Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (36 page)

of his heart. His utterances are despondent. The East India Company had voted ten thousand pounds in token of their gratitude. Two thousand pounds of it he bestowed on his relations; the whole was placed at his wife's disposal. " I that never yet had any money to think about, should be surprised if I troubled my head about it," he told his old intimate and business manager, Davison (the rich contractor of St. James's Square), whom, after the Nile battle, he had appointed agent for his scanty prize-money. " In my state of health, of what consequence is all the wealth of this world? I took for granted that the East India Company would pay their noble gift to Lady Nelson; and whether she lays it out in house or land, is, I assure you, a matter of perfect indifference to me. . . . Oh! my dear friend, if I have a morsel of bread and cheese in comfort it is all I ask of kind Heaven, until I reach the estate of six foot by two which I am fast approaching." It was not long before Maltese successes had quite restored his spirits, and Ball could write to say how happy it made him to think that " His Grace " could enjoy exercise in company with the Hamiltons. All this is characteristic of a tense organisation by turns on the rack and on the rebound, yet with an evenness of patriotism and purpose immovable beneath its elasticity.

Emma's fever of enthusiasm showed no abatement. She immediately gave Nelson the pine-appled teapot which has this year been generously presented with other relics to the Greenwich Painted Chamber. His letters to her breathed an affectionate respect. " May God almighty bless you," one of them closes, " and all my friends about you, and believe me amongst the most faithful and affectionate of your friends." Was she not the " Victory " who had crowned him with honour? He reposed such confidence in the Hamiltons that dur-

ing his absences he empowered them to open all his letters.

But already there appeared a seamier side to Emma's heroic gloss. The tmreinstated Queen still ailed in health and spirits. She had set her heart on accompanying the King to Naples in his projected visit this November, yet he had flatly refused. She seems to have turned from the pious devotions which after her darling boy's death had engrossed her to the delirium of play. The King loved his quiet rubber, but he was no gambler. The Queen gambled furiously—all her moods were extreme; she was a medley of passions. She had been Emma's lucky star, but all along her evil genius. Emma for the first time was bitten by the mania. Sir William's fortunes were crippled; she might sometimes be seen nightly with piles of gold beside her on the green baize. Troubridge bluntly remonstrated. His remonstrance, however, he added, did not arise from any " impertinent interference, but from a wish to warn you of the ideas that are going about," and to " the construction put on things which may appear to your Ladyship innocent, and I make no doubt done with the best intention. Still, your enemies will, and do, give things a different colouring." To his delight, she promised him to play no more. That promise was shortlived; it was not likely to last. Women of Emma's buoyancy and volatile salt are not easily weaned from the false flutter of such a game. All along her vein had been one of thrill under uncertainty, and her whole course a cast for high stakes. " I wish not to trust to Dame Fortune too long," wrote Nelson to her in possible allusion; " she is a fickle dame, and I am no courtier." And reports—some of them untrue and most, exaggerated—were beginning to filter into England and affront the regularities of red-tape. Nelson was depicted as Rinaldo in Armida's bower.

He is not shown to have himself gambled, but it was rumoured that he assisted, half asleep, at these revels, till the small hours of the morning, and this though his father appears to have been unwell at the time. That she played with Nelson's money to the tune of £500 a night—a rumour hardly confirmed by his bankbook. That Sir William and he had nearly settled differences by duel—a preposterous idea. That the royal bounty to her amounted to a value some five times greater than it seemingly was. That the singers whom Emma was constantly befriending and recommending were a byword for their scandalous behaviour. It never crossed her mind that anybody wished her ill. Both the Hamiltons and Nelson had been living in an isolated fool's paradise of popularity, remote from the canons or the realities of England. They hugged the illusion of home popularity. Unpopularity, whether deserved or due to envy or ill-nature, usually comes as a shock and a surprise to those who have provoked it far less than Lady Hamilton. She had long passed the patronage of that English society which only condones in a parvenue what it can patronise. It now resented her intrusion, while it resented more, and with better reason, her perpetual association with Nelson, who owned himself happy with the Hamiltons alone, and suspicious of letters being opened. The Government too had now decided to recall Hamilton. ; ' You may not know," Troubridge told her, " that you have many enemies. I therefore risk your displeasure by telling you. I am much gratified you have taken it, as I meant it — purely good. You tell me I must write you all my wants. The Queen is the only person who pushes things; you must excuse me; I trust nothing there," he continues with personal soreness, " nor do I, or ever shall ask from the court of Naples anything but for their service, and the just demands I have on them."

