Kate Williams

by Unknown

  CHAPTER 56

  “A Chance I May Live”

  After a miserable “three days sickeness at sea,” Emma was relieved to be on dry land. “I managed so well with Horada alone that I was at Calais before any new writs could be issued out against me,” she reported in delight. With Napoleon in exile on Elba, Calais was retrieving its prewar swing as one of the most fashionable and expensive resorts in Europe, crowded with pleasure seekers on their way to Paris or nearby spas. Emma hoped to prevail on some of those who had enjoyed her hospitality in the past and to regain her old glitter.

  Emma knew only one way of raising her profile: to spend money. She took apartments in the expensive Dessein’s Hotel, the only place for traveling luminaries. Aristocrats supped on boiled turtle in the exquisitely decorated restaurant and swapped fashion tips in the glamorous lounge. The Duke of Clarence had been rather fond of the town when he had visited, and Emma hoped he might return. She still cut a grand enough dash to fool the Calais moneylenders into giving her credit and, flush with bundles of new notes, she threw splendid dinner parties and hired a harp and piano for Horatia as well as music teachers, insisting, “I would sooner starve than her fine and beautiful mind should not be cultivated.” Radiating optimism and new hopes, Emma wrote to George Rose on July 4,

  I feel so much better, from change of climate, food, air, large rooms and liberty, that there is a chance I may live to see Horatia brought up. I am looking out for a lodging. I have an excellent Frenchwoman who is good at everything; for Horatia and myself, and my old dame, who is coming, will be my establishment. Near me is an English lady who has, resided here for twenty-five years, who has a day school, but not for eating and sleeping. At eight in the morning, I take Horatia; fetch her at one; at three, we dine, and then in the evening we walk. She learns everything—piano, harp, languages grammatically. She knows French and Italian well, but she will improve. Not any girls, but those of the first families go there. Last evening we walked two miles to a fete cham-petre pour les bourgeois. Everybody is pleased with Horatia… our little world of happiness is in ourselves.1

  Emma was proud that Horatia was becoming a fine young lady proficient in French and Italian, as well as speaking a little German and Spanish. She was also making progress in music, mathematics, geography, and English and classical history. As Horatia later asserted, about her mother, “through all her difficulties she invariably till the last few months, expended on my education etc., the whole of the interest of the sum left me by Lord Nelson, and which was left entirely in her control.“2 Emma implored Rose to petition Lord Sidmouth for money for Horatia’s education and clothes, declaring that she was “the victim of artful mercenary wretches.”

  After a few months, the Calais lenders and shopkeepers began to question Emma’s grande dame act, and she began the old game of hiding from them and fobbing them off At the same time, she was increasingly dispirited by the hopeless watch for the mail, and her health worsened. She was once more confined to bed with stomach pain, nausea, and headaches. Fretting about money, Emma moved into a large farmhouse in the village of St. Pierre, two miles from Calais—so out of the way that she did not trust her post to arrive, and she asked friends to send mail to Dessein’s Hotel. The rent in St. Pierre was cheaper, and she thought that the country air might alleviate her sickness. Emma hoped that moving away would help her to hide her illness, for the Calais creditors would start pressing in earnest the minute they knew she was seriously unwell. She also aimed to keep her sickness out of the newspapers: she had a chance of a pension to care for Nelson’s daughter only if she looked to live a long time.

  Emma and Horatia were not dirt poor. They felt destitute because they had recently lived so stylishly, but they were never without food. Emma’s old housekeeper, Dame Francis, came to run the household, and there were other servants, such as one Mary Cornish, to do her cooking, cleaning, and washing and serve her guests. Emma sent her maids to buy nourishing food at prices much cheaper than in London. In one letter, she described how they bought the best meat at five pence a pound and two big turkeys for four shillings, a large turbot for a half a crown, partridges, and excellent Bordeaux. She was anxious that Horada live as normally as possible, getting out of bed to take her to parties and dances, and delighting when her daughter’s graceful dancing and fluent French made her the pet of the company.

  By the end of September, the Calais tradesmen were demanding repayment. Her annuity from Sir William had been pledged away. She begged the executor of Sir William’s will, Robert Greville, for an advance of £100, but he was still fending off her creditors and had no money to spare. Her attempt to hide her illness was working too well—the gossip columns in England reported on Lady Hamilton living it up in Calais, exaggerating her spending, which did not help persuade Robert Greville or the government to send her money. Emma protested angrily that she was living quietly and contested the revelations of the Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, declaring to the Morning Herald that she, Sir William, and Nelson were all “too much attached to his Royal Highness ever to speak or think ill of him,” but her quest to win sympathy was doomed.3 Convinced that she would be rescued, Emma kept up the show to the end and continued to solicit assistance by hosting grand parties. But for most of the English in Calais, a drive out to Nelson’s flamboyant mistress simply meant a free dinner and a good story to tell their friends. In October, she beseeched the government that she had not a shilling, pleading, “If there is Humanity still left in British Hearts they will not suffer us to die in famine in a foreign Country for God’s sake.“4 Money failed to appear, and her health worsened. She began to seek the solace of religion, attending the local Catholic church and finding a sympathetic friend in the local priest. The behavior of Earl Nelson, erstwhile clergyman, perhaps convinced her to embrace a faith in which priests seemed less worldly. Her reasons for turning to Catholicism were also pragmatic—in the St. Pierre congregation, she was free of the prying eyes of the English at the Anglican church in Calais, a gossipy little social club for expats and travelers.

