Kate Williams

by Unknown

  “I cannot describe to you my feelings on your being so near us,” exulted Emma to the knight on his way. She enclosed a letter of the queen’s in which “with her whole heart and soul she wishes you victory,” and flirtatiously instructed him to “kiss it, and send it back.“2 Coyly, Nelson replied that he hoped to be “kissing her hand” soon.3 Her request for British help coincided with Nelson’s decision to fight Napoleon in the Mediterranean, and he was eager to reach Naples. On the way, however, he heard that Bonaparte was heading for Egypt, and he changed his plans to set off in hot pursuit. He sailed so fast that he arrived before his prey; rather than wait, a sitting target, he turned the ships around and headed back to Syracuse in Sicily to restock with food and water. When he attempted to enter, however, the governor refused him entry, believing that Ferdinand’s kingdom was still keeping to the treaty with the French. Nelson wrote to Sir William for help, and Emma sent him a deeply sympathetic letter while encouraging Maria Carolina to press her husband to order the governor to allow Nelson to take the supplies he needed. The queen and Emma together were successful. Bulging with food and drink, Nelson’s Vanguard and the ten other ships left Syracuse and sailed once more for Egypt.

  On the night of July 28, Nelson and his company shattered the French fleet off the coast of Alexandria at Aboukir Bay. In what came to be known as the Battle of the Nile, nine ships were taken, two were sunk, and only two escaped. “Victory,” Nelson declared, “is not a strong enough name for such a scene as I have passed.” He instructed Sir William to “communicate this happy event to all the courts in Italy.” Emma immediately wrote to Maria Carolina, who declared herself “wild with joy.” “Gratitude is engraven on my heart,” she wrote, and begged Emma to find her a portrait of Nelson. Emma scrawled on the back of the letter that she received it on “the happy day we received the joyful news of the gret Victory over the infernal french by the brave gallant Nelson.” The city was illuminated for three days in honor of the amazing victory.

  Nelson set sail for Naples, ready to be fêted. Emma made plans to celebrate him, struggling a little to imagine how he would look on his arrival. She knew he had been badly wounded in the battles against the French, but she had no idea of how ravaged his body had been. Since she had last seen him in 1793, he had lost what little good looks he had. At the Battle of Calvi in Corsica, in 1795, stone splinters from an enemy shot hit Nelson’s right eye, and he was immediately blinded, although he could soon distinguish objects as well as light and dark. His eye was heavily scarred, the iris and pupil were so static as to seem dead, and it gave him terrible pain in times of stress. In July 1797, when leading a rash assault on the town of Santa Cruz on Tenerife by night, his right arm was destroyed by grapeshot. Josiah bound it with handkerchiefs and the surgeon amputated the arm in a dark, freezing, and flooded ship’s cabin, where nothing would hold still under a weak, flickering light. Nelson returned home in agony from his infected wound, tormented by hallucinations caused by the laudanum he took for the pain. Fanny was a devoted nurse, and the period of Nelson’s convalescence was the happiest in their marriage. To her misery, he recovered only to seize fame with doubled fervor.

  Nelson trumpeted his triumph against the French at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, a Portuguese peninsula near Gibraltar, on February 14, 1797, by presenting himself as the champion of the hour, dramatically boarding the enemy ship and shooting his way to the quarterdeck until the crew surrendered. His version appeared in the Times and the Sun. Most English soon believed that he lost his arm at Cape St. Vincent. The newspapers gushed praise for Nelson’s bravery, engravings of him were sold across the country, and London, Bath, Bristol, and Norwich voted him the freedom of the city. He was promoted to the position of rear admiral and was given a knighthood. Fanny, newly Lady Nelson, hoped that Nelson’s promotion would encourage him to desist from “boarding,” leading parties of armed men onto enemy ships, a dangerous job that most admirals delegated to their captains. Nelson ignored her: he loved the excitement of the risk and was determined to pursue glory at all costs.

