Losing Nelson (31 page)

“Well, you are strange in some ways, Charles, that’s all I’m saying. You wouldn’t know Tony Blair if you passed him in the street, but you would know an admiral that fell off his perch two hundred years ago.”

“He never fell off anything, he is immortal,” I said, but it was a waste of breath. She used habitual phrases and did not think beyond them; it did not occur to her that she was speaking of Horatio as if he were a dead canary.

That was about the sum of our political conversation. After that we resumed work. But the book was giving me less pleasure now. It is from around this time that I date the real beginnings of the dissatisfaction that would lead me in the end to suspend work on the book altogether. The further I went ahead with his life, the more my failure to clear up the Naples business weighed on me. It was in the May of 1803, on the sixteenth, that the Napoleonic War began, after the brief interval of peace afforded by the Treaty of Amiens, signed the previous March. Two days later, as commander-in-chief Mediterranean, he hoisted his flag in HMS
Victory
and the run-up to Trafalgar began. How could I take him through these days of unparalleled glory while leaving unresolved in his wake the question of his conduct in Naples? It was not a question of some violent excess or tempestuous love, such as could easily be accommodated in the heroic life. It was a question of cold-blooded falsehood and fraud. This would never do for the British. A wily hero might suit the Greeks, but we are a straightforward people, detesting perfidy in all its forms. No, he had to be cleared.

As the weeks passed and the anniversary of the events themselves came closer and closer, I dashed myself repeatedly against these
rocks of the past, made up of truth and lies and unsupported assertions, and fell back bruised. Mahan and Badham, allegorical twins, stalked mouthing and gesturing through my days and nights. Whether Ruffo had actually moved the troops was in a way immaterial; it would have been enough that Horatio believed he intended to do so. In fact, to withdraw them would have been the proper thing if Horatio was offering to break the treaty, because they had been moved to this favourable position on the twenty-third at the request of the rebels themselves, in anticipation of their coming out, to protect them from the vengeance of the populace, the savage
lazzaroni
, one of the bloodthirstiest mobs in history, passionately faithful to King Ferdinand, murderously disposed towards his republican enemies. Natural and honourable, then, if the treaty was to be abrogated, to restore the status quo ante. And Horatio
was
threatening to abrogate the treaty. There is his Declaration, sent into the forts on the morning of the twenty-fifth, signed by his own hand, in which he acquaints the rebels that he will not permit them to embark or quit those places, that they must surrender to His Majesty’s royal mercy.

The following morning the cardinal despatched his ultimatum to Horatio that he would withdraw the Russian troops and leave the English to conquer the enemy on their own. Or so Badham asserts; Mahan denies it. On that morning, the twenty-sixth, a Thursday, I woke at daybreak and the questions fastened on me again, buzzed in my ears like flies. Why would Ruffo write thus if he didn’t believe Horatio was about to break the treaty? Even if, as Mahan maintains, there was no document at all, even if there was no more evidence than the résumé of the cardinal’s intentions made in retrospect by his secretary, Sacchinelli—even so, would it not have put Horatio under pressure to seek some less direct way of repossessing the forts? There
was
a change of attitude on his part between the twenty-fifth and the twenty-sixth, no-one denies that. He gave an assurance to Ruffo on
the twenty-sixth that he would not oppose the embarkation of the rebels. This document exists. In Badham’s view, this was tantamount to an endorsement of the treaty as a whole, or so the rebels would have understood it—they would have believed they would be allowed to sail for France. In Mahan’s view, the document referred only to the embarkation and nothing further, and the rebels knew this perfectly well. The crux of the thing was there.
What were they given to understand?
Would they have come out only to sit and wait in the crowded transports? Wait for what?

His Majesty’s royal mercy
 … It occurred to me now that I had not completed the cast of players. There was still the royal couple, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina. The prospect of some action came as a relief. I got out of bed, dressed in the dimness, and went along to the kitchen, where I made tea, observing each stage in the process carefully. I took the teapot and my special mug with the double C on it into the study. Clean sheet, carefully sharpened pencil.

