Nelson's Lady Hamilton

by Meynell, Esther

  external things she criticized: the defects of manner and taste of a great and worn-out seaman, who was childishly vain and very slow to think that people could be judging him unkindly, and of a woman whose heart was on all occasions better than her breeding.

  CHAPTER XIII ENGLAND AGAIN

  EVERY seaport in England would have rejoiced to be the first to greet the returning Hero of the Nile. But the honour fell to Yarmouth, in Nelson's native county of Norfolk, and on the 6th of November, 1800, he landed there, accompanied by his inseparable companions, Sir William and Lady Hamilton. Yarmouth received the greatest admiral who had ever stepped upon English soil with hearty seafaring enthusiasm. The quaint old seaport blossomed into bunting, the ships in the harbour hoisted their colours, guns fired, infantry paraded, Nelson's carriage was unhorsed, and his shouting countrymen drew him in triumph to the Wrestler's Inn, which was his first shelter under an English roof for nearly three years. The Mayor and Corporation waited upon him in solemn state, in order to present him with the freedom of the town—an idle ceremony, after all, for thenceforward Nelson held, as by royal right, the freedom of every true English heart. If he ever met with slights and coldness

  after the Nile it was from those in high places, who were stamped with the curious official fear of recognizing a hero before he is safely dead. But the people of Yarmouth had no such caution : they rejoiced to have Nelson among them warm and living, and when on the day of his arrival he went to a thanksgiving service, they went to church with him, as did all the naval officers on shore, and the Mayor and Corporation.

  Emma Hamilton shared in all these triumphs. When he landed she walked down the little wooden jetty with her hand on Nelson's arm; when he addressed the people from the balcony of the Wrestler's Inn, she stood by his side before the eyes of the assembled townsfolk; when he went in procession to the church, she was with him. But the Yarmouth folk looked kindly on a handsome face, and in any case they were not inclined to criticize their glorious admiral. It is believed that on this occasion Lady Hamilton wore the dress which had been designed for the Palermo f&te of a year ago—a dress of white muslin, with a flounce embroidered in gold thread and coloured silks, with anchors and leaves, with medallions containing the words " Nelson" and " Bronte " alternating on the border. A piece of this flounce was to be seen in the Loan Collection of the Museum of the United Service Institute in the Centenary Year of Trafalgar.

  Yarmouth could not pay enough honour to

  LADY HAMILTON AS "THE COMIC MUSE"

  ANGELICA KAUKFMAN

  the hero and his party : " On leaving the Town/' says the Naval Chronicle, " the corps of cavalry unexpectedly drew up, saluted, and followed the carriage, not only to the Town's end, but to the boundary of the County."

  And so Nelson set out for London, with Emma at his side, to meet the wife he had not seen since the days when there had been no shadow between them, when rumour, flaunting another woman's name, had not set foot upon the threshold of their household peace. Lady Nelson has been unjustly blamed for not having met her husband at Yarmouth on his landing. But it appears that in awaiting him in London, with his aged father, she was obeying his express wish. She had been expecting his return for several months, in uncertainty as to when and where he would land—for Nelson at first talked of Portsmouth. Captain Hardy, too, was anxiously awaiting the admiral's return, and in one of his newly discovered letters (published for the first time by Mr. John Murray, in 1906), he says—

  " Notwithstanding all the Newspapers, his Lordship is not arrived in town, and when he will God only knows. His Father has lost all patience, her Ladyship bears up very well as yet but I much fear she also will soon despond. He certainly arrived at Yarmouth on Thursday last and there has been no letter received by anybody. Should he not arrive to-morrow I think I

  shall set off for Yarmouth as I know too well the cause of his not coming"

  Alexander Davison, earlier than this, had been desired by Nelson to inform his wife of his impending return to England, and in making the announcement Davison added, " I fancy that your anxious mind will be relieved by receiving all that you hold sacred and valuable." But however Lady Nelson's anxious mind may have doubted and feared, she had refrained from reproaches and written patiently and kindly to her wandering husband. In one of her last letters to him, before he left Palermo, she said—

  " I can with safety put my hand on my heart and say it has been my study to please and make you happy, and I still flatter myself we shall meet before very long. I feel most sensibly all your kindnesses to my dear son, and I hope he will add much to our comfort. Our good father has been in good spirits ever since we heard from you; indeed, my spirits were quite worn out, the time had been so long. I thank God for the preservation of my dear husband, and your recent success off Malta. The taking of the GMreux seems to give great spirits to all. God bless you, my dear husband, and grant us a happy meeting."

