Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (20 page)

The home explosion had been arrested; Neapolitan discontent had been appeased; but the frauds of the corn-contractor, Mackinnon, added knavery to increasing fiscal embarrassments. And Naples was soon to become involved in a mesh of degrading treaties. The Peace of Brescia, enforcing her neutrality and mulcting

her of eight million francs, sounded the first note of Austrian retreat. It culminated by 1797 in the shameful treaties of Campoformio and Tolentino, which eventually bound Austria to cry off. By the close of 1796 the distraught Queen raved over a separate and partly secret compact exacted by France—the most galling condition of which excluded more than four vessels of the allies at one time from any Neapolitan or Sicilian port—a proviso critical in 1798. By 1797 Naples was forced to acknowledge the French Cisalpine Republic, and France had gained the natural frontiers of the Alps and the Rhine. Buonaparte returned to Paris covered with glory. In a single campaign he had defeated five armies, and won eighteen pitched battles and sixty-seven smaller combats. He had made one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners. He had freed eighteen states. He had rifled Italy of her statues, pictures, and manuscripts. For his adopted country's arsenals he had pillaged eleven hundred and eighty pieces of artillery, and fifty-one muniments for her harbours; while no less than two hundred million francs were secured for her treasuries.

But a worse defection than Prussia's or Austria's was that of Spain, which fell like a bomb on the coalition against France, and which, as Emma alleged, first brought her on the political stage to the knowledge of the English Ministry.

Her claim, and Nelson's for her, differing in dates, since there were several transactions, was that her friendship with the Queen obtained the loan of a secret document addressed by the Spanish monarch to the King of Naples, and forewarning him of his intention to ally himself with France, a copy of which she got forwarded to London.

This service has been more questioned by Professor Laughton than by Mr. Jeaffreson, who, however,

doubts some particulars in her account of this obscure matter, and her direct initiative in it. Whatever its subsequent embroidery, Emma's contention, certified by Nelson, nor ever denied by the truthful Hamilton, is favoured by its likelihood. At the very outset, any subsidiary objection raised as to the improbability that an important despatch in cipher would have been entrusted to her keeping, falls at once to the ground, since there exists such a document in her own handwriting among the Morrison autographs; 1 while in the Queen's correspondence occurs more than one mention of a cipher transmitted to her. But, indeed, neither in her memorial of 1813 to the Prince of Wales, nor in that other to the King, nor in Nelson's last codicil, is a " ciphered letter" mentioned. The first document styles it only a " private letter." The last two agree in calling it the King of Spain's letter " expressive of " or " acquainting him with " his " intention of declaring war aga.inst England." Such pains perhaps need hardly have been bestowed to identify the document meant, with the celebrated cipher of Galatone, which the Queen handed to Emma in the spring of 1795. Some circumstantial evidence may favour the view that the substance of her claim relates to information sent home in autumn 1796, the year specified by Nelson's last codicil, by his conversation at Dresden in 1800, and on many other occasions.

Roughly speaking, the facts are these.

From the opening of the year 1795 to the autumn of 1796 the Neapolitan Ambassador at Madrid (in 1795 " Galatone," Prince Belmonte) was in constant communication, both open and secret, with the King, Queen, and Gallo, then foreign minister; and in such

1 Morrison MS. 259. Transcript (in Italian) in Lady Hamilton's handwriting of a letter (in cipher) to the Foreign Minister of Naples. Dated Aranjuez, March 31, 1796.

cases official letters, which are naturally guarded, should be carefully distinguished from private information surreptitiously conveyed. From the moment that the French Directory replaced the Reign of Terror in Thermidor, 1794, and represented itself under the dazzling triumphs of Napoleon as a stable, if epicicr, Government, Spain had been steadily smoothing the way for wriggling out of the Anti-Gallic Coalition, the more so as she longed to try conclusions with Great Britain in partnership with France, whom she had hitherto been bound to attack. For this purpose—• as Acton's manuscript letters attest—she sought to bully Naples, first out of the Anti-Gallic league, and subsequently, in 1797, out of enforced neutrality. She still considered her navy powerful, although throughout 1795 Nelson derided it as worse than useless. Her Florentine envoy wrote insolently in the autumn of 1795 that it was of no consequence that the English flag was flaunted in Mediterranean waters; the real Spanish objective ought to be Cuba, Porto Rico, St. Domingo. Tradition, national pride, and inclination all united in her effort gradually and insidiously to prepare a breach with the allied powers and a rapprochement with France.

