Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey. Richard Holmes
describes the tactics, the plans and risks, bringing them to a climax of suspense, and then–as if he had prepared a well-laid a fire–he sets light to the whole with a single phrase by Nelson.
The evening before Aboukir Bay is one such a masterly passage, which ends with the following characteristic exchange. ‘Captain Berry, when he comprehended the scope of the design, exclaimed with transport, “If we succeed, what will the world say?”–“There is no if ‘in the case,” replied the Admiral; “that we shall succeed is certain, who may live to tell the story is a very different question.”’
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In the light of modern research, Southey’s biography does have many technical shortcomings. He is too close to the war against Napoleon to set it in any larger European context. He has nothing like the modern scholar’s access to the Nelson and Admiralty archives. He frequently over-simplifies the manoeuvrings and chaos of a large naval battle and, despite his conversations with Tom Southey, he often underestimates the stunning, brutal violence of naval warfare for officers and seamen alike. Clipped phrases like ‘he was almost cut in half, lose all meaning. Alexander Scott, the chaplain aboard the Victory at Trafalgar, described it as finding himself suddenly plunged into ‘a butcher’s shambles’ of human body parts. He refused to write any detailed memoirs, and was traumatised for years afterwards.
But the portrait of Nelson is admirable in its depth, and contrasting lights. What is most striking is its mixture of flamboyant patriotism and grim psychological realism. It is not a flat portrait, or hagiographic study. It presents an immensely powerful and seductive figure, who is also restless, self-deluding and vain. There are many penetrating glimpses of Nelson’s inner doubts and turmoil. Southey emphasises his weakness as a child, the disastrous loss of his mother at the age nine, and writes a moving passage about Nelson’s boyhood homesickness, which in a sense continues until he meets Emma Hamilton. He isolates the episode of young Nelson’s despair, on the voyage back from India, and suggests a moment of intensely Romantic selfdedication to the idea of ‘heroism’ itself. He describes the depressions, professional frustrations and bitterness of Nelson’s middle period; his anger with the Admiralty; his disillusion with many superior officers; and hints at the physical disappointments of his marriage with Frances Nisbet, later Lady Nelson.
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One of Southey’s main challenges as a biographer was how to write about Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Here he was faced with subtle problems of libel, scandal and biographical convention. Although Nelson had separated from his wife in 1800, he had never divorced Lady Nelson, never publically acknowledged his liaison with Emma Hamilton (though he lived openly with her on their estate at Merton from 1801), nor officially recognised his daughter by her, Horatia ‘Thompson’, born in February 1801. Clarke and M’Arthur had simply refused to write about Lady Hamilton. Yet the affair was common knowledge throughout the Navy, and probably across most of England, since it was depicted so often and with such relish in Cruickshank’s and Gillray’s openly erotic and mocking cartoons.
At the time of writing in 1810-13, both women were alive, although living in characteristically different styles. Lady Nelson was established frugally and respectably on her large Suffolk estate, influential at Court, and receiving a fine state pension of £3,500. She would live into her seventies. Emma, on the other hand, was recklessly besporting herself, drinking heavily, gambling, mortgaging the Merton estate, and talking hypnotically to a stream of visitors about her ever-beloved Nel. But by 1812 she had become obese, confused and virtually bed bound; and was rumoured to be selling off Nelson’s letters to pay her debts. In 1815 she was to die in Calais, tragically exiled, penniless and alcoholic, aged only forty-nine.
Accordingly, Southey decided to adopt a double strategy. Only the most discreet and gracious mention would be made of Lady Nelson, and certainly very little of her shortcomings as a wife. As a result, ironically, she is reduced to something of a cipher in his biography. But the story of Nelson and Emma, however scandalous, was too emotionally revealing for Southey not to use it as fully as he dared. Emma in fact gave him unique opportunity to write about the private life of a public figure. She gave him access to Nelson’s turbulent inner world, and thereby allowed him to give Nelson’s character a truly Romantic dimension.
His tactic was to state formally and solemnly at the outset that there was absolutely no ‘criminal connection’ (viz. sexual relationship) between them, and that it was simply ‘an excessively romantic’ friendship which brought Nelson much trouble. He then proceeded to write about it in such a way that it was clear to any adult reader that here was the grand passion of Nelson’s life, an ‘infatuated attachment’ of a supremely sexual nature. It was a love-affair that kept Nelson alive to fight the battle of Trafalgar, but also in some matters–political as well as moral–severely and permanently damaged his reputation.
Southey describes how Nelson and Emma first met fleetingly in 1793 at Naples, a strategic key to the Western Mediterranean, and at that time the largest city and port in Italy. Here Emma was established as the picturesque young wife of the charming and eccentric Ambassador to the Court of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie-Carolina (sworn enemies of Napoleon), Sir William Hamilton. Nelson immediately took to them both, and innocently described Emma (in a letter home to his wife), as ‘a young woman of amiable manners’ who did honour to her diplomatic station. Southey adds, choosing his words carefully: ‘thus that acquaintance began which ended in the destruction of Nelson’s domestic happiness’.
Southey prudently avoids more than a sketch of the exotic Ambassadorial couple. Sir William was a career diplomat and a dilettante, whose main passion in life (like his friend Lord Elgin of the Marbles), was collecting Greek and Roman sculptures and pottery. He also studied volcanoes. Sir William was sixty-two, rich, ugly, aristocratic, easy-going and sophisticated. Lady Emma was twenty-eight, a blacksmith’s daughter from Cheshire, exuberant, loud, large and stunningly beautiful. Before being recuperated by Sir William she had worked as an artists’ model and as an attendant in a Turkish Bath in the Adelphi as plain Emma Hart. Accordingly, she was said by visiting naval officers to be the most valuable and curvaceous amphora in Sir William’s collection.
‘Her figure is colossal, but well-shaped,’ wrote one admirer; ‘she resembles the bust of Ariadne’. ‘She’s a whopper’, added another, simply–Regency slang for a smasher. She was frequently painted by Romney: her thick black hair parted in the centre above large wide dark eyes, upper arms 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.’
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