England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (32 page)

In February, the new government of France, determined to be respected as the European superpower, declared war on England and Holland. The English government began sending envoys to Naples to encourage the king and queen to ally with England. At the end of the previous
year, the French had sent out warships to threaten the king and queen with invasion, forcing them to recognize their new regime. Ferdinand and Maria Carolina were nervous about inflaming their enemies any further. Emma struggled to persuade the queen that the British could assist, and after a series of debates, an Anglo-Neapolitan treaty was signed on July 12. Britain would maintain a fleet in the Mediterranean, and Naples was required to provide ships and men and no longer trade with France. Sir William's comfortable backwater was about to become crucial to the battle for dominance over Europe.

Emma's support for Maria Carolina's aversion to the French would change her life. In August, Admiral Lord Hood, commander in chief of the British fleet in the Mediterranean, decided to call in troops from Naples, to assist his men in defending the French town of Toulon. As his messenger, he sent HMS
Agamemnon
and its young, ambitious captain, Horatio Nelson.

Neapolitan Nights

CHAPTER 28
The Hero Visits

S
ince 1787, Horatio Nelson had been retired and miserable, on half pay in muddy Norfolk, making model ships, reading the newspapers, and feigning patience with his sickly, unfulfilled wife, Fanny. When he arrived in Naples on the evening of September 10, 1793, at the age of thirty-five, he knew it was his chance to grab back the future glory that had seemed so secure before his marriage. "I have only to hope I shall succeed with the King," he worried.

Ferdinand came to meet Nelson's ship, resplendent in full court dress, accompanied by the princes and princesses, numerous courtiers, and Emma and Sir William. Nelson had been on shore only twice since leaving Britain four months ago and had hardly seen a woman in that time. He described himself as "sick with fatigue," but he soon perked up when he spotted Lady Hamilton, the glamorous star of the gossip columns, sparkling in her court finery. Emma ushered him back to the Palazzo Sessa and into the apartments prepared for him and his thirteen-year-old stepson, Josiah. They probably occupied the handsome suite with the sea view and the ceiling painted with stars that she first used when she arrived in 1786. Nelson slept in a room adorned with portraits of Emma as a bacchante and a goddess, as was every room in the palazzo, and Vigée-Lebrun's celebrated portrait of Emma as a sibyl glowed softly over his bed.

Still stung by Queen Charlotte's refusal to receive her, Emma strained to prove herself to the visiting captain by planning entertainments and trying to anticipate his every need. Nelson had not eaten fresh meat or vegetables for weeks, and he gleefully tucked into the silver plates of the finest fish, turtle, and exotic sweetmeats arriving regularly from the palazzo's
kitchens. Emma accompanied him to court and listened raptly to his stories of bravery, overwhelming the shy sailor with tricks of flirtation and allure she had perfected with hardened Neapolitan courtiers. Obsessed by social rank and terrible at languages, he was immediately impressed by her intimacy with the queen and by her fluent translation from Italian and French.

In just four days, the king pledged Nelson his troops and wrote an obliging letter to Lord Hood. Nelson exulted that the king called him and his company "the saviours of Italy." Exhilarated by his social success and Ferdinand's cooperation, Nelson planned an elaborate Sunday breakfast on his ship. The king was to attend, along with the court, but the pregnant queen probably stayed behind. Also in attendance were Sir William and Emma and the most distinguished English visitors: the Bishop of Winchester and family, Lord and Lady Plymouth, and various other aristocrats. The meat was roasting in the ovens, the table laid with china borrowed from the Palazzo Sessa, and Sir William and Emma were already on board when John Acton sent the urgent message that a French man-of-war had arrived at Sardinia.
¹
Detecting a chance for glory, Nelson hustled his guests off the ship, rushed to raise the anchor, and set off in pursuit. He wrote to his hosts twelve days later, thanking Sir William for organizing some prints for him and apologizing for dashing off with the embassy's butter pan.

Fanny, alone in her empty Suffolk home, Roundwood, needed to be reassured about her husband's meeting with the woman the newspapers declared no man could resist or forget. "Lady Hamilton has been wonderfully kind and good to Josiah," he wrote, carefully concealing his attraction to her. "She is a young woman of amiable manners and who does honour to the station to which she is raised." Sexual guilt always prompted Nelson to buy Fanny a gift, and he found time in his hectic few days to purchase some rich sashes of Naples silk. One of Emma's trademark fashions was a thick, colored silk sash tied tight around a muslin dress, an almost childish style. Romney painted her in the same outfit for
The Ambassadress,
and she wore a similar style for her wedding and then repeatedly in Naples. Nelson was even thinking of Lady Hamilton as he bought his wife a gift.

The English gossip columnists rushed to exploit the meeting between the ambassadress sex bomb and the virile captain. The scandalous
Bon Ton Magazine
made fun of Sir William, Nelson, and Emma in a tale about “the
lovely Syren.” A young, newly married woman who is sexually unsatisfied by her elderly husband, Lord E, who, like Sir William, has a “violent rage for private theatricals and dramatic representations,” falls in love with a captain when he visits. A cartoon depicts a small man who looks like Nelson helping a lady descend down a wall to him, accompanied by the scurrilous tale of how the visiting captain becomes a

professed adorer of the lovely Syren, whose beauty, about three years ago fascinated Lord E—— in such a bewitching manner, that his lordship, actually forgetting what he owed to himself, his family and rank, after a courtship of a few months, led her… a willing victim to the Temple of Hymen [i.e., he married her, a joke on Emma's work in the Temple of Health]. But though Lord E—— may be as great an admirer of female charms as most of his compeers, he is certainly but ill qualified to do homage to the power of beauty, in that way that the ladies generally expect.

