Sepia and Technicolor

James Gilray's political cartoon of Emma Hamilton as Dido in Despair is so insulting that you might think that its portrayal of Nelson's mistress as a blowsy and hysterical trull is a triumph of satire. Not at a bit of it. The Diary of Melesina Trench, who encountered the 'menage Nelson' at Dresden in October 1800, suggests that Gilray has merely given us in sepia what Mrs Trench supplies in glorious technicolour.

Born in Dublin in 1768, Melesina Trench was descended from a family of huguenot churchmen. Her father was the son of Richard Chevenix, the Bishop of Waterford, and her mother wasthe daughter of Archdeacon Gervais. Both her parents died when she was a child, and Melesins was brought up by two ecclesiastical grandparents in succession.

Melesina was 19 years old in 1786 when she married Colonel St.George, but in 1790 the colonel left her a widow of twenty-two with an infant son. Soon after, Mrs St.George began to keep a Journal, which was highly esteemed by Edward Fitzgerald, who later described her letters as the 'next best to Walpole and Cowper in our language'. Anyone who has read Fitzgerald's own letters, may regard them as having their own claim to occupy that rank, and will know how to rate that judgment.

Having spent the next decade or so in Regency London, Mrs St.George found herself disillusioned with a what she described as 'a gulf of splendid misery and attractive wickedness.' In London, she says, she found everyone around her 'acting a part, pursuing they know not what, yet as eager in the pursuit of it as if eternal happiness depended upon it. An anxiety to go everywhere, to know everybody, to associate with those above them in position, seems a marked feature of the polished inhabitants of London. Like flies caught in a bottle of honey, all are smothered in disgusting sweets, and all are trying to rise above each other, no matter how. The distinctions of vice and virtue are broken down, 'well-dressed, well-bred, well-equipped' is a passport to every door. The affected lip-deep homage paid to virtue, while every knee bows to Baal, whenever he appears clad in purple, and fine linen, spreads a varnish over vice which only throws it out in stronger colours and darker deformity.'

Disgusted with the capital, she resolved to travel in Germany. So it was that she found herself at the Court of Dresden at the moment that England's great admiral was passing through it in the rolling triumph that attended the latter's return from the bay of Naples to his native land.

On October 3, 1800, Mrs St. George dined with 'the Nelson party' at the residence of the British Ambassador to Dresden, Mr Elliot. It is plain' she aferwards wrote 'that Lord Nelson thinks of nothing but Lady Hamilton, who is totally occupied by the same object. She is bold, forward, coarse, assuming and vain. Her figure is colossal, but excepting her feet, which are hideous, well-shaped. Her bones are large, and she is exceedingly enbonpoint... the shape of all her features is fine, as is the form of her head, and particularly her ears; her teeth are a little irregular but tolerably white; her eyes light blue, with a brown spot in one, which though a defect, takes nothing away from her beauty or expression. Her eyebrows and hair are dark, and her complexion coarse. Her expression is strongly marked, variable and interesting; her movements in common life ungraceful, her voice loud, yet not disagreeable. Lord Nelson is a little man without any dignity... Lady Hamilton takes possession of him, and he is a willing captive, the most submissive and devoted I have seen... After dinner we had several odes in honour of Nelson, written by Miss Knight, and sung by Lady Hamilton. She puffs the incense full in his face; but he recieves it with pleasure, and snuffs it up very cordially. The songs all ended in the sailor's way with 'Hip, hip, hip, hurra,' and a bumper with the last drop on the nail, a ceremony I had never seen or heard before.'

On 4 October, Mrs St. George accompanied Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton to the Opera when she noted that Lady Hamilton was profuse in such compliments as 'prove that she thinks mere exterior alone of any consequence'. On 5 October, Lady Hamilton invited Mrs St. George to see Lord Nelson dressed for Court. Mrs St. George's description of the hero as 'a perfect constellation of stars and orders' reminds one of another of Gilray's cartoons showing Nelson, with chelengk, as The Hero of the Nile. On 6 October Mrs St.George dined with Nelson at his hotel, and afterwards went to a party and a concert in his honour, and records that Lady Hamilton visited her with 'all the marks of friendship at first sight.' On 7 October she breakfasted with Lady Hamilton, and saw her in her celebrated Attitudes. Her description, which gives lady Hamilton praise where praise was due, does much to bolster the reader's confidence in some of the writer's less flatterring observations.

