England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (56 page)

Nelson should have predicted Emma's fate. He had left her a house, but £500 a year was not enough to maintain it, as well as a child, even if Emma had been a skilled and frugal housekeeper. A man, when he died, usually impoverished his wife and daughters by willing his property to his closest male relation, but then asked in his will that his heir care for them. Usually, the heir gave them little, an outcome scathingly laid bare by Jane Austen when she described the penurious state of the Dashwood sisters in
Sense and Sensibility.
¹⁰
Now that he was the heir, William, Earl Nelson, wanted every penny of Nelson's estate for his son. Nelson's vision of Emma after his death, singing at his funeral, happy with his family, bringing up Horada in security, may have comforted him as he faced death, but it was a fantasy.

Inspired by the torrent of gossip and scandalous novels, would-be writers and biographers were demanding to read Emma's letters. William Nelson was the most pressing of all. Intending to commission a biography that would outsell all the others being discussed, he wanted the whole cache, even the most explicit. In between sending her cheering verses, her old friend, the poet William Hayley expressly told her
"as your very sincere friend,
I should advise you to retain these Letters in your own Custody, & not suffer
even me,
your old and faithful Friend, to persuade you to impart them to the Public, except at some distant day,
as a Legacy to your Country from yourself"
¹¹
Emma followed his advice, much to Earl Nelson's anger. Her relations with him quickly became strained. Sarah, now Countess, Nelson wrote to Emma demanding the bloody coat, "in point of right there can be no doubt to whom this precious relic belongs."
¹²
Emma kept the coat but behaved emolliently, still hoping that William Nelson might give money to Horada. She was disappointed. He was infuriated by Nelson's provision that his estate should pay the expenses and bills at Merton for six months after his death and he was utterly unable to feel sympathy for the child. He accused Emma of adding on bills accrued before Trafalgar and demanded that Mrs. Cadogan show him the accounts. At the same time, he failed to pay the £500 pension due her from Bronte. Believing his brother's lies that he loved Emma and Horada, Nelson had dreamed that Horatia might marry William Nelson's son, Horace, and mentioned this hope in his will. While his brother was alive, William enthused about the idea and encouraged him to fund his son's education. As soon as Nelson died, he forbade Horace to visit Emma and made plans for his son to marry a rich aristocrat.

In Emma's time, only the very richest woman could survive without the legal protection and financial support of a man. Emma's only chance of keeping herself and Horatia in a genteel manner was to remarry immediately. But she could not bring herself to look for another partner. Despite Grenville's refusal, she still hoped that the government would honor the codicil. She threw herself into society once more, anxious to make herself so conspicuous that she could not be overlooked.

CHAPTER 50
Fashion on Credit

I
n the two years after Nelson's death, Emma was the most popular guest in London. Everybody clamored to meet the mistress of a national icon. In an attempt to numb her grief and gain support for her mission to win a payout from the government, Emma attended every event. From 1806 to 1808 she retained her central place in the premier society of the Prince of Wales and his chatterbox brothers Clarence and Sussex, and continued to be one of London's leading charitable patrons, as well as a cultural doyenne hosting splendid performances by singers Madame Bianchi and Mrs. Billington. She was playing a role that was impossible to sustain.

Emma received only a few thousand pounds from Nelson's will, and it was on the annual £800 left to her by Sir William (given to her net of tax by Greville) that she tried to maintain her role as the inheritrix of Nelson's glory. In December 1806, the will was published in the press. The nation read that Nelson entrusted Lady Hamilton and Horatia to the care of the government and assigned Horatia Thompson to the guardianship of Lady Hamilton, also decreeing that the child's surname be changed to Nelson. Since women were treated as juveniles under the law, unable to retain their money and entirely subject to the will of their husbands or male relations, children were always left to the guardianship of a man, never a woman. The publication of his will made it obvious to everybody that Horatia was Emma's daughter.