  Religion gave her optimism, but her body was unable to keep up. Emma’s long-term problems with sickness, diarrhea, and stomach pain were the result of amoebic dysentery, probably picked up in Naples, since Sir William had suffered from the same complaint. Although her love of rich foods and fine wine did not help, her health was ruined not by gluttony, as is commonly argued, but by a parasite caught in the city that made her famous.

  By November, Emma was unable to afford the farm and too ill to live in the country, for she needed daily access to doctors and chemists. She, Horatia, Dame Francis, Mary, and the other maids moved to a cheap flat in 27 rue Frangaise in Calais, rented from a Monsieur Damas. Emma had one room, Horatia lived next door, and the servants were crammed into another. The move exhausted her last shreds of energy, and within a week of arriving, she took to her bed. She wrote no more letters. In an attempt to dull the pain, she drank spirits and took heavy doses of laudanum, which, mercifully, was freely available and cheaper than alcohol. She was dying.

  Shivering and struggling to breathe, Emma passed her final weeks in a blur of pain. Initially, her hands and feet began to swell, then her legs filled with fluid as the abscess drained into the lungs, stomach, and chest. Eventually, as her kidneys failed and her body became saturated, she suffered severe shooting pains, coughing, and vomiting. Horatia believed she had “water on the chest” or tuberculosis, which suggests she was coughing blood and unable to eat or drink. Doctors commonly treated stomach and liver complaints with doses of mercury, so her sufferings would have been intensified by even more vomiting.

  Dame Francis, Mary Cornish, and possibly a hired nurse tended Emma, but there was little they could do to make her comfortable. The British consul, Henry Cadogan (coincidentally named but no relation), gave them money and covered the outstanding bills. Emma gave him some jewelry and a lock of Nelson’s hair in gratitude. The last of her dresses and trinkets went to the pawnbrokers.


  When the effects of the laudanum wore off, Emma had little to cheer her. She knew that Nelson’s child would be left a penniless orphan. Thirteen-year-old Horatia bravely tried to keep Emma company. Washing and trying to feed her mother was beyond her, but she was determined to help. Earl Nelson refused to give them their installment of the Bronte allowance before it was due in spring. Horatia begged him for an advance of £10 on the interest due on the sum Nelson left for her, and beseeched a loan of £20 from a friend, probably James Perry or Joshua Smith. She also attempted to give her mother some comfort by writing to the Matchams to ask if she could live with them after her mother’s death. The flat resounded to Emma’s coughing and sickness, and it was difficult to sleep. As she later confessed, the period of her mother’s decline was “too indelibly stamped on my memory ever to forget.“5

  Nelson had died in glory in an afternoon, but Emma gasped out her life in long terrible weeks, drifting in and out of consciousness. Toward the end, she asked for her priest, but she was soon too delirious to speak. “Latterly she was scarcely sensible,” Horatia recalled.6 On January 15, 1815, at one in the afternoon, she breathed her last.

  Emma had wished to be buried in England, in the vault next to her mother in Paddington Green, but there was no money to transport her body back home. Henry Cadogan planned a modest funeral in the Roman Catholic church: £28 compared to Nelson’s £14,000. Emma’s faithful friend Joshua Smith reimbursed Cadogan for both the funeral costs and the price of an oak coffin. England’s mistress was buried on January 21 in the land of her lover’s enemies, in the public ground outside town. The Gentleman’s Magazine reported that “all the English Gentlemen in Calais” attended her funeral. It was said that the captains and masters of the many vessels in the harbor also joined the procession behind her coffin to the grave, out of respect for Nelson’s Emma. Journalists across Europe fought to be first to announce her death.

  CHAPTER 57

  Horatia Alone

  Henry Cadogan cared for Horatia in the aftermath of Emma’s death. Presumably he bought her a mourning dress and paid to liberate the trinkets that her mother had pawned. After persuading Emma’s creditors in Calais to allow Horatia to leave, he gave her the money to travel as far as Dover. The deeply traumatized teenager had a miserable fourteenth birthday under his protection at Calais, and then, accompanied by Dame Francis and probably Mary Cornish, set off home on January 28,1815. It was just in time: hostilities resumed with France at the end of February, and the gay tourists who had danced in the ballroom at Dessein’s Hotel were stranded in Calais. Emma’s creditors had insured her life, and they were paid off (solicitors pursued Mary Cornish for an affidavit to prove Emma had actually died). Horatia was now free of debt, but she had inherited little from her mother. Mr. Matcham met Horatia at Dover and took her to their home.

