I could not stay in the study after this. I thought of going back down to the basement and perhaps rearranging some of the cabinets—always a soothing occupation. But I suddenly felt enormously weary, so much so that I could hardly keep on my feet. I was averaging no more than four hours’ sleep at night during all that period. For some time now I had been sleeping at odd times of the day, a habit quite new to me.
I went along the passage to the living room and sat in the big old armchair, the one I always used, dark green in colour and very capacious. I wrapped myself in the patchwork rug that my mother made, which I always kept over the back of the chair. I saw her making this rug. I suppose I was three years old, or perhaps four. She had her own room where she did this kind of work, and I was allowed in there. She used odds and ends of different-coloured wool to make the squares, any colour at all, it didn’t seem to matter. Use enough colours and they will not clash, she said. The table was heaped with bright remnants.
I found this rug some time after she was gone. It was in a spare bedroom, rolled in a cotton bag, in the big drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. I think my father put it away there, or told the housekeeper to do so. There was a housekeeper then, a Mrs. Bryce. I suppose I was eleven when I found it, one day during the summer holidays. In those August afternoons I would sometimes go to the bedroom, get out the rug, and spread it on the bed. I would take off my clothes: shoes, jacket, trousers, shirt, underclothes—socks always last, for some reason. It always had to be in the same order. When I was naked I would creep under the rug until it came over my head, but in such a way that I did not disturb the edges at the sides or foot. If I failed in this, I would have to spread the rug out and try again. I would lie there on my back, quite still, in the dimness under the rug. I would feel the warmth spread over me, and with the warmth there seemed to come the scent of my mother. No-one ever found out about this, and after the beginning of the new term I never did it again. Now, when the rug was warm, I still sometimes imagined I could catch the scent of her in it.
I slept long, perhaps two hours. When I woke it was late afternoon; the light was already fading. I was not conscious of having dreamed, but I had woken with some vague feeling of horror, and as I sat there this became clearer and colder and I knew it had concerned the Ça Ira and the terrible damage she had suffered, a disabled beast, cut off from the pack, wallowing there with her heavy cannon that she could not bring to bear while Horatio savaged her hindparts, rent her, and bled her. Images of the slaughter on her decks came to me, the sounds of it, always the same sounds: crash of shot in the timbers, keening of shrapnel, shrieks of the men on the raked decks, cheers from our English lads as they gave the crappos a good drubbing. Shrieks and cheers again mingling …
I sat there as the room grew darker around me, trying to break free from these thoughts. After all, war was war; it had been a triumph, Horatio had acted with great gallantry and panache. It was the next day that the Ça Ira was taken. She was too much hurt to repair her masts in the night and make good her escape. She waited there, bleeding into the sea. All through the night her surgeons worked in the after cockpit, sweating in the close heat, fighting to win the race against gangrene, sawing and slicing on the improvised operation table in a stench of blood and sawdust and rum, with buckets for the amputated parts and a brazier to warm the blades, lessen the shock of the cold steel.
And then, with her masts gone and most of her guns out of action, at five minutes past ten next morning, she surrendered. Andrews, the name of the lieutenant that Horatio sent aboard her to take possession. He would have needed a strong stomach, walking about on those decks. Three hundred and fifty dead and wounded, getting on for half her total complement. And on the Agamemnon, in the whole engagement, thirteen men slightly wounded, no dead. We were right to hail it as a triumph, to thank the Almighty for his manifold favours, as we did that following Sunday, holding services on the decks of the ships. Horatio did his duty and came out with credit. Thank God I have done my duty. His last words …
Upon this thought, quite unbidden, there again came into my mind the verdict of the poet laureate of the day, Robert Southey, most famous of all his biographers, on the events in Naples in 1799—the sticking point of my book. A stain upon the memory of Nelson and the honour of England. I had always discounted this judgement. Southey was influenced by the views of Charles James Fox and the Whig politicians; he listened to the malicious innuendos of republican sympathizers; he actually allowed himself to believe that Horatio had tricked the Neapolitan Jacobins into quitting their forts under promise of safe conduct, only to have them arrested and handed over to the vengeance of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina.
Horatio could never have stooped to such a thing. His nature was too noble; he was the incarnation of the spirit of fair play, that profoundly British virtue, for which we are known far and wide. But the slanders had persisted, maintained an evil life on their own, in spite of his many champions. Buried somewhere in this great heap of argument, two centuries old by now, was the bright fragment that would clear his name. How glorious to be the one to find it, to see it glint like gold among the husks of old polemic. My name would be joined with his for as long as his deeds were remembered. Charles Cleasby, the vindicator of Horatio Nelson.
