Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (50 page)

ment concerning its surrender, in his wife's handwriting, still attests. In the future, only two years after declaring, " No one can wish her better than I do," he was to begrudge one halfpenny of the expenses after her death. Only a few months before it, his behaviour caused her to exclaim in a letter which has only this year seen the light, and which is one of the most piteous yet least complaining that she ever wrote, " He has never given the dear Horatia a frock or a sixpence." He squabbled over Clarke and M'Arthur's Life of his brother. And long after Emma lay mouldering in a nameless grave, he declined to put down his name for the book of a brother clergyman, on the ground that for books he had long ceased to subscribe. If Emma rasped him by overbearing defiance (and she never set herself to conciliation), it would excuse but not justify him, since Horatia's prospects were as much concerned as Emma's in the fulfilment of the last request of the departed brother, to whom he and his owed absolutely everything.

The worst was yet far distant. But harassing vexations already began to cluster round the unhappy woman, who was denied her demands by ministers alleging as impediments long lapse of time and the inapplicability of the Secret Service Fund, though Rose and Canning afterwards acknowledged them to be just. Pitt's death with the dawning year rebuffed anew, as we have seen, the main hope of this unfortunate and importunate widow. Hidden briars beset her path also. Her once obsequious creditors already clamoured, and were only staved off temporarily by the delusive promises of Nelson's will. For a time one at least of the Connors x caused her secret and serious uneasiness

1 Ann, who, with the touch of madness peculiar to the whole family, and at this time dangerous in Charles, associated herself now with Emma " Carew," whose pseudonym she took, as Lady

by ingratitude and slander; while the whole of this extravagant family preyed on and " almost ruined " her. But, worse than all, the insinuations of her enemies began at length to find a loud and unchecked outlet. " How hard it is," she wrote of her detractors, during a visit to Nelson's relations, in a letter of September 7, 1806, to her firm ally the departed hero's friend and chaplain, " how cruel their treatment to me and to Lord Nelson! That angel's last wishes all neglected, not to speak of the fraud that was acted to keep back the codicil. ... It seems that those that truly loved him are to be victims to hatred, jealousy, and spite. . . . We have, and had, what they that persecute us never had, his unbounded love and esteem, his confidence and affection. ... If I had any influence over him, I used it for the good of my country. ... I have got all his letters, and near eight hundred of the Queen of Naples' letters, to show what I did

Hamilton's daughter. " How shocked and surprised I was, my dear friend," writes Mrs. Bolton. " Poor, wretched girl, what will become of her? What could possess her to circulate such things? But I do not agree with you in thinking that she ought to have been told before, nor do I think anything more ought to have been said than to set her right. ... I am sure I would say and do everything to please and nothing to fret." —Morrison MS. 896, Friday, October n, 1806. In her "will" of 1808 Emma records:—" I declare before God, and as I hope to see Nelson in heaven, that Ann Connor, who goes by the name of Carew and tells many falsehoods, that she is my daughter, but from what motive I know not, I declare that she is the eldest daughter of my mother's sister, Sarah Connor, and that I have the mother and six children to keep, all of them except two having turned out bad. I therefore beg of my mother to be kind to the two good ones, Sarah and Cecilia. This family having by their extravagance almost ruined me, I have nothing to leave them, and I pray to God to turn Ann Connor alias Carew's heart. I forgive her, but as there is a madness in the Connor family, I hope it is only the effect of this disorder that may have induced this bad young woman to have persecuted me by her slander and falsehood."—Morrison MS. 959.

for my King and Country, and prettily I am rewarded." For glory she had lived, for glory she had been ready to die. In seeking to rob her of glory by refusing to acknowledge her services, and by traducing her motives her foes had wounded her where she was most susceptible. Pained to the quick, yet as poignantly pricked to defiance, she uplifted her voice and spirit above and against theirs:—

" Psha! I am above them, I despise them; for, thank God, I feel that having lived with honour and glory, glory they cannot take from me. I despise them; my soul is above them, and I can yet make some of them tremble by showing how he despised them, for in his letters to me he thought aloud." The parasites were already on the wing. " Look," she resumed, " at Alexander Davison, courting the man he despised, and neglecting now those whose feet he used to lick. Dirty, vile groveler." She meets contumely with contumely.

