The Perils of Command (4 page)

There was silence as William Hotham watched his flag being bent on, the sailors turning to the captain of the ship, John Holloway, to await the command. And wait they did as the admiral savoured his moment. Finally he nodded, Holloway barked and the blue flag shot up the foremast. The joy was to watch all those white flags being struck and every vessel doing likewise.

There were three Neapolitan ships in the fleet, two 74s and a frigate. They had run up a signal to wish Hotham well, this as the sound broke out across the anchorage as every man in the British Fleet cheered their new commander, soon drowned out as he was afforded his due of a fifteen-gun salute from his own flagship cannon. It would have taken a keen eye to see that there was far from universal joy.

Sam Hood had been a popular C-in-C, a man who had fought in more than one successful fleet action and, to those he led, a proper sailor. He was the hero of the Battle of the Saintes, the man everyone in the navy reckoned deserved the credit for victory in that action instead of the rapacious sod George Rodney, who had been granted that honour.

If anyone had told William Hotham he was not loved he would not have cared; he had too much self-regard to
be bothered. He could not help but look up at the blue flag, cornered by the ensign of the nation. It was forty-three years since he had first entered as a midshipman and now the dream he had harboured on that day was realised.

‘Mr Holloway, we will need to send word to the inshore squadron to change their flags. Let the French see they have a new challenger to deal with.’

‘Sir. And may I give you joy of your promotion.’

‘You will be pleased to know, Holloway, that Admiral Parker is to return to us, so he will resume his post as Captain of the Fleet. Thus you will no longer be required to perform that duty.’

‘A relief indeed, sir.’

‘I think you may look forward to shifting to a frigate too, you have done enough service as a flag captain.’

The lie was smoothly delivered by Holloway. ‘It would be a shame to relinquish
Britannia
, sir, and proximity to your flag.’

‘A signal to all captains to repair aboard, if you please.’

The invitation to celebrate had to be extended to every captain and that included the Neapolitans, masters and commanders, lieutenants in charge of non-rated ships; sloops, brigs and bomb vessels. If many were welcome it was not all; too many of those coming aboard were Hood’s men, none more so than Captain Horatio Nelson. To Hotham’s way of thinking, Nelson was a man much overindulged by his predecessor; how many times had he been sent away on detached duties in place of men equally deserving?

Not that Nelson showed the slightest sign of disappointment, which in a way irritated Hotham. He was effusive in his praise, which the recipient took to be an attempt to crawl into his good books instead of genuine feeling. It would not wash; Hotham had his own client officers to care for, men like Ralph Barclay who would now be favoured with a chance to cruise independently and perhaps snap up a prize or two in the process.

There was a temptation to remove Nelson’s blue commodore’s pennant, given to him when he had commanded not only his own vessel but a trio of frigates; it was, after all, only a courtesy rank in the gift of Hood as C-in-C. He decided to let it rest for a while. Nelson would find out soon enough how little favour he enjoyed in the great cabin of ‘Old Ironsides’, the sobriquet by which HMS
Britannia
was known throughout the fleet.

‘Captain Barclay, I find you well?’

‘Set up even better than normal, Sir William. No man deserves more what has come to you this day.’

Picked up by others, unavoidable it having been said in such a carrying voice, it engendered a whole host of salutations. The cabin rang with, ‘Hear him, hear him!’ and clinking goblets, any natural enthusiasm being fuelled by already copiously consumed wine. The less pleased were well versed in false zeal, it being a very necessary trait in the service to manufacture sentiments not truly held.

The bulkheads towards the stern were removed, to show a highly polished and long mahogany dining table, with all its leaves employed and set with crystal glass and silver cutlery, both gleaming due to the sunlight streaming through the casement windows.

The very best of Hotham’s possessions had been laid out from which to eat and drink, in order to drive home that their host was already a wealthy man, to indicate that if God had answered his prayers, such good fortune would fall upon them too.

