Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (28 page)

lish, applies also to his own communications, " Heav-ings from every side . . . contradictions from every corner."

Nelson, however, would brook no more trifling. Everything should be settled by about seven. Count Thurn should be at the appointed rendezvous, the Molesiglio. His password, unless some unexpected force intervened, was to be the English, "All goes right and well"; otherwise, " All is wrong, you may go back."

One can imagine the unfortunate Count rehearsing his provoking part that afternoon with an Austrian accent : " Al goes raight " — " Al ees vrong."

Acton and Caracciolo drew up the order of embarkation. By half-past eight the royal contingent, convoyed by Nelson and his friends through the secret passage to the little quay, were to have been rowed on board the Vanguard. It comprised besides the King, Queen, the Hereditary Prince with his wife and infant (whose " zafatta," or nurse, was no less a personage than the Duchess of Gravina), the little Prince Albert, to whom Emma was devoted (with his " zafatta " also), Prince Leopold, the three remaining princesses, Acton, Princes Castelcicala and Belmonte, Thurn, and the court physician Vincenzo Ruzzi. The second embarkation was to follow two hours later with a great retinue, including, it is interesting for Mendelssohn-admirers to notice, the name of " Bartoldi." The rest were to proceed in three several detachments, amounting to nearly four hundred souls, noble and otherwise, among whom Joseph Acton's family are specified. The two royal spinsters of France were to be conducted with every precaution by land to Portici, whence they might find their way over the border. All friendly Ambassadors were to be notified. Such was the routine. It should be especially noticed

that from these exact lists, detailing the names of every passenger, the Hamiltons are absent. They were under Nelson's care, and of his party—a point most material to the future narrative substantiating Lady Hamilton's own subsequent story. And it must further be emphasised that these Acton letters, as well as a reference in one of the Queen's, go far to establish the plan of the secret passage as an historical fact, instead of as any figment or after-inlay of Emma's imagination.

As night drew on Maria Carolina sat down to indite two letters, the one to her daughter at Vienna, the other to Emma, who would rejoin her so soon in this crisis of her fate. She wrote them amid horrors and in wretchedness. The army could no more be trusted. Even the navy was in revolt. Orders had been given that, after the royal departure, the remaining ships were to be burned lest they should fall into French or revolutionary hands. As she wrote, the tidings came that the miserable Vanni—the creature of her inquisition—had shot himself dead, and she loads herself with reproaches. Massacre continued; the very French emigres were not spared by the Italian Jacobins. Everywhere tumult, disgrace, bloodshed. The crowd, calmed for a moment, still howled at intervals for their King, whose departure they now suspected. The " cruel determination " had been foisted on her. Once on board, the Queen tells the empress, " God help us, . . . saved, but ruined and dishonoured." To Lady Hamilton she repeats the same distracted burden. Discipline has vanished. " Unbridled " license grows hourly. Their " concert with their liberator " is their mainstay. Her last thoughts are for the safety of friends and dependants, whom she confides by name to Emma's charge. Her torn heart bleeds. Mack despairs also, for Aquila is taken, " to the eternal

shame of our country." She trembles for the horrors that a cowardly people may commit.

The sky was clouded. There was a lull in the strong wind off the shore, but a heavy ground-swell prevailed as the appointed hour approached. The royal party anxiously waited in their apartments—the Queen's room with its dark exit, so familiar to the romantic Emma,—for the signal which should summon them through the tunnel to the water-side. On the Mole-siglio, and at his station near the Arsenal, stood Thurn, muffled and ill at ease. It was the night of a reception given in Nelson's honour by Kelim Effendi, the bearer from the Sultan of his " plume of triumph."

The exact sequence of what now occurred is difficult, but possible, to collect from the three contemporary and, at first sight, conflicting documents that survive. There is the Queen's own brief recital to her daughter. There is Nelson's dry official despatch to Lord St. Vincent, accentuating, however, Emma's conspicuous services. There are Emma's own hurried lines to Greville, thirteen days after that awful voyage, which, for three days and nights, deprived her of sleep and strained every faculty of mind and body.

Let us try to ascertain the truth by collation. Nelson's account is brief and doubtless accurate:—

"On the 2ist, at 8.30 P.M., three barges with myself and Captain Hope landed at a corner of the Arsenal. I went into the palace and brought out the whole royal family, put them into the boats, and at 9.30 they were all safely on board."

It is an official statement, which naturally omits the Count in waiting, the password, the mysteries of the secret corridor, which Acton in his letters, confirming Emma's after account, had arranged with Nelson.

