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  Infatuations with married women were Nelson’s specialty. “This Horatio is for ever in love,” he had once imagined himself described, although his amorous obsessions were not generally matched by success. Small at just under five foot six, thin, and pale, he had a shock of unwieldy ginger hair, and his Norfolk drawl was very pronounced. Nelson’s sharp, chiseled face and small, sunken eyes disappointed when the ideal of male beauty was Lord Byron with his limpid eyes and sensual plump mouth. At least two young ladies had snubbed his offers of marriage, and his friends derided the courtesans and mistresses he chose after his marriage. When he took up with a young opera singer, Adelaide Correglia, when stationed in Leghorn (now Livorno), a strategic port on Italy’s Tuscan coast, his colleague Captain Fremantle complained he made himself “ridiculous” with his excessive devotion to her, ruining the whole dinner by gazing devotedly into her eyes.

  Horatio Nelson was born in 1758, the third son (he was technically the fifth, but two elder brothers had already died) of a country rector in Burnham Thorpe, a small village in Norfolk, ten miles from England’s east coast. When he was nine, his mother died, aged only forty-two, after producing eleven children in seventeen years. Little Horatio claimed to remember no more about her than that she “hated the French.” Most widowed fathers remarried as quickly as possible, but Edmund Nelson remained single and brought up his family on small resources and tight discipline. Horatio escaped home at the age of twelve to become a midshipman, thanks to his uncle, who paid for his commission. He traveled to the West Indies, the Arctic, India, and the Mediterranean and did not see his father or his siblings for six years.3 Starved of affection since childhood, he fell desperately in love with nearly every woman he met. Neither good-looking, well-connected, nor rich, he was snubbed by genteel young English ladies, and he had no chance with his grande passion, the belle of Quebec town, Mary Simpson. As he grew up, he was increasingly attracted to young married women with a maternal gleam in their eye. While stationed in the Caribbean, he became infatuated with the beautiful young wife of the elderly commissioner of Antigua, declaring, “Was it not for Mrs. Moutray, who is very very good to me, I should almost hang myself at this infernal hole,” and extolling her: “her equal I never saw in any country.” His desires piqued by days of flirtation with her, Nelson sailed for the Caribbean island of Nevis. There he met John Herbert, a rich planter and president of the island council, and developed a crush on his niece and housekeeper, Fanny Nisbet, a widow with a young son.

  A fractious only child, Frances Herbert Woolward had enjoyed a leisured childhood in Nevis, but in 1779 her father died, leaving her nothing, and she was forced to accept the marriage proposal of the doctor who had attended him, Josiah Nisbet, ten years her senior. The newlyweds traveled to England. Most Nevisians who moved to England did so in the hope that the cold climate would cure their sufferings from lead poisoning, caused by drinking rum that had been distilled in lead pipes, and Josiah Nisbet was probably similarly afflicted. She quickly fell pregnant, but Dr. Nisbet sickened, probably with syphilis, and died in 1781, hallucinating wildly in his final months.4 Left a widow at twenty-one, with a son, Fanny had no choice but to return and become her uncle’s housekeeper.

  Two years later, Nelson arrived. Touched by her bruised sadness and impressed by her fortitude after losing both father and husband in quick succession, Nelson began to enjoy Fanny’s company. She had the mature, maternal air he loved, and he admired her petting her young son, imagining her doing the same to him and their brood of children. He was enjoying just another pleasant crush—but he had no idea that the Herberts saw him as the answer to their prayers. Herbert wanted his disillusioned niece and her son off his hands, and she was desperate to flee the stultifying routine of her life as his housekeeper. Any man with reasonable prospects would have done. Fanny knew her youth was fading. In the excitable young captain, she saw her last chance of escape from growing old as her uncle’s servant.

