Superwomen Part 28

In 1805 the deadlock was broken. Nelson was again to fight the French.

He told Lady Hamilton and many others that this campaign was to end in his death. He ordered his coffin made ready for him. Then he sailed against the French fleet, met it off Cape Trafalgar, and annihilated it. In the thick of the fight a musket ball gave him his death wound.

He was carried below, and there, the battle raging around him, he laboriously wrote a codicil to his will, entreating his king and country to repay his services by settling a pension on Lady Hamilton.

Then to his next-in-command he panted:

"I am going fast. Come nearer. Pray let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair and all other things belonging to me. Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton--poor Lady Hamilton! Thank G.o.d I have done my duty!"

 

And so he died, this knightly little demiG.o.d--true lover, false husband--who had fouled his snowy escutcheon for a worthless woman.

Now comes the inevitable anticlimax.

All England turned with loathing from Lady Hamilton. Her husband was dead. Lovers stood aloof. Folk who had received her for Nelson's sake barred their doors against her. She had followed the popular custom of living in luxury on nothing a year. Now her creditors swarmed upon her.

Her house was sold for debt. Next she lived in Bond Street lodgings, growing poorer day by day until she was condemned to the debtor's prison. A kind-hearted--or hopeful--alderman bought her out of jail. A former coachman of hers, whose wages were still unpaid, threatened her with arrest for debt. She fled to Calais.

There she lived in an attic, saved from absolute starvation by a fellow Englishwoman, a Mrs. Hunter. Her youth and charm had fled. The power that had lured Nelson and Greville and Hamilton to ruin was gone.

In 1815 she died. She was buried in a pine box, with an old black silk petticoat for a pall. No clergyman could be found to take charge of her funeral. So the burial service was read by a fellow debt exile--a half-pay Irish army captain.

One wonders--perhaps morbidly--if Nelson's possible punishment in another world might not have been the knowledge of what befell his "dear" Lady Hamilton in her latter days.

THE END.