One of the courtiers who had fled with the king and queen to Palermo was Prince Caraccioli, Nelson's close friend and Lady Hamilton's bitter enemy. Caraccioli asked leave to go back to Naples to look after his endangered property. As soon as he reached the city, he threw in his lot with the rebels and was made admiral of their navy.
Presently, by the aid of England's fleet, the royal family returned. The rebellion was put down, and the king and queen were once more seated firmly on their thrones. The rebel leaders were seized and brought to trial. Nelson is said to have promised immunity to Caraccioli if he would surrender. Relying on his friend's pledge, Caraccioli surrendered. At Emma's request Nelson had the overtrustful man hanged from the yardarm of his own flagship.
This is the darkest smear on Nelson's character, a smear that even his most blatant admirers have never been able to wipe away. It is not in keeping with anything else in his life. But by this time he belonged to Lady Hamilton, body and soul.
She, by the way, had managed to acquire from her friend, the Queen of Naples, a nice tendency toward blood-thirstiness; as witness the following sweet anecdote by Pryne Lockhart Gordon, who tells of dining with the Hamiltons at Palermo, in company with a Turkish officer:
In the course of conversation, the officer boasted that with the sword he wore he had put to death a number of French prisoners. "Look," he said, "there is their blood remaining on it." When the speech was translated to her, Lady Hamilton's eyes beamed with delight. "Oh, let me see the sword that did the glorious deed!" she exclaimed. Taking the sword in her hands, which were covered with jewels, she looked at it, then kissed the incrusted blood on the blade, and passed it on to Nelson. Only one who was a witness to the spectacle can imagine how disgusting it was.
Enshrined once more at Naples, hailed as savior of the realm, acclaimed for her share in the Nile victory, the confidante of royalty—it would be pleasant to say good-by here to Emma Lyon, ex-nursemaid, ex-barmaid, ex-lady's maid, nameless offspring of a Lancashire inn slavey. It was the climax of a wonderful life. But there was anticlimax aplenty to follow.
Nelson went home to England to receive the plaudits of his fellow countrymen and to settle accounts with his wife. Home, too, came the Hamiltons, Sir William having been recalled.
Lady Nelson was not at the dock to meet her hero husband. Bad news traveled fast, even before we boosted it along by wire and then by wireless. Lady Nelson had heard. And Lady Nelson was waiting at home. Thither, blithely enough, fared the man in whose praise a million Englishmen were cheering themselves hoarse—and in whose silver-buckled shoes perhaps no married Englishman would just then have cared or dared to stand. But Nelson was a hero. He went home.
I once had a collie puppy that had never chanced to be at close quarters with a cat. I was privileged to see him when he made his first gleefully fearless attack upon one, ignorant of the potential anguish tucked away behind a feline's velvety paws. Somehow—with no disrespect to a great man—I always think of that poor, about-to-be-disillusioned puppy when I try to visualize the picture of Nelson's home-coming.
Just what happened no one knows. But whatever it was, it did not teach Nelson the wisdom of husbandly reticence. For, a few weeks later, he remarked at breakfast: