Sir William

by David Stacton

  They went ashore at a gilded stucco stage, emblematical of everything and nothing, where the local senators awaited them, robes flapping in the breeze. The city was drunk but not disorderly. The Te Deum sung in the Cathedral was long but uplifting. In the evening there was not one pyrotechnic display, but several.

  “Pinchbeck,” said Sir William, fingering his royal medallion, “but neatly mounted, all the same.”

  Nelson’s gift was to be a title, a thing not only to be prized above diamonds, but considerably less costly to have made up, though an estate was included with it, as was also a diamond sword. The sword he accepted. About the title, he was wary, for titles, he had learned, are apt to become an expense.

  Emma implored him to accept. Where else would he be offered a dukedom? “You consider your honor too much,” she said, “if you persist in refusing what the King and Queen consider theirs.”

  “Lord Nelson,” said the King, his tone elevated, his manner not, “do you wish that your name alone should pass with honor to posterity, and that I, Ferdinand Bourbon, should appear ungrateful?”

  “Of course not,” said Nelson brusquely, deeply moved. “I shall accept.”

  Glad to get rid of it, for it had gone begging, the King embraced him.

  “Where the devil is it?” asked Nelson afterward.

  “At the foot of Mount Etna, near Syracuse. The name Bronte means thunderer.”

  “The Queen has sent me two carriage loads of dresses!” shouted Emma, bursting in with the most splendiferous a hasty rummage could provide. “If I have fagged, I am more than repaid.”

  As the Austrian Ambassador said, no one but his master was forgotten here.

  “He has done nothing worth remembering,” snapped the King, who had hoped the Holy Roman Emperor would send a few troops.

  “We are dying with the heat, and the feast of Santa Rosalia begins this day. How shall we get through it?” demanded Nelson. “Even our dear Lady Hamilton has been unwell.”

  It was the excitement; it did fair do her in.

  Santa Rosalia was made of more durable stuff. A cave-dwelling ascetic, she had been so intent upon her devotions as not to notice that the stalactites dripped calcium and had solidified in the act of turning the penultimate page of a volume of the Church Fathers. God, in this case, had offered not bread, but a stone, and her handsomely chiseled features were trotted about yearly, carried aloft in procession by sturdy peasants with the biceps to manage her.

  Between popery and propinquity, Charles Lock was not happy.

  “That infamous woman,” he wrote home, “is at the bottom of all the mischief which has rendered my stay so uncomfortable for the last six months. We have in Lady Hamilton the bitterest enemy you can imagine.” He had no doubt of it; he had been seated incorrectly at dinner, according to his precedence as British Consul rather than his presumption as the husband of a relative of Lord Fitzgerald. It rankled.

  What he complained of was true. Emma was without malice, and so, unsuited to the polite usages of society. As the Duchess of Devonshire had discovered years ago, though respectable enough in other ways, she had no small talk. Lock complained to Sir William.

  “The Court has the impression you are a Jacobin,” said Sir William. “You must be on your guard.”

  “She has insinuated my wife’s principles are Republican,” said Mr. Lock. This was quite untrue: as everybody knew, his wife had no principles.

  “The Queen says that our not going about in society more shows we condemn it. But how can we go, if we are not asked?”

  “I shall have Emma put you down on the list,” said Sir William.

  “No doubt Your Excellency means well, but what can you do, when there is a person so able and so bent upon counteracting you?” said Lock, forced to speak plainly.

  “You will have the goodness to refer to my wife by her correct title,” said Sir William. “She is not from Porlock. I do not haul you out of your own mire for the joy of being besplattered by it. You may go.” He was not a man who reacted favorably to the use of force.

  “She has poisoned his mind against me,” wrote Lock. “His health is very much broken and his frame is so feeble that even a slight attack of bile, to severe fits of which he has lately been subject, may carry him off. With all this malice, her Ladyship maintains every appearance of civility with expressions of goodwill to us both.” He had no patience with appearances, which was odd, since he had so much difficulty in keeping his own up that surely he might be expected to realize that others did not always find their maintenance easy.

