Too Great a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  “We are no longer living in a backwater, my love,” I told Sir William. “The queen believes that the wolf is at our door. The republicans have already taken Toulon and now have garrisons in the Papal States, right on Naples’s northern boundary. ’Er Majesty says we must fortify ourselves against the possibility that they may come further. What do you think of that?!”

  He remained thoughtful for several moments. “I am not one to ever conscience violence,” Sir William replied. “But before we rush ahead where angels fear to go, we must take a moment to reflect upon why the societies of Neapolitan artists and intellectuals have embraced many of the republican sensibilities. In this country justice does not exist, the government of it is very defective, and the people have a right not to be trampled on. I know you have become thick with the queen, Emma, but you must caution yourself that your infatuation with her does not render you blind to these defects. If you wish to behave like a diplomat, you must consider a thing from every one of its sides. Naples more closely resembles a decahedron, wife, than a wafer. If this government does not speedily and seriously set about a reform in all its branches, the general discontent now silently brooding will probably, sooner or later, break out into open violence. Nature has certainly done more for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies than for any kingdom in Europe, and yet I have been witness myself of more misery and poverty among the inhabitants of some of its richest provinces than I ever saw in the whole course of my travels.”

  “But if you, as ’Is Britannic Majesty’s envoy, do not seek to protect the Two Sicilies by encouraging England to come to her aid, where will the revolutionaries stop, Sir Willum? Will solid, beef-eating English subjects soon be sipping brandy instead of quaffing beer and singing ‘La Marseillaise’ instead of ‘God Save the King’? You must do something about it, Sir Willum. If ever there was a time for England to seize the present in order to protect ’er glorious future, that time is now!”

  Sir William regarded me with studied curiosity. “Egad, my dear, you sound like Britannia herself!”

  Yet my impassioned words did have an effect. On behalf of their respective governments, Sir William and Sir John Acton signed the Anglo-Neapolitan treaty on July 23, officially declaring Naples an ally of the British Crown. Suddenly, Sir William and I were two of the most influential people in Naples. For years now, we had set the tone in fashion and entertaining, but now the stakes were significantly higher; securing our friendship and goodwill was of vital political importance.

  In August, a British fleet under the command of Lord Hood arrived in Toulon, under orders to blockade the port. Invoking the terms of the Anglo-Neapolitan treaty, he sent an emissary to Naples charged with demanding that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies honor its pledge to provide troops in return for subsidies from the British Crown.

  On September 11, 1793, that envoy arrived. Hood had dispatched the thirty-four-year-old post captain of the Agamemnon, a slender, slight man named Horatio Nelson, much admired by his men, we were told, and highly commended for his decisiveness and grace under pressure. I could never have known it at the time, but his appearance would change all of our lives irrevocably.

  “Nothing could be finer than the view of Vesuvius.” Those were the first words he said to Sir William, and had Nelson been a diplomat instead of a naval captain, he could not have ingratiated himself more with the British ambassador.

  As for me, when I first saw him, I thought I was seeing a ghost, for he so resembled poor dear Samuel Linley, the young navy officer I was smitten with as a girl, that I was immediately undone. Nelson’s size and stature, his almost-fragile physique, the shock of unpowdered light hair that would not be tam’d, the blazingly intelligent blue eyes—and even the outmoded uniform with its wide flaps on the waistcoat—it was as if Samuel breathed again before my eyes.

  “Does Lady Hamilton usually have such a . . . passionate . . . reaction to visitors?” Nelson inquired politely.

  “Forgive me for the outburst, gentlemen.” Covering a blush, I excused myself from the room, for I could not very well have added, You remind me beyond all measure of my first love.

  I allowed a few minutes to compose myself, reentering Sir William’s library in time to hear Nelson request an immediate commitment of six thousand Neapolitan troops. As His Britannic Majesty’s ambassador, it was up to Sir William to broker the deal with Acton and Their Sicilian Majesties.

  “I do not know if you are aware, sir, that the ‘king’ of Naples is really the queen,” Sir William said smoothly. “I will most assuredly take your demand to Sir John, but to win the unmitigated support of Maria Carolina, it is my wife to whom one must make a petition, for she and the queen are thick as thieves. You said you have no Italian and even less French, am I right?”

  “You must hate the Frenchmen as you hate the Devil, Sir William.”

  “Then I take that to mean you have not learnt the lingua franca?”

  “I am just a common English sailor, sir, with no pretensions to much of a formal education. I set aside my books for the smell of pitch and bilgewater when I was but twelve and a half years of age.”

  “But you see, as much as you detest the lot of ’em, French remains the language of diplomacy. Now, by coming to Naples at nineteen or twenty-one, or whatever it was—you should have seen her then, all emotions and eagerness to absorb everything around her like a sea sponge—Emma has got the language better than I have in twenty-eight years. Although we have had many ladies of the first rank from England here, and indeed such as give the Tone in London, the Queen of Naples has often remarked that my Emma’s deportment was infinitely superior.”

  Nelson bowed politely. “Then I place myself at her ladyship’s disposal.”

