Too Great a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  The whole bloody mess was too vague and indirect. A proper order was an imperative. Nelson needed a hard commitment, not diplomatic dithering. Meeting with Maria Carolina in secret, I urged her to supplement Acton’s inadequate document with direct instruction. Sir William dashed off a private communiqué to Nelson, saying, You will receive from Emma herself what will do the business and procure all your wants.

  I wrote Nelson:17th June, 1798

  My Dear Admiral, God bless you, and send you victorious, and that I may see you bring back Buonaparte with you. The Queen desires me to say everything that’s kind, and bids me say with her whole heart and soul she wishes you victory. 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 us.

  —Ever, Ever, dear Sir, Your affte. and gratefull EMMA HAMILTON

  I enclosed a carefully worded letter from Her Majesty that would do the trick, as they say. The English squadron sailed that very day.

  But what an unexpected welcome they received! The Sicilian governors made the business of watering and revictualling the English squadron as difficult as they could without engaging in outright treason. I received an angry communication from Nelson dated July 22. His handwriting looked different than I had remembered it, though I thought nothing of it at the time.

  I am so much distressed at not having had any account of the French fleet, and so much hurt at the treatment we receive from the power we came to assist and fight for, that I am hardly in a situation to write a letter to an elegant body; therefore you must on this occasion forgive my want of those attentions which I am ever ambitious to show you. I wish to know your and Sir William’s plans for going down the Medn. for if we are to be kicked in every port of the Sicilian dominions the sooner we are gone the better. Good God! How sensibly I feel our treatment. I have only to pray I may find the French and throw all my vengeance on them.

  However, the queen’s letter must have eventually achieved its intended impact, for enclosed with the next packet of letters for Sir William and myself was a note addressed to the both of us:My dear Friends, Thanks to your exertions we have victualled and watered, and surely watering at the Fountain of Arethusa, we must have victory. We shall sail with the first breeze, and be assured I shall return either crowned with laurel or covered with cypress.

  “Covered with cypress!” My eyes welled with emotion as I read Nelson’s words. “Impossible!” A single tear escaped, and as it rolled down my cheek I wiped it away with the back of my hand. So keenly did I feel for this brave man I had scarcely met, yet believed I knew so well, that my tender heart could not bear to imagine his death.

  Twenty-seven

  See, the Conquering Hero Comes

  So, yes, I was half in love with him then, but then it was the glossy infatuation that men and women alike feel for heroes or saviors. Their deeds elevate them in your esteem and from there is it but a short journey to the heart. It was easier for me to keep my head by writing to Nelson of others’ admiration for him. Everybody here prays for you. The Neapolitans say mass for you, but Sir Wm. and I are so anxious that we neither eat, drink, nor sleep; and till you are safely landed and come back we shall feel mad. All the hopes and fears for the future of England, as well as Naples, rested on Nelson’s golden epaulets.

  Then, on September 1, news of the grandest and most glorious victory reached our ears. A month earlier, Nelson had engaged the French fleet in Aboukir Bay near the mouth of the Nile. It had been a magnificent engagement, culminating in the spectacular explosion of the French flagship L’Orient. I was enraptured, dizzy beyond all measure with triumph. And to know that I myself had played some little part in this tremendous success—by securing the permission for our ships to be watered and restocked in Syracuse—filled every fiber of my being with euphoria. I could not wait to hear every last detail from Nelson himself—yet all I received was a cryptic note, reading, My dear Lady Hamilton, you will soon be able to see the wreck of Horatio Nelson. May it count for a kindly judgement if scars are a mark of honor.

  So great was my excitement that my hand shook as I wrote to Nelson of our collective reaction to his brave and brilliant conquest. My words tumbled forth as if I were speaking them; my emotions could not be contained on a mere scrap of paper, nor controlled by the mean servants of quill and ink.