The Queen's short notice to the Empress of Austria (hitherto unmarked) makes no mention of Emma's

name—the Queen never does in any of her letters to her daughter—but further corroborates the melodrama of the secret staircase winding down to the little quay:—

" We descended —all our family, ten in number, with the utmost secrecy, in the dark, without our women or any one, and in two boats. Nelson was our guide."

Now let us listen carefully to Emma's own graphic narrative. The hours named in it do not tally with Nelson's, and after the long strain of the tragic occurrences, culminating in the death of the little Prince Albert, she may well have been confused. They are really irrelevant. The point is the real sequence and substance of events, which, more or less, must have stayed in her immediate remembrance. It will be found that her vivid words bear a construction different from that which might appear at the first blush, and it should be borne in mind that no possible motive for distorting the facts can be alleged in this friendly communication to her old friend:—

" On the 2 ist at ten at night, Lord Nelson, Sir Wm., Mother and self went out to pay a visit, sent all our servants away, and ordered them in 2 hours to come with the coach, and ordered supper at home. When they were gone, we sett off, walked to our boat, and after two hours got to the Vanguard. Lord N. then went with armed boats to a secret passage adjoining to the pallace, got up the dark staircase that goes into the Queen's room, and with a dark lantern, cutlasses, pistols, etc., brought off every soul, ten in number, to the Vanguard at twelve o'clock. If we had remained to the next day, we shou'd have all been imprisoned."

Reading this account loosely, it might be imagined that Emma transposed the true order; that Nelson, stealing with the Hamiltons away from the reception, first brought them on board, and afterwards returned

for the royal fugitives. But the reverse of this admits of proof from her own statement. She, with her family and Nelson, quitted the party at (as she here puts it) ten. It took them two hours to reach the Vanguard. Nelson saved the royalties, who were not on board till " twelve." It is obvious, therefore, that (whatever the precise hour) the Hamiltons and Mrs. Cadogan arrived on the Vanguard at the selfsame moment as the King, the Queen, their children, and grandchild. The misimpression arises from the phrasing " Lord Nelson then went with armed boats," etc., following the previous statement of their being at their destination " after two hours." But this " then" as so often in Emma's thinking-aloud letters, seems an enclitic merely carrying on disjointed sentences. It may be no mark of time at all, but a mere reference to what happened after they hastened from the entertainment, having ordered everything as if they intended to remain until its close. Otherwise they must have " got to " the Vanguard long before the King and Queen, which, by her own recollection in this letter, they do not. It will be noted from Nelson's recital that the Vanguard could be reached in an hour.

What happened, then, seems to be this. After their hurried exit, the Hamiltons accompanied Nelson on foot. The Acton correspondence shows that, as has appeared from the pre-arrangements, the Hamiltons must have been of Nelson's private and unspecified party. Together they went to their boat where, before their start, they awaited the separate escape of the royalties. Eventually the two contingents stepped on to the deck of the Vanguard at the same moment and together. But, in the interval, something must have necessitated and occupied their attendance.

What was it ?

Here Emma's own account in her " Prince Regent's

Memorial," more than fourteen years afterwards, perhaps comes to our aid. It has been discredited even as regards the " secret passage " incident which Acton's letters reveal by distinct allusion. This is what Emma says:—

" To shew the caution and secrecy that was necessarily used in thus getting away, I had on the night of our embarkation to attend the party given by the Kilim Effendi, who was sent by the grand seignior to Naples to present Nelson with the Shahlerih or Plume of Triumph. I had to steal from the party, leaving our carriages and equipages waiting at his house, and in about fifteen minutes to be at my post, where it was my task to conduct the Royal Family through the subterranean passage to Nelson's boats, by that moment waiting for us on the shore. The season for this voyage was extremely hazardous, and our miraculous preservation is recorded by the Admiral upon our arrival at Palermo."

I venture, therefore, to suggest the following probability. Count Thurn is keeping watch, in accordance with the preconcerted plan. Captain Hope and Nelson arrive at about 7.30 by Neapolitan time at the Molesiglio. Leaving Captain Hope in charge, Nelson hurries to the reception, as if nothing were in process, and, as designed, meets the Hamiltons and Mrs. Cado-gan. Within a quarter of an hour they all sally forth, walk to the shore, and proceed in Sir William's private boat to the rendezvous, Emma, quitting her mother and husband, hastens by the palace postern to the side of her " adored Queen." The signal for the flight has already been made by Count Thurn. Emma accompanies the royal family to the winding and underground staircase, up which Nelson climbs with pistols and lanterns to conduct them. They all emerge from the inner to the outer darkness. The royal family are bestowed by Hope and Nelson in their barges. The

Hamiltons re-enter their own private boat. In another hour they again meet on board the Vanguard.