I got up to put on the standard lamp behind the chair. But Southey’s unjust words remained in my mind, despite the light that came flooding. I decided to check the reference once again. Pointless—I was completely familiar with the words—but there was a semblance of purpose in it, and anything was better than sitting on there, a passive prey to his vilifiers. I was worried about returning to my study so soon, because of that inimical voice. I entered the room somewhat apprehensively, but everything seemed quiet and accustomed in there. I found the passage almost at once: To palliate it would be in vain; to justify it would be wicked: there is no alternative, for one who will not make himself a participator in guilt, but to record the disgraceful story with sorrow and with shame.
Strong words indeed, and beautifully put, however misguided. The most robust response I had so far found was J. K. Laughton’s in the preface to his selection of Horatio’s letters and despatches, which came out in 1886: Southey was wrong. There is another alternative. We neither palliate, nor justify, nor record; we deny. The story is a base and venomous falsehood.
My heart warmed to this sturdy and patriotic rebuttal by the then professor of modern history at King’s College, London. Historians were more personal and more passionate in those days. I was sure that Laughton was in the right of it, but unfortunately he calls no witnesses, he refuses to admit any evidence outside of Horatio’s own words, as contained in his letters and despatches. The reasoning is therefore circular. Of course it is right, in a way, that it should be circular. After all, Nelson is in a special category as our quintessential hero and quintessential national representative. We British do not extol cunning as a virtue, but courage and honour. Horatio is the soul of honour, he tells the truth under all circumstances, therefore his own reports of the business are to be believed without reservation, therefore Southey’s verdict is false.
Certainly Horatio’s words are there and he never wavered in them. There is his letter to Alex Stephens written nearly four years later, in the February of 1803: I very happily arrived in Naples and prevented such an infamous transaction from taking place; therefore when the rebels surrendered, they came out from the castles as they ought, without the honours of war and trusting to the judgement of their sovereigns.
This is clear enough but lacking in detail. The transaction he was referring to is the treaty with the rebels signed before his arrival. The crux of the thing is in the last few words. Did these people, when they came out of their forts, think that they were going to be shipped to France in accordance with the treaty, or did they think they were going to be handed over to their Sicilian majesties? That is the argument, that is the form it has taken; but for me there was no argument at all. To believe that they didn’t know what they were coming out to is to believe that Horatio was first a party to fraud and afterwards covered it up by lying. No-one could believe that who knew him as I did. The difficulty lay not in knowing what to believe but in finding the proof of his innocence.
He is not helped by those of his defenders who try to gloss over the business or even, in their generous sympathy, actually misrepresent the facts. Carola Oman is a case in point. A surprising thing, to my mind, that it should be a woman to write one of the best lives of Horatio this century. First published in 1947, containing much new material, it is a detailed and vivid picture of the man. Yet coming to his dealings in Naples on the morning of June 26, 1799, this is what she writes: Sir William Hamilton sent the Cardinal a hasty assurance that Lord Nelson would do nothing, pending instructions from Palermo, to break the Armistice, a statement which Nelson … later confirmed in his own hand.
This confirmation in Horatio’s own hand I had not so far found, nor, as far as I knew, had anyone else. The ambassador’s note, however, does exist: Lord Nelson begs me to assure your Eminence that he is resolved to do nothing that can break the Armistice which your Eminence has accorded to the Castles of Naples.
That is the whole text. Nothing about pending instructions, nothing about Palermo. Palermo, of course, was where the king and the queen were, having fled to Sicily from the advancing French. What led Carola Oman, so generally scrupulous, to insert that phrase into her text as if it were an integral part of Hamilton’s note? She would have had that note before her, as did I. It is hard not to conclude that she was taking for granted the very thing she should have been trying to prove: that these people knew when they came out of the forts that the fulfilling of the treaty depended on the endorsement of their offended sovereigns—an endorsement not yet received.
A being of such shining honesty as Horatio is not to be defended by sleight of hand. Nor is it to be done by glaring omission. In the most recent biography I had read, that of Christopher Hibbert, published in 1994, in a total of almost five hundred pages, only five lines are devoted to June 26, 1799, surely one of the most important dates in Nelson’s entire life. Hibbert refers to the rebel garrisons emerging under the treaty as refugees, which suggests that they were already outside the forts before the intention was formed to arrest them, which completely begs the question of why they left the forts in the first place. As I sat there that March evening, as darkness settled over the stricken Ça Ira, I was swept once again by the ardent desire to clear him, free him forever from the bungling of his friends as well as from the malice of his foes. Everything lay there, in those few days of June. The clue was there if I could find it. I fell to pondering the sequence of events yet again.
