Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (54 page)

Nile, paid often and often out of my own pocket at Naples . . . and also at Palermo for corn to save Malta. Indeed, I have been ill used. Lord Sidmouth is a good man, and Lord Liverpool is also an upright Minister. Pray, and if ever Sir William Hamilton's and Lord Nelson's services were deserving, ask them to aid me. Think what I must feel who was used to give God only knows [how much], and now to ask! " l Such was the plight of one who had gladly lavished care and money on the son and daughter of Earl Nelson. That new-made Earl, who had canvassed her favour, and called her his " best friend," was now calmly leaving her to perish, and his great brother's daughter to share her carking penury and privation.

Lawyers' letters molested even the seclusion of St. Pierre. The English papers published calumnies which she was forced to contradict. Their little fund was fast dwindling, and as late autumn set in they were forced to transfer their scanty effects to a meagre lodging in the town itself.

In the Rue Franchise—No. in—and even there in its worst apartments, looking due north, the distressed fugitives found themselves in the depth of a hard winter.

They were not in absolute want, but, had their suspense been protracted, they must ere long have been so. At the beginning of December the " annuitants' " attorneys were in close correspondence with the Honourable Colonel Sir R. Fulke Greville. Proceedings, indeed, were being instigated in Chancery, which were only stopped by Lady Hamilton's unexpected demise. An embargo was laid on every penny of Emma's income. Even Horatia's pittance was not paid in advance, till she herself begged for a trifle on account from her uncle, Earl Nelson.

'Lady Hamilton to Sir William Scott—September 12, 1814.

. Under the strain of uncertainty, Emma, worried out of her wits, and drawn more closely than ever to the daughter who absorbed her fears, her sorrow, and her affection, at length collapsed. The strong and buoyant spirits, which had brought her through so many crises, including Horatia's own birth, and the coil of its consequences, failed any longer to support her. A dropsical complaint, complicated by a chill, fastened upon her chest. By New Year's Day, 1815, her state of pocket, as well as of health, had become critical. Some ten pounds, in English money, her wearing apparel, and a few pawn tickets for pledged pieces of plate, were the sole means of subsistence until Horatia's next quarter's allowance should fall due. In 1811 the Matchams had sent all they could spare; they may have done so again. If the mother, denuded of all, asked for anything, it was for Horatia that she pleaded. At her debut, Greville had noticed that she would starve rather than beg: it proved so now. Only seven years ago she had implored the Duke not to let their " enemies trample upon them." Those enemies had trampled on them indeed. A new creditor was knocking at her door, the last creditor—Death.

One can picture that deserted death-scene in the Calais garret, where the wan woman, round whom so much brilliance had hovered, lay poverty-stricken and alone. Where now were the tribes of flatterers, of importuners for promotion, or even the crowd of true and genial hearts? Her still lingering beauty had formed an element of her age, but now only the primitive elements of ebbing life remained intact—the mother and her child. By her bedside stood a crucifix —for she had openly professed her faith. Over her bed hung, doubtless, the small portraits of Nelson and of her mother—remnants from the wreck. Nelson was no longer loathed at Calais; a Bourbon sat on

the throne, and not even wounded pride angered the French against the man who had delivered the sister— now dead herself—of Marie Antoinette. Perhaps Emma is trying to dictate a last piteous entreaty to the hard-hearted Earl, and sad Horatia writing it at the bare table by the attic casement. Perhaps, while she gasps for breath, and calls to mind the child within her arms, she strives but fails to utter all the weight upon her heart. Horatia sobs, and kisses again, may be, and again that " guardian " whom now she loves and trusts with a daughter's heart. Sorrow unites them closely; here " they and sorrow sit."

Of her many tragic " Attitudes " (had Constance ever been one?) the tragedy of this last eclipses all. She, whose loveliness had dazzled Europe, whose voice and gestures had charmed all Italy, and had spellbound princes alike and peasants; whose fame, whatever might be muttered, was destined to re-echo long after life's broken cadence had died upon the air; she whose lightest word had been cherished— she now lay dying here. Nelson, her mother, her child, these are still her company and comfort, as memories float before her fading eyes. Ah! will she find the first again, and must she lose, the last ?

