attacking the British squadron in the Mediterranean. The receivers of her most generous bounty bit the hand of their benefactress. Luigi di Medici, the young cavalier on whom she had conferred absolute power, was denounced by a mathematical professor. As " Regente della Vicaria " he was tried by the last novelty in tribunals, an invention of Acton. Besides other old hands like the inevitable Prince Pignatelli, it consisted of three principal assessors—Guidobaldi, a judge; Prince Castelcicala, a prop always trusted; and lastly Vanni, a man of the people, a 1 " professional " whom the Queen had actually made Marquis. This trio was nicknamed " Cerberus." It was the reverse of former experiments: for the first time two members of the disaffected " professionals " were admitted into the bureaucracy. Vanni, a miniature Marat, who well merited his subsequent downfall, dictated; and his dictatorship stank in the nostrils of all Italy as " the white terror of Naples." Di Medici had himself headed a fresh conspiracy—for the King's murder —