A man like the Admiral, so inexhaustible in emergencies, but so prone to sink back into a low state of vitality between whiles, was more than ordinarily likely to slip into such an arrangement easily. Attending state banquets and galas was always peculiarly exhausting to him, except where he had some diplomatic problem that roused his energy, or companionship in which he delighted.
By what I knew of the Admiral I do not see that there is anything in the portion of the Journal above quoted which might not have been written by him. The sole difficulty is to account for the existence of such a journal without his trusted Will ever having seen a trace of it, in his constant personal attendance.
Chapter XI.—How the Admiral entered the maze of Neapolitan Politics.
MARIA CAROLINA, Queen of Naples, was more of a man than her husband, though he was of great stature and much addicted to the chase. The daughter of Maria Theresa, the sister of Marie Antoinette, it was not surprising that she should have beauty and capacity in no common degree. History has it that she was of coarser fibre than her mother and sister; it was perhaps necessary for the part she had to play. Marie Antoinette could be reckless, Maria Carolina is said to have stopped at nothing which stood in the way of her desires, except that she was loyal in her friendships and her hatreds.
After a lengthy period of a kind of social purgatory, Lady Hamilton had been admitted into the truly Oriental paradise of the Neapolitan Court. The Queen did not do things by halves. When once her Ladyship had been admitted to the court, she was rapidly admitted to the Queen’s intimacy. My Lady’s beauty and high spirits, her usefulness in the al fresco entertainments in which the King and Queen delighted, and for which she had a perfect genius, and her extreme popularity, made her desirable to a dissolute court which lived in the frankest way for pleasure. And every one knows now that she served the Queen in another capacity, unsuspected by any except those in her confidence and that of the British leaders at Naples.
The kingdom of Naples, or the Two Sicilies, was on the point of being swallowed up by France. The British fleet apart, it was practically at the mercy of the French, for though it had a certain number of men capable of offering a bloody resistance in guerilla warfare or street fighting, we now know that it had no army or navy capable of contending with the veteran and splendidly-led forces of France. The nobles and the wealthier portion of the population, to a large extent, believed in the honesty of the French intentions, and, as I have said, had a good deal of sympathy with the new ideas spread on the air by the French Revolution. The King did not see the danger in which his kingdom lay from the French. But the Queen’s wits were sharpened by her hatred: she never forgot for an instant the murder of her sister or the sympathies of her family—the Imperial House of Austria. Being on the qui vive, she saw the sword which was hanging over the kingdom, and with characteristic energy determined to dash it away.
But there were difficulties, and she saw that she must lean upon the English and their brilliant naval commander. The island part of her kingdom could hardly be seriously invaded until the British sea power in the Mediterranean was broken; but the Continental part was in a very different position. There were French forces no farther off than Rome, and until our sweeping victory at the Nile had shut the great French expeditionary force under General Buonaparte up in Egypt it was more than half likely that it would have been employed for a descent on Naples. The English, on the other hand, had no land forces in Italy, and we had not indeed shown that we had either commanders or regiments of a character to maintain the prestige won under the great Duke of Marlborough. Any formal defiance of the French, therefore, involved a grave risk of losing the Continental part of the Neapolitan kingdom, until an Austrian army marched down the Peninsula. And to bring about a French invasion it was only necessary for the Queen to show herself in open alliance with the English. No one doubted her wishes in this direction. She was simply overborne by the sympathy or fear for the French entertained by those who had the power to override her.
Maria Carolina had more than ordinary courage; but she had cunning also, and quietly developed her plans in connection with the English, and contrived to do so, as history has proved, and certain of us knew all along, through her intimacy with Lady Hamilton.
Lady Hamilton, it is true, was the wife of the British Ambassador; but, partly from her antecedents, no doubt, people did not regard her as capable of having any political weight, and she was much identified with the frivolities which took up the time of the Royal Family to such an extent as to be a scandal.