by John Sugden
More than fifty books have been written about Emma Hamilton and they vary greatly in the portrait they present of her. Few people have been so damned and so sainted. Her powerful compound of strengths and weaknesses led contemporaries to extol or detract vigorously. That potent cocktail should not be forgotten, for we will shed little light on Emma simply to reproduce the prejudices of one side or another. Traducers considered her low-born, and therefore coarse, vulgar and graceless; she spent much of her life in Naples, imbibing its liberality, and was consequently indecorous; she was beautiful, forward and infectious, and therefore a magnet for the jealous and envious. Above all, perhaps, she was something of an outsider. Her experiences transcended classes and kingdoms, and though she was raised to that threatened order of aristocracy she never quite fitted into it. Emma wore her faults on her sleeves. Talented rather than intelligent, ridiculously theatrical, tempestuous, vain, attention-seeking and ruthless in pursuit, she was a spendthrift and trivial socialite. But she was also warm-hearted, humane, generous, loyal, energetic and brave. We will never understand her blistering impact on a succession of individuals, be they painters, diplomats or naval officers, if we do not realise that first and foremost she was a most remarkable woman.
Her beauty would have struck Nelson immediately. Emma was tall, strong and almost Amazonian – too much so for some men’s tastes – but she also sported a voluptuous figure no clothes could disguise. Her form may have been at its best that first time Nelson saw her, for it expanded disastrously in the following years, when it seemed to grow by the day. Classically moulded, her commanding and expressive countenance was lit by lively blue eyes and surmounted by an immense chestnut mane. Some men spoke of her as ‘one of the most beautiful creatures’ they had ever seen, though not everyone agreed. Certainly she entranced painters, who had made her a leading model of the time. Chief among them was the fashionable English artist George Romney, for whom Emma was ‘superior to all womankind’ and worthy of the dozens of canvasses he devoted to her. In Italy such was the scramble for her services that as many as half a dozen or more sculptors and artists might be working on her likeness at any one time.39
Most of all Emma loved to perform, to move and inspire. Confident in her looks and powers, she danced with ‘a volupte, a grace which would set on fire the coldest and most insensible man’, sang like ‘an angel’, and created ‘a new source of pleasure to mankind’ with her famous ‘attitudes’. The attitudes were costumed poses, most of them drawn from Classical mythology, the sort painters used but now endowed with movement and expression. Emma successfully plied them before fashionable gatherings in Naples and London, but no one left a better description than Goethe, who sat through a performance in Caserta in 1787. Dressed in a Greek outfit, Emma:
lets down her hair, and with a few shawls gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express, realised before him in movements and surprising transformations – standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious – one pose follows another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a head-dress . . . This much is certain: as a performance it’s like nothing you ever saw before in your life.40
Her public thought the attitudes extraordinary, and men found them sexually charged, with Emma’s flimsy draperies and short male tunics revealing in art what would have been indecent in society. The applause only fired Emma’s ‘passion for admiration’ and made her work the harder. In fact, in her own way she was as much a perfectionist as Horatio Nelson, but whereas he hungered for the perfect naval victory she needed the ultimate public performance. ‘I sung after that one with a tambourin in the character of a young girl with a raire-shew [raree-show], the pretist [prettiest] thing you ever heard,’ she told a former lover in 1787. ‘I left the people at Sorrento with their heads turned. I left some dying, some crying, and some in despair.’ Emma, like Nelson, was bent upon conquest.41
Sir William doted on a young wife thirty-three years his junior, and proudly exhibited her talents. He stage-managed the attitudes, controlling the lighting, and finding the inspiration for many of her poses in the vases and sculptures of his vast collection and the pages of a well-stocked library. If he felt threatened he managed to hide it. Emma’s ability to captivate and her appetite for attention made her a formidable figure in any social gathering, in which she was a tireless hunter of the hearts of men and women alike, wooing them with generosity, warmth and endless attention. Sir Gilbert Elliot, who knew her well, said she had the ‘easy’ manners ‘of a barmaid, [was] excessively good humoured and wishing to please and [to] be admired by all ages and sorts of persons that come in her way’. Significantly he noticed that ‘with men her language and conversation are exaggerations of anything I ever heard’. But her ageing husband seemed only proud of her powers. ‘She makes me happy and is loved and esteemed by all,’ he wrote to a kinsman in Toulon. ‘Come and see, and my life for it, she will gain you!’42
Nelson, of course, was susceptible to being gained by anyone who fed his own huge ego, let alone one as overwhelming as Emma Hamilton. From the beginning he liked her, and since it was his nature to return goodwill extravagantly, whatever the station of its bearer, he had no time for those who whispered malignantly about Lady Hamilton’s background.