  “Public opinion should be formed, but never followed,” said Sir William wearily, telling Emma about Lock. “But since it is our duty to others to do the former, and to ourselves, to avoid the latter, could you not be more discreet?”

  “But I am discreet,” wailed Emma, in some bewilderment, for in her lexicon—since she had compiled it from oral evidence—this word had a merely sexual meaning. She then went off with Nelson to play faro. They would have gone all three, but Sir William these days had to retire by ten.

  *

  Nelson’s brother William had been baying after succession to the title, and now there were two would bay twice as loud. “Ambition, pride, and a selfish disposition are among the various passions which torment him,” wrote Fanny, who knew nothing of Palermo, where even the heat was passionate. She added that Lord Minto’s eldest son was deaf.

  Nelson was not. Nor did he care for the high moral tone to which Admiralty correspondence seemed recently to have risen. “Do not, my dear Lord,” he asked Lord Spencer, “let the Admiralty write harshly to me—my generous soul cannot bear it.”

  With that indifference to sensibility which is the chief characteristic of states sensible of the proprieties, the Admiralty wrote harshly anyway, and as he had warned, he could not bear it. He was accused of dalliance.

  He scarcely knew what to do. He had had a sound Christian upbringing, which tells us what we shouldn’t do, not what we should. Smiting the heathen is always allowable, but what does one do when one is smitten? For the Song of Solomon, as we know—for we have been told, if the subject must be brought up—is a purely allegorical work. It describes the soul’s union with God. It settles for less.

  And though universal applause can drown out the hypercritical, it cannot, alas, drown them outright. When the applause dies down, they become once more audible, like crickets at evening—like Consul Lock.

  *

  On the 3rd of September, the Queen concluded the display of her gratitude with a fête champêtre, the palace, the city, the gardens illuminated, and a counterfeit of the French flagship Orient blown up in fireworks and then allowed to sink through the black waters of the sky, still one more allusion to the Battle of the Nile.

  Emma, disguised as the Genius of Taste, but she had risen above mere taste and that showed, led the party forward across the lawn toward a Temple of Fame, on the roof of which squatted Fame herself, blowing a trumpet. Inside the temple stood three wax statues, Nelson in the middle, with Lady Hamilton on one side of him and Sir William on the other. Prince Leopold, a boy of nine, dressed as a midshipman, mounted a stepladder behind the middle statue and placed on its brow a crown of laurel, the dew on its leaves counterfeited in diamonds.

  Nelson then embraced the Prince. “You are the guardian angel of our papa and my dominions,” said Leopold, who had been rehearsed, but not enough.

  Since wax dissolves in warm weather, the statues were then removed to a lumber room.

  *

  “Entre nous, I fear their Sicilian Majesties will not follow our advice, which is to return immediately to Naples,” said Sir William. Certainly the King had no mind to. What with venery and Venus, the palace and piscator, and the theatre in the evening as well, he found nothing lacking. Like Charles II—but with the advantage of one more kingdom, if far less brains—he did not propose to go upon his travels again.

  “I have wrote you lately but short letters,” Nelson explained
to his wife, and it was quite true they got no longer, “for my time is fully occupied that I never set my foot out of the writing room, except now and then in the evening with Sir William and Lady Hamilton to the palace.”

  That there was a large state bed in the writing room nagged at him. These palaces, though sumptuous, were apt to be furnished in harum-scarum taste. The bed had been too large to move. It stood at the far end of the writing room, on a dais, and neither had been nor would be occupied.

  He had been disappointed in Bronte, for though he had not seen it, he had hoped to see some ready money from it. Expenses had been heavy.

  “In Sicily, money is never ready,” explained Sir William. “And if it is, there is a hand there all the sooner to take it.”

  Nelson had been informed that though His Sicilian Majesty’s Government would be delighted to clear the title, this would cost £1000.

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” Sir William piously consoled. “They are a literal-minded people, being devout.”