Already by the twenty-fifth, relations between Horatio and Cardinal Ruffo are breaking down. For hours the two of them argue, face to face in Horatio’s cabin on the Vanguard, in the hot June weather, the cardinal speaking French, the admiral English, and the ambassador interpreting. Emma in the background, dressed in white, with a broad-brimmed hat. Perhaps she throws in the occasional few words in her mixture of Lancashire and Neapolitan. She peers through the bay window of the cabin to see if anyone she knows is in the pleasure boats out in the bay.
The dispute continues. Horatio does not hate Italians in the way he hates the French, but he regards them as immoral and lacking in the military virtues. He distrusts Ruffo as a devious and probably treacherous cleric. To Ruffo he seems irascible, overbearing, ignorant of the real situation in Naples. Horatio refuses to accept the treaty that Ruffo, as commander of the royalist forces, has signed in King Ferdinand’s name. The rebels are traitors; they must surrender unconditionally and be delivered to the justice of their sovereign. Ruffo insists that the treaty to which he has put his name should be honoured. The people in the forts are misguided patriots. The best way to heal the wounds of civil war is to be lenient with the vanquished.
This treaty, the heart of the dispute, has been signed not only by Ruffo but, in the name of George III, by Captain Foote, the senior British officer in Naples at the time, and by the representatives of the Russian and Turkish detachments—in other words, by the whole allied command. By its terms the castles are to be handed over to the allied troops and the people composing the garrisons are to take their choice of being carried with their property under safe conduct to Toulon or remaining unmolested in the city.
Neither will give way. Horatio works the stump of his arm—a habit of his when irritated or impatient. Ruffo displays an amazing virtuosity of gesture. Voices rise and tempers fray. Ruffo quits the ship in disgust. Horatio writes a declaration, which is handed in to the forts at daybreak on the twenty-sixth: Rear-Admiral Lord Nelson, K.B., Commander of his Britannic Majesty’s Fleet in the Bay of Naples, acquaints the rebellious subjects of his Sicilian Majesty that he will not permit them to embark or quit those places. They must surrender themselves to His Majesty’s royal mercy.
This they show no smallest sign of doing. Noteworthy, this use of the word embark. It seems here to mean depart, sail, leave for Toulon. Later it came to bear a more restricted meaning.
By now the situation is extremely dangerous. The English fleet is drawn up in line of battle in the bay, ready to bombard the forts. The guns of the French garrison in the Castle of St. Elmo are ready to reply. The republican rebels in their forts lack cannon and shot, but they are desperate, and there is enough explosive in the magazines to blow themselves sky high and half the city with them. Ruffo has made it clear that if Horatio breaks the armistice, he will give no assistance with either men or guns. Not only that: he will withdraw his forces from the positions they have occupied, leaving the English to conquer the enemy with their own forces.
In spite of all this, Horatio sends in his declaration. Thereupon the cardinal, believing that the English are preparing an assault, sends in a note warning the garrisons that the allied troops will now retire to their original positions. This sudden withdrawal causes immediate consternation and terror in the city. People stream out of Naples in their thousands, fearing that a general bombardment is about to begin. Rumours circulate that the besieged Jacobins have torn up the steps over the powder magazines so as to be able, in the last extremity, to throw in a match. This seems to suggest, if it is true, that they were not thinking of surrender—not yet, at least.
Now, at this most critical of moments, there occurs that sudden change in Horatio’s attitude which no documents have yet been found to explain. By ten o’clock on the morning of the twenty-sixth, Ruffo had in his hands that hasty note of Sir William Hamilton’s to which Carola Oman so misleadingly refers. It is brought by two of Horatio’s captains, Troubridge and Ball. In the cardinal’s presence, these two either write or dictate a further declaration: Captains Troubridge and Ball have authority on the part of Lord Nelson to declare to his Eminence that his Lordship will not oppose the embarkation of the rebels and of the people who compose the garrison of the Castles of Nuovo and dell’Ovo.
There it is again: embarkation. They were embarked—so much is certain. That same afternoon they came out of their forts, carrying with them the personal effects they were intending to take to France. But they did not sail. They waited there in the harbour, under the eyes of the English ships, crowded together on the small transports, men, women, and children—for many of the men had been joined by their families. Then, on the morning of the twenty-eighth, the expected letters were received from Palermo: Horatio was officially authorized to act. The transports were brought under the English guns and the people aboard them made prisoners.
