England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (63 page)

Even more of us wish we owned some of their belongings. I have been shown hundreds of items that dealers and owners assert originally belonged to her, including shoes, dresses, musical instruments, and furniture, and nude pictures that families say she gave to Nelson's captains. Very few of these items date from the early 1800s, and most were made later in the nineteenth century. Almost all of her belongings were sold, and those she gave away were lost or even destroyed, for the belongings of
most of her friends were also destroyed after their death. The Prince of Wales did keep his mementoes of Emma, in a bizarre, secret collection. After George IV died, his executor, the Duke of Wellington, was shocked to find a stash of “a prodigious quantity of hair—women's hair—of all colours and lengths,
gages d'amour,”
or love tokens.
³
Stuffy Wellington reeled at the “Volumes of love letters… trinkets of all sorts, quantities of women's gloves,” even pocket handkerchiefs he had used to wrap up old “faded nosegays… in short, such a collection of trash as he had never seen before,” in the words of a friend. He decided the best thing would be to burn the whole lot.
⁴
Locks of Emma's chestnut hair and her gloves and letters were tied up in these bundles, along with those of other society beauties such as Maria Fitzherbert, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Billington, Lady Jersey, and Lady Conyngham.

Emma's life was intense, dazzling, and soon over. She fought for her celebrity by constantly re-creating herself and directing her image. When society had little to offer a woman of her class other than exploitation by men, she struggled to establish her own identity. Emma refused to be beaten, but she was destroyed by her mix of overconfidence and a wish to please, desires that made her vulnerable in a society that had no place for a woman like her. Despite all her charisma, intelligence, and charm, Emma had no rights and had to rely on what she could win from men—and when men would not give it to her, she had nothing. Striving for success, she was always tormented by what she had achieved and what she had sacrificed. Glamorous, open-minded, optimistic, and showy but also undisciplined, unaccustomed to compromise, and overreaching, she epitomized the high Georgian age. And yet she also showed its limitations as she struggled to forge her own destiny, ignore social prejudice, live independently, and survive without a protector. Today, when women have more opportunities than ever before to realize their ambitions but still feel terrible compunction about doing so, her strong will and attempts to follow her heart have even more resonance. A woman who both embodied and transcended her age, she was, truly, England's mistress.

NOTES

This book is based on the original documents of letters by Emma, as well as letters, diaries, and reports by those who knew her. These are contained in archives across the world, at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, the Beinecke Library, Yale University, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, the British Library in London, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the Nelson Museum in Monmouth, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Fitzwilliam Library, Cambridge, as well as record offices across the country, and also in private collections. If a letter has been cited but not footnoted, this is because it is in a private collection, seen with the very kind courtesy of the owner, or printed in
The Collection of Letters and Historical Documents formed by Alfred Morrison, the Hamilton and Nelson Papers,
edited by Alfred Morrison, two volumes (privately printed, 1893-4); or the
Dispatches and Letters of Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson
by Sir Nicolas Harris Nicolas, seven volumes (London, 1844–46), and the originals have been lost.

Abbreviations are: BL: British Library Manuscript Room. Hundreds of Emma documents are contained in the sixteen Egerton volumes of correspondence between Maria Carolina and Emma, as well as the Egerton collection of Nelson's letters to Emma, and there are hundreds more, chiefly in the ninety bound volumes of Additional MSS, 34902-34992, between Nelson and his wife, and within the Nelson family, and also the Additional MS collection of William Hamilton correspondence, as well as the papers of St. Vincent and the Althorp MS papers of the Spencer family. NMM: National Maritime Museum Greenwich. More than two thousand Emma documents are contained in the Nelson-Ward (NWD), Bridport (BRP), Trafalgar (TRA), Davison (DAV), Keith (KEI), Girdlestone (GIR), and Matcham (MAM) collections, as well as in the Letterbooks (LBK). PRO: Public Record Office, Kew. The letters from William Hamilton to the Foreign Office, and also to Charles Greville, contained in thirteen volumes, FO 70, 1-13, covering the period 1780 to 1800, have proved an invaluable source, along with the prison record books, PRIS. Monmouth: The Nelson Museum, Monmouth. More than eight hundred letters and documents, most unpublished and many throwing much new light on Emma. Bodleian: Bodleian Library, Oxford; Fitzwilliam: Fitzwilliam Library, Cambridge; Wellcome: Wellcome Library for the History of Science and Medicine, London; Beinecke: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Hough-ton: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Harvard University; Huntington: Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

CHAPTER 1

^1.
William Mortimer,
History of the Hundred of Wirral
(Manchester, 1972), p. 65.

