Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

  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 extra
ordinary 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?”

  Nelson never replied to her letter; their relationship was effectively finished. Meanwhile, he wrote daily, sometimes several times a day, to Emma. When he returned from the campaign in the Baltic, he and Emma took up residence at Merton Place, a small but pretty country house in a village near Wimbledon in Surrey. Sir William Hamilton, who had remained a staunch friend to Nelson since their first meeting in Naples and had been prepared to turn a blind eye to his wife’s infatuation with the naval hero, at last began to complain about Emma’s way of life, particularly her lavish dinner parties. “I by no means wish to live in solitary retreat,” he told her, “but to have seldom less than twelve to fourteen at table, and those varying continually, is coming back to what was becoming so irksome to me in Italy during the latter years of our residence in that country.” 16 He wanted to keep their expenses down, but he also wanted a quiet life. In the spring of 1803, he moved to London, and there he died in Emma’s arms with Nelson holding his hand.

  Following the Peace of Amiens, signed in March 1802, Nelson could have expected to have time to enjoy the pleasures of Merton Place, but it soon became apparent that the peace between Britain and France was only a temporary interlude. Napoleon was determined to resume his plans for the conquest of Europe, and in particular the invasion of England. The Admiralty decided that the man to prevent the realization of Napoleon’s plans was Nelson. He was given command of the British fleet in the Mediterranean, and in May 1803, he hoisted his flag on HMS Victory. For the next two years, he was almost continuously at sea. When the French fleet under Admiral Villeneuve succeeded in eluding the British blockade of Toulon, Nelson with a fleet of twelve ships chased him across the Atlantic to the West Indies. Villeneuve eluded him there and sailed back to Cádiz to join forces with the main body of the Spanish fleet, where the combined fleet was penned in by twenty-five British ships under the command of Collingwood. Nelson now returned to Portsmouth and hired a post chaise to take him to Merton, where he enjoyed an ecstatic welcome from Emma.

  Nelson spent twenty-five days in England before being recalled to his ship and setting off to meet the French fleet off Cape Trafalgar. They were happy days. There were numerous official meetings in London, but there was also time to be with his beloved Emma. The extensive gardens at Merton were flourishing in the late-summer sun, and the house, laden with pictures and trophies of past battles, was full of children. Lord Minto visited one Saturday and found Nelson just sitting down to dinner with a family party consisting of his brother William Nelson, William’s wife and their children, and the children of a sister. Emma was seated at the head of the table, and her mother, old Mrs. Cadogan, at the other end. Nelson was unusually relaxed: “He looks remarkably well and in spirits. His conversation is cordial in these low times. . . .” As for the relations between Nelson and Emma, Lord Minto noted that “the passion is as hot as ever.” 17

  At five o’clock on the morning of September 2, a carriage swept up the gravel drive. Captain Blackwood had driven straight from Portsmouth with urgent dispatches from the fleet off Cádiz. Nelson hurried to London, where he was asked to resume his command. Within two weeks he was back on board HMS Victory and heading down the English Channel. On September 28, the day before his forty-seventh birthday, he rejoined the fleet, where he was greeted with enthusiasm by Collingwood and his fellow officers. Everyone was aware that a great battle was imminent. On October 19, Nelson wrote to Emma from the great cabin of his flagship:

  My dearest, beloved Emma, the dear friend of my bosom. The signal has been made that the enemy’s combined fleet are coming out of port. We have very little wind, so that I have no hopes of seeing them before tomorrow. May the God of Battles crown my endeavours with success; at all events, I shall take care that my name shall ever be most dear to you and Horatia, both of whom I love as much as my own life. And as my last writing before the Battle will be to you, so I hope in God that I shall live to finish my letter after the battle. 18

  On October 20, Admiral Villeneuve slipped out of Cádiz with the combined fleet of thirty-three French and Spanish ships of the line. At dawn the next day, the waiting British fleet saw their topsails on the eastern horizon. Nelson had twenty-seven ships of the line under his command and was so confident of the spirit of his men and the firepower of his ships that he planned to approach the enemy’s line of battle in two long columns. This would expose his leading ships to the full broadsides of the enemy but would enable the British to cut the enemy’s line in two places, and then outnumber and overwhelm the ships in the center and rear before the van could turn and
rescue them. A storm was brewing out in the Atlantic, and the ships rolled in a long ocean swell; but that morning there was only a light westerly breeze, so it took six hours for the fleets to cover the ten miles separating them. Shortly before noon, the guns of the French ship Fougueux opened fire on Admiral Collingwood’s flagship Royal Sovereign, which was leading one of the British columns. Soon the sound of the bands playing martial music was drowned out by the booming roar of great guns and the crackle of shot from the sharpshooters in the fighting tops.

  Back in England, Nelson’s women anxiously awaited news, and it was Fanny who was the first to hear the outcome of the battle. She was staying in Bath, and on November 6, she received a letter from the First Lord of the Admiralty, which began:

  Dear Madame, it is with the utmost concern that, in the midst of victory, I have to inform your Ladyship of the death of your illustrious partner, Lord Viscount Nelson. After leading the British fleet into close action with the enemy and seeing their defeat, he fell by a musket ball entering his chest. 19