You detested the French, that much is beyond doubt. I remembered your solemn words of advice to a young midshipman: You must hate a Frenchman as if he were the devil. You also detested rebels, and these were rebels doubly detestable: they had leagued themselves with the French. But you would never have allowed that to sway you from the path of honour. You, more than any other Englishman who ever lived, epitomize our great past, you are the standard-bearer to this more tarnished age, you gave your life, you cleared the seas of our enemies for a century to come. Was there a distinction in your mind between embarking and sailing? Could you have thought those people in the forts would come out only to be embarked and not to sail? That hasty note—it was written by Sir William Hamilton and sent by him to Ruffo. It was written in French, a language of which you were largely ignorant. Could this foxy diplomat have deliberately omitted something you intended him to include, something to make that crucial distinction clear? But if so, where was the proof? And how can one explain the subsequent declaration, made in your name by Captains Troubridge and Ball, in which you repeated the undertaking not to oppose the embarkation? Was it possible for Ruffo to take this document in any other sense than as an agreement on your part to allow the treaty to be put into effect?
I was now at the heart of the problem that had held up my book and exhausted my mind for more than two months by that time. And I was no nearer a solution that March evening than I had been at the outset. I was beginning to feel the usual nausea of defeat, that slackening and slipping away of the mind which seemed like a foretaste of death. Always worse, compounded by all the previous failures … Quite suddenly I remembered Miss Lily’s words: It was a show, they were stars. Ludicrously inappropriate to talk about Horatio in that way. But perhaps, in the absence of any other sort of evidence, some clue to the truth of those June days could be found in the personages involved, in the interplay of character. A cast of six: the two protagonists in conflict, Horatio and Ruffo; the diplomatic go-between, Hamilton; the confidante and messenger of the queen, Emma; and their Sicilian majesties, Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina, in whose names these actions were taken. I could make a brief sketch of each in turn and see what light was cast, if any. Not a course of events, a maze of personality. There can be more than one way into a maze, and which you have chosen doesn’t matter once you are in it. I started with the diplomat.
Sir William Hamilton. Sixty-eight-years old at this time, tall and lean, slightly stooped, from either scholarly activities or the many years of elaborate courtesies at the Neapolitan court; a man of distinguished appearance, with an aquiline nose and an air of intelligence and refinement. Son of Lord Archibald Hamilton, grandson of the third Duke of Hamilton, he had served for some years as an officer in the Third Foot Guards and had been—very briefly—member of Parliament for Midhurst. Younger son of a younger son, he had no money of his own, a state of things he remedied in 1758 by marrying an heiress, through whom he obtained an estate in Wales worth about £8000 a year. In 1764 he joined the Diplomatic Service, a career for which by background and manners he was well fitted. The delicate state of his wife’s health made Naples, with its sea air and warm climate, a natural choice. The marriage by all accounts was happy. The first Lady Hamilton died in 1782, and in the following year, returning to England with her embalmed body for burial, he met the extremely beautiful young woman who was his nephew’s mistress. She called herself Emma Hart at this time and was to become the second Lady Hamilton and Horatio’s great love. (I had been fascinated to learn that he met her at the same hotel, Nerot’s in St. James’s, where eighteen years later Fanny and Emma were to endure the mutual dislike of their first encounter.)
That September of 1798, when Horatio, the victor of the Nile, came sailing into the bay, Hamilton had been British envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the court of Naples for thirty-six years. A man of elegant manners, all were agreed. A keen sportsman, hunting companion of King Ferdinand—they slaughtered thousands of quail and woodcocks together. A more than competent musician. He played the cello and kept his own band of musicians. He made experiments with electricity, kept a tame monkey, and planted an English garden in the grounds of the royal palace at Caserta. William Beckford said of him: “The first of connoisseurs—not only in the fine arts, but in the science of human felicity.” The best dancer at the Neapolitan court, it was said, though his dancing days were drawing to a close by then, must have been—he was feeling his age, his liver was in bad shape. Too many banquets. The wild and voluptuous Sicilian dance, the tarantella, which was all the rage, was probably beyond him. Emma, still only thirty-three, danced it wonderfully well … From February of the following year, the year of the Jacobins, Horatio and Emma were sleeping together, as regularly as Horatio’s duties would allow.
