by Unknown
On November 25, 1808, her friend Sir John Perring, banker and former lord mayor of London, hosted a “meeting of the friends of Lady Hamilton,” a group of influential financiers largely organized by Abraham Goldsmid. The solicitor had advertised for all her creditors to contact him, and he estimated her debts stood at £8,000, with another £10,000 needed to pay off loans. The party decided to appoint trustees for the sale of Merton, judging the house and grounds to be worth £11,000. They also came up with a generous estimate of the contents at £6,500 (including £2,000 for wine), which gave Emma £3,700 to pay off her most pressing creditors, and pledged to form a “Committee to follow up the claim on Government.” Emma was ebullient.
All these things and papers of my services and my ill treatment I have laid before my trustees; they are paying my debts. I live in retirement, and the citty are going to bring forward my claims; in short, I have put myself under their protection, and nothing, no power on earth shall make me deviate from my present system.1
Emma’s promises to reform were sincerely meant but futile. Her “Citty friends” persuaded her to sell her beloved horses, but they could do nothing about her fondness for throwing lavish parties, determination to retain her troupe of elderly servants, and her preoccupation with using her position to help poverty-stricken old friends and distant relations of Nelson’s siblings. Emma beseeched so often on behalf of others that she destroyed any chance of attracting favor for herself
In spring 1809, the Mary Ann Clarke scandal broke. For Emma, it was an object lesson in how to make money out of a famous lover—which she had conspicuously failed to do. Clarke, a witty courtesan, captured the king’s second son, the Duke of’York, commander in chief of the army. When he set her up in 1803 in a large Mayfair house, she spent thousands on exquisite furniture, china and glass, and expensive dinners. The delighted duke had no idea that his allowance of £1,000 a year hardly covered the coal bill. Like Emma, Mary Ann lived on credit, but she added to her income by taking bribes from those seeking army commissions or trade contracts from the duke. When the duke abandoned her and failed to pay her an allowance, Mary Ann embarked on her revenge. Summoned to testify about whether the duke had any knowledge of the bribes, she refused to take the blame, electrifying the stuffy lawyers with smart answers. The humiliated duke hung his head as his love letters were read aloud and the lurid details of his domestic life were bandied around the court. Mary Ann also threatened to publish her memoirs but was bought off with an annuity of £600 a year plus a lump sum of £10,000. In such a delicate climate, the princes would not risk pushing Emma’s claims, and the government was even less sympathetic to mistresses who had fallen into debt through keeping up appearances.
Horatia was now nearly nine. Although she had lost her home at Mer-ton and many of her playmates as their parents severed links with Emma, she remained an outgoing and sweet-natured child. She had proved an attentive pupil of singing and music under Mrs. Billington and, proud of how the little girl lived up to Nelson’s name, Emma immediately spent some of the money advanced to her by her city friends on appointing her an expensive French governess. She retained Sarah and Cecilia Connor, Horatia’s nursery governesses, even though they were no longer of practical use.
The artist David Wilkie was excited to meet the “too celebrated Lady Hamilton” but was disappointed to find that although “lusty and tall, and of fascinating manners,” all her attention was focused on her little daughter, a “creature of great sweetness.” Emma made it clear that the child was Nelson’s. Referring to her daughter as Miss Nelson, as the will had commanded, was simply too daring for some gatherings, and so Emma introduced her as Horatia Hamilton.
Lady Hamilton, knowing me by name, called me and said that her daughter had the finest taste imaginable, and that she excelled in graceful attitudes. She then made her stand in the middle of the room with a piece of drapery, and put herself into a number of those elegant postures for which her Ladyship in her prime was so distinguished. She afterwards told me of all else her daughter could do, and concluded by asking me if I did not think her very like her father.2
Emma was socializing with City gentlemen, sure that the government could not ignore their pleas on her behalf. To repay Abraham Goldsmid for his generosity, she persuaded the Dukes of Clarence, Sussex, and Cumberland to stay with him in town and accompany him to a concert at a synagogue, to the horror of the conservative press. Meanwhile, the “friends of Lady Hamilton” were failing to fix her financial affairs. Germain Lavie wrote to George Rose that he had an “excellent” paper from her in which she listed her services, but he was unsure if anyone in government had ever seen it and where to take it. “I believe I could get half the City of London to sign a commendatory Paper if it would be any help,” he added.3 But the government continued to ignore her.
