Love Conquers Nothing

by Emily Hahn

  All of this was said in England later, and it was said loudly because the way was paved for such criticism by what Nelson did next.

  The Italian war, reflecting the general turmoil in Europe, now swung round again in favor of republicanism. Ferdinand refused to come back to the mainland at all. Maria Carolina refused to return to Palermo. But she could not remain in Naples, and so it was decided that she should make her way overland to take refuge in Vienna. The British Embassy must close down, of course, so Sir William and Lady Hamilton would travel with her and continue on their way to England. That was all quite in the order of the day, and might almost be called a conventional arrangement, if arrangements during wartime are ever conventional. But the fourth main member of the party was a rather surprising addition. Why should Nelson, an admiral, feel called upon to leave his ship and travel on land in such strangely selected company?

  Nelson at least thought it quite a reasonable thing to do. If he had any misgivings about his course of action, he must have argued them into silence without taking anyone into his confidence. He felt he was answering the call of Honor itself in supporting Maria Carolina through his support of Lady Hamilton.

  In his eyes Emma was a heroine, one of England’s saviors. Her efforts with the Queen on his behalf, he felt, had been as much patriotic as loving; he was more than Nelson; he represented England’s Navy. In all the excitement of evacuating the royal family from Naples, when he had taken them to safety at Palermo through a terrible storm and they had all lain helplessly ill in the tossing ship, Emma was just as cheerful, strong, practical, and helpful as one would expect her (or her mother) to be. The little son of Maria Carolina had died aboard ship, in her arms. She was maid, nurse, virtually doctor as well. In the emotion of that emergency she never faltered or showed weakness. Anyone would have admired her then, and Nelson’s natural passion, that of an innocent man for an accomplished charmer, became more than ever fervent: it approached a pitch of idolatry. Passion alone would not have been permitted by a man like Nelson to shape his life, but this, he would have insisted, was a great deal more than passion. Emma, the beautiful big creature who resembled one of the more opulent of Grecian goddesses, was truly a goddess to Nelson.

  As for Nelson’s guilt in cuckolding Sir William, I do not for a moment doubt how he condoned that. Emma assured her lover that she had long been a wife in name only, and that Sir William was not only impotent but complacent as long as her affairs were not forced upon his attention. Moreover, I don’t think she lied in saying so.

  She was not always strictly truthful, however. She told Nelson it was her great sorrow that she had no children. “Love Sir William and myself,” she once wrote, “for we love you dearly. He is the best husband, friend, I wish I could say father allso; but I should have been too happy if I had the blessing of having children, so must be content.” Actually she had the blessing; somewhere in England, she knew, there was living an unattractive narrow-browed sulky young woman, also named Emma, who was maintained by a kind of family committee and who had no idea she was Lady Hamilton’s daughter. But Emma the elder never told Nelson about the girl. Quite possibly she really forgot about the matter herself most of the time.

  Regardless of Nelson’s own state of mind, however, it was not a pretty story which reached England ahead of the party. Lady Hamilton and the Queen were painted as bloodthirsty creatures, Gorgons who slaughtered from sheer love of power, and Nelson was alleged to be their tool. After all, said the critics, the insurrection of Naples had not been directly aimed at Britain. The Italian army had proved worse than useless; as allies Ferdinand and his Queen were a dead loss and there was no diplomatic necessity for Nelson to have committed himself so deeply. It was shamefully obvious that he had been dazzled by the Queen and/or Lady Hamilton, women who did not scruple to take turns as his mistress.

  It was a savage, grotesque version of events, which was not to endure with the public for long, at any rate in such extreme form. But there is no doubt that the continental tour worsened matters for Nelson, especially in the minds of the admiralty. His reason for behaving so very unlike a seaman may have been sufficient to himself, and tenable, but Gossip was enabled to put a very different construction on the proceedings. What the world of London would have done had it known the worst, that Emma was pregnant by her lover at the time they arrived home, I shudder to think. Fortunately for Nelson, Lady Hamilton was a match for Gossip. The trip across Europe had been a long one, but not too long. She was in time.

