Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (2 page)

" Don't tel my mother what distres I am in, and dow afford me some comfort.

" My age was got out of the Reggister, and I now send it to my dear Charles. Once more adue, O you dear friend."

Who was this girl in " reall distres," what her past ? who were the friends who looked " cooly " on her, and for what reasons? These questions will shortly be answered so far as replies admit of real proof. But first a brief space must be devoted to Greville himself,

1 Sir Harry Fetherstonehaugh, of Up Park, Sussex, who lived, to correspond in middle age with her in terms of deferential friendship. His name is thus spelt in his letters.

since his individuality is as necessary to the coming plot as her own.

The Honourable Charles Francis Greville was now thirty-two.

The second son of the Right Honourable Francis, Earl of Brooke (afterwards Earl of Warwick), and of Elizabeth Hamilton, one of Sir William's sisters, he was born at Fulham on May 12, 1749, and baptised on June 8 following. He was born prematurely old, parsimoniously extravagant, and cautiously careless. His cradle should have been garlanded with official minutes, and draped with collectors' catalogues. From his earliest days he was prim, methodical, and pedantic beyond his years. The unlikelihood of surviving his eldest brother had been ever before his eyes, and he was set on the emoluments of a political career, promising much to one so highly connected. While still in his teens he began amassing virtu with discernment, and specimens of mineralogy on a " philosophical " system. Some years before his majority he had struck up a brotherly affection with his freehearted uncle, nearly twenty years his senior, who relied on a precocious judgment, invaluable to one compelled by long absences to entrust to others the management of his wife's Pembrokeshire property, indispensable also to both in the keen pursuit of their common tastes, the one in Italy, the home of art, the other in England, the nursery of science. From a very early date the student of beauty and curios, the investigator of shells, marine monsters, and volcanoes, " Pliny the Elder," as he came to be called, was always exchanging rarities with " Pliny the Younger," or commissioning him to buy, sell, or raffle Dutch and Italian pictures, Etruscan urns, Greek torsos, and Roman vases.

Hamilton was a true man of science, and a really

great archaeologist. When he first came to Naples in 1764 he spent months in his Villa Angelica, on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, taking observations and excavating antiquities. He was far less a trafficker in objects of art and learning than his nephew. He presented both books and specimens of value to the British Museum. His aim, in his own words, was that of " employing his leisure in use to mankind." Not quite so, however, was that of Pliny the Younger, who in his turn bought crystals and works of art with equal zest of connoisseurship. Greville was barely twenty-one when he went the Italian tour, stayed with his uncle at Naples, then in the full fever of unearthing buried chefs-d'oeuvre at Herculaneum and Pompeii, which were so soon to experience many fresh escapes from re-destruction by earthquakes and eruptions. From Rome, in this year, the nephew indited two of the most self-assured letters of grave gossip and counsel that any youngster has ever addressed to one nearly twice his age. They are so like himself that a small part of one must be given: " I begin with a subject that I have resolved every time I have wrote to mention, and now particularly I am under an obligation to remember, as for the first time my handkerchief

1 Observations on Mount Vesuvius, etc. (1772). The villa was probably called after the artist. Hamilton constantly ran great danger in observing and recording violent eruptions. He was indefatigable in superintending excavations, and he mentions being present at Pompeii when a horse with jewelled trappings and its rider were unearthed. He was a munificent patron alike of discoverers, travelers, scientists, and artists, including Flax-man and Wedgwood. He was a trustee of the British Museum, and a vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries. A big book on his Greek and Roman antiquities was written by D'Harcau-ville (Naples, 1765-1775; Paris, 1787). Besides the book already mentioned, supplemented in 1779, Hamilton wrote Campi Phlegrai (Naples, 1776-77), and the famous work on Greek and Etruscan urns, etc., illustrated by Bartolozzi. A Life worthy of him ought to be written.