His motives leak out in the concluding sentences about Lord Keith :"...! should have been a very rich man if I had served George III. instead of the King of Naples, . . . The new Admiral, I suppose, will send us home—the new hands will serve them better, as they will soon be all from the north, full of liberality and generosity, as all Scots are with some exceptions.'' Emma's own account deserves to be cited also. It occurs in a letter to Greville, hitherto unnoticed, is perfectly truthful, and seeks to protect not herself, but her husband and Nelson:—" We are more united and comfortable than ever, in spite of the infamous Jacobin papers jealous of Lord Nelson's glory and Sir William's and mine. But we do not mind them. Lord N. is a truly vertuous and great man; and because we have been fagging, and ruining our health, and sacrificing every comfort in the cause of loyalty, our private characters are to be stabbed in the dark. First it was said Sir W. and Lord N. fought; then that we played and lost. First Sir W. and Lord N. live like brothers; next Lord N. never plays: and this I give you my word of honour. So I beg you will contradict any of these vile reports. Not that Sir W. and Lord N. mind it; and I get scolded by the Queen and all of them for having suffered one day's uneasiness." l

Yet she was by no means the slave of her new excitement. She tried to heal old wounds, she corresponded with diplomatists; she could not relinquish her part of female politician, the less so as Hamilton had now settled to return home on the first opportunity, and the Queen was desolated at the mere thought of separation. 2 The Duchess of Sorrentino besought her good

1 Nelson Letters, vol. i. p. 269, Lady Hamilton to Greville, February 25, 1800.

2 Morrison MS. 444, 484. In the first Hamilton tells Greville " the Queen is really so fond of Emma that the parting will be

offices from Vienna, and in urging her suit Emma abused the King so roundly, that in his umbrage he turned violently both on her and the Queen. A heated scene ensued—so heated, indeed, that the monarch demanded Emma's death and threatened to throw her out of the window for her contempt of court. 1

Nelson's acting chief command expired on January 6, 1800. Ill, and with a fresh murmur of " unkind-ness," he put himself under Lord Keith's directions at Leghorn. The blockade of Malta, which had lasted over a year, the as yet uncaptured remnant of the French squadron from the Nile, the resolve that the French army should not be suffered to quit Egypt — these were the objects, now shared with Emma, of his thoughts and of his dreams. He determined to run the risk of independent action. To Malta he proceeded instantly, and he was transported with joy when he captured Le Genereux, though he had yet to wait for the eventual surrender of the single remaining frigate to his officers. " I feel anxious," he wrote in February to Emma, during his constant correspondence with the Hamiltons, " to get up with these ships, and shall be unhappy not to take them myself, for first my greatest happiness is to serve my gracious King and Country, and I am envious only of glory; for if it be a sin to covet glory, I am the most offending soul alive. But here I am in a heavy sea and thick fog!— Oh God! the wind subsided—but I trust to Providence I shall have them. Eighteenth, in the evening, I have got her— Le Genereux —thank God! twelve out of

a serious business." In the second, " Emma is in despair at the thought of parting from the Queen." Emma herself says, " . . . I am miserable to leave my dearest friend. She cannot be consoled."— Nelson Letters, vol. i. p. 272.

1 He became excellent friends, however, with her afterwards, and joined in pleasant messages to her so late as 1803.

thirteen, only the Guillaume Telle remaining; I am after the others. I have not suffered the French Admiral to contaminate the Foudroyant by setting his foot in her." By the end of March the end of the Maltese blockade was in sight, and Nelson was back again in Palermo. His health was so " precarious," that he " dropped with a pain in his heart," and was " always in a fever." Troubridge was deputed to finish the Maltese operations. When Nelson heard of the capture of the Guillaume Telle through Long and Black-wood, his cup of thankfulness ran over, and his despatch to Nepean is a Nunc dimittis.