Sarah and Charlotte moved swiftly to sever their links with Emma. "Is it true that Lady Charlotte Nelson can be ungrateful," marveled Emma. About £2,000 of her debts had been accrued paying for Charlotte's education,
clothes, presents, holidays, and board for seven years, as well as many of Horace's expenses, but, Emma wrote resentfully, “they have never given the dear Horatia a Frock nor a sixpence.”
¹
She had cared for Charlotte in order to please Nelson and to seem respectable, but she had soon become genuinely fond of the teenager and she missed her deeply. Emma had spent hundreds of thousands supporting Nelson's bid for celebrity, but it was grasping William who benefited from it all. A letter remains in which Sarah invited Emma to dine at half past five but communicated that the Connors and Horatia were not welcome until the other guests had left. As Sarah commanded, “Whatever young people you may have with you, we shall hope to see them at eight o'clock, as we have some other friends dine with us.” She signed herself “Nelson and Bronte,” the title Emma so wished to possess.
²

Charlotte's exit did not reduce Emma's expenses. The Boltons and the Matchams deposited their adolescent daughters with her to educate, clothe, and introduce into society. Incensed that Earl Nelson had refused to give them anything, they inundated her with begging letters. Emma handed over more cash she did not have and implored the government and her famous friends for money on their behalf. Susanna Bolton thought that Emma's “affairs were drawing to a crisis” and encouraged her to focus on her own needs. “With or without the child, if you are well provided for, she can never
want,”
she pressed. “Depend on it she will marry
well.
”
³
But she continued to ask for favors. She shied from begging for further help from the Prince of Wales, declaring,
“You must deliver the message in your own name,
we are not in the habit of sending & speaking to such great personages.” Since Nelson's will was published in the newspapers, every one of them should have realized that Emma had little to give, but it suited them to believe her act of being a wealthy woman. “I only wish you had fortune equal to your generosity,” Susannah sighed, but by then she had helped herself to a large amount of Emma's “fortune.”

Emma moved from Clarges Street to cheaper lodgings in 136 New Bond Street. But she could not relinquish the monument to Nelson's glory she had so lovingly created, and Merton creaked on, guzzling every penny from her purse. By February 1806, the unpaid bills had reached £1,300. Struggling to borrow and scrimp, Mrs. Cadogan had no spare money for her relations, so they began to blackmail Emma. Her older brother, feckless, hard-drinking William Kidd, was nearly seventy and wanted to live out the rest of his life in ease, thanks to his famous niece. He had plenty of ammunition: details about Emma's early adulthood and,
most terrible of all, insinuations about the mysterious death of her father. Emma had paid him off before, but she could no longer meet his demands. He threatened to come and occupy Merton until she gave him the hundreds he required. Mrs. Cadogan vowed to bar the door against him, staunchly declaring that she would never let him under her roof, "never does he sleep in the house where I do."

Ann, the youngest daughter of Mrs. Cadogan's sister, Mrs. Connor, was proving equally troublesome. She felt she deserved some of her aunt's riches, since Emma had adopted her elder sisters, Cecilia and later Sarah, as nursery governesses on huge salaries, and Nelson had bought her brother, Charles, a commission in the navy. Ann whipped herself up into a state of furious resentment, soon so angry with her mother for holding her back (as she saw it) that she convinced herself she was not her parents' child. In the autumn, she wrote blackmailing notes, threatening to expose Lady Hamilton as her mother and, as Emma despaired, "persecuted me by her slander and falsehood."
⁴
Emboldened to bully Emma for money because she had no male protector, Emma's family was battering at her door. After Emma Carew came on a short summer visit in late June, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh sent £500 for the benefit of mother and daughter (perhaps as a bribe to ensure Emma kept his parentage a secret), but few others showed her any generosity.