  Naples, 8 September, 1798

  My Dear, Dear Sir,

  How shall I begin, what shall I say to you? ’Tis impossible I can write, for since last Monday I am delerious with joy, and assure you I have a fevour caused by agitation and pleasure. God, what a victory! Never, never has there been anything half so glorious, so compleat. I fainted when I heard the joyfull news and fell on my side and am hurt, but well of that. I shou’d feil it a glory to die in such a cause. No, I wou’d not like to die till I see and embrace the Victor of the Nile. How shall I describe to you the transports of Maria Carolina, ’tis not possible.

  The Neapolitans are mad with joy, and if you wos here now, you wou’d be killed with kindness. Sonets on sonets, illuminations, rejoicings; not a French dog dare shew his face. How I glory in the honner of my Country and my Countryman! I walk and tread in the air with pride, feiling I was born in the same land with the victor Nelson and his gallant band.

  My dress from head to foot is alla Nelson. Even my shawl is in Blue with gold anchors all over. My earrings are Nelson’s anchors; in short, we are be-Nelsoned all over. Once more, God bless you. My mother desires her love to you. I am so sorry to write in such a hurry. I am affraid you will not be able to read this scrawl.

  I send you two letters from my adorable Queen. One was written to me the day we received the glorious news, the other yesterday. Keep them, as they are in her own handwriting. I have kept copies only, but I feil that you ought to have them. We are preparing your appartment against you come. I hope it will not be long, for Sir William and I are so impatient to embrace you. I wish you cou’d have seen the house the 3 nights of illumination. ’Twas covered with your glorious name. Their were 3 thousand Lamps, and their shou’d have been 3 millions if we had time. All the English vie with each other in celebrating this most gallant and ever memorable victory. Sir William is ten years younger since the happy news, and now wishes to see his friend to be completely happy. How he glories in you when your name is mentioned. He cannot contain his joy. For God’s sake come to Naples soon. We receive so many Letters of congratulation. I send you some of them to shew you how much of your success is felt here. How I felt for poor Troubridge. He must have been so angry stuck there on the sandbank and unable to fight, so brave an officer! In short I pity those who were not in the battle. I wou’d have been rather an English powder-monkey, or a swab in that great victory, than an Emperor out of it, but you will soon be so tired of all this. Write or come soon to Naples, and rejoin your ever sincere and oblidged friend,

  Emma Hamilton

  Finally, after scanning the horizon several times a day, on September 22 I spied Nelson’s flagship, the Vanguard, limping into the Bay of Naples. “Sir Willum—’e’s ’ere at last!” My husband raced to his observation tower, wig askew, to see for himself. I made my toilette as carefully as I could for one in such a state of agitation, and dashed to the palace to tell the queen that our hero had arrived at last!

  Five hundred vessels went out to greet the Vanguard that day, though the flagship itself appeared much the worse for wear, its own battle scars evident from the battering its hull and rigging had received in Aboukir. Not even the Prince Royal’s wedding had merited such a festival. The king had commissioned boatloads of singers and musicians to serenade Nelson’s arrival with “Rule Britannia,” “God Save the King,” and “See, the Conquering Hero Comes.” Thousands of caged birds—doves and swallows—were released into the air. King Ferdinand wore his finest state-occasion ensemble, and there was nary a drop of gravy to be seen upon’t. For the first time since I had met the Neapolitan sovereign a dozen years earlier, he loo
ked every inch a king.

  We were rowed out in our own barge amid much fanfare. Sir William in his burgundy silk coat and knee breeches, with his Order of the Bath, was the very personification of England’s embassy. I wore my costume alla Nelson, and wrapped a blue-and-white bandeau about my tresses inscribed with the words Nelson and Victory in golden letters. Only my stays kept my heart within my throbbing breast. Every additional minute of waiting was its own agony.

  We finally reached the ship and I was hoisted up in a bo’sun’s chair, each foot bringing me closer to our hero. But once on deck I gasped at the sight before me! When I had last seen Nelson, he was hale and hearty and whole. The picture before me might as well have been of a different man. His right arm! Gone! Gone! His empty sleeve was affixed to his blue jacket in a right angle, a delicate loop securing it to a button of his lapel. And while his left eye focused on me, his right eye was unseeing, as if clouded over. His hair was nearly white—at first I thought ’twas from the stress and worry of battle, but then I saw that it was powder, for Nelson had bedecked himself with as much formality as he could muster; and he had arranged a lock of hair to flop over his forehead, barely concealing a hideous scar just above the bad eye, nearly fresh, an ugly slash of tender pink flesh marring the noblest brow in all of Europe.

