England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [112]
In October 1796, Ferdinand's nerve gave way and he signed a treaty with the French, bribing them from attacking with sixty million francs, vases and statues, and the rights to excavate at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Portici. But people soon began to whisper that Napoleon would break the treaty. Northern Italy was falling fast to the French. Throughout 1797, Napoleon seized Italian art for the Louvre, and his men, marching with no supplies, robbed from petrified villagers and city dwellers alike, attacking and raping as they went. Ferdinand declared himself and the queen "ready to spill our blood and perish for our subjects, we expect them to reciprocate." He offered new army recruits the bounteous salary of a shilling a day, and the Neapolitans hurried to join up (in England and France men were better fed and had to be press-ganged and conscripted into fighting). Ferdinand's fine words came too late: after years of underinvestment in the army and general poverty across the kingdom, the troops were malnourished and much less effective than Napoleon's determined, disciplined men.
Rome fell in February 1798, and the Pope was bundled out of his apartments and taken to France to die in ignominy. Napoleon's armies began trekking south. All the English travelers in Italy fled to Naples. Maria Carolina insisted that her subjects would see the French as their liberators, declaring there was "general unrest, all classes, especially the best educated, entirely corrupted" and that the city buzzed with "hothouses for running down the government." Afraid that the French would rob his home, Sir William took an inventory of his belongings. Emma conjured terrible scenarios of the queen seeing "her friends sacrificed, her husband, children and herself led to the Block." Pamphlets published around the city accused Emma of having been a spy from at least 1792, initially as a payback to the English government for leaning on John Acton to introduce her at court. Accused of lesbianism and manipulating Maria Carolina and portrayed as a prostitute, Emma believed she risked sharing the fate of the Princesse de Lamballe.
Then, in the spring of 1798, Emma heard that Horatio Nelson was returning to the Mediterranean. Nelson's mission had nothing to do with Naples: he was charged with investigating reports of French ships being assembled in Toulon to attack. Sir William and she had corresponded with him over the last few years in a businesslike fashion, and now she saw her chance. Emma resolved to do everything in her power to persuade Nelson and his superiors to defend her dear queen.
CHAPTER 31
The Battered Hero
I feel myself highly honoured and flattered by your ladyship's charming letter," enthused Earl St. Vincent, Nelson's commander, to Emma in May 1798. "The picture you have drawn of the lovely Queen of Naples and the royal family, would rouse the indignation of the most unfeeling of the creation, at the infernal designs of those devils, who, for the scourge of the human race, are permitted to govern France. I am bound by my oath of chivalry to protect all those who are persecuted and distressed." Luckily, he had a "knight of superior prowess in my train, who is charged with this enterprize, and will soon make his appearance."1
St. Vincent was not by any stretch of the imagination a gallant man. That same year he was waging a bitter war against women on British ships for wasting