England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (46 page)

I have just got your letter, and I live again. DO NOT let the lyar come…. May God Blast him! Be firm!… Do not, I beseech you, risk being at home. Does Sir William want you to be a whore to the rascal? Forgive all my letter; you will see what I feel, and have felt. I have eat not a morsel, except a little rice, since yesterday morning, and till I know how this matter is gone off. But I feel confident of your resolution and thank you 1,000,000 of times. I write you a letter, which may be said as coming from me, if you like, I will endeavour to word it properly. Did you sit alone with the villain for a moment? No, I will not believe it! Oh, God! oh, God! keep my sences. Do not let the rascal in.

Later, when Greville invited her to attend a soiree with the prince at the house of another aristocrat, probably the Duke of Devonshire, Nelson thundered, "Tell the Duke that you will never go to the house," and he
added, "Mr G must be a scoundrel; he treated you once ill enough, & cannot love you, or he would sooner die."

He hardly ate, abandoning himself to lurid fantasies. "I might be trusted with 50 virgins naked in a dark room," he raved. Nelson suspected that Sir William was using Emma as bait to encourage the prince's assistance in his efforts to gain a pension and some compensation for his losses. After all, if Sir William had turned a blind eye to Nelson's frantic courting of Emma in Palermo, he was hardly about to start playing the jealous husband about visits from the Prince of Wales.

Emma was deeply hurt by Nelson's accusations. She had been unfaithful to Sir William only once—with him. It was rumored that King George's madness was returning, and everybody believed the prince might soon be regent. All London wanted to invite him for dinner. Nelson was being naive: if Emma did manage to become friendly with the prince, it would also assist his position. Infuriated that he had called her a whore, Emma accused him of cruelty, and suggested that he was the one with the wandering eye. Nelson wrote, "I am alone with your letters, except the cruel one, that is burnt, and I have scratched out all the scolding words, and have read them 40 times over… again I in treat you never to scold me, for I have never deserved it from you, you know." But he had— Emma was his faithful lover, struggling to keep life together without him, and she did not deserve to be called "a whore to the rascal."

Emma was flattered by the prince's attentions. He courted women intensively. Lady Bess Foster reported that he writhed on the floor in front of her, sobbing and vowing eternal love, promising to break with all his other ladies and that she "should be his sole confidante, sole advisor— private or public."
³
Most women responded to his pleas, flattered by such emotional attentions from the heir to the throne. Emma might sing for him, show him her Attitudes, flirt, and allow him to tease her that he had been her client at the Temple, but it went no further.

As 23 Piccadilly was bombarded with Nelson's letters, Sir William grew concerned about Emma. Then Nelson hit a new level of frenzy when he ranted, "Rather let the lowest wretch that walks the streets dine at his table than that unprincipled lyar…. Sir William never can admit him into his house, nor can any friend advise him to it unless they are determined on your hitherto unimpeached character being ruined.
No
modest woman would suffer it. He is permitted to visit only houses of notorious
ill fame."
Emma was devastated by his comparison of her house to one of "ill fame." Even the man who claimed to love her more than life seemed obsessed
with her background. She wept so violently that she gave herself a migraine. It was the last straw for Sir William.

Whether Emma will be able to write to you today is a question, as she has got one of her terrible sick headaches. Among other things that vex her is that we have been drawn in to be under the absolute necessity of giving a dinner to the Prince of Wales on Sunday next. He asked it himself having expressed his strong desire of hearing Banti's and Emma's voices together…. Emma would really have gone to any lengths to have avoided Sunday's dinner, but I thought it would not be prudent to break with the prince who really has shown the greatest civility to us… and she has at last acquiesced to my opinion. I have been thus explicit as I know your lordship's way of thinking and your very kind attachment to us.

Sir William added he was "well aware of the danger that would attend the prince's frequenting our house," not because he thought Emma might "ever be induced to act contrary to the prudent conduct she has hitherto pursued" but for fear that the newspapers might misinterpret her hospitality. His is a remarkable letter: a husband writes to his wife's lover, assuring him that she is being faithful. It shows how much the
tria iuncta in uno
depended on each other. When he remarked that "the world is so ill-natured that the worst construction is put upon the most innocent actions," he implied Nelson was being similarly unfair.

Around February 23, a very remorseful Nelson wrote to Emma that, writing as Mr. Thompson, he had "forgot all his ill health, and all his mortifications and sorrows, in the thought that he will soon bury them all in your dear, dear bosom." He declared, "I daresay twins will again be the fruit of your & his meeting. The thought is too much to bear. Have the thatched cottage ready to receive him, & I will answer that he would not give it up for a queen and a palace." The "thatched cottage" was his pet name for her genitalia, while "twins" was a sexual joke—the act of intercourse was sometimes described as being "twinned." Nelson was fond of Shakespeare and often recited entire passages, and he was perhaps thinking of the line in
Othello
where sexual intercourse is the "beast with two backs." Sorry at having hurt her, Nelson anticipated a night in bed together.

On the same day as he wrote to Emma to prepare the "thatched cottage," Nelson was given leave to return home. Traveling through the night
by carriage to reach 23 Piccadilly by 7 a.m., he hurried to Emma's arms. King George was ill, and the attention of the press was—briefly—diverted from celebrity watching. Dreading a recommencement of Fanny's campaign for his attention, he wrote to command her to remain in Brighton. She dared not disobey him. He stayed at Lothian's Hotel in Albemarle Street, and Emma introduced him to Horatia at Mrs. Gibson's in Maryle-bone. Nelson fell in love with his infant daughter on the spot, rhapsodizing, “A finer Child never was produced by any two persons, it was in truth a love begotten Child.” He decided, “She is in the upper part of her face so like her dear good mother,” and burbled, “If it is like its mother it will be very handsome…. I think her one, aye, the most beautiful woman of the age.”