A pang, a spasm, a cry. The priest is fetched in haste. She still has strength to be absolved, to receive extreme unction from a stranger's hands. Weeping Horatia and old " Dame Francis " re-enter as, in that awful moment, shrived, let us hope, and reconciled, she clings, and rests in their embrace.

It had been her wish to lie beside her mother in the Paddington church. This, too, was thwarted. On the next Friday she was buried. The hearse was followed by the many naval officers then at Calais to the cheerless cemetery, before many years converted into

a timber-yard. Had she died a Protestant—such was the revival of Catholicism with monarchy in France— intolerance would have refused a service: only a few months earlier, a blameless and charming actress had been pitched at Paris into an unconsecrated grave. It was these circumstances that engendered the fables, soon circulated in England, of Emma's burial in a deal box covered by a tattered petticoat.

Earl Nelson and the Mr. Henry Cadogan, who has been mentioned earlier, came over before the beginning of February—the former to bring Horatia back, the latter to pay, through Alderman Smith's large-heartedness, the last of the many debts owing on the score of Lady Hamilton. None of them were defrayed by the Earl, who had never given his niece so much as " a frock or a sixpence." It was soon known that the " celebrated Emma " had passed away. Polite letters were exchanged between Colonel Greville and the " Prefect of the Department of Calais " as to the actual facts, and Greville's executor was much relieved to feel that Emma's departure had spared him the bother of a long lawsuit.

Horatia owed nothing to her uncle Nelson's care: she stayed with the Matchams until her marriage, in 1822, to the Reverend Philip Ward of Tenterden. She became the mother of many children, and died, an octogenarian, in 1881.

The research of these pages has tried to illumine Lady Hamilton's misdeeds as well as her good qualities, to interpret the problems and contrasts of a mixed character and a mixed career. It has tracked the many phases and vicissitudes both of circumstance and calibre that she underwent. We have seen her as a girl, friendless and forsaken, only to be rescued and trained by a selfish pedant, who collected her as he collected

his indifferent pictures and metallic minerals. We have seen her handed on to the amiable voluptuary whose torpor she bestirred, and for whose classical taste she embodied the beautiful ideal. We have seen her swaying a Queen, influencing statesmen and even a dynasty, exalted by marriage to a platform which enabled her to save, more than once, a situation critical alike for her country, for Naples, and for Europe. We have seen her rising not only to, but above, the occasions which her highest fortunes enabled. We have followed her conspicuous courage, from its germs in battling with mean disaster, to a development which attracted and enthralled the most valiant captain of his age. We have marked how her resource also enhanced even his resourcefulness. We have watched her swept into a vortex of passionate love for the hero who transcended her dramatic dreams, and sacrificing all, even her native truthfulness, for the real and unshaken love of their lives. We have shown that she cannot be held to have detained him from his public duty so long as history is unable to point to a single exploit unachieved. And eventually, we have found that the infinite expressiveness which throughout rendered her a muse both to men of reverie and of action, rendered herself a blank, when the personalities she prompted were withdrawn and could no more inspire her as she had inspired them. We have viewed her marvellous rise, and we have traced her melancholy decline, from the moment of the prelude to Horatia's birth to the years which involved its far-reaching and inevitable sequels. We have found, despite all the resulting stains which soiled a frank and fervid but unschooled and unbridled nature, that she never lost" a capacity for devotion, and even self-abandonment; while her kindness and bounty remained as reckless and extravagant as the wilfulness of her moods and