  That is a simple and rather touching letter; not the letter of a selfish, cold-hearted woman, or one who had ceased to care. She could not

  throw herself into the passionate raptures over the taking of the G6ndreux that would have been natural to Emma Hamilton. She had not a passionate nature; but, such as she was, Nelson had met and won and married her. It is a noticeable fact that even at the time of his engagement, when he might naturally be expected to see everything through the glamour of love and youth, he never lavished on Fanny Nisbet the extravagant passion he, as a much older man, spent on a much older woman. There was a calmness about his declarations of affection for his wife that, in view of later events, is very significant. The first letter he wrote her after their engagement is typical: " My greatest wish," he said, " is to be united to you ; and the foundation of all conjugal happiness, real love and esteem r is, I trust, what you believe I possess in the strongest degree towards you." He is contented, but certainly not rapturous, and he harps unduly on " esteem " as the only foundation for a happy marriage. Esteem was as powerless as chaff before the wind when he knew the meaning of a consuming passion. Shortly before the wedding he wrote to her :—

  " His Royal Highness often tells me, he believes I am married ; for he never saw a lover so easy, or say so little of the object he has a regard for. When I tell him I certainly am not, he says, * Then he is sure I must have a

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  great esteem for you, and that it is not what is (vulgarly), I do not much like the use of that word, called love.' He is right: my love is founded on esteem, the only foundation that can make the passion last."

  It is not recorded how his Frances liked this letter: she was of a calm and unexcitable temperament ; but, even so, most women would wish a little more ardour in a lover. Nelson himself had ardour and passion in plenty when he met the woman who could stir him to the heart. But Frances Nisbet never roused in him that perturbation of spirit, that gladness and idealizing glamour which go with love—the word he did " not much like " in 1787 ! When he praised her, it was without a lover's extravagance, as when he wrote to his brother : " The dear object you must like. Her sense, polite manners, and, to you I may say, beauty, you will much admire. She possesses sense far superior to half the people of our acquaintance."

  Such were his feelings towards the woman he made his wife. That she stirred nothing deeper in him, that he whose heart was so warm and ardent, and whose sensibilities were so keen, was content to marry on a basis of " esteem," made up their double misfortune, their double tragedy. Frances Nelson could not say, as his wife, " I am as a spirit who has dwelt within his heart of hearts." Judging from her letters, she never fully

  realized the nature of the man she had married; never realized the need of so making herself a part of his life that neither years, nor absence, nor the bewitchments of any other woman, could have drawn him away from her. But later Nelson himself realized this need; realized with fatal surety when he met Emma that " esteem" was not a sufficient basis for a lifelong fidelity.

  It
is not right to blame Lady Nelson, as has been too often done, for failing to hold Nelson's affections. According to the light that was given her she was a good and patient wife. As Sir Harris Nicolas says: "The exemplary character of that amiable woman is little known to the world; and it is only justice to her to state that her letters, which in their style are perfectly simple and unaffected, are filled with expressions of warm attachment to her husband, great anxiety for his safety, lively interest in his fame, and entire submission to his wishes." A lady who was the widow of one of Nelson's officers, and the personal friend of both Lord and Lady Nelson, wrote to Sir Harris Nicolas as follows:—

  " I will only say on this sad subject, that Lord Nelson always bore testimony to the merits of Lady Nelson, and declared, in parting from her, that he had not one single complaint to make—that in temper, person, and in mind, she was everything he could wish. They had never had a quarrel; but the Syren had sung, and cast