CHAPTER 2

^1.
Nathaniel Spencer,
The Complete English Traveller
(London, 1771), p. 412.

CHAPTER 3

^1.
National Library of Wales, PA 1605-30. See also Flintshire Record Office, D/HA/312, 599, 601.

CHAPTER 4

^1.
Dr. Thomas was buried in 1805 at the age of seventy-six.

^2.
Samuel and Sarah Adams,
The Complete Servant
(London, 1825), p. 258.

^3.
It is said that the family used her as a model for their drawings—although there is no evidence for this—and if so, perhaps she had become too friendly with her new employers.

^4.
The Carlton House Magazine,
April 1793.

CHAPTER 5

^1.
At this date, London was just bigger than the other world cities: Peking and Edo, modern-day Tokyo.

^2.
Sophie von la Roche, “Diary for 1786,” in
Sophie in London,
ed. Clare Williams (London, 1933), p. 141.

CHAPTER 6

^1.
Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz,
A Picture of England
(London, 1791), p. 191.

^2.
Henry Fielding,
An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers
(London, 1751), p. 10.

^3.
Pierre Grosley
A Tour to London
(London, 1772), I:75.

^4.
Anon.,
A Present for Servants from their Ministers, Masters or other Friends,
eighth edition (London, 1768), p. 17.

^5.
As Emma's later portraits by Romney show exquisitely pale hands, one has to question how hard she scrubbed the hearths and saucepans at Chatham Place.

^6.
Town and Country Magazine,
April 1777, p. 186.

CHAPTER 7

^1.
Fielding,
Late Increase of Robbers,
p. 76.

^2.
Anon.,
Authentic Memoirs of the Green Room
(London, 1801), pp. 184–85.

^3.
Anon.,
The Secret History of the Green Room
(London, 1793), p. 185.

^4.
On Jane's roles, see Philip H. Highfill,
A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses in London, 1660-1800
(Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1973), pp. 65-66.

^5.
Grosley,
Tour to London,
I:49.

^6.
Fielding,
Late Increase of Robbers,
p. 6.

CHAPTER 8

^1.
John B. Morritt,
Letters and Journeys, 1794-96, A Grand Tour,
ed. G. E. Marindin (London, 1985), p. 215.

^2.
Melesina Trench, “The Recollections of Melesina Trench,” Hampshire Record Office, 23 m/93 2/1.

^3.
Elizabeth Steele,
Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley
(London, 1787), II:114.

^4.
See
The London Stage 1660-1800,
ed. William van Lennep, Emmet L. Avery, A. H. Scouten, G. W. Stone Jr., and C. B. Hogan (Carbondale, Illinois, 1969), V:193.

^5.
Secret History of the Green Room,
p. 55.

^6.
Ibid., p. 69.

^7.
Grosley,
Tour to London,
I:160.

^8.
Henry Angelo,
Reminiscences of Henry Angelo
(London, 1828), II:21.

CHAPTER 9

^1.
Sir John Fielding,
A Plan for a Preservatory and Reformatory for the Benefit of Deserted Girls
(London, 1758), p. 10.

^2.
One of Sir William's colleagues, James Bland Burges, declared Emma “set out as a common prostitute in Hedge Lane” before being “engaged by the Committee of the Royal Academy to exhibit herself naked as a model for the young Designers.” (James Bland Burges, 1791, Fitzwilliam Museum, Percival Bequest MS).

^3.
William Hickey
Memoirs
(1809), ed. Roger Hudson (London, 1995), p. 276; James Northcote,
Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds
(London, 1813), p. 280;
World,
September 1781.

^4.
Joseph Farington,
The Farington Diaries,
ed. Kathryn Cave (New Haven, 1982), VIII:3170.

^5.
See
Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings,
ed. David Mannings (New Haven and London, 2000), p. 556.

^6.
Nicholas Penny,
ed., Joshua Reynolds
(London, 1986), p. 295.

^7.
Thomas Rowlandson implied she modeled for the Academy in his caricature
Lady H———s Attitudes.

^8.
Northcote,
Memoirs,
p. 103.

^9.
Emma to Romney December 20, 1791, Houghton Library, MS Eng. 156.

CHAPTER 10

^1.
See Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun,
Memoirs,
translated by Siân Evans (London, 1989), p. 101.

CHAPTER 11

^1.
Town and Country Magazine,
April 1778, p. 177. The newspapers also made sly hints on her work in the “Nunnery,” and many of those who knew Emma commented on her experiences at Kelly's. Nelson's contemporaries suggested she had been employed by a St. James madam.