Too Great a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  The gravel crunched beneath our feet and I wished it’d been chips of ice instead. “And . . . ?” I was not even sure I wanted to hear the answer.

  “She says her doctors have advised her that a change of climate would benefit her health. . . . As you know, she is always suffering colds. . . . On the hottest day of the year, the woman could swathe herself in layers of flannel nightshirts under her gowns.” What a pleasant appearance she must present, I thought, the green-eyed monster grabbing hold of my senses. Nelson stopped under the shade of an orange tree. A bergamot-scented breeze riffled through his hair. “I . . . I have no wish to see her, Lady Hamilton. Nor would it even be prudent for me to do so, as I told her by return post. For one thing, her departure would leave no one to care for my father, whose age and infirmities preclude him from much activity. Imagine this—I felt compelled to explain to her what should have been abundantly obvious: that I am essentially in the middle of a campaign. ‘The Hamiltons and I are the mainspring which governs what goes on in this country,’ I told her. She wished to journey as far as Portugal, expecting me to meet her there. I told her that the notion was not only impractical; it was preposterous, for no sooner did I greet her but I would have to strike my colors and bring her right back home again. Which of course would be well out of my commission. She thinks that because I am living on dry land with my two dearest friends in the world, that I must be on holiday.”

  “Every day with you is a holiday.” I smiled, delighting in the curve of his upper lip. Wishing I could touch it. “Perhaps she finally recognizes that.”

  “You are an angel to say so, Lady Hamilton. But the truth of the thing is”—he glanced away uncomfortably and scuffed the pebbles with his shoe—“the truth is . . . that . . . and I confess that since my marriage I have bedded other women than Fanny . . . but knowing you now, I cannot imagine being in the company of any other woman ever again.”

  I felt the heat rise in my cheeks and my skin began to tingle as if a thousand twinkling stars had taken up residence just beneath the surface. If my heart could have leapt out of my chest into his hand, I was sure it would have done so. Just as I lowered my head to risk kissing him for the first time, we heard footsteps, and we broke apart. Nelson offered me his arm and the conversation was not resumed. We returned to the Palazzo Palagonia in complete silence, scarcely daring to exchange a glance, both of us, I think, too fearful to speak of love.

  Since the loss of his most valuable treasures in the wreck of the Colossus, Sir William had also lost the vigor and vitality that had once made him “the most juvenile man I ever knew.” More and more, he wished to be left alone. He would wander through the vast rooms of the Palazzo Palagonia caressing the objects of virtu that we had managed to bring with us from Naples, as if they were living things—as though his touch upon the clay or marble could bring back their absent companions. It broke my heart to see him so defeated. And as much as he loved Nelson like a brother, my husband was not a champion of the admiral’s vision for recapturing the lost half of the Sicilian kingdom. “I am King George’s servant, my dear, not King Ferdinand’s,” he would remind me. “You know that it will not do for the envoy from the Court of St. James to take an active part in another country’s politics nor in a foreign campaign. In fact, such a thing is most emphatically outside my embassy.”

  His intransigence had the effect of bringing Nelson and me closer together, for the admiral and I—of a single unequivocating mind—spent increasingly longer hours strategizing, either alone or in the company of the king and queen. Given Sir William’s frequent absences, I was indispensable as a translator at the latter’s discussions, for Nelson spoke no foreign languages.

  While the weather, even hotter, more sultry, and more indolent than in Naples, carried its own erotic charge, our mutual involvement in the tumultuous political climate eventually had a heady effect on us as well.

  Thirty-one

  Rough Justice

  Nelson and I spent nearly every waking hour in each other’s company. The campaign to retake Naples brought us together by day, but in the evenings, we could not bear to quit each other’s side. Everyone who witnessed our behavior, however careful we were not to seem more than the most amicable of friends, could not fail to be sensible of the current between us. Though nothing untoward had happened, I believe we both knew it was inevitable. Yet never had I endured such agony. I had spent thirteen years totally loyal to Sir William, proud to prove to the world that a once-fallen woman could be a paragon of fidelity and a model wife, even, or perhaps especially, amid the licentious and permissive Neapolitans.