Emma's temperament alike and circumstances forbid us to suppose that, at such an hour, she would allow herself to stay apart from the Queen. She lived, and had for weeks been living, on tension. The melodrama of the moment, the danger, the descent down the cavernous passage, the lanterns, pistols, and cutlasses, the armed boats, the safe conduct of her hero, would all appeal to her. It was an experience unlikely to be repeated, and one that she would be most unlikely to forgo. Affection and excitement would both unite in prompting her to persuade Nelson into permitting her to assist in this thrilling scene. And it would be equally unlikely that either she or Nelson would report this episode to England. In any case, the incident was one more of personal adventure than of necessary help. What Nelson does single out for the highest commendation in his despatches, what was published both at home and abroad, and universally acknowledged, what Lord St. Vincent praised with gratitude, was her signal service before the voyage and under that awful storm which arose during it, in which, by every authentic account, she enacted the true heroine, exerting her energies for every one except herself, caring for and comforting all, till she was called their " guardian angel." " What a scene," wrote Sir John Macpherson to Hamilton, " you, your Sicilian King, his Queen, Lady Hamilton, and our noble Nelson have lately gone through! . . . Lady Hamilton has shown, with honour to you and herself, the merit of your predilection and selection of so good a heart and so fine a mind. She is admired here from the court to the cottage. The King and Prince of Wales often speak of her."

It was not till seven o'clock on the morning of the

23rd that the Vanguard could weigh anchor. Fresh consignments of things left behind were awaited. It was still hoped that riot might be pacified and disaffection subdued. Prince Francesco Pignatelli had been commissioned to reign at Naples during the King's absence, and was nominated Deputy-Captain-General—of anarchy. During this interval of suspense, a deputation of the magistrates came on board and implored the King to remain among his people. He was inflexible, and every effort to move him proved unavailing. On the one hand, the Lazzaroni, incensed against the Jacobins despoiling them of their King; on the other, the French Ambassador, smarting under his formal dismissal procured by Emma's influence, were each precipitating an upheaval itself engineered by French arms and agitators and used by traitorous nobles, whom both mob and bourgeoisie had grown to detest. While Maria Carolina's name was now execrated at Naples by loyalist and disloyalist alike, her misfortunes called forth sympathy from England, alarmed by the French excesses, and regarding the Jacobin mercilessness as fastening on faith, allegiance, and freedom.

Not a murmur escaped the lips of the pig-headed King or the hysterical Queen, though inwardly both repined. From the Vanguard, ere it set sail, Maria Carolina wrote her sad letter to her daughter. The " cruel resolution had to be taken." Her " one consolation " was that all faithful to their house had been saved.

After two days' anxious inaction the Vanguard and 'Sannite, with about twenty sail of vessels, at last left the bay in disturbed weather and under a lowering sky. Among the last visitors was General Mack, at the end of his hopes, his wits, and his health: " my heart bled for him," wrote Nelson, " worn to a

shadow." The next morning witnessed the worst storm in Nelson's long recollection.

And here Emma approved herself worthy of her hero's ideal. A splendid sailor, intrepid and energetic, she owned a physique which, like her muscular arms, she perhaps inherited from her blacksmith father. So quick had proved the eventual decision to fly, such had been the precautions against attracting notice by any show of preparation, so many public provisions had been hurried, that the private had been perforce neglected. Nelson himself thus paints her conduct on this " trying occasion." " They necessarily came on board without a bed. . . . Lady Hamilton provided her own beds, linen, etc., and became their slave; for except one man, no person belonging to royalty assisted the royal family, nor did her Ladyship enter a bed the whole time they were on board." Emma's Palermo letter to Greville, which is very characteristic, will best resume the narrative :—

