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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 education 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