  Yet every night I went to bed alone. Sir William and I had not shared a càmera da letto in well over a year; he now preferred to take a book to his bedchamber and fall asleep at his leisure, rather than disturb my slumbers. Before then, if he desired to visit me, he would gently catch me by the arm as our dinner party was breaking up and run his thumb along the tender flesh in the crook of my elbow, a gesture he performed less and less frequently as the months went by. As I lay in my lonely bed, my thoughts were now filled with nothing but Nelson. I was tormented by my passion for him. Is it any wonder that I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning at the gambling tables? I had the energy of a restless tigress and nowhere else to vent it. So I began to satiate myself instead with high-stakes hands of cards, with gourmandizing, and with copious quantities of champagne. Because I was unable to enjoy a private moment with the man who had captured my head and heart in a way that no one had ever come close to doing in the past, I would fill the house with strangers and laughter and music so that my thoughts and emotions could be directed elsewhere.

  I welcomed the morning, for it meant I would see Nelson again. With abandon I threw myself into his plans, believing in them as much as he did. We would all indeed be covered with glory for our achievements. And to me, as to Nelson, glory meant honor. In those tense and terrible months, we both dedicated our existence to Honor, and it brought us even closer together. If only we could persuade the cowardly Ferdinand to see things the same way. After weeks of Nelson’s urging the king to behave like a proper sovereign, what finally drew him fully into the campaign was the report that a new Parthenopean law declared that anyone called Ferdinand had to change his name!

  “Who is this Cardinal Ruffo whom the king has chosen to replace Pignatelli as viceroy?” Nelson handed me a dispatch from Naples.

  “What ’appened to Pignatelli?”

  “Absconded. I am beginning to think it is bred in the Neapolitan temperament to be craven. I beg of you, Lady Hamilton, to translate this mumbo jumbo so I may advise His Majesty as to the swiftest course of action.”

  I perused the paper. “Cardinal Ruffo’s title is honorary. ’Is family is as rich as Croesus and ’e was the minister of war to Pope Pius VI. This document states that ’e ’as an army of seventeen thousand—Sanfedists, they are calling themselves, the “Army of the Holy Faith.” If I know Ruffo, this so-called army are really ’is tenants, incited to defend the crown with the promise of relief from taxes, the chance to battle the Devil, and unlimited looting.”

  “What a helpmeet you are in every way! An angel to behold, and a true partner in my work . . . as well as in my heart.”

  My own heart stopped for a moment as we gazed upon each other, sensible of an equal measure of mutual longing and pain. A silence settled between us before Nelson returned to the matter at hand.

  “Do you think Ruffo’s army can stop the Jacobin terrorism?” He began to pace the room as if it were his quarterdeck. “I wish to draft a note to King Ferdinand. Tell him that it is my belief that the Spanish might send another naval squadron to bear down on the Two Sicilies by the end of March. England and Naples need to prepare for such an eventuality. To that end, in His Sicilian Majesty’s name, I am dispatching Captain Troubridge to Procida to effect a blockade of Naples and take control of the islands in the bay.”

  But Troubridge handled this assignment with bloodthirsty zeal, hang
ing Jacobins at Procida, and passing a death sentence on a squad of Swiss Guards who complained at the high cost of food, a verdict he commuted at the last possible moment. Was all that brutality really necessary? I wondered.

  “War is no place for gentlemen, miledi,” insisted the queen. “Now Ruffo confesses that he is surprised and appalled by the butchery perpetrated by his army’s counterrevolution. He says he had never envisioned such a thing. He must treat Naples and these soi-disant patriots like the rebels of an Irish town. Quash them without equivocation!”

  “Your Majesty, Ruffo’s men, the counterrevolutionaries, are resorting to wholesale rape. To cannibalism. The Sanfedists claim to be royalists and yet they looted the Palazzo Reale! They took whatever they could steal and even pried the lead off the mullioned windows. ’Ow does this gain you and the king the respect you need to regain your thrones?”

  “Respect? Miledi, respect is a word reserved for diplomats, begging Sir William’s pardon.”

