England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (52 page)

T
he
thought
of seeing him again agitates me and makes me mad with joy, then fear comes across me that he may not come." Emma had just received a bundle of Nelson's letters and she was reading fifty-four pages of news, protestations of love, and advice on improving their home, veering between "different feelings that elate and oppress me." "Your resemblance is never far from my mind," he wrote in one. "I hope very soon that I shall embrace the substantial part of you instead of the Ideal, that will I am sure give us both
real pleasure and exquisite happiness.
⁸
His romantic letters lifted her heart but others brought back the raw pain of losing her baby. Every woman in England wanted to be Lady Hamilton, but no one understood her difficulties. She was spending heavily to try to stifle her grief Urgently attempting to keep up appearances, all the while worrying about Nelson, she shone at the most expensive parties, and entertained a few true friends and many sycophants and hangers-on with luxurious dinners. Nelson worried about the "intrigues" of the set around Lady H—, possibly Lady Hertford, intimate of the Prince of Wales, whom he termed "as great a pimp as any of them." Otherwise, he loved Emma's extravagance, for it seemed to him fitting to his status. "Don't mind the expense, money is trash," Nelson had used to fulminate to Fanny, exasperated that she could not cut the dash he wished after his success at the Nile.

Soon after the death of her husband, the marriage proposals began. In 1804 alone, she received one from an earl, from the second son of a viscount, and from a relation of Sir William's. Her suitors were wealthy men—they had to be to countenance her gigantic and ever-growing debts.

Emma had to dress stylishly, entertain the highest echelons of society,
and maintain two houses, but her £1,200 a year from Nelson and £800 left to her by Sir William hardly covered the food bills. She still owed money to her husband's creditors. Nelson promised that he would become wealthy with prize money and would leave her rich in his will, and she borrowed more and more, eager to believe him. She comforted herself by remembering the amounts her friends owed, such as the Duchess of Devonshire, in debt for an amount equivalent to $9 million today, accrued mainly through gambling and socializing. Emma did not understand how much more vulnerable she was than such great ladies. Aristocrats such as Devonshire had the assets to sustain their debt and they could always beg money from their family.

Emma's paramount desire was to keep in with the Prince of Wales, who she thought would protect her. She was trying to promote herself as a hostess to the glamorous Whig set, as well as attempting to win over James Perry, editor of the pro-Fox and pro-Whig and sometimes anti-Nelson
Morning Chronicle.
Bitterly disappointed in the king's treatment of her, she was convinced that the accession of the Prince of Wales would bring her and Nelson more recognition. Nelson's political loyalties wavered, so after he took his seat in the House of Lords in October 1801 the Whigs wanted him on their side.

London was fizzing with political gossip. The Whigs had been debating an alliance with Lord Grenville of the Tory party, against Henry Adding-ton, current prime minister. Covert meetings mushroomed across London. James Gillray satirized the cabaling in his caricature
L'Assemblée Nationale
—
or, Grand Co-operative Meeting at St Ann's Hilt.
The major Whigs discuss allying with Grenville at the house of Charles James Fox. Emma, adorned with a Nelson miniature, stands above Fox and his wife as they receive the notables. She flutters her fan and gossips with the Duchess of Devonshire, while Greville's brother, Colonel Robert Greville, eavesdrops on them. Among the luminaries in attendance are the Prince of Wales, Mrs. Fitzherbert, who was still at the prince's beck and call despite his stream of mistresses, the Dukes of Bedford and Norfolk, the Duchess of Gordon, Lord Cholmondeley, the Duke of Clarence (future William IV) and his mistress, the actress Mrs. Jordan, Lord and Lady Derby, and Lady Buckinghamshire, and Lord Grenville. Emma was swinging with the in crowd. By frantic entertaining, socializing, and spending, she presented herself as the keeper of Nelson's flame and favor. The Fox set had bottomless purses—Fox once lost £32,000 at the card tables in a single
night—and most owed the equivalent of millions. Emma could not afford to keep up, but she tried.

James Gillray's LAssemblée Nationale—or, Grand Co-operative Meeting at St Ann's Hill (June 1804). Emma, wearing a Nelson miniature around her neck and a feathered headdress, gossips with the Duchess of Devonshire as, directly in front of them, plump little Charles James Fox and his wife receive the luminaries. Emma's position with the duchess in the center of the picture suggests how predominant she was in the hedonistic Fox set.

The same aristocrats were active in the “Pic-Nics,” an amateur dramatic society organized by Colonel Greville, at Tottenham Court in London, and it seems as if Emma was also a participant. The press declared their weekly meetings were excuses for giant orgies and extravagance.
²
One commentator decided that if the “uncorrupted… did not oppose and overthrow [private theaters], decency would abandon Britain.”
³
In Dilettante Theatricals,
Gillray caricatured the party staging
The Rival Queens,
by Nathaniel Lee, with Emma singing at the back of the party behind Mrs. Billington. The gossips were wrong: the Pic-Nics' only excess was the inordinate sums expended on costumes, sets, and jewels, which was money Emma could ill afford.

Like all society women, Emma was trying to establish herself as a charitable patron. She had allied herself with a fashionable London orphanage, the Foundling Hospital, by standing as “godmother” to a child, which meant that she gave money and occasionally received updates on the
child's progress. As Nelson indulged her, "Your purse, my dear Emma, will always be empty; your heart is generous beyond your means."
⁴
Otherwise, she spent her time visiting Nelson's relations and bathing in the sea. A sharp-eyed lady spotted her in Ramsgate in the summer of 1804, lonely in the sea resort without Sir William.
⁵
She was endeavoring to take the waters to improve her fertility, hoping to fall pregnant quickly when her lover returned.

