England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (62 page)

Dame Francis, Mary Cornish, and possibly a hired nurse tended Emma, but there was little they could do to make her comfortable. The British consul, Henry Cadogan (coincidentally named but no relation), gave them money and covered the outstanding bills. Emma gave him some jewelry and a lock of Nelson's hair in gratitude. The last of her dresses and trinkets went to the pawnbrokers.

When the effects of the laudanum wore off, Emma had little to cheer her. She knew that Nelson's child would be left a penniless orphan. Thirteen-year-old Horatia bravely tried to keep Emma company. Washing and trying to feed her mother was beyond her, but she was determined to help. Earl Nelson refused to give them their installment of the Bronte allowance before it was due in spring. Horatia begged him for an advance of £10 on the interest due on the sum Nelson left for her, and beseeched a loan of £20 from a friend, probably James Perry or Joshua Smith. She also attempted to give her mother some comfort by writing to the Matchams to ask if she could live with them after her mother's death. The flat resounded to Emma's coughing and sickness, and it was difficult to sleep. As she later confessed, the period of her mother's decline was "too indelibly stamped on my memory ever to forget."
⁵

Nelson had died in glory in an afternoon, but Emma gasped out her life in long terrible weeks, drifting in and out of consciousness. Toward the
end, she asked for her priest, but she was soon too delirious to speak. "Latterly she was scarcely sensible," Horatia recalled.
⁶
On January 15, 1815, at one in the afternoon, she breathed her last.

Emma had wished to be buried in England, in the vault next to her mother in Paddington Green, but there was no money to transport her body back home. Henry Cadogan planned a modest funeral in the Roman Catholic church: £28 compared to Nelson's £14,000. Emma's faithful friend Joshua Smith reimbursed Cadogan for both the funeral costs and the price of an oak coffin. England's mistress was buried on January 21 in the land of her lover's enemies, in the public ground outside town. The
Gentleman's Magazine
reported that "all the English Gentlemen in Calais" attended her funeral. It was said that the captains and masters of the many vessels in the harbor also joined the procession behind her coffin to the grave, out of respect for Nelson's Emma. Journalists across Europe fought to be first to announce her death.

CHAPTER 57
Horatia Alone

H
enry Cadogan cared for Horatia in the aftermath of Emma's death. Presumably he bought her a mourning dress and paid to liberate the trinkets that her mother had pawned. After persuading Emma's creditors in Calais to allow Horatia to leave, he gave her the money to travel as far as Dover. The deeply traumatized teenager had a miserable fourteenth birthday under his protection at Calais, and then, accompanied by Dame Francis and probably Mary Cornish, set off home on January 28,1815. It was just in time: hostilities resumed with France at the end of February, and the gay tourists who had danced in the ballroom at Dessein's Hotel were stranded in Calais. Emma's creditors had insured her life, and they were paid off (solicitors pursued Mary Cornish for an affidavit to prove Emma had actually died). Horatia was now free of debt, but she had inherited little from her mother. Mr. Matcham met Horatia at Dover and took her to their home.

At the Matchams', after a week or two of pampering, she took up her new life. No longer the benefactress's daughter, she was a dependent relation and had to earn her keep by caring for the younger children, eleven-year-old Horace, nine-year-old Charles, and four-year-old Nelson. Horatia tried to fit in with her new family and their demands, quelling her grief for her mother and trying to forget the despair of her final days in Calais. She had to work hard to maintain her composure when Mr. Matcham decided to take the whole family to Calais for a holiday in July 1815 and again the following year. After Emma's careful tutoring, she could speak five languages and sing and play well, but she had little chance to practice her gifts while working as a glorified upper servant. No longer
able to enjoy so much fine meat or perform for the Prince of Wales, she became a voracious reader and, unlike her mother, an excellent needlewoman.

