The Barbed Crown

by William Dietrich

  I brought diplomatic credentials from Napoleon, explained I was becoming astonishingly familiar with the viewpoint of all sides, and was allowed by a cautious British Admiralty to confer with their most aggressive admiral at Nelson’s country estate at Merton, a 160-acre tract between London and the Channel seaport of Portsmouth. It was more house than Nelson could afford and less than his mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton, thought he, and she, deserved. Merton was a mansion in progress, constantly renovated in order to confirm the meteoric rise of a rector’s son and blacksmith’s daughter. More than a century old, the two-story country estate was approached on a bridge over a decorative canal. The front facade was neoclassical in design, with Greek pediment over imposing entry, while the side terrace had French doors opening onto gardens. From modern water closets to rabbit hutches and hen coops, Emma worked tirelessly to create an Eden of escape.

  The rendezvous with Nelson reminded me of another similarity between Bonaparte and the admiral. Both were famous for their women. By crowning Josephine, Napoleon had cemented her reputation as the most famous wife in Europe, a Martinique creole and widow of the revolution who’d seduced a rising general and ridden him to the summit. In falling in love with Emma Hamilton and leaving his wife, Fanny, Nelson had initiated the world’s most notorious love affair with a mistress who’d built a life out of worship of a one-armed, one-eyed, close-lipped hero who’d spent most of his life at sea since age twelve.

  People are strange, aren’t they?

  Emma Hamilton’s butler let me in, but the mistress herself floated down Merton’s staircase in a loose gown designed to camouflage middle-age weight. She was vain, but not disciplined.

  “Mr. Gage! So honored to have an American envoy from the den of the ogre Napoleon.”

  “The honor is mine. And I bring what I hope will be good news, Mrs. Hamilton. The ogre is marching east, and the need for a naval showdown is over. I’m an emissary of peace.”

  She brightened, giving me a glimpse of her former magnetism. Emma was at least forty; some whispered she’d been illegitimate, baptized late, and thus was actually forty-four. The once-renowned nymph now had a plump face and an excess of underarms that swung like suet. But she’d been blessed with looks, charisma, and cunning. In youth she rose quickly from nursemaid to shop model for a quack doctor, posing as goddesses in filmy garments to draw curious males inside. By age sixteen she was mistress to Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, and vaulted upward from him to nobleman Charles Greville. When this Greville became bored, she was handed off to Sir William Hamilton, envoy extraordinaire to the Court of Naples and a man more than three decades Emma’s senior. Emma took the insult as opportunity. The girl landed in Naples on her twenty-first birthday, won a place in Neapolitan society, and after a five-year campaign got Hamilton to marry her when he was sixty. Her station secured, she met Captain Horatio Nelson two years later and let mutual infatuation turn to volcanic love under the shadow of Vesuvius.

  The aging Hamilton agreed to the bizarre living arrangement of being cuckolded in his own house by a naval hero. Nelson, the personification of British rectitude, let Emma be his private release, caring nothing for the resulting scandal or his long-neglected wife, Fanny. Sir William had died two years before my visit. Meanwhile, Nelson was so ashamed of his treatment of his wife that he’d refused even to visit his father’s deathbed, lest he meet her there. He’d given Emma the money to buy Merton, and the adulterous couple fantasized about refuge after one last great battle.

  Britain’s aristocracy scorned Emma not just for her low birth, her lack of formal education, and her anxious striving, but also for the very cleverness that won her the nation’s best warrior. Like Nelson, Napoleon, and Josephine, she had ability without station, and thus was a rebuke to the nepotism and favoritism of European society. The harder she tried, the more she was reviled.

  I’m not as judgmental and hoped the pair could find happiness, but they dragged baggage of renown and ridicule wherever they went. They pretended their daughter Horatia, who was just six months younger than Harry, wasn’t really theirs. No one believed them, so in trying to live up to propriety they’d made themselves absurd.

  Now “this Hamilton woman” embraced me as an envoy of hope. No battle! That meant she might actually keep what she’d won. Her dream was marriage; her fear was a hero’s death that would leave her penniless. Her light blue eyes were reddened from crying.

  “Ethan [her immediate adoption of the familiar was indicative of her practiced charm], we had word you were coming! I so hope you can save the love of my life. You say Napoleon has given up his schemes against England, but Captain Blackwood has brought word that the French and Spanish fleets are gathered at Cadiz. Once more Horatio is being called upon to save England.”

  “He’s already saved it by running Villeneuve to ground in Cadiz. The French don’t want a fight, they want peace on the oceans.”

  “Can you convince him of that?”

  She was, I have said, north of forty, and a lifetime of excess had changed her from the girlish beauty painted by besotted George Romney to the voluptuous, blowsy, middle-aged matron that she was. She spent wildly, gambled more, and kept the naval hero of England in chronic debt. Many visitors wondered what he saw in her. Decades of practice had not entirely erased the edge of her commoner accent, and she had none of Astiza’s intellect. I saw not a book in the house, except for books about Nelson.

  But she still had large, luminous eyes that artists love, a rosebud mouth, a lustrous mane of hair, a heart-shaped face, and the remnants of an outline that had made men ache. She could speak French and Italian, evidence of good memory, and knew English society the way Napoleon knew his army lists. Emma could expertly rank the noblewomen she longed to join with the precision of a drill instructor. She also had the charm that comes from the rare talent of being able to give another person her full attention. Her gaze fell like a beam of sunlight; your cares instantly hers. She took my hand and then my arm, fingers tapping like dancing mice, and ushered me from foyer to a marble-tiled hall where a grand staircase led to the rooms above.

  She lived in a shrine, her home a peculiar museum of Nelson memorabilia. Light from tall windows fell everywhere on paintings and drawings of the couple. There were Nelson mugs, Nelson plaques, Nelson souvenir medals, and oil paintings of Nelson victories. Not waiting for posterity to recognize their importance, the couple had decided to celebrate it now. I believe that philosophy eminently sensible; what good is renown when you’re already dead? Better to have it when it might win a free meal or better seats to the theater.

  All portraits of Emma showed her slimmer and in the pose of a Greek grace, leaning so romantically and precariously that she probably threatened to topple when she posed. These pictures were the way she still saw herself.

  “There’s no mistaking whose house this is,” I said diplomatically.

  “I fill it with him because he is so seldom here. He has given his arm, his eye, and his years to his country. As he has sacrificed his life, so have I sacrificed mine.” She had the melodramatic instincts of an actress.

  “Word is that Lord Nelson has been ill.”

  “Weary. Responsibility wears on him. He has suffered from scurvy, dysentery, seasickness, concussion, depression, heart pain, dyspepsia, constipation, gout, and rheumatism. That’s why your news is so welcome.”

  I rotated in the hall to show my appreciation. “A fragment of one of his ships?” I looked at a timber that soared toward the ceiling.

  “The topmast of L’Orient, the French flagship destroyed at the Nile. Its flag was attached to this fragment. Are you familiar with that battle, Mr. Gage?”

  “I was in it, madam.”

  “Oh! Then you are a hero, too.”

  “Unfortunately, I was trapped on L’Orient and thus on the side opposite your husband, though I took no direct part in the fighting. I won’t make the mistake of facing him
again. He’s rather terrifying.”

  “But the ship blew up. You represent a miracle.” Her eyes were wide with wonder.

  “Dumb luck, I’m afraid, and good swimming. I met the admiral after that fracas and recognized his worth. He and Napoleon have the same ability.”

  “But my Nelson for good, and Bonaparte for evil,” she said patriotically. “I had the same flash of recognition, Mr. Gage. When the admiral stepped ashore at Naples after his Egyptian victory, grateful fishermen released hundreds of pigeons that rose in a celebratory cloud. He looked like Apollo.”

  “Neptune, maybe, in his naval uniform.”

  “I’ve been consumed with love ever since. How fortunate I am, and how haunted by how he puts himself in danger!”

  “All the world knows of your devotion, Lady Hamilton.” I personally thought doves more celebratory than pigeons, but then no one has released so much as a chicken for me.