'She assumes their attitude, expression, and drapery with great facility, swiftness and accuracy. Several indian shawls, a chair, some antique vases, a wreath of roses, a tambourine and a few children, are her whole apparatus. She stands at one end of the room, with a strong light to her left, and every other window closed. Her hair (which by-the-bye is never clean) is short, dressed like an antique, and her gown a simple calico chemise, very easy, with loose sleeves to the wrist. She disposes the shawls so as to form Grecian, Turkish and other drapery, as well as a variety of turbans. Her arrangement of the turbans is absolute sleight of hand, she does it so, and so easily, and so well. It is a beautiful perforamnce, amusing to the most ignorant, and highly interesting to lovers of art. the chief of her imitations are from the antique. Each representation lasts about ten minutes. It is remarkable that, though coarse and ungraceful in common life, she becomes highly graceful, and even beautiful, during this performance. It is also singular that, in spite of the accuracy of her imitation of the finest ancient draperies, her usual dress is tasteless, vulgar, loaded and unbecoming. She has borrowed several of my gowns, and much admires my dress; which cannot flatter, as her own is so frightful'.

Despite all Lady Hamilton's efforts to win her over, Mrs St. George owned that Emma did not gain on her. 'I think her bold, daring, vain even to folly, and stamped with the manners of her first situation much more strongly than one would suppose, after having represented Majesty, and lived in good company fifteen years. Her ruling passions seem to me vanity, avarice, and love for the pleasures of the table. She showed a great avidity for presents and has actually obtained some at Dresden by the common artifice of admiring and longing. Mr. Elliot says 'she will captivate the Prince of Wales, whose mind is as vulgar as her own, and play a great part in England.'

On 8 October, Mrs St. George dined with the Nelson party at the table of Madame de Loss. Lady Hamilton had not at first been invited, but when Nelson refused the invitation for that reason, Mr Elliot prevailed upon Madame de Loss to include her. The Electress of Saxony would not receive Lady Hamilton, and a diplomatic solution was only found by the suspension of Court for so long as the Nelson party remained in Dresden. When Nelson got wind of the fact that the Elector did not wish to meet Lady Hamilton he said to Mr Elliot 'if there is any difficulty of that sort, Lady Hamilton will knock the Elector down!' - a threat which His Majesty's representative at the Court of Saxony must by now have known to take absolutely literally.

On 9 October, a harrassed Mr Elliot gave a breakfast party at the residence, where Lady Hamilton gave another performance of her attitudes. 'All the company, except their party and myself, went away before dinner; after which lady Hamilton, who declared that she was passionately fond of champagne, took such a portion of it as astonished me. Lord Nelson was not behindhand, called more vociferously than usual for songs in his own praise, and, after many bumpers, proposed the Queen of Naples, adding 'She is my Queen; she is Queen to the backbone.' Poor Mr Elliot, who was anxious the party should not expose themselves more than they had done already, and wished to get over the last day as well as he had done the rest, endeavoured to stop the effusion of champagne, and effected it with some difficulty; but not till the Lord and Lady, or, as he calls them, Anthony and Moll Cleopatra, were pretty far gone. I was so tired, I returned home soon after dinner, but not til 'Cleopatra' had talked to me a great deal of her doubts whether the Queen would receive her, adding, 'I care little about it. I had much rather she would settle half Sir William's pension on me.'

On the following day, which was 10 October, word came that there was a frigate waiting for the party at Hamburg, and Nelson and his party made an immediate and (as it turned out) unfounded decision to embark for that port. Mr Elliot, with what must have been a huge sigh of relief, went down to the riverside to see the party off, and told Mrs St.George on her return: 'The moment they were on board there was an end of the fine arts. of the attitudes, of the acting, the dancing, and the singing. Lady Hamilton's maids began to scold in French about some provisions which had been forgot, in language quite impossible to repeat, using certain French words, which were never spoken but by men of the lowest class, and roaring them out from one boat to another. Lady Hamilton began bawling for an Irish stew, and her old mother set about washing the potatoes, which she did as cleverly as possible. They were exactly like Hogarth's Actresses Dressing in a Barn'.

Making History

'Let them eat cake' has become a lazy shorthand for describing the supposed combination of arrogance, ignorance and stupidity that provoked the French Revolution. Usually attributed to Marie Antoinette in the form 'Qu'ils mangent de la brioche', the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Ed.1999), notes that the phrase was a lot older. In his Confessions (1740), Jean-Jacques Rousseau refers to a similar phrase as a well known saying, and the Dictionary of Quotations attributes the sentiment to Marie-Therese, the wife of Louis XIV, in the form 'Que ne mangent-ils de la croute pate?' citing a somewhat disloyal Louis XVIII as authority.

