Unhappily there was soon to be another outcome of Nelson's victory at the Nile; a meeting that turned the whole course of his life, domestic and public, into a sea of troubles, which has written into the pages of history a romantic legend as immortal as that of Tristan and Isolde.
VII Emma 1798-1800
Having wiped out the greater part of the French battle fleet in the Mediterranean, Nelson could afford to divide his force. As soon as his six repairable prizes were seaworthy, on 14 August 1798, Saumarez took them to Gibraltar with an escort of seven sail-of-the-line: St Vincent might need them for the now practicable operation of retaking Minorca, which had proved of such value as a base for watching Toulon, whilst continuing his blockade of Cadiz. (In the event, Commodore John Duckworth needed only two ships-of-the-line to land troops commanded by Nelson's old companion of Corsican days, now Lieutenant-General Charles Stuart, on 7 November, to whom the garrison of 3,500 capitulated on the 15th.) Hood was left in the Zealous, together with the Swiftsure, Goliath and three frigates (which had at last rejoined their Admiral) to blockade the Egyptian coast so that Bonaparte's army received neither supplies nor reinforcements. The three ships most in need of refit, the Vanguard (into which Hardy had been promoted out of the Mutine in place of Berry), Alexander and Culloden sailed on the 19th for Naples. And Nelson went with them because he suffered so much from his head wound that he doubted his fitness to retain his command.
But this mood passed during a voyage that was delayed a week by the loss of the Vanguard's jury foremast in a sudden squall. 'I shall not go home,' he wrote on 7 September, 'until [the Armée d' Orient's] destruction is effected, and the islands of Malta, Corfu, etc. retaken' (which demolishes Bernard Shaw's facile contention that what was now to happen was the consequence of Nelson's head wound).
When Ball and Troubridge reached Naples ahead of Nelson on 16 September, they brought word to Sir William Hamilton that their Admiral expected to stay for only four or five days because 'these times are not for idleness'. He was impatient to be off to Syracuse which would be his base for a blockade of Malta, whither Decrès and Villeneuve had taken their fugitive ships - and to which purpose he had already directed a Portuguese squadron of four 74s under Rear-Admiral the Marquess de Niza, following the French garrison's rejection of a surrender demand by Saumarez en route to Gibraltar. In the event, Nelson remained at Naples for the better part of a month. The magnet was Emma Hamilton. He had met the wife of the British envoy for only four days whilst serving in the Agamemnon, and had not seen her since 1793. They had, however, been in touch: that ugly virago, the forty-five-year-old Queen Maria Carolina, being the effective ruler of the Two Sicilies rather than her buffoon of a husband, King Ferdinand (Nelson was to call her 'a great king'), and etiquette denying Hamilton access to her so that he was obliged to employ Emma as a go-between, whereby she had gained considerable influence at the Neapolitan Court, Nelson had reinforced his formal appeals for help from the Two Sicilies with notes urging her to plead his cause. And she had warned him against the prostitutes of Leghorn, at least one of whose favours he had accepted in 1794.
Emma's effusive style impelled Nelson to respond with something of the same warmth. Thus, when to seaward of Naples seeking Brueys' fleet in June, he received this:
'God bless you, my dear Sir, I will not say how glad I shall be to see you. Indeed, I cannot describe to you my feelings on your being so near to us. Ever, ever dear Sir, your affectionate and grateful Emma Hamilton' to which he answered:
'My dear Lady Hamilton, I have kissed the Queen's letter [which Emma sent him]. Pray say I hope for the honour of kissing her hand when no fears will intervene, assure Her Majesty that no person has her felicity more at heart than myself, and that the sufferings of her family will be a tower of strength on the day of battle; fear not the event, God is with us. God bless you and Sir William. . . . Ever yours faithfully, Horatio Nelson.'
This was no more than a pen-friendship, but out of it, from the day that the Vanguard entered Naples Bay to a hero's welcome, as 'Nostro Liberatore' - flags, gun salutes, bonfires, fireworks - there arose Dante's threatening personification of Love, 'E' m'ha percosso in terra . . . '
Emma's humble birth, and how she came to marry the dilettante Hamilton, have been mentioned in Chapter III. Now aged thirty-three, she had, according to William Beckford, 'beautiful hair and displayed it. Her countenance was agreeable - fine, hardly beautiful, but the outline excellent.' And to Lord Minto, now British Minister in Vienna, she was 'all Nature and yet all Art . . . excessively good-humoured and wishing to please and be admired. . . . One wonders at the . . . pains she has taken to make herself what she is.' But both men were also critical. Beckford described her as 'full in person, not fat, but embonpoint . . . ill-bred, often very affected, a devil in temper'. To Minto her manners were 'very easy . . . [as] of a barmaid. . . . With men her language and conversation are exaggerations of anything I ever heard anywhere.'
