Nelson's Lady Hamilton by Meynell, Esther (cheapest way to read ebooks .txt) 📗

so to the end of your days." And with that fatherly wish—which greater causes than either he or Emma foresaw were destined to bring to nought — Romney passes out of the story of Emma Hamilton.

Emma's marriage, which was destined to have such important consequences, has been somewhat hurried over, and it is necessary to go back a step and give some further details. In

*>,. X.

1

LADY HAMILTON AS EMMA

FROM A DRAWING BY SIR T. LAWRENCE

the month before her marriage Emma and Sir William Hamilton spent some time in visiting at country houses, glad to get out of town during an unusually hot August. Among other places, they went to Fonthill Abbey, where Emma's somewhat exuberant taste was delighted by the bizarre glories of " Vathek" Beckford's palatial residence. Nearly ten years later she and Sir William were to vist Fonthill again, having Nelson with them.

Emma was destined to play many parts, but she only played that of a bride on one occasion. Her wedding-day was the 6th of September, 1791, and she was married at Marylebone Church, in the presence of Lord Abercorn and the Mr. Dutens to whom she refers in her letter to Romney. It was a very happy Emma who turned away from the church door with her hand on Sir William's arm. Now she could look the world in the face without either shrinking or defiance. She rested content in the thought of the name and the position her " dear, dear husband " had given her, and probably considered that her adventures and her ambitions were ended—whereas, in reality, they were only dawning upon the horizon of her consciousness.

As for Sir William Hamilton, no doubt he too was happy in an approvingl conscience and the highly respectable ending of a doubtful adventure. He was certainly proud of the radiant and

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lovely woman at his side whom he believed— how mistakenly the future was to prove—he had " engaged for life/ 1

Horace Walpole's comment on the marriage was, " So Sir William has married his gallery of statues!" But Emma was very little of a statue at heart—had she been a little colder she would have remained Sir William's " for life/' and Nelson's glory would have had no single stain upon it.

CHAPTER VII

THE QUEEN'S COMRADE

ON their return to Naples, Sir William and Lady Hamilton passed through Paris, where they were received by Marie Antoinette, the sister of the Queen of Naples. The coming doom was already darkening round the fair head of the French Queen, and there can be little doubt that she took the opportunity of their visit to send some communication to her sister of Naples by the hand of the British Ambassador. Lady Hamilton, who was beginning to thrill to the excitement of the European situation, and who always tended to exaggerate her part in events, declared, many years later, that she brought Marie Antoinette's last letter to the Queen of Naples.

The unhappy Queen of France has become one of the heroines 'of history because of the unenviable greatness and the tragic fall that fate and circumstance thrust upon her. But her sister, Maria Carolina, though less known to fame, as playing her part upon a smaller stage,

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was in reality far more richly endowed by nature —she had greater beauty, infinitely more brain power, and a considerable share of the forceful-ness, capacity, and statecraft of her mother, Maria Theresa. Her King and consort, Ferdinand, was the son of Charles III. of Spain, and a typical Bourbon in his extravagant passion for the chase. He cared little for the dignities and the responsibilities of his position—the fate of dynasties and the internal condition of his people were matters that he was generally content to leave to his clever wife, while he pursued the noble boar at Persano. On the whole, it was fortunate that his tastes turned to sport instead of government, for on the rare occasions when he remembered his duty as a monarch, he showed himself to be of a bullying, obstructive disposition. Beckford called him "a lobster crushed by his shell." His heavy good humour, on which the Queen played, enabled her to be the effectual ruler of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; but occasionally his Spanish tendencies would bestir themselves in his slow mind, and with characteristic delicacy and chivalry he would call his wife the " Austrian hen." The Bourbon in him, the Hapsburg in her, were continually at war; but the advantages were with the alert and determined Queen, for her Bourbon husband was so much occupied with sport and his own forms of enjoyment that he never really mobilized his forces. General Pepe",

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in his " Memoirs," said of him, " He was both by nature and education weak, strongly addicted to pleasure, and utterly incapable of opposing himself to the strong mind of the young queen, who soon discovered the character of her husband.'* Sir John Acton, that curious, cautious, capable, wooden-natured Englishman who played such a variety of parts at the Neapolitan Court, from Admiral of the Neapolitan Fleet (such as it was) to Field-Marshal and Minister of Finance, summed up the King by saying that he was a good sort of man because nature had not endowed him with the faculties necessary for the making of a bad man.

The outbreak of the Revolution in France was watched with great uneasiness and distress of mind by the Queen of Naples, not only because of the threatening danger to her sister and Louis XVI., but also because she saw it as the beginning