Writing of the final years of the monarchy when she was a small child at Versailles, Madame de Boigne, attributes almost exactly the same remark to Madame Victoire (1733-1799), the third daughter of Louis XV, with sufficient circumstantial detail to suggest that she all but witnessed it. Madame Victoire, she says, was a Lady of very little intelligence but great generosity. At a time of shortages, when people were discussing the misery of the poor, it was she who said, with tears in her eyes, 'Mais mon Dieu, s'ils pouvaient se resigner a manger de la croute de pate.' (Memoires de la Comtesse de Boigne du Regne de Louis XVI a 1820), ed. Jean-Claude Berchet, Mercure de France, 1999. p.65).

'True wit,' says the poet, 'is nature to advantage dress'd/What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd,' but it is equally the case, that the better the story, the less likely it is to be true.
Marie Antoinette probably never said 'Let them eat cake', but in the poisonous atmosphere of the time, there were many who might have wished that she had, and even more who were prepared to believe it.

As a child, Madame de Boigne had amazed the Court at Versailles with her precocity. She tells us that at the age of three she was sufficiently in command of her letters to be able to recite passages from Jean Racine 'pour mon plaisir et meme, dit-on, pour celui des autres.' Well, we must take her word for it, but I can't help being reminded of little William Byng in Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Verses about Bill's sister, Sarah. Sarah, of course, was the lazy girl who could not read and was tossed by a very furious bull. Bill was better read, but even he was comparatively ancient when, at an age of between 9 and 12, he is said to have become 'unnaturally keen On 'Athalie', by Jean Racine'.

Madame de Boigne tells a good story, and has an even better turn of phrase. Compelled to leave France in 1791, she subsequently found herself at the court of Naples, and describes how, on occasion, she was permitted to assist in Lady Hamilton's celebrated Attitudes.

' On one occasion' says Madame de Boigne, Lady Hamilton made her, 'pose, kneeling, before an urn with my hands joined in an attitude of prayer and leant against me, as if overwhelmed with grief. All of a sudden she stood up, stepped away, and pulled me so sharply by the hair as to make me turn towards with her in shocked surprise. This, it turned out, was just the thing that my role required, for there she was, flourishing a dagger. The enthusiastic spectators burst out with cries of 'Bravo, Medea!' but a moment later, and she drew me towards her, clutching me to her bosom as if in despite of heaven, and wresting cries of 'Well done, Niobe!' from the same spectators'. It was, said Madame de Boigne, a unique achievement, often imitated but never equalled, one of those things in which the sublime was only one step away from the ridiculous. Apart from her artistic talent, nobody could have been more common and vulgar then Lady Hamilton. Her conversation was devoid of interest, and even intellect. 'C'etait a tout prendre, une mauvaise femme et une ame basse dans une enveloppe superbe' (p.124)).

One tale Madame tells concerns her father, the Marquis d'Osmond, who, she says, was in Toulon, waiting for a favourable wind, when he was approached by Corsican gentleman who requested passage to Ajaccio for himself, his son, and their cook. The Marquis agreed, and during the passage, invited the officers of his own regiment to dine with him. The Corsican's son, who was dressed in the uniform of the Military Academy, was sitting at the back of the boat, reading, so the Marquis sent an adjutant called Belloc to invite him to table. A few moments later, Belloc returned scowling, and said that the invitation had been rejected. 'Shifty individual with the face of a crook,' said Belloc, 'I've a good mind to go and shove him overboard! How about it, Colonel?' 'No, no' said the Marquis, 'and anyway, your quite wrong, the lad's face has character, and he will make his mark!'

Well, reader, you will probably have guessed that that shifty looking individual was Napoleon. Madame de Boigne says that Belloc used to heave a deep a very deep sigh when he told this story: 'If only the Colonel had let me have my way, the world wouldn't be in quite the mess it is today!' But as it it turns out, the details of this story aren't quite accurate. The Officer in question was not called Belloc, but Belly, and the man that he subsequenttly took for Napoleon was in fact the latter's elder brother, Joseph on his way back to Corsica with his father in the summer 1794, having just completed his military training at Autun.