I paused at this point to pace about the room for a while. No clue in the bare facts of anyone’s life. A typical product of his time and class. He seems not to have believed in anything much. Prejudices and opinions, yes, but no very firm principles. He wanted to pass his days agreeably. And yet in one or two important ways he wasn’t typical at all. What really distinguished him was his very refined taste. Connoisseur, collector of classical antiquities, expert vulcanologist … He had one of the best collections of antique vases in private hands. And he was tolerant to an extraordinary degree. Victorian biographers deny that he knew of the adultery, deny that there was any adultery. But all the evidence goes to show that there was and he did. Not only knew, but fully accepted it, lived in the knowledge of it, unruffled and benign. All three lived under the same roof, they saw each other every day. Emma had been passed on to him; perhaps he was ready to pass her on in his turn, feeling himself too old, too tired? A woman, of whatever class, was always a commodity. And for a collector, of course, anything could be passed on, people as well as objects. Just a matter of rearrangement. I remembered reading somewhere that when he returned to London in 1800, his days of foreign service over forever, the house he took in Piccadilly had garden statuary that outraged his taste. It gave him a headache just to look at it. He could not live in the house until he had got rid of it all and put there in its place an antique statue of the Nile.
Nowhere any evidence that this exquisite sensibility suffered through thirty-six years at the corrupt and devious court of Naples. Presumably there was nothing in this to outrage him—moral outrage was probably not much in his line. A collector acquires things, sets them out, finds the right arrangement. If it doesn’t look good here, we shift it there. I had quoted in my book some lines from a letter of his that very well illustrated this readiness to shift things. Written to Sir John Acton, prime minister in the Neapolitan court, the queen’s adviser and rumoured former lover, perhaps the most powerful man in the kingdom: However, after good reflection, Lord Nelson authorized me to write to his Eminence yesterday morning early to certify to him that he would do nothing to break the Armistice … That produced the best possible effect … If one can’t do exactly what one wishes, one must act for the best; and that is what Lord Nelson has done; I hope therefore that the result will be approved by their Sicilian Majesties …
That is a shifty letter. What does it mean? Acton would have known, presumably. This was June 27, when the rebels had already been embarked. If one can’t do exactly what one wishes, one must act for the best. In what way did you act for the best? What you wanted is clear enough: you wanted unconditional surrender. And all the rest of your life you maintained that that was what it had been. What can Hamilton be talking about? The assurance was given, Naples was restored to calm, the Jacobins came out and embarked on their transports. Two days later they were seized; the transports were converted into floating prisons.
Yes, there is no doubt that Hamilton was shifty. Highly diplomatic, to call it by a gentler name. He even, in a later despatch to Lord Grenville at the Foreign Office, says that the Jacobins were already on the transports on June 14, already there before you arrived, and that there was an urgent need to arrest them because they were about to set sail! No question of subterfuge, no question of what the garrisons were led to believe. So he became the first in that long line of obfuscators that extends to the present day, those who have smirched you, who were all truth, by their lack of it. Grenville could not have believed it, in any case. His view of Hamilton’s conduct comes out clearly enough in his letter to the new ambassador in Palermo, asking him to explain to Sir William, without reserve, the utter impossibility of his going back to Naples in any public situation. Though this, of course, may be due more to disapproval of an ambassador’s sharing his wife with an admiral at a foreign court.
In the stress of these thoughts, I fell to pacing from bookshelf to wall. Approach the bookshelf, choose a book. This evening it was Harold Acton’s The Bourbons of Naples. Choose a word in the title. You can choose any word, but once you have chosen, you must keep to it. I chose Bourbons. Forefinger of the right hand, touch the word, then straight across, six paces, touch the wall with both palms flat against it, thumbs horizontal but they mustn’t touch. Then six paces back to the shelves, touch the word again. Very soothing. The only other thing about Hamilton that came to my mind that evening, as I went through my paces, was the fact that he had recently suffered a grievous loss. Earlier that year he had heard that the Colossus, bound for England with his entire collection of classical treasures aboard her, the cherished hoard of a long career, had been wrecked off the Scilly Isles. Nothing of the cargo was saved but the corpse of Admiral Lord Shouldham, preserved in spirits. The kind of thing to break the heart of an elderly aesthete—a dead admiral pointlessly rescued, his precious collection lost in the depths. Did he somehow hold the Jacobins responsible? Habitual cynicism, embittered by such a loss, might have made him vindictive …
I went back to my desk, settled down to write again. Who next? Who but the detested adversary, the man behind the treaty?
Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo. Fifty-five years old at the time of these events, active and vigorous. Member of an ancient, princely family, inheritor of vast feudal estates in his native Calabria. In his younger days a prominent member of Roman high society. (He was descended from the Roman family of Colonna on his mother’s side.) For a while he was the lover of the marchesa Girolama Lepri, notorious for her promiscuity. This was a profligate, licentious, profoundly corrupt society. By all accounts Ruffo was entirely at home in it. Horatio calls him a “swelled-up priest,” but he had never taken orders. His cardinal’s hat had been bestowed on him when he retired from the post of treasurer-general to the Vatican—some say in order to get rid of him after a suspected misappropriation of funds. Slander, probably; a man like that would not have lacked for enemies … Of all the nobles and court hangers-on that fled with their majesties to Palermo, he is the only one to show spirit. With the blessing of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina—though without their material assistance—he leaves Sicily on January 27, 1799, four days after the proclamation of the republic in Naples. His declared object: to promote and lead a counter-revolution, drive out the French, suppress the republican rebels, restore the kingdom of Naples to Ferdinand.
At the beginning of February he lands in Calabria with only eight followers and proclaims a holy war to rid the kingdom of foreign atheists. Within a few weeks, 17,000 fierce and undisciplined irregulars have flocked to his standard. This horde—the Christian Army of the Holy Faith, as Ruffo calls it—sets off from Naples bearing the Sicilian royal standard and spreading terror as it advances. Their numbers are swelled by bands of brigands and by some thousands of convicts released from Sicilian jails.
Success is rapid. By the beginning of June the French have withdrawn, leaving only a garrison in the castle of Sant’Elmo. On the fourteenth, Ruffo lets loose his Christian army on Naples. No, that is to misrepresent him; he can no longer hold it back. The Jacobin rebel militia take refuge in their two forts of Nuovo and dell’Ovo. Ruffo’s troops give themselves up to slaughter and pillage. They are joined by the street people of Naples, called the lazzaroni, a ragged army many thousand strong, fiercely loyal to the king. Anyone suspected of Jacobin sympathies—and it is enough to be respectably dressed—is hauled off to the main square and butchered on the spot.
I paused at this point to consider the situation now facing the victorious Ruffo. The city is in chaos. His troops openly defy his attempts to restrain them. A visiting German author, August von Kotzebue, describes the terror of those days in his Travels through Italy. One or two extracts were there in my book.
The lazzaroni roasted men in the streets and begged money of the passers-by to purchase bread to their roast meat. Many of them carried in their pockets fingers, ears, etc. which they had cut off; and if they met a person they looked upon as a patriot, they triumphantly exhibited their bloody spoils … All who wore cropped hair fell victim to the mob. False tails were procured but the people ran behind anyone that passed, pulling him by the tail, and if it came off, it was all over with the wearer …
Touch the word, six paces, palms against the cool wall. Naples given over to a festival of blood. People dragged out of their houses, on any pretext or none, men, women, and children, and hacked to death on the streets. The slaughter went on through the night, lit by the flames from buildings set on fire by the looters or by incendiary bombs from the besieged republicans in their forts.
What was Ruffo to do? He was not burdened by principle, any more than Hamilton—in fact, these two had a great deal in common. The aesthete and the pragmatist, both deep-dyed. Not much difference. The cardinal’s main purpose in all this, from the very beginning, had been to secure Bourbon gratitude and the rewards he hoped would follow. He was cynical, opportunistic, completely egotistical. His whole career goes to show this. But above all he was very, very realistic and therefore entirely unheroic, light-years away from an angelic nature like Horatio’s.
This was the main difference, but there was another. I wanted to be fair to Ruffo, to try to see things as he would have seen them that afternoon as he sat arguing there and the rage mounted. Otherwise there was no point in assembling these people, there could be no exit from this maze of personality, I would just go walking round and round in it. Ruffo was a royalist because the power of the great families was guaranteed by the monarchy. But he had no devotion to the Bourbon cause or to any other. The thing that really marked him out was that he was an Italian, and Calabrese at that; Naples was his city. He cared what happened to her and to her people. A Spanish king, an Austrian queen, a prime minister half English and half French, a British ambassador … So he makes the treaty, knowing it will not be welcomed in Palermo but believing himself to be authorized, as vicar general and Ferdinand’s accredited representative, to act on his own initiative. The objective is gained; he sees no point in further bloodshed. But the others do; they are intent on punishment, especially the fearful and vindictive Carolina, from whom in one way or another they all take their tone. Yes, even you, Horatio.
Then, on that morning of the twenty-sixth, after all the quarrelling, there comes the volte-face. Ruffo finds in his hands first Hamilton’s hasty assurance, then the declaration delivered by the captains—which they refuse to sign. His Lordship will not oppose the embarkation.
