England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [127]
Sir William reported that the Neapolitans greeted Caracciolo's death with "loud applause," praising "so speedy an act of justice." Others were less persuaded. To the eighteenth-century mind, the commander's code of honor had the same standing as the Geneva Convention: it guaranteed decency in war. The code was simple: treaties should be honored and officers treated with respect. After breaking the treaty with the rebels and hanging Caracciolo, Nelson had flouted it twice, and English observers were scandalized. Sexual confidence tended to make Nelson more rash (he had been imprudent in the West Indies after Fanny had agreed to marry him), and he was reckless in Naples. He applied the tactics he used in his sea battles: hunt down and destroy every enemy. To him, the treaty had always been invalid, since the king and queen had instructed Cardinal Ruffo not to settle with the rebels. Nelson was a poor politician for the same reason that he was a great fighter: he saw matters in black-and-white terms as loyalty and disloyalty, good versus evil.
Emma was seen as the queen's representative, and she was visited on the Foudroyant by streams of Neapolitan women proclaiming their loyalty to the throne and imploring forgiveness for supporting the rebellion.5 Desperate people addressed her as "Signara excellentissima," "Bella Milady" and "Excellenza," pressing her to use her influence over Nelson to commute sentences.6 Nelson angrily complained to Mrs. Cadogan that Emma "has her time so much taken up with excuses from Rebels, Jacobins, & Fools, that she is every day most heartily tired."7 Emma, however, could do nothing for these women unless the queen felt generous, and Maria Carolina would not be swayed. She asked Emma for a detailed list of Jacobins, and pages survive where Emma added names in her own hand, including Domenico Cirillo, her old friend and physician, who was also a friend of the queen.8
Like Nelson, Emma had come to believe that they would save the city by purging it. Cirillo and the others were, to her, potential murderers of the royal family, who had helped cause the death of Prince Albert and whose equivalents had killed Marie-Antoinette. Even if she had hated the idea of a purge and had begged Nelson to desist, he would not have listened to her. He always ignored questions and doubts, even from his superiors at the Admiralty, and perceived pleas for moderation—as when Fanny begged him to soften his campaign against corruption in the West Indies—as a weakness, a failure of a woman's essential duty of support and loyalty.
As the reprisals subsided, the citizens of Naples began to feel guilty. Many declared it unlikely that the rebels would have attacked again, and others were tormented by guilt, claiming they saw Caracciolo's corpse bobbing in the harbor. Nelson, however, congratulated himself for "driving the French to the devil, and in restoring peace and happiness to mankind." Maria Carolina wrote to Emma that she had "done wonders" and assured her she was "gratefully sensible of your exertions." Emma inscribed on the back of her note, "My blood if necessary shall flow for her! Emma will prove to Maria Carolina that a humble born English woman can serve her Queen with zeal and a true soul, even at the risk of her life."9
When Nelson and the Hamiltons returned to Palermo, the royal family and the court showered them with gratitude for Nelson's success. They were all rather proud—Sir William boasted to his superiors that he and Nelson had restored "tranquillity to the distracted city" and placed the king and queen back on their throne.10 "We return with a Kingdom to present my much loved Queen," Emma vaunted to Greville. The king called Emma his "Grande Maitresse" and the queen told her