Addicted to spending as a way of dulling the loss of Nelson and all her other ordeals, Emma was too proud to admit to herself that she could not afford to party with London’s glitterati. She also had a genius for acquiring some of England’s most useless servants. The few she did manage to lose wanted money. Sir William’s old secretary, Francis Oliver, upset all his successive employers and resorted to “threatening to publish” secrets about her. One of his disgruntled ex-employers suggested she issue him with an “action for defamation, which would fully put a stop to his nonsense.” But he knew too much about her, for Nelson had trusted him to carry some of his most sexually explicit letters to her. As he had written before a torrent of risque comments, “I can give full Scope to my feelings for I dare say Oliver will faithfully deliver this letter.“4 Oliver joined a growing list of blackmailers, many of them discharged servants, who had seen everything and were as interested as her creditors in the windfall from her “Citty friends.” Her family were equally eager to share her good fortune. Thanks to them, Emma’s ruin was ensured.
CHAPTER 53
Trouble with the Relations
I am sorry to hear that you have so much trouble with your relace tions,” Mrs. Marie Thomas sympathized. “It is a pity that your great generosity towards them shou’d be so ill-placed.” Emma had asked her old employer to settle her troubled uncle, William Kidd, in Hawarden and to send her the bills for his clothes, lodgings, and debts. Kidd sharply told Mrs. Thomas “he was not brought up to work,” and demanded more money. Mrs. Thomas did not give him the £5 Emma offered, “for it wou’d onely be spent in the ale house and then he gets abusive.”
Merton remained unsold until Abraham Goldsmid’s brother, Asner, agreed to buy it in April 1809. At the news that Lady Hamilton had come into money, more creditors pressed forward, and the money from the sale disappeared into their pockets. In the same month, Charles Greville died at his home in Paddington Green, just a few weeks short of his sixtieth birthday, beaten down after a year of sickness. On his walls were the Romney portraits he had inherited from Sir William, the sophisticated Emma Hart in Morning Dress and the glamorous Bacchante, in which Emma is draped in pink and gauze. After devoting his life to becoming Sir William’s heir, he had never married or had children, and ended his days in the place where he had been young and happy with Emma, so many years before.
Emma mourned Greville deeply. The estate went to his brother, Robert, who refused to pay her annuity until he had sorted out his brother’s affairs. The Duke of Queensberry gave Emma money through Goldsmid to bridge the gap, but on condition that she was not “informed of his interference on this occasion,” guessing that Emma would have been distressed to find that the duke had helped her once again. A few months later, Greville’s belongings were put up to auction. Sir William’s fabulous library went on sale at Christie’s on June 8 and 9 and raised more than £1,000. On June 10, all the paintings of Emma were sold, including Romney’s St. Cecilia, and Cassandra, Thais, and Angelica Kauffman’s wedding portrait as the Comic Muse.1
Meanwhile the Connors were making trouble. In her will of 1808, Emma complained, “I have the mother and six children to keep, all
of them, except two, having turned out bad…. This family having by their extravagance almost ruined me, I have nothing to leave them.” When she heard they had been spreading rumors that Emma had been miserly, she responded by making Mrs. Connor sign a document acknowledging that “she and her children have been generously supported for many years by the bounty of Lady Hamilton, who has expended on her account, as she believes, little less than Two Thousand pounds,” as well as benefiting from Mrs. Cadogan’s generous assistance.2
Weakened by the catalogue of deaths and debts, Mrs. Cadogan became very ill in 1809. She managed to struggle feebly through Christmas but died on January 14, 1810. Emma had lost an invaluable friend and essential support. Many had dismissed Mrs. Cadogan as no better than a servant or a brothel madam, but few women had a mother as strong as Emma’s. Only in her early forties when she arrived in Naples, she contentedly took a backseat, intent on helping her daughter to shine. She nursed the royal family as they traveled to Sicily, and she withstood the exhausting journey to England. Her loyalty may have stemmed from her guilt at abandoning Emma as a child, but she soon became her daughter’s greatest defender and staunchest ally.
“I have lost the best of Mothers,” Emma grieved. “My wounded Heart, my Comfort all buried with her. I can now not feel any pleasure but that of thinking and speaking of her.” She buried her at the church on Paddington Green six days after her death, possibly in one of the vaults that held many coffins below the church floor. Presumably she chose the area because Mrs. Cadogan had lived there happily with Emma and Greville. Greville, Sir William, Nelson, and all those who had loved Mrs. Cadogan were dead, so it was a small funeral. Since the register notes her residence as in the parish of St. George’s, Hanover Square, Mary had probably died in Emma’s Bond Street apartment, and it would have cost substantially more for Mrs. Cadogan to be buried in the church near her old home. The funeral expenses inflated Emma’s debts. Mary’s death was also a practical disaster for her. Emma no longer knew what groceries or lodgings should cost. She moved to a hotel in Stratford Place and then to a smaller apartment at 76 Piccadilly to save money.
Emma had paid the Blackburns and then her aunt, Mrs. Connor, to look after her daughter, Emma Carew, but she could no longer afford to do so. Miss Carew realized she had no choice but to go into service as a governess or companion. She wrote to her mother begging her for sympathy, asking for the identity of her father, in the hope that he might intervene to save her. “My memory traces back circumstances which have taught me too much, yet not quite all I could have wished to have known—with you that resides, and ample reasons, no doubt, you have for not imparting them to me. Had you felt yourself at liberty so to have done, I might have become reconciled to my former situation and have been relieved from the painful employment I now pursue.” Emma never told her daughter that Sir Harry was her father. She was keeping an old promise to her ex-lover, but she also dreaded that her daughter would be caused even more pain if she found her father was alive and did not want her. Fetherstonhaugh was so unpredictably volatile that he might cut her off for good if she confirmed the secret—and she needed every friend she could get.
Ill and fighting off her creditors, there was nothing Emma could do to save her daughter. Miss Carew’s chance of marriage was much higher as a governess than as a relation of Lady Hamilton. She sailed away alone. The rest of her life remains a mystery. Too sickly to work when she was only in her mid-twenties, she probably died young.
In early July, twenty-two-year-old Charlotte Nelson married Samuel Hood, Baron Bridport, grandson of Nelson’s old superior, Lord Hood. Emma had introduced them at Merton back when Charlotte was still a schoolgirl, and reported in delight to Sarah that Sam had “seemed to devour her with his eyes. That would be a good match.” Although Emma had tried to encourage the relationship, neither she nor Horatia were invited to the wedding or a reception. To rub salt into the wound, the ceremony took place at St. Marylebone, where Emma had married Sir William. The new Baroness Bridport paid a bridal visit to Fanny, Viscountess Nelson.
Emma’s debts were still not public knowledge. Gossip columns reported on her parties, and fashion commentators continued to promote the Grecian look her Attitudes had perpetuated.3 Out of the public eye, she shot off begging letters. Relaxing amid commemorative bronzes of the Battle of the Nile, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh replied, “No one better deserves to be happy,” but he would only send her baskets of game.4 In debt himself, he later tried to coerce the nation into buying Uppark for the Duke of Wellington, and he may have strengthened bonds with Emma after 1805 in case she could have encouraged the government to choose Uppark as the Trafalgar estate.
The Duke of Queensberry advanced £2,500 to Abraham Goldsmid to pay Emma’s debts and instructed that “Lady Hamilton herself is to have no control over or to have any interference with any part” of the sum, for it must be devoted to payment of “abovementioned debts & for that purpose only”5 But Goldsmid let the news slip, and Emma seems to have wangled £800 of the money. It was the last of Abraham’s many kind acts to Emma. He had battled depression since the suicide of his brother in 1808. In September, he suffered two massive losses on the stock market, and he was left owing £350,000 to the East India Company, as well as being partly responsible for a £13 million loan. On the morning of September 28, the day his payment to the East India Company was due, instead of jumping into his coach and setting off to his office in the City, Abraham walked into the grounds of his house and shot himself. The coachman found him dying, the pistol still clutched in his hand.
