The Divine Lady: A Romance of Nelson and Emma Hamilton

by L. Adams Beck

The terror and chaos which dominated the France of the Revolution had at last overflowed her coasts, and the vision of Marie Caroline was realized before the eyes of all the world. Driven by fear and hatred and a nascent sense of power, the young tiger that had tasted blood and mastery was not only standing at bay as formerly, but now making alarming springs on neighbouring territory. Here and there his swift paw struck and left its bleeding scores. What hope was there for Europe but a coalition, not only against the armed forces of France but also against her new and frightful gospel of Death to Despotism, to the Aristocrats, to the Kings? Death also to God—no peace until the last king had been strangled in the bowels of the last priest. One after another, silently, tremblingly, rallying, led by Austria whose royal daughter was in the hands of the murderers, the European nations herded together as frightened cattle herd when the howl of the wolf is heard at midnight.

It is easy now for armchair philosophers to trace the features of liberty behind the mask of the Medusa and to hold to the belief that the root of democracy was watered by the blood that drenched the soil of France—not only royal blood, be it remembered, but the blood of the people also. It was more difficult at the end of the eighteenth century when, to most sober men, France had become a madness drunk with abominations, wild with bloody and sexual license, a shame to look upon, the enemy of God and man.

The Queen of the Two Sicilies certainly made that view her religion and conscience. It was not wonderful. Every fragment of her mother’s, the great Empress Maria Theresa’s, policy, was being trampled to pieces by the French republicans before her eyes. Her doomed sister was in their hands, tortured daily and nightly with every fiendish cruelty the mind of man and woman could conceive—widowed by the guillotine, discrowned, and drawing daily nearer to the same fate. For, as Danton cried in his tremendous image: “The coalized kings threaten us; we hurl at their feet, as gage of battle, the head of a king.”

And the reply of the kings and peoples was to ring the French about with fire as enemies of all the harvest that painful ages have brought to mankind. They had sown the tares, they should reap them. And it may be that the historian of the twentieth century may write that that sowing and reaping are not even yet finished for the world.

And besides all these universal concerns, Marie Caroline, as Queen of the Two Sicilies (for her husband counts for nothing save as the sand in the machinery of her rule), had her own cruel anxieties. She doubted the strength of Austria and the policy of her brother the Emperor, she was aware that her husband’s brother, the miserable King of Spain, was angling for French favour at the instance of a wife who would have sold Spain’s honour in exchange for the crown of the Two Sicilies for her son. She looked out into the world with almost hopeless eyes, and saw but one star of hope—England.

Could England unmoved behold Italy and Sicily in French hands, coldly withdrawing herself from European intrigues and bloodshed? If she could do this, all was over.

England, as usual, hesitated and temporized. The quality of swift decision has never been national, though many a great Englishman has flashed it out in emergency. She acted with a caution so cold that to many English hearts it appeared weakness. Advice was sent from the English Cabinet to the Queen to make peace while yet she could with France—the rising star of war. She could not if she would. Daily the position grew worse as the doctrines of mob-anarchy filtered along the Mediterranean coasts and among their inflammable southern peoples. The inaction of England drove her almost frantic. What! England, Mistress of the seas, Ruler of India, was it possible for her to behold unmoved the Mediterranean become a French lake, and Antichrist enthroned in every European capital but London? And yet it seemed that this very thing might be.

And then the last weight was thrown into the peace scale of English patience and it dropped. Marie Antoinette was guillotined, and even in Marie Caroline’s anguish she realized that her sister had not died in vain. That event touched the conscience of Europe with horror—that and all the cruel circumstances involved. By itself alone it could not have effected it, but as the last snowflake fluttering on the massed snow tilts its equilibrium until it rushes down in roar and ruin, so that horror, perhaps no worse than many precedent, called England to arms. War was declared, and the great arsenal of Toulon seized by the British Admiral Lord Hood. The day that news reached the Queen her wearied eyes flashed dominant once more. “We have them!” she said.

But not yet. There was much, much yet to be done before the guns of Trafalgar should open a conquering road for those of Waterloo, and with the grim dogged patience of her ancestry Marie Caroline settled down to the long struggle. Who could hope that the interests of a little kingdom like the Two Sicilies should loom large in the councils of a power like England? What would the English care if the Bourbon Royalties were driven from Naples? They were but a name to the islanders.

With trembling but resolute care she surveyed her hopes and weapons, Acton was a clear-headed man, but somewhat of a lath painted to look like iron. No one knew that better than the Queen now, whatever had been her opinion at first. Still, though an Irishman, he was strongly pro-British and imbued with the necessary hatred of the French and all their works, Hamilton was old—too much of the dilettante, his interest keener in an unearthed statue, a strayed gem from the Medici collections, than in all the protocols of Europe—clear-headed certainly, life-practised in the tortuous ways of diplomacy; but old; lacking in zest and fire. Yet, considering all this with the frigid judgment of a statesman, Marie Caroline felt his value still. He belonged to one of the ruling families of England, he was connected with the King by ties which had not broken even in the strain of his marriage with Emma, and was universally respected as a man of high character—the English type of the great gentleman, self-possessed and cool in dangerous times. Nor had his marriage injured him except with a few scandalous old women of both sexes. Emma, supported by the Queen, had worn her honours excellently, without either flaunting or shame. Quick as lightning to assimilate even the unspoken hint, and to take colour from the society about her, she filled her post to perfection. The Queen and Hamilton between them modelled and drilled her into the Ambassadress and by 1793 the work was finished. The born great lady, cold and dignified, could never have suited the Neapolitans from the Queen downward so well as this warm-hearted, kindly, eager, beautiful creature who yet could dazzle the world with her graces and again chill it, if necessary, with the “Majesty and Juno air,” of which she had written to Greville years before. And in this emergency it was to Emma the Queen’s mind chiefly turned.