Losing Nelson (17 page)

I went back to my desk, settled down to write again. Who next? Who but the detested adversary, the man behind the treaty?

Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo. Fifty-five years old at the time of these events, active and vigorous. Member of an ancient, princely family, inheritor of vast feudal estates in his native Calabria. In his younger days a prominent member of Roman high society. (He was descended from the Roman family of Colonna on his mother’s side.) For a while he was the lover of the marchesa Girolama Lepri, notorious for her promiscuity. This was a profligate, licentious, profoundly corrupt society. By all accounts Ruffo was entirely at home in it. Horatio calls him a “swelled-up priest,” but he had never taken orders. His cardinal’s hat had been bestowed on him when he retired from the post of treasurer-general to the Vatican—some say in order to get rid of him after a suspected misappropriation of funds. Slander, probably; a man like that would not have lacked for enemies … Of all the nobles and court hangers-on that fled with their majesties to Palermo, he is the only one to show spirit. With the blessing of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina—though without their material assistance—he leaves Sicily on January 27, 1799, four days after the proclamation of the republic in Naples. His declared object: to promote and lead a counter-revolution, drive out the French, suppress the republican rebels, restore the kingdom of Naples to Ferdinand
.

At the beginning of February he lands in Calabria with only eight followers and proclaims a holy war to rid the kingdom of foreign atheists. Within a few weeks, 17,000 fierce and undisciplined irregulars have flocked to his standard. This horde—the Christian Army of the Holy Faith, as Ruffo calls it—sets off from Naples bearing the Sicilian royal standard and spreading terror as it advances. Their numbers are swelled by bands of brigands and by some thousands of convicts released from Sicilian jails
.

Success is rapid. By the beginning of June the French have withdrawn, leaving only a garrison in the castle of Sant’Elmo. On the fourteenth, Ruffo lets loose his Christian army on Naples. No, that is to misrepresent him; he can no longer hold it back. The Jacobin rebel militia take refuge in their two forts of Nuovo and dell’Ovo. Ruffo’s troops give themselves up to slaughter and pillage. They are joined by the street people of Naples, called the
lazzaroni,
a ragged army many thousand strong, fiercely loyal to the king. Anyone suspected of Jacobin sympathies—and it is enough to be respectably dressed—is hauled off to the main square and butchered on the spot
.

I paused at this point to consider the situation now facing the victorious Ruffo. The city is in chaos. His troops openly defy his attempts to restrain them. A visiting German author, August von Kotzebue, describes the terror of those days in his
Travels through Italy
. One or two extracts were there in my book.

The
lazzaroni
roasted men in the streets and begged money of the passers-by to purchase bread to their roast meat. Many of them carried in their pockets fingers, ears, etc. which they had cut off; and if they met a person they looked upon as a patriot, they triumphantly exhibited their bloody spoils … All who wore cropped hair fell victim to the mob. False tails were procured but the people ran behind anyone that passed, pulling him by the tail, and if it came off, it was all over with the wearer
 …

Touch the word, six paces, palms against the cool wall. Naples
given over to a festival of blood. People dragged out of their houses, on any pretext or none, men, women, and children, and hacked to death on the streets. The slaughter went on through the night, lit by the flames from buildings set on fire by the looters or by incendiary bombs from the besieged republicans in their forts.

What was Ruffo to do? He was not burdened by principle, any more than Hamilton—in fact, these two had a great deal in common. The aesthete and the pragmatist, both deep-dyed. Not much difference. The cardinal’s main purpose in all this, from the very beginning, had been to secure Bourbon gratitude and the rewards he hoped would follow. He was cynical, opportunistic, completely egotistical. His whole career goes to show this. But above all he was very, very realistic and therefore entirely unheroic, light-years away from an angelic nature like Horatio’s.

