Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (30 page)

Sir William Hamilton invited Nelson to stay at his house, and gratefully Nelson retired to a room in the ambassador's residence overlooking the bay. In addition to the pain of his head wound, he was suffering from a recurrence of the malaria that he had contracted in the West Indies. Lady Hamilton took charge of nursing him, a role she delighted in and was to be a feature of their future relationship. When he was able to get up and about, she continued to fuss over him, and later when they toured Europe together, she would lead him by the hand, cut up his food for him at meals, and treat him as if he were still an invalid.

At his previous meeting with Lady Hamilton, Nelson had described her as “a young woman of amiable manners, and who does honour to the station to which she is raised.” He now wrote to his wife and told her, “She is one of the very best women in the world. How few could have made the turn she has. She is an honour to her sex and proof that even reputation may be regained but I own it requires a great soul.” It is clear that he was aware of her past and had nothing but admiration for the way she had transformed herself.

Emma, Lady Hamilton, had come a long way from her humble beginnings on the Wirral Peninsula, near Liverpool. Her father, a blacksmith who worked for the local colliery, had died two months after her birth, and she owed her early advancement to her mother, who brought her to London and found her employment as a maidservant in various households. Numerous stories have gathered around her activities at this time. It is unlikely that she ever posed for the life classes at the Royal Academy, but she may have worked as a prostitute in a high-class brothel run by Mrs. Kelly on Arlington Street. She certainly stayed with Mrs. Kelly for a while. It was around this time that her exceptional beauty brought her to the attention of Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, a young baronet. In 1781, at the age of sixteen, she became his mistress and was installed in a cottage on his estate at Uppark in Sussex. It was said that she danced naked on the dining-room table for the entertainment of Sir Harry and his friends, and she later wrote of this time in her life, “Oh, my dear friend, for a time I own through distress my virtue was vanquished, but my sense of virtue not overcome.”

Sir Harry soon tired of Emma and brought her back to London, where she persuaded Charles Greville, one of his friends, to take her under his protection. He set her up in a house on Edgware Road with her mother and paid her living expenses on the condition that she abandon her promiscuous life and remain faithful to him. Emma, who had fallen in love with Greville, was very happy with this arrangement. She lived a relatively quiet life, of which the highlights were her visits to the studio of George Romney, who was commissioned by Greville to paint her portrait. Romney was so entranced by her appearance and by her ability as an actress to take on many different roles that she became his favorite model and the inspiration for a series of pictures in which she appeared as Ariadne, Circe, Juno, Medea, and a host of other women from the stories of classical Greece.

The quiet life in London's West End did not last long. Greville was fond of Emma and liked showing her off, but he had many other interests, and he also had financial problems. His solution was to marry an heiress and persuade his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, to take Emma off his hands. Sir William was fifty-three years old and recently widowed. He had met Emma several times and later admitted that her exquisite beauty had much affected him during his visits to England, but he had reservations about taking her back to Naples with him. After lengthy negotiations between uncle and nephew, it was agreed that Emma and her mother should travel to Italy in the spring of 1786 while Greville was traveling in Scotland.

It was not until Emma had been ensconced for several weeks in Sir William's delightful villa overlooking the bay of Naples that she learned that Greville had no intention of coming back to collect her. For a while she was inconsolable. “I find life is unsupportable without you,” she wrote to Greville. “Oh my heart is intirely broke.” But soon her cheerful, outgoing nature and Sir William's flattering attentions lifted her spirits. Within a few months, she was enjoying the delights of life in Naples. She attended the theater, went sailing on the bay, toured the surrounding countryside. She was painted by many of the artists who were living in the city, and she became a favored guest at the court of the King and Queen of Naples. Sir William provided her with a language master, a singing master, and a music teacher and encouraged her to sing in front of invited audiences. In March 1787, a year after her arrival, Goethe paid a visit to the city and recorded his impressions of Emma acting out a series of sketches based on the attitudes and gestures of Greek and Roman statues:

Sir William Hamilton has now, after many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature, found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, she lets down her hair and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can scarcely believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized 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.