Ferdinand IV, king of Naples and Sicily. Born in 1751, the third son of Charles III of Spain. The eldest son was mad—he had to be restrained from assaulting any woman on sight; the second was feeble-minded, quite incapable of rule. Ferdinand was not mad, but from childhood on he was kept ignorant and simple so that the government of Naples could continue to be directed from Spain through Charles III’s ministers. He grew up without any call being made on his mind or judgement; his companions were people of the lowest sort, and his speech was like theirs, the street language of Naples. At the age of seventeen he married Maria Carolina of Austria, a woman far more intelligent and forceful than himself
.

He was strong and active and his cramped energies found release in rough games, practical jokes, above all in hunting and fishing. Hunting was his ruling passion, but it was hunting without risk. He would drag his ministers with him for dawn-to-dusk sessions of slaughter. Standing in a brick-built shooting box, he would wait for his keepers to drive the game
to him. He was a crack shot—a visiting diplomat recorded that in a hundred shots, the king only missed once. An expert fisherman and sailor, he delighted in running races with boatmen out in the gulf. Dressed as a fisherman, he would sell his catch on the market, haggling over the price in Neapolitan dialect. The common people loved him, they thought of him as one of them. Unprepossessing in appearance, with a low forehead, a huge nose, and a pendulous lower lip
.

He had a rough good humour when things were going smoothly, but he hated anything to be required of him, any opposition or difficulty, any mental effort. He avoided the trouble of having to sign documents by giving one of his ministers, the Marquese Tannucci, a stamp with his signature on it. He was never required to consult anything but his own pleasures. His manners were gross, even for that age. Sir William Hamilton, who was often in attendance on the king, relates in a letter how Ferdinand, after a hearty meal, would lay a hand on his belly and remark that having eaten well, he now needed a good easing of his bowels. He would choose some of those around him for the privilege of keeping him company during the performance. Infantile, cowardly, vindictive when crossed, totally lacking in conscience or compunction
 …

Attacked by restlessness at this point, I got up and fell to my usual pacing from bookshelves to wall. The title this time was
The Wooden World
, by N.A.M. Rodger, and the word was
Wooden
. Finger on the letters, six paces, palms against the wall, thumbs mustn’t touch. This was the king of Naples and Sicily, this the man who came out across the bay in his royal barge, sweating in his black velvet and gold lace, to thank his one-armed, one-eyed saviour, the hero of the Nile, on that September day in 1798, while the bands played and the white birds flew up from their cages into the sky. Infantile. That was the key. It was a ruined child that clambered aboard to make you that speech of welcome and thanks. It was a ruined child to whom you delivered the Neapolitan Jacobins. The past is littered with ruined
children.
His Majesty’s royal mercy
 … But that was not it either: it was not to him but to the queen that they were really delivered. Her turn now, the last member of the cast.

Maria Carolina. Born 1752, daughter of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. At sixteen she was married to Ferdinand, who was one year older. She bore him eighteen children, of whom eight survived. Her sister Marie Antoinette married Louis XVI of France and went to the guillotine some months after him, in October 1793, confirming Maria Carolina’s fear and hatred of republicanism and all forms of liberal dissent, especially if they came with a French stamp on them. They had this in common, she and Horatio
 …

Devout and superstitious—she wrote prayers on scraps of paper and tucked them into her stays or sometimes swallowed them. In marked contrast to Ferdinand, she had regal manners, a grasp of European politics, and the will to rule. On the birth of her first son, in 1775, she claimed her right to sit in the Council of State and within a few months was the effective ruler of the kingdom. She was subject to violent swings of emotion. On the few occasions that Ferdinand attempted to oppose her will, she screamed and raged at him and drove him to flight. On that day of your triumphant arrival in the Bay of Naples, she was forty-five years old. She had never been regarded as a beauty. A glassy eye, a frozen look, the long Hapsburg jaw, a figure at once massive and gaunt. But she had a grand manner. You were impressed with her, touched by her dignity and her distress at the danger from France, the common enemy. Truly a daughter of Maria Theresa, you said. What did you mean by that? You were moved because she placed her trust in you, the one man who could save her kingdom and her person. And she, what did she think of
you,
what did she really think?

The question gave me pause. There was no way of knowing. She needed the ships and the guns, the backing of Britain. Horatio was a hero; she flattered him—he was always susceptible to flattery, she
would have known that. And in those June days of the following year, which were giving me so much trouble, she would have known something more. The admiral was deeply in love with the lady ambassadress, who was also her private ambassadress—a flatterer too and a hater of the French. Love, trust, flattery—not easy to disappoint the expectations of two such women, not when you share the hatred too.

Truly a daughter of Maria Theresa. Somewhere in my notes I had an extract of a letter of Hamilton’s in which he spoke of this inheritance. After some minutes I found it:
It is well to own, and indeed the Emperor Joseph told me so himself when at Naples, that all the daughters of Maria Theresa had very tender hearts susceptible to sudden and violent impressions
.

A hysteric married too young to a ruined child, putting it in basic terms. This was the royal couple who enlisted your services and gained your devotion, to whose mercy the rebels were delivered. However obscure the circumstances in which they were prevailed upon to surrender, there is no doubt at all about what happened to them subsequently. They were embarked on the transports and kept there in the bay. On the twenty-eighth, the letters Horatio had been waiting for arrived from the court at Palermo, conferring full powers on him. Who had these powers before? A question raised by Badham. Presumably it was Ruffo.

Your first move was to order the boats with the rebels on board to be hauled under the guns of the warships. Some of the leaders were taken off and put in irons. The people who had left the forts during the truce were summoned to give themselves up on pain of death. Ruffo protested, then backed down, and with this all hopes for the rebels were at an end.

The king sailed in with his suite on July 10 and established his court aboard your flagship, the
Foudroyant
. He held levees on the quarterdeck and amused himself by shooting passing seagulls. In
the balmy evenings, Emma would dress as Britannia and stand on the poop to sing to the assembled company, beginning, naturally, with “Rule Britannia.”

The picture came irresistibly into my mind as I sat there. The warmth of the evening, the aromatic hillsides and the stinking city blending their scents together, wafting them across the bay; the shifting reflections in the water, with here and there dead floating gulls attesting to the king’s marksmanship; Emma resplendent on the poop in helmet and trident and billowing robe.

The swelling notes must have filled the hearts of those on board and carried far across the bay—to the sailors of the British fleet in their hammocks; to the republicans in the cramped and unsanitary prison ships, where they had been confined for two weeks now; perhaps to the city itself, where the faithful
lazzaroni
were continuing to cut up, roast, and eat suspected French sympathizers.

The royal justice began to operate soon after this. All through the summer the executions continued. Some went to the block; others, women as well as men, were hanged. It was these public hangings that were dreaded most, because of the hideousness of the method. Thoughts of this fascinated and appalled me; I could not keep still, I had to get up and start my pacing again. This time the book was John Keegan’s
Battle at Sea
and the chosen word was the first one,
Battle
. But now, quite naturally and without being conscious of any choice, I found myself varying the procedure, touching the word with the forefinger of my
left
hand.

Most of the executions took place in the Piazza del Mercato, which I had never seen but imagined as vast and desolate, on a scale somehow with the number and manner of the deaths. The gallows was a tall post with one arm, which was reached by means of a ladder. The hangman bound the arms of the prisoner, blindfolded him, and placed the rope round his neck. This done, he went first up the ladder, leading the prisoner by the rope. Blind, the rough hemp at your neck, tugged upward step by step, mounting to the sky, the terrible shouts of the populace in your ears.
Battle
. White word on a black spine. Left forefinger, six paces, arms against the wall, thumbs mustn’t touch … Step by step, mounting the ladder. Close behind, bringing up the rear, the hangman’s nimble assistant, known as
tirapiedi
, pull-feet. The hangman scrambles onto the crossbeam and makes the rope fast. He then makes a sign to his assistant, who pushes the prisoner off the ladder, adroitly catches him by the feet as he falls, and swings with him into space. At the same moment the hangman lowers himself from the crossbeam and straddles the shoulders of the prisoner, and the three of them swing back and forth like a circus act, applauded by the vast crowd. Back and forth, back and forth. Thumbs mustn’t touch. This time, however, I stop, lean forward, lay my forehead against the cool wall, close my eyes. In my mind the picture of that dangling, three-headed beast, all in struggling movement. One riding above, one swinging below, the middle one choking, dying. Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca, the poetess, died like this, and Domenico Cirillo, the biologist, fellow of the Royal Society, and Michele Natale, bishop of Vico, and the philosopher Mario Pagano.