During these long negotiations both Acton and Hamilton were kept in designed ignorance by the King, who, under his inherited bias for Spanish influence, rejoiced to think that he was now at last his own minister, outwitting and emancipated from his thwarted Queen. Maria Carolina, however, had provided her own channels of information also. All that she could ferret out was carefully communicated to Lady Hamilton, and forwarded, under strict pledges not to compromise by naming her, to Lord Grenville in London.

There are two distinct sets of the correspondence between Hamilton and Acton and Acton and Hamilton—•

that of spring and early summer, 1795, relative to the Spanish peace with France achieved in July, the project for which, however, had leaked out long before; and that of late summer and autumn, 1796, regarding Spain's much more secret and momentous decision to strike a definite alliance, offensive as well as defensive, with the enemy of Europe.

It was in connection with the latter that Nelson's last codicil claimed Emma's assistance in divulging it to the ministers, while he regretted the opportunities missed by their failure to improve the occasion. Lady Hamilton's last memorial assigns no specific date, though her brief narrative there confuses (as usual) the peace and the alliance together. The evidence points to a possibility of her having been twice instrumental in procuring documents weighty for both these emergencies; but her main exertion, as Nelson averred, was bound up with the last. Professor Laughton's acumen bears most strongly upon the letters of 1795, though at the same time he supplies and discusses the data for 1796. To his article the student is referred. Both he and Mr. Jeaffreson fasten upon her statement in the " Prince Regent " memorial alone, 1 and have not considered her undecorated and

1 These are its words:— " By unceasing application of that influence " — i. e. with the Queen— " and no less watchfulness to turn it to my country's good, it happened that I discovered a courier had brought the King of Naples a private letter from the King of Spain. I prevailed on the Queen to take it from his pocket unseen. We found it to contain the King of Spain's intention to withdraw from the Coalition, and join the French against England. My husband at that time lay dangerously ill. I prevailed on the Queen to allow my taking a copy, with which I immediately despatched a messenger to Lord Grenville, taking all the necessary precautions; for his safe arrival then became very difficult, and altogether cost me about £400 paid out of my privy purse."— Cf. Morrison MS. 1046, where the date conjectured "March, 1813 " tallies with her letter in the Rose diaries inclosing it.

Her memorial to the King contains a simpler statement

simple account tallying with Nelson's in her memorial to the King. I beg the reader's patient attention to the wording of both of these, below cited.

It is clear from the first that Emma in treating of two years mixes up the documents which she admittedly obtained from the Queen and delivered to Hamilton for transmission both in April and June, 1795, with one of several that she obtained in 1796. No single " letter " could have comprised both the rupture with the alliance and the compact with France, belonging respectively to two successive years. On April 28, 1795, the Queen sent her a ciphered letter from Galatone, demanding its return " before midnight." Next day she sent her " the promised cipher," " too glad in being able to render a service." Emma recorded on her copy of the first that her husband forwarded it with the cipher to England.

It is open, however, to argument that Emma's chief aid in unravelling a long and tangled skein of maturing crisis may have been rendered about September, 1796. Its history will resume our thread; and, since the next chapter's evidence is to support not only her crowning service with regard to the Mediterranean

"That it was the good fortune of your Majesty's memorialist to acquire the confidential friendship of that great and august Princess, the Queen of Naples, your Majesty's most faithful and ardently attached Ally, at a period of peculiar peril, and when her august Consort . . . was unhappily constrained to profess a neutrality, but little in accordance with the feelings of his own excellent heart. By which means your Majesty's memorialist, among many inferior services, had an opportunity of obtaining, and actually did obtain, the King of Spain's letter to the King of Naples expressive of his intention to declare war against England. This important document, your Majesty's memorialist delivered to her husband, Sir William Hamilton, who immediately transmitted it to your Majesty's Ministers." This assertion tallies with Nelson's. There is no proof of the date of this paper, which in the Morrison MS. (1045) is guessed to be identical with that of the " Prince Regent" memorial above transcribed.

fleet, but the substantial accuracy of her two statements of it, it is worth while in this matter also to inquire somewhat closely whether Emma was a liar, and Nelson a dupe.