  Once, when alone in the room, Nelson had been unable to resist the impulse to look under the embroidered coverlet of the bed, to see if it had sheets and blankets upon it. It had not.

  “I have one piece of news to tell you which causes a few is it possible?” reported Fanny. “Admiral Dickson is going to marry a girl of 18 years, surely he has lost his senses. All true, the Admiral saw Miss Willings (a daughter of one of the minor canons at Norwich) not quite three weeks at Yarmouth. He fell desperately in love, gave balls on board ship, then on shore, in short was quite desperate … I heard Admiral and Mrs. Nugent have separated, a difference of temper she says is the cause … Miss Susanna I took to the concert last Thursday. We were entertained by seeing an old nabob make love to a very rich porter brewer’s daughter … she must marry one of the most unpleasant-looking men in the world for the sake of driving four horses.”

  “Oh God,” said Nelson. There was a ball to be given on ship that night. The arrangements he had left to Emma.

  “Emma who looks as well and as blooming as ever talks of death every day,” wrote Sir William to Lord Minto, with complacency and amusement. “I believe it is the heat and sirocco winds that depress us all for Lord Nelson complains too.”

  “I think you had better ask, in strict confidence, that Lord Elgin stop on his way out to Constantinople and investigate,” said Lord Minto to Lord Grenville. “It seems there is something in the wind.”

  “Fox has shown me some most odd letters,” said Lord Grenville to Lord Minto, “from a young relative of his by marriage, a Mr. Charles Lock, who is our Consul at Palermo.”

  *

  Mr. Lock’s dandiacal addiction to facial hair had resulted in an incident. The King could not abide facial hair, and in particular not side whiskers, which he associated with the Jacobin.

  Despite a warning, Lock attended a court ball disguised as a Thames fisherman, though changing the red bonnet for a blue, for fear of giving offense.

  “The King says your dress is indecent,” said Sir William, in a flap out of nowhere. “You had better retire, put on a domino, and return.”

  Offended, Lock drew himself up to his little height, an acrobatic feat akin to the exertions of a macaw beaking its way back onto its perch.

  “I have only to observe to Your Excellency that I wore this identical dress at a masquerade when several of our royal family were present; it could therefore never enter my head that it would be offensive here. If the character of my costume is economical, I have spared no expense in that of my wife, so it cannot be supposed that I intended any disrespect to this Court thereby.” Mr. Lock was a typical member of the new middle classes and exhibited their morality in the same sense that a bitch in heat would have exhibited herself. “My wife,” he added, “is the Peruvian over there. The one with the fruit on her head.”

  “Il n’était pas nécessaire que Monsieur Lock vint ici nous braver dans un costume sans culottes pour demontrer ses principes!” roared the Queen, though French is not a gusty language and she always shook like an old bridge when she clattered across it.

  “Turn him out. Turn him out! Or I will turn him out myself,” squealed the King, standing above the rising floods upon a bench, and glowering with the glum resignation of a Cnut.

  Lock waited upon Sir William next day with a handwritten memorial of the incident.

  “It is unfortunate,” said Sir William, and made no apology.

  Emma came in to say she had talked the Queen around, but since she was as clumsy to move as a barge, it had taken two hours.

  “Lock,” said Sir William, “that you should be agreeable perhaps transcends reason, but could you not confine yourself to common sense? The King trounced a whiskered Portuguese officer out of the theatre pit only last night. Unfortunately his fellow officers rose, pointed to their own whiskers, and burst into a horse laugh. As a result, His Majesty smarts. The punishment for side whiskers is three months’ imprisonment. So shave.”

  Sobbing with indignation, Lock shaved. “So well does this artful woman know how to create herself a merit by this ostentation of what she terms doing good for evil,” he wrote home, after Emma had once more gotten him received at Court.

  “I always heard she was a harmless creature, boisterous perhaps, but not bad,” said Fox. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s there.”

  “Well, so’s my cousin by marriage or whatever you call ’im. I must say he does not write a pretty letter.”

  “But he writes often,” said Lord Grenville. “Where is Elgin now?”

  “In Vienna.”