" Pray let me know," wrote Ball from Malta in March, " what Sir William Hamilton is determined on; he is the most amiable and accomplished man I know, and his heart is certainly one of the best in the world. I wish he and her Ladyship would pay me a visit; they are an irreparable loss to me. ... I long to know Lord Nelson's determination." Ball had not long to wait. Nelson was anxious to settle affairs finally for Great Britain at Malta,—a settlement that eventually transferred it to Britain and greatly exasperated Maria Carolina. Sir William had now been definitely superseded by his unwelcome successor Paget, although he allowed himself the fond hope of a future return. He resolved to sail on the Foudroyant, accompanied by his friends and the indispensable poetess, Miss Knight. On April 23 they proceeded from Palermo to Syracuse— the scene of Emma's triumph by the waters of Are-thusa. Her birthday was celebrated on board by toasts and songs. On May 3 they again set sail and anchored in St. Paul's Bay before the next evening.

Hitherto only rumour had been busy with Nelson's philanderings. Lord St. Vincent persisted to the last in saying that he and Emma were only a simpering edition of Romeo and Juliet—just a silly pair of senti-

mental fools. And at this time Sir William seems to have thought the same; it was all Emma's " Sensibility," all Nelson's loyal devotion. He was the idol of them both. But this voyage southward under the large Sicilian stars marks the climax of that fence of passion, the first approaches, the feints, parries, and thrusts of which I have sought to depict. The " three joined in one," as they called themselves, had long been un-severed. From the date of the Malta visit, as events prove, the liaison between the two of the trio ceases to be one of hearts merely. The Mediterranean has been the cradle of religion, of commerce, and of empire. On the Mediterranean Nelson had won his spurs and ventured his greatest exploit; on it had happened the rise of Emma's passion and his own, and it was now to be the theatre of their fall. 1

It has been well said that apologies only try to excuse what they fail to explain, and any apology for the bond which ever afterwards united them would be idle. Yet a few reflections should be borne seriously in mind. The firm tie that bound them, they themselves felt eternally binding; no passing whim had fastened it, nor any madness of a moment. They had plighted a real troth which neither of them ever either broke or repented. Both found and lost themselves in each other. Their love was no sacrifice to lower instincts; it was a true link of hearts. Nelson would have adored Emma had she not been so beautiful. She worshipped him the more for never basking in court or official sunshine. And their passion was lasting as well as deep. Not even calumny has whispered that

1 From a passage, however, in a letter from Nelson of February 17, 1801, it would seem to have happened earlier. Cf. Morrison MS. 516: "Ah! my dear friend, I did remember well the I2th February, and also the two months afterwards. I never shall forget them, and never be sorry for the consequences."

Emma was ever unfaithful even to Nelson's memory; and Nelson held their union, though unconsecrated, as wholly sacred and unalterable. If the light of their torch was not from heaven, at least its intensity was undimmed.

Their worst wrong, however, was to the defied and wounded wife. Cold letters had already reached Nelson, and rankling words may already have been exchanged ; Lady Nelson's jealousy was justified, although as yet Nelson never meditated repudiation. Emma had no scruple in hardening his heart and her own towards one whom she had offended unseen and unprovoked; she would suffer none to dispute her dominion. Under her spell, Nelson perverted the whole scale of duty and of circumstance. In his enchanted eyes wedlock became sacrilege, and passion a sacrament; his insulted Fanny seemed the insulter; his Emma's dishonour, honour. The woman who had failed to nerve or share his genius, turned into an unworthy persecutress and termagant; she who had succeeded, into the pattern of womankind. The mistress of his home was confronted by the mistress of his heart, Vesta by Venus; nor did he for one moment doubt which was the interloper. Unregenerateness appeared grace to his warped vision. Nothing but sincerity can extenuate, nothing but sheer human nature can explain these deplorable transposals. The reality for him of this marriage of the spirit without the letter, blinded both of them to all other realities outside it. Emma's few surviving letters to him are those of an idolising wife. One unfamiliar sentence from one of his, written within a year of this period, speaks volumes : " I worship, nay, adore you, and if you was single, and I found you under a hedge, I would instantly marry you." *