has been knotted on the occasion. It is to desire you to enquire for two books I left in my room at your house; 2 pocket volumes of Milton's works. I borrowed them, and left them with an intention they should be sent to Mrs. Harfrere to whom they belong. . . . The ink bottle has this moment oversett, but you see I am not disconcerted, so pray don't make observations, and the letter is as good as it was. Pray let me beg you to avoid every mention of prices, I have done so once before. Pray let me send and be favoured with the acceptance of some baubles. . . . I am in the best of humours. I received this morning a line from Lord Exeter, who informed me of the Douglas cause being decided in his favour. ... I am running about the antiquities from 9 to n with Byres, from 11-12 with Miss A., so you see I gain Horace's happiness, omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci. . . . Pray let me lay on you a disagreeable task, choose me a handsome pattern for an applicee, have it wrought for me instantaneously, and sent to Rome. I wish an Etrusc vase could be introduced. It must be handsome and rich; as to its elegance, anything, particularly Etrusc, conducted by your taste cannot fail to be elegant. If a contrivance could be hit on for making it less regular and straight, ... I should be pleased. Yours is charming, but rather too much like a lace. . . . The spangles must be caution'd against and well fastened. There have been some fine conversations since the Emperor has been here. The Grand Duke asked after you of me. . . . The E. has lessened the talk about the D. However I like the D. best: more of engaging and gentlemanlike deportment, and more of the world. . . . By the Bye if you can pick up any vases, of which you have duplicates, lay them aside for me, and don't buy them if not well conserv'd and good; nor

many of a shape, a few elegant and good. Adieu my dear Hamilton."

Certainly Greville proved the Horatian mixer of pleasure with profit; and since he, like his far franker uncle, was ever complaining of a narrow purse tantalised by the temptations of virtu, that other trite Horatian maxim, Virtute me involve, would also admirably fit them. Wrapped in their mantles of Virtu, they both bewailed means far too slender for their tastes. The richer Sir William, indeed, expending in antiquities what he retrenched elsewhere, seems in his correspondence all debt and Correggio; while Greville removed to his mansion under pretext of its size being a bargain. Each sought to serve the other, and Greville in his youth persistently charged his uncle to be his depute. As time proceeded, Sir William with an ailing wife and a buried daughter, his nephew ever on his watch-tower for an heiress, confided to each other their little gallantries, and peccadilloes also. As for Greville, just as in the case of the " applicee," " contrivances " were soon " hit on " for making him " less regular and straight." Already, in 1781, this solemn frequenter of new Almack's had acquired the Reynolds picture of " Emily in the character of Thais," which had been left on Sir Joshua's hands. His character was that of a free-living formalist, the reverse of austere, but with all austerity's drawbacks.

Yet there were some excellent points in this queer compound of the Pharisee and the Publican, something between a Charles and a Joseph Surface. If none was more prone to sin with self-righteousness, and to excuse to himself half-shabbiness as unselfish generosity, if none could write more glibly of a " good heart," he was not consciously a hypocrite; though par excellence the man of taste rather than the man of feeling.

He displayed scrupulous honour in all money trans-

actions, much dignity and reticence, with grace of demeanour (if not always of behaviour) ; independence too of mind, and a public-spirited industry that often kept him sitting on important committees six hours at a stretch. He was a steadfast friend, and the early death of his Pylades, the brilliant Charles Cathcart, was a real blow to him and an irretrievable loss. He was an ideal trustee. He could say with truth, " I am a good jobber for a friend, but an awkward one for myself." He was worthy of his uncle's confidence, and to the last superintended his affairs and those of others with integrity and tact. Nor did he neglect the welfare of Hamilton's tenants at Milford. He was capable of limited disinterestedness as well as of true patriotism. His father's death and his brother's accession to estates and title in 1773 reduced his allowance afresh, and all his resource was needed to repair the deficiency.

Socially a disciple of the old-fashioned Chesterfield, and affecting to flout the opinion of a world that he was far from despising, politically he was a trimming Whig, but an unbending supporter of all authority and establishment. He throve on coalitions, and lamented with reason the near ing end of that coalition ministry which was still in power when this chapter opened.

Such is an epitome of the man who still holds the soi-disant " Emily Hart's " letter in his hands. It is her origin and past that now demand re-investigation. In view of her instinctive independence and her native appetite for glory, the notion of which grew with her expanding horizon, these trivial beginnings are not unimportant, while some of her cousins played a prominent part in the later scenes of her life.

