BOOKS Naples and Napoleon

CAROLA OMAN

Sir William Hamilton was not really much of a fellow. His letters to his precious nephew Charles are sometimes quite as disagreeable in their worldly wisdom as those of Lord Chesterfield to his natural son. But the young Stanhope was amiable if doltish, and Charles Greville was decided- ly neither. He and his uncle (who called one another 'My dear Hamilton', and 'My dear Greville', but were nevertheless dubbed the Elder and Younger Pliny) were a couple of cold fishes, with dreadfully sharp eyes for the main chance.

Still, it is not fair that for one person who has opened the Campi Phlegraei (in three volumes of rare beauty, and a supple- ment), a thousand know only that the author was the old husband of Nelson's Emma. Sir William deserves much better than that, and Brian Fothergill's careful and interesting biography (Sir William Hamilton, Envoy Extraordinary, Faber 75s) gives him recognition long overdue.

William Hamilton was a younger son, one of the ten children of a natural bully, Lady Jane Hamilton, a daughter of the Duke of Abercorn, scandalously allirmed to be the mistress of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and her cousin, Lord Archibald Hamilton, a mild retired naval ollicer and Governor of Greenwich Hospital, son of the Duke of Hamilton (but again a younger son). William Hamilton had elegant tastes and was chronically hard-up. Contemporary writers, and Brian Fothergill, too, often refer to him as 'the foster-brother of George tit', but he was seven and a half years older than that delicate and withdrawn princeling who does not seem in after years to have done over-much for him. William served on the continent in two campaigns, attained the rank of captain, became a Member of Parliament and voted obediently. He resigned his commission on marrying, 'something against my inclination', a minor Welsh heiress who was musical and appar- ently asthmatic. With her he lived in amity if not fidelity for nearly a quarter of a cen- tury. After her death he mentioned often her many virtues.

This excellent biography has been bravely divided into two parts, the first covering fifty-three years, the second twenty. That invaluable collection of Hamilton and Nelson Letters, privately printed when it was the Morrison manuscript, has been largely drawn upon and with far more skill than usual. Sir William is shown as having the qualities of his defects. He could be dim and discreet and dignified, if not am- bassadorial. He was both 'envoy extra- ordinary' and Minister Plenipotentiary, but never more. At first he had rather despised Naples. But, as the years slipped by. having failed to infect the royal family, nobility or any of his immediate circle with sturdy British virtues, he seemed on visiting English to have become himself 'a perfect Neapolitan'. His aristocratic features, burnt black by the suns of thirty-seven summers and twenty-two ascents of Vesuvius, had acquired a saturnine, almost sinister aspect. Unfortunately for him, Hamilton at Naples was such a success he could not possibly be moved —to Paris, Madrid, Vienna. He was a Knight of the Bath, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a dilettante, reverenced for his collection of Greek and Roman vases, and for his two volumes describing them. But he never made any secret of his intention to make a profitable sale of his treasures, an act which is to the dedicated collector the mark of the beast. The vase of Roman cameo glass in the British Museum, once his, is the Port- land Vase. The dowager duchess bought it from him. He contributed to the Philo- sophical Transactions of the Royal Society his observations of the activities of Vesuvius. Etna and Stromboli. In 1870 his name was still mentioned with commend- ation in a work called Founders of the British Museum. But Sir William Hamil- ton's theories on the earth's crust had been fairly superseded even by then, and in his own day the Royal Society had been rich in splendid amateurs with good inquiring minds. There had been nothing Darwin- like in his forward view. He was at his best as a discerning patron of musicians and artists. The Palazzo Sessa, ruefully des- cribed by him as almost an inn, 'The King's Arms', was visited during his years en poste by every foreign traveller of distinc- tion as well as all British.

At the age of sixty-one, out of kindness, thinks his latest biographer, he married a girl of twenty-six, who had been sent off to Italy by Greville who could not afford to keep her any longer and did not wish his uncle to marry. When 'Mrs Hart', born Amy Lyon, daughter of a Cheshire black- smith, discovered that Greville never meant to follow her, she wrote to him in fury that she would make Sir William marry her. It took her five years and to all appear- ances the strange match was highly bene- ficial to all parties. Her command of French and Italian was soon remarkable and her powerful voice was trained. She became literally a howling success, the bosom friend of the Queen of Naples. Her 'Attitudes', a series of dumb-show poses after classical models, directed by Sir William, were almost unanimously com- mended. Her beauty, recorded by Romney, Reynolds, Angelica Kauffmann and many others, was outstanding. Brian Fothergill presents the novel suggestion that 'she is perhaps better understood if regarded as one of the comic characters of English his- tory'. There is foundation for this.

The outbreak of the French Revolution, which had speedy repercussions over- whelming Naples, was disastrous for Sir William. He had not the political or diplo- matic experience for a situation beyond his capacity. He was not the stuff of which heroes are made, but he did recognise a

hero when he met one. How soon he dis- covered that Nelson, 'the greatest man that ever England produced', was the lover as well as the embarrassingly open admirer of Emma was a secret nobody ever discovered. Mr Fothergill thinks he did know and held his peace when Emma gave birth to Nelson's first children under her husband's roof a few months after they had all re- turned to England. Sir William became rather a pathetic figure, but not yet senile. according to his biographer, as he watched with all possible dignity his wife's inept efforts to reign as a social success in London as in Naples. The caricaturists were savage, and he rather half-heartedly sug- gested a separation.

