Kate Williams

by Unknown

  Emma had played a difficult game, ensuring everyone knew she was the mother of Nelson’s child, but without suggesting she had intended to court newspaper attention. Aware that women could be elevated one day and eviscerated the next, Emma worked hard to keep the newspapers on her side by pretending not to actively court their attention but “allowing” it if it came her way. A flurry of gossip and jokes in the newspapers followed the birth. Caricaturists were just as quick. James Gillray worked overtime drawing Emma as the Carthaginian queen in Dido in Despair, and it was immediately displayed in pride of place in the print shops. A heavily pregnant Emma in her nightdress (a joke on her revealing muslin dresses) throws an attitude of misery. Out of the window, we see Nelson’s ships sailing away9 Gillray portrays Emma’s bedroom as littered with Sir William’s broken statues, erotic art, and a book of her Attitudes. Sir William slumbers on in bed, oblivious. Emma’s poor ankles are heavily swollen from pregnancy. It was impossible for anyone to misunderstand Gillray’s point: Emma was massively pregnant and about to give birth as Nelson departs. Like Dido (and not Cleopatra), Emma weeps alone, keeping her grief to her bedroom, just as society believed a woman should.

  ∗ Women who wanted to give birth covertly hurried abroad or to a country retreat. Because she needed to prove she had been pregnant by showing herself off as swollen and then recovered, Emma had chosen to have her baby in one of the most conspicuous houses in London.

  Five days later, Gillray produced another caricature exploiting the birth of Nelson’s child. In A Cognocenti Contemplating the Beauties of the Antique a wizened Sir William hunches in his collection rooms surrounded by broken stone phalluses and cracked pots, examining a bust of Emma missing a nose. A pot was a figure for the (unsatisfied) woman in caricatures, and Gillray means his reader to infer that Emma’s husband was impotent. On the walls in front of him are three portraits: a topless Emma in a version of Romney’s Mirth, Nelson looking manly, and Vesuvius exploding with the fire Sir William lacked. He had, as everyone now knew, been well and truly cuckolded.

  Emma quickly recovered her health. Convalescing in closed, hot rooms put women at severe risk of catching puerperal fever, and Emma’s decision to venture out undoubtedly improved her health. A romantic man such as Nelson might hope that his children would be breast-fed, believing that breast milk carried spirit and character, but Emma could not keep the child at 23 Piccadilly. Everybody loved to joke about her baby, but no one would visit her home if they thought the baby was present, and she would be publicly reviled if she was ever seen with her child.

  A few days later, Mrs. Cadogan wrapped her granddaughter in a muff and furs and, perhaps accompanied by Emma, hurried in a hired cab from 23 Piccadilly to the home of a Mrs. Gibson at 9 Little Titchfield Street, Marylebone. Mrs. Gibson seemed to be discreet. Her lack of a husband was a bonus, for men tended to be more alert to the opportunities for selling stories to the newspapers. Emma paid Mrs. Gibson handsomely to care for Horatia and hire a wet nurse. The gentry routinely sent children out of the home for the first eighteen months or so. Only the upper aristocracy had nannies and wet nurses living with them, and Emma’s behavior would have been little different if her child had been legitimate. She had to express her milk at home to ease her discomfort, once again separated from a baby daughter only a few days after her birth.

  James Gillray’s A Cognocenti Contemplating the Beauties of the Antique. Emma’s pregnancy was the definitive evidence that Sir William had been cuckolded.

  Soon Emma had a second problem to deal with. The Prince of Wales had decided she had “hit his fancy.” He had admired Emma for years and, to Nelson’s intense jealousy, owned portraits of her. “I know his aim is to have you for his mistress,” moaned Nelson to Emma on February 4. The prince was separated from the Princess of Wales, and his only other regular lover was modest Mrs. Fitzherbert, who lacked the sexy, blowsy allure he adored. There was a definite vacancy for a new and glamorous celebrity woman in his life. Emma was just his type: strong-minded, stylish, and adored by the public. Nelson was terrified. It seemed to him that Fanny’s insinuation that Emma was incapable of the fidelity needed to be his partner might well prove true after all.

  CHAPTER 40

  The Prince and the Showgirl

  Oh God, why do I live?” Nelson wailed about a week after the birth of Horatia. “I am mad, almost dead…. God strike him blind if he looks at you.” Even the newspapers were beginning to hint at the Prince of Wales’s passion for Nelson’s Cleopatra. “I am in tears, I cannot bear it.”

  Emma was the most famous woman in England, and the prince wanted her. The prince could give Emma anything she desired: a Mayfair mansion, her own carriage with six white horses, showers of diamonds, court dresses, and introductions to anyone she desired. An affair with the prince would turn her into a megawattage celebrity: courted by aristocrats, mobbed in her carriage, the toast of dressmakers, the star of every fashion plate. Nelson mournfully decided himself a poor prize in comparison. He wrote self-pityingly, “I am only fit to be second or third, or four” in Emma’s heart. It was obvious to him—and to the newspapers—that becoming the prince’s mistress would be Emma’s revenge on the royal family for not inviting her to court, and it would also solve her financial problems. Even worse, she might have her eye on marriage. Nelson rued, “You would grace a Court better as a Queen than a visitor.” The prince was a fabulous prize. As Nelson whimpered, “No one, not even Emma, could resist the serpent’s tongue.”

  Emma was still uncomfortable after the birth, longing to be with her child, and trying to play hostess while pandering to a fretful Sir William. Even worse, a nurse, probably one of the wet nurses, was threatening to talk and had to be bribed. And now Nelson, only a few days after he claimed to be dancing with joy, was bombarding her with frantic letters full of explicit references to her as the prince’s courtesan. Most women did not resume sexual relations until at least four weeks after giving birth. And Emma was in no state to be making love with anybody, let alone the party-loving Prince of Wales.

  But Nelson could not think rationally. Suffering from stress and searing eye pain, which he could only dull with opium, he implored, “I cannot, will not believe you can be false. No, I judge you by myself; I hope to be dead before that should happen, but it will not. Forgive me, Emma, oh, forgive your own dear, disinterested Nelson.” In a muddle of feelings, he scribbled she was “kind and good to an old friend with one arm, a broken head, and no teeth,“1 and then later, “Hush, hush my poor heart keep in my breast, be calm. Emma is true!” He declared that his cooled alter ego, Mr. Thompson, “is almost distracted; he wishes there was peace,” so that he could “instantly quit all the world and its greatness to live with you a domestic, quiet life,” because he “doats on you and the child.” Nelson even promised to sacrifice the chance to beat Bonaparte just to be with Emma.

  The prospect of the prince coming to dinner tipped him into hysteria. He had visions of Emma performing suggestive songs to her royal guest that she had once sung to him. “I could bawl with my whole strength and my last breath should say do not suffer him into your home. “2 Late at night he scrawled, “Will you sing for the fellow, The Prince, unable to Conceal His Pain? No you will not…. Tell me all, every word, that passes. He will propose if you—no, you will not try; he is Sir Wm’s guest.” Before he could send the letter, he received one from Emma. He replied:

  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, Go
d! 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 Marylebone. 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

  The 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.