by Unknown
CHAPTER 54
Afflicting Circumstances
London society had been waiting for decades for the Prince of Wales to become regent. Everyone was disappointed. Declaring that he was only representing the king, he dismissed any requests he found tiresome and concentrated on wrangling with his estranged wife. For years, Emma had staved off her creditors with the promise that the prince would help her. When he refused her, she was lost.
Emma spent most of 1812 in fear of being arrested. Ill and anxious, she went into hiding at the comfortable Fulham home of Mrs. Billington, although she kept her apartment at 150 Bond Street and sometimes emerged for dinners and parties. When the author Thomas De Quincey met her with Samuel Taylor Coleridge at a supper party, he was smitten by “Lord Nelson’s Lady Hamilton—the beautiful, the accomplished, the enchantress,” declaring that she had “Medea’s beauty and Medea’s powers of enchantment.” After seeing her perform the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth, a favorite of Mrs. Siddons, twenty-seven-year-old De Quincey decided her “magnificent” and “the most effectively brilliant woman he ever saw.” Coleridge had long wanted to meet her, after spending a hot summer in Malta in 1804 hearing about Lady Hamilton and her efforts to help the starving people. Equally bewitched, he “admired her… as who would not have done, prodigiously,” and she appeared equally fascinated by him.1 She worked hard to dazzle and enchant, determined not to disappoint.
Not long after meeting Coleridge, Emma sparkled at the gala party for the Prince of Wales’s birthday. In the midst of crippling debt, she had bought a magnificent new dress, still refusing to believe that he would never help her. By the end of the year, however, no money had arrived. Emma’s bravado seeped away. The government had finally compensated Sir William’s estate for his outlay in Naples, to the tune of £8,300, but it all went to Robert Greville, who was not about to hand out more money to his aunt.2 Nervous and tense, her petitions hopeless, her annuity from Sir William pledged to creditors, she fell into a profound depression. This was not how she imagined herself, Nelson’s Britannia, to be living less than ten years after his death.
In December, Emma was so afraid of arrest that she resorted to desperate measures. She actually chose to commit herself to prison, lodging herself voluntarily in the area of the King’s Bench Prison in St. George’s Fields in Southwark. The general view is that Emma was actually convicted; however, her name does not appear in the King’s Bench record books and there is no documentation of her appearance before the magistrate or any record of her discharge. Genteel prisoners of the King’s Bench—usually debtors—could escape the squalor of the cells by buying the right to live and move “within the Rules,” a three-square-mile area around the prison walls. Once in prison or “within the Rules,” no debtor or criminal could be arrested again and many on the brink of capture sought refuge there. Dozens of shops, taverns, brothels, gaming dens, and cafés served the prison population. Guards stood on the street corners to prevent prisoners escaping, but they had no mandate to prevent the hundreds who had not been convicted from creeping into the Rules in order to avoid arrest. Emma sent Dame Francis, her old housekeeper from Mer-ton, along with four or five maids and footmen on ahead. Then, in the middle of the night so her creditors did not see, she and Horatia hurried into a discreet carriage and drove at full speed to the Rules.∗
Emma had recently thrown herself on the goodness of Joshua Smith, leader of Southwark Borough Council, and he befriended her and gave her the money to rent an expensive home. She and Horatia moved into 12 Temple Place, in the Rules, a terraced house on the east side of Blackfriars Road where it joins what is now St. George’s Circus. Out of her front window, she could see the Magdalen House, the home for penitent prostitutes, but she no longer had the money to visit as a fine patroness—or the inclination to imitate the impecunious girls as she once had. “I am so truly unhappy & wretched,” she wrote to James Perry, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, who was one of her most faithful visitors. Years earlier, she had roamed Blackfriars, a maid dreaming of stardom. Now she was bereft and confined, unable to think of a way out of her terrible predicament.
∗ Emma was safe from her creditors and there were other benefits to her new home. Although the authorities had failed to ban gin shops from the area, there were fewer opportunities for shopping, drinking, and gambling.
