At the time Nelson and the Hamiltons returned to Palermo, the Queen of Naples was wishing, for political reasons, to visit Vienna.  To meet this wish Nelson took the “Foudroyant” and “Alexander” off the blockade of Malta, that they might carry herself and suite to Leghorn, together with the Hamiltons.  He clung also to the hope that Keith would give him his powerful flagship to return to England, in which case the Hamiltons would go with him.  “I go with our dear friends Sir William and Lady Hamilton,” he wrote to Lord Minto; “but whether by water or land depends on the will of Lord Keith.  May all orders be as punctually obeyed,” alluding to the completion of the destruction of the Nile fleet by the capture of the “Guillaume Tell,” “but never again an officer at the close of what I must, without being thought vain (for such I am represented by enemies), call a glorious career, be so treated!”

Keith’s opinion of Nelson’s obedience was probably somewhat different.  The latter had written him on the 12th of May, that, being under an old promise to carry the Queen to the Continent, he proposed to take the two ships-of-the-line for that purpose, and Keith sent him a letter forbidding him to do so, and directing them to be sent back at once to Malta.  Nelson, it is true, did not receive this; but it is impossible to reconcile with attention to orders the diversion of two ships of their force from the singularly important station appointed them by the commander-in-chief, without reference to him, and using them to carry about foreign sovereigns.  On arriving in Leghorn, on the 14th of June, Nelson announced the fact to Keith, with apparent perfect unconsciousness that the latter could be other than charmed.  “I was obliged to bring the Alexander, or the party never could have been accommodated:  I therefore trust you will approve of it.”  “I was so displeased by the withdrawing of the ships from before Malta,” wrote Keith to Paget, “and with other proceedings, that her Majesty did not take any notice of me latterly.”  It would seem also that some harm had come of it.  “What a clamour, too, letting in the ships to Malta will occasion.  I assure you nothing has given me more real concern, it was so near exhausted.”  “Had not Nelson quitted the blockade,” he wrote a week later, “and taken the ships off the station, it might have fallen about this time."[6]

Lord Keith had been engaged for six weeks past in the famous blockade and siege of Genoa, the garrison of which, spent with famine and disease, marched out on the 5th of June, 1800.  On the 14th—­the day Nelson reached Leghorn—­was fought the Battle of Marengo, in which the Austrians were totally defeated, the French army under Bonaparte remaining victorious across their line of retreat to Mantua.  The next day Melas signed a convention, abandoning Northern Italy, as far as the Mincio, to the French, to whom were given up all the fortified places, Genoa included.  At midnight of June 18, Nelson received