strong and bare, bosom full. She had that curious combination attractive to many men: a child’s face upon a large, voluptuous body. But Emma was not a child: quick, generous, highly intelligent and expressive, she had blossomed in the Mediterranean, learnt to speak fluent French and Italian (better than most British diplomats), host diplomatic dinners and entertainments (usually with rather too much champagne), and write vivid letters and confidential reports. She had also become the closest female confidante to Queen Marie-Carolina, who as the executed Marie-Antoinette’s sister, was a key figure in the dangerous, shifting Continental alliances against the French republicans.
Emma also had an exaggerated, operatic, Italian enthusiasm which Nelson came to adore. This was most famously expressed in her ‘Attitudes’, a form of after-dinner entertainment she had invented. Dressed in a series of thin flowing veils and shawls, she would dance across the room and strike a series of rapid, classical poses, which she would then hold in complete stillness, like living statuary. Some were based on Greek or Roman themes, others more Turkish or Egyptian. Goethe witnessed one of the more classical performances, which he pronounced truly artistic and astonishing. Sir Nathanial Wraxall witnessed another, more reminiscent of a Bacchante, which involved ‘screams, starts and embraces’, and he thought only appropriate for select, adult company.
Depending on the evening, the guests, and Emma’s mood, her ‘Attitudes’ seemed to have ranged between classical ballet, theatrical mime and nightclub striptease. She always retained her native humour, as well as her Northern accent. Once, while draped as a buxom half-naked Naiad over one of Hamilton’s larger and more expensive Greek urns, she was heard to say in a stage-whisper: ‘Don’t be afeared Sir Willum: I’ll not break your joog.’
At first Southey hints at little of this. But when Nelson met Emma again in 1798, now returning to Naples as the glorious but wounded and exhausted hero of Aboukir Bay, Southey feels free to expand. He describes the hero’s welcome in a scene strongly reminiscent of Plutarch’s account of Antony meeting the seductive Cleopatra, together with triumphal barges, feasts and music. The operatic emotion is now openly expressed: When [the Hamilton’s] barge came alongside the Vanguard, at the sight of Nelson Lady Hamilton sprang up the ship’s side, and exclaiming, ‘O God! Is it possible?’ fell into his arms–more, he says, like one dead than alive.’ This must have impressed the crew; it certainly impressed Nelson, who gallantly described it as ‘terribly affecting’.
The sexual feeling is also strongly implied, with Southey’s acute intuition that what partly attracted the battle-hardened Nelson was Emma’s promise of generous, almost maternal comforts. This was still, after all, the boy who had lost his beloved mother at the age of nine. He nicely quotes Sir William’s witty and knowing invitation to Nelson: ‘A pleasant apartment is ready for you in my house, and Emma is looking out for the softest pillows to repose those few limbs you have left.’ Later Southey describes her as having ‘totally weaned’ Nelson’s affections from Lady Nelson; and during the King and Queen’s escape from a pro-Republican mob in Naples, which Nelson engineered, he says that Emma impressed Nelson by acting with extraordinary courage and decision, ‘like a heroine of modern romance’.
Yet Southey suggests deep moral conflict in Nelson, and produces a weirdly effective passage at the start of the affair, when Nelson dines with his coffin behind his chair, antagonizes his officers, and seems close to exhaustion and mental breakdown.
Southey–in another Antony and Cleopatra passage–blames Emma’s sexual magnetism for distorting Nelson’s political and moral judgement at Naples. He implicates her (though indirectly) in the execution of the patriot Caracciolo in June 1799, which he describes as ‘a deplorable transaction! A stain upon the memory of Nelson and the honour of England.’ But worse, he holds Nelson’s ‘baneful passion’ for Emma as almost wholly responsible for the failure of his natural sense of justice and generosity (so characteristic of him as a commander at sea), thus allowing the terrible massacre of the civilian prisoners that followed in July 1799. This failure ‘stained ineffaceably his public character’. Southey’s biography here rises to one of its fiercest, most outspoken and impressive rhetorical heights.
If Nelson’s eyes had not been, as it were, spellbound by that unhappy attachment, which had now completely mastered him, he would have seen things as they were; and might perhaps have awakened the Sicilian court to a sense of their interest, if not their duty. The court employed itself in a miserable round of folly and festivity, while the prisons of Naples were filled with groans, and the scaffold streamed with blood.
At such moments it might seem as if Southey was simply casting Emma as Nelson’s sexual nemesis, and the biography has often been interpreted in this way. But Southey is far more subtle than this. He goes on to show how well Emma understood-and matched–Nelson’s own extravagant temperament, how she saved him from recurrent periods of near suicidal depression, and how she genuinely made a new home for him at Merton. While his marriage with Lady Nelson had been childless, the birth of Horatia ‘Thompson’ brought him a wholly new kind of domestic happiness. It also brought him a new sense of a future, and Southey implies that this in turn inspired him to go on to fight Trafalgar. He is brave enough to quote not only Nelson’s last naval signal and diary entry before battle, but also the whole of the open letter ‘bequeathing’ Lady Hamilton to the nation. A bequest which, Southey dryly points out, had not yet been fulfilled by 1813.
Southey was surely right in this complex, nuanced and Romantic reading of their love-affair. Much of its deep and genuine emotion appears in the passionate, unguarded letters that Nelson wrote to Emma in 1802. Although Southey had the materials Emma had supplied to Harrison in 1806 to draw on, he could not have read these particular letters. But they retrospectively confirm much of what he had been able, with some reservations, to suggest of their mutual infatuation.
“You know, my dearest Emma, that there is nothing in this world that I would not do for us to live together and have our little child with us…You, my beloved Emma, and my Country are the two dearest objects of my fond heart…My longing for you, both person and conversation, you may readily imagine. What must be my sensations at the idea of sleeping with you! It sets me on fire, even the thoughts, much more would the reality. I am sure all my love and desires are all to you, and if a woman naked were to come to me, even as I am thinking of you, I hope it might rot off if I would touch her even with my hand.’
Southey accepts Emma’s own authority for one of the most moving passages towards the end of the book. In summer 1805 Nelson is distractedly walking the little lawn in the Merton garden which he called his ‘quarterdeck’. He had not accepted a new command, and claimed to be happy in retirement, surrounded by ‘his family’. Sensing his secret restlessness, Emma ‘knew he was longing to get at the combined fleet’. She destroys her own happiness by encouraging him to ‘do his duty’–to go back and take over the Mediterranean battle station off Toulon. Southey presents this as an act of supreme unselfishness on both their parts, and a final justification of their love. ‘If there were more Emmas, there would be more Nelsons.’
In fact Emma Hamilton comes strangely to dominate the later chapters of the biography, and there is a sense in which Southey had written a great, doomed Romantic love story. Like many biographers, Southey only seems to have become aware of the underlying emotional drive of his own book after it was published. His inhibitions may also have been released by the publication of some of Nelson’s love letters to Emma in 1814, and her own death in the following year. Certainly the main additions he made to the biography, long after in 1827, consisted of expanded passages about Emma and extracts from her own letters to Nelson.
10
Finally the process of writing lead Southey to revise many of his erstwhile political opinions, and his views of British Government policy in the Mediterranean, particularly where Nelson had been involved in Corsica, Sardinia, and Naples. He also came to reflect on the whole notion of patriotic ‘duty’,