Two years later, at the age of sixteen, she was sent off to live with the Boltons, deemed old enough to act as housekeeper for her uncle, whose wife, Susanna, had died in 1813. Anxious to escape her position as poor relation, she married her neighbor, the Reverend Philip Ward, at the age of twenty-one. With her husband, she found a happiness she had not experienced since childhood. The mother of eight (one son died in infancy) and the grandmother of many more, Horatia became what Emma had desired to be: the matriarch of a big family.

Emma's daughter was never rich. Even when her mother's old friend, the Duke of Clarence, became king, there was no money for her. She battled to raise her family on a clergyman's income. But she had Emma's natural style. A photograph of her in old age shows her wearing a rich crinoline dress of dark silk, perhaps purple, one of Emma's favorite colors, with ruffled sleeves and a full skirt. In a miniature of her at age thirty-six she looks captivating in a blue off-the-shoulder dress. She is slender, and her face is beautifully regular, with Emma's limpid eyes and Nelson's straight nose. Thanks to her mother's efforts, Horatia became a lovely, graceful, and accomplished woman, and her health was not impaired by her experience of misery during her teenage years.

One of the few possessions of Emma's that Horatia brought back with her from Calais was a dress of green and pink embroidered silk. The dress was altered many times and ended up in the dressing-up box of Horatia's great-great-great-granddaughter, but even years later the material was still thick and opulent, the embroidery delicate. Although she sold most of her fine clothes and lost others, Emma was still, in her last days, trying to keep up some of the style and beauty that had once set Europe alight.

Emma's obituaries were generally salacious. The
Morning Post
reported:

The origin of this Lady was very humble, and she had experienced all those vicissitudes in early life which too generally attend those females whose beauty has betrayed them into vice, and which unhappily proves the chief means of subsistence. Few women, who have attracted the notice of the world at large have led a life of more freedom. When, however, she became such an object of admiration as to attract the attention of Painters, she formed connections which, if she had conducted herself with prudence, might have raised her into independence, if not affluence. ROMNEY, who evidently felt a stronger admiration for her than what he might be supposed to entertain merely as an Artist, made her the frequent subject of his pencil. His admiration remained till the close of his life in undiminished ardour. The late CHAS GREVILLE, well known for his refined taste in VIRTU, and who was a prominent character in the world of gallantry, was the PROTECTOR, to use the well-bred language of the polite circles, of Lady Hamilton, for some years; and when his uncle, the late Sir William Hamilton wanted to take abroad with him a chere amie, he recommended the LADY with so good a character that Sir William took her with him and having a reliance on her fidelity, married her.

The journalist dwelt on the
"friendship
between Lady Hamilton and our great Naval Hero" and criticized her for being "intoxicated with the flattery and admiration which attended her in a rank of life so different from the obscure condition in her early days," but still admitted that in "private life, she was a humane and generous woman… obliging to all whom she had any opportunity of serving by her influence."
¹

Emma died just short of fifty, but she outlived many of her friends and contemporaries. A few remained: Sir Harry was bluff and dim-witted until the end, a living testament to the health-giving properties of killing foxes every day. At the age of eighty he married his young dairymaid and packed her off to Paris to be refined. Earl Nelson was so determined to have an heir that he married a twenty-eight-year-old at the age of seventy, his first wife, Sarah, hardly cold in her grave, but he died without a son. William, Sarah, and their son, Horace, were buried near Nelson in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral—even in death, the hero couldn't escape his officious brother and his family. Fanny Nelson outlived everybody. She lived comfortably near Exmouth until her death in 1832 at the age of seventy-six. Her beloved Josiah became a successful merchant and married happily. She saw Emma die poor and lonely, Horatia grow up in obscurity, and Earl Nelson squander his money and the goodwill of the country.

In 1994, a group of faithful supporters erected a plaque in Emma's honor on the front of the rambling house in Calais. But many of her other friends, relations, and lovers have no monument. An owner of Slebech Castle demolished Sir William's grave, and his final resting place is unmarked.
The graves of Mrs. Cadogan and Greville in Paddington Green are also lost. Only Nelson's magnificent tomb remains.

Britain was at war throughout most of Emma's life. Four million Frenchmen and hundreds of thousands of Russians, Austrians, Italians, and English were slaughtered, with 650 English sailors killed at Trafalgar alone. Emma died just months before the end of the wars that had made her famous, missing the days of celebration that greeted Lord Wellington's cataclysmic win at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815.

After 1815, public sympathies about England's most notorious love triangle began to fall with Fanny. Jane Austen's dearest brother, Frank, was one of Nelson's favored captains, and his ship even took a dispatch to Nelson while he was living at Palermo with Emma and Sir William. In her novel
Emma,
the brazen, obsessively matchmaking Emma Woodhouse is taught a lesson: she must behave more like the restrained Jane Fairfax, a second Fanny. In
Mansfield Park,
quiet Fanny—whose brother brings her a cross in the fashion of Emma's Maltese Cross from Italy—wins Edmund from sexy, blowsy Mary Crawford, an excellent actress who makes a scandalous joke in public about admirals and their fondness for “Rears and Vices,” just as Emma would have done. Another character worries that visitor numbers at his guesthouse have dropped because he called it Trafalgar and “Waterloo is more the thing now.”

Soon Emma and all she stood for were out of fashion, replaced by Victorian piety. The time when a girl from nowhere could rise to become the most famous woman in England was over. Glamour was gone and mistresses were kept tucked away, not paraded around fashionable London. After the death of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Clarence, who became George IV and William IV respectively, Queen Victoria ascended the throne, and a new age of dynamic industry and public professions of virtue began.
²

Emma could have achieved her success only in the last years of the eighteenth century. She was a woman of her period. But her abilities and ambitions cried out for a different time, when there were more options available to a woman than marriage, motherhood, or the life of a courtesan.

Emma has been castigated as fat, drunk, extravagant, promiscuous, a prostitute. And yet she had a better figure than most women of her class, and her drinking, gambling, and spending were, although reckless and excessive, nothing unusual when compared with the habits of her friends. Most of her debts were incurred in an effort to improve Merton and make herself the glamorous, generous hostess Nelson so craved. If she was a
courtesan, she was in good company: many female aristocrats had once been demimondaines, and at least one in eight women had worked as a prostitute at some period in their lives. She was a good wife to Sir William and a faithful mistress to Nelson, and her relationship with Horatia was spoiled only by the pressures of debt and illness. She cannot be held responsible for breaking Nelson's marriage: he had long since fallen out of love with his unhappy wife and resented her inability to have children. Nor was Emma a distraction from his duty. His pursuit of glory was in part motivated by his desire to win money and fame for his daughter and "wife in the face of heaven."

Emma's story is about ambition and heartbreak, beauty and pain. While writing this biography, I discovered that everybody knew about Nelson and his battles, but Emma provoked very different reactions from men. A pensioner at a friend's wedding told me she must have been a "fantastic fuck." Another guest said, "That's what happens to you when you don't live a good life." It is still Nelson's mistress—not Nelson—who is judged and must suffer for the affair.

Although Emma Hamilton has been disparaged, I have been startled by the hundreds of people who claim to be her descendants. Most were people I simply happened to meet, such as an estate agent or a friend of a friend; others contacted me directly after seeing me speak on television programs. Surfing on the Internet revealed many more, and it seems that thousands of people around the world believe themselves to be descended from Nelson and Emma, based on perceived physical resemblances and family myth.
Punch
once printed a cartoon about the one man on earth who had not had an affair with Emma Hamilton. The satire is spot on: nearly everyone whose male ancestor passed within a mile of Emma (and some female relations too) claims he had a torrid affair with her, and often that she bore his child. Nelson and Emma are probably the most cited ancestors in British history. Historians may condemn the pair, but, enchanted by the glory and tragedy of their lives, scores of us wish to be related to them.