Emily (or " Emy ") Lyon was born on April 26 in 1765, the year of her baptism, unless, without reason,

we are to assume her illegitimacy. The Neston parish registers prove the marriage of her parents to have taken place on June n, 1764. The rumours and fictions about her early adventures, seemingly requiring a longer space than her extreme girlhood affords, have impelled certain biographers to antedate her birth by so much as four years. But many references, both in Greville's letters and Hamilton's, with other evidence outside them, entirely tally with the date that I have assigned. She was christened " Emily" (of which " Emy " and not " Amy," as has been alleged, is the contraction), though from the "Emy" she may in childhood have been called " Amy" at times. The copy of the baptismal register sent to Greville is incorrect, as will be seen in the note below. Her marriage register, it is true, is signed " Amy Lyons " according to the Marylebone clerk's information, but this again seems a natural misreading of her rapid and often indistinct handwriting for " Emy Lyon."

Her father was Henry Lyon, " Smith of Nesse," and her mother Mary Kidd of Hawarden, Flintshire. In their marriage register both sign by marks, although her mother soon afterwards became " a scholar." Her father died, it is said, in the year of her birth; but there is no vestige of her mother's remarriage to one " Doggan " or " Doggin," to which has been attributed her after-name of Mrs. Cadogan from the present period in London to that when she became " La Signora Madre deH'Ambasciatrice," and the esteemed friend both of Hamilton and of Nelson. '" Emy " has always been described as an only child, but she seems to have had a brother or half-brother, " Charles." Thomas Kidd, an old salt and cousin, writing from Greenwich in 1809, to thank for past and beg for future favours, observes: " I have to inform you that your brother Charles is in Greenwich College

and has been here since the 6th inst.;" but I can find no further trace of this " brother," nor is there any record of relatives on the father's side. 1 This Thomas Kidd may well have been the son of a William Kidd, "labourer," who, as "widower" in September, 1769, in the Ha warden registers, married one " Mary Pova." And William Kidd is possibly Lady Hamilton's cousin or uncle, who was at one time a publican, and who used to complain that he was " never brought up to work." If this be so, something of the paternal strain seems to have descended to the son, who, in the letter just mentioned, excuses his remissness in calling, as requested, by the insinuating remark that " I declare my small cloaths are scandolous, and my hat has the crown part nearly off "; while he speaks pointedly of the attentions of a " Mr. Ingram," who in turn refers to his " justifiable character " in " His Majesty's service," and suggests that, since both the porter of the west gate and the " roasting cook " of the college are infirm and ill, there is a choice of probable promotions awaiting him. In after years it was not only her humble kinsfolk, whom she never forsook, that were to importune Emma for advancements.

The Kidds were mostly sailors or labourers. Lady Hamilton's grandmother, with whom in girlhood she often stayed, and whom she always cared for and cherished, dwelt in one of some thatched cottages, two of which still remain. That Mary Lyon, nee Kidd, was a superior woman, is shown by her after-acquirements. Tradition associates her both with dressmaking and with domestic service. If tradition again is trustworthy, she may have been cook in the household of Lord Halifax, who is also reported to have educated both her and her child. But Lady Hamilton herself,

1 At the last moment I have been informed that Emma had a sister " Anna."

writing to Mr. Bowen of Portman Square (and of Merton?) in 1802 about Charlotte Nelson's education, declares that her own did not begin till she was seventeen—that is to say, under Greville's auspices. I have read none of her mother's letters before 1800, and it is not improbable that mother and daughter began their education together. She was always an energetic housekeeper and a most resourceful home-physician. Her letters to Emma, to George Rose, and others, seem neither ill-worded nor ill-spelt. At Naples and Palermo we shall find her visited by the Queen. The King of Naples was in the December of 1798 to call her an " angel" for her services during the hurricane attending the royal escape to Palermo, though he also, if we may trust the Marchioness of Solari, had before dubbed her " Ruffiana." The Duke of Sussex highly esteemed her. Nor can the accomplished Miss Cornelia Knight have found her intolerable, for on the return of Nelson, the Hamiltons, and herself to London after the ill-starred continental tour of 1800, she drove straight off and stayed with Mrs. " Cado-gan " at the hotel in St. James's. There is no evidence as to how this homely and trustworthy woman came by her grand name. Doggin, her second husband, however, may not be a myth; although the Marchioness of Solari mentions that " Codogan " was the name by which " Emma's reputed mother " caused her to be known at Naples before her marriage; and at any rate it is a singular coincidence that Earl Nelson's companion when he went to Calais to fetch Horatia away, after Lady Hamilton's death in 1815, was to be a Mr. Henry Cadogan, a relation of the late and well-known Mr. Rothery.