Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; by Sichel Walter Sydney 1855-1933

Author:Sichel, Walter Sydney, 1855-1933
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hamilton, Emma, Lady, 1761?-1815, Nelson, Horatio Nelson, Viscount, 1758-1805
Publisher: New York : P. F. Collier & Son

shame of our country." She trembles for the horrors that a cowardly people may commit.

The sky was clouded. There was a lull in the strong wind off the shore, but a heavy ground-swell prevailed as the appointed hour approached. The royal party anxiously waited in their apartments—the Queen's room with its dark exit, so familiar to the romantic Emma,—for the signal which should summon them through the tunnel to the water-side. On the Mole-siglio, and at his station near the Arsenal, stood Thurn, muffled and ill at ease. It was the night of a reception given in Nelson's honour by Kelim Effendi, the bearer from the Sultan of his " plume of triumph."

The exact sequence of what now occurred is difficult, but possible, to collect from the three contemporary and, at first sight, conflicting documents that survive. There is the Queen's own brief recital to her daughter. There is Nelson's dry official despatch to Lord St. Vincent, accentuating, however, Emma's conspicuous services. There are Emma's own hurried lines to Greville, thirteen days after that awful voyage, which, for three days and nights, deprived her of sleep and strained every faculty of mind and body.

Let us try to ascertain the truth by collation. Nelson's account is brief and doubtless accurate:—

"On the 2ist, at 8.30 P.M., three barges with myself and Captain Hope landed at a corner of the Arsenal. I went into the palace and brought out the whole royal family, put them into the boats, and at 9.30 they were all safely on board."

It is an official statement, which naturally omits the Count in waiting, the password, the mysteries of the secret corridor, which Acton in his letters, confirming Emma's after account, had arranged with Nelson.

The Queen's short notice to the Empress of Austria (hitherto unmarked) makes no mention of Emma's

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