Some parts of this epistle could not hav* been pleasant reading to the Honourable Charle.'i Greville. In a letter she wrote him about th<
London visit a month or two earlier, Emma had not let him into the secret of her hopes of at last obtaining an assured position; she had merely said—
" You need not be affraid for me in England. We come for a short time, and that time must be occupied in business, and to take our last leave. I don't wish to attract notice. I wish to be an example of good conduct, and to show the world that a pretty woman is not allways a fool. All my ambition to make Sir William happy, and you will see he is so. ... You can't think 2 people, that as lived five years with all the domestick happiness that's possible can separate, and those 2 persons, that knows no other comfort but in each other's comppny, which is the case I assure you with ous."
By the summer of 1791 Charles Greville had the pleasure of seeing with his own eyes the result of his handiwork and the imminent upset of his cold schemes for his own welfare. Sir William Hamilton and Emma were in London —Emma more beautiful than ever, more assured, more radiant, more accomplished, but not a whit less warm-hearted and impulsive. Of her meeting with the man who had betrayed her trust in him there is no record. But her faithfulness to old friends is shown by the way in which she hastened to cheer Romney with a sight of his " divine lady." On a morning of June she once
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more betook herself to the old studio in Cavendish Square, where she found Romney in a state of dejection and melancholy, which was immediately dispelled by the vision of Emma, fair and kind, once more present to inspire and hearten him. She was " still the same Emma." In spite of her many engagements—for the King's consent had been obtained, and she was to marry Sir William Hamilton before leaving London—she found time to sit to Romney for several pictures, for in the presence of his most exquisite model, Romney's failing powers were reinspired, and he painted once more at his best. In June of this year (1791) he wrote to Hayley—
"At present, and the greatest part of the summer, I shall be engaged in painting pictures from the divine lady. I cannot give her any other epithet, for I think her superior to all womankind. I have two pictures to paint of her for the Prince of Wales. She says she must see you, before she leaves England, which will be in the beginning of September. She asked me if you would not write my life.—I told her you had begun it:—then, she said, she hoped you would have much to say of her in the life, as she prided herself in being my model." A week or two later Romney wrote— " I dedicate my time to this charming lady; there is a prospect of her leaving town with Sir William, for two or three weeks. They are very
LADY HAMILTON AND A DOG-" NATURE
GEORGE ROMNEY
much hurried at present, as everything is going on for their speedy marriage, and all the world following her, and talking of her, so that if she had not more good sense than vanity, her brain must be turned. The pictures I have begun, are Joan of Arc, a Magdalen, and a Bacchante, for the Prince of Wales; and another I am to begin as a companion to the Bacchante. I am also to paint a picture of Constance for the Shakespeare Gallery."
Romney's mind was already clouded by illness, and he was morbidly sensitive about Emma—he would weave himself a tragedy from airy nothings. He fancied, on one occasion, that she was cold to him, and was forthwith plunged in despair.
" In my last letter," he tells Hayley on the 8th of August, " I think I informed you that I was going to dine with Sir William and his Lady. In the evening of that day, there were collected several people of fashion to hear her sing. She performed, both in the serious and comic, to admiration, both in singing and acting; but her 'Nina* surpasses everything I ever saw, and I believe, as a piece of acting, nothing ever surpassed it. The whole company were in an agony of sorrow. Her acting is simple, grand, terrible, and pathetic. My mind was so much heated that I was for running down to Eartham to fetch you up to see her. But, alas! soon after, I thought I discovered an alteration in her conduct to me. A
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coldness and neglect seemed to have taken the place of her repeated declarations of regard for me. They have left town to make many visits in the country. I expect them again the latter end of this week, when my anxiety (for I have suffered much) will be either relieved or increased, as I find her conduct. It is highly probable that none of the pictures will be finished, except I find her more friendly than she appeared to me the last time I saw her."
The wholly imaginary clouds disappeared under the sunshine of Emma's wholesome smiles when she returned to town. Once more to Hayley Romney expressed his content in her, as he had expressed his morbid distress—
" When she arrived to sit, she seemed more friendly than she had been, and I began a picture of her, as a present for her mother. I was very successful with it; for it is thought the most beautiful head I have painted of her yet. Now indeed, I think, she is cordial with me as ever; and she laments very much that she is to leave England without seeing you. ... I was afraid I should not have had power to have painted any more from her ; but since she has assumed her former kindness, my health and spirits are quite recovered. She performed in my house last week, singing and acting before some of the nobility with most astonishing powers; she is the talk of the whole town, and
really surpasses everything both in singing and acting that ever appeared. Gallini offered her two thousand pounds' a year, and two benefits, if she would engage with him, on which Sir William said pleasantly that he had engaged her for life/'
This somewhat trivial little episode of an imaginary coldness has been given space because it shows how much Emma was to Romney, how she had the power not only to inspire his genius, but also to cheer his shrinking, sensitive heart. The summer spent in London in 1791, just before her marriage, was the last time the two met—the two who are perpetually associated so long as canvas and colours last. Romney's brush has made Emma immortal as the very type and perfection of English beauty—a type that in its freshness and bloom is the very flower of our English soil and climate, our rains and mists and gentle sun.