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  her spell about him, and he was too guileless in his nature, and too unsuspecting, to be aware of his danger until it was too late. I am aware of your intention not to touch upon this delicate subject : I only allude to it, in order to assure you, from my personal knowledge, in a long and intimate acquaintance, that Lady Nelson's conduct was not only affectionate, wise, and prudent, but admirable, throughout her married life, and that she had not a single reproach to make herself. The affections of her Lord were alienated, not when they were together, but at a distance, and beyond the reach of her mild and feminine virtues. I say not this to cast unnecessary blame on one whose memory I delight to honour, but only in justice to that truly good and amiable woman, the residue of whose life was rendered so unhappy by circumstances over which she had no control. If mildness, forbearance, and indulgence to the weaknesses of human nature could have availed, her fate would have been very different. No reproach ever passed her lips; and when she parted from her Lord, on his hoisting his Flag again, it was without the most distant suspicion that he meant it to be final, and that in this life they were never to meet again. Excuse my troubling you with these observations, as I am desirous that you should know the worth of her who has so often been misrepresented, from the wish of many to cast the blame

  anywhere, but on him who was so deservedly dear to the Nation. There never was a kinder heart than Lord Nelson's ; but he was a child in the hands of a very designing person, and few, perhaps, could have resisted the various artifices employed to enslave the mind of the Hero, when combined with great beauty, extraordinary talents, and the semblance of an enthusiastic attachment."

  On Saturday the 8th of November Nelson reached London and met his wife, who was waiting for him at Nerot's Hotel in St. James's Street. No record of what took place at this meeting is in existence—neither the husband nor the wife would be likely to put their feelings on paper; but the meeting can hardly have been otherwise than constrained and painful. On the one side was reproachful distress, on the other a distracted heart and a burdened conscience. And yet Nelson displayed either extraordinary callousness or extraordinary simplicity—even those who most love and admire him will be puzzled to say which—for apparently he expected his wife to receive Lady Hamilton with open arms. It is true that Lady Nelson did not know the lengths to which his passion for Emma had gone, but he knew, and he must have been wandering in a fog of moral blindness when he conceived it possible that the two women could meet and accept each other.

  At first an attempt was made to draw a veil of decency, convention, or hypocrisy—any word may be chosen — over a sufficiently intolerable state of things. Lady Nelson had written to Yarmouth before the Nelson party set out for London, inviting the Hamiltons to stay with herself and her husband at Round Wood, their country home. When Emma reached London she wrote to Lady Nelson, shortly after her arrival—

  "I would have done myself the honour of calling on you and Lord Nelson this day, but I am not well nor in spirits. . . . Permit me in the morning to have the pleasure of seeing you, and hoping, my dear Lady Nelson, the continuance of your friendship, which will be in Sir William and myself for ever lasting to you and your family."

  But words were a frail bridge to throw across such a gap as yawned between the two women. Lady Nelson and Lady Hamilton met a fe 1 times, dined together, went to the play. It is sai< that in the box of a theatre Lady Nelson was overcome by seeing her husband's public devotion to Emma that she fainted; while another form of the story is that Emma was the one who fainted, and that Lady Nelson going to her aid discovered the secret which gave her sick fears their fullest justification. Be that as it may, the situation was impossible, the explosion inevitable.

