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

your King, your familly, all Europe, Asia, Affrica, and America, and for the scorge of France, but particularly for the happiness of Sir William and self, who Love you, admire you, and glory in your friendship." Then she falls to reflecting on the gratitude England owes him : " Your statue ought to be made of pure gold and placed in the middle of London. Never, never was there such a battle, and if you are not regarded as you ought, and I wish, I will renounce my country and become either a Mameluch or a Turk. The Queen yesterday said to me, 'the more I think on it, the greater I find it, and I feil such gratitude to the warrior, the glorious Nelson, that my respect is such that I cou'd fall at his honner'd feet and kiss jthem/ You that

know us booth, and how alike we are in many things, that is, I as Emma Hamilton, and she as Queen of Naples—imagine us booth speaking of you. We touch ourselves into terms of rapture, respect, and admiration, and conclude their is not such another in the world. I told her Majesty, we onely wanted Lady Nelson to be the female tria juncta in nno y for we all Love you, and yet all three differently, and yet all equally— if you can make that out. Sir William laughs at us, but he owns women have great souls, at least his has. I would not be a lukewarm friend for the world.

" I am no one's enemy, and unfortunately am difficult, and cannot make friendships with all. But the few friends I have, I wou'd die for them. And I assure you now, if things take an unfortunate turn here, and the Queen dies at her post, I will remain with her. I feil I owe it to her friendship uncommon for me."

Assuredly, with all her faults, Emma was no " lukewarm friend," though equally certainly she deceived herself when she said she was " difficult "—in reality the fundamental weakness of her character was that she was too easy. But in her ardour, her generous, even extravagant enthusiasm, her real courage and grit, she was a woman after Nelson's own heart—as he was already beginning to discover. " My situation in this country," he wrote from Naples at the beginning

of December to Commodore Duckworth, who had just captured Minorca, "has had doubtless one rose, but it has been plucked from a bed of thorns." Within five months of the Nile, in the midst of thronging events and many anxieties, Emma was thus beginning to stand out in his eyes from all around her.

The time was rapidly approaching when Emma's courage was to be put to the test. Idle boasting was dangerous for those who lived amid wars and rumours of wars, for quick on the heels of the boast came the imperative need to prove it. But Emma's fondness for big words was based on a fondness for big actions, and she welcomed the occasion when it faced her. As Mahan says, " There was in her make-up a good deal of pagan virtue." And Greville's quite just estimate of her was, " Emma's passion is admiration, and it is capable of aspiring to any line which will be celebrated, and it would be indifferent, when on that key, whether she was Lucretia or Sappho, or Scaevola or Regulus; anything grand, masculine or feminine, she could take up."

By the end of November the King of Naples and General Mack—whom Rosebery describes as "a strategist of unalloyed incompetency and unvaried failure"—had marched to Rome with their army and entered the city in triumph. But the first triumph was the last; the French defeated Mack's scattered columns in detail, and on the

7th of December Ferdinand fled from Rome, while the retreat of his rash and untrained army quickly became a rout. Nelson scornfully wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty : "The Neapolitan officers have not lost much honour, for God knows they have but little to lose; but they lost all they had." The soldiers who ran away at Toulon ran away again; while the officers, said Nelson, " seemed alarmed at a drawn sword, or a gun, if loaded with shot."

Having been so dared by the ill-advised King of Naples, the French speedily followed him across the frontiers of his kingdom; and thus the war that was to have been carried into the enemies' territory and away from home, came hot upon the footsteps of the defeated Ferdinand. There seemed no alternative for the distracted Court save flight. But though the French were on the borders, and the fate of Marie Antoinette and her Consort seemed hovering above the heads of the Sicilian sovereigns, yet there were many difficulties in Naples. The Lazzaroni were entirely loyal to their King; but it was a fierce loyalty, ready to tear him and his wife and children in pieces if they saw any signs of escape—which naturally enough in their eyes would wear all the ugly colours of desertion and abandonment.

In this tangle of fears and dangers Emma Hamilton's sound English grit came out. It seemed that into her hands and into Nelson's was

178 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

committed the safety of the Sicilian Court. They worked together, and in that working, amid storm and the peril of death, came to such knowledge of each other as first led them into love. He stood upon the height of his fame—a fame un-marred and perfect; she had touched the last point of her beauty—the point at which the rose has reached its fullest and final flowering before the petals fall. And to the woman who had in so large a measure redeemed the past, as to the