But her warm and uninterrupted intercourse with Nelson's sisters and their families proved throughout a ray of real sunshine. She stayed with them—especially the Boltons—incessantly, and they with her at Merton. The Countess Nelson herself, even after her husband's unfriendliness, was her constant visitor. Horatia was by this time adopted " cousin" to all the Bolton and Matcham youngsters. Nothing could be further from the truth, as revealed in the Morrison Autographs, than the picture of Emma, so often given, as now a broken " adventuress." She led the life at home of a respected lady, befriended by Lady Elizabeth Foster and Lady Percival. Lady Abercorn begged her to bring Naldi and perform for the poor Princess of Wales. But her heart stayed with Nelson's kinsfolk, with Horatia's relations. She stifled her sorrow for a while with the young people, who

still found Merton a home, as Mrs. Bolton tenderly acknowledged. Charlotte Nelson was still an inmate, and Anne and Eliza Bolton were repeatedly under its hospitable roof. Emma's godchild and namesake, Lady Bolton's daughter, was devoted to Mrs. Cadogan —they all " loved " her, she called her " grandmama." The Cranwich girls reported to " dearest Lady Hamilton " all their tittle-tattle, the country balls, their musical progress, the matches, the prosperous poultry, their dishes and gardens. They awaited her Sunday letters—their " chief pleasure "—with impatience. They never forgot either her birthday or Mrs. Cado-gan's. When in a passing fit of retrenchment she meditated migration to one of her several future lodgings in Bond Street, who so afraid for her inconvenience as her dear Mrs. Bolton? When the ministry, after Pitt's demise, brought Canning to the fore, who* again so glad that George Rose was his friend and hers, so convinced that the " new people who shoot up " as petitioners were the real obstacles to her success ? And so in a sense it proved, for one of the ministry's excuses may well have been that a noble family had been ten years on their hands. Mrs. Bolton still hoped—even in 1808—that the " good wishes of one who is gone to heaven will disappoint the wicked." Mrs. Matcham, too, who " recalled the many happy days we have spent together," was always soliciting a visit: " It will give us great pleasure to fete you, the best in our power." She longed—in 1808 again—to pass her time with her, though it might be a " selfish wish." But Emma preferred the Bolton household. She and Horatia went there immediately after the " codicil" annoyances, and twice more earlier in that same year alone. Emma, they repeated, " was beloved by all." And her affection extended to their friends at Brancaster and elsewhere. Sir William Bolton re-

mained in his naval command, and Lady Hamilton kept her popularity with the navy. Anne and Eliza Bolton, together with their mother, hung on her lightest words, and followed her singing-parties at " Old Q.'s," in 1807, with more than musical interest. Eliza, indeed, one regrets to recount, confided a dream to Emma, a dream of " Old Q.'s " death and a thumping legacy. " There is a feeling for you at this heart of mine," wrote Anne Bolton, just before the crash, " that will not be conquered, and I believe will accompany me wherever I may go, and last while I have life." Surely in Emma must have resided something magnetic so to draw the hearts of the young towards her •—even when, as now, she seemed to neglect them. Those who judge, or misjudge her, might have modified their censoriousness had they experienced the winning charm of her friendship.

But all this while, and under the surface, Emma continued miserable, ill, and worried. Her importunities with the Government were doomed to failure; her monetary position, aggravated by reckless generosity towards her poverty-stricken kinsfolk, grew more precarious; but her pride seems not to have let her breathe a syllable of these embarrassments to the Boltons or the Matchams.

For a while she removed to 136 Bond Street as a London pied-a-terre. One of her letters of this period survives, addressed to Captain Rose, her befriender's son. Horatia insisted on guiding Emma's hand, and both mother and daughter signed the letter. " Continue to love us," she says, " and if you would make Merton your home, whenever you land on shore you will make us very happy." To Merton, so long as she could, she and her fatherless daughter still clung.

To carry out Nelson's wishes with regard to Hora-tia's education was her main care, but her ideas of

education began and ended with accomplishments. Horatia's precocities both delighted and angered her. Of real mental discipline she had no knowledge, and her stormy temper found its match in her child's.