  It seems incredible that a woman so much in the public eye as Lady Hamilton could have concealed her state, but she was aided by several factors. She had always affected Greek draperies and a flowing style of dress, ever since the days of Romney and the studio; Sir William, the antiquary, had encouraged her to continue the style after they married. A sudden change to a “concealing” type of costume might have drawn attention to the necessity of concealment, but she avoided that. To all intents and purposes, Emma Hamilton always wore maternity dresses.

  Then, too, she had gained weight steadily in the past few years, and had become what Lord Minto ungallantly described as immense. Possibly Minto, who disliked her, exaggerated out of malice; possibly Emma was merely Junoesque. But it is quite easy for a Junoesque lady in Greek draperies to hide her pregnancy, as Emma did. And we must also remember the important point that she had her mother to help her through this awkward adventure. Mrs. Cadogan was resourceful, knowledgeable, and trustworthy to the highest degree.

  So it came about that Lady Hamilton, unknown to the world and Sir William, managed to be safely delivered of Nelson’s daughter. It was quite easy, considering. Lady Hamilton was indisposed for several days, and then she was seen in public again, and Gossip knew nothing whatever about it. I don’t know how the rest of the modern world may feel about Emma, but I for one admire her, if only for this outwitting of society’s snoopers.

  She was not always admirable. It is difficult thoroughly to admire a silly person, and Emma, I fear, was very silly. Admittedly it was a rather endearing silliness. She loved her hero to distraction, and was always telling him in a hundred ways how wonderful he was. When, after Lady Nelson left him, Nelson bought Merton Place and Emma furnished it, she put portraits of the master everywhere, in paint and marble and plaster and black and white; she hung up souvenirs of his glory and made of the house a museum in his honor. Nelson didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, simple sailorly soul that he was, he loved it. The thicker the butter was spread the more avidly he swallowed it, but as self-confidence seems never to have spoiled his admiral’s technique, we must not be too hard on him. Besides, he paid Emma back in her own coin, and told her as often as he had a chance what an absolutely perfectly wonderful woman she was. He told everyone else the same thing. There must have been many awkward pauses in the conversations of London during that period, whenever Lord Nelson was at the party.

  He did not quite lose his head; he continued to observe the conventions of the day, but we must be excused if we feel that the spirit of his observance, if not the letter, was somewhat lacking. Take for example the case of Lady Nelson. We have no way of knowing what went on between the pair in private, but it seems that Nelson did not confess his infidelity in so many words. Instead he behaved as if his wife would (and ought to) accept the state of affairs without being so crude as to speak of it, ignoring the evidence and continuing to go everywhere with him in company with the Hamiltons. Why he should have thought such an arrangement humanly possible is a mystery, but then he was an uncomplicated soul, and he was a man besides. Men often go on the assumption that these problems, if severely ignored, cease to exist.

  For poor Lady Nelson, however, the problem was very much there. She hardly knew what to do. She was never a keen-witted woman. There were one or two scenes in public and a fainting fit at the theater; we can only guess at the endless quarrels and nagging and wretchedness that went on in private, until she took the last desperate course and left her husband. It is
a pitiable story which her many faults as a wife do nothing to make less painful. Yet so strong are the forces of convention that the Hamiltons continued to be seen everywhere with Lord Nelson, as if they felt it their duty to do so and thus contradict the inevitable rumors.

  Lady Nelson did not bring suit for divorce, as a woman in her position would almost certainly do today. It was not a thing people did in her day. Had she been able to manage events, she would have taken her husband back and saved appearances, but this was beyond her power.

  The Hamiltons spent most of their time at Merton Place, Sir William showing no resentment whatever. Once he found it necessary to remonstrate with his wife because she rushed him about too much, more than he felt was right for a man his age. He did not like being pushed around, and he said so. But there is no written word of his recording a single accusation against his wife on account of her misconduct with Nelson. He had taken his stand and he maintained it. Every reference he made to the admiral was in a spirit of affection. When he died—in 1803, not quite three years after the return from Naples—he left in his will a legacy to Nelson, “the most virtuous, loyal, and truly brave character I ever met with, God bless him, and shame fall on those who do not say ‘Amen.’”