His vaunted Correggio was considered by later experts a work of Luca Cambiasi, an artist who had decorated the Doria palace in his native Lucca, and the Escurial. His Leonardo has become a Luini—not bad for a man who never gave big prices. He died. enigmatic to the last, in the arms of Emma with Nelson holding his hand. His will announced, 'the copy of Madame le Brun's picture of Emma, in enamel by Bone, I give to my dearest friend Lord Nelson, Duke of Bronte; a very small token of the great regard 1 have for his Lordship, the most virtuous, loyal and truly brave character I ever met with. God bless him, and shame fall on those who do not say "Amen".'

Sir William Hamilton had faded from a European scene with which he was out of sympathy four years before he Tsar met the Emperor Napoleon in a fairy-tale pavil- ion on a raft constructed across the river Niemen. Here was framed the Treaty of Tilsit, which is the point from which Georges Lefebvre took up again his tale of Napoleon and the Napoleonic period. (The author was anxious to point out that this second volume—Napoleon: From Tilsit to Waterloo 1807-1815, Routledge and Kegan Paul 45s--the result of a life-time's study. was not a mere biography.) Lefebvre's view is Olympian. It has a curious resemblance to Hardy's Dynasts. as he looks down on France from the heights, and watches the clouds part, disclosing puppets struggling, scenes of battle and intrigues, financial crises, marriages, births, deaths. The story moves on inexorably—the Treaty took half his kingdom from the King of Prussia, gave all west of the Elbe to a brother of Nap- oleon, and Prussia's Polish territory to the King of Saxony. There were secret clauses against England and Turkey . . .

Lefebvre's study of eight years is sub- divided into three parts. The first deals with the Continental System from 1807- 1809, the war of 1809, English successes at sea and Wellington's campaigns (but only up to 1809), the continental blockade and the opening of the fatal Russian campaign. The second part, which is by far the most interesting, describes imperial France in 1812, the Continental System again and the independent forces—the rise of nationality in England and France, capitalism and the expansion of Europe. Part three is neces- sarily sad--the fall of Napoleon. This covers the Russian campaign, the two cam- paigns of 1813, the first abdication, the Con- gress of Vienna, the return from Elba and the Hundred Days. The great Napoleonic achievement--the establishment of a new dynasty and the building of a universal empire—ended in failure.

The author is remarkably fair, no blind worshipper of the Emperor. By 1807, 'he was showing himself less and less capable

of self-control'. By 1815, 'it would seem that the Emperor's health. energy and confidence were no longer what they had been in former days.' Perhaps he is a little wrong about the Iron Duke: 'a hard and dry character in which imagination and affection were equally wanting', and about the most faithful of the Emperor's vassels, Eugene, Viceroy of Italy, who certainly did not begin to negotiate with Murat 'in the hope of keeping the kingdom of Italy for himself. J. E. Anderson's careful transla- tion of a masterpiece of French scholarship must not be mistaken for easy reading, but is beyond doubt a must-have for the student of the Napoleonic period.

Brewer and Benham disagree as to the nationality of the favourite proverb that you cannot make an omelette without

breaking little eggs. Denis-Charles Parquin was one of the little eggs broken to make

the Napoleonic omelette, and he was ex-

tremely French. His memoirs (Napoleon's Army, edited by B. T. Jones, Longmans

50s), covering his colourful ca-eer from 1803-1815, form a welcome addition to the series edited by Brigadier Peter Young.

There are some errors of date and place- names in Parquin's saga, but he is essentially

truthful. He was clearly noisy and quarrel-

some; neither literary nor artistic nor par- ticularly sensitive; but as an eye-witness he is valuable. He was so often on the spot— at Jena. at Wagram, fraternising with British cavalry officers in the Peninsula, and with leading guerrillas. Berthier bought and hunted one of his horses from Grosbois A very pretty hand passed him an orange as he rode alongside the coach bearing Marie-Louise into France (it was probably intended for her equerry, General Colbert, 'but I took it from the hand of the Em-

press'). At a review after the return from

Russia Parquin stationed himself advan- tageously. 'Who are you?' asked the Emperor. 'An officer of the Old Guard, Sire...I was born and bred in Paris, but at the age of sixteen 1 left my native city as a volunteer. I was commissioned on the battlefield and have received ten wounds, although I would not exchange them for

the number I have inflicted on the enemy.

I captured an enemy standard in Portugal. On that occasion the Commander-in-Chief put forward my name for a decoration but the distance between Portugal and Moscow is so great that I have not yet received the

answer.' Of course he received his cross of the Legion d'honneur, from the Emperor's own hands. He was in the court- yard at Fontainebleau when the Emperor said farewell to his Guard . .

The story ends at this melancholy point. In fact, it was the Emperor Napoleon in not 1 who was ultimately fatal to poor Parquin. He married a lady-in-waiting to Hortense, Queen of Holland, and they ran a château on Lake Constance as a pension with great success. (Parquin was always a great one for the ladies.) He re- counts without a blush that he used to carry a supply of lockets containing locks of his hair, with him on his campaigns to bestow upon weeping fair ones when duty called. In 1840, he was condemned to twenty years' imprisonment for his assistance to the son of Queen Hortense in his second attempt to win over a garrison—and the French nation, He wrote his memoirs in prison. If he could only have survived till 1852 he would have seen his second hero an Emperor. He was only fifty-eight when he died. The glamour of Boney caught them so young.