Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (35 page)

return to Palermo, and bring back the royal family; for I foresee not any permanent government till that event takes place. Nor wou'd it be politick, after all the hospitality the King and Queen received at Palermo, to carry them off in a hurry. So you see there is great management required. I am quite worn out. For I am interpreter to Lord Nelson, the King and Queen; and altogether feil quite shattered; but as things go well, that keeps me up. We dine now every day with the King at 12 o'clock. Dinner is over by one. His Majesty goes to sleep, and we sit down to write in this heat; and on board you may guess what we suffer. My mother is at Palermo, but I have an English lady 1 with me, who is of use to me, in writing, and helping to keep papers and things in order. We have given the King all the upper cabin, all but one room that we write in and receive the ladies who come to the King. Sir William and I have an apartment below in the ward-room, and as to Lord Nelson, he is here and there and everywhere. I never saw such zeal and activity in any one as in this wonderful man. My dearest Sir William, thank God, is well and of the greatest use now to the King. We hope Capua will fall in a few days, and then we will be able to return to Palermo. On Sunday last we had prayers on board. The King assisted, and was much pleased with the order, decency, and good behaviour of the men, the officers, etc."

The self-consciousness, the strenuousness, the devotion, the enthusiasm, the egotism, and yet the sympathy —all the old elements are here. She had thirsted for the blood and thunder of her girlhood's romances; she now beheld blood and thunder in reality. The " much-loved " King had a summary way of finishing off his enemies, and bribery as well as butchery reigned in 'Miss Cornelia Knight.

Naples. The Morrison Collection gives but three of the appeals to Lady Hamilton's kind heart. Of one the ring is tragic. A snatch of humour is welcome. A certain Englishman, Matthew Wade, was a loyalist in Naples. He it was who had begged Ruffo to grant him troops for the occupation of the castles. Troubles, in these troublous times, had fallen on his household, and I cannot refrain from subjoining a passage in a letter of his about them to Emma.

" I beg leave to remind your Ladyship that the Governour's finances is become very low, and I suppose in a short time I will lose my credit, as my house was plundered when I was in prison, under a pretext of finding papers and being a Royalist; and after, by the Calabrace before my return here, for being a Jacobine. The last was a dirty business, as they robbed my mother-in-law of her shift. She said six, tho' I never knew her and her daughter to have but three, as I well remember they usually disputed who was to put on the clean shift of a Sunday morning. However, I was obliged to buy six shifts in order to live quiet. Pray assure her Majesty and General Acton that I can't hold out much longer. Besides, my family is increased. I have got a cat and a horse which has been robbed from me by the Jacobines. I met him with a prince, and took emediately possession of him as my real proprity. ... I am told a conspiracy has been discovered and a sum of money found, in order to let seventeen of the principal Jacobines escape, now confined (and they are marked for execution) in the Castell-Nuovo; they say the Governor (from whom they have taken the command) is deeply conserned in the business. I am sorry for him, tho' I have no acquaintance with the man, but I am told he is a brave man and a soldier. But there is something in the air of the climate that softens the nerve so much, that I never knew a man—nay, nor a

woman of the country—that cou'd resist the temptation of gold." Thus Matthew Wade, humourist and philosopher.

The Vicariate of Naples was now reposed in the Duke of Salandra, who had always been loyal. Nelson appointed Troubridge Commodore of the Naples squadron, and presented him with the broad, red pennant. Nelson himself was soon to be elevated for a time to the chief Mediterranean command. The ist of August was celebrated with as much rejoicing as the situation allowed. Nelson relates to his wife, not in " vanity " but in " gratitude," the King's toast, the royal salute from the Sicilian ships of war, the vessel turned into a Roman galley in the midst of which, among the " fixed lamps," stood a repetition of last year's " rostral column," the illuminations, the magnificent orchestra, the proud cantata—Nelson came, the invincible Nelson, and they were preserved and again made happy. Indeed, Leghorn and Capua had both surrendered, as well as Naples. By the Qth of August the Foudroyant with its jubilant inmates had returned to Palermo.

Emma had again triumphed. But at what a cost to her peace of mind! A royal reign of terror had unnerved her. She was never to see " dear, dear Naples " again. Her husband leaned upon her daily more and more; and yet the active association of nearly two months, which seemed like two years, had brought her and Nelson closer than ever together as affinities. All along it was the force and vigour of her character far more than her charms and accomplishments that appealed to him, and her unflagging strength of spirit had never displayed itself to greater advantage than during these trials of the last few months. She tended faster and faster towards some irrevocable step, the

very shadow of which perturbed while it allured her. A note of discord jars on the whole tune of her triumph.

On one of the short sea expeditions, so rumour goes, that time had allowed them to join in making, a phantom had startled them. Out of the depths the livid body of Caracciolo, long immersed but still buoyant, had risen from nothingness and fixed them with its sightless gaze.

CHAPTER X

HOMEWARD BOUND

To December, 1800

THERE is an almost imperceptible turning-point in career, as in age, when the slope of the hill verges downwards. Emma had now reached her summit. Henceforward, in gradual curves, her path descends.

The royal fete chain petrc at Palermo in Nelson's honour eclipsed each previous pageant. No splendour seemed adequate to the national gratitude. The Temple of Fame in the palace gardens, its exquisitely modelled group of Nelson led by Sir William to receive his wreath from the hands of Emma as Victory; the royal reception and embrace of the trio at its portals, and the laurel-wreaths with which Ferdinand crowned them; the Egyptian pyramids with their heroic inscriptions; the Turkish Admiral and his suite in their gorgeous trappings, grave and contemptuous of the homage paid to the fair sex; the young Prince Leopold in his midshipman's uniform, who, mounting the steps at the pedestal of Nelson's statue, crowned it with a diamond laurel-wreath to the strains of " See the Conquering Hero "; the whole court blazing with jewels emblematic of the allied conquests; the mimic battle of the Nile in fireworks; the new cantata of the " Happy Concord," and the whole Opera band, with the younger Senesino at their head, bursting at the close into " Rule

J306 EMMA, LADY HAMILTON

Britannia " and " God save the King "; the weather-beaten Nelson himself moved to tears—all these formed picturesque features of a memorable night. Lieutenant Parsons, an eye-witness, thus alludes to it and the tutelary goddess both of the royal house and its two defenders, by sword and pen:—

" A fairy scene . . . presided over by the Genius of Taste, whose attitudes were never equalled, and with a suavity of manner and a generous openness of mind and heart, where selfishness, with its unamiable concomitants, pride, envy, and jealousy, would never dwell —-I mean Emma, Lady Hamilton. . . . The scene [of the young Prince crowning Nelson] was deeply affecting, and many a countenance that had looked with unconcern on the battle . . . now turned aside, ashamed of their . . . weakness." Viva Nelson! Viva Miledi! Viva Hamilton! rent the air.

Emma divided the honours with Nelson. A torrent of stanzas gushed from the Sicilian improvisatori; even surgeons burst into song.

But there were more substantial favours. Nelson received not only a magnificent sword of honour and caskets of remembrance, together with, a few months later, the newly founded order of merit, but, partly by means of Emma's advocacy, the title and estates of the Duchy of Bronte. These, however, through the mismanagement first of Grafer and afterwards of Gibbs, yielded a poor and most precarious revenue for him, and, as will be seen hereafter, a fluctuating one for Emma, whose annuity was to be charged upon it. The title " Bronte," with its Greek derivation of thunder, so curiously according with the name of his vessel, caused Nelson afterwards to be continually styled by Emma and his sisters " Jove " the thunderer. Presents poured in upon him: the Crescent from the Grand Signior, the sword and cane from Zante, commemorat-

ing the deliverance of Greece, the grants from English companies. Nor was Emma without royal recognition. A queenly trousseau awaited her on her arrival, and she received regal jewels, valued, it was said, at six thousand pounds, but which she sold two years afterwards, to Nelson's admiration, for her husband's benefit. " Nestor," indeed, was becoming more and more involved in debt, and about this period he borrowed over two thousand pounds from Nelson. He was not only worried, but worn. He took offence at trifles, and had quarrelled even with Acton.

