“If I had been a man in this great revolution,” she wrote, “—I should have either been killed at once or made a name and done some good for my country. Lord Nelson’s motto would be mine—Victory or Westminster Abbey”—meaning a tomb under the floor. She had the ambition that he lacked, and she sought to exercise it through him. It was something of a curse, she acknowledged, not a source of delight and satisfaction. In one diary entry she wailed, “Why was I born so frightfully ambitious?”