  The legacy was a portrait of Emma.

  Still the conventions retained their grip. Lord Nelson could not marry Lady Hamilton, because Lady Nelson was not dead. There the situation was, and there it remained. Lady Hamilton could not live outright in his house, and he could not live with her in her London house, either. It was a little inconvenient. Otherwise, there was no difficulty; Emma had long since won the good will of his people, and there was always a sister or someone else suitable to chaperon them.

  Two other complications were not so easily dismissed. The baby girl Horatia had been put out to nurse, and nobody knew about her, but now as she grew older her father wanted to see more of her during his periods of shore leave. How to account for the child? Emma and Nelson gave it out that she was the daughter of an old friend who had died. More and more often she was brought to Merton, and at last Nelson adopted her legally. But Lady Hamilton never told anyone, as far as is known, that she had any claim whatever to the little girl. Her contacts with Horatia were just what they would have been had she actually been the great and good friend of Horatia’s adopted daddy, and nothing more.

  The other complication was that more common one, shortage of money. Sir William had left Emma an income which in most hands would have been adequate. Emma, however, was hopeless about money. Nelson let her have all he could, but that wasn’t enough, and anyway he had the unusual delicacy to see that she would prefer to be able to pay her own bills. A heroine like his wonderful Emma should not have to go in need. The nation owed her a pension, Lord Nelson felt, and he began working on the question as soon as Sir William’s estate was settled. He besieged his acquaintance among the peerage, stoutly declaring that her rights should be observed, and asking them to use their influence.

  Unfortunately the peers remained strangely obtuse. They were cross with Lady Hamilton; cross and embarrassed. No one save Nelson felt inclined to consider her a heroine or to give her rewards. On the contrary, they would have liked to punish her. Nelson would have been such a splendid fellow had it not been for that woman! But where she was concerned he was evidently blind, and the admiralty was forced to pretend blindness of another sort and condone the relationship just as Nelson’s own family condoned it, by ignoring it and not snubbing Emma. It was far more awkward for the admiralty, of course, than for the Nelsons, for the latter genuinely liked Emma, as most people did when they knew her.

  Nelson’s emotions about Horatia, happily for him, were not complicated by such practical details, and they were full-flowering. To him, the baby was pure romance. She seemed an exquisite, almost mythical being, the personification of his and Emma’s love. The little niggling details, the legal quibbles, the roundabout way Emma and her mother had to go to change Horatia’s name to that of her “godfather,” and explain her occasional appearances at Merton Place—such things did not trouble the romantic sailor who spent much of his time at sea. His not to fret in an atmosphere of hot milk and sour nappies. He was a hero; his life was consistently sheltered from everything but danger.

  The question of Horatia’s future, however, did trouble him. He was always short of money to keep Merton up in the style Emma was used to, but nevertheless he set aside a certain lump sum for Horatia, and through many financial worries he left it untouched, and often lectured Emma on the subject, telling her she must do likewise. His property, like his titles, would go to the brother who was his legal heir. That was the convention; that was his duty. But Horatia had her little income.

  As for Emma—oh, Emma was a great problem, the most worrying of all. It is untrue that she wasted whatever Sir William left her at gambling. It has been proved that she was no card player, as her enemies have alleged, but she had no practical sense. She didn’t use up money on any one thing; she was one of those people who merely disperse it somehow and never have much to show for it afterward. Pondering this truth, which even a hero like Nelson could not avoid facing, the admiral appealed to the generosity of his old friend the Queen of Naples, who was now reinstated, when on one of his voyages he found himself back in Italy. Surely Maria Carolina would think kindly of Emma, her faithful intimate of the past! Several times in writing to the Queen he repeated his urgings.

  But Maria Carolina, like the peers of Britain, was slow to catch on to Nelson’s meaning. She was warmly kind in referring to himself, but she never said anything about Lady Hamilton—nothing at all, not even a polite reference, let alone an offer of help. Nelson gave up in disillusioned disgust. He did not like the Queen, he decided. So much for the rumor of their affair, cooked up long afterward by defrauded Gossip.