And in fact you did not. Now comes the question: if on someone’s part there was an intention to deceive, who in fact was deceived? Was it Ruffo? Domenico Sacchinelli, the cardinal’s secretary, in his account of the events of that morning, says that his employer suspected something was wrong: The Cardinal, although he suspected there might be here some treachery, not wishing to wrangle with those two captains, took no further measure beyond deputing the Minister Micheroux to accompany those two captains to the Castles to arrange with the republican commanders the execution of the articles agreed upon.
Why should he suspect treachery? Not because the captains refused to sign; there was no reason for them to sign, they were the transmitters, not the authors. Surely, then, because of the equivocal tone. In that case, why didn’t he demand further clarification? Why, above all, did he send to Micheroux, together with the ambiguous documents he had received, a letter in his own hand stating that Lord Nelson had consented to carry out the capitulation, a clear exaggeration of their import? Did he believe what he wrote or merely pretend to believe it? Perhaps he didn’t suspect anything at all? Sacchinelli was writing many years later, working from notes and memories. He was on a pension from the Bourbon court; he wanted to shift the blame to the English for the terrible things that happened afterwards.
In this business, wherever one pressed, a dark syrup of treachery came oozing round the edges. But whose? Whose was the mind, whose were the glances? The rebels came out to atrocious deaths. Was it Emma? The thought sent me back to my desk again. Difficult to write briefly about Emma; there was so much of her, and so much of it was folly. Her beauty, her vulgarity, her extraordinary spelling, her capacity to absorb and deal out flattery … However, there was no play without her; the attempt had to be made.
Emma, Lady Hamilton. Born in 1765 to a colliery blacksmith and his wife on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire. Baptized in the name of Emy Lyon. No birth certificate yet found. Father signed his marriage certificate with a cross. The hamlet where she was born one of the most wretched and squalid in the land, a collection of hovels lived in by the colliers who worked in the nearby pit. Difficult to imagine, even in those times, more miserably deprived beginnings to life.
Emma was spirited and notably beautiful and she got out. At twelve she was employed as an under-housemaid in the home of a Chester surgeon. A year or two later she found a place in London as a maidservant. At the age of sixteen she gave birth to an illegitimate child, having been abandoned in pregnancy by the young baronet who was keeping her. She subsequently fell into the hands of the Hon. Charles Greville, whose mistress she became. She loved and admired this cold-eyed young man, second son of the Earl of Warwick, and was deeply hurt when, wanting to marry money, he packed her off to Naples, into the hands of his uncle, Sir William.
She was stricken, yes—she had thought Greville returned her love. But she must have known already, must have known from her earliest years, that she was a commodity. And the move turned out lucky for her. There wouldn’t have been much for her in England, once her looks had gone. In Naples, beauty and spirit again combining, she first captivated the aging ambassador, then became indispensable to him. In 1791 he made her his wife. So she got out twice—she was an escapee. (Her third great escape, drunk and destitute in Calais, ten years after Trafalgar, was out of this world altogether.)
When Horatio’s sails appeared on the horizon that September day, he was nearly forty, she was thirty-three. For eight years she had been a celebrated figure at the Bourbon court, intimate friend of the queen, hostess to a wealthy and glamorous international society.
I paused on this. Thoughts of Emma excited me almost always. She was fond of dressing up, and in my imaginings she had worn many kinds of attire and often none at all. But I wanted that evening to control all stirring in the loins. I was intent not on putting her beauties together in that synthesis of touch upon touch until only the last, the lightest touch is needed, a patient and precarious process that I knew well. No, I was set on analysis, I wanted to isolate some element in her that might help me to understand the part she had played in those June days.
She had become flaunting and splendid and in a way powerful, with many favours in her gift. But to have known want and degradation, to have known yourself for a commodity—these are things that can never be effaced. Kindness will seem like love; love will get confused with gratitude. I remembered an early letter of hers to her benefactor, Sir William, and I got up from my desk to find it.
My friend, my All, my Good, my kind Home in one, you are to me eating, drinking and cloathing, my comforter in distress. Then why shall I not love you?
