The attitudes of Lady Hamilton

GEORGE SEDDON

When Emma, Lady Hamilton, died at Calais in 1815, in poverty and exile, with little remaining to her of a once unparalleled beauty, few of her compatriots dropped a tear. On the contrary. A little cloud of rumor, gossip, and bawdry settled for a moment, like a swarm of flies, around her unfortunate corpse. Then there was silence. And silence, in the opinion of the British public, which has never been partial to unsuccessful sinners, was the fitting reward for a notorious life.

But history has frequently proved itself less moral than the British public. It has a habit of neglecting the lives of the virtuous altogether; while to sinners, particularly if they are feminine sinners, it offers at times an unpredictable attention. Lady Hamilton has survived in biography and drama; she flutters through the foot-notes of formidable tomes: and at last she has attained a status only second to that of Maintenon and Pompadour.

She was, indeed, a very notorious woman. But history is not flagrant, and it does not preserve the memories of women simply because they were notorious. Why, then, has Lady Hamilton survived? Was it because her beauty has been enshrined in more than forty portraits by George Romney? Or was it because she was the mistress of Lord Nelson, that remarkable hero? But Romney painted other beautiful women, and most remarkable heroes have provided themselves with mistresses. Perhaps there was some other quality in Emma Hamilton which has effectually defied both time and morality. Could she have been, not simply a lovely and notorious woman, but something infinitely more important and more perilous—aTypical Woman? It might be interesting to inquire.

For the greater part of her career she seems to have been preoccupied with two very feminine desires—to be good, and to please. Had she been born in the twentieth century, she might have achieved both these desires without coming to grief. Unfortunately, she was born in 1765. More unfortunately still, she was the daughter of a blacksmith; and—most unfortunate of all —she was exceedingly beautiful. The eighteenth century may have possessed many admirable qualities; but it was never very kind to beautiful girls, if they happened to be poor and anxious to please. When Emma Lyon became, at the age of fifteen, a housemaid in London, her fate was already sealed: at the age of sixteen she was the mistress—the curiously innocent mistress, so his friends declared—of an orgiastic gentleman called Sir Harry Fetherstonehaugh, who was good enough not to desert her until it became pretty plain that she was going to bear him a child.

Her next protector was Charles Greville, a younger son of the Earl of Warwick. With characteristic caution, he waited until Emma's baby was born and provided with foster-parents before he invited her to share the somewhat meagre comforts of his little house in the Edgware Road. Emma thankfully changed her name, becoming a Mrs. Hart. She also changed her character. If Sir Harry had required a certain flamboyance from her, Mr. Greville, she perceived, wanted exactly the reverse.

There was nothing in Charles Greville which could occasion one, in retrospect, any rapture. He was a prig, and a prig in a very eighteenth-century manner. That is to say, while he saw no harm in keeping a mistress, as a gentleman should, he was determined that his mistress should be a pattern of propriety and education. Emma was willing. Here was a man whom she could actually please by being virtuous; and though he could never teach her to spell (she never did learn to spell), in other respects she did him no discredit.

If posterity has any reason to remember Greville, it is for his introduction of Emma to the painter, George Romney. Her hours in the Romney studio were, beyond doubt, the most sensational of her whole career. It was not merely the fact that she was beautiful; that she had auburn hair, and sapphire eyes, and a spectacular figure: it was her capacity for being a model which takes one's breath away, as it took George Romney's breath away, more than a hundred years ago. He had merely to suggest a character, and she became it. She could be Circe and Cassandra and Ariadne; she could assume, without apparent effort, such exacting poses as "Nature", "Melancholy", and "Tragedy nursing the infant Shakespeare". It was very astonishing; it was also very revealing. For what she was in Romney's studio, she was also in life. She had one characteristic which, to a lesser degree perhaps, is the property of a great many women; she could not help representing, to each man she met, that man's secret ideal of what a woman should be. To Sir Harry she was a pagan; to Mr. Greville a prude; and to Sir William Hamilton, Greville's uncle and the Ambassador to Naples, she became—it was inevitable—the very essence of youth.

Sir William was an affable and courteous gentleman of some fifty-three summers, an age which is particularly susceptible to the charms of young women. Emma, when she met him, was just eighteen.

Whether Mr. Greville was tired of his mistress, or whether he was simply avaricious, is a question which will never be decided: but the fact remains that, in return for a settlement of his debts and a testamentary share in Sir William's estate, he agreed to hand over Emma to his uncle's keeping. The two gentlemen took a considerable time to arrive at this discreditable bargain, for the Greville debts were large and Sir William's estate not inconsiderable; it was over three years before Emma innocently set sail for Naples on what was supposed to be a "visit" to the good Ambassador.

She was still of a candid and virtuous disposition, as her letters to Greville prove: it was only to please him that she went. She arrived in May, when the orange trees were in flower. Beyond her window, on her first night beneath Sir William's roof, a red cloud waxed and waned upon Vesuvius. The rich scents of the Neapolitan springtime flooded her room. From the city below there was a continual thrumming of guitars. It was all very romantic; but Emma hid her face in the pillow, and wept for the undistinguished comforts of Edgware Road ...

When would Greville come to fetch her back? She wrote to him again and again. Sir William's behavior was really most peculiar, she said: "He does nothing but look at me & sigh". At last a brutal letter from Greville convinced her that she had nothing more to expect of him, that she was just part of a cynical bargain, that Sir William's looks and sighs were the symptoms to be expected from a gentleman who desired some interest on his money. She saw that there was no choice left her, and she yielded. She had been in Naples just six months.

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On this and the opposite page are four portraits of Lady Hamilton by Romney: two canvases of her head, and two of one of her favorite poses—as a Bacchante

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Within the next five years an extraordinary change was to come over Emma. She still retained some vestiges of her humble origin—a certain thickness in the accent, an occasional mistake in manners; but month by month she came more and more to resemble what Sir William, in his secret heart, wished her to be—not an Ambassador's young mistress, but his young wife. She was unaffectedly good-natured, she was gay, abundant, beautiful; she was not a wit, but witty men enjoyed her company. As for her chastity—she was never unfaithful to the ageing Hamilton—it became really famous. And when, on their first visit to England in 1791, Sir William and Emma became man and wife, no one but the Hamilton family and Mr. Greville affected any surprise.

Back in Naples, Emma very soon found herself a place at Court. Not an official place, of course; she could not be received as Ambassador's wife, for George III of England had not seen fit to recognize her. But she could be received as Lady Hamilton, a woman who—to use her own words—had "had her innocence restored". And did not the garrulous, excitable, unpopular Queen Maria Carolina very obviously need a confidante? A confidante, therefore, is what Emma Hamilton became.

In the corrupt and colorful Neapolitan society, she blossomed like a rose; scarcely a dinner party or reception was considered successful unless she could be prevailed upon to give her "Attitudes", when, dressed in a simple Grecian robe, with just two shawls to assist her, she became successively all the leading heroines of literature and mythology. Her postures were so unaffected, so graceful, that the ladies broke into genuine applause. As for the gentlemen, they were extremely envious of Sir William's private life: "If I were he," said Comte d'Espinchal, "I would pass in review all the goddesses of Olympus."

In 1793, with the French Revolution an accomplished fact, an English fleet descended upon the Mediterranean; Toulon was captured; and a Captain Horatio Nelson, of H. M. S. Agamemnon, was sent to Naples to arrange for a garrison. He came and went, hardly noticed by Emma. "Lady Hamilton is a young woman of amiable manners" was all he wrote to his wife.

And then, five years later, Nelson reappeared in the Mediterranean. But this time he was preceded by an enviable renown. He was not merely an Admiral; not merely a brilliant strategist; not merely a fighter with a cool brain and a fiery heart: he was a portent. Against the rising star of Napoleon his star alone stood in opposition, brilliant and unpredictable.

His fleet put in at Naples for victuals and water. Would King Ferdinand brave the wrath of France and provide them? For a little while, everything was in doubt. Was it the Queen's influence which turned the king to the cause of England—her influence, backed by the impassioned pleas of the patriotic Emma Hamilton, kneeling in a tragic Attitude? Emma herself was

in no doubt. When the fleet sailed, victualled and watered, she felt that she alone was responsible. She had not seen Nelson, but her choicest prayers, and one or two of her most explosive epistles, followed him as he sailed towards Egypt, to win a smashing, a phenomenal victory at the Battle of the Nile.

No one received this news with more spirit than did Lady Hamilton. "My dress from head to foot is alia Nelson." she wrote; and it was true. Swathed in blue silk, rather too liberally printed with gold anchors, she waited, day after impatient day, for the victorious fleet to limp back into Naples. At last, on September 22, the flag-ship Vanguard was seen at the harbor mouth. The King, Sir William, Lady Hamilton were hurriedly rowed alongside; and "tip flew her ladyship," wrote the Admiral to his wife, "and exclaiming '0, God, is it possible?' she fell into my arms, more dead than alive."

What Lady Hamilton saw, before she fainted in his arms, was a livid little man, with one eye and one arm. But what did Nelson see? The question is, perhaps, what at that particular moment in his career did he want to see? He was the son of a clergyman, and the husband of an unenterprising wife: he was also a hero. And he was in search of a heroine.

Emma Hamilton was, after all, simply a rather extreme example of a very ordinary type of woman. She had scarcely recovered from her faint, you might say, before she assumed the most difficult, the most spectacular of all her Attitudes. Before the eyes of Nelson she became a heroine—the kind of heroine who would specially appeal to a married hero with religious scruples. She was simultaneously all respectability and all paganism, all purity and all seduction: it was a very difficult Attitude, and one can hardly blame her if it proved the ruin of her.

From then onwards. Nelson thought of no other woman. It was she, they said, who jockeyed him into supporting Naples in a ludicrously unsuccessful war against France. It was she who, for the next two years, altogether shrouded him in a fog of flattery. The royal family, driven from Naples in December, 1798, settled in Palermo; the Hamiltons were with them, of course, and so was Nelson. He had forgotten his duties as Commander-inChief in the Mediterranean, forgotten his fighting spirit, forgotten the admonitions of the Admiralty and the plaudits of his countrymen.

He was superseded in his command. Still disobeying orders, he permitted Napoleon to escape, in a frigate, from Egypt—from which it might be argued that the fate of Europe was decided by the heauty of an English blacksmith's daughter. It was only when Sir William. grown senile, was recalled to England, that Nelson applied for leave, on the plea of sickness. On their homeward journey through Europe, Emma at last became his mistress.

The rest of the story need not be lingered over. London accepted him, but not her. The unhappy Lady Nelson, broken-hearted, disappeared from the scene. When Nelson, filled with a new energy, sailed off to win the Battle of Copenhagen, Emma bore him a secret child—Horatia "Thomson". Sir William still pretended that there was nothing between his wife and her lover; he was too old and too indifferent to see the dreadful change which had overtaken Emma—the sudden change which follows a spiritual disintegration—how fat she had become, how sadly addicted to champagne and Faro—how, in fact, her last and most difficult Attitude having failed her, she was rapidly running to seed.

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But it cannot be said that Nelson noticed these defects, either. The three of them set up house together at Merton, where Sir William died: "unhappy day," she wrote—it was April 6, 1803—"unhappy day for the forlorn Emma." Most of his estate was seized by Greville; the rest was drowned in the ocean of her debts. Two years later, Nelson himself was killed at Trafalgar, recommending her in his will to the care of his country (which paid not the slightest attention), and leaving her £4000 in trust for their daughter.

Fat, coarsened, extravagant, Emma lingered on for twelve years. Sometimes her old spirits re-asserted themselves; and in friendly drawing-rooms she might still, occasionally, be prevailed upon to give her Attitudes. But they had lost their magic. At last she was forced across the Channel to die— in January, 1815—in miserable lodgings in Calais.

What had Nelson said to her, just before Trafalgar? "Brave Emma, good Emma. If there were more Emmas, there would be more Nelsons." Perhaps this was true. But then one remembers that last, that heroic, that fatal Attitude; one remembers the cards and the drink and the debts; and the garret in Calais. And then one wonders if the reverse is not the case; if it is not the Nelsons of this world, after all, who create the Emmas.