England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (39 page)

W
ithin two weeks of the royal family abandoning the palace, French troops invaded Naples, and Ferdinand's viceroy surrendered. The remaining citizens mostly welcomed the invaders. When the theaters staged a play that mocked the flight of the court and the English to Sicily, they prolonged the curtain calls with, as Sir William noted unhappily, "the greatest applause."
¹
Matters were not much better in Palermo. Ferdinand had found his Palazzo Ciñese far too near to the city for his liking, and he took the court on an indefinite vacation to another hunting lodge at the tiny town of Ficuzza, in the deep Corleone forest, thirty miles south of Palermo. Angered by the king's trademark governing style of absenteeism and high-handed aggression, many Sicilians were already whispering about revolution—and were ready to welcome the French when they came. Ferdinand battered the island's wildlife while his wife lay panicking in darkened rooms. "The dangers we run here are immense and real," she agonized. "Before forty days revolution will have broken here. It will be appalling and terribly violent." "The priests are completely corrupted," Emma wailed, "the people savage, the nobility more than uncertain and of questionable loyalty." She felt "quite desperate."

Only after much pressing from his wife, Nelson, the Hamiltons, and John Acton, as well as many of his courtiers, did Ferdinand stop hunting long enough to send Cardinal Ruffo, minister of war, to lead an army of Calabrians and Turks, accompanied by royalist Neapolitans, to attempt to recapture the city. By June, Ruffo had trapped most of the Neapolitan rebels and the French fighters in the city's castle. They offered their surrender on condition that they received a pardon. Ruffo and Nelson's Captain
Foote signed the agreement and congratulated themselves on restoring order with a minimum of bloodshed. On June 24, Nelson arrived on his ship, the sparkling new
Foudroyant,
recently arrived to replace the battered
Vanguard,
itching to shatter the city's uneasy calm. Fired up by the commands of the queen and the king's obsession with his divine right to rule, he decided the agreement was invalid. "Rebels and traitors," he thundered, "must instantly throw themselves on the clemency of their sovereign, for no other terms would be allowed them."

Emma had accompanied Nelson and Sir William on the boat to Naples at the request of Maria Carolina. The queen had demanded Emma write daily informing her of what was going on, and also, according to Sir William, charged her with "many important Commissions."
²
The king, queen, and John Acton demonized the rebels as evil traitors who deserved no mercy. Hamilton agreed and called the truce a "shameful capitulation." Chivvying for a "second Aboukir," Maria Carolina declared that no one could "deal tenderly with this murderous rabble." The British government had recently come down hard on insurrections in Ireland, nervous that the Irish might ally with the French, and the queen exhorted Nelson to handle Naples "as if it was a rebel city in Ireland behaving in like manner." She instructed him to "make an example of the leading representatives" with an "exact, prompt, just severity." Any female rebels should also be treated without pity.
³
Captain Foote pleaded with Acton to show mercy, but to no avail.

Convinced he was defending Europe by following the orders of the Neapolitan king and queen, and believing himself the man able to stop Jacobin fury, Nelson assumed the mantle of divine vengeance and described himself as "the happy instrument of His punishment against unbelievers."
⁴
The city exploded into violence once more. Royalist mobs, operating with unofficial sanction, roamed the streets, beating and burning suspected republicans. Officers arrested anyone who held a position in the Republic. Middle-class and poor men and women alike were sentenced to death, and about a hundred were executed. Among the rebels apprehended was Caracciolo, admiral to the royal family and old friend of the Hamiltons. Intent on showing that not even the most elevated Neapolitans could escape punishment, the court, assembled on Nelson's ship, sentenced him to death by hanging. Nelson refused Caracciolo's plea for execution by gunfire—the customary mode of death for a commander— and also his request for time to prepare. He commanded that the admiral be hanged the same day from the fore yardarm of his own ship,
La Minerva.
His body would remain there until sunset and then be thrown into the sea.

The crowds were already waiting on the shore by the ship to hear Caracciolo's sentence. When it was announced, there were hysterical cheers, while those sympathetic to him slunk away, too fearful of arrest to express their horror. Waiting in the
Foudroyant,
Caracciolo knew he would be hung in front of a jeering crowd and then left to be circled by the seagulls. Like most Catholics, he believed that without a proper confession, ceremony, and grave, he would not reach heaven. He begged for a moment apart from a guard to pray, but he was roughly refused. It was midday. All he could do was wait for the frame to be readied on the
Minerva.

The Neapolitan sun was still hot at five o'clock. As the admiral waited to mount the block, he saw the crowds jeering on the shore. Dozens of little boats had drawn up beside the ship, spilling with spectators. Sailors hung off the rigging of the
Minerva
and the
Foudroyant,
intent on seeing his death. When the officer put the hood over his head, it was a relief to be no longer able to see.

Sir William reported that the Neapolitans greeted Caracciolo's death with "loud applause," praising "so speedy an act of justice." Others were less persuaded. To the eighteenth-century mind, the commander's code of honor had the same standing as the Geneva Convention: it guaranteed decency in war. The code was simple: treaties should be honored and officers treated with respect. After breaking the treaty with the rebels and hanging Caracciolo, Nelson had flouted it twice, and English observers were scandalized. Sexual confidence tended to make Nelson more rash (he had been imprudent in the West Indies after Fanny had agreed to marry him), and he was reckless in Naples. He applied the tactics he used in his sea battles: hunt down and destroy every enemy. To him, the treaty had always been invalid, since the king and queen had instructed Cardinal Ruffo not to settle with the rebels. Nelson was a poor politician for the same reason that he was a great fighter: he saw matters in black-and-white terms as loyalty and disloyalty, good versus evil.

Emma was seen as the queen's representative, and she was visited on the
Foudroyant
by streams of Neapolitan women proclaiming their loyalty to the throne and imploring forgiveness for supporting the rebellion.
⁵
Desperate people addressed her as
"Signara excellentissima," "Bella Milady"
and
"Excellenza,
" pressing her to use her influence over Nelson to commute sentences.
⁶
Nelson angrily complained to Mrs. Cadogan that Emma
"has her time so much taken up with excuses from Rebels, Jacobins, & Fools, that she is every day most heartily tired."
⁷
Emma, however, could do nothing for these women unless the queen felt generous, and Maria Carolina would not be swayed. She asked Emma for a detailed list of Jacobins, and pages survive where Emma added names in her own hand, including Domenico Cirillo, her old friend and physician, who was also a friend of the queen.
⁸

Like Nelson, Emma had come to believe that they would save the city by purging it. Cirillo and the others were, to her, potential murderers of the royal family, who had helped cause the death of Prince Albert and whose equivalents had killed Marie-Antoinette. Even if she had hated the idea of a purge and had begged Nelson to desist, he would not have listened to her. He always ignored questions and doubts, even from his superiors at the Admiralty, and perceived pleas for moderation—as when Fanny begged him to soften his campaign against corruption in the West Indies—as a weakness, a failure of a woman's essential duty of support and loyalty.

As the reprisals subsided, the citizens of Naples began to feel guilty. Many declared it unlikely that the rebels would have attacked again, and others were tormented by guilt, claiming they saw Caracciolo's corpse bobbing in the harbor. Nelson, however, congratulated himself for "driving the French to the devil, and in restoring peace and happiness to mankind." Maria Carolina wrote to Emma that she had "done wonders" and assured her she was "gratefully sensible of your exertions." Emma inscribed on the back of her note, "My blood if necessary shall flow for her! Emma will prove to Maria Carolina that a humble born English woman can serve her Queen with zeal and a true soul, even at the risk of her life."
⁹

When Nelson and the Hamiltons returned to Palermo, the royal family and the court showered them with gratitude for Nelson's success. They were all rather proud—Sir William boasted to his superiors that he and Nelson had restored "tranquillity to the distracted city" and placed the king and queen back on their throne.
¹⁰
"We return with a Kingdom to present my much loved Queen," Emma vaunted to Greville. The king called Emma his
"Grande Maitresse"
and the queen told her she was her deputy. They both gave her a miniature of themselves set in diamonds, the queen's inscribed
"Eterna Gratitudine"
as well as a lock of Maria Carolina's hair set in diamonds, diamond and pearl earrings, a brooch of diamonds in the shape of the queen's initials, a complete dress of finest lace, baskets of
gloves, and a selection of ornate court gowns.
¹¹
Having lost many of her own clothes in the flight from Naples, Emma welcomed her new presents, dreaming of captivating the Neapolitan court in her swaths of exotic silk, the Nile hero by her side. She was taller and more busty than the queen, so the ever-reliable Mrs. Cadogan was set to work letting down the hems and the seams.

"Emma is really the Queen's bosom friend," boasted Sir William.
¹²
Emboldened by Maria Carolina's promises of never-ending affection, Emma asked for the ultimate favor: she wanted her daughter, Emma Carew, now eighteen, appointed to the queen's house as a lady of the bedchamber. Emma assured Greville that "the Q. has promised me." She was deluded: Maria Carolina, however much she doted on Emma, would never take an illegitimate daughter of a minor English aristocrat as her lady-in-waiting.

Nelson wrote jubilantly that the king had "created me Duke of Bronte and has annexed an Estate of 3000 pounds Sterling a year, both Title and Estate at my disposal together with a magnificent diamond hiked sword."
¹³
He was thrilled with Bronte, a large estate on the western slopes of Mount Etna, the famous volcano on Sicily's eastern coast. Bronte now produces Italy's best pistachio nuts, but it was then a chilly, poverty-stricken estate, days by cart from any large town and cut off by terrible roads. Thanks to years of chronic underinvestment by Ferdinand, the tenants lived miserably and the buildings were collapsing. The yield was nearer £30 than £3,000. Bronte needed a tough estate manager, experienced in agriculture, fluent in Sicilian, ready to rebuild every building and replant every field. Nelson, however, with no time to undertake the lengthy visit to Bronte, believed Ferdinand's claims that the estate was in perfect condition and sent the hypersensitive landscape gardener, John Graefer, to "turn the grounds into a beautiful garden fit for a great gentleman." If Ferdinand's gift was a joke, since the original Bronte was, in Greek myth, a one-eyed Cyclops, Nelson, like every member of the court, was accustomed to Ferdinand's puerile sense of humor. Deeply satisfied with the gift, he saw it as compensation for the refusal of the English government to make him a viscount, and for the rest of his life he signed himself "Nelson & Bronte."

The court celebrated the end of the rebellion at a giant party at the Palazzo Ciñese. Maria Carolina commissioned three life-size waxworks of Emma, Sir William, and Nelson as the centerpieces. The Emma statue wore a purple gown embroidered with the names of the captains of the Nile. Bewitching
lamps were strung all across the palace gardens, exotic ices were arranged in fabulous sculptures, and guests feasted on exquisite sweetmeats and downed decanters of fine alcohol. The grateful, happy court danced in their most sumptuous outfits and marveled at a lavish fireworks display imitating the Battle of the Nile, which ended with the blasting of a tricolor into red, white, and blue sparks. When Ferdinand's youngest son, nine-year-old Prince Leopold, crowned Nelson's statue with a laurel wreath covered in diamonds, Nelson burst into tears, believing that he had finally found a court to truly appreciate him. His body had paid the price for his victories: he was now minus his top teeth, and his remaining eye was filming over, but at moments like this, the sacrifice seemed worth it. He made sure to send glowing accounts of the party to the
Times
in England.