From these and other contemporary descriptions Emma emerges as a gifted woman of full-blooded charm, for all that she had lost the fresh beauty that inspired Romney's brush: but she remained a child of nature with a veneer of sophistication. She could be affectionate, amusing, brave and generous; she was also proud, impulsive, strong-willed and unscrupulous. Above all she was ambitious: not for her the passive role of consort to the British envoy to the Neapolitan Court; she must play an active part in the affairs of the Two Sicilies through her friendship with the Queen. Nor was she content with being wife to an amiable, but complacent husband more than twice her age whose chief interests were volcanoes and Etruscan vases: she was a Delilah seeking her Samson. And in Nelson she found him. On hearing the news of the Nile and of his expected arrival at Naples, she did more than prepare a room for him at the Palazzo Sessa; she dressed from head to foot 'alla Nelson. . . . Even my shawl is blue with gold anchors all over. . . . Come soon.' And when she accompanied Sir William onboard the Vanguard on 23 September 1798, she displayed all the gifts of the born actress which she was accustomed to demonstrate in her celebrated 'Attitudes'. 'Up flew her Ladyship,' wrote Nelson, 'and exclaiming, "OH GOD, IS IT POSSIBLE?" fell into my arm more dead than alive.'
That this meant little to him at the time is clear from this tender comment to Fanny: 'If so affecting to those who were only united to me by the bonds of friendship, what must it be to my dearest wife, my friend, my everything which is most dear to me in this world?' and: 'May God bless you, my dearest Fanny, and give us in due time a happy meeting.' But, though great men be rare enough, those among them so fortunate as to love and be loved by a woman of the calibre of Sarah, first Duchess of Marlborough, are much rarer. And Emma was shrewd enough to know the key to the heart of a man who had a deep-seated longing for the devotion of a woman whose spirit matched his own. By appeasing his thirst for flattery, as the neurotic Fanny seldom attempted, she blinded him to her real worth; to his diamond brilliance she matched tinsel glitter.
'Lady Hamilton is an Angel,' wrote Nelson soon after his arrival at Naples; 'she has honoured me by being my ambassador to the Queen: therefore she has my implicit confidence and is worthy of it.' Beckford saw their relationship in a harder light: 'Nelson was infatuated. She [Emma] could make him believe anything. . . . He was her dupe.' One thing is certain, that Emma soon dominated all Nelson's thoughts and actions; and it is to explain his consequent mistakes, to use no harsher word, that so much has to be said about her in a book intended to study Nelson's naval career. The moral, ethical and psychological aspects of infidelity lie outside its scope.
To begin with, although Nelson sent the Alexander and Culloden to join de Niza's blockade early in October, the Vanguard did not arrive off Malta until the 24th. He believed that he delayed his departure from Naples to the good purpose of persuading the Two Sicilies to join the war against France, so that their handful of ships-of-the-line might strengthen his forces in Maltese and Egyptian waters. In his right mind he would have realized the consequences, that inste
ad of helping his fleet this would impose an additional burden. As he wrote to St Vincent on 22 October:
'I shall, after having arranged the blockade of Malta, return to Naples, and endeavour to be useful in the movements of their army. In thus acquiescing in the desire of the King of Naples, I give up my plan, which was to have gone to Egypt and attended to the destruction of the French shipping in that quarter.'
But he came nearer the truth when he told Emma: 'I feel my duty . . . is in the East, but who could resist such a Queen.' In plainer words, Nelson could not resist Emma: because of her he stayed off Malta for only a week, during which the smaller island of Gozo surrendered, then returned to Naples, entrusting to Ball and de Niza the tedious task of helping 10,000 insurgent Maltese to besiege General Vaubois' garrison of 3,000 within the fortress of Valletta. For the same reason he left Hood in charge of the Levant, and cancelled a plan to send Troubridge to evict the French from the Ionian Islands, which they had seized from the Venetians in 1796.