Toward the end of 1786, Emma succumbed to Sir William's advances and became his mistress, and five years later, during a visit to London in September 1791, they were married. Sir William was sixty, and Emma was twenty-six. She had become an accomplished hostess and was renowned for her extraordinary beauty, her singing, and her unusual theatrical performances, which had become known as Lady Hamilton's Attitudes.

This was the woman with whom Nelson now found himself spending every hour of the day. He admired her and felt at ease with her. He may have been a much-fêted admiral, but with his provincial background, he was without grand connections. He no doubt felt more in common with her than with most of the aristocratic ladies he met. And he certainly reveled in her flattery. He had always felt himself a man of destiny: He had thirsted for recognition and for glory, and she constantly reminded him of his fame and his achievements. For his fortieth-birthday party in September 1798, a few weeks after his arrival in Naples, she arranged the most extravagant celebration. Eighty guests dined at Sir William's house, and nearly 2,000 people attended a ball. Patriotic songs were sung in Nelson's honor, and the people danced in a salon dominated by a triumphal column inscribed with the names of the heroes of the Nile.

Emma and Nelson were drawn closer together by dramatic events that took place at the end of the year. In December, the French army invaded the Kingdom of Naples and advanced on the city. Nelson supervised the escape of King Ferdinand and his Queen from their palace through a subterranean passage to the water's edge. On an overcast, blustery night, they were rowed out to HMS
Vanguard.
The Hamiltons were already on board, and two days before Christmas, they weighed anchor and headed for Palermo, the capital of Ferdinand's other kingdom, Sicily. On Christmas Eve, they ran into the fiercest storm Nelson had ever encountered. The
Vanguard
's topsails were torn to shreds, and the sailors stood by with axes ready to cut away the rigging if the masts were brought down by the hurricane-force winds. Most of the passengers were prostrate with fear and seasickness, but Emma proved herself a heroine. While Sir William wedged himself into a chair with loaded pistols in each hand ready to shoot himself if the ship went down, Emma never once retreated to her bed but looked after the children of the royal family. The youngest one became critically ill and died in her arms. The
Vanguard
reached the safety of the harbor at Palermo on December 26, Boxing Day.

Thanks in large measure to Nelson's resolute but brutal behavior during the next few months, the French withdrew from Naples, the Italian rebels were hanged by the mob, and King Ferdinand was restored to his throne. Returning to Sicily after the restoration of the monarchy in Naples, Nelson was once again at the center of celebrations and parties in his honor. Admiral Lord Keith, commander in chief in the Mediterranean, called to see him and could scarcely conceal his disapproval: “The whole was a scene of fulsome Vanity and Absurdity all the long eight days I was at Palermo.” It was during February 1800 that Nelson's relationship with Emma developed from one of mutual admiration into physical intimacy and a full-blown affair. It had become the habit of Sir William to retire after supper to bed, leaving Emma and Nelson alone in the private apartments of the Palazzo Palagonia. They spent many evenings gambling at the card tables, and their behavior caused Troubridge, one of Nelson's most loyal captains, to send him a note of warning: “If you knew what your friends feel for you, I am sure you would cut out all the nocturnal parties; the gambling of the people at Palermo is talked of everywhere. I beseech your Lordship, leave off. Lady Hamilton's character will suffer; nothing can prevent people from talking.”
¹²
Troubridge only mentioned the gambling, but of course people were also talking about a love affair that had become obvious to all.

Nelson ignored the warning, and in April 1800, he offered to take the Hamiltons on a cruise in the
Foudroyant.
They sailed to Syracuse, where they went ashore and viewed the antiquities. From there they sailed to Malta and arrived in the harbor of St. Pauls Bay on May 4. It was during this cruise that Emma conceived her twins.