The last picture Romney painted of her is that known as the " Ambassadress," and she gave him a sitting for this on the very day of her wedding. It is the artist's farewell picture, and one of his finest. Here is no wild and gay Bacchante with hair streaming to the wind, no wide-eyed and doom-speaking Cassandra, but Emma herself, sweet and more grave than usual, dressed for travelling, and wearing one of the imous blue hats. She looks in this picture like
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a woman who has weighed some of the chances of life, and has the ambition to play a larger and more serious part than she had hitherto attempted. Vesuvius smokes in the background, typical of the Italy to which she is returning and of the stormy happenings into which a few years will plunge her.
Before Romney passes entirely out of her life it is necessary to quote the letter she wrote him after reaching Caserta, on the 2oth of December, 1791. It closes that chapter of her existence and turns down the page.
" MY DEAR FRIEND, —I have the pleasure to inform you we arrived safe at Naples. I have been receved with open arms by all the Neapolitans of both sexes, by all the foreigners of every distinction. I have been presented to the Queen of Naples by her own desire. She as shown me all sorts of kind and affectionate attentions. In short, I am the happiest woman in the world. Sir William is fonder of me every day, and I hope he will have no corse to repent of what he as done; for I feel so gratefull to him, that I think I shall never be able to make him amends for his goodness to me. But why do I tell you this ? You know me enough. You was the first dear friend I opend my heart to. You ought to know me, for you have seen and discoursed with me in my poorer days. . . . How
gratefull then do I feel to my dear, dear husband, that as restored peace to my mind, that as given me honors, rank, and what is more, innocence and happiness. Rejoice with me, my dear sir, my friend, my more than father. Believe m
e, I am still that same Emma you knew me. If I could forget for a moment what I was, I ought to suffer. Command me in anything I can do for you here; believe me, I shall have a real pleasure. Come to Naples, and I will be your model:—anything to induce you to come, that I may have an oppertunity to shew you my gratitude to you. Take care of your health for all our sakes. How does the pictures go on ? Has the Prince been to you ? Write to me. I am interested in all that concerns you. God bless you, my dear Friend. I spoke to Lady Souther-land about you ; she loves you dearly. Give my love to Mr. Hayley. Tell him I shall be glad to see him at Naples.
" As you was so good to say you would give me the little picture with the black hat, I wish you would . . . give it to Mr. Duten. I have a great regard for him. He took a deal of pains and trouble for me ; and I could not do him a greater favour than to give him my picture. Do, my dear friend, do me that pleasure; and, if their is anything from Naples, command me.
" We have a many English at Naples as Ladys Malmsbury, Maiden, Plymouth, Carneigee,
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Wright, etc. They are very kind and attentive to me. They all make it a point to be remarkably cevil to me. You will be happy at this, as you know what prudes our Ladys are. Tell Hayly I am allways reading his 'Triumphs of Temper;' it was that made me Lady H., for God knows I had for 5 years enough to try my temper, and I am affraid if it had not been for the good example Serena taught me, my girdle wou'd have burst, and if it had I had been undone; for Sir W. minds more temper than beauty. He therefore wishes Mr. Hayley wou'd come, that he might thank him for his sweet-tempered wife, I swear to you, I have never been out of humour since the 6th of last September. God bless you. Yours. E. HAMILTON"
Romney replied to this warm and affectionate epistle, telling her how he rejoiced in her happiness, and praying, " May God grant it may remain so to the end of your days." And with that fatherly wish—which greater causes than either he or Emma foresaw were destined to bring to nought — Romney passes out of the story of Emma Hamilton.
Emma's marriage, which was destined to have such important consequences, has been somewhat hurried over, and it is necessary to go back a step and give some further details. In
*>,. X.
1
LADY HAMILTON AS EMMA
FROM A DRAWING BY SIR T. LAWRENCE
the month before her marriage Emma and Sir William Hamilton spent some time in visiting at country houses, glad to get out of town during an unusually hot August. Among other places, they went to Fonthill Abbey, where Emma's somewhat exuberant taste was delighted by the bizarre glories of " Vathek" Beckford's palatial residence. Nearly ten years later she and Sir William were to vist Fonthill again, having Nelson with them.