  Maria Carolina was deaf to my suggestions for moderation. Fearing a rupture in our most precious friendship, during our subsequent strategizing discussions I began to hold my tongue.

  The sovereigns’ paranoia increased with their superstition. Now every artisan and aristocrat in Palermo who in any way evinced a thirst for knowledge was suspected of being a secret Jacobin. All literary and scientific meetings were henceforth banned. Anyone who owned more than a handful of books was under suspicion. Theologians, lawyers, chemists, professors, scholars, doctors, and musicians—even the clergy—were now under surveillance. To own—let alone read—Voltaire and Rousseau was treasonous. Someone caught with a single forbidden book was tossed into prison for three years. For a man nabbed with unpowdered hair, the sentence was six months.

  Sir William, who read, and owned, several works by both of the banned philosophers, was livid. “Voltaire himself would have been horrified to be thought of as an inciter to riot and violence; to think he promulgates brutality is to entirely misread his writings. This is not the country I ever knew,” he muttered angrily, murmuring that perhaps it was time to tender his credentials to King George and return home to England. “If I were not a foreign ambassador, I might well be a victim myself. And so should you, my dear, for I have seen you reading Candide.”

  Nelson had returned to sea to better assess the political situation. A worried Sir William wrote to him that Emma is unwell and low-spirited with phantoms in her fertile brain that torment her. I fear she has too much sensibility. It was all too true. I despaired daily for Nelson’s safety. What horrors might he witness? What ugly disputes might he be called upon to mediate? Would the rebels respect his British citizenship or would they drag him down to hell?

  In mid-May, Nelson recalled the vainglorious Troubridge to Palermo, replacing him with the milder and more diplomatically minded Captain Edward Foote of the frigate Seahorse. Nelson prayed that Foote’s appointment would restore order and preserve life, but fears for his own mortality rose to the surface, as they did just before an action. On May 25, 1799, Nelson wrote a codicil to his will, and three days later, he was back in Palermo, planning to withdraw some of his ships from Malta in order to concentrate his forces wholly on the retaking of Naples.

  I flung my arms about him the moment he set foot in the Palazzo Palagonia. “My dear, dear friend,” I murmured into his chest. “Don’t ever leave again. Promise me you will never, ever leave.”

  He looked into my tearstained face. “Duty, Lady Hamilton. A sailor’s first obligation.”

  “I wish it weren’t, you know.”

  Nelson caught a falling tear on his fingertip and brought it to his lips. “Emma. Beautiful, magnificent Emma.” Our fingers entwined. “Now why are you weeping?”

  “It’s the first time you’ve used my Christian name.”

  On the eighth of June, now a rear admiral of the red, Nelson shifted his flag from the Vanguard to the eighty-gun Foudroyant. Eight days later, Sir William received an alarming dispatch from Naples. “It would appear from this communiqué that Cardinal Ruffo has concluded a twenty-one-day armistice with France—signed by representatives for Naples, Russia, and Turkey, as well by Captain Foote on behalf of His Britannic Majesty, I might add—and Ruffo is also spreading rumors that Nelson fled to Palermo because he feared the French fleet.”

  “Feared!” Nelson roared. His usually pallid complexion turned crimson with rage. “I, who delivered the French fleet the soundest thrashing it ever received?! This shall not be countenanced!” He glanced quickly at the papers. “I never gave Foote the authority to sign treaties, make armistices—he is out of his commission. Sir William—Lady Hamilton—whichever of you can speak that infernal Neapolitan tongue—send a message to His Sicilian Majesty that we must make for Naples as soon as it is practicable. The king’s authority and sovereignty must be asserted and this armistice, entered into without Ferdinand’s knowledge—let alone his consent—must be undone.”

  A few days later, the king accompanied the tria juncta in uno aboard the Foudroyant, and with a total of nineteen ships, we hoisted sail for the Bay of Naples. Maria Carolina, still racked with fear for her own safety, was determined to remain behind in Palermo.

  Sailing into the bay, Nelson was heralded as a rescuer. The city was aglitter with illuminations, as if to welcome us. Upon our arrival, the flagship became a kind of central command post from which Nelson sent and received all official dispatches and correspondence, and where Acton and the king would interrogate the captured rebels, trying them if necessary.

