Nelson's Lady Hamilton

by Meynell, Esther

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  directions minutely; send this to Lord St. Vincent, at Brentwood, so as to reach him on Sunday morning.' My commission as an officer was dated the same as the aforesaid certificate. May it be made up to thee in another and better world, sweet lady!" exclaims the grateful lieutenant, " for man's injustice in this—where thou hast been most foully calumniated—and thy sins and weaknesses attributed to their proper source: thy low birth and association of thy infant years, joined to the most extraordinary talent and beauty that ever adorned thy sex."

  In the summer of this year the Hamiltons and Nelson and Charles Greville set out for a driving tour to Sir William's estates at Milford, which Greville had been managing for his uncle. Owing perhaps to seeing Milford Haven in company with Lady Hamilton, Nelson was struck with its suitability for a dockyard, and through his influence at the Admiralty one was established there on land belonging to the Hamiltons. Some years later the dockyard establishment was transferred to Pembroke. The tour turned out a triumphal progress for the admiral: in every town and hamlet he passed through, his countrymen came out to welcome and rejoice over him. There might be coldness and caution in high quarters, notably at Blenheim, which they visited, but the hearts of the people were warm. Emma herself partook in all the glory and all the plaudits;

  and when she got back to Merton, exhausted with her exertions, but triumphant, she wrote exultantly, "We have had a most charming Tour which will Burst some of THEM.'* An explosive comment which is typical Emma!

  The time was now drawing on when Emma's rightful protector was to leave her. Sir William's health had been slowly failing, and in the early spring of 1803 it was evident that he was very near his end. His wife and Nelson were constantly with him, caring for his last hours with a tenderness that would be strange in view of the facts, were human nature itself not capable of such strange complexities. Nelson had referred to Sir William as Emma's " uncle," and openly speculated upon his death. Emma had played the traitor to her husband and hidden the consequence without an apparent pang of compunction. Yet on the day he died she wrote, " Unhappy day for the forlorn Emma. Ten minutes past ten dear blessed Sir William left me." While Nelson said, "Our dear Sir William died at 10 minutes past Ten this morning in Lady Hamilton's and my arms without a sigh or a struggle. Poor Lady H. is as you may expect desolate."

  In all the curious drama of Emma's life there is surely no episode so inexplicable as this of Sir William dying in the arms of his weeping and faithless wife, while Nelson soothed his last moments. Whether Sir William Hamilton

  LADY HAMILTON AS A NUN

  GEORGE RO.MNEY

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  suspected anything of the truth must remain a mystery. It seems impossible to believe that he, very much a man of the world and not ignorant of his wife's upbringing, should have been so blind to a situation at which many people were broadly hinting. Yet never by word or sign did he display the least doubt of either his friend or his wife, and in his will he left a miniature of Emma to Nelson: " The copy of Madame Le Brunn's picture of Emma in enamel by Bone, I give to my dearest friend Lord Nelson, Duke of Bronte, a very small token of the great regard I have for his lordship, the most virtuous, loyal, and truly brave character I ever met with. God bless him, and shame fall on all those who do not say Amen."

  The conduct of all the three is best characterized by Mr. A. C. Swinburne's saying of Mary Stuart: " That there are fewer moral impossibilities than would readily be granted by the professional moralist, those students of human character who are not professional moralists may very readily admit."

  Captain Hardy's comment on the affair was somewhat curt: " Sir William Hamilton died on Sunday afternoon, and was quite sensible to the last. How her Ladyship will manage to Live with the Hero of the Nile now, I am at a loss to know, at least in an honourable way."

  Part of this problem was temporarily solved

  by the outbreak of war with France, when Nelson was given the command of the Mediterranean, for " Buonaparte knows that if he hoists his flag it will not be in joke." Nelson's views on the renewal of the war are shown in the noble words he used in the House of Lords the previous winter. " I, my Lords, have in different countries, seen much of the miseries of war/' said the great admiral; " I am, therefore, in my inmost soul, a man of peace. Yet I would not, for the sake of any peace, however fortunate, consent to sacrifice one jot of England's honour. Our honour is inseparably combined with our genuine interest. Hitherto there has been nothing greater known on the Continent than the faith, the untainted honour, the generous public sympathies, the high diplomatic influence, the commerce, the grandeur, the resistless power, the unconquerable valour of the British nation."

  And to maintain these honours of his country, he left the English home which had grown so dear to him, and the woman who was more to him than anything on earth, and went to sea, hoisting his flag for the first time in the fatal and glorious Victory. He could not now fully practise what Codrington says he used to preach, "that every man became a bachelor after passing the Rock of Gibraltar"; for his heart was ever turning homewards to the England and the Emma, which in his thoughts had become

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  inextricably one. But in act he was as instant as though he had no horizon but the sea-rim, and no hope in life save to destroy the French. " That dear domestic happiness," as Codrington said, " never abstracted his attention." For two years he never set foot outside his ship, thus triumphantly proclaiming to Lady Hamilton and to the world his entire devotion to the two objects on which his heart was set—the woman he loved and the French fleet. If he met either, he declared, he would embrace them so closely that no power on earth should part them. " I have not a thought except on you and the French fleet," he told Emma ; " all my thoughts, plans, and toils tend to those two objects. Don't laugh at my putting you and the French fleet together, but you cannot be separated."

  But though these two different yet consuming passions were inseparable in his thoughts, the pursuit of the one severed him completely from the presence of the other. Emma Hamilton fretted and rebelled at the prolonged separation, though she had far more to distract her in her life on shore than had the lonely, harassed admiral at sea. But when she suggested coming out to him, Nelson was stern in refusal. The Victory was no place for her. " Imagine what a cruize off Toulon is; even in summer time we have a hard gale every week, and two days' heavy swell. It would kill you ; and myself to see you.

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  Much less possible to have Charlotte, Horatia, etc., on board ship! And I, that have given orders to carry no women to sea in the Victory r , to be the first to break them ! I know, my own dear Emma, if she will let her reason have fair play, will say I am right; but she is like Horatia, very angry if she cannot have her own way." He appeals to the motives which were always so potent to him. " Your Nelson," he tells her, " is called upon, in the most honourable manner, to defend his country. Absence to us is equally painful: but, if I had either stayed at home, or neglected my duty abroad, would not my Emma have blushed for me ? She could never have heard any praises, and how the country looks up."

  But though separated from her by stern duty and leagues of ocean, his thoughts were continually with her. Each little happening at Merton was of a vital interest to him, and he kept regretting that the isolation of his sea-life prevented him from sending the gifts his generous temper prompted. " I go nowhere to get anything pretty; therefore do not think me neglectful." Emma was somewhat over-fond of gifts, and probably she was little pleased with Nelson's fine and jealous care when he told her that Mr. Scott, his secretary, had received from Venice "two very handsome Venetian chains," which would have been presented to her had he not

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  forbidden it. " I allow no one to make my own Emma presents, but her Nelson." Emma would certainly fail to appreciate this sentiment. But f all her life she lacked delicacy in accepting "avours, she hers
elf gave in return good measure, pressed down and running over. " Your purse, ny dear Emma," Nelson told her on one occasion, will always be empty; your heart is generous Beyond your means." Beggars, children, and inimals always clustered round her, with the nstinctive recognition they have for the open-landed and open-hearted. And the beautiful, latural ardour which vivifies her early letters to jreville, and the excitable epistle she wrote Melson after the Nile, was still hers in maturer fears. On the first anniversary of the Battle of :he Baltic she wrote to the hero—

  " Immortal and great Nelson, what shall I say :o you on this day ? My heart and feeling are to overpowered that I cannot give vent to my ull soul to tell you, as an Englishwoman gratefull :o her country's saviour, what I feel towards you. d as a much loved friend that has the happi-s of being beloved, esteemed, and admired by good and virtues Nelson, what must be my de, my glory, to say this day, have I the happi-of being with him, one of his select, and how tefull to God Almighty do I feel in having erved you through such glorious dangers that er man before got through them with such

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  Honner and Success. Nelson, I want Eloquence to tell you what I fell, to avow the sentiments of respect and adoration with which you have inspired me. Admiration and delight you must ever raise in all who behold you, looking on you only as the guardian of England. But how far short are those sensations to what I as a much loved friend feil! And I confess to you the predominant sentiments of my heart will ever be, till it ceases to beat, the most unfeigned anxiety for your happiness, and the sincerest and most disinterested determination to promote your felicity, even at the hasard of my life. Excuse this scrawl, my dearest friend, but next to talking with you is writing to you. . . . God bless you, my ever dear Nelson. Long may you live to be the admiration of Europe, the delight of your country, and the idol of your constant, attached Emma."

  And while Emma thus sang the praises of her hero, Nelson himself was not behindhand in the generous contest. In one of his letters he assures her, " In short, in every point of view, from Ambassatrice to the duties of domestic life, I never saw your equal! That Elegance of manners, accomplishments, and, above all, your goodness of heart, is unparalleled/ 1 He had told her, a year or two earlier, during Sir William Hamilton's lifetime, and alluding to the fact that Queen Charlotte never would receive her, " You

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  Thus she shone for him until the end. It is he only happy thing about the story. Dis-llusion would have broken his heart.

  In the spring of 1804, while Nelson was at ea, his second child, again a girl, was born. The :hild only lived a short time—she came and lisappeared again, a wandering baby ghost, caving not even a birth or death certificate Behind her.