  “Call me Emma.” And so we hit it off, me enjoying her instinctual seductiveness, and she sensing a receptive audience for her charms.

  She also played to Nelson’s vanity, earning her place in the world by fortifying the esteem of England’s greatest hero. You might think the famed grow beyond the need for praise, but my experience is that renown is like money. The more you have of it, the more you want. Great men and women are driven to notoriety because compliments become a drug.

  The fifteen-bedroom house had been crowded with relatives since he’d returned for shore leave in August. Merton swarmed with nine adult relatives, seven children, a dozen servants, and a constant parade of naval officers. But for this momentous business Emma invited me into a private drawing room containing Smith, frigate captain Henry Blackwood, and the famous admiral.

  “Ah, Gage,” Lord Nelson greeted, as if it had been days instead of years since we’d last seen each other. “We were just discussing the obliteration of the French.”

  I tried to hide my shock. Nelson looked as haggard as Pitt. Napoleon may not have invaded England, but his relentless pressure seemed to be aging his most vigorous opponents. The admiral looked emaciated, face drawn, hair thinning, lines etched by relentless discomfort. Being important wears on a man. Being a savior crucifies him.

  Yet his eyes burned as I remembered, his lips firm, his carriage erect as a mast. There was an odd ghostliness about him, as if he already had one foot in the next world. Even while paying attention he seemed distracted, listening to voices only he could hear. Nelson was gathering himself for one last great battle.

  “I put you ashore in Egypt to take word of my victory to Napoleon,” the admiral said, “and figured that’s the last I’d ever see of you. Yet here you are, bringing word from Bonaparte.” He coughed, and as we talked I realized he was struggling with the hack as a chronic, and ominous, condition.

  “I’m drier this time, Admiral. And not so deaf from cannon fire.”

  “Yes, you were on the receiving end of our broadsides, weren’t you? And what do you think of British gunnery? Can we beat the frogs again?”

  “Your crews are the best in the world, my own United States excepted, of course. I must be patriotic.”

  “John Paul Jones was a fighter. But he was really a Scot.” They laughed.

  “I bring you word, Lord Nelson, that you’ve already beaten the French, that Napoleon has abandoned his plans to conquer England, and that no battle need be fought at all. You are saved.”

  The room went still with consternation. This was the last message they expected to receive. Blackwood looked skeptical, Smith intrigued, and Nelson disapproving.

  “But that is the very opposite of what we want,” the admiral said.

  “Peace? I thought England longed for it.”

  “What you suggest is not peace, but a respite while Bonaparte conquers elsewhere. Is this not true? The Combined Fleet of my enemy safe and our finely honed battle fleet laid up in port, its officers at half pay? Peace will come, Mr. Gage, only when the enemy navy is destroyed.”

  “Damned right,” Blackwood said.

  Emma closed her eyes.

  “But the threat of invasion is over,” I repeated.

  “At the very least this is useful news,” Sir Sidney told the others. “But why has Napoleon abandoned his plans?”

  “He received word of the French fleet retreating to Spain at the same time Russia and Austria joined to march against him. He really had no choice. But the end result is that your long blockade has succeeded; you delayed him enough that invasion became impractical. He sent me to admit it and spare more bloodshed.”

  “Why you?” Nelson asked.

  “I am trusted by all sides.” This was a tiny exaggeration.

  “Spare us until he beats the Austrians and turns again,” said Blackwood.

  “That may not happen,” Smith said. “Our allies outnumber him.”

  “Yet always the threat, looming over the horizon,” Nelson said. “The way to eliminate it, gentlemen, is to destroy Villeneuve directly and completely.”

  Nelson could be an odd man, I’d heard, prattling on about his own achievements. The British general Arthur Wellesley had just met him for the first time in London, and Nelson had boasted like a child until learning that the officer before him was the hero of India, at which point he changed manner and became sober about strategy. That was his demeanor now. He could also be a deeply profound man, an ardent student of strategy and tactics.

  Emma looked stricken. He was refusing escape.