Emma worried that her lover "seems to hope the rooms are done and has written a great deal about improvements." His designs to landscape the grounds, construct a driveway, and add new entertaining rooms and bedrooms were proving increasingly expensive. She was having a new entrance constructed on the north side of the house, and building stables, while planning a proper coach house. Thomas Cribb, the garden designer, had employed twenty men to turn the muddy grounds into a graceful and orderly garden. Ambitious to transform the first house that was truly her own into a handsome modern mansion, a lasting monument to Nelson's glory, and the equivalent of an aristocratic seat, she willingly paid the bills. "What I have done has been to make comfortable the man that my soul dotes on, that I would think it little to sacrifice my life to make him happy," she wrote. "Nelson and Emma can have but one mind, one heart, one soul, one interest, and I can assure you that if the nation was to give my beloved Nelson a Blenheim, Merton would be the place he would live in."

Nelson's family treated her homes like finishing schools for their adolescent children. The Boltons sent clodhopping Eliza and Anne on extended visits. Emma, who had once negotiated arguments between courtiers, now arbitrated between teenage girls. William Nelson's prickly, obstreperous son Horace stayed for his holidays from Eton, and he usually needed new shoes, new clothes, and coach fare back to his parents' home or he fell ill and required nursing with special food and expensive milky drinks. Sarah also asked if Emma could arrange a rich wife for him, even though Nelson had already claimed he hoped he would one day marry his Horatia (this was very unlikely since he would have to wait until he was at least thirty to do so). Charlotte Nelson was always at Emma's side. She was taken to hear Mrs. Billington perform, to parties and masquerades, and to dinners with aristocrats, and, after many music lessons, Emma organized a private concert so that everybody could hear her sing.
⁶
Sarah commanded Emma subtly, "You and I want her to be every thing that is accomplished and to marry well."
⁷
"How good you are to dress her so
smart," she pressured.
⁸
Sarah badgered her to hire dancing masters and buy Charlotte "Dumb-bells" and "make her use them," and Emma treated her new "foster daughter" to holidays by the sea and a gold watch.
⁹
As Sarah admitted to Emma, "you have had the bringing her up."

The Duchess of Devonshire took notice of Charlotte, and Sarah suggested Emma might "think of having her presented this winter? Would she not be able to go better with you into company if she was?"
¹⁰
Emma could not present Charlotte at court, since she had never attended, and her friends were apparently unable to help. Sarah deluged Emma with letters, encouraging her to turn awkward, ill-educated Charlotte into a "Girl of Fashion, what pleasure she would have, when she walk'd across the room, to hear people say, what an elegant young woman that is… perseverance shall do it." Although Nelson was often dubious about his family's greed, Sarah had hectored Emma into believing that helping her family would win his esteem: "How often have I with pleasure seen him delighted with you & hope I shall do again."

All the while, Emma grew more desperate for her lover's homecoming. The death of little Emma weighed on her mind, and by mid-August, Nelson was so worried by her letters that he asked to return to England at the end of the year. He pressed her to keep Horatia at Merton, proposing that the country was the ideal place for their daughter to learn "virtue, goodness, and elegance of manners… to fit her to move in that sphere of life she is destined to move in." His was an impossible dream: the building work had made the house uninhabitable, covered in dust and overrun with workmen. When his return seemed imminent in the winter of 1804, Emma dropped everything and devoted herself to completing the most urgent renovations at Merton. In late December, she spent hundreds on rugs and mirrors from one shop alone. Nelson remained at sea, and she was left with the dozens of guests she had invited to give him a family Christmas, all of them happily eating up the lavish dinners she had ordered for him. In January 1805, again anticipating Nelson's arrival, she ran up even more bills. She bought two long mahogany chests of drawers for £7 each, five cushion covers and six chair covers for £10, a bed filled with the finest feathers for £16, and down pillows for £3, paying extra for transport. By early 1805, her debts were around £7,000, and most had been amassed since Sir William's death two years previously.

Nelson expected to soon be free to "fly to dear Merton where all in this world which is dear to me resides." "I shall lose no time in coming to your
dear, dear embraces," he wrote happily. But his homecoming was continually cancelled.
¹¹
Emma consoled herself by writing poems to him, dismissing them with ladylike modesty as "bad Verses on my Soul's Idol."

I think, I have not lost my heart
Since I, with truth, can swear,
At every moment of my life
I feel my Nelson there!

If, from thine Emma's brest, her heart
Were stolen or flown away;
Where! where! should she my Nelson's love
Record each happy day?

When Emma was not writing to Nelson, she was shopping. In summer 1805, she spent over £30 storing and transferring her existing furniture and musical instruments between Clarges Street, Brewer Street, and Mer-ton and buying new items. Moving the pianofortes alone cost 14 guineas.
¹²
She bought the finest furniture: a mahogany cabriol chair with upholstered arms and seat, six scarlet and green ottomans, more mahogany chests of drawers, a mahogany coffee table, a Kidderminster carpet at £14 for the master bedroom, and more for chandeliers. She then paid £15 to move the furniture out so that the house could be whitewashed.

To enable Horatia to live at Merton, Nelson wrote a letter for Emma to show to curious visitors in which he explained that the child was an orphan "left to his care and protection" in Naples. Although Nelson had found a position in the navy for Charles Connor, the son of Emma's aunt, her other Connor cousins were always demanding money. Nelson decided that the eldest girl, Cecilia, should become Horatia's governess at "any salary you think proper."
¹³
Emma paid Miss Connor a substantial wage, and later also appointed her sister Sarah as governess. Emma Carew also visited Merton. Nelson was sorry to miss her. As he wrote, "I would not have my Emma's relative go without seeing her."