  I translated Nelson’s first dispatch, which contained orders to dissolve the truce immediately, giving the French all of two hours to surrender. Those who did so would be given safe passage back to France, but “as for the rebels and traitors, no power on earth should stand between their gracious king and them.”

  Thought he met with resistance from Ruffo, Nelson was not one to accept no for an answer.

  By the next evening, although the peace had not been fully secured, the fortresses had been surrendered and the royal colors once again flew from their crenellated turrets. Finally able to exhale after months of violence, the royalist nobles rejoiced in the streets with typical Neapolitan vivacity—plenty of music and macaroni— and the royal standard fluttered alongside the British flag from every loyal home.

  Unfortunately, an alarming number of Neapolitan Jacobins had been friends of ours: men and women of high rank and position, including a number of Maria Carolina’s former ladies-in-waiting, noblewomen who for years had been Her Majesty’s bosom companions. Many of these sympathizers were brought out to the Foudroyant, where they begged us for clemency. I confess that it made me feel good to be needed as much as it appealed to my nature to be of some benefit to others. But it was exhausting business. Nelson hated to see me so fagged at the end of every day, referring to the desperate petitions as “Lady Hamilton’s teasers.” To Greville I wrote, It’s nice to be with the king, but it’s better to be by oneself. I am waiting to get quiet. I am not ambitious of more honners.

  The gray-haired, elegant Ruffo was taken on board the Foudroyant to account for himself and his actions, and I translated the angry contretemps between Nelson and the cardinal. Ruffo raised a vociferous defense with classic Neapolitan passion. Yes, he had agreed to the armistice—but he had done so in order to keep the peace. The violence unleashed by his Sanfedist counterrevolutionaries had got well out of hand. It sickened him. “You have not seen the hangings, your lordship,” Ruffo said hotly. “My army erected makeshift scaffolds in the public squares, employing a particularly vicious form of execution, where it takes three of them to hang a person. In addition to the hangman, one man climbs atop the scaffold and presses down upon the victim’s shoulders. The third man, standing on a ladder, grabs the victim by the ankles, and once the trap opens, the condemned is both pulled and pushed to his—or her—death. Yes, your lordship, women have not been spared this gruesome torture. Such was the fate of the celebrated Jacobin poetess Eleonora
Fonseca da Pimentel. I have seen republican-minded noblemen such as the Duca della Torre and his brother dragged out of their beds, tarred and feathered, shot, stabbed, and set afire, their burning bodies disemboweled as they gasped their last—while remaining alive enough to be fully sensate of their torture. Naked Jacobin prisoners were dragged en masse before me and shot before my eyes. Fifty at a time on one occasion! And you wonder why I make an armistice? True, I did not have His Majesty’s authority but—”

  “But. There is no but,” Nelson countered. “And therein lies your error. For every command must issue directly from the king and in taking matters into your own hands”—here Nelson raised his voice—“in taking matters into your own hands, you are in violation of your commission and as guilty of treason as any of the rebels.”

  “With all due respect, your lordship,” shouted Ruffo, without the slightest trace of deference in either his voice or his manner, “it is important under these delicate circumstances to be merciful in order to restore law and order. Law and order will not be restored to Naples with further acts of violence! You are a foreigner in our waters. I am Neapolitan born, and I understand my own people. I know that order will not be established either quickly or smoothly. Trust must be gained, tempers soothed.”

  “Sir, I am here as His Sicilian Majesty’s servant, acting under his orders,” Nelson thundered. “You, on the other hand, as His Majesty’s viceroy, acted of your own accord, well outside of them. You have no choice but to concede that I am in the right, having been deputized by King Ferdinand to represent his express wishes in this situation.”

  The two men were at a stalemate. Evidently, Ruffo and his subordinates had attempted to persuade the rebels that once they surrendered, they were free to escape to France without having to submit to the punishment of the sovereign whom they had actively defied. Yet Nelson, on the king’s behalf, was adamant that the traitors be awarded no free pass. Three days of tense standoff followed.