Still, that background was important and underpinned her behaviour. Always there was an insecurity in Emma, a need to prove herself worthy of the great station she had reached. And always there was another lurking in corners of her mind – that former lover whose work of rehabilitation she desperately wanted to consummate, and for whom she still nursed a suppressed jealousy and half-hidden need to please. Hers had been an eccentric rags-to-riches Pygmalion past that constantly leaked out. The fine gowns of the diplomat’s lady could not disguise the down-to-earth manner and Liverpudlian accent that made precious English women with cut-glass voices shake their heads. Nor did they, or their wearer’s infectious influence, match the careworn, homely, round-faced, retiring person usually found behind Emma, sitting quietly in the corners of rooms away from the more splendid company. A shadowy companion with the look of an elderly retainer recruited from the plain hard labour of another world, Mrs Cadogan, as she called herself, was actually Emma’s mother. She was, wrote one observer with scarcely veiled contempt, ‘what one might expect’.43
Nevertheless, the Hamiltons were not reluctant to admit Emma’s lowly origins, and viewed her progress with a degree of pride. Nelson learned something of Lady Hamilton’s story during his first days in Naples. She had been born on 26 April 1765 in Neston parish on the Wirral peninsula in Cheshire. Her father was an illiterate Ness black-smith, Henry Lyon, and to her dying day Emma’s letters betrayed her lack of formal education. Like many a girl of that class she entered domestic service, but there her life took a wholly individual turn and began to read like modern romantic fiction. Somehow the young woman found her way to London, and after a number of domestic situations ended up in the home of a noted ‘madame’ in Arlington Street. At her tender age she was probably being groomed for prostitution, but in 1781, when she was sixteen, she was whisked to Uppark on the South Downs, the house of Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, an intemperate young baronet, and in the spring of 1782 gave birth to a child.
From red-blooded Sir Harry, Emma passed to the Honourable Charles Greville, second son of the Earl of Warwick. It was Greville who put the girl on an upward course. He established Emma and her mother in his house in Edgware Row in London, undertook to protect and educate her, and to introduce her by and by into society. She unquestionably loved him deeply, but when Greville decided he wanted to marry an heiress and found Emma suddenly inconvenient, he palmed her off on his widower uncle, Sir William Hamilton. Tricked into going to Naples in 1786, she ultimately accepted her fate, though
for long afterwards the bitterness and sense of betrayal was wont to slip from her pen. Sir William was middle-aged, but he was kind, and she eventually learned to love him. Moreover, she prospered in Naples, attacking the deficiencies of her education, gaining a rudimentary command of French and Italian, mastering the art of entertaining, and winning considerable acclaim for her social accomplishments. She married Hamilton in 1791 and was accepted at the Neapolitan court, where her growing friendship with the queen was fast making her a political force in the Kingdom. We still await a full assessment of her role in Italian politics, but the journey from Neston to the Neapolitan palaces was certainly the stuff of legend.
Her future was to be no less erratic. Since Emma and Fanny eventually competed for Nelson’s love and grew to hate each other, it is usual to compare them. They are depicted as fire and ice, with Emma vibrant, burning and passionate, and Fanny cold, controlled and correct. Emma wordly, ambitious, adventurous and extrovert, Fanny domestic, retiring and dull. Emma the exotic beauty, Fanny the plain sparrow. And most of all, Emma, who understood, nurtured and shared Nelson’s genius, and Fanny who stifled it with a blanket.