  Thus was I drafted to intercede with the queen on Nelson’s behalf, but it was Sir William who applied to Acton for the troops, a request that was promptly honored.

  “I must say, I admire your husband tremendously,” a grateful Nelson remarked.

  “As do I, Captain Nelson. ’E ’as many fine qualities. But tell me your reasons for likin’ ’im so.”

  “We are of a mind, Lady Hamilton. Sir William is a man of action who conducts his business in the same manner as myself.”

  I smiled. “And ’ow is that?”

  “With no dithering and a great respect for and trust in those under his aegis. I am speaking of yourself, your ladyship, and your husband’s implicit confidence in your ability to carry out your assignment with skill, diligence, and all due speed.”

  I suppressed a blush. “You honor me, Captain Nelson.”

  “As does Sir William.”

  Sir William was equally impressed by Nelson. “He is a little man who could not boast of being very handsome,” said my tall and elegant husband in the privacy of our rooms, “but mark my words, Emma, Captain Nelson will become the greatest man that England ever produced.”

  Accompanying Captain Nelson on his errand was his fourteen-year-old stepson, Josiah Nisbet. “Your Excellency must excuse me for bringing one of my midshipmen. I make it a rule to introduce them to all the good company I can, as they have few to look up to besides myself during the time they are at sea,” Nelson told us. “Some of my colleagues think my attention to these young men is madness, but I assure you there is both merit and method in’t. For it is my belief that you must be a seaman to be an officer, and alas, you cannot be an officer without being a gentleman.”

  In the four days that Nelson spent on Neapolitan shores, he was much honored by the king and queen, meeting with them no fewer than three times—and once, he was placed by the king’s right hand—a grand success by any account. As a measure of thanks, he insisted on hosting a dinner party for us aboard the Agamemnon. Mam was beside herself with amusement that the little captain, as she called him, had asked her for the loan of plate and cutlery from the Palazzo Sessa, for he dared not expose us grandees to the rigors of shipboard life. “He even asked me for butter dishes!” Mam exclaimed. “Don’t Farmer George outfit ’i
s warships with butter dishes?!”

  “Fourteen seems terribly young to be away for so many months, if not years, at sea,” I mused, raising my glass to Josiah.

  “Perhaps ’tis,” Nelson replied. “But in fact, many boys are first taken on board when they are only twelve, though the Admiralty has declared it unlawful. However, they wink at it as often as not and the exception has become the rule. When I was Josiah’s age I had a bit of a dust-up with a polar bear!”

  “But ’ow?!”

  “Though no boys were permitted to join up, I talked my way into becoming a member of an expedition to the North Pole, reckoning I might be of service as a coxswain; and there we were, just below the polar ice cap when I took it into my boyish head to bring back a souvenir for my father. He would have been the only rector in Norfolk to have a bearskin rug, you see. But my musket misfired and the bear became rather agitated.”

  I clutched my heart. “What ’appened?”

  Nelson smiled sheepishly. It was charming. “A signal shot fired from my ship frightened the beast and he lumbered off in search of something else to call his dinner.” He emptied the last drop from his wineglass onto his fingernail. “An old naval superstition,” he murmured, when he caught me watching him intently. “Takes care of the heeltap.”

  Our party was abruptly interrupted when a man arrived from the shore with a message from Acton: four French ships had anchored off Sardinia. Nelson immediately issued the command to his crew to disembark the guests and weigh anchor. There was not a minute to be lost. In the blink of an eye the captain’s table was cleared, and the vessel was once again a warship.

  “The Agamemnon is the fastest ship in the Mediterranean,” Nelson explained as our little party was ushered to the gunwale, where below us the longboats bobbed upon the dark waters, waiting to row us back to shore. “I must make for Toulon immediately.”

  “But what about the knives?” Mam wanted to know. It had become abundantly clear that the crew could spare no time to comb through all the dinner things and return our dirty cutlery. “And the butter dishes?”

  “Permit us to hold them in trust against our inevitable return, ma’am.” Though his thoughts were no doubt elsewhere, Nelson managed a smile for his guests and bowed politely. For the first time, I realized that he was a few inches shorter than I. “Duty is the great business of a sea officer. All private considerations must give way to it, however painful it is.”

  The man might as well have been a prophet.

  Twenty-five

  Treachery Unmasked

  It was a race against time. If the English couldn’t hold Toulon, it was a certainty the republicans, with a toehold in the Mediterranean already, would emerge victorious. Sir William and Nelson maintained a regular correspondence, keeping each other apprised of developments. I might as well have been an ambassador without portfolio, for all the negotiations I continued to effect on my own. By now, I was quite obviously the queen’s favorite.

  I was in Her Sicilian Majesty’s salon, translating documents from French into English, when we received the devastating news that the Queen of France had been beheaded on the sixteenth of October.

  Maria Carolina shrieked and tore her hair. In her rage she flung priceless treasures onto the floor, smashing them to bits. “Never will I sleep till vengeance is satisfied!” she declared. “Je poursuivrai ma vengeance jusqu’au tombeau. ‘To my dying day,’ as you English say. I will never rest until the last Jacobin tastes the dust.”