The “reports in general circulation” imply that Lord E “sleeps at night with a pound of raw beef stakes clapt on each cheek, to give them a fresh and ruddy appearance,” and wears silver thimbles to “render his fingers conical and tapering.” Although, however, he “might secure the
appearance
of youth and vigour… we greatly doubt whether the whole
Materia Medica
can recall the actual enjoyment of those enviable blessings,” for he is impotent. After a few weeks, the new wife was deeply disappointed by the failure of her husband's “bag-pipes” (the Hamiltons were Scottish) and, because women are “ill qualified to put up with crosses and disappointments,” frolics with the handsome captain.
²

Infatuations with married women were Nelson's specialty. “This Horatio is for ever in love,” he had once imagined himself described, although his amorous obsessions were not generally matched by success. Small at just under five foot six, thin, and pale, he had a shock of unwieldy ginger hair, and his Norfolk drawl was very pronounced. Nelson's sharp, chiseled face and small, sunken eyes disappointed when the ideal of male beauty was Lord Byron with his limpid eyes and sensual plump mouth. At least two young ladies had snubbed his offers of marriage, and his friends derided the courtesans and mistresses he chose after his marriage. When he took up with a young opera singer, Adelaide Correglia, when stationed in Leghorn (now Livorno), a strategic port on Italy's Tuscan coast, his colleague
Captain Fremantle complained he made himself "ridiculous" with his excessive devotion to her, ruining the whole dinner by gazing devotedly into her eyes.

Horatio Nelson was born in 1758, the third son (he was technically the fifth, but two elder brothers had already died) of a country rector in Burn-ham Thorpe, a small village in Norfolk, ten miles from England's east coast. When he was nine, his mother died, aged only forty-two, after producing eleven children in seventeen years. Little Horatio claimed to remember no more about her than that she "hated the French." Most widowed fathers remarried as quickly as possible, but Edmund Nelson remained single and brought up his family on small resources and tight discipline. Horatio escaped home at the age of twelve to become a midshipman, thanks to his uncle, who paid for his commission. He traveled to the West Indies, the Arctic, India, and the Mediterranean and did not see his father or his siblings for six years.
³
Starved of affection since childhood, he fell desperately in love with nearly every woman he met. Neither good-looking, well-connected, nor rich, he was snubbed by genteel young English ladies, and he had no chance with his grande passion, the belle of Quebec town, Mary Simpson. As he grew up, he was increasingly attracted to young married women with a maternal gleam in their eye. While stationed in the Caribbean, he became infatuated with the beautiful young wife of the elderly commissioner of Antigua, declaring, "Was it not for Mrs. Moutray, who is
very very
good to me, I should almost hang myself at this infernal hole," and extolling her: "her equal I never saw in any country." His desires piqued by days of flirtation with her, Nelson sailed for the Caribbean island of Nevis. There he met John Herbert, a rich planter and president of the island council, and developed a crush on his niece and housekeeper, Fanny Nisbet, a widow with a young son.

A fractious only child, Frances Herbert Woolward had enjoyed a leisured childhood in Nevis, but in 1779 her father died, leaving her nothing, and she was forced to accept the marriage proposal of the doctor who had attended him, Josiah Nisbet, ten years her senior. The newlyweds traveled to England. Most Nevisians who moved to England did so in the hope that the cold climate would cure their sufferings from lead poisoning, caused by drinking rum that had been distilled in lead pipes, and Josiah Nisbet was probably similarly afflicted. She quickly fell pregnant, but Dr. Nisbet sickened, probably with syphilis, and died in 1781, hallucinating wildly in his final months.
⁴
Left a widow at twenty-one, with a son, Fanny had no choice but to return and become her uncle's housekeeper.

Two years later, Nelson arrived. Touched by her bruised sadness and impressed by her fortitude after losing both father and husband in quick succession, Nelson began to enjoy Fanny's company. She had the mature, maternal air he loved, and he admired her petting her young son, imagining her doing the same to him and their brood of children. He was enjoying just another pleasant crush—but he had no idea that the Herberts saw him as the answer to their prayers. Herbert wanted his disillusioned niece and her son off his hands, and she was desperate to flee the stultifying routine of her life as his housekeeper. Any man with reasonable prospects would have done. Fanny knew her youth was fading. In the excitable young captain, she saw her last chance of escape from growing old as her uncle's servant.

To Nelson, Nevis was a romantic paradise. More than three thousand feet high, Mount Nevis towered over thirty-six square miles of lush vegetation, fruit trees, and hot springs. According
to A Description of the Island of Nevis,
dedicated to John Herbert and compiled in consultation with Dr. Nisbet, the island was “altogether pleasing and agreeable.”
⁵
Sugar cane grew thick on the rich volcanic soil, and the Herberts, owners of the Montpelier Plantation, were the island's first family. The beauty hid the misery and pain of ten thousand beaten, abused slaves. Nevis's population was small, with only a thousand whites, and out of every five people who came to Nevis, free or as a slave, three were dead before the end of five years, and few white inhabitants lived past fifty. Fanny had no chance of meeting new men. Since most women married before twenty, she was old. The white population was in decline, and because English servants were unwilling to travel out, most women had more domestic work than their English counterparts. Fanny knew she had to turn Nelson's crush into a desire to marry her. Her uncle was more than willing to encourage the match by throwing them together and declaring her four years younger than her true age. Nelson turned out to be less easily swayed than he had hoped, but Herbert was not to be daunted. He played his trump card: the offer of a massive dowry.