They were very different women, of course, but Fanny has suffered more from the exercise than she deserves. Until recently many Nelson biographers, concerned to defend their hero at all costs, enhanced the image of a loyal but cold and suffocating wife. What she did, particularly in caring for Nelson’s father during long years the captain spent at sea, has seldom been truly reckoned, and no one who reads her letters can doubt the passionate love she bore him or her pride in his achievements. Unlike Emma, there was nothing flamboyant or overstated about Fanny, but she had considerable charm and impressed people. ‘I am more pleased with her if possible than ever,’ wrote Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy after breakfasting with her in 1802. ‘She certainly is one of the best women in the world.’ She was also a woman of silent strengths, and though ultimately defeated by Emma survived a sad old age with considerable dignity. The victor, on the other hand, self-destructed within a few years of her lover’s death.44
None of those shadows were there in 1793, when Nelson first set eyes on Emma Hamilton. She debuts modestly in his letters and journals for 14 September, and while Horatio happily added the Hamiltons to his list of regular correspondents it was to Sir William that he usually wrote. On their part they often spoke of ‘you and your good boy’ after Nelson’s departure, but there was no hint of the notorious triangle that would eventually develop.45
The fourteenth of September 1793 was another memorable day for Nelson, however. Leaving the Agamemnon preparing for the king’s visit, he accompanied Sir William to Acton’s for dinner. Among the dignitaries at the table were a Spanish naval captain and the Spanish ambassador, but Nelson eagerly recorded that he and Sir William were held behind when the others had gone, and personally shown around the first minister’s ‘most magnificent house’. That evening a contented Nelson retired to the Palazzo Sessa, where Emma received some ‘princess’ who doubled as first lady of the chamber to the queen. The princess promised to visit Nelson’s ship the following Monday, and flattered the captain with the queen’s good wishes.46
The next day was Sunday, and Sir William and Nelson were on board the Agamemnon at nine in the morning awaiting the visit from the king. Hamilton received a fifteen-gun salute as he arrived. Unfortunately, the swell was too great for Ferdinand to attend, but he asked the pair to dine with him again and Nelson found himself ‘placed’ at the king’s ‘right hand, before our ambassador and all the nobles present’. His Majesty promised to visit the Agamemnon the next day, but also told Nelson that the first two thousand men for Hood would be marched into town at dawn and he was welcome to review them. Consequently, Nelson and Hamilton pitched up early on 16 September and jostled their way to the front of a thin part of the large crowd that had gathered to watch as Ferdinand pompously led three battalions of the garrison of Capua through the town. When the king saw Nelson and Hamilton he halted the march and ‘dressed’ his men before parading them before the important observers.47
Back on board the Agamemnon Nelson entertained the Hamiltons and other English expatriates to a ten o’clock breakfast, an event one suspects that was largely of Emma’s making. The captain duly found himself shaking hands and bowing to the Bishop of Winchester, Mrs Henrietta North, Lord and Lady Plymouth, Lord Grandison and Lady Gertrude Villiers. But the pleasure of the king’s company was again and finally foregone. At noon, just before the breakfast guests were departing in readiness for His Majesty, a message from Sir John Acton arrived. A French frigate with an English prize and two French merchantmen had been seen off the southern tip of Sardinia on the 12th. They had been repairing topmasts at the time, and there was a chance that Nelson might catch them if he hurried. With seven Neapolitan ships and a Spanish frigate in the harbour, he did not hesitate. Though Nelson’s ship had not finished provisioning and some of her casks were still ashore, he felt on trial. ‘I considered that the city of Naples looked what an English man of war would do, [and] I ordered my barge to be manned, sent the ladies on shore, and in two hours my ship was under sail . . .’48
There was something special about Naples. Goethe had spoken of it as a ‘paradise’ in which ‘everyone lives in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness’. As the city faded behind the wake of the Agamemnon, Nelson too tasted that heady draught. It is not difficult to understand why. Naples had given Nelson everything he craved in abundance. Here he had met exciting new friends, who had thrown their house open to him and attended his every need. Here he had met a prime minister and king who had feted and flattered him, and granted his every wish. Here, too, he had been treated with immense reverence, and placed above all others. Thousands of men had been instantly mobilised at his command. Within hours of Nelson’s departure from Naples two thousand soldiers, two seventy-fours, four frigates and corvettes and a transport were on their way to Toulon. Nelson lapped up his new status like a thirsty dog. Never had he been treated like this before, and as Naples receded he was in a state of warm euphoria.49