This was the main difference, but there was another. I wanted to be fair to Ruffo, to try to see things as he would have seen them that afternoon as he sat arguing there and the rage mounted. Otherwise there was no point in assembling these people, there could be no exit from this maze of personality, I would just go walking round and round in it. Ruffo was a royalist because the power of the great families was guaranteed by the monarchy. But he had no devotion to the Bourbon cause or to any other. The thing that really marked him out was that he was an Italian, and Calabrese at that; Naples was his city. He cared what happened to her and to her people. A Spanish king, an Austrian queen, a prime minister half English and half French, a British ambassador … So he makes the treaty, knowing it will not be welcomed in Palermo but believing himself to be authorized, as vicar general and Ferdinand’s accredited representative, to act on his own initiative. The objective is gained; he sees no point in further bloodshed. But the others do; they are intent on punishment, especially the
fearful and vindictive Carolina, from whom in one way or another they all take their tone. Yes, even you, Horatio.

Then, on that morning of the twenty-sixth, after all the quarrelling, there comes the volte-face. Ruffo finds in his hands first Hamilton’s hasty assurance, then the declaration delivered by the captains—which they refuse to sign.
His Lordship will not oppose the embarkation
.

And in fact you did not. Now comes the question: if on someone’s part there was an intention to deceive, who in fact was deceived? Was it Ruffo? Domenico Sacchinelli, the cardinal’s secretary, in his account of the events of that morning, says that his employer suspected something was wrong:
The Cardinal, although he suspected there might be here some treachery, not wishing to wrangle with those two captains, took no further measure beyond deputing the Minister Micheroux to accompany those two captains to the Castles to arrange with the republican commanders the execution of the articles agreed upon
.

Why should he suspect treachery? Not because the captains refused to sign; there was no reason for them to sign, they were the transmitters, not the authors. Surely, then, because of the equivocal tone. In that case, why didn’t he demand further clarification? Why, above all, did he send to Micheroux, together with the ambiguous documents he had received, a letter in his own hand stating that Lord Nelson
had consented to carry out the capitulation
, a clear exaggeration of their import? Did he believe what he wrote or merely pretend to believe it? Perhaps he didn’t suspect anything at all? Sacchinelli was writing many years later, working from notes and memories. He was on a pension from the Bourbon court; he wanted to shift the blame to the English for the terrible things that happened afterwards.

In this business, wherever one pressed, a dark syrup of treachery came oozing round the edges. But whose? Whose was the mind,
whose were the glances? The rebels came out to atrocious deaths. Was it Emma? The thought sent me back to my desk again. Difficult to write briefly about Emma; there was so much of her, and so much of it was folly. Her beauty, her vulgarity, her extraordinary spelling, her capacity to absorb and deal out flattery … However, there was no play without her; the attempt had to be made.

Emma, Lady Hamilton. Born in 1765 to a colliery blacksmith and his wife on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire. Baptized in the name of Emy Lyon. No birth certificate yet found. Father signed his marriage certificate with a cross. The hamlet where she was born one of the most wretched and squalid in the land, a collection of hovels lived in by the colliers who worked in the nearby pit. Difficult to imagine, even in those times, more miserably deprived beginnings to life
.

Emma was spirited and notably beautiful and she got out. At twelve she was employed as an under-housemaid in the home of a Chester surgeon. A year or two later she found a place in London as a maidservant. At the age of sixteen she gave birth to an illegitimate child, having been abandoned in pregnancy by the young baronet who was keeping her. She subsequently fell into the hands of the Hon. Charles Greville, whose mistress she became. She loved and admired this cold-eyed young man, second son of the Earl of Warwick, and was deeply hurt when, wanting to marry money, he packed her off to Naples, into the hands of his uncle, Sir William
.

She was stricken, yes—she had thought Greville returned her love. But she must have known already, must have known from her earliest years, that she was a commodity. And the move turned out lucky for her. There wouldn’t have been much for her in England, once her looks had gone. In Naples, beauty and spirit again combining, she first captivated the aging ambassador, then became indispensable to him. In 1791 he made her his wife. So she got out twice—she was an escapee. (Her third
great escape, drunk and destitute in Calais, ten years after Trafalgar, was out of this world altogether.)

When Horatio’s sails appeared on the horizon that September day, he was nearly forty, she was thirty-three. For eight years she had been a celebrated figure at the Bourbon court, intimate friend of the queen, hostess to a wealthy and glamorous international society
.