  Perhaps it was the loss of this child that made Nelson and Emma Hamilton feel it impossible to leave Horatia any longer in other hands. She must come under their own roof at Merton —the only difficulty was that she could not be openly acknowledged as their own daughter. A fresh fiction had to replace the " Thompson" one, to account for her presence. The " tangled web " of deceit had enmeshed even the feet of Nelson, and he wrote to Lady Hamilton, on the 13th of August, 1804, a letter, which was evidently intended for the public eye :—

  " I am now going to state a thing to you and to request your kind assistance, which, from my dear Emma's goodness of heart, I am sure of her acquiescence in. Before we left Italy I told you

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  of the extraordinary circumstance of a child being left to my care and protection. On your first coming to England I presented you the child, dear Horatia. You became, to my comfort, attached to it, so did Sir William, thinking her the finest child he had ever seen. She is become of that age when it is necessary to remove her from a mere nurse and to think of educating her. . . . I am now anxious for the child's being placed under your protecting wing."

  This was for the world to see; but on an enclosure was written for Emma alone, " My beloved, how I feel for your situation and that of our dear Horatia, our dear child,"

  Once the little Horatia was established at Merton, Nelson at sea was full of the most anxious care and thought for her well-being. " Everything you tell me about my dear Horatia charms me," he writes to Lady Hamilton. " I think I see her, hear her, and admire her." He wishes he could be at Merton to assist in making the alterations that were being carried out. He speaks of the stream and the pond and their danger for the child, "Only take care that my darling does not fall in, and get drowned. I begged you to get the little netting along the edge, and, particularly, on the bridges." In another letter he writes, " I would not have Horatia think of a dog. I shall not bring her one; and, I am sure, she is better without a pet

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  of that sort. But she is like her mother, would get all the old dogs in the place about her." To Horatia herself he wrote, a few days later—

  <{ MY DEAR HORATIA, —I send you twelve books of Spanish dresses, which you will let your guardian angel, Lady Hamilton, keep for you, when you are tired of looking at them. I am very glad to hear, that you are perfectly recovered ; and, that you are a very good child. I beg, my dear Horatia, that you will always continue so; which will be a great comfort to your most affectionate NELSON AND BRONTE"

  In writing to a child so young, Nelson could not express anything of his passionate feeling for her; but in a letter of this time to his niece, Charlotte Nelson, there is a little outburst, strangely out of keeping with his professed mild interest in the " orphan." " I feel truly sensible," he tells her, " of your kind regard for that dear little orphan, Horatia. Although her parents are lost, yet she is not without a fortune: and, I shall cherish her to the last moment of my life; and curse them who curse her, and Heaven bless them who bless her ! Dear innocent! she can have injured no one."

  And if his child Horatia meant all this to Nelson, Emma, the mother, meant more. There

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  was not an anniversary or an episode that did not remind his exiled heart of the one woman in whom his devotion centred. On his last birthday but one he wrote to her—

  " This day, my dearest Emma, which gave me birth, I consider as more fortunate than common days; as by my coming into this world, it has brought me so intimately acquainted with you, who my soul holds most dear. I well know that you will keep it, and have my dear Horati; to drink my health. Forty-six years of toil an< trouble! How few more, the common lot mankind leads us to expect; and, therefore, it is almost time to think of spending the few 1; years in peace and quietness."

  At home Emma celebrated the hero's birthday and the anniversaries of his victories with champagne and songs and all the gaiety, which she loved to the end of her days. To sit in solitude and remember the absent was not her way. To her, lights, plaudits, many faces were a necessity; the world was too much with her all her life, and the " still small voice " was drowned as completely in the crash of her falling fortunes as in the thunder and applause of her most brilliant days. She would laugh with the world so long as all went well, and when the world turned against her and deserted her she would still fight—with a certain violent courage. Neither love, nor grief, nor success, nor the bitter edge

  LADY HAMILTON

  BY ANGELICA KAUFFMAN (Ry kind permission of J. T. Herbert Raily, Ksq.)

  1

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  of poverty and debt and disgrace changed the essential Emma.

  At this time, even while Nelson was living, her extravagance and lavish methods were plunging her more and more deeply into debt. Sir William Hamilton had failed to get the pension he expected from the Government, and his widow was still urging and protesting her rights and her needs. When she could not get what she wanted she adopted a somewhat thin attitude of noble magnani
mity. To the Honourable George Rose, Nelson's friend, she wrote, in 1804—

  " Lord Nelson has the greatest reliance on your friendship for him, which makes me take the liberty of now writing to you. I hope you will call on me when you come to town, and I promise you not to bore you with my own claims; for if those that have power will not do me justice, I must be quiet; and, in revenge to them, I can say,—if ever I am a minister's wife again, with the power I had then, why I will again do the same for my country as I did before; and I did more than any ambassador ever did, though their pockets were filled with secret-service money, and poor Sir William and myself aever got even a pat on the back. But, indeed, the cold-hearted Grenville was in then. I know if I could tell my story to Mr. Pitt he would do me justice ; but I never am to be so happy as to