  *

  Not only would the King not return to Naples, he would no longer listen to the advice of the Queen. He said he preferred to die where he was, and that not soon, rather than go where she proposed to send him.

  “I have always foreseen that as I grew older my power would diminish,” said the Queen. “If I knew where to find the River Lethe, I would travel there on foot in order to drink its water.” Lethe’s exact whereabouts being unknown, she toyed instead with the idea of a trip to Vienna, which has always been on the Danube, a chartable stream. “I shall ask for a few months’ leave to distract my mind, restore my health and marry my daughters,” she told Emma. If she had not an army, she had daughters, and there are more ways than one of getting aboard a throne.

  The King had commissioned Canova to do an heroic portrait, which loomed larger in Naples, where it was set up, than ever it did in the master’s oeuvre.

  “He allowed himself to be scaled the wrong way,” said Sir William. “Nothing taller than eight feet has any aesthetic merits whatsoever. It is the same with any microcosm; multiply the field of vision, and you can see the flaws.”

  Lord and Lady Elgin arrived in October, he sending home the male, or serious, recommendations; Lady Elgin, being a woman, preferring to report upon the unforgivable, and hence irremediable, flaws.

  Nelson was seen with Emma everywhere, most often drowsing beside her at the gaming table, and the public display of devotion must ever be an offense against the well-regulated decorums of society.

  “Captain Morris went to Sir William to deliver some dispatches he had for Lord N. He read them and then called Lady Hamilton out of the room. When she came back, she said, ‘Sir William, we shall not go to the country today; you must dress yourself and go to Court after breakfast.’ ‘Why?’ asked Sir William. ‘Oh, I will tell you presently,’ said Lady Hamilton, flounced her head, and went on talking. Is it not a pity a man who had gained so much credit should fling himself away in this shameful manner?”

  Lady Elgin was indignant. No matter who she was now, they all remembered what Lady Hamilton had been. And Nelson, to speak plain, had not come from a background much better, though Lady Nelson was understood to be, whatever her other faults, quite respectable.

  Lord Elgin recommended that Sir William be recalled. Emma had grown too high-flown. If tampering with His Majesty’s Navy was, on a low sensual level
, explicable, tampering with His Majesty’s Mail Pouch was beyond excuse.

  “She runs everything,” said Lock.

  Having made their several reports, the Elgins went off to Athens: he to play marbles; she to entertain.

  *

  On October 5th, Nelson was forced to sail to the blockade of Minorca, with nothing to entertain him on the voyage but some letters from Fanny.

  Brother William was still snuffling after the possible succession to Bronte. He was plump for a trufflehound. Josiah had sent home a description of the estate, and so—like Lord Falmouth in greater extremity—had given “last first proof that he had brains.” “The dampness occasioned by the constant rain was beyond description.” And worse than that, beef was 9/4 the stone. She was to go and brace her nerves in Devonshire.

  *

  In Palermo, they could not brace their nerves at all. “I wish it could be pointed out to the King that there should be an amnesty,” said a courtier, “but who could do so?” He had already caused so much, that there was no one willing to risk his further displeasure.

  Nelson returned from Minorca.

  On the 9th of November, which was called the 19th Brumaire, there was a coup d’état in France. The Directory fell. Napoleon was in, and therefore the revolutionary calendar was out. He had better things to do than rename streets and confuse poesy with politics. In Germany, Goethe—as benign and mechanical as ever—saluted the dawn of a new age, but had no desire to beckon to it; a salute should suffice. In Palermo, Emma, who knew nothing of Cardano on Cards or the medieval versions of Fortuna, went gambling to celebrate. Her favorite game was faro. The word means lighthouse, specifically that beacon built in Ptolemy’s day to guide the mariner home. Nelson dozed beside her. When his eyes were open, she dazzled him with a glance. When his eyes were shut, she wondered why he dazzled her. They were a noticeable couple, for both had been born egregious, a quality which cannot be concealed and so naturally provokes the ill-will of those who have everything to conceal themselves, mostly their own mediocrity.