  At the Matchams’, after a week or two of pampering, she took up her new life. No longer the benefactress’s daughter, she was a dependent relation and had to earn her keep by caring for the younger children, eleven-year-old Horace, nine-year-old Charles, and four-year-old Nelson. Horatia tried to fit in with her new family and their demands, quelling her grief for her mother and trying to forget the despair of her final days in Calais. She had to work hard to maintain her composure when Mr. Matcham decided to take the whole family to Calais for a holiday in July 1815 and again the following year. After Emma’s careful tutoring, she could speak five languages and sing and play well, but she had little chance to practice her gifts while working as a glorified upper servant. No longer able to enjoy so much fine meat or perform for the Prince of Wales, she became a voracious reader and, unlike her mother, an excellent needlewoman.

  Two years later, at the age of sixteen, she was sent off to live with the Boltons, deemed old enough to act as housekeeper for her uncle, whose wife, Susanna, had died in 1813. Anxious to escape her position as poor relation, she married her neighbor, the Reverend Philip Ward, at the age of twenty-one. With her husband, she found a happiness she had not experienced since childhood. The mother of eight (one son died in infancy) and the grandmother of many more, Horatia became what Emma had desired to be: the matriarch of a big family.

  Emma’s daughter was never rich. Even when her mother’s old friend, the Duke of Clarence, became king, there was no money for her. She battled to raise her family on a clergyman’s income. But she had Emma’s natural style. A photograph of her in old age shows her wearing a rich crinoline dress of dark silk, perhaps purple, one of Emma’s favorite colors, with ruffled sleeves and a full skirt. In a miniature of her at age thirty-six she looks captivating in a blue off-the-shoulder dress. She is slender, and her face is beautifully regular, with Emma’s limpid eyes and Nelson’s straight nose. Thanks to her mother’s efforts, Horatia became a lovely, graceful, and accomplished woman, and her health was not impaired by her experience of misery during her teenage years.

  One of the few possessions of Emma’s that Horatia brought back with her from Calais was a dress of green and pink embroidered silk. The dress was altered many times and ended up in the dressing-up box of Horatia’s great-great-great-granddaughter, but even years later the material was still thick and opulent, the embroidery delicate. Although she sold most of her fine clothes and lost others, Emma was still, in her last days, trying to keep up some of the style and beauty that had once set Europe alight.

  Emma’s obituaries were generally salacious. The Morning Post reported:

  The origin of this Lady was very humble, and she had experienced all those vicissitudes in early life which too generally attend those females whose beauty has betrayed them into vice, and which unhappily proves the chief means of subsistence. Few women, who have attracted the notice of the world at large have led a life of more freedom. When, however, she became such an object of admiration as to attract the attention of Painters, she formed connections which, if she had conducted herself with prudence, might have raised her into independence, if not affluence. ROMNEY, who evidently felt a stronger admiration for her than what he might be supposed to entertain merely as an Artist, made her the frequent subject of his pencil. His admiration remained till the close of his life in undiminished ardour. The late CHAS GREVILLE, well known for his refined taste in VIRTU, and who was a prominent character in the world of gallantry, was the PROTECTOR, to use the well-bred language of the polite circles, of Lady Hamilton, for some years; and when his uncle, the late Sir William Hamilton wanted to take abroad with him a chere amie, he recommended the LADY with so good a character that Sir William took her with him and having a reliance on her fidelity, married her.

  The journalist dwelt on the “friendship between Lady Hamilton and our great Naval Hero” and criticized her for being “intoxicated with the flattery and admiration which attended her in a rank of life so different from the obscure condition in her early days,” but still admitted that in “private life, she was a humane and generous woman… obliging to all whom she had any opportunity of serving by her influence.“1

  Emma died just short of fifty, but she outlived many of her friends and contemporaries. A few remained: Sir Harry was bluff and dim-witted until the end, a living testament to the health-giving properties of killing foxes every day. At the age of eighty he married his young dairymaid and packed her off to Paris to be refined. Earl Nelson was so determined to have an heir that he married a twenty-eight-year-old at the age of seventy, his first wife, Sarah, hardly cold in her grave, but he died without a son. William, Sarah, and their son, Horace, were buried near Nelson in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral—even in death, the hero couldn’t escape his officious brother and his family. Fanny Nelson outlived everybody. She lived comfortably near Exmouth until her death in 1832 at the age of seventy-six. Her beloved Josiah became a successful merchant and married happily. She saw Emma die poor and lonely, Horatia grow up in obscurity, and Earl Nelson squander his money and the goodwill of the country.

  In 1994, a group of faithful supporters erected a plaque in
Emma’s honor on the front of the rambling house in Calais. But many of her other friends, relations, and lovers have no monument. An owner of Slebech Castle demolished Sir William’s grave, and his final resting place is unmarked. The graves of Mrