LETTER XXXII.
[July 1803.
MY DEAREST EMMA,
Although I have wrote letters from various places, merely to say—"Here I am," and "There I am;"—yet, as I have no doubt but that they would all be read, it was impossible for me to say more than—"Here I am, and well:" and I see no prospect of any certain mode of conveyance, but by sea; which, with the means the Admiralty has given me, of small vessels, can be but seldom.
Our passages have been enormously long. From Gibraltar to Malta, we were eleven days: arriving the fifteenth in the evening, and sailing in the night of the sixteenth—that is, three in the morning of the seventeenth—and it was the twenty-sixth before we got off Capri; where I had ordered the frigate, which carried Mr. Elliot to Naples, to join me.
I send you copies of the King and Queen's letters. I am vexed, that she did not mention you! I can only account for it, by her's being a political letter.
When I wrote to the Queen, I said—"I left Lady Hamilton, the eighteenth of May; and so attached to your Majesty, that I am sure she would lay down her life to preserve your's. Your Majesty never had a more sincere, attached, and real friend, than your dear Emma. You will be sorry to hear, that good Sir William did not leave her in such comfortable circumstances as his fortune would have allowed. He has given it amongst his relations. But she will do honour to his memory, although every one else of his friends call loudly against him on that account."
I trust, my dear Emma, she has wrote you. If she can forget Emma, I hope, God will forget her! But, you think, that she never will, or can. Now is her time to shew it.
You will only shew the King and Queen's letters to some few particular friends.
The King is very low; lives, mostly, at Belvidere. Mr. Elliot had not seen either him or the Queen, from the seventeenth, the day of his arrival, to the twenty-first. On the next day, he was to be presented.