  “I endured the Battle of the Nile on L’Orient,” I said doggedly, “and witnessed hell itself. To inflict that on men again, when the strategic situation makes it unnecessary, is a grave decision indeed.”

  “Your word grave is not inappropriate,” Nelson said. “Captain Carew fished out L’Orient’s shattered mainmast after the battle and used the wood to make me a coffin. I’ve kept it since, and recently ordered it carved with reliefs and made ready.”

  Emma almost swooned. She was an actress, as I’ve said.

  “No one knows the horror of war better than I, Mr. Gage. I’ve seen three score engagements and bear battle scars worse than Alexander the Great. I’m wracked with pain. But I also find ceaseless blockade a misery, my absence from Merton heartbreaking, and the terror that England has lived under these last three years almost unendurable. I don’t want it to end on Bonaparte’s whim; I want to end it on England’s terms, which is the complete destruction of the Combined Fleet. Britain must have total sea supremacy if we’re ever to be safe.”

  Here’s the truth about opportunity: people refuse it all the time. Nelson had already smashed one French fleet, destroyed a Danish one, and bottled up the survivors. Napoleon’s invasion had been canceled. Yet all this meant not a whit; this admiral had already chosen his path. He thirsted for glory and closure. Death, too, I suspected. Nelson knew he was being hollowed out. Did he want to die to the whispers of gossip in bed with Emma Hamilton, or to the sound of guns on a flaming quarterdeck? The fact that he would take thousands with him never occurred. Valhalla requires a heroic demise.

  “Then you’ll sail regardless?”

  “My orders are to return to command of our fleet off Cadiz.”

  Blackwood nodded approval. He was a scrapper, too. In 1802 he’d used his frigate Euryalus to whip French vice admiral Denis Decrés in the much bigger Guillame Tell. It says something of life’s unfairness that Blackwood was still a captain, while the defeated Decrés had become the French minister of marine, in charge of the entire navy.

  Sir Sidney summarized my failure. “You’ve brought us something momentous, and it changes nothing, does it?”

  “Apparently not.” I shrugged. “Have your decisive battle, if you will. My purpose is to reunite with my wife and son. I need a ship to get me to Venice so I can travel to Bohemia ahead of Napoleon, and as you know I haven’t a penny to my name. I brought you Tal
leyrand’s papers that foiled Bonaparte’s earlier naval maneuver, Sir Sidney, joined your attack on Boulogne, suffered capture by your enemies, and came back to reveal that the French army is no longer an immediate threat. Surely I’ve earned simple passage by now.”

  My British patron considered my plea. “You also failed our torpedo experiment, let a valuable French prisoner escape back to his homeland, and brought news our admiral doesn’t care for. Yes, you’ve accomplished something, but it only makes up for your failures in Paris, so I judge our accounts squared. There’s only one more thing you must do for me, and then I will provide you with papers giving you passage on a naval vessel going to Italy.”

  “Good Lord, what now?” The more jobs you complete, the more you’re given.

  “I want you to do to the French and Spanish admirals in Cadiz what you’ve just tried to do to us. Tell them of this meeting.”

  “I’m to go to Cadiz now? I can’t even find it on a map.”

  “The southwestern corner of Spain, Ethan, and we’ll transport you there. It’s on the way to Venice, if that makes you happier. I want you to explain that even with the immediate threat of invasion removed, the heroic Nelson will not rest until the Combined Fleet is destroyed—unless the Spanish are willing to forgo their alliance, or Villeneuve to surrender his French ships. I want you to make clear they’re fighting a sea battle with no purpose, against an admiral who cannot be deterred, for a tyrant who’s marched away to Germany. I want you to sap their spirit before they leave Cadiz harbor.”

  “But what if they then hide and don’t come out?” Blackwell objected.

  “Their fleet will rot and their careers end in shame. Men fear humiliation more than death, or there’d never be battles at all. So some will choose to rest at anchor and others a fight, and the result will be a muddle. Gage is perfect at making a mess of things.” He turned to me. “Confuse their strategy, and then you are released to go find your wife.”