There is, however, another point of view; that other considerations justified Nelson's decision to keep a sizeable part of his fleet at Naples. Admiralty orders issued on 3 October 1798, named first among his duties, 'the protection of the coasts of Sicily, Naples and the Adriatic, and . . . an active cooperation with the Austrian and Neapolitan armies' - though this anticipated the Emperor Francis II's decision to declare war by nearly six months. Secondly, his was not the only fleet now operating against the French in the Mediterranean: a Russo-Turkish force headed by twelve ships-of-the-line under Vice-Admiral F. F. Ushakov, supported by Vice-Admiral Kadir Bey, passed through the Dardanelles on 1 October. And the fifty-four-year-old Ushakov, whose considerable reputation rested on his victories over the Turks at the battles of Kerch, Tendra Island and Cape Kalialcra in 1790-1, wrote: 'I have the honour to congratulate you . . . on such a most perfect victory [the Nile] and hope that I shall soon have the pleasure of being in your vicinity, and, perhaps, of acting jointly with you against the enemy.'
Nelson suggested that Ushakov and Kadir Bey should reinforce Hood, and also take the Ionian Islands. The Russian squadron was sufficient for the latter task; the Turkish was the proper one to help clear the French from Egypt. These Admirals would not, however, divide their force in this way; they feared to split their battle fleet lest another French fleet appear in the eastern Mediterranean; and Russian and Turk were alike determined that the Ionian Islands should be their country's prize. Two Turkish frigates and ten gunboats were all that Kadir Bey sent to Alexandria where they stayed only until mid-November. The Russo-Turkish battle fleet proceeded to capture Zante on 24 October 1798, Cephalonia on the 28th and Santa Maura on 13 November, then to blockade Corfu, where General Chabot held out with the help of the Genereux and the captured Leander.
Nelson was diplomatically critical. He hoped 'to hear soon about the destruction of French ships in Alexandria [which included ten armed transports under Ganteaume], as well as the entire French army in Egypt. . . . I nourish great hopes that Corfu will soon be taken thanks to your efforts, [but] Egypt is the first objective, Corfu the second.' How much better if he had gone to the Levant after visiting Malta, and discussed with Ushakov and Kadir Bey a joint campaign against the French, instead of relying on letters which were inevitably a source of misunderstanding between men of very different races who had never met. As it was, Nelson not only returned to Naples but played a large part in a major strategic blunder. Accepting the Queen's assertion, derived from her daughter, the Empress, that Austria was about to open a campaign against the Armée d' Italie, he persuaded King Ferdinand to order his own army commander, the incompetent Austrian General Mack, to march into the neighbouring Papal States on 23 November.
In truth Francis II was far from decided whether to rejoin the war. And although Nelson landed 5,000 Neapolitan troops at Leghorn on 28 November 1798 to threaten the French from the north, these were no substitute for an Austrian army. Within a fortnight he had to admit the reality of the situation :
'The [Neapolitan] army is at Rome, Civita Vecchia is taken, but . . . [not] the Castle of St Angelo. . . . The French have 13,000 troops at . . . Castellana . . . Mack has gone against them with 20,000. The [outcome] . . . is doubtful, and on it hangs the . . . fate of Naples. If Mack is defeated, this country, in fourteen days, is lost; for the Emperor [of Austria] has not yet moved his army, and if the Emperor will not march, this country has not the power of resisting the French.'
He justified himself in these words: 'It was not a case of choice, but necessity which forced the King of Naples to march . . . and not to wait until the French had collected a force sufficient to drive him . . . out of his kingdom.' In reality he had provided the French with a valid reason for an attack which they might otherwise have deferred. Ferdinand entered Rome in triumph on 29 November: eight days later he had to leave hurriedly to avoid being captured by the French. As soon as General Championnet ordered his men forward, the Neapolitan army - 'la plus belle Armée d'Europe', according to Mack - showed how little it was worth: though nearly twice as strong, it broke and fled, with the French in hot pursuit to the outskirts of Naples itself.