Emma adorned her new home with her fine mahogany furniture from Merton and the exquisite china, for when her well-connected friends deigned to call. The pictures, the bust of Nelson, a few books, her jewels, and some gorgeous dresses, the remnants of her old glory, now decorated rooms that bore the traces of dirt left by the many debtors before her. The new decoration did little to lift Horatia’s spirits. A celebrity child, she had grown up petted by doting adults, followed by the press, and indulged by her grandmother, and she was utterly miserable in the Rules. She had only seen Blackfriars from the comfort of a carriage when visiting the Magdalen House, and the sights and smells of her new home sickened her. Gutters ran with blood from the nearby slaughterhouses, and fetid smoke from the factories hung in the air. Children sold gin, prostitutes solicited openly, and beggars and stray dogs lingered in alleyways and courtyards. Since about a hundred families were living in houses in the Rules, most of them unlucky debtors, there were many respectable playmates for her, but she tended to stay indoors. Emma tried to comfort her daughter and keep her occupied. She hired a piano, paid for singing and music lessons, bought the best meat and fish, and threw a big party for Horatia’s birthday in January.
Although Emma could not go outside the Rules, she could order in food, clothes, medicines, and books as well as receive visits from friends, family, merchants, and doctors. Even the Duke of Sussex was a frequent visitor. But the prison was a profit-making institution, and living within the Rules was disastrously expensive, with accommodation and service, such as washing, costing about five times more than they did outside. Joshua Smith covered the bills.3
The new year prompted Emma to gather her energies. She wrote to Perry in January 1813, “My friends come to town to-morrow for the season, when I must see what can be done, so that I shall not remain here.” She fired off petitions to the government and the Prince of Wales and sent begging letters to her friends. Melodramatically, she declared, “I will appeal to a generous public, who will not let a woman who has served her country with the zeal I have, be left to starve and insult.“4 When the newspapers published details about Lady Hamilton’s efforts, men in high places were even more annoyed. Flustered, she wrote, probably to Lord Sidmouth, “This unexpected publication made me pause as a continuance in that manner wou’d appear absurd.” But she could not think of another way to help herself, and she ended passionately with “Nelson loved you, & I am alone and feil folorn in the world and his Spirit if it cou’d look down wou’d bless you for your kindness & attention to his last wishes in the moment of Death & Victory.“5 All her petitions failed. Joshua Smith coughed up £400 for the contents of the Richmond house (including Nelson’s bloody uniform). He and James Perry somehow persuaded other creditors that petitions to the prince would succeed. Within a few weeks, the most importunate of the creditors were paid off and Emma was able to return to 150 Bond Street.6
Although the Matchams begged her to allow them to take Horatia, Emma was afraid that if she gave up her daughter even for a short period, she would lose her for good. But Horatia was becoming a teenager and the strain of living together was showing. Resentful over the loss of their home and terrified that they might have to return to the Rules, she grew angry with her mother. Emma saw any demonstration of independence as an insult.
Listen to a kind, good mother, who has ever been to you affectionate, truly kind, and has spared no pains to make you the most amiable and most accomplish’d of your sex…. I have weathered many a storm for your sake, but these frequent blows have kill’d me…. I lament to see the increasing strength of your turbulent passions.7
Emma promised Horatia that their lives
would soon be more secure, but she was slowly realizing that she would never get her pension. The Prince Regent passed her pleas to the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, who communicated through Lord Sidmouth that he could not help, as he had received “representations of difficulty and distress, in many other quarters.” In June three creditors threatened to have Emma arrested. Agitated and afraid, she advertised the sale of “The Property of a Lady of Distinction” and sold dozens of her belongings, including the diamond star, the gold box, and the four-poster bed she had shared with Nelson, her Domesday Book, portraits of Nelson, French chintz curtains, heavy Grecian-style mahogany furniture from Merton, fine commemorative services of china including a fifty-piece white and gold tea set, goose-feather beds, chintz hangings, and a piano. She also auctioned her copy of Rehberg’s Lady Hamilton’s Attitudes, Hayley’s Life of Romney, and another book that owed much to her, Thomas Baxter’s illustrated book of ancient costumes. In other boxes were magazines and fashionable novels, including Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph and her beloved The Wife and the Mistress.9 Emma had clung to her most treasured possessions, rather than leave them to be sold with Merton, and now they went for a pittance. One lucky lady snapped up six dining chairs, cases, earrings, bracelets, a miniature and a reading chair as well as other items for £22. Joshua Smith kindly took many of the Nelson relics, but even then the auction did not raise enough.