  At first Nelson endeavoured to mould things to his will, to believe that somehow the relationship might be adjusted. But it was beyond even his powers—London was not Naples, or even Dresden ; the Mediterranean glamour no longer hid the ugly outlines of wrong-doing. He felt the difference in the two atmospheres acutely, and shortly after his return said bitterly, "This place of London but ill-suits my disposition." It was a miserable time for them all; in their different ways they all three suffered, and Emma once more proved the truth of the old saying, that it is the wrong-doer who never can forgive the wronged, for in all her later references to Lady Nelson there is more than a touch of malice. Emma had not a small or feline nature, but she frequently displays these characteristics towards the woman she had ousted from her place at Nelson's side. The general disapproval and censure which Nelson's infatuation for Lady Hamilton aroused in London society acted ill upon the admiral; it aroused his opposition and defiance, he was not to be wrested from his unhappy love by sneers or cold looks, whether from Court or commons. Lady Nelson, in his distempered eyes, began to appear as an adversary to be crushed, instead of a woman wronged in her tenderest feelings. Sir William Hotham, who knew her, said, "His conduct to Lady Nelson was the very extreme of unjustifiable weakness, for he should

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  at least have attempted to conceal his infirmities, without publicly wounding the feelings of a woman whose own conduct he well knew was irreproachable." In attempted justification of her own and Nelson's conduct, Emma Hamilton laid stress on Lady Nelson's temper, declaring that it drove her Lord into wandering wretchedly all one night through the streets of London, till at last in his despair he sought refuge at her and Sir William's house in Grosvenor Square. The story may have some truth in it, but it bears evident marks of exaggeration. And if Frances Nelson was driven to tears, reproaches, anger, was it surprising ? Maybe it was not the way to win back her husband's strayed affection, but it was the way that many a woman, more loving than wise, has been driven to in similar wretched circumstances. Her spirit, her self-respect, her very affection as a good wife, forbade her to submit silently. Nelson had made her a peeress, but such an honour proved paltry when the giver proved unkind. Lady Nelson was not a specially large-souled or large-hearted woman, but at least she was above the meanness of being content with worldly advantages when the very spirit and essence which would have made them sweet was withdrawn.

  But his wife's sufferings and his wife's wrongs were microscopic in Nelson's eyes. For him it was Emma, and nothing but Emma, His honour

  gone awry and falsely true, he felt it necessary, as Miss Cornelia Knight says in her "Autobiography," "to devote himself more and more to Lady Hamilton, for the purpose of what he called supporting her." All the deeper tenderness of his nature, all the passionate desire—which had hitherto gone unsatisfied—for a child of his own, was called out by the fact that Emma was expecting shortly to become a mother. So with the object of " supporting " her, and in almost direct insult to his own wife, Nelson went with her and Sir William Hamilton to spend Christmas with " Vathek " Beckford at Fonthill Abbey, leaving Lady Nelson behind in lodgings at Arlington Street. This is perhaps the most callous action of which Nelson was ever guilty ; and yet it was not deliberate cruelty to his wife, but the blind passion which put Emm
a and her need before all the world.

  William Beckford was naturally anxious to welcome the Hero of the Nile to his house, and a flavour of scandal in the attendant circumstances mattered little to him. On the 24th of November he wrote to Lady Hamilton and said, " I exist in the hopes of seeing Fonthill honoured by his victorious presence, and if his engagements permit his accompanying you here, we shall enjoy a few comfortable days of repose, uncon-taminated by the sight and prattle of drawing-room parasites." While Emma could procure

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  him any advantages, he did not scruple to address her with extravagant flattery, speaking of her as a " superior being," and saying, " You must shine steadily. . . . That light alone which beams from your image, ever before my fancy, like a vision of the Madonna della Gloria, keeps my eyes sufficiently open to subscribe myself with

  tolerable distinctness ." But his real opinion

  of the beauty came out many years later in his " Memoirs," where, replying to the question whether Lady Hamilton was a fascinating woman, he says—

  " I never thought her so. She was somewhat masculine, but symmetrical in figure, so that Sir William called her his Grecian. She was full in person, not fat, but embonpoint. Her carriage often majestic, rather than feminine. Not at all delicate, ill-bred, often very affected, a devil in temper when set on edge. She had beautiful hair and displayed it. Her countenance was agreeable,—fine, hardly beautiful, but the outline excellent. She affected sensibility, but felt none—was artful; and no wonder, she had been trained in the Court of Naples—a fine school for an English woman of any stamp. Nelson was infatuated. She could make him believe anything."