Her restless energy, bereft of its old vents, found refuge in getting Harrison to write his flimsy life of the hero; in trying to dispose of the beloved home, which she became hourly less able to maintain; in coping with her enemies; in dictating letters to Clarke, another of the throng of dependants with whom she liked to surround herself; in hoping that Hayley would celebrate her in his Life of Romney. An unpublished letter from her to him of June, 1806—a portion of which has been already cited—depicts her as she was. She is " very low-spirited and very far from well." She was " very happy at Naples, but all seems gone like a dream." She is " plagued by lawyers, ill-used by the Government, and distracted by that variety and perplexity of subjects which press upon her," without any one left to steer her course. She passes " as much of her time at dear Merton as possible," and " always feels particularly low " when she leaves it. She tries hard to gain " a mastery over herself," but at present her own unhappiness is as invincible as her gratitude to her old friend who so often influenced her for good. She is distraught, misinterpreted, the sport of chance and apathy.

"L'ignprance en courant fait sa roide homicide, L'indifference observe et le hasard decide."

Two years later again, when misfortunes were thickening around her, she thus addressed Heaviside, her kind surgeon:—". . . Altho' that life to myself may no longer be happy, yet my dear mother and Horatia will bless you, for if I can make the old age of my good mother comfortable, and educate Horatia, as

the great and glorious Nelson in his dying moments begged me to do, I shall feel yet proud and delighted that I am doing my duty and fulfilling the desires and wishes of one I so greatly honoured." And in the same strain she wrote in that same year to Greville, who had then relented towards her. She strove, she assured him, to fulfil all that " glorious Nelson" thought that she ".would do if he fell"—her "daily duties to his memory." Of " virtuous " Nelson she writes perpetually. On him as perpetually she muses. For till she had met him she had never known the meaning of true self-sacrifice. In his strength her weak soul was still absorbed. Remembrance was now her guiding star; but it trembled above her over troubled waters, leading to a dismal haven. Nor, in her own sadness^ was she ever unmindful of the misery and wants of others.

Before the year 1808, which was to drive her from " dear, dear Merton," had opened, she received one more letter which cheered her. Mrs. Thomas, the widow of her old Hawarden employer, the mother of the daughter who first sketched her beauty, and whom Emma always remembered with gratitude, wrote to condole with her on the misconduct of some of the Connors. She alluded also to that old relation, Mr. Kidd, mentioned at the beginning of our story, who from being above had fallen beyond work, but who still battened on the bounty of his straitened benefactress :—

"... I am truly sorry that you have so much trouble with your relations, and the ungrateful return your care and generosity meets with, is indeed enough to turn your heart against them. However; ungrateful as they are, your own generous heart cannot see them in want, and it is a pity that your great generosity towards them shou'd be so ill-placed. I don't doubt

that you receive a satisfaction in doing for them, which will reward you here and hereafter. .1 sent for Mr. Kidd upon the receipt of your letter. I believe he has been much distressed for some time back. ... As he observes, he was not brought up for work." In her opinion, the less pocket-money he gets, the better; it " will onely be spent in the ale-house." The Reyn-oldses, too, had been living upon Emma, and another relation, Mr. Nichol, Kidd's connection, expected ten shillings a week. Emma had provided Richard Reynolds with clothes, and a Mr. Humphries with lodging. They all imagined her in clover, and she would not undeceive them. When her " extravagance " is brought up against her, these deeds of hidden and ill-requited generosity should be remembered. She was more extravagant for others than for herself. She even besought the Queen of Naples to confer a pension on Mrs. Grafer, though she besought in vain. And all the time she continued her unceasing presents to Nelson's relations, and to poor blind " Mrs. Maurice Nelson."

But these were the flickers of a wasting candle. By April, 1808, Merton was up for sale. The Boltons had not the slightest inkling of her disasters. They missed the regularity of her letters; they had heard that she was unwell, and fretting herself, but they were quite unaware of the cause. Indeed, Anne Bolton was herself now at Merton with Horatia, under the care of Mrs. Cadogan, who was soon ill herself under the worries so bravely withheld.

Maria Carolina, still in correspondence with her friend, was, however, unable, it would seem, or unwilling to aid her since she had written the reluctant plea on her behalf to the English ministers four years previously. Indeed, it may be guessed that one of the reasons alleged for disregarding the supplication of