  Altogether, Gossip has been badly beaten by the Nelson romance. She never managed to break it up, nor even to spoil it for the admiral. One feels that Emma Hamilton, in spite of the dingy death awaiting her, emerged triumphant from that adventure. Not Gossip, but Lord Nelson’s death and the loss of her mother sealed her own fate; without her love and her mainstay she was lost. She went down to ruin. All Nelson’s family, all their affectionate care, couldn’t save the bereaved, confused, defeated creature. There was no question of Horatia’s proving her salvation, for Emma was not a strongly maternal woman. Because of the circumstances and her own deficiency, she had never been a true mother to the baby.

  Only one thing was left: drink. She had always been fond of wine; now she depended on it. With a puzzled Horatia in her wake, she went to the Continent and wandered about, drinking more and more. She was miserably unhappy, and it must have been an ordeal for the girl as well. Horatia knew only that she was Nelson’s daughter by some unknown, and that her aunts and uncles wished her to stay with Lady Hamilton, or at least did not object to her being with Lady Hamilton.

  The situation came to an end at last. Poor Emma died in squalor. Yet when one thinks of her it is with a sense of her achievements.

  It was surely no small feat, we must admit when we sum up her life, to have borne Horatia discreetly enough to have avoided Society’s bloodhounds. In spite of the world’s croaking, she made the hero happy, which Lady Nelson had never succeeded in doing. Moreover, to the end Emma kept the faith in her own way. Until the last few drunken months she even avoided dipping into Horatia’s money, but that was not her greatest self-denial. Emma was a gushing woman, much given to “attitudes,” not only the charade-like poses for which she was famous, but everyday indulgences in melodrama. She must have been tempted a thousand times to burst out with the truth to the fastidious, ladylike girl who accompanied her in her wanderings. However, she refrained. She never burdened Horatia with the true story of her origin, which would have much distressed the child. I think Emma deserves honor for that: Nelson’s daughter never knew.

  “He was treated with coldness by his wife …” wrote Horatia primly, long after Emma�
�s death. “Had Lady Hamilton’s character in early youth been irreproachable, I question much if Lord Nelson would have incurred the suspicions under which he labored.”

  Thus innocent Horatia, who married a reverend, and sometimes wondered with a delicious thrill if she might not after all be a queen’s daughter.

  Two Ladies of Calcutta

  It is a far cry from Portuguese Angola to British India, from the early seventeenth century to the late nineteenth, from Nzinga to the Princess Talleyrand or Mrs. Warren Hastings. It is a farther cry still from Nzinga’s Church to the Established Church of England, or whatever faith the princess may have belonged to in Chandernagore. Perhaps it would he simplest to sum it up in a phrase: British colonials were different.

  Save for the very occasional religious fanatic, you saw no proselytizing in the early East India Company settlements of Madras and Calcutta. Unlike the Portuguese, the British were not interested in native souls. The Indians in all their numbers, with their bewilderingly many religions and castes, were too much to tackle, and so the British left them to stew in their own juice, interfering in gingerly fashion only when it came to the rites of Sati. The attitude of John Company’s employees toward the mysterious East has been well expressed by a lady of my acquaintance: “Too many goddesses with too many arms.”

  This policy of live and let live, believe-as-you-like-only-don’t-bother-me-about-it, and all the rest, led to an inevitable aloofness between the races. The British kept themselves to themselves, lived as they had always done, built their houses as if they were settling down in Twickenham or King’s Lynn, and altogether maintained themselves in an amazingly uncomfortable manner. Even in love, as we shall see, they tried to keep it English, but this was difficult. There were not enough European ladies to go around. There were always plenty of bachelors who lost out in the eternal shuffle which took place whenever a new boat came in, and these gentlemen solaced themselves with Indian girls, but only a few hardy souls, determined, shameless reprobates such as William Hickey, made no attempt to cover up such liaison.