THE Immortals, the lesser gods, watch their prey at leisure and, one would say, with ironic amusement. The angels may weep but it is certain they laugh.
Emma’s plans were nearing fruition, and, again granting the initial error, were they so unnatural? Her husband was gone; that chapter finally closed; and every hope for the future grew nearer and more dazzling. If any untoward fate were to remove Tom Tit, she herself would succeed her and life at Merton and in London be all her heart’s desire with Nelson and the little “adopted” Horatia, and, if Lady Nelson unkindly persisted in living, there was at the worst the sunny dukedom of Bronte in lovely Sicily; and there she knew it had long been Nelson’s wish to retire and live in peace among his own vineyards with his Santa Emma and his Horatia. The simple kindly people there would take them unquestioning. Marie Caroline could not do less than spread a protecting wing over them and life might drift away like a dream and Nelson be blessed as he never had been blessed yet. Of course, London would be her choice, with the opera singers coming and going, and the gay old Duke of Queensberry who was so much attached to her that she had even visions of a legacy there also if the friendship continued. But after all, the old Castello of Maniace in Bronte could be filled with guests, and Italy had its pleasures and—many dimly agreeable things ran through her brain in those days of freedom. She was really not pinched for money at the moment. Nelson allowed her £100 a month for the housekeeping at Merton, and with that and Sir William’s annuity she might have managed well but for—a large but—her own incorrigible extravagance and incapacity for saying no either to herself or to any one else. How could she do without a little house in London?—and there was a charming one in a charming neighbourhood, Clarges Street, out of Piccadilly. She must have that. And the expenses would be smaller at Merton because the French were at their old game and Nelson was again ordered to sea—to the Mediterranean, to Naples, where he would see her adored Marie Caroline and remind her of her Emma; for indeed it appeared as if that ungrateful Majesty were forgetting her steadily but surely. Possibly the Queen felt that her friend’s services had been well paid with £30,000 worth of diamonds and other Royal gifts and such Royal condescensions as fall to the lot of few blacksmiths’ daughters.
Yes, it all promised exceedingly well, and Emma found her widow’s cap, if so the black veil could be described, “le vrai bonnet de la liberté.”
Greville was troublesome certainly. He was cold and sharp. He no longer cared to hide his dislike and he hurried her out of the Piccadilly house in a way which any self-respecting widow would resent. Still, she remembered the past with a certain tenderness, and he had had his uses. The “little Emma,” now a young woman, had been edged off to a situation abroad without any certain knowledge as to her parentage, and was heard of no more. He might be useful also in her endless petitions to the Government for a pension as a reward for her own services in the matter of victualling the British Fleet before the Battle of the Nile. But that unfortunately fell flat. There was a prejudice against her in high places which she could never understand. Against Nelson also, though he was the darling of the people—who had alas! no pensions to bestow. But he would win fresh honours, prize money, rewards, in this commission and then all would be well.
His love letters were always as passionate as the first he had ever written her. He would scarcely allow himself any recreation ashore in the lovely Mediterranean lands lest she should be jealous of the dark-eyed signoras. She had no anxieties there. Indeed, she might enjoy herself in perfect security in London with old Q. (as they called him) and his revellers, and Emma was the first and gayest of them all. She had her admirers, and Nelson wrote, with a jest which stings a little:
“Never mind the great Bashaw at the Priory. He be damned! If he was single and had a mind to marry you he could only make you a Marchioness but, as he is situated and I situated, I can make you a Duchess, and, if it pleases God, that time may arrive—Amen, Amen!”
An odd invocation, but cheering to Emma.
In the January of that year Nelson’s second daughter was born—another “little Emma,” for, all unknowing of the first, that name commended itself to him. Her life, however, was brief, and the charming mother resumed her gaieties untrammelled. With this, and the threatening of blindness, he had enough to trouble him on his apparently hopeless quest of the French Fleet, and never was his triumphant greatness in public affairs better shown than in that long and dogged patience. He never went ashore from June, 1803, until July, 1805. All his thoughts were concentrated on Emma and on the French Fleet, and in truth they meant the same thing for without the conquest of the one he could not hope to see the other, so firmly were the country’s eyes fixed on him. It is a relief to turn from that hectic life of Emma’s, with its noisy assumption and petty cruelties to the deserted wife, to the pure austerity of his life on the high seas. Gradually, the man was escaping from her clutch, resolving, as a cloud does in approaching the sun, into pure glory. There is a clear wind blowing now, the wind of the great oceans and the noble deeds of men. Who can read the account of that long passionate hope-deferred chase without a pang of sympathy? Let us turn to it.
I who write have heard the tale of it as a child from an old, old man of my own blood, who was serving as a young midshipman in the gallant Captain Parker’s Amazon—Parker, a nephew of the great Lord St. Vincent, Nelson’s teacher and friend. Who could forget that gallant story who has heard it from the lips of one who shared it all? Nelson, misled by a false report that Villeneuve, the French Admiral, was about to attack the West Indies, made what speed he might for the Gulf of Para. Ten sail of the line pursuing eighteen. At Barbados he was reinforced by two line of battleships, and thence made what speed he could for Trinidad.
Reaching the Gulf of Para, he summoned his captains on board the Victory, and my relative accompanied Captain Parker as midshipman of his boat, carrying some official papers with them with which he followed him to the poop. The officers gathered about Nelson, and pointing in the direction of the island, he said:
“The French Fleet is probably there. They have eighteen sail of the line. The Victory will take three. Canopus, Spartiate and Belleisle will take two each, and the rest of you, one apiece. Now, gentlemen, the fleets are equal.”
Yet this was no foolhardiness in spite of its gallantry, for, ship for ship, Nelson’s fleet was more equal to Villeneuve’s than the one which he commanded at the Nile had been to that of Bruey’s. There was the flash in Nelson, but there was also the thunder to back it. That must never be forgotten.
And later, off Toulon, came the same Parker’s famous dash for Lisbon in the Amazon, under Nelson’s orders to avoid Sir John Orde, the Admiral, who, according to the Nelsonic notion, was robbing him of his frigates and too jealously guarding the bounds of his own station to the west. Parker was to avoid his ships like the devil!
“And if it comes to a court martial,” says Nelson with humour in his face, “you shall not be broke though Sir John Orde is my senior officer. I will stand by you. Take your orders and good-bye. And remember, Parker, if you can’t weather that fellow, I shall think you have not a drop of your old uncle’s blood in your veins!”
Off and away went Parker burning with zeal, and as he passed Spartel, lo and behold Sir John Orde’s squadron taking it easy in the moonlight! Parker might have slipped past, but, alas, an outlying frigate, lynx-eyed, commanded by “little good Captain Hoste,” who had borne Nelson’s despatches to Naples after the Battle of the Nile, caught sight of the Amazon lying low and gave chase and had the heels of her. Aboard came Hoste, brimming with Orde’s jealous orders that no ship should proceed to the westward. Parker buttonholed him in his cabin.
“Captain Hoste, I believe you owe all your advancement in the service to my uncle Lord St. Vincent and to Lord Nelson. I am avoiding Sir John Orde’s squadron by desire of Lord Nelson. I must go on.”
Hoste stood dumb and doubting. Parker, being his senior, he could not delay him on his own authority, and with Nelson behind him—! Parker saw the doubt and continued: “After all, would it not be better if you were not to meet the Amazon to-night, Captain Hoste?” Silence. Hoste went quietly over the side and back to his own ship in the moonlight. He had not met the Amazon. Mahan tells this story finely, but it is something to have heard of the Villeneuve chase from a man who took part in it.
It would be a gallant tale to write the incidents of that long cruise with its seemingly unsuccessful ending. Yet not unsuccessful, for it prepared and paved the way for the struggle of giants to follow, and the English people knew it and hailed him as the conqueror he was when he returned for his brief three weeks’ respite to England before the last and greatest struggle of Trafalgar.
Portsmouth, London, surged about him. What did Lady Hamilton or anything matter where their hero, their darling, was concerned?
“I met Nelson in a mob at Piccadilly!” said Minto, “and got hold of his arm, so that I was mobbed too. It is really quite affecting to see the wonder and admiration and love and respect of the whole world. It is beyond anything represented in a play or in a poem of fame.”
Beyond everything. The instinct was true, was right. Because he had not the evil skill to hide that one fall in his great life as a wickeder man would have done with easy hypocrisy, was he—their Nelson—to be scorned? God forbid, they thought and said. But, oh—but, oh, that it had been for a worthier woman! The inadequacy of the divinity to the sacrifice is what breaks the heart in this story. Yet be she what she might, one is glad to remember that those three weeks at Merton were happy. His old father had gone to his reward, but the rest of the family clustered about him, his little Horatia there and Emma radiating sunshine. Even Minto, who could not abide her, owns that. “She is a clever being after all; the passion is as hot as ever.” Yes, and a driving force that neither Minto nor any other could estimate—a passion to be justified before earth and Heaven.
He knew that any moment might part them—he savoured every instant as its sweetness touched his lips. And yet, almost before it seemed possible, the call came. Could he, the beloved and trusted of the whole nation, hesitate, when it was known that the French Fleet had been seen off Cadiz? Not he. Emma was swooning and weeping all over the dinner table, according to Minto. Nelson’s passion was burning in a clear white flame that admitted of no outward expression of emotion. His farewell to her no human eye saw, but by the little Horatia’s bed he knelt and prayed while she slept. She it was who sanctified that bond to him—God’s blessing made visible in a little child.
Death was approaching and he knew it, and in the solemn twilight of that great presence all his feelings took on a majesty far removed from the tumult of days not long gone by. He wrote in his intimate journal:
“At 10.30 drove from dear, dear Merton where I left all which I hold dear in this world to go and serve my King and country. May the great God whom I adore enable me to fulfil the expectations of my country; and if it is His good pleasure that I should return, my thanks will never cease being offered up to the Throne of His Mercy. If it is His good Providence to cut short my days upon earth, I bow with the greatest submission, relying that Pie will protect those so dear to me that I may leave behind. His will be done.” He closed with a triple Amen.
So Emma, leaning from the window, choked with sobs, saw the night enfold him in its darkness. He was but forty-seven—so much before him yet! So much to hope and to do. In that moment surely nothing was left of her but what was purely womanly, though her easy tears dried soon.
He joined the Victory elate but calm. The Admiralty, realizing the battle of the giants to be, had invited him to name his own officers. What! And cast a slur on those he might not choose? That would not be Nelson? He replied:
“Choose yourselves, my Lords. The same spirit actuates the whole profession. You cannot choose wrong.” Nor could they. He and the nation alike owned it. The Fleet owned it. They knew who led them, and when the signal flew from masthead to masthead from the watchful inshore frigates to Nelson fifty miles at sea off Spartel, “The enemy are coming out of port,” there was not a heart but beat steadily with a calm confidence in the man set over them not only by the Admiralty but by the Almighty.
Once more and for the last time Nelson confronted Napoleon in the person of his combined fleets of France and Spain.
The story of Trafalgar is not one for the pen of a romancer, for the more simply the stern and glorious truth is told, the more it raises the human imagination to its own great heights. Yet certain pictures arise and wring the soul with their humanity. And these may be spoken of, for the feet of the true Romance tread near indeed to God.
Nelson, writing the famous codicil to his will in which he committed Emma and his child as a sacred trust to the nation, causing its attestation by the signatures of his two old friends Blackwood and Hardy, and setting beneath this the solemn sentence, “In sight of the combined fleets of France and Spain, distant about ten miles.”
Nelson watching the removal of the bulkheads of his cabin for action and, as they displaced her picture, bidding them: “Take care of my guardian angel.”
An officer, hastening to speak to him with a petition for a post of danger and glory, but halting, seeing the Admiral on his knees in the dismantled cabin, writing—his last words, his last prayer—and withdrawing in a reverence that would not break his solemn communion.
“May the great God whom I worship grant to my country and for the benefit of Europe in general a great and glorious victory and may no misconduct in any one tarnish it, and may humanity after victory be the predominant feature in the British Fleet. For myself individually I commit my life to Him who made me, and may His blessing light on my endeavours for serving my country faithfully. To Him I resign myself and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend.”
And again the triple Amen. And so he went on deck.
The glorious signal of England’s certain expectation from her sons, the stately advance of the fleets into action, Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign leading, as all the ships of the three nations to be engaged chivalrously and by one impulse hoisted their flags in haughty and dignified salute. What a sight to linger forever in the world’s memory!
Then Nelson flew the signal for close action and turned to Blackwood—“Now I can do no more. We must trust to the great Disposer of Events.” Blackwood, returning to his ship, took his hand. “God bless you, Blackwood,” he said, “I shall never speak to you again.” And even as Blackwood left the Victory the first shot tore through her maintopgallant sail, and the battle was begun.
These are the pictures that rise amid the hell of flame and smoke. So, in great moments when the littleness of the vanishing world is apparent, men fling themselves on the Unseen, the Mighty, surrounding us as the unplumbed sea girdles the earth. And through these, at last, when he lay, wounded to death, Nelson attained to look upon the beginnings of peace.
War thundered about him—“Oh, Victory, Victory, how you distract my poor brain”—and yet, through the roar of the guns, a stealing quiet can be discerned.
It was Victory in another sense also—triumph that he must carry with him for he could not live to taste it. Hardy, now in command, hurrying from the bloody deck, gave him the glad news of victory almost beyond hope, eventual ruin to Napoleon and safety to England. He heard it and rejoiced; then, gasping:
“Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton, Hardy. Take care of poor Lady Hamilton.”
And then, in the strange loneliness of death, like a child, the great Admiral said: “Kiss me, Hardy”—the last token of human love, vanishing, vanishing in the Eternal. And Hardy stooped and kissed him and once more took his station on deck, never again to meet his friend in life.
He was sinking rapidly now. To the chaplain: “I have not been a great sinner—” and after a short pause, “Remember. I leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter as a legacy to my country. Never forget Horatia.”
Nearer, nearer, came the end, and at last even those beloved names faded and passed from the mirror of his mind and were gone, and only the two which were one remained, and the man, bending above him to lose nothing, heard only “God and my Country,” as he passed away into the inmost of his country’s love and remembrance, and higher—higher.
After that scene and when the threads must be gathered up, it is surely impossible to write anything condemnatory or slighting of the beautiful woman whom such a man had loved. With him her romance ended, and she became a tragic triviality. Let others follow her sinking star through all its sorrowful clouding—I cannot.
For Nelson, Trafalgar was the crowning mercy, the glorious reward of a life of self-devotion scarcely to be paralleled. Had he lived, it is said that blindness must have been his fate, and perhaps a yet more cruel clear-sightedness where he might well have prayed to be blind forever, for she had been tested by her attitude to his wife and had failed—a tragic failure that must have marred all their future. But he died with his faith unbroken.
Surely his great belief uplifts her and, washing all the stains away, leaves her fair face pure beauty in our memory, as Romney, who also loved her, has given it to us forever. To whom little is given, of them shall little be required, and she had little enough in her young days when character is unalterably moulded for life.
As for judgment on him—Heaven forbid! The cruelty to his wife is patent, but not the circumstances which led up to it. Nor her compensations. It was not all loss. If she had ever envied Emma her great husband’s love, Emma had cause to envy her also.
When the day of their final separation came, this was Nelson’s last farewell to his wife: “I call God to witness there is nothing in you or your conduct I wish otherwise.” Let that be set against the bitternesses with which the other influence inspired his generous heart.
I stood by her tomb in Littleham Churchyard, Devon, not many years ago and read its proud legend: “Frances, Viscountess Nelson, Duchess of Bronte.” So she bore his name unsullied to the grave. She lived her days in peace in the family of her son, tenderly cared for by those who loved her. Here is her portrait by one who knew her well: “If mildness, forbearance and indulgence to the weaknesses of human nature could have availed her, her fate might have been very different. No reproach ever passed her lips. You should know the worth of her who has been so often misrepresented from the wish of many to cast the blame anywhere but on him who was so deservedly dear to the nation.”
Deservedly dear indeed, and most dear to her also. Many waters cannot quench love. Her grandchild remembered and recorded how she would take her husband’s miniature from a preciously treasured casket and kiss it and lay it back, and how in her low voice she would say: “You too, little Fan, may one day know what it is to have a broken heart,” with the gentle sweetness of nature that lived in the child’s memory. This lady, too, had had her battle and had conquered.
What room is there for judgment? These things are beyond us. There was gold in Emma also, with all her evil. Her devotion to her poor lowly-born old mother, unfaltering in riches and poverty, is a flower that time cannot wither, and there was the quick passion for courage and high deeds, and the generous hand in giving. England owes her a debt for the beacon fire of sympathy which lit Nelson’s way across stormy seas—a debt she never paid, but should not forget. There is a sullied splendour about the woman which makes her rememberable where women greater and better are forgotten, a warm humanity, which pleads for her eternally and must until Nelson’s own name is drifted over with the remorseless sands of time.
If it is possible to imagine some world where love in pure essence seeking its source immortal is one, it may be believed that the love of these two women, so strangely different in character and circumstances, may, at last united, heal his wounds and draw him forever to the heart of the Beautiful made manifest in each of them. For Love is eternal, and who shall judge his way in the deep waters?
THE END