By September 1806, it was clear that the government was ignoring Nelson's last request. "It seems that those that truly loved him are to be victims to hatred, jealousy and spite," Emma lamented. Sir William's old secretary, Francis Oliver, had solicited her help for his journalist friend James Harrison and his large family. She invited them to live at Merton and paid their expenses for at least six months while she employed Harrison to write a two-volume
Life of Nelson.
Published at the end of 1806, Harrison's
Life
ran rapturous on the virtuous nature of her affair with Nelson, while making it clear that Horada was his child, and it pressed the government to honor the codicil.

Creditors were still pursuing Emma, but no one in high society suspected that Nelson's glamorous mistress was poor. When she emerged from mourning, she was once more at the helm of style. The classical look had slipped slightly out of favor, but after Nelson's death, the season's most sought-after look was once more "petticoat white crape, a Grecian drapery elegantly drawn up," and flat slippers, just as Emma had worn in her Attitudes.
⁵
Everywhere she went, she took her belongings with her: the Nelson souvenirs, the relics, and most dramatically his blood-spattered
coat, which servants in the houses of her guests fought to have the privilege of airing.
⁶
Afraid of losing her friends, Emma tried to be an exciting guest. Discussing Emma's visit to town, Lady Abercorn commanded, “We hope you will not forget any of your shawls or things for attitudes.” Emma had previously experimented with different kinds of performance, and before Nelson's death, she had often refused to perform the Attitudes. Now, frantic to keep her place in high society, she had to recreate the old favorites she had perfected at twenty-six.

Dreary supper parties across London perked up when Lady Hamilton arrived. George Villiers, Hyde Earl of Clarendon asked to meet her. Delighted by “her talent and cleverness at conversation,” he encouraged Emma to describe her sea voyage from Naples to Palermo in 1799.

Her picture of the danger and horror which had surrounded her was awful almost to reality, and it was diversified by the introduction of some ludicrous incidents, which had occurred at the time, in a manner not unlike that of Shakespeare—particularly an anecdote of the pursuit of an old Duenna after her confessor, in the utmost eagerness to say a sin or two before she sank.

Since her audience seemed so interested in imitations of peasant women, Emma performed another act.

Lady Hamilton arose from table to address herself to the supposed image of the Virgin, in the character of a young Italian peasant, who wished for permission to remarry. Her shawl was adjusted as if mantling an infant, and she supplicated her patroness with every possible in-treaty… interrupted only by soothings and caresses of her child. The Saint being supposed to remain unmoved by her prayers, they were heightened into expostulations, and, at length, with an apparent impulse of forwardness, she arose and turned from the image—But, after having retired a few paces in disdain, she seemed to recollect herself, and again turned, her countenance and attitude changing, at once into an expression of resignation and humility so captivating that she seemed to have reserved the full effect of her genius for the conclusion of the personification, which ended in her again casting herself at the feet of the image.
⁷

Emma's overblown style was perfect for an age when Sarah Siddons was acclaimed for tearing up the scenery when she played Lady Macbeth.

At her writing desk, Emma scribbled begging letters, flitting between demanding the government carry out Nelson's wishes and requesting a pension for her services in Naples. Unhappy that Mrs. Fox, widow of Charles James Fox and previously a courtesan, received a pension of more than £1,200 a year, she began to lie that she herself had collected the Neapolitan gold from Maria Carolina to put it on Nelson's ship, rather than receiving the convoys of luggage at the Palazzo Sessa. Still no money came. Her position was hopeless. If she had sold Merton immediately, dismissed all her servants, and retired with Horada to a cheap rented house in Norfolk, perhaps, or by the sea, she could have managed on Sir William's legacy. But she owed about £7,000 at Nelson's death, and she had over a dozen people directly dependent on her, with many more soliciting regular payouts. She had no choice but to keep up Merton and continue wasting her money in London, the city with the highest cost of living in the world. Her life was crammed with concerts, parties, and dinners with the portly, womanizing forty-one-year-old Duke of Clarence, his younger brother, the Duke of Sussex, and sometimes their high-rolling brother, George, Prince of Wales. She was sure they would force the government to honor her.