  “O God, is it possible!” I exclaimed, falling in a sudden swoon, more dead than alive, into his remaining arm.

  “You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said softly as I bedewed his fine jacket with tears, just grateful and ecstatic then that he was alive and had returned to Naples.

  The upper portion of Nelson’s right arm twitched as though the phantom lower segment was reaching to shake Sir William’s hand. “I am Lord Nelson, and this is his fin,” he chuckled to Sir William, who was nearly as overcome as I by so drastic an alteration of Nelson’s appearance.

  I could barely contain my weeping. Tears of joy and tears of sorrow commingled in bittersweet splashes.

  Sir William bent to murmur in my ear, “Emma, my dear, you must pull yourself together; the king approaches.”

  It wasn’t seemly for me to be such a jumble of emotions in Ferdinand’s presence. I reached for my handkerchief to blot my nose and cheeks, and practically held my breath when His Sicilian Majesty stepped onto the deck and hailed Nelson as “Nostro Liberatore , Deliverer and Preserver of Naples.”

  Modestly, Nelson accepted his accolades. Touching his tender scar, he said, “I confess I should have been done for entirely had I not been wearing my hat,” whereupon the king demanded to see it. A midshipman produced the hat, battered and torn to pieces. Gesturing with it toward his tangled rigging, Nelson quipped, “You will see that I am in as much disrepair as my ship.”

  “Then I insist you stay with us at the Palazzo Sessa while the Vanguard is refitted. I refuse to take no for an answer.”

  Sir William laughed. “She said those very words to Troubridge, and look where it got His Majesty’s Navy!”

  But Nelson demurred. “You are kindness itself, Lady Hamilton, but I would not wish to turn your residence into a quarterdeck, with officers traipsing in and out at all hours. I am sure your marble floors would be much the worse for it.”

  He looked utterly exhausted, trying to put a brave face on it. And I could see that he was feverish. “You’re ill,” I whispered. “And you know it as well as I. Of what use will you be to your men, who look up to you in every way as if you was great Jove himself, if you present them with an invalid?” Now that he’d returned alive, if rather the worse for wear, I thought never to let him out of my sight. Some heroine to my country I’d be if I let the victorious hero of the Nile perish from want of proper care!

  Overhearing me, Sir William concurred. “You would do well to let Emma tend to you, my friend. I stand here before you as a personal beneficiary of her soothing ministrations. In fact, were it not for such a fine nurse, the bilious fever would have carried me off years ago.”

  This convinced him. But the Neapolitans’ rejoicing would not permit him to recuperate in solitude. On the night of Nelson’s arrival, Sir William and I hosted a lavish dinner in his honor at the Palazzo Sessa. Three thousand candles blazed, while an orchestra struck up the martial airs that had greeted the Vanguard ’s arrival in the bay. I wrote a new verse to “See, the Conquering Hero Comes” and sang it fortissimo as the entire blazing assemblage of Neapolitan and English nobility raised their glasses in a toast to Nostro Liberatore.

  “You must tell us all about the great victory,” Sir William urged him. “And begin at the beginning.”

  Though he looked flushed and tired, Nelson could not disappoint the multitude of guests eager to learn from the hero’s own lips how he’d bested Boney.

  “And with only one eye and one arm!” Mam exclaimed, toasting him with her gin glass.

  “And in the dead of night, too!” I added.

  Nelson took a prodigious gulp of wine before launching into the story that hundreds of ears were eager to hear. Tears sprang to my eyes when I recalled how he had spilt the last drop onto his little finger on the night he feted us aboard the Agamemnon, for that simple little gesture was now an impossibility.

  “Best to explain it in laymen’s terms,” said Nelson, winking at Francesco Caracciolo, the admiral of Naples’s own fleet. “Essentially, I made a naval sandwich! You see, the French admiral, Brueys, had left too much room between his line of ships and the shore; I sent some of my vessels to get between them, so that the enemy would end up bombarded from both sides, for all of Brueys’s cannons were facing in only one direction—seawards. This shocked the devil out of them, but there was no escaping by that time, and in short order, we disabled many of the French ships.”