On June 28, for a debt of £400, Emma was publicly seized by officers of the court and bundled into a carriage.∗ She was taken first to an officer’s house and then to appear before the court. Still proud, she was arrested as Lady Hamilton, and demanded when she made her appearance in court to be called by her grandest title, Dame Emma.9 She still had her gold and diamond Maltese Cross. Sentenced to imprisonment until she could pay, Emma chose to live once more at 12 Temple Place, taking Horada with her. In the autumn she fell ill; in addition, her spirits were crushed when Susanna Bolton died and she was not permitted to attend the funeral. In a letter to Sir Richard Puleston, she was almost incoherent with distress about “the scenes of plunder, Robery & villainy which has been practised on my unsuspicious Heart & pocket.”
Emma wrote that she was determined to “act with firmness, Fortitude, Honor, and Prudence.” But prison sapped her strength, and soon she was describing herself as “broken… with grief and ill health.” She became so weak that the authorities permitted her to take some fresh air in a carriage outside the Rules. Terrified that her daughter might desert her, she was unable to handle Horatia’s bouts of anger. “Your cruel treatment of me is such that I cannot live under these afflicting circumstances; my poor heart is broken,” she protested. Always grasping after the dramatic, she described an imaginary scenario in which she would defend herself against Horatia’s accusations before a tribunal of their servants and friends.
Horatia was dismayed by her mother’s feverish efforts to entertain possible patrons and old admirers, including the royal princes. Mrs. Billington and the Duke of Clarence celebrated the girl’s “false” birthday in October, and the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile was another excuse for a big celebration. Emma’s house was full to bursting every Sunday as fashionable visitors who had watched the girls at the Magdalen Chapel popped in for refreshments at Lady Hamilton’s. In her desperation, she was spending more than Joshua Smith could give her, and she had turned to the extortionate rates of the king’s Rules moneylenders.
∗ Debtors were arrested in public and the officers chose a place the accused frequented regularly, usually church.
Emma invited everyone she could think of to dinner. One guest, Sir William Dillon, an admiral who had known Nelson, remarked afterward that he had not seen her for three years, but it did not strike him that she needed his help. He was amazed to find that his fellow guest was the Duke of Sussex with his mistress, Mrs. Buggin (Lady Cecilia Letitia Buggin, daughter of the Earl of Arran and later his second wife), and startled by the rich silver dishes on the table and the luxurious food. Dillon gaped at the main course, a giant goose—without a servant to carve it. Emma had no knife, and she prevailed upon him to pull it apart with his fingers, which he did, doling out the portions between the illustrious guests, to much hilarity. Dillon trotted home, full of good food and satisfied “after a very sociable and agreeable entertainment.” In the midst of despair, Emma could still retrieve her old vivaciousness to charm her guests. Despite her efforts, she spent the freezing winter as she had the previous one, in Temple Place. Still, as she knew, most of her friends were indignant on her behalf and she had the sympathy of the public. All that was about to change.
CHAPTER 55
Reading the Herald
To my great surprise,” Emma wrote to James Perry on April 22, 1814, “I saw yesterday in the Herald that Lord Nelson’s letters to me were published. I have not seen the book, but I give you my honour that I know nothing of these letters. I have been now nine months in Temple Place, & allmost all the time I have been very ill with a bilious complaint, brought on by fretting and anxiety, & lately I have kept my bed for nearly twelve weeks.” Perry believed her protestations of innocence, but few others were so generous. The most sensational book to be published in decades, the Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton scandalized the nation.