  To Nelson, Nevis was a romantic paradise. More than three thousand feet high, Mount Nevis towered over thirty-six square miles of lush vegetation, fruit trees, and hot springs. According to A Description of the Island of Nevis, dedicated to John Herbert and compiled in consultation with Dr. Nisbet, the island was “altogether pleasing and agreeable.”5 Sugar cane grew thick on the rich volcanic soil, and the Herberts, owners of the Montpelier Plantation, were the island’s first family. The beauty hid the misery and pain of ten thousand beaten, abused slaves. Nevis’s population was small, with only a thousand whites, and out of every five people who came to Nevis, free or as a slave, three were dead before the end of five years, and few white inhabitants lived past fifty. Fanny had no chance of meeting new men. Since most women married before twenty, she was old. The white population was in decline, and because English servants were unwilling to travel out, most women had more domestic work than their English counterparts. Fanny knew she had to turn Nelson’s crush into a desire to marry her. Her uncle was more than willing to encourage the match by throwing them together and declaring her four years younger than her true age. Nelson turned out to be less easily swayed than he had hoped, but Herbert was not to be daunted. He played his trump card: the offer of a massive dowry.

  Nelson, like all the English, believed the white inhabitants of the Caribbean to be wildly rich, as well as more sexual, thanks to their acquaintance with the black arts of witchcraft and the torrid climate. Prime Minister Pitt declared that four-fifths of Great Britain’s overseas wealth came from the West Indies, but the income of the Nevisian planters was actually in decline because the soil was losing its fertility through overcul-tivation. Herbert hid his worsening fortunes and let Nelson believe that he would “provide handsomely” for Fanny: a large gift on marriage, £300 a year, and £20,000 on his death.6 Nelson also anticipated that she would inherit the bulk of Herbert’s estate.

  Tempted by the prospect of catching an heiress to millions, Nelson began to imagine himself a husband. After all, he was of an age to be married, and he longed to start a family. Most importantly, while every other woman had turned him down, Fanny was a sure thing. Although she was no beauty and could never be called vivacious, she was wealthy, fertile, and seemingly possessed of the self-control, poise, and maturity vital for a navy wife. Nelson was very much in the dark. He had no idea that Fanny and her uncle were engaged in an effort to show her off as independent— in reality, she was tremulous and nervous. Neither did he realize that she was no longer fertile, her womb wrecked, probably by an infection contracted from syphilitic Josiah Nisbet. He was also utterly ignorant that Herbert’s famed riches were a lie.

  Once they were engaged, Herbert offered nowhere near the money he had promised. Breaking an engagement was always reviled as a dishonorable act, so Nelson could only complain—and anyway, he had high hopes that Fanny’s uncle would shower money on her in the future. Their marriage took place on March 11, 1787, in Montpelier House, across the road from the sugar plantation where the slaves still toiled. The hell-raising twenty-two-year-old Prince William Henry, the future King William TV, was visiting and agreed to give away the bride. The wedding was celebrated in his honor, and a hundred dined on the island’s best produce and watched cockfighting and horse racing while toasting the prince with gallons of wine and imported rum.

  The bridal couple returned to London to begin their life together. Disaster struck almost immediately. Nelson was retired and put on half pay of eight shillings a week. In Nevis, he had leapfrogged over his superior’s head to request that the Admiralty uphold the law and prevent the islands from trading with America. His fault as a subordinate was what later made him great: convinced he was right, he refused to conciliate. Nelson’s tactless accusations of fraud (to the extent of writing to the prime minister) had annoyed the Admiralty. Even worse, King George blamed him for failing to stop Prince William’s irresponsible behavior and ludicrous spending in the West Indies. Nelson was firmly out of favor. As it was a period of peace, there were not many ships ava
ilable, and he had no chance at the few that came up.

  Fanny had believed that her acquaintance with the prince would give her an inroad into a position in the queen’s household. It was an outlandish idea: Queen Charlotte despaired of her wild son and wanted nothing to do with those he had befriended on his travels. Fanny was marooned in Norfolk, far from London and the fashionable life she had dreamed about. To her distress, Josiah was sent away to school, and the couple moved in with Nelson’s father, Edmund, still the rector at Burnham Thorpe. As the weather turned cold, she was entirely debilitated by the Norfolk damp and mud. Racked by chills, rheumatism, and nervous fevers, she wept her weeks away in her room. “Mrs Nelson takes large doses of the bed,” sighed Edmund in exasperation. Fanny made no friends in the tiny village and she was not helped by the English prejudice that West Indian ladies were leisured and self-indulgent. Back in Nevis, Herbert was nursing a grudge that he had been pushed aside at the wedding by the limelight-seeking Prince William, and he refused to entertain requests for money.