Faced with this crisis, Nelson applied all his energy and skill to saving the King, not only from capitulation, but from the fury of his panic-stricken countrymen. With Emma's determined help he embarked the royal family onboard the Vanguard, and on 23 December 1798 sailed with them and the Hamiltons for Sicily. Three days later, he landed them at Palermo. This was well done: it was, nonetheless, a task which could have been entrusted to one of his captains; it did not merit the personal attention of an admiral whom Spencer and St Vincent had charged with the conduct of the naval war in all the Mediterranean to the east of Corsica and Sardinia. Moreover, in the light of subsequent events, Nelson would have been even wiser had he insisted on this task being carried out by Ferdinand's own ships.
For the next six months Nelson exercised his command from the Hamilton residence at Palermo more often than from the quarterdeck of the Vanguard. (1) Having entangled himself with a grotesque Neapolitan Court, he believed that he had a moral obligation to remain with them. The blunt truth is that he and Emma became lovers. (2) But this was only the half of it: many another men, Bonaparte for one, has taken a mistress without affecting his capacity for war. While Emma gloried in having a godlike hero, Nelson was obsessed by a passion such as he had never felt before, as just one of his letters to her shows:
'My Dearest Friend,
I hope you will have seen Troubridge last night and he will probably tell you that he did not leave me perfectly at ease. . . . When I gave [him] a letter for you it rushed into my mind that in ten hours he would see you, and a flood of tears followed: it was too much for me to bear. . . . I am sure . . . that you will on no consideration be in company with that – I neither this day nor any other: he [the Prince Regent, who was supposed to be intent on seducing Emma] is a false lying scoundrel. . . . I have received your truly comforting letters. . . . I wish you in my heart for ever. I am all soul and sensibility. . . . I hope very soon to get a few days leave of absence. . . . I have been [asked] to dine ashore by the Admiral [and his] wife . . . but I will dine nowhere without your consent although with my present feelings I might be trusted with fifty virgins naked in a dark room. . . . I am, my Dear Friend, for ever and ever your faithful
Nelson and Brontë' (3)
For all the affection in his many letters to his wife written before 1799, none is in such terms as this.
The fact that it was penned in 1801, after Nelson's return to England, shows that theirs was no temporary infatuation, but a love that lasted until death. Hamilton was no cuckold: such was his admiration and liking for Nelson that he was not only a mari complaisant, but one who wished to avoid 'an explosion which would totally destroy the comfort of the best man and the best friend I have in the world'. He and Nelson lived with Emma in a ménage a trois, or, to use Hamilton's own description, a tria juncta in uno, whose luxuries Nelson fina
nced to an extent he could ill afford - 'on my birthday night 80 people dined . . ., 1,740 came to a ball, 800 supped . . . in such a style of elegance as I never saw' - the while he penned mendacious answers to his wife's pleas to be allowed to join him: 'I could, if you had come, only have struck my flag, and carried you back again, for it would have been impossible to have set up an establishment at either Naples or Palermo. Nothing but the situation . . . in this country has kept me from England.' Hamilton might plead his age: Nelson was arrogant enough to suppose that the victor of the Nile could behave with scant regard for a scandal which soon spread much further than the corrupt Court of the Two Sicilies. Even his loyal subordinates - the captains such as Troubridge who were of his Band of Brothers - grew critical as the war continued.
Naples capitulated to Championnet on 23 January 1799. With a facile dismissal of his own part in this disaster, Nelson blamed the Austrian Emperor as readily as he criticized the commander of the Neapolitan fleet for staying to defend the city instead of getting it away to Palermo, so that he had to burn his ships-of-the-line to prevent them falling into enemy hands. In the same month the flamboyant thirty-four-year-old Commodore Sir William Sydney Smith, arrived in the 80-gun Tigre with Admiralty orders which not only appointed him senior officer in the Levant, but seemed to mean that this part of the station was to become an independent command. A slighted Nelson - 'never, never, was I so astonished' - sent Troubridge to Alexandria with instructions to ensure that Smith did not prise from his grasp any of the ships with which Hood was blockading Egypt. Simultaneously he wrote asking to be relieved: 'It is impossible for me to serve in these seas with the [Levant] squadron under a junior officer.' Fortunately St Vincent also protested: Spencer then realized that he had been trapped into an unfortunate gaffe by the Foreign Office's desire to appoint Smith as their envoy to Turkey. Fresh instructions were quickly sent making clear that Smith was under Nelson's orders. As quickly Nelson accepted Spencer's explanation and recalled Troubridge to Naples.
Nelson the Commander Page 16