The publishers chose the perfect time. Ten days before, the war with France had been declared over. London lit up in celebration at the news that Napoleon had abdicated and retreated to exile on the island of Elba. Fireworks exploded every night. Central London was so crowded that the St. James cows dashed in a panic out of Green Park. The city was crammed with visitors with money to burn—and everybody was buying the Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton.
Nelson’s adoring populace lapped up the book, shocked by his complaints about the Admiralty, greedily appalled by his jealousy of the Prince of Wales, and outraged that he had wanted to dally with Emma rather than carry out his duty at sea. Almost overnight, the image of Emma in the public imagination as the adoring mistress of Nelson and the mother of his child was shattered. If she had ever had any chance of a pension, the book crushed it for good. The prince—even though he had sold the king’s fraught letters to him to three newspapers in 1803—seized the excuse to reject her petitions. The government followed suit. The royal brothers, aristocrats, and Nelson’s family welcomed the opportunity to turn their backs on her.
Emma implored James Perry to defend her, declaring she had once left her papers in a case with a friend she thought she “cou’d depend on.” Emma and Horatia believed the culprit was James Harrison, who had stayed in her house while working on his Life of Nelson. She had allowed him to look at her papers, and he could easily have found other letters and transcribed them with the help of his blackmailing ex-secretary friend, Francis Oliver. Emma had always been dogged by former acquaintances and staff who wanted to spill the details about life at Merton to the newspapers, but Oliver had the biggest hold of all, for he had delivered Nelson’s most explicit letters to her.
Emma had not helped herself by being chronically disorganized through the chaos of moving between homes and taking frequent holidays. She was a compulsive hoarder, and by 1810, having lost her mother and her more reliable maids, she was drowning in a confusion of memorabilia and belongings. In 1811, Dr. Beatty was entreating her to return a letter from Nelson to a friend that he had sent her in 1806, but she never found it.1 She had failed to keep track of her letters—and now she was paying the penalty.
The sale of Nelson’s letters would have brought her a sizable injection of cash, but her finances only declined from 1805 onward. If she had wanted to sell them, it would have made sense to do the deal via James Perry, but he was ignorant of the affair and the Herald, his rival paper, had the scoop. Unlike mistresses who had extorted money from aristocrats by threatening to publish their letters, Emma had never contemplated her love letters as some kind of pension. She expected the government would recompense her for her services.
As her last friends turn
ed their backs on her and the newspapers feasted on the remnants of her reputation, she frantically beseeched Earl Nelson for the £500 a year pension from Bronte that Nelson had left her.2 When he reluctantly paid over £200, it was a drop in the ocean. Emma’s health had declined rapidly. Suffering from crippling stomach pain, she was so weak, dizzy, and sick that she could not leave her bed. She believed she was dying and begged Joshua Smith and James Perry not to leave her to live out her last days in prison. But they knew that if they bailed her out, she would only be arrested once more at the behest of another creditor. Smith and Perry hatched a plan. As they told her, she could not be arrested in a foreign country and now that the war was over, travelers could visit France.
Smith and Perry sold her remaining valuables, including the silver dishes that had pleased Sir William Dillon, and raised further cash from other friends. Smith put up bail on June 22, and the next day, after a year living under the Rules of the King’s Bench, Emma was free. Perry and Smith arranged for her and Horada to escape. Emma’s discharge certificate is still in a box in the Public Record Office, along with those for hundreds of other debtors released in the same month. For the clerk writing out paper after paper, the poignant decline of Nelson’s mistress was just one story of self-delusion and bad luck among many. She was anxious to leave the country immediately, but she risked being arrested again if she traveled on a normal cross-Channel ferry. To put her creditors off the scent, she and Horatia hid in England for a week as Perry and Smith worked frantically to arrange her escape. On July 1, Emma and her daughter boarded a small private boat from London Bridge, bound for Calais, on France’s northern coast. She was exhilarated to be free but had only £50 in her purse.