  Horatio occupied himself with examining nautical charts, reading Dampier’s Voyages and the newspapers, modeling ships, and writing to the Admiralty. Fanny tried and failed to embroider and paint, disappointing Edmund’s wish for entertainment by declaring she was too miserable to sing or play. She had bravely borne her father’s death and husband’s insanity and illness, but as she reached thirty, she seemed to lose her spirit. Her hopes of genteel comfort as mistress of her own home had crumbled. Nelson, in turn, was dismayed by her sickliness and lost all hope of her becoming the wife he had hoped for: an efficient, wealthy mother of sons.

  Girlish Frances Nisbet would have been the ideal wife for a quiet country vicar, but she was wrong for ambitious Nelson. She always counseled moderation, and he began to perceive such advice as disloyalty. Before they were married, she urged him not to pursue the issue of American trade with the Caribbean islands, but he wrote to her firmly that if he had done as she advised, “I should have neglected my duty.” As their marriage wore on, he was irritated by Fanny’s failure to praise him as he desired, and he was increasingly baffled by her lethargy and depression.

  Five years dragged by and there was no sign of a baby. Fanny had conceived two months after her first marriage. Fertility problems were not uncommon, but what was rare was the Nelsons’ refusal to investigate a cure. In the eighteenth century, since infertility was always deemed to be the fault of the woman, scores of desperate childless wives of the middle and upper classes took the waters in Bath, consulted doctors, submitted to peculiar regimes of diet and exercise, and even paid James Graham £50 for a night on the Celestial Bed. A woman who was not a mother was considered a failure, and so a baby was thought to be ample recompense for the indignity of being probed by doctors and quacks. But Fanny and Nelson appeared not to have tried any remedy. Their marriage was simply too fraught to embark on the stresses of treating infertility. Within a year of arriving in England, they were trapped in a bitter round of mutual blame.

  When the revolution began in France in 1789, war with France seemed inevitable, but Nelson felt as if every man but him was called to sea. With inactivity and illness all around him, he sank into depression and no longer wrote to ask for places. Salvation came for him in 1793. Understaffed and in crisis, the navy could ignore him no longer (by 1795 naval demand was so great that the authorities had to open their jails and send in criminals as seamen). He received his orders and left Norfolk for Chatham, Kent, on England’s southeast coast, to join the Agamemnon, jubilant to escape the slow drag of his marriage. While he was preparing the ship for sea, Fanny had devastating news: her uncle Herbert had died and left her only a token amount of money and £500 for Josiah. Nelson plunged himself into provisioning and staffing his ship, trying hard to quash his anger over the millions he had expected. He had to accept that his wife would always be poor and would never bear another child.

  Nelson returned to sea in May determined to pursue glory. He was delighted to meet a woman who was Fanny’s complete opposite: uncomplaining, vivacious, flattering, and obsessed with fame. As Nelson’s success with King Ferdinand confirmed him back in favor with the Admiralty, he would have adored Lady Hamilton for her assistance in procuring him the promise of troops even if she had been a dumpy matron with ten grandchildren. When he set sail for Sardinia on September 15, after only five days in Naples, Nelson was already a little in love.

  CHAPTER 29

  War Approaches

  Emma’s time with Nelson was soon little more than a pleasant memory to recall occasionally. Only a few days after he departed, her life became more frenetic than it had ever been. Marie-Antoinette was in terrible danger in France, and it seemed as if Napoleon was finalizing plans to invade Naples. Emma’s every hour was devoted to Maria Carolina. “Owing to my situation here,” she scrawled to Greville, “I am got into politicks and I wish to have news for our dear much loved Queen.”