In a journal clearly written with posterity in mind, Nelson confided, ‘I believe we carry with us the good wishes of Naples, and of Sir William and Lady Hamilton in particular, which I esteem more than all the rest. Farewell Naples! May those who were kind to me be repaid ten-fold. If I am successful, I return. If otherwise, [I] go to Toulon.’50
4
Nelson’s plan to return to Naples went awry, however, and the French frigate eluded him. He was left with a mysterious incident that took place in the night of 18 September. Nelson was summoned from his cot with the news that two ships seemed to be converging upon the Agamemnon from different directions. It was dark, but Nelson suspected the sinister shapes materialising from the gloom might be Algerian pirates mistaking the British warship for a fat merchantman. Two days before he had heard that two such raiders had plundered a ship in the area, and receiving no replies to his signals he fired a fusillade of round and grape and closed in. By the time the British were able to board the two vessels, which turned out to be a ship and a galley, they had been abandoned. Both were armed with ten guns and swivels, and many small arms were found aboard, but the prize court in Leghorn later considered them harmless Genoese traders. Nelson rued that he did not even get salvage money.51
Soon he was at Leghorn himself, collecting the various prize crews he had sent there and replenishing his ship’s supplies. His men were worn out by the relentless service, and three died in a week. ‘I am going into Leghorn absolutely to save my poor fellows,’ Nelson wrote.52
Leghorn belonged to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, one of the small neutral powers that complicated war and displomacy in the Mediterranean. When the Agamemnon arrived on 25 September, John Udny, the British consul, came aboard to inform Captain Nelson about local sensibilities. Things could be better, Udny said. Apart from the disappointments in the prize courts, the British had annoyed the governor by trying to ship oxen to Hood’s f
leet in Toulon. A fortygun French frigate, L’Imperieuse, was also in the harbour, full of diehard republicans. Like many of the French ships at that time it was in a state of turmoil, and the captain was being deposed by his men. Looking at her through his telescope Nelson judged the frigate easy prey, but his hands were tied. This was a neutral port, open to belligerents of both sides so long as they observed a truce. Nelson kept the Frenchman under constant surveillance, ready to follow her the moment she ran for the open sea, but days passed without the frigate stirring. Finally Nelson blinked first. He was needed in Toulon and had to sail at the end of the month.53
Along the way he took two more prizes, both carrying supplies to the French garrisons in Corsica. One was a Genoese bark with hides and fruit and the other a Frenchman laden with wine. Nelson also saw the Neapolitan reinforcements at sea. When he reached Toulon on 5 October the first two contingents from Naples had already arrived, and the last, with provisions and thirty-two pieces of artillery, was due to sail. As the Agamemnon slipped among the other British ships in the outer roads Nelson realised how badly those reinforcements were needed, for affairs at Toulon had taken a turn for the worse.
Hood’s position was serious. A superior French army investing the town had gained command of the surrounding heights. Its artillery, including pieces served by an ambitious young officer named Napoleon Bonaparte, were throwing shot and shells at the allied forts and across the harbour. Hood had fifteen miles of vulnerable defences to man, and was putting together a polyglot force of 12,500 Britons, Spaniards, Neapolitans, Sardinians and Piedmontese, but the redcoats were few and many of the others proved almost useless. The Spaniards, who were holding important positions, appeared to confuse their right and left shoulders in drill, and were apt to ‘run away, officers and men together’. Yet Hood’s ships sat as oblivious to the descending shells as if they were anchored in Spithead, and the admiral remained optimistic. He still hoped for major reinforcements, his men were conducting brilliant sorties against the encircling forces and there were hopes that the besiegers would quarrel among themselves. When Nelson went on board the Victory on 6 October it was difficult not to catch some of the old admiral’s enthusiasm. ‘He is so good an officer that every body must respect him,’ Nelson told his wife.54