Nelson did not dally, though Downing Street pained him by its insinuations. From all these festivities his alertness at once returned to vigilance and service. Not a fortnight passed before—occupied as he was with every sort of multifarious correspondence—he sent Duckworth to protect the British trade, on the maintenance of which he laid infinite stress, at Lisbon and Oporto, to watch Cadiz, and to keep the Straits open. He minutely directed Ball's operations at Malta, still hampered by every vexatious delay on the Italian side, and by the follies of Nizza, the Portuguese Admiral. Early in September he charged Troubridge and Louis with their mission to Civita Vecchia, which within a month freed Rome from the French., Directly he received this most cheering intelligence, he himself started in the Foudroyant for Port Mahon, with the one object of concentrating every available force by land and sea on the complete reduction of Malta, which remained ever in his " thoughts, sleeping or waking." He did not land at Palermo till October, when he was able to announce to Sidney Smith (uniformly and magnanimously helped, praised, and counselled by him throughout) that Buonaparte had passed Corsica in a bombard steering for France. No crusader ever returned with more humility—contrast his going in L'Orient. All

the same this was ill news, and Nelson was furious also at not receiving troops from Minorca, and at the frauds of the victualling department. He kept a sharp lookout on the Barbary States and pirates. He deplored the inactivity of the Russian squadron at La Valetta, and he resented the Austrian demand for their presence elsewhere; his representations caused a " cool reception " to the Archduke's suite when they visited Palermo. By Christmas he cursed the stupidity which had allowed Napoleon, hasting back for his strokes at Paris, to elude the allies. But above all, both he and Emma strained every nerve to extort grain for starving Malta from the King and Queen of Naples chicaning with Acton to retain every bushel for their own necessities. Until, after " infamous " delays and falsified promises, the dole was granted which saved thirty thousand of the Maltese loyalists from death, he " cursed the day " he " ever served the King of Naples." " Such," he wrote to Troubridge, " is the fever of my brain this minute, that I assure you, on my honour, if the Palermo traitors were here, I would shoot them first and myself afterwards." Troubridge was equally emphatic. The Maltese deputies lodged under Emma's roof. She was their " Ambassadress." It was not long before Emma's services in this matter were publicly recognised by the Czar, as Grand Master of the Maltese Knights. When he bestowed the Grand Cross on Nelson and on Ball, he also bestowed it on Lady Hamilton, with a special request to the King of England for his licence to wear it there, the only occasion, as she was ever proud to relate, that it had ever been conferred upon an Englishwoman. 1 This order

1 Cf. Nelson Letters, vol. i. p. 271. The vexed question of whether she spent as much as £5000 on this matter scarcely repays investigation. The fact remains that her services were sufficient for imperial recognition, and that the King of England

she wore next year at Vienna, and it still figures in a portrait of her taken there, as well as in a drawing of her in 1803 by Sir Thomas Lawrence. She was styled " Dame Chevaliere of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem," and from this time forward Ball always addressed her as " sister."

But the Maltese embroilments were by no means the sole annoyances that distracted Nelson's sensitive nature. He was stung to the quick by the Admiralty's complaints and suspicions. " As a junior Flag officer, . . . without secretaries, etc.," he wrote home, " I have been thrown into a more extensive correspondence than ever perhaps fell to the lot of any Admiral, and into a political situation, I own, out of my sphere. . . . It is a fact that I have never but three times put my feet on the ground since December, 1798, and except to the court, that till after 8 o'clock at night I never relax from my business." " Do not," he breaks out to Lord Spencer, " let the Admiralty write harshly to me—my generous soul cannot bear it, being conscious that it is entirely unmerited "; and, once more, to Commissioner Inglefield, " You must make allowances for a worn-out, blind, left-handed man."

Nor was he least tormented by the growing passion

allowed her to wear the order on her return. Her own account in a letter to Greville, hitherto uncited, is this: " I have rendered some service to the poor Maltese. I got them ten thousand pounds, and sent corn when they were in distress."— Nelson Letters, vol. i. p. 277. Her Prince Regent's Memorial alleges details: " I received the deputies, open'd their despatches, and without hesitation I went down to the port to try what could be done. I found lying there several vessels loaded with corn for Ragusa. I immediately purchased the cargoes: . . . this service Sir Alexander Ball in his letters to me, as well as to Lord Nelson, plainly states to be the means whereby he was enabled to preserve that important island. I had to borrow a considerable sum on this occasion, which I since repaid, and with my own private money this expended was nothing short of £5000."—Morrison MS. 1046.