  “Bravo!” I cried, clapping my hands. “Hip hip hurrah for Nelson!” The whole room joined me in a rousing cheer and a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

  “It was not quite such an easy victory, Lady Hamilton. The losses on both sides were heavy, so closely were our ships entangled. We had to toss the bodies into the bay, for there was no other choice but to dispose of them as they fell. Stripped to the waist, for the heat was so intense, several of my own gunners were dragged away dead. Powder monkeys dashed to and fro, trying to avoid the darkening pools of blood that colored the decks while taking care not to spill their fresh ammunition or the buckets of water needed to cool the guns. It was so dark that it was near impossible to see one’s hand in front of one’s face, as they say. Our eyes stung and our lungs smarted from the clouds of billowing smoke that blotted out the firmament with a blanket of soot.”

  “How ghastly!” remarked Cornelia Knight, who, I was certain, was in the instant composing in her head a panegyric in Nelson’s honor.

  “Two hours into the battle, as dusk descended, the eighth of the French ships struck her colors, the blasted tricolor left in tatters amid her rigging.” Nelson touched two fingertips to his forehead. “I was hit with flying langridge—shards of iron debris—and knocked back onto the quarterdeck as the blood ran into my eyes and down my face. I thought I was done for. ‘I am killed!’ I exclaimed. ‘Remember me to my wife.’ ”

  “Oh God,” I whispered. My hands, folded discreetly in my lap, twisted my linen napkin, for I was suffering a pang of jealousy that her name might be the last on his heroic lips.

  “I refused to go down to the surgeon, but my men insisted. Their morale was so elevated with our brave showing thus far that I was certain it would plummet if they knew me to be hit. But once below, I was adamant that I wait my turn.”

  “What a man! No wonder your men respect you so much,” said Sir William admiringly, proud to call Nelson his friend.

  “Yet, though I’d been hit, as long as there was a breath of life within me, I could not rest, nor consider relinquishing my command to a subordinate. My orders were to destroy the French fleet, and by God I was honor- and duty-bound to see it done! I dictated dispatches from the sick bay in case it proved true that I was a dying man. ‘How
fast can you sew me up?’ I asked the surgeon. ‘It won’t be pretty if I go quickly,’ he cautioned. ‘Never mind about beauty, man. And if a sculptor is so foolish as to waste good marble and bronze on my already-disfigured physiognomy, I’d rather have them memorialize a living Nelson than a dead one!’ ”

  How I wanted to reach over and tenderly stroke the still-angry gash upon his noble brow! How many men, thus wounded in the heat of battle, would remain so clearheaded? How many would place their crew’s morale above their own survival?

  “The action intensified, and the sky above the bay flashed red and orange from the roaring cannon. The finest painter could not have done justice to the scene; he could never have adequately captured the atmosphere—as filled with fear as it was with triumph, every cannonade an angel of death. All through the night, we exchanged broadsides. Just past nine a cry went up: ‘The Orient is on fire!’ ”

  Everyone in the vast ballroom seemed to gasp at once. The men began to pound the table with their fists, behaving as if they were at a gentlemen’s club instead of a state dinner. I feared we’d have to replace half our china and crystal. “More!” they cried, “Dicaci di più! Tell us more!”

  Nelson became caught up in the moment, buoyed by their excitement. His voice took on a more dramatic tone. “Against the surgeon’s better judgment, I raced up to the deck, my head swaddled in bandages. Sure enough, the towering French three-decker was silhouetted in flame, like a ghostly illumination in the night. And when the fire reached the flagship’s powder magazine, she blew—with a sound so ferocious and so violent that it drowned out the rolling cannonade. Never in all my years at sea, and in the many actions in which I have taken part, have I heard an explosion one-tenth as deafening! The men who were not thrown by sheer force into the water, like so many ninepins, hurled themselves into the bay, which was already red with the blood of the dead and dying.”