  Maria Carolina was obsessed with the plight of Marie-Antoinette. “Every time they enter her room,” she agonized, “my unfortunate sister kneels, prays and prepares for death. The inhuman brutes that surround her amuse themselves in this manner…. I should like this infamous nation to be cut to pieces, annihilated, dishonoured, reduced to nothing for at least fifty years. I hope that divine chastisement will fall visibly on France.” On October 14, 1793, Marie-Antoinette was hauled up before a public court, accused of treachery and of sexually abusing her eight-year-old son, Louis Charles. The audience, expecting her to be plump and pampered, were shocked by the pale and emaciated woman in front of them, dressed in a threadbare black dress. Fifty witnesses were called to the two-day trial, and although Marie-Antoinette’s spirited defense, particularly against the accusations about her son, won the crowd’s sympathy, she was summoned back into the court at four in the morning to hear that she was condemned to death. At eleven o’clock on the following day, her hair cut short and her hands bound, the queen was driven along the long route to the guillotine in an open cart to the derisory shouts of the crowd. Through it all, she kept her composure, stepping gracefully from the cart and walking lightly to the block. At twelve-fifteen, her head was cut off and displayed to a jubilant crowd. Many had expected her to escape execution, and aristocrats and ordinary people alike across Europe were stunned by her fate. They rushed to buy the newspapers, poring over the detailed transcripts of the trial and the queen’s death.

  Maria Carolina was prostrate with grief. Eight months pregnant, furious with the failure of her late brother and husband to mount a rescue, and paralyzed at the death of a sister she had not seen for so long, she could hardly be compelled to leave her apartments. “My poor sister,” she mourned un-comprehendingly “Her only fault was that she loved entertainments and parties.” Under a picture of Marie-Antoinette in her study, she inscribed, “I shall pursue revenge until the grave.” The court was devastated, Sir William reported, thrown “into the utmost grief and indignation.” Ferdinand ordered four months of mourning and closed the theaters.1

  When she was not weeping for her sister, the queen dwelt on her terror that she might share her fate. Students, respectable burghers, and members of the armed forces as well as intellectuals were forming clubs dedicated to bringing in a republic. Maria Carolina knew that she was a particular focus for resentment. According to Giuseppe Gorani’s Secret Memoirs of the Italian Courts (1793), rushed off the Paris press to a public avid to give their political grievances sensual color, the lazy king lived in a moral vacuum, caring only for hunting. Shrewd John Acton was the queen’s lover, governing Naples despotically for his own gain. The queen, “like her sisters,” was concerned only to “increase the power of the Austrian Royal Family,” disdaining her husband and his kingdom alike. “Hard, capricious,” she was a second Catherine de Medici without Catherine’s administrative skills. Emma had a starring role in Gorani’s bestseller: she was “a charming orphan from the most notorious nunnery in London.” He ridiculed her low background and dubious educ
ation but noted her extreme beauty and her rare mix of affability and dignity. Everything about her was, he decided, as extraordinary as her almost unbelievable history.2 Gorani trotted out the usual salacious biography of Emma to lend ammunition to the representation of the Neapolitan court as obsessed by pleasure. It was fortunate that he had had little access to the palace, for the comparison between Marie-Antoinette’s Petit Trianon and Maria Carolina’s English Garden was impossible to miss: both queens spent absurd sums of money on exotic plants while their subjects lived in squalor. The price of foodstuffs was spiraling, and the people begged the king to use some of his wealth to subsidize the cost of oil and macaroni, the staples of the Neapolitan diet. When Ferdinand refused, the lazzaroni, traditionally royalists, began to pay attention to the passionate students preaching liberty on their street corners.3

  Determined to defend her dear friend, Emma wrote to Greville:

  No person can be so charming as the Queen, she is everything one can wish, the best mother, wife & friend in the world. I live constantly with her & have done intimately so for 2 years & I have never in all that time seen any thing but goodness and sincerity in her & if ever you hear any lyes about her contradick them & if you shou’d see a cursed book written by a vile french dog with her character in it don’t believe one word.