In December, Queensberry died. Emma had hoped for a legacy— William Beckford calculated he could be bled of “5 or 600,000.”6 Susanna Bolton, looking forward to lots of presents when Emma got her half million, was quivering with anticipation, declaring her husband wanted to place a bet on the sum and “Anne dances; Tom says he is as nervous as my Lady to hear the contents… we are full of hopes.” But Queensbury died in a bed strewn with begging letters from famous beauties, and he had already been more than generous to Emma. He left her only £500 a year. His family immediately contested his will, and she never received a shilling. Shrugging that the duke was always “a little capricious throughout,” Sir Harry consoled her by suggesting the Prince of Wales might soon ascend the throne.
After attacks of sickness and stomach pain, Emma was losing weight. Susanna Bolton worried, “I should be sorry to see you grow any thinner than you were when I last saw you in Town.” Under increasing pressure, Emma had begun to pledge future payments of her annuity in return for amounts of ready cash.
Everyone was trying to extract money before they made the final break with Emma. Susanna besieged Emma with letters on behalf of herself, “invalids” in her family, and distant relations, such as Bob Nelson, who needed £100. Dr. Beatty still hoped to become surgeon to the Prince of Wales. “I am all anxiety for the result of your friendly exertions on my behalf, which alone can bring me near you, and my prayers are offered up daily, even hourly, for the speedy success of your endeavours.“7
Since her credit was bad, Emma had to pay huge interest rates for loans and high prices for even basic goods and services. Sarah Connor was shocked to find her cousin had paid a landlady astronomical sums for accommodation and food, even when she hardly occupied the rooms.8 By 1810, there was no money to pay the bread bill, let alone two expensive governesses for Horatia. An argument over a foreign visitor—possibly Melesina Trench—who declared that Mrs. Cadogan had been a prostitute, was finally an excuse to let Sarah go. Begging Emma to change her mind, Sarah wrote she had been the “happiest Girl in the World in living with you” and promised “everything in my power to serve and please you,” claiming she would love her “until the last hour of my existance.“9 Soon afterward Emma asked Cecilia to leave. She could no longer afford her high salary. Emma also tried to dismiss Fatima, but her old maid was unemployable and had to be boarded at a workhouse for ten shillings a week. There she suffered a breakdown and had to be
taken by Cribb the gardener to St. Luke’s madhouse.
Emma was drifting between cheap lodgings in Piccadilly and Bond Street. Although she was squandering her money, it was impossible for her to flee to the country to live in quiet retirement. With Queensberry and Goldsmid dead, she had realized she needed a protector for herself and Horatia, and she was trying to encourage herself to hunt for a rich husband. Emma’s love for Nelson ruined her twice over: she ran up debts improving his house and supporting his relations, and she was too faithful to his memory to find another husband within a few years of his death. Unless they were elderly or very rich, all women began hunting for a second husband soon after the death of the first. In trying to live independently, Emma had made a fatal mistake.
An eager reply from one of the men she tried to fascinate survives. Her invitation must have conjured a heavenly scenario, for it set Sir Richard Puleston chomping at the bit to pay tribute to her:
Many thousand thanks for your kind invitation to your fairy palace in Bond Street, where I shall be most happy to pay my earliest respects when I get to town…. How soon do you return there? How delighted I shall be next year to escort you & ramble with you over your almost native mountains, & to tell you, which is true, that we have met before.
Daringly, she invited Sir Puleston to come to her house alone. Her “fairy palace” would have been expensive: lovely decorations, candles, food, and wines. Desperate to make him her protector, she even offered to accompany him on a tour to Sicily.
Beckford expressed his pleasure that “you are recovering a little of those charming spirits which vivify and animate every object around you.”10 Her social standing was still formidable. The Countess of Banbury felt she had arrived when she was invited to a party where Lady Hamilton and Mrs. Billington sang a duet.11 At the close of 1810, Emma had more reason to feel hopeful. The king’s mental state had deteriorated rapidly and the Whig factions in Parliament were demanding that his son assume the reins of power. When the Prince of Wales was finally appointed regent in early 1811, she thought her troubles were over.