This hedonistic life of parties, card games, and cruises under the Mediterranean sun could not last forever. Sir William learned that he was to be replaced as British minister in Naples, and Nelson received a brisk letter from Lord Spencer, the First Lord of the Admiralty. The gossip had reached London, and Nelson's superiors were losing patience with him. He had pleaded his ill health as a reason for staying in Italy, but Lord Spencer told him he was more likely to recover his strength in England than in an inactive situation in a foreign court, “however pleasing the respect and gratitude shown to you for your services may be.” Nelson's request to sail home in his flagship was refused, so he made plans to return overland with the Hamiltons. The Queen of Naples decided to join them for part of the journey, because she wanted to visit Vienna to see her daughter, who was now Empress of Austria.

So began an extraordinary triumphal journey across Europe. On July 12, 1800, a cavalcade of fourteen coaches and four baggage wagons set off from Leghorn, heading for Florence. The party included Nelson, Sir William Hamilton, Lady Hamilton and her elderly mother, the Queen of Naples, three of the Queen's daughters, and a retinue of royal servants. They arrived at Trieste on August 1 to find the town celebrating the second anniversary of the Battle of the Nile. With much of Europe crumbling under the advance of Napoleon's armies, Nelson was fêted as the man who had inflicted a crushing defeat on the French fleet and thwarted Napoleon's plans in Egypt. From Trieste they traveled on to Baden. Wherever they went, there were banquets and receptions in honor of Nelson, and everywhere his devotion to Emma was noted. One of the highlights of the tour was a visit to Eisenstadt, where Joseph Haydn was the court musician. To Sir William's delight, the composer accompanied Emma when she sang, and in one concert she performed Haydn's
Arianna a Naxos
to considerable acclaim. A newspaper review described her as “a thirty-five-year-old, tall Englishwoman with a very handsome face, who knows well how to demean herself. One of her many rare qualities is her clear, strong voice with which, accompanied by the famous Haydn, she filled the audience with such enthusiasm that they almost became ecstatic.”
¹³

There was a tearful parting from Queen Maria Carolina and her retinue in Vienna, and the Hamilton party headed for Hamburg, where they boarded a ship bound for England. They arrived at Great Yarmouth on November 6 to a noisy welcome. A cheering crowd assembled on the beach and then hauled the carriage of the homecoming hero through the streets. This cheerful reception was followed by an icy welcome from Nelson's wife when they finally reached London. Fanny was well aware of the rumors of Nelson's affair and had been dreading the meeting. There followed several weeks of miserable public occasions, as she was expected to accompany her husband to a series of parties, dinners, and visits to the theater. Nelson treated her with cold detachment and reduced her to tears at a dinner given by the First Lord of the Admiralty. Emma, who was now seven months pregnant, found the situation equally difficult. She was jealous of Fanny's elegant manners and was chilled by her hostility. Fortunately, they were all rescued by the Admiralty, which promoted Nelson to vice admiral and ordered him to join his flagship in Portsmouth. He told Fanny, who had gone to stay in Brighton, that on no account was she to visit him.

On January 29, 1801, Emma gave birth to twin daughters at a house in Piccadilly. She decided that under the circumstances, one child was more than enough to handle. She arranged for the second baby to be looked after by a nurse and then sent to the Foundling Hospital in Holborn.
¹⁴
Nelson was told that only one baby had survived, and as soon as he could arrange for a few days' leave, he hurried to London to be reunited with his mistress and their daughter, who was to be called Horatia. “A finer child was never produced by any two persons,” he wrote. “In truth, a love-begotten child!”

Poor Fanny was now frozen out of Nelson's life. Following his victory over the Danish fleet at the Battle of Copenhagen in April 1801, she wrote him a letter to congratulate him and added, “Let me beg, nay, intreat you to believe no wife ever felt greater affection for her husband than I do. And, to the best of my knowledge, I have invariably done everything you desired. If I have omitted anything I am sorry for it.”
¹⁵
Pathetically, she concluded, “What more can I do to convince you that I am truly your affectionate wife?”