" We arrived on Christmas day at night, after having been near lost, a tempest that Lord Nelson had never seen for thirty years he has been at sea, the like; all our sails torn to pieces, and all the men ready with their axes to cut away the masts. And poor I to attend and keep up the spirits of the Queen, the Princess Royall, three young princesses, a baby six weeks old, and 2 young princes Leopold and Albert; the last, six years old, my favourite, taken with convulsion in the midst of the storm, and, at seven in the evening of Christmas day, expired in my arms, not a soul to help me, as the few women her Majesty brought on board were incapable of helping her or the poor royal children. The King and Prince were below in the ward room with Castelcicala, Belmonte, Gravina, Acton, and Sir William, my mother there assisting them, all their attendants being so frighten'd, and on their knees

praying. The King says my mother is an angel. I have been for 12 nights without once closing my eyes. . . . The gallant Mack is now at Capua, fighting it out to the last, and, I believe, coming with the remains of his vile army into Calabria to protect Sicily, but thank God we have got our brave Lord Nelson. The King and Queen and the Sicilians adore, next to worship him, and so they ought; for we shou'd not have had this Island but for his glorious victory. He is called here Nostro Liberatore, nostro Salvatore. We have left everything at Naples but the vases and best pictures. 3 houses elegantly furnished, all our horses and our 6 or 7 carriages, I think is enough for the vile French. For we cou'd not get our things off, not to betray the royal family. And, as we were in council, we were sworn to secrecy. So we are the worst off. All the other ministers have saved all by staying some days after us. Nothing can equal the manner we have been received here; but dear, dear Naples, we now dare not show our love for that place; for this country is je[a]lous of the other. We cannot at present proffit of our leave of absence, for we cannot leave the royal family in their distress. Sir William, however, says that in the Spring we shall leave this, as Lord St. Vincent has ordered a ship to carry us down to Gibraltar. God only knows what yet is to become of us. We are worn out. I am with anxiety and fatigue. Sir William [h]as had 3 days a bilious attack, but is now well. . . . The Queen, whom I love better than any person in the world, is very unwell. We weep together, and now that is our onely comfort. Sir William and the King are philosophers; nothing affects them, thank God, and we are scolded even for shewing proper sensibility. God bless you, my dear Sir. Excuse this scrawl."

At three in the afternoon of that sad Christmas Day,

the royal standard was hoisted at the head of the Vanguard in face of Palermo. The tempest-tossed Queen, prostrate with grief at the death of her little son, refused to go on shore. The King entered his barge and was received with loyal acclamations. The Vanguard did not anchor till two o'clock of the following morning. To spare the feelings of the bereaved Queen, Nelson accompanied her and the Princesses privately to the land. Even then she was surrounded by half-enemies. Caracciolo had not yet evinced his Jacobin sympathies and was already sailing under dubious colours. The Neapolitan Captain Bausan, whose skill contributed to the safety of the ships, and who was again to pilot the King next year into port, became, in that very year, himself a suspect and an exile.

Among the furniture abandoned at the English Embassy may have been a beautiful table and cabinet which the grateful Nelson had ordered from England as mementos for Emma, and whose classical designs of muses and hovering cupids are said to have been painted by Angelica Kauffmann. These still exist, and are in the present possession of Mr. Sanderson, the eminent Edinburgh collector, to whose kindness the writer is indebted for a photograph. Was it to these, perhaps, that Nelson alluded when he mentioned the " Amorins " to Emma in 1804?

The Queen secluded herself in the old palace of Colli. It seemed ages, she soon wrote, since she had seen one to whom she repeated her eternal gratitude and perpetual concern. Her throat, head, and chest were affected; the physicians were summoned, but her malady lay beyond their cure. Not only had she been sorely bereaved, disgraced by defeats, and stung by treacheries, but her husband now began to make her a scapegoat. This, forsooth, was the fruit of her Anglo-

mania — a revolted kingdom, a maddened though adoring populace, an advancing and arrogant enemy. Every day the Queen frequented the churches for prayer and the convents for meditation. Each evening she poured out her heart to the helpful friend of her choice, whose sympathy lightened a load else insupportable.

With some difficulty the Hamiltons, whose permanent guest Nelson now first became, found a suitable abode not too distant from the palace, and, as they hoped, healthier in situation than most of a then malarious city. But they all suffered from the bad air, the more so in the reaction of the change from their Neapolitan home. On Emma now devolved half the duties of the transferred Embassy. Sir William waxed peevish and querulous. He bemoaned the wreck of the Colossus, which had carried his art treasures home. Homeward he himself yearned to retire, leaving the Consul Lock as his charge d'affaires. " I have been driven," he told Greville, " from my comfortable house at Naples to a house here without chimneys, and calculated only for summer. ... As I wax old, it has been hard upon me, having had both bilious and rheumatic complaints. I am still most desirous of returning home by the first ship that Lord Nelson sends down to Gibraltar, as I am worn out and want repose." But he shared his wife's enthusiasm for Nelson, which acted like a tonic on his nerves. " I love Lord Nelson more and more," he adds; " his activity is wonderful, and he loves us sincerely." He consoled himself with the thought that he had done his duty.