the exuberance of her enthusiasm. We have found her headstrong successively, and resolute, bold and brazen, capricious and loyal, vain-glorious, but vainer for the glory of those she loved; strenuous yet inert, eminently domestic yet waywardly pleasure-loving; serviceable yet alluring, at once Vesta and Hebe. We have tracked her, as catastrophe lowered, tenaciously beating the air, and ever sanguine that she could turn stones—even the stones flung at her—to gold. We have tracked also the cruelty and shabbiness of those that were first and foremost in throwing those stones, whose propriety was prudence, and whose virtue was self-interest. We have marked how long this woman of Samaria's way fare was beset by bad Samaritans. We have felt the falsities to which they bowed as falser than the genuine idolatry which held her from a nobler worship, and from an air purer than most of her surrounders ever breathed. It was in Nelson's erring unselfishness that her salvation and her damnation met. And in her semi-consecration of true motherhood, springing at first from wild-animal devotion to her first child, we can discern the refinement of instinct which at length led the born pagan within the pale of reverence. Astray as a girl, she had found refuge in her own devotion, with which she invested Greville's patronage. An outcast at the close, she turned for shelter to a worthier home. And above all, implanted in her from the first, and ineradicable, her unwavering fondness for her mother has half-erased her darkest blot, and made her more beautiful than her beauty. May we not say, at the last, that because she loved much, much shall be forgiven her: quid multum amavit.

The site of her grave has vanished, and with it the two poor monuments rumoured to have marked the spot; the first (if Mrs. Hunter be here believed) of

wood, " like a battledore, handle downwards"; the second, a headstone, which a Guide to Calais mentions in 1833. 1 Its Latin inscription was then partially decipherable :—

"... Quae

. . . Calesiae Via in Gallica vocata Et in domo c.vi. obiit Die xv. Mensis Januarii. A.D. MDCCCXV. suae LI." 2

It was perhaps erected by some officer of that navy which, long after she had gone, always remembered her unflagging zeal and kindness with gratitude.

Her best epitaph may be found in the touching lines indited by the literary doctor Beattie (not Nelson's Sir William Beatty), after visiting her grave on his return from attending William IV. and his wife in Germany. They were published in 1831, and have been quoted by Pettigrew.

" And here is one—a nameless grave—the grass Waves dank and dismal o'er its crumbling mass Of mortal elements—the wintry sedge Weeps drooping o'er the rampart's watery edge; The rustling reed—the darkly rippling wave— Announce the tenant of that lowly grave.

. . . Levelled with the soil, The wasting worm hath revelled in its spoil— The spoil of beauty! This, the poor remains Of one who, living, could command the strains Of flattery's harp and pen. Whose incense, flung From venal breath upon her altar, hung, A halo; while in loveliness supreme She moved in brightness, like th' embodied dream

1 Pettigrew, vol. ii. p. 636. The " battledore" bore the inscription, " Emma Hamilton, England's friend." 1 i. e. In the fifty-first year of her age.

Of some rapt minstrel's warm imaginings, The more than form and face of earthly things.

Few bend them at thy bier, unhappy one! All know thy shame, thy mental sufferings, none. All know thy frailties—all thou wast and art! But thine were faults of circumstance, not heart. Thy soul was formed to bless and to be bless'd With that immortal boon—a guiltless breast, And be what others seem —had bounteous Heaven Less beauty lent, or stronger virtue given! The frugal matron of some lowlier hearth, Thou hadst not known the splendid woes of earth: Dispensing happiness, and happy—there Thou hadst not known the curse of being fair! But like yon lonely vesper star, thy light— Thy love—had been as pure as it was bright. I've met thy pictured bust in many lands, I've seen the stranger pause with lifted hands In deep, mute admiration, while his eye Dwelt sparkling on thy peerless symmetry. I've seen the poet's—painter's—sculptor's gaze Speak, with rapt glance, their eloquence of praise. I've seen thee as a gem in royal halls Stoop, like presiding angel from the walls, And only less than worshipp'd! Yet 'tis come To this! When all but slander's voice is dumb, And they who gazed upon thy living face, Can hardly find thy mortal resting-place."

THE END

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