  When the news of the Battle of the Nile was confirmed on October 2, England went wild. Their Nelson had won the most cataclysmic victory of the Napoleonic Wars so far. He became Baron Nelson of the Nile and of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, his home town. Every newspaper praised him, and even scabrous James Gillray produced congratulatory caricatures. The fashion for Nelson merchandise that began after his victory at Cape St. Vincent became a craze, an unprecedented hysteria for one man that has never been equaled. Shop windows exploded with Nelson memorabilia. Manufacturers put his face and figure on any possible item and worked overtime to satisfy demand. Within a month or so of the Nile victory, virtually every house owned an image of Nelson, whether on paper, porcelain, cloth, silk, wood, or stone. As well as busts, bronzes, and portraits, there were Nelson tea sets, dinner sets, and home accessories such as doorknob handles, flowerpots, and vases, along with less delicate ware, cheap jugs, mugs in Pratt ware, and pewter plates. Ladies embroidered tapestries of England’s hero, and others bought Nelson jigsaws. When they were not buying Nelsonia, they treated themselves to Egyptian-themed homeware and fashions. Wedgwood even produced a blancmange mold that made a pudding topped with an Egyptian symbol. In England’s most exquisite drawing rooms, ladies wore crocodile ornaments and seated themselves on a sofa shaped like a sphinx, while mummies decorated the walls. One satirist ridiculed the “Dresses a la Nile,” showing a gentleman resplendent in a crocodile coat and boots like webbed feet conversing with a woman festooned in feathers, both blazoning “Nelson and Victory” on their ludicrous headdresses.

  Nelson was suddenly a heartthrob. Fashionable ladies hurried to dress themselves “alla Nelson” in Nelson-themed shawls, hair ribbons, rings, brooches, earrings, charms, scarves, bags, necklaces, pendants, hats, and petticoats. They wore gold anchors that celebrated their hero, who “relieves the World at the Mouth of the Nile.” Particularly sought after was the Nelson riding habit, a blue jacket with gold buttons, a near exact copy of his uniform.4 His face was featured on thousands of enamel boxes used to store beauty patches, as well as on other intimate objects, such as jewelry and pomade boxes. Patriotic ladies turned up at social functions festooned with Nelson jewelry and knickknacks. They snapped up fans commemorating him that also bore lists of the English and French fleets and details of new dances, including “Sprigs of Laurel for Lord Nelson.”

  England wanted Fanny to be the high priestess of the new Nelson cult, but she refused. The new Lady Nelson refused to wear fashions after her husband, crocodile earrings, or Vanguard buttons, and she had no intention of ornamenting her home with life-size mummies. Accosted by fans when she was shopping and besieged by dignitaries wishing to praise her husband, Fanny struggled with the social demands made upon her. She dreaded being caricatured, and she was horrified to find that her name was being used to dub a quickstep “Lady Nelson’s Fancy.” Nelson was deeply disappointed by her efforts to ignore the avalanche of tacky goods in his honor and to fan worship. He wanted her to cultivate his fame while he was away, cover her house and herself in tributes to him, and report back on the eulogies in the papers.

  Emma knew that Nelson’s arrival in Naples was her opportunity to catapult herself onto a world stage. She desperately wanted to grab his attention and share some of his incredible fame. At the same time, she was determined to confirm him as the defender of her dear queen, proving herself the key political machinator of the court. Intent on captivating him, she wrote an extravagantly passionate letter:

  How shall I begin, what shall I say to you ‘tis impossible I can write…. I am delerious with joy, and assure you I have a fervour caused by agitation and pleasure. God, what a victory! Never, never has there been anything half so glorious, so compleat. I fainted when I heard the joyfull news, and fell on my side and am hurt, but well of that. I shou’d feil it a glory to die in such a cause. No I wou’d not like to die till I see and embrace the Victor of the Nile. How shall I
describe to you the transports of Maria Carolina, ‘tis not possible. She fainted and kissed her husband, her children, walked about the room, cried, kissed and embraced every person near her, exclaiming, Oh brave Nelson, oh, God bless and protect our brave deliverer, oh Nelson, Nelson what do we not owe to you, o Victor, Saviour of Itali, that my swolen heart cou’d now tell him personally what we owe to him!

  The Neapolitans are made with joy, and if you wos here now, you wou’d be killed with kindness. Sonets on sonets, illuminations, rejoicings; not a French dog dare shew his face. How I glory in the honner of my Country and my Countryman! I walk and tread in the air with pride, feiling I was born in the same land with the victor Nelson and his gallant band….