  From that day on, the queen became even more formidable, granting neither clemency nor leniency to anyone even suspected of harboring republican sentiments. She demanded my presence and companionship with ever-increasing frequency, as though she could invent in me a new younger sister. “My beloved Emma, we could never have dreamed to know it at the time, but you brought to me Marie Antoinette’s very last letter,” she would weep, touching her heart with two fingers. “And for that, you are forever in my bosom.” Fearing the loss of her own family, she drew them even more tightly about her. She retired to her favorite palace at Portici, refusing to eat or bathe, pouring out her grief to her forty German maids.

  In December, word came that Toulon had fallen to the republican army, due to the efforts of a ruthless young Corsican named Napoleon Bonaparte. Six thousand citizens—women and children among them—had been slaughtered. The Neapolitan troops, never battle-ready, had proven disastrous. “Perhaps our friend Nelson and his superiors are regretting their request,” sighed Sir William.

  Often during those tense years in Naples I found myself comparing the kingdom’s bubbling political cauldron—with its republican sentiments simmering below the surface, ready to blow at any moment—to Sir William’s beloved Vesuvius. I had long grown accustomed to seeing the perennial wisp of smoke curling skyward from the volcano’s peak whenever I glanced in its direction, like a kettle always on the boil, but all through the early months of 1794, the great mountain had been quiet.

  Late at night on June 12, we were violently shaken from our beds by a powerful earthquake. “There’s going to be a thumping good eruption, my dear!” exclaimed my husband. He clasped my wrist, and together—Sir William in his nightshirt and cap and me in my shift, with plaited hair—we raced down the corridor to his observatory.

  Just as Sir William adjusted his telescope, the clear night suddenly went completely black. “Mark my words, Emma, it’s coming,” Sir William said excitedly. “We are witnesses to history.”

  Three days later, a second shock, milder than the first, shook the region. A fountain of bright fire spewed up from the central crater—then another burst of fireworks erupted from farther down—and then—one, two, three, four—fifteen torrents of lava, we counted, commenced their blazing descent toward Torre del Greco. The sky rumbled with thunder as though the heavens had erupted with artillery fire, whilst at the same time a tremendous whoosh, like the roar of an angry sea, filled the night. And then we heard another blowing noise, like that of the going up of a large flight of skyrockets, as Sir William described it.

  I could not turn my gaze from the rivers of liquid fire snaking down the black mountain, carmine and amber and gold. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen something quite so beautiful!” I exclaimed.

  “Vincenzo, the carriage!”

  We dressed in haste and made for Villa Emma, for Sir William thought we could more safely witness the eruption from Posillipo. But for all his experience, he was proved wrong when two fiery orbs, joined together by a small link like a chain shot, came rolling down toward the villa. We held our breath. Would they ignite our home? My heart pounded in my chest and I clung to Sir William’s waist as though his strength had the power to protect our property. And then, but a few yards above us, the balls of fire separated, one falling into the vineyard above the house, the other in the sea.

  On the sixteenth of June, the lava enveloped Torre del Greco, leaving rubble in its roiling wake, and reached the sea, turning the azure waters of the bay bloodred. The sun was all but blotted out. Day and night had become one. There was not a whiff of fresh air to breathe; with every inhalation we felt as though we had buried our noses in a damp blanket covering a passel of rotten eggs. Buildings crumbled and collapsed like toys under the weight of the ash. The lava traveled from the summit to the sea—a distance of four miles—in all of six hours! As fascinated as I was terrified, I was sure we would become another Pompeii. I dared not sleep a wink for fear I’d never wake, and centuries later I would be found just as I had perished: bolt upright in bed, clutching Sir William’s arm.

  The volcano’s summit did not become visible through the ash and smoke until June 18. Sir William gasped at its radically altered silhouette. Where the very tip had been conical, it now was flat. One-ninth of the crater had been utterly demolished by the force of the eruption, as though someone had sheared it off with a celestial scythe.

  For some weeks, the air in Naples remained unfit to breathe. Sir William insisted we repair to the capannina in C
aserta. The mountain still gasped and sighed, pouring out a steady column of vapor that filled one’s lungs with white ash whenever a strong sirocco blew over the city. From mid-June through August, it descended upon us in torrents of heavy rain, carrying away the already-crumbling walls of fragile houses, toppling trees, drowning livestock, and covering everything with a layer of volcanic mud.

  To the monstrously superstitious Neapolitans it was a sure sign that God was angry. But at whom?

  The wild ride that had become my life continued to dip and turn like the road from Vesuvius to Portici. The English attempt in July to wrest Corsica from the French had been an unmitigated disaster, but the queen found consolation in toasting the end of the Terror when the villainous Robespierre was executed by his own confederates on the twenty-eighth of that month. She hoped this would bode well for the political climate in Naples, forcing the Jacobins to recant their views. But our rejoicing was interrupted by an urgent message from my maid Giulia: Sir William had taken ill again.