The trip across Italy by the Pelicans was one taken in mixed circumstances. The Via Traiana, running straight and flat through endless olive groves of Apulia, had been built in the reign of Trajan to shorten the route to the Adriatic and was, as Michael O’Hagan observed when told of its age, in a far better state than many a road in England laid down in the intervening seventeen hundred years.

The benign weather that had greeted them at Brindisi did not last. Many times the Pearce party were caught in heavy rain, and in one case a ferocious storm that sent down bolts of lightning by the hundred, terrifying for the fact that there seemed no shelter for miles around; it was in the lap of providence that anyone or anything survived.

They saw an ancient olive tree split in two and set alight. Several cows and sheep were struck dead as the Pelicans cowered by the coach, with Michael O’Hagan wailing a prayer to the Virgin Mary for salvation, hardly audible against the fury of the wind and the regular claps of thunder.

Nor did they enjoy the comfort of a flat landscape for
the whole journey. Seven leagues from Benevento the road rose into the Apennines, escalating continuously through snowcapped mountains while the passes through which they had to make their way were also of high elevation.

This necessitated that the passengers, wrapped up against the chill, walk alongside their conveyance so that it could breast the steep inclines, even being occasionally called upon to lend a shoulder so that the weary animals could make it to the next post house and rest, or to carry their own possessions – John Pearce’s chest and the Pelicans ditty bags – for the same purpose.

Away from the ship and the hierarchy that imposed, the four men could act as equals in the manner they had on first acquaintance: for they had originally met each other as civilians in the Pelican Tavern, set on the banks of the Thames. That was an event much recalled, as was the arrival of the man who, it turned out, was running from a King’s Bench warrant, most of these new acquaintances being in fear of a mere tipstaff.

In recollection, the name of Pearce’s father Adam came up since he, according to Charlie Taverner, had been the cause of all of his son’s problems. ‘Don’t you smoke it, John. If he had not been so keen on his levelling then you would not have had those King’s Bench bastards on your tail and you would never have sought shelter.’

‘You place a mighty burden on his old shoulders, Charlie. Happen if the likes of you had risen up in the same way as did the French, we would not have had anything to fear.’

‘Excepting the loss of your head.’

This was imparted by Rufus Dommet in a manner that had become more common of late; the onetime tyro of the
group, nervous and often silent, had grown up now and in doing so had acquired a serious mien as well as a handy pair of fists. Where Charlie, first met, had been a fly sort, not surprising given his background, Rufus had been a shy youth and on the run from the law for a broken bond of apprenticeship.

Handsome Charlie, with his winning ways, good looks and native cunning had been in the Thameside warren known as the Liberties of the Savoy for his way of life. He was a villain the tipstaffs would have dearly loved to collar for the way he had dunned the innocent out of their money.

This was done through the sale of glister not gold, forged lottery tickets and his dab pickpocketing hand. Trouble was, said bailiffs were barred from the Liberties by ancient statute and could not touch him within its bounds, and all were free to wander where they willed on Sundays.

In speaking of decapitation Rufus had alluded to something that had troubled John Pearce long before his own father had suffered the fate of so many. The mere mention brought back a horrible memory of the day in Revolutionary Paris that ardent tongue had finally been stilled. He had stood as witness to that terrible act in a jam-packed Place de la Revolution as the guillotine did its work.

Adam Pearce, the radical speaker and pamphleteer known as the Edinburgh Ranter, chased from his own country because his views were seen as seditious, had fallen foul of men who, spouting words of freedom, hated that he questioned their motives and actions which had descended into barbarism. In place of
Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité
there had come about a vengeful bloodbath.

No amount of threats would silence him until finally
the vocal sermonising about their crimes led to Adam being incarcerated and proscribed as an enemy of the Revolution, which could have only one outcome in what had subsequently been dubbed the Terror. Sure that he was seriously ill, certain the hand of death was already upon him, Adam went to his fate in place of another, an aristocrat and family man who shared a cell with him in the fetid corridors of the Paris prison known as the Conciergerie.

