Sir William Hamilton Portrait
of Hamilton by Pompeo Batoni
 Sir William Hamilton
(1730-1803) was born in Scotland as the fourth son
of Archibald Hamilton, the third Duke of Hamilton as well as the
British governor of Jamaica. Because of his parents’ proximity
to the royal family, William grew up in close friendship with the
future king
George III. William served
in the military before getting married in 1758. (His wife, Catherine
Barlow, died in 1782.) In 1764 Hamilton was appointed to the Bourbon court of Naples as Britain's Envoy
Extraordinary (and eventually Minister
Plenipotentiary, but never "ambassador" although that's what everyone
called him) and
served in that capacity until 1800.Hamilton was typical of the “gentleman scholar” of his day—diplomat (or whatever) by profession, but propelled by an avid interest in history, art, and the natural sciences and by keen powers of observation. He was eventually made member of the Royal Society of London; his output of publications in various fields was considerable and valuable. He was knighted in 1772. Hamilton was an ardent antiquarian, archaeologist and vulcanologist. He collected Greek vases and other artifacts that eventually formed the nucleus of the Roman and Greek section of the British Museum* (see note 1, below); as an archaeologist he actively participated in the early excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum (note 2); and he studied local volcanic and seismic activity. He was definitely not an arm-chair geologist —witness this passage from his Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, and Other Volcanos (pub. T. Cadell, London, 1774): “…I passed the whole day and the night of the twelfth upon the mountain, and followed the course of the lava to its very source: it burst out of the side of the mountain, within about half a mile of the mouth of the Volcano, like a torrent, attended with violent explosions, which threw up inflamed matter to a considerable height…” As well, Hamilton published Campi Phlegraei. Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies, as they have been communicated to the Royal Society of London (Naples 1776-79). He also published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 73, (1783) the first English-language account of the devastating Calabrian earthquake of that year; his report was his translation of a letter he had received from Count Francesco Ippolito detailing the effects of the disaster.  Diplomatically, Hamilton
was instrumental in bringing about the
alliance between Britain and the Kingdom of Naples through a treaty
signed on July 12, 1793. According to the terms of the treaty, Naples
provided 6,000 men for service in Britain’s war against France. The
troops served in Toulon where the British had occupied the city against
the French Republican Army. (The British and Neapolitans were finally
expelled by a Republican force led by a young and
soon-to-be-promoted
artillery captain, Napoleon Bonaparte.) The
British, in return, were permitted to use the port of Naples as a base
and later were instrumental in shepherding the Bourbon royal family to
safety in Sicily and sheltering them there during both the period of
the Neapolitan Republic (1799) and,
shortly thereafter, the decade-long
French rule of Naples under Murat.In his long tenure as ambassador, Hamilton was a friend to many of the great names on the Grand Tour, including Mozart and Goethe, the latter of whom who stayed in Hamilton’s residence, the villa Sessa (photo, above left, at what is now the Piazza dei Martiri). (German sources claim that Hamilton deserves—by sharing his knowledge of Italy with Goethe and others—some credit in the development of what is called the Weimarer Klassik in German literature.) Hamilton’s name is associated with that of his young lover and then wife, Emma Lyon (Lady Hamilton) and admiral Horatio Nelson, with whom Lady Hamilton conducted an infamous love affair—apparently with the encouragement of her husband, William, and much to the delight of generations of novelists and scandal lovers. Sir William finally applied to be recalled in 1796, but did not receive news that his request had been accepted until late 1799. That was after the Bourbon royalist forces had retaken the kingdom from the revolutionary Republic and Hamilton had had a chance to reenter and again see Naples, the city where he had played such an active role. He returned to London and died shortly thereafter. ---- This
red-figured water jar is considered the finest
in the first  * 1. Hamilton became quite the
antquities dealer early in his tenure as ambassador. Within a few years
he had bought entire private collections of vases, marbles, sculpture,
etc. Hamilton exported and sold many of these items abroad
in spite of the fact that it was illegal to do so. He sold his first
collection to the British museum in 1772. The collection then
formed the nucleus of the
museum's department of antiquities. Illustrations with commentary of
the first collection were published
between
1766-76 in Naples in 4 volumes as A
Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet
of the Hon. W. Hamilton. The first collection influenced artists of
the day such as Angelika Kauffmann and Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the
famous British pottery firm. Some
of the second collection
(1798) ,
however,
was lost at sea when the ship transporting the collection, HMS Colossus, went down off the Isles of Scilly
in December 1798; recent salvage has managed to recover some of the
items. The first collection was vast and included (as cited in Ramage,
below) hundred of vases, terracottas, bronzes, bas-reliefs, gems, coins
and miscellaneous sacrificial, agricultural and domestic items.
Details on the second collection may be found in McPhee and Morris
(below). (Back up to
main text.)* 2. In the days before careful archaeology, Hamilton may be regarded as somewhat of a pioneer. He was not at all in favor of the helter-skelter approach of the day: uncover the ruins, walk off with what you can, and cover up the holes again, all without taking notes. He favoured drawing the ruins in situ and keeping objects together that had been found together for purposes of putting them on display. (Back up to main text.) Excluding all the fictional and non-fictional ink spilled on Hamilton’s membership in the juicy William/Emma/Nelson love triangle, there is considerable literature about William Hamilton’s life, in general. Recent bibliography includes: —Fothergill, Brian. Sir William Hamilton: Envoy Extraordinary, (Nonsuch Publishing, 2005); —Constantine, David. Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton, (Phoenix Press, 2002); —Davis, John A. (ed.) and Giovanni Capuano (ed. ). The Hamliton Letters: The Naples Dispatches of Sir William Hamilton, (I.B. Tauris, 2008). Hamilton’s activities as a collector and dealer of antiquities are well-documented in —Ramage, Nancy H. “Sir William Hamilton as Collector, Exporter, and Dealer: The Acquisition and Dispersal of His Collections” in The American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 94, No. 3 (July, 1990), —McPhee, Ian.
Review of “Corpus Vasorum
Antiquorum, Great Britain 20: The British Museum 10: Fragments from Sir
William
Hamilton's Second Collection of Vases Recovered from the Wreck of HMS
Colossus by
V. Smallwood and S. Woodford” in The
Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 124, (2004), pp. 212-213; —Morris, Roland. H.M.S. Colossus: The Story of the Salavge of the Hamilton Treasures, Periscope Publishing, Penzance, (2006). |