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

of the Roman Church—long before, while at Naples, she had professed the Catholic faith. In one of her recently discovered letters to Sir Harris Nicolas, Horatia gives a distressing account of the closing scene: the somewhat unsympathetic detachment of her tone is due to

the fact that she never believed Lady Hamilton was her mother :—

" At the time of her death she was in great distress, and had I not, unknown to her, written to Lord Nelson to ask the loan of £10, and to another kind friend of hers who immediately sent her £20, she would not literally have had one shilling till her next allowance became due. Latterly, she was hardly sensible. I imagine that her illness originally began by being bled, whilst labouring under an attack of jaundice, whilst she lived at Richmond. From that time she never was well, and added to this the baneful habit she had of taking spirits and wine to a fearful degree, brought on water on the chest. She died in January, 1815, anc ^ was buried in the bury ing-ground attached to the town. That was a sad, miserable time to me. Latterly her mind became so irritable by drinking, that I had written to Mr. Matcham, and he had desired that I would lose no time in getting some respectable person to take me over, and that I was to come to them, where I should always find a home. After her death, as soon as he heard of it, he came to Dover to fetch me. With all Lady Hamilton's faults, and she had many, she had many fine qualities."

All the best of Emma Hamilton's life had really died ten years before at Trafalgar, and in the year of Waterloo the flame which had burnt

368 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

high and brilliantly was extinguished. The span of her life covered the great era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars; she had lived through them all, from the " Glorious First of June" to the Nile, the Baltic, and Trafalgar; from Ulm and Austerlitz to Talavera and Vit-toria; Borodino and Napoleon's retreat from Moscow came within the scope of her lifetime, as did the American War of 1812; and she died only six months before Waterloo was fought. Amid many of these high events, in that scene of the world's activities, the Mediterranean, Emma Hamilton had played her part and played it well — with courage, with resource, with infinite ardour. She began life as an outcast, and she ended it as one; but between her troubled youth and her desolate death she had crowded a breathless age of living —she had known power and used it; she had lived in hundreds of eyes as the beauty of her time; and she had been the single passion of Nelson's life. Her career is full of dazzling events, just as her character, in spite of many and most glaring faults, is rich, and human, and lovable. But "the years that bring the philosophic mind" never came to Emma; instead, her years were full of restless excitements and ambitions. To the end the lessons of life were unlearned ; she had a heart defiant but not strong, and a temper impatient to the last of all

ut prosperity. She was not made of that finer mettle which is tempered in the fire of affliction. In the final event it is neither beauty, nor power, nor fame that counts, but the spirit—and that only. There was something prophetic in the words she wrote in a shaken hand on the back of Nelson's last letter to her—the letter which was found open on his desk after Trafalgar was fought and the hero was dead—" Oh, miserable, wretched Emma! Oh, glorious and happy Nelson!"

It might well stand for the epitaph of them both—and Emma Hamilton has no other, for the very place of her grave in the Calais cemetery is obliterated. There is a sad and curious irony Jin the fact that she who was Nelson's last charge and legacy to the English people—Nelson, whose whole life was given to fighting the French, and who died by a French bullet—should lie buried in a " little, little grave, an obscure grave," in France.

2 B

ACTON, GENERAL SIR JOHN, 97, 98, 117, 127, 135, 137, 141, 183, 202, 217, 218

Albert, Prince [of Naples], 189 "Ambassadress," the, 89 Arethusa, fountain of, 147, 258 Argyll, Duchess of [Elizabeth Gunning], 82, 83

"Attitudes," the, 2, 22, 67, loo, 264, 265

Ball, Captain, 155, 205, 213, 253 Battles—St. Vincent, 118, 122;

the Nile, 149, 150; the Baltic,

302 ; Trafalgar, 345 ; Waterloo,

368

Beckford, William, 93,281, 282,295 Buonaparte, Napoleon, 105, 106,

120, 146, 150, 328, 339, 340

Cadogan, Mrs. [Lady Hamilton's mother], 3-5, 21, 29, 54, 102, 209, 287-289, 348, 358, 359

Caracciolo, Prince Francesco, 73, 224-228

Carlyle [quoted], 201, 248

Chatham, Earl of, 169

"Christian Army," 203

Danton, in

Davison, Alexander, 195, 240, 272 Duckworth, Commodore, 176, 213, 241

Edgware Row, 21, 318 Elliot, Sir Gilbert, 99, 100 Emma " Carew " [Lady Hamilton's first child], 12, 13, 37, 39, 42,

Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, 68, 96, 97, 101, 102, 108, 122, 157, 158, 177, 236, 244, 245

Fetherstonehaugh, Sir Harry, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16-18, 25, 48, 57, 70

Foote, Captain, 208, 216, 222

Graham, Dr., 7

Greville, the Hon. Charles, antecedents and appearance, 13 ; meets Emma, 14 ; writes to her, 16-19; his house in Edgware Row, 21 ; his collection, 22 ; satisfaction with Emma, 25 ; " Pliny the Younger," 36 ; wishes to transfer Emma to his uncle's care, 48-51 ; callous behaviour, 59-62 ; Emma resumes her letters to, 76, 85, 104, 108, 109, 176, 230, 231, 246, 292, 319, 325; Goethe, description