CHAPTER 41
Precious Jewels

T
he excited new father returned to his ship at Yarmouth bubbling with happiness. "My own Dear Wife for such you are in my Eyes and in the face of heaven," he wrote,

there is nothing in this World that I would not do for us to live together and to have our dear little Child with us. I firmly believe that this Campaign will give us peace and then we will sett off for Bronte, in 12 hours we shall be across the Water, and freed from all the nonsense of his friends or rather pretended ones… it would bring 100 of tongues and slanderous reports, if I separated from her which I would do with pleasure the moment we can be united. I want to see her no more. Therefore we must manage till we can quit this Country, or your Uncle dies.

They were still dreaming that they would soon be able to return to Sicily and live in bliss on his estate at Bronte. "I never did love anyone else," he promised. He was already quivering with anticipation for his next home leave: "My longing for you, both person and conversation, you may readily imagine what must be my sensations at the idea of sleeping with you. It setts me on fire even the thought, much more would the reality. I am sure my love and desires are all to you, and if any woman naked was to come to me even as I am this moment thinking of you, I hope it might rot off if I were to touch her even with my hand."
¹
Mr. Thompson, he wrote, was "more in love with her than ever" and "sorry that she was a little unwell when he was in London as it deprived him of much pleasure, but he is determined to have full scope when he next sees her."
²

Nelson's sexual obsession with Emma was tinged with concern about Sir William's power. The law allowed Sir William to banish Emma and keep her daughter. Had he chosen to do so, neither Emma nor Nelson would ever have been able to see their daughter again, and after Sir William's death she would go to his heir—namely, Greville. Sir William might have owed his "dear friend" money, but he technically owned his child, and Nelson detested the uneasy balance of power. One hopes Emma's husband never found those letters in which his friend wished his rival would hurry up and die. Nelson busied himself with pursuing the dream of living with Emma by making provision in his will for her and Horatia. As he wrote, Sir William owed him £927 for expenses in Palermo, £255 lent him in 1800, and £1,094 as his half share of expenses of thejour-ney home in 1800. He left this debt in trust (i.e., William would pay it back to Emma, not to Nelson), as well as £1,000 a year for Emma in her lifetime. Nelson guessed that Emma would live for only another twenty years: she would, as it happened, live another fourteen, so he was prescient—strangely so, considering she was only thirty-five.

Nelson's provision for Emma was shoddy. Sir William could not reimburse the debt, and Nelson should have guessed that Greville, as Sir William's heir and executor of his will, would never pay it. In the eighteenth century, property and money, like votes and power, were the business of men, and they guarded them jealously. A man left his estate to his male heirs or relations, and they were supposed to care for his wife and female offspring. Nelson may have been sufficiently unconventional to desert his wife and have a child with Emma, but he was not independent-minded enough to leave her adequate money to live on after his death. Glowing with visions of them living together in his brand-new home on the Bronte estate, enjoying his fame after he had beaten Napoleon, he thought he was never going to die.

Nelson was breaking his ties with Fanny. The Admiralty was exasperated with Josiah's brawling, insubordination, and laziness, and not even Nelson's intervention could secure him another ship. Nelson raged to Fanny that he had done all he could for Josiah and commanded her to stop writing to him: "I neither want nor wish for any body to care what become of me, whether I return or am left dead in the Baltic, seeing I have done all in my power for you… my only wish is to be left to myself." She called it "Lord Nelson's letter of dismissal" but refused to take "the least note of it." She begged sympathy from Nelson's prize agent, Alexander Davison,
as well as from Nelson's family and the Admiralty Board, declaring she found Nelson's behavior utterly incomprehensible.

Fanny did just as any other canny eighteenth-century woman would: she ensured that Nelson and all his friends knew he had no grounds to divorce her. She pursued a careful strategy by emphasizing to everyone how she was the perfect wife: "faithful, affectionate, desirous to do everything I could to please him."
³
Divorce was difficult and costly. A husband could divorce his wife for adultery, but a wife could cite only non-consummation and cruelty. Fanny's letters made it clear: the marriage was "affectionate" and consummated, and she had been entirely faithful and always his deeply loving wife. She also stressed that she wished the marriage to continue: even if Nelson chose to present himself as cruel, she would refuse to divorce him on such a basis. Her status, her social preeminence, and the respect she gained from her peers were contingent on being Nelson's wife, and if she lost him, she lost everything. Fanny stepped up the public relations war against Emma by stressing her excellence to anyone she could find. But she dared not go too far: she wanted to keep Nelson's generous allowance to her. Incensed, Nelson instructed Davison, "Before I arrive in England, signify to L[ad]y N that I expect, and for which I have made such a very liberal allowance to her, to be left to myself, and without any enquiries from her."

Although Horatia had secured her position in Nelson's heart, Emma felt vulnerable. Her lover hated to hear even the mention of his wife's name, so she kept her jealousy secret and plunged her energies into trying to fulfill his dream of a home filled with his family and friends. She infuriated Fanny by attempting to employ Nelson's French butler from Roundwood, and trying to win over his siblings. Nelson's clergyman brother William wrote to Emma unctuously, "Your image and voice are constantly before my imagination, and I can think of nothing else…. It is no wonder that my good, my great, my virtuous, my beloved brother should be so attached to your ladyship." Nelson's family had read the news (William had seen it for himself) about Emma's pregnancy and they knew it meant he had transferred his loyalties for good, and they were fully prepared to follow.