Had he been right? Even before that dreadful day, son John had harboured doubts about his father’s solutions to the ills of monarchy and government by the powerful driving down on the weak: while he agreed with the sentiment it was not so easy to see the reality. In a peripatetic life, touring the country with the man known for his forceful oratory, he had seen much of human nature which was compounded when the pair had experienced, thanks to a nervous British government, the hell of the Fleet Prison for a short spell.

The dregs of humanity resided there, and just as what had happened in France demonstrated the results of rapidly overturning the rule of law, that experience had shown John Pearce his fellow men and women in all their guises, and few of those, be they high born or low, could be described using a word like glorious.

The observation Rufus had made about losing your head was seen as unthinking by Michael O’Hagan, troubling to Pearce and that got the freckle-faced younger man a glare to tell him he had overstepped the mark, engendering an immediate mumbled apology, one brushed aside.

‘My father was all for freedom of speech Rufus. He would not have had you hold your tongue, even if it was likely to cause upset.’

‘Sure, John-boy, there’s a way of saying things that’s right and another that is not.’

‘True.’

That brought to the Irishman’s face a look that presaged a sally, a sure sign he was going to get great amusement from his own comment. ‘Like a rebuke to me for the effects of drink when you come aboard two nights on the trot, three sheets to the wind an’ scarce able to walk.’

‘If I felt any shame for it, Michael, all I would have to do is recollect the night we met. You were blind drunk I recall and you sought to remove my head from my shoulders with those great fists of yours. Yet you have not behaved so since, so I must be content.’

The incident in that smoky tavern, prior to the invasion of a whole hoard of naval brutes, was a standing joke amongst the Pelicans, one of the few that could be drawn out as such from an occasion that lived in their minds as a calamity. Ralph Barclay had led his press gang into the Liberties, against both the law and custom, to take up for sea duty men not bred to it, which was another crime on its own.

Such a jocular response from John Pearce should have brought on shared laughter and repeated reminiscence, added to comments that it was a pity Michael’s swinging hams had missed. That it did not confused him; indeed his companions, if anything, looked sheepish rather than pleased to be reminded.

‘Have I said something untoward?’

‘No,’ replied Charlie, who for all his skill had a cast in his eye of false innocence.

‘It has always pleased me that we are friends—’

‘Not always, John.’

‘True, Rufus, there are times when I have cursed you all. But deep down we share a regard and a history that binds us firm and makes us honest with each other, or so I believed till this very moment.’

‘Don’t get what you is driving at,’ Charlie chipped in.

‘I sense a secret shared by you and kept from me.’

‘Imaginings,’ opined Michael.

This only deepened the suspicions of Pearce, there being a deliberate attempt to avoid eye contact. He then reasoned that it had been a long time since they had been in a position such as they were now, free from the need to act as officer and common seamen, not since Leghorn and that had been brief. Had something occurred in the interval – his own behaviour being the most obvious – that was acting to stretch their bond? He could ask, but he doubted he would be afforded an honest answer and that was hurtful.

The cry from the coachman was a now familiar one – the need to disembark – yet it was no steep incline to overcome this time but a customs post, soon revealed as the crossing they must make from the Kingdom into the Papal States, fortunately as opposed to the French revolution as were Naples and Britain.

‘This should make you happy, Michael. If the Catholic God has a corporeal presence anywhere it will be here as well as Rome. Happen you’ll get a sight of where your Peter’s pence is actually spent.’

If said in a jocose way there was an underlying mischievousness in the statement. Adam Pearce had lambasted the aristocracy for their blind cruelty to the poor, but he had even more vehemently cursed a church that called
itself Christian yet acted as if Satan was more their master, and in this his son had entirely agreed.

How many times had John heard Adam ask in his stump speeches why an Archbishop of Canterbury required two palaces and an income of twenty-five thousand pounds a year, his inferior bishops just as well housed and just as suffused with personal greed, while minor clerics were often close to starvation and their parishioners rarely dined on meat?