I paused on this. Thoughts of Emma excited me almost always. She was fond of dressing up, and in my imaginings she had worn many kinds of attire and often none at all. But I wanted that evening to control all stirring in the loins. I was intent not on putting her beauties together in that synthesis of touch upon touch until only the last, the lightest touch is needed, a patient and precarious process that I knew well. No, I was set on analysis, I wanted to isolate some element in her that might help me to understand the part she had played in those June days.

She had become flaunting and splendid and in a way powerful, with many favours in her gift. But to have known want and degradation, to have known yourself for a commodity—these are things that can never be effaced. Kindness will seem like love; love will get confused with gratitude. I remembered an early letter of hers to her benefactor, Sir William, and I got up from my desk to find it.

My friend, my All, my Good, my kind Home in one, you are to me eating, drinking and cloathing, my comforter in distress. Then why shall I not love you?

It is all there. This was what lay behind her habit of flattery, both the practise and the appetite. The mutual assurance of being safe, being necessary, being admired. Like preening among birds that have come to a sheltered place in the course of some perilous migration. For full effect, it had to be reciprocal …

Finger on the gilt letters.
Bourbons
. Six paces, palms against the
wall, thumbs mustn’t touch. Miss it once and you have to start all over again with a different book. Emma’s love for Greville was not reciprocated, though she thought it was. Sir William was kinder but not much different in spirit. Besides, he was drying out. The queen, she loved the queen; they wrote to each other every day, even when they were both in Naples. Emma would write to Maria Carolina in moments of exaltation, with no intention of sending the words to her. It was a form of praying. Like the words she wrote on the envelope of one of the queen’s letters:
Yes, I will serve her with my heart and soul. My blood if necessary shall flow for her. Emma will prove to Maria Carolina that a humble-born Englishwoman can serve a Queen with zeal and true love, even at the risk of her life
.

There was no risk to Emma’s life. She always saw herself as the heroine; Miss Lily had been right in that. But once again she believed that her love was reciprocated. She was surely mistaken in this. Maria Carolina was a member of the great Hapsburg dynasty, rulers of Austria-Hungary, allied by blood or marriage with practically all the crowned heads of Europe. She would have grown up in the art of self-preservation and the exercise of power. Monarchs rarely reciprocate devotion from commoners. They take it for their due and use it for their ends. Emma was the deputy and mouthpiece of this woman, who hated the French and all liberal sentiment, who feared the loss of her life and throne, who needed Horatio’s total support in eliminating opposition in Naples, and who knew that Horatio was deeply in love with her devoted messenger.

She was there with them that day, in the cabin of the
Foudroyant
, while Horatio and the cardinal argued together, while the differences between them widened and the dislike grew. As I continued to pace back and forth, never faltering, never missing, soothed by the simple but exact repetition of gestures and steps, I could see them there, in their particular places.

Horatio walks up and down, working the stump of his arm. Such a poor remnant; it seems strange it could move at all. The cardinal sits at one end of the table; he is richly dressed and wears a black velvet skull-cap. He interrupts, he gestures. The treaty must be respected. Horatio raises his voice. He is being contradicted aboard his own ship, in his own cabin. He stops to slam his left hand down on the table. The treaty must be scrapped. Hamilton stands midway between them in close-fitting white trousers and a cutaway coat, peering down that high-bridged nose of his, softening the tones as he translates. Emma takes no direct part, but she is very much there, she is the queen’s special agent. She is constantly on the move—she could never keep still for long. She listens to everything. How she hates this wily priest who wants to offer terms to the vile republicans. She is in a dress of white muslin with a fringed sash. Her hat, broad-brimmed, trimmed with red ribbons, and crowned with ostrich plumes, lies discarded on the table.

Through the great bay window of the cabin, stretching the whole width of the ship, they can see the lights of Naples and the flames and smoke of riot; they can hear the occasional crash of shots; perhaps the screams of raped or mutilated victims carry across the bay. Among the warships, the bobbing lamps of dozens of small boats, offering to sell fish to the sailors. The barges of the nobility have seen a hasty change of flag since Horatio’s arrival. The tricolour of the republic has been hauled down; they fly the white standard of the Bourbons now. From these barges, through the soft summer air, come the strains of “Rule Britannia”—the fiddlers have played it so often in these two days that they know it by heart.