for a time entertained, the thought of joining him on the station; but, if she broached the idea to Nelson, he certainly discouraged it.  Writing to her on the 10th of April, 1799, he said:  “You would by February have seen how unpleasant it would have been had you followed any advice, which carried you from England to a wandering sailor.  I could, if you had come, only have struck my flag, and carried you back again, for it would have been impossible to have set up an establishment at either Naples or Palermo."[75]

The scandal increased apace after his headquarters were fixed at Palermo.  Lady Minto, writing from Vienna to her sister, in July, 1800, says:  “Mr. Rushout and Colonel Rooke,[76] whom I knew in Italy, are here.  Mr. Rushout is at last going home.  He escaped from Naples at the same time as the King did in Nelson’s ship, and remained six months at Palermo; so I had a great deal of intelligence concerning the Hero and his Lady ...  Nelson and the Hamiltons all lived together in a house of which he bore the expense, which was enormous, and every sort of gaming went on half the night.  Nelson used to sit with large parcels of gold before him, and generally go to sleep, Lady Hamilton taking from the heap without counting, and playing with his money to the amount of L500 a night.  Her rage is play, and Sir William says when he is dead she will be a beggar.  However, she has about L30,000 worth of diamonds from the royal family in presents.  She sits at the Councils, and rules everything and everybody.”  Some of these statements are probably beyond the personal knowledge of the narrator, and can only be accepted as current talk; but others are within the observation of an eye-witness, evidently thought credible by Lady Minto, who was a friend to Nelson.  Mr. Paget, who succeeded Hamilton as British minister, mentions the same reports, in his private letter to Lord Grenville, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.  Hamilton had asked to see his instructions.  “I decided at once not to do so, for he would certainly have been obliged to show them to Lady Hamilton, who would have conveyed them next moment to the queen ...  Lord Nelson’s health is, I fear, sadly impaired, and I am assured that his fortune is fallen into the same state, in consequence of great losses which both his Lordship and Lady Hamilton have sustained at Faro and other games of hazard."[77]

The impressions made upon Lord Elgin, who touched at Palermo on his way to the embassy at Constantinople, are worth quoting; for there has been much assertion and denial as to what did go on in that out-of-the-way corner of the world, Lady Hamilton ascribing the falsehoods, as she claimed they were, to the Jacobinical tendencies of those who spread them.  “During a week’s stay at Palermo, on my passage here,” wrote Elgin, “the necessity of a change in our representative, and in our conduct there, appeared to me most urgent.  You may perhaps know from Lord Grenville how strong