It is all there. This was what lay behind her habit of flattery, both the practise and the appetite. The mutual assurance of being safe, being necessary, being admired. Like preening among birds that have come to a sheltered place in the course of some perilous migration. For full effect, it had to be reciprocal …
Finger on the gilt letters. Bourbons. Six paces, palms against the wall, thumbs mustn’t touch. Miss it once and you have to start all over again with a different book. Emma’s love for Greville was not reciprocated, though she thought it was. Sir William was kinder but not much different in spirit. Besides, he was drying out. The queen, she loved the queen; they wrote to each other every day, even when they were both in Naples. Emma would write to Maria Carolina in moments of exaltation, with no intention of sending the words to her. It was a form of praying. Like the words she wrote on the envelope of one of the queen’s letters: Yes, I will serve her with my heart and soul. My blood if necessary shall flow for her. Emma will prove to Maria Carolina that a humble-born Englishwoman can serve a Queen with zeal and true love, even at the risk of her life.
There was no risk to Emma’s life. She always saw herself as the heroine; Miss Lily had been right in that. But once again she believed that her love was reciprocated. She was surely mistaken in this. Maria Carolina was a member of the great Hapsburg dynasty, rulers of Austria-Hungary, allied by blood or marriage with practically all the crowned heads of Europe. She would have grown up in the art of self-preservation and the exercise of power. Monarchs rarely reciprocate devotion from commoners. They take it for their due and use it for their ends. Emma was the deputy and mouthpiece of this woman, who hated the French and all liberal sentiment, who feared the loss of her life and throne, who needed Horatio’s total support in eliminating opposition in Naples, and who knew that Horatio was deeply in love with her devoted messenger.
She was there with them that day, in the cabin of the Foudroyant, while Horatio and the cardinal argued together, while the differences between them widened and the dislike grew. As I continued to pace back and forth, never faltering, never missing, soothed by the simple but exact repetition of gestures and steps, I could see them there, in their particular places.
Horatio walks up and down, working the stump of his arm. Such a poor remnant; it seems strange it could move at all. The cardinal sits at one end of the table; he is richly dressed and wears a black velvet skull-cap. He interrupts, he gestures. The treaty must be respected. Horatio raises his voice. He is being contradicted aboard his own ship, in his own cabin. He stops to slam his left hand down on the table. The treaty must be scrapped. Hamilton stands midway between them in close-fitting white trousers and a cutaway coat, peering down that high-bridged nose of his, softening the tones as he translates. Emma takes no direct part, but she is very much there, she is the queen’s special agent. She is constantly on the move—she could never keep still for long. She listens to everything. How she hates this wily priest who wants to offer terms to the vile republicans. She is in a dress of white muslin with a fringed sash. Her hat, broad-brimmed, trimmed with red ribbons, and crowned with ostrich plumes, lies discarded on the table.
Through the great bay window of the cabin, stretching the whole width of the ship, they can see the lights of Naples and the flames and smoke of riot; they can hear the occasional crash of shots; perhaps the screams of raped or mutilated victims carry across the bay. Among the warships, the bobbing lamps of dozens of small boats, offering to sell fish to the sailors. The barges of the nobility have seen a hasty change of flag since Horatio’s arrival. The tricolour of the republic has been hauled down; they fly the white standard of the Bourbons now. From these barges, through the soft summer air, come the strains of “Rule Britannia”—the fiddlers have played it so often in these two days that they know it by heart.
Emma moves constantly against the lamplight in her fever of duty and importance. That perfect molding of the brows and mouth. She passes from one side to the other, across the whole width of the window. Between the lamps of the cabin and the deepening indigo of night outside, her limbs glow through the thin stuff of the dress. With every movement, every slightest turn, the muslin touches and defines her—the beautiful shoulders, deep breasts, strong hips. The dress is high-waisted, in the fashion of the time, emphasizing the long thighs, the curve of the abdomen as it dips to the shadowed cleft below, the exquisite concavity in the small of the back, the swell of the buttocks. Back and forward, wall to wall she goes; she cannot keep still. She leans to look through the window, she waves, she has seen someone she knows on one of the gilded, high-prowed barges. Her dress at the front falls away from her body, only a little, enough to see the sway of her breasts, to know they are unconfined. She is wearing only the lightest of garments underneath. Stripped away, thrown aside easily.
We know, even in the rage that possesses us at the cardinal’s obduracy, we know she is waiting. Back and forth, between the lamplight and the lights of the murderous city, waiting for us. She is entirely ours, entirely ready. When this discussion ends, as it will, in frustration and ill-temper, she will still be there for us, she will wash the cramp away in a gush of love. What greater pleasure than the sureness of love waiting? Across the window, from side to side, a promise in every movement … Later, when the yellow-looking Sir William has retired to his chamber, she will come to ours. She will still be in the same dress, she will kneel, she will lift it up over her head, she is wearing nothing under it. She kneels above us. She will take us in her hand, she will lower her warm mouth to us …