Emma was destined to play many parts, but she only played that of a bride on one occasion. Her wedding-day was the 6th of September, 1791, and she was married at Marylebone Church, in the presence of Lord Abercorn and the Mr. Dutens to whom she refers in her letter to Romney. It was a very happy Emma who turned away from the church door with her hand on Sir William's arm. Now she could look the world in the face without either shrinking or defiance. She rested content in the thought of the name and the position her " dear, dear husband " had given her, and probably considered that her adventures and her ambitions were ended—whereas, in reality, they were only dawning upon the horizon of her consciousness.
As for Sir William Hamilton, no doubt he too was happy in an approvingl conscience and the highly respectable ending of a doubtful adventure. He was certainly proud of the radiant and
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lovely woman at his side whom he believed— how mistakenly the future was to prove—he had " engaged for life/ 1
Horace Walpole's comment on the marriage was, " So Sir William has married his gallery of statues!" But Emma was very little of a statue at heart—had she been a little colder she would have remained Sir William's " for life/' and Nelson's glory would have had no single stain upon it.
CHAPTER VII
THE QUEEN'S COMRADE
ON their return to Naples, Sir William and Lady Hamilton passed through Paris, where they were received by Marie Antoinette, the sister of the Queen of Naples. The coming doom was already darkening round the fair head of the French Queen, and there can be little doubt that she took the opportunity of their visit to send some communication to her sister of Naples by the hand of the British Ambassador. Lady Hamilton, who was beginning to thrill to the excitement of the European situation, and who always tended to exaggerate her part in events, declared, many years later, that she brought Marie Antoinette's last letter to the Queen of Naples.
The unhappy Queen of France has become one of the heroines 'of history because of the unenviable greatness and the tragic fall that fate and circumstance thrust upon her. But her sister, Maria Carolina, though less known to fame, as playing her part upon a smaller stage,
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was in reality far more richly endowed by nature —she had greater beauty, infinitely more brain power, and a considerable share of the forceful-ness, capacity, and statecraft of her mother, Maria Theresa. Her King and consort, Ferdinand, was the son of Charles III. of Spain, and a typical Bourbon in his extravagant passion for the chase. He cared little for the dignities and the responsibilities of his position—the fate of dynasties and the internal condition of his people were matters that he was generally content to leave to his clever wife, while he pursued the noble boar at Persano. On the whole, it was fortunate that his tastes turned to sport instead of government, for on the rare occasions when he remembered his duty as a monarch, he showed himself to be of a bullying, obstructive disposition. Beckford called him "a lobster crushed by his shell." His heavy good humour, on which the Queen played, enabled her to be the effectual ruler of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; but occasionally his Spanish tendencies would bestir themselves in his slow mind, and with characteristic delicacy and chivalry he would call his wife the " Austrian hen." The Bourbon in him, the Hapsburg in her, were continually at war; but the advantages were with the alert and determined Queen, for her Bourbon husband was so much occupied with sport and his own forms of enjoyment that he never really mobilized his forces. General Pepe",
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in his " Memoirs," said of him, " He was both by nature and education weak, strongly addicted to pleasure, and utterly incapable of opposing himself to the strong mind of the young queen, who soon discovered the character of her husband.'* Sir John Acton, that curious, cautious, capable, wooden-natured Englishman who played such a variety of parts at the Neapolitan Court, from Admiral of the Neapolitan Fleet (such as it was) to Field-Marshal and Minister of Finance, summed up the King by saying that he was a good sort of man because nature had not endowed him with the faculties necessary for the making of a bad man.
The outbreak of the Revolution in France was watched with great uneasiness and distress of mind by the Queen of Naples, not only because of the threatening danger to her sister and Louis XVI., but also because she saw it as the beginning of a tempest that might soon sweep through Europe to the shores of Italy. "The French have shown themselves/' said Burke, "the ablest architects of ruin who have hitherto existed in the world. In a short space of time they have pulled to the ground their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufactures." And it was as "architects of ruin" that Maria Carolina regarded all Jacobins, whether French or Neapolitan.
With France in ruins and dishevelment, with
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Europe bewildered, with a pro-Spanish husband, the Queen saw herself and her schemes in sore need of support. Her hopes turned towards the England of Pitt—the great Minister who stood out unmoved and calm and obstinately sanguine amid the growing storm. She took the English Acton for her counsellor, she cultivated English sympathies and English good will. She had always been gracious to the British Ambassador, but when he returned in the autumn of 1791 with his wife, she t
ook the surest way to make him her friend by extending a hand to Emma, whom she had heretofore been unable formally to countenance. " Emma has had a difficult part to act," wrote Sir William Hamilton to Horace Walpole, "and has succeeded wonderfully, having gained, by having no pretensions, the thorough approbation of all the English ladies. The Queen of Naples was very kind to her on our return, and treats her like any other travelling lady of distinction; in short, we are very comfortably situated here."
A little later the Queen was to treat her not as a "travelling lady of distinction," but as a friend and confidant and tool, though Emma herself never realized the latter fact.
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