Two Acton manuscripts towards the end of Augast, 1796, cast a sidelight on the numerous letters of that year from the Spanish court, culminating in some kind of announcement by the Spanish King to his brother of Naples of his final decision to join the French.

Acton vied amicably with Hamilton in obtaining the first advices for transmission to London; and indeed to Acton's penchant (like our own Harley's under Queen Anne) for engrossing business and favour Nelson afterwards referred in a letter to Lady Hamilton, where he declares that he will no longer " get everything done " through Acton, as was his " old way." Both Acton and Wyndham, England's envoy at Leghorn, were already aware of Spain's tentatives with France; but neither they nor the English Ambassador at Madrid could have discovered till later the precise terms of a coming alliance, vital to Europe. It would press the more on Naples, in view of that undignified and stringent accommodation with the French Directory, into which the Franco-Hispanian conspiracy, after a brief armistice, was fast driving her reluctant councils. For months Prince Belmonte (transferred from Madrid to Paris) had been dangling his heels as negotiator in the French capital, subjected to insolent demands and mortifying delays and chicanes. From the spring of 1796 onwards a series of threatening letters had been received by Ferdinand from Charles; and all the time the pro-Spanish party, designing a dethronement of the Neapolitan Bourbons, kept even pace with Maria Carolina's hatred of a sister-in-law caballing for her son. Ferdinand himself still clung to the Spanish raft; Charles of Spain

was his brother, and blood is thicker than water. While England grew more and more faint-hearted, and Grenville forwarded despatch after despatch advising Naples to give up the game and make the best terms available with the Directory; while Napoleon's victories swelled the republicanisation of Italy, the Spanish plot also for sapping Great Britain's Mediterranean power, and overthrowing the dynasty of the Two Sicilies, increased in strength. Yet the King of Naples still temporised. For a space even Acton veered; he listened to Gallo and the King, the more readily because his own post was endangered in 1795, when there had been actual rumours of his replacement by Gallo. In 1796 he saw no way out but the sorry compromise with France, which he half desired, and the enforced neutrality which disgusted Naples in December. Milan had fallen. Piedmont had been Buonaparte's latest democratic experiment. The Austrians, led by Wurm-ser, were failing in combat, as their court by the first month of the next year was to fail in faith. Naples was fast being isolated both from Italy and Britain; small wonder then that through Acton's earlier letters of 1796 there peers a sour smile of cynical desperation. But directly he realised the full force of the Franco-Hispanian complot, and the stress of reverses to the allied arms, he changed his ply. ^ He avowed himself ready " to break the peace "; he rejoined and rejoiced the Queen; he again looked to England. As Grenville waxed colder, the more warmly did Acton compete with Hamilton in egging on the British Government by disclosing the hard facts detected. Hamilton, however, forestalled him. He, Emma, and the Queen had throughout been in frequent confabulation, while the Hamiltons were also in close correspondence with Nelson. But it was Emma, not her husband, that was daily closeted with Carolina,

whose letters to the ambassadress prove how well she was informed of Spain's machinations. So early as June, 1793, we have seen Emma already politicising. In April, 1795, she reports once more to Greville: " Against my will, owing to my situation here, I am got into politics, and I wish to have news for my dear, much loved Queen whom I adore." She had already transcribed a ciphered communication from Spain as to King Charles's probable defection from the alliance. She now definitely advances towards the political footlights.

The preceding year had settled the habit by which the Queen conveyed secret documents to the friend who as regularly copied or translated them for her husband. 1 So far the chief of these had been the " Chiffre de Galatone " transmitted to England at the close of April, I7952 All of them, however, principally related to the Spanish peace with France then brewing in Madrid, of which the British Government had gained other advices from their representative at the Spanish court. That even this, however, was not quite a