He recalled telling Michael tales of the Catholic Church of France, stories he had heard in the salons of Paris after he and Adam had been forced to flee there and his father was still a feted visitor for his radical views.

Prior to the rise of the Jacobins, the city had been a delightful place in which to reside, free from the stench of monarchy and with a religious bloodsucker equally tamed. The Church in France had been broken. It no longer held vast swathes of property or was corrupt to an almost unimaginable degree.

Prior to the change, cardinals lived like princes, with retinues numbered in the hundreds, many armed, and incomes reckoned by the millions of livres. They and their bishops lived in sumptuous splendour, consorting openly with mistresses who made no attempt to hide their presence or the production of their illegitimate offspring. Adam had no great love for the notion of celibacy and neither did his son but both abhorred the blatant hypocrisy of a religion founded on the principles of poverty and simplicity.

‘Never pay heed to that, John-boy,’ had been Michael’s response, and it was one that survived the sight of the numerous papal palaces and overdecorated churches of Benevento, a cool mountain retreat to divines in the summer
months. ‘The creatures who occupy these will have to answer for their sins on the Day of Judgement.’

‘Then let us hope money plays no part in that assessment of worth,’ had been John Pearce’s jaundiced reply.

Soon they passed back into the Kingdom of Naples, making rapid progress downhill and on the flat, slowed every time they came to one of the hills between them and their destination, until atop one peak they finally spotted Vesuvius, or at least the column of sulphurous smoke that rose from its cone.

Nothing, not even a doubt about the strength of friendship that had troubled John Pearce, could dim the excitement he felt at being so close to his lover.

Emily Barclay had ceased to use the style of the husband she had come to despise, reverting to her maiden name of Raynesford, this being how she was known in Naples. She had sought to keep her residence discreet, a convenient cover as, even in such a lax environment, a married woman openly consorting with her lover was a cause of comment, but such sentiments were brushed aside by her hostess.

As Lady Hamilton had pointed out many times, marital fidelity in Naples was the exception not the norm, and too often for her own liking Emily found herself in an open coach with the wife of the British Ambassador, both hailed for their beauty by the populace as they passed through the crowded streets.

If Lady Hamilton was untroubled by such a liaison her guest was not. Emily had been brought up to respect her religion and the tenets by which women of her social class lived their lives and that did not encompass an acceptance of
adultery. It was all very well for John Pearce to ridicule such sentiments, with his constant references to how life was lived in Paris and better for it, but Emily could not fully accept existing in such a state.

His presence alleviated that, obviously: she was in love with him and when he was by her side or shared her bed it was hard to feel guilty. His absences, however, brought back her feelings of doing wrong and the thought that the God in whom she firmly believed must be frowning at her behaviour, never mind her friends and family, if they knew, for she could not communicate with them to offer any explanation. This allowed guilt to triumph over any memory of pleasure.

She had tried to break their connection and return to England without him once already but that had been thwarted by circumstance. Yet the idea had not died; it was very much in her mind. As a guest of Sir William Hamilton and his wife she could not have asked for more in the way of comfort and with propinquity came a less harsh judgement of a lady with a very chequered past, a woman she had originally seen as somewhat spiteful.

Lady Hamilton had been branded a whore in the collective mind of the British upper classes, her husband pitied more than envied for first keeping her as a mistress and then marrying a woman of her background. Some of that, Emily realised, was brought on by jealousy, for Emma Hamilton had been a rare and stunning beauty in her younger years.

Often painted in classical poses by George Romney, Emma’s looks were known to many in the
ton
who had never met her but were happy to traduce her from gossip alone. Such was her attraction to portraitists that the Palazzo Sessa was filled with paintings of her by any number of famous
artists who has passed through Naples, and one Madame Vigée Le Brun was near to being another resident, so often was she calling. Emma’s flaming hair was more muted now than hitherto and the purity of those looks had suffered a little from the consequences of time, but she was still a feast to a male eye and, Emily had discovered, accomplished in many ways.