  We are preparing your appartment against you come. I hope it will not be long, for Sir William and I are so impatient to embrace you. I wish you cou’d have seen our house the 3 nights of illumination. Tis, ‘twas covered with your glorious name. Their were 3 thousand Lamps, and their shou’d have been 3 millions if we had time…. For God’s sake come to Naples soon. We receive so many sonets and letters of congratulation…. I woul’d rather be an English powder monkey or a swab in that great victory than an Emperor out of it.

  My dress from head to foot is alia Nelson. Ask Hoste. Even my shawl is in Blue with gold anchors all over. My earrings are Nelson’s anchors; in short, we are be-Nelsoned all over. I send you some Sonets…. I am afraid you will not be able to read this scrawl.5

  After the Battle of the Nile, every woman in England and Naples wanted Nelson, but Emma made sure to get there first. Nelson was deeply gratified by her letter. Puffed with pride, he wrote to Fanny that on hearing the victory, Lady Hamilton “fell apparently dead and is not yet recovered from severe bruises.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Falling into His Arms

  Nelson arrived at Naples in the Vanguard on September 22, 1798. Five hundred boats spilling musicians and cheering courtiers flocked to meet him. Crowds lined the shore, and bands played “Rule Britannia” and “See the Conquering Hero.” Emma staged her own dramatic welcome. To the delight of the watching audience, she arrived on deck and flung herself against him, exclaiming in happiness and shedding sympathetic tears over his wounds. “Up flew her ladyship,” Nelson spluttered in excitement, “and exclaiming ‘Oh God is it possible’; fell into my arms more dead than alive.” Entranced by the display, he temporarily forgot he had only one arm.

  Emma swept Nelson and also Josiah, now eighteen, back to the Palazzo Sessa. Nelson had bought Emma the present of a black maid, perhaps a Sudanese girl from a dealer who had set up shop on his ship after the Battle of the Nile. A black maid was a mark of extreme sophistication in England, kept by fine ladies to make their complexions look paler. Ecstatic about her new gift, Emma called her Fatima. Almost as soon as he arrived on shore, the battle-scarred hero collapsed with exhaustion. Emma devoted every hour to caring for him: serving him nourishing meals and warming drinks and helping him to sleep by soothing his brow. Hamilton had written to him before he arrived, promising that “Emma is looking out for the softest pillows, to repose the few wearied limbs you have left.” She plumped up the pillows and patted his hair.

  While she had him prostrate before her, Emma exerted all her seductive powers to encourage Nelson to protect Maria Carolina and the kingdom of Naples. Nelson had other missions in the Mediterranean—namely, to warn France away from Egypt and protect Malta—but Emma aimed to ensure he focused on her.1 She pulled out her glamorous muslin dresses from the closet, wearing every item that could be even vaguely “alia Nelson.” When two of his captains had arrived in Naples with the news of the victory of the Nile, she accompanied them to the opera wearing a headband embroidered with “Nelson and Victory” in gold. Since then, she had turned herself into a living tribute.

  Nelson had been excited to receive such an inviting letter from the famous sex bomb. Indeed, he had written to Sir William rather weakly offering to lodge in a hotel.2 Now he could hardly believe that she was tending to him so closely in her home. He was soon wrapped around her little finger, dazzled by her warm attentions. Beautiful, flirtatious, sexy, witty, and young, as well as frank and not easily offended, she was a great contrast to the dreary, stiff wives of ambassadors and other superiors who usually dismissed him as a vulgar little man. “She is an honour to her sex,” he wrote to Fanny, whom he had seen for seven months in the last seven years, and “one of the best women in this world.” To Earl St. Vincent, his commander, he was more honest. “I am writing opposite Lady Hamilton, therefore you will not be surprised at the glorious jumble of this letter,” he admitted, describing his heart as fluttering with confusion. “Naples is a dangerous place, and we must keep clear of it.”

  Unlike sybaritic, rank-obsessed playboys at the Neapolitan court, Nelson’s charisma inhered in his passion for his work and his serious ambition. He radiated blunt honesty, and he was probably the least cynical guest the palazzo had ever entertained. Unlike every other person in Emma’s social circle, he was from a humble background, and his education was patchy. He was a man of action: he could not play music, sing, or dance, and he was a terrible dresser. Neapolitans and English aristocrats cut a dash in pastels, exotic pink suits, and gold shoes, but out of his impressive dress uniform, gaudy with medals, Nelson wore dull black, gray, and brown wool, and his hair was unstyled and unpowdered. He was smaller than most men, so thin as to seem emaciated, and he had a large bald patch where he had cut his head at Aboukir, which he tried to hide by combing over some of his unruly ginger hair. Covered with scars and wrinkles from sun exposure, he was neither attractive nor suave. Emma didn’t care.

  Emma worked hard to bring Josiah out of his shell. Rebellious and unhappy, convinced that others mocked him for not being up to his job, Josiah drank heavily and refused to obey his stepfather’s commands. He was sullen and defensive, and Nelson, who had no patience with depression or anxiety, was simply infuriated. But Emma was soon working wonders with her pimply-faced teenage guest. “He likes Lady Hamilton more than any female,” boasted Nelson to Fanny. His bluster that Emma would “make more of Josiah than any woman” and that she would “fashion him in 6 months in spite of himself” was hardly calculated to win over his wife. Fanny was deeply worried about the tense relationship between father and stepson, and Emma’s breezy promise that although she and Josiah might “quarrel sometimes, he loves me and does as I would have him” only twisted the knife. Fanny had to read lashings of praise about Emma. “How few could have made the turn she has,” Nelson marveled to his wife, “proof that even reputation may be regained, but I own it requires a great soul.” Nelson knew Emma’s history—everyone did—and he hardly cared. Thanks to his humble upbringing, he was sympathetic toward women who had to make their own way, and aware that there were few choices for a poor girl but prostitution. He had worried that his sister Anne had been exposed to insult when she worked as a lacemaker’s apprentice in London. Nelson’s attitude toward prostitution was pragmatic. Whenever a ship came ashore, traders arrived to set up stalls on the deck, and hundreds of prostitutes flocked on board, rowed out in “bum boats” and then taken down by the men to their hammocks in the huge orlop deck where they all slept. The officers went onshore to meet expensive courtesans or local actresses. As Nelson knew, in the ranks of the men there was no dividing line between “virtuous woman” or wife and prostitute: many men married women who came on board ship or entered into alliances with the hundreds of prostitutes in Greenwich, who looked after their money, checked their lottery numbers, and cared for them when they returned.

  Real life in the navy was nothing like the dignified oil paintings. Most of his men were no more than seventeen, while many were as young as thirteen, high on their rations of a gallon of beer a day, pimply adolescents starved of female company, unable to write home, their only possessions the clothes they were wearing when they had been seized by the press gang. They were often drunk, the ship resounded to the sound of the cows, sheep, and hen
s packed into cages, women dressed as men worked as sailors (without anyone guessing), men with a little money and seniority took prostitutes as “wives” for the journey, and sex was not always consensual: in the Caribbean, plantation owners sent out their slaves to work as prostitutes. Having ruled over a ship that was at times a floating brothel, menagerie, pub, and shopping center, Nelson was less hypocritical than the average eighteenth-century man. When he had an affair with the singer Adelaide Correglia in the Italian port of Leghorn between 1794 and 1796, he demanded his superiors acknowledge the importance of the intelligence about ships’ movements that she gave him. Rather than goggle at Emma as an ex-courtesan or joke about her background, he accepted her as he saw her: a woman who had made a great turn in life.

  “Ten thousand most grateful thanks are due to your ladyship for restoring the health of our invaluable friend,” St. Vincent wrote skittishly to Emma. “Pray do not let your fascinating Neapolitan dames approach too near him, for he is made of flesh & blood & cannot resist their temptation.” Emma did not need any warnings. She was determined to monopolize Nelson’s attentions.

  While Nelson recovered his health, Emma planned her most spectacular party ever to celebrate his fortieth birthday. She spent thousands of pounds on food, decoration, and entertainment so opulent that even Nelson worried it might make him vain. On September 29, the Palazzo Sessa played host to eight hundred Neapolitan dignitaries and select English guests, and nearly a thousand more joined them for dancing. “Such a style of elegance as I never saw, or shall again probably,” wrote an utterly impressed Nelson to his wife. Emma adorned the courtyard with elaborate arrangements of flowers, lights, and candles and a column inscribed with “Veni, vidi, vici.” Every ribbon and button bore a picture of Nelson, and one of the English travelers composed a new verse to be added to “God Save the King,” which began “Join we great Nelson’s name/First on the roll of fame.”