Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (7 page)

A belated answer arrived at last; Emma was very grateful. But this was not the letter for which she looked. What she wanted was omniscience's permission for " little Emma " to share their home, to let her be a mother indeed. After a week two " scolding " notes were his reply. " Little Emma " in Edg-ware Row was not on Greville's books at all. He would charge himself with her nurture elsewhere, but the child must be surrendered; he certainly knew how to " play" his " trout." Emma meekly kissed her master's rod. Greville being Providence, resignation was wisdom as well as duty. She was not allowed to remain a mother:—

" I was very happy, my dearest Greville, to hear from you as your other letter vex'd me; you scolded me so. But it is over, and I forgive you. . . . You don't know, my dearest Greville, what a pleasure I have to think that my poor Emma will be comfortable and happy . . . and if she does but turn out well,

EMMA, LADY HAMILTON $7

what a happyness it will be. And I hope she will for your sake. I will teach her to pray for you as long as she lives; and if she is not grateful and good it won't be my fault. But what you say is very true: a bad disposition may be made good by good example, and Greville wou'd not put her anywheer to have a bad one. I come into your whay athinking; hollidays spoils children. It takes there attention of[f] from there scool, it gives them a bad habbit. When they have been a month and goes back this does not pleas them, and that is not wright, and the[y] do nothing but think when the[y] shall go back again. Now Emma will never expect what she never had. But I won't think. All my happiness now is Greville, and to think that he loves me. ... I have said all I have to say about Emma, yet only she gives her duty. ... I have no society with anybody but the mistress of the house, and her mother and sister. The latter is a very genteel yong lady, good-nattured, and does everything to pleas me. But still I wou'd rather be at home, if you was there. I follow the old saying, home is home though 'tis ever so homely. . . . PS. —. . . I bathe Emma, and she is very well and grows. Her hair will grow very well on her forehead, and I don't think her nose will be very snub. Her eys is blue and pretty. But she don't speak through her nose, but she speaks countryfied, but she will forget it. We squable sometimes; still she is fond of me, and endead I love her. For she is sensible. So much for Beauty. Adue, I long to see you." *

Empowered by the Sultan of Edgware Row, the two Emmas, to their great but fleeting joy, were suf-

1 Morrison MS. 128. There is, of course, no conclusive evidence for identifying " little Emma" with the nameless child born early in 1782, but I can see no reason otherwise, or for supposing an earlier " Emma."

fered to return in the middle of July. Sir William and his nephew were still on their provincial tour, when Emma, who fell ill again in town, thus addressed him for the last time before his own return. It shall be our closing excerpt:—

" I received your kind letter last night, and, my dearest Greville, I want words to express to you how happy it made me. For I thought I was like a lost sheep, and everybody had forsook me. I was eight days confined to my room and very ill, but am, thank God, very well now, and a great deal better for your kind instructing letter, and own the justice of your remarks. You shall have your appartment to yourself, you shall read, wright, or sett still, just as you pleas; for I shall think myself happy to be under the seam roof with Greville, and do all I can to make it agreable, without disturbing him in any pursuits that he can follow, to employ himself in at home or else whare. For your absence has taught me that I ought to think myself happy if I was within a mile of you; so as I cou'd see the place as contained you I shou'd think myself happy abbove my sphear. So, my dear G., come home. . . . You shall find me good, kind, gentle, and affectionate, and everything you wish me to do I will do. For I will give myself a fair trial, and follow your advice, for I allways think it wright. . . . .Don't think, Greville, this is the wild fancy of a moment's consideration. It is not. I have thoughroly considered everything in my confinement, and say nothing now but what I sliall practice. ... I have a deal to say to you when I see you. Oh, Greville, to think it is 9 weeks since I saw you. I think I shall die with the pleasure of seeing you. ... I am all ways thinking of your goodness. . . . Emma is very well, and is allways wondering why you don't come home. She sends her duty to you. . . . Pray, pray come as soon as you

come to town. Good by, God bless you! Oh, how I long to see you."

It should be at once remarked that Greville conscientiously performed his promise. He put " little Emma " to a good school, and several traces of her future survive. Meanwhile, having won his point, and having also " prepared " her mind for another separation, of which she little dreamed, he came back to his bower of thankful worship and submissive meekness. He can scarcely have played often with the child, whose benefactor he was—a dancing-master, so to speak, of beneficence, ever standing in the first position of correct deportment. In August he bade farewell to his indulgent uncle, whom, indeed, he had " reason " to remember with as much " gratitude and affection " as Emma did. Romney was commissioned to paint her as the " Bacchante " for the returning Ambassador, who had reassured his nephew about the distant future. He had appointed him his heir, and offered to stand security if he needed to borrow. He had also joined Greville's other friends in advising him to bow to the inevitable and console his purse with an heiress. Whether he also had already contemplated an exchange seems more than doubtful. But the secretive Greville had already begun to harbour an idea, soon turned into a plan, and perpetually justified as a piece of benevolent unselfishness. While the ship bears the unwedded uncle to softer climes and laxer standards, while Greville, with a sigh of relief,, pores over his accounts, we may well exclaim of these two knowing and obliging materialists, par nobile fratrum — a noble brace of brothers indeed!

CHAPTER III

" WHAT GOD, AND GREVILLE, PLEASES "

To March, 1786

*'"¥" REALY do not feel myself in a situation to accept favours." " I depend on you for some

-*• cristals in lavas, etc., from Sicily." These sentences from two long epistles to his uncle at the close of 1784 are keynotes to Greville's tune of mind. With the new year he became rather more explicit:—• " Emma is very grateful for your remembrance. Her picture shall be sent by the first ship—I wish Romney yet to mend the dog. 1 She certainly is much improved since she has been with me. She has none of the bad habits which giddiness and inexperience encouraged, and which bad choice of company introduced. ... I am sure she is attached to me, or she would not have refused the offers which I know have been great; and such is her spirit that on the least slight or expression of my being tired or burthened by her, I am sure she would not only give up the connexion, but would not even accept a farthing for future assistance."

Here let us pause a moment. In the " honest bargain " shortly to be struck after much obliquity, Greville's shabbiness consists, if we reflect on the prevailing tone of his age and set, not so much in the disguised transfer—a mean trick in itself—as in the fact

1 In the first picture of the " Bacchante." Some trace of a goat as well as of a dog figures in all the known versions.

that, while he had no reproach to make and was avowedly more attached to her than ever, he practised upon the very disinterestedness and fondness that he praised. Had he been unable to rely on them with absolute confidence, so wary a strategist would scarcely have ventured on the attempt, since his future prospects largely depended on her never disadvantaging him with Sir William. That she never did so, even in the first burst of bitter disillusion; that she always, and zealously, advocated his interests, redounds to her credit and proves her magnanimity. A revengeful woman, whose love and self-love had been wounded to the quick, might have ruined him, as the censor of Paddington was well aware. That he continued to approve his part in these delicate negotiations is shown by the fact of preserving these letters after they came into his possession as his uncle's executor. He never ceased to protest that his motives in the transaction were for her own ultimate good. He was not callous, but he was Jesuitical. Let him pursue his scattered hints further:—

" This is another part of my situation. If I was independent I should think so little of any other connexion that I never would marry. I have not an idea of it at present, but if any proper opportunity offer'd I shou'd be much harassed, not know how to manage, or how to fix Emma to her satisfaction; and to forego the reasonable plan which you and my friends advised is not right. I am not quite of an age to retire from bustle, and to retire into distress and poverty is worse. I can keep on here creditably this winter. The offer I made of my pictures is to get rid of the Humberston engagements which I told you of. I have a £1000 ready and 1000 to provide. I therefore am making money. If Ross will take in payment from me my bond with your security, I shall get free from Humberston affairs entirely, and be able to give them

up. It is indifferent to me whether what I value is in your keeping or mine. I will deposit with you gems which you shall value at above that sum. ... It will be on that condition I will involve you, for favor I take as favor, and business as business."

His subsequent communications dole out the growing plot by degrees and approaches; he works by sap and mine. In March, 1785, after discussing politics at large, he doubts if his uncle's " heart or his feet " are " the lightest." He compliments him on his energy in sport, flirtation, and friendship—" quests " not " incompatible " in " a good heart." He moots his design in the light of Hamilton's welfare. " He must be a very interested friend indeed who does not sincerely wish everything that can give happiness to a friend." He is convinced that each of them can sincerely judge for the other. He does not, of course, venture to " suppose " an " experiment " for the diplomatist; but he himself has made the happiest though a " limited " experiment, which, however, " from poverty . . . cannot last"; his poverty but not his will consents. And then he opens the scheme. " If you did not chuse a wife, I wish the tea-maker of Edgware Rowe was yours, if I could without banishing myself from a visit to Naples. I do not know how to part with what I am not tired with. I do not know how to go on, and I give her every merit of prudence and moderation and affection. She shall never ^vant, and if I decide sooner than I am forced to stop by necessity, it will be that I may give her part of my pittance; and, if I do so it must be by sudden resolution and by putting it out of her power to refuse it for I know her disinterestedness to be such that she will rather encounter any difficulty than distress me. I should not write to you thus, if I did not think you seem'd as partial as I am to her. She would not hear at once of any change, and from no

one that was not liked by her. I think I could secure on her near £100 a year. It is more than in justice to all I can do; but with parting with part of my virtu, I can secure it to her and content myself with the remainder. I think you might settle another on her. ... I am not a dog in the manger. If I could go on I would never make this arrangement, but to be reduced to a standstill and involve myself in distress further than I could extricate myself, and then to be unable to provide for her at all, would make me miserable from thinking myself unjust to her. And as she is too young and handsome to retire into a convent or the country, and is honorable and honest and can be trusted, after reconciling myself to the necessity I consider where she could be happy. I know you thought me jealous of your attention to her; I can assure you her conduct entitles her more than ever to my confidence. Judge, then, as you know my satisfaction in looking on a modern piece of virtu, if I do not think you a second self, in thinking that by placing her within your reach, I render a necessity which would otherwise be heartbreaking tolerable and even comforting."

Havdng prepared the ground, he wrote again in the following May, " without affectation or disguise." Delicacy had prevented him from writing about " Lady C [raven] " who, Hamilton's friends were glad to learn, had departed. Would not all of them prefer one like Emma? The " odds " in their own two lives were not " proportioned to the difference " of their years; he was very " sensible " of his uncle's intentions towards him. At what followed Sir William must have smiled.

The real reason for all his fencing emerges. Sir William's joint security on the pledge of half his minerals, the assurance that he was made his heir, were mere credentials to be shown by Greville to a

prospective father-in-law. " Suppose a lady of 30,000 was to marry me," and so forth—a vista of married fortune. Even now the name of the lady thus honoured was withheld; but Hamilton must have known it perfectly: ". . . If you dislike my frankness, I shall be sorry, for it cost me a little to throw myself so open, and to no one's friendship could I have trusted myself but to yours, from which I have ever been treated with indulgence and preference."

A month more and he disclosed a positive, if " distant and imperfect," prospect. Lord Middleton's youngest daughter was the favoured lady—in the " requisites of beauty and disposition," " beyond the mark for a younger brother." The die was cast; he penned a formal proposal to her father. It may be gathered that the lady rejected him; Greville certainly never married. Often and often he must have wished his poor and unfashionable Emma back again, when she was poor and unfashionable no longer: his amour propre had been hurt, and, till he became vice-chamberlain in 1794, to Lady Hamilton's genuine pleasure, 1 his fortunes drooped.

Greville's tentatives were now at an end. At length he laid a plain outline before Sir William:—" If you

1 Cf. her letter of congratulation (Sept. 16, 1794), Morrison MS. 246, in answer to his letter of August 18 announcing his good fortune and claiming the approbation of such friends as herself, as the best reward for one who plumes himself on friendship [Nelson Letters (1814), vol. i. p. 265]: "I should not flatter myself so far," he writes, "if I was not very sincerely interested in }-our happiness and ever affectionately yours." " I congratulate you," she answers, " with all my heart on your appointment. . . . You have well merited it; and all your friends must be happy at a change so favourable not only for your pecuniary circumstances, as for the honner of the situation. May you long enjoy it with every happiness that you deserve! I speak from my heart. I don't know a better, hon-ester, or more amiable and worthy man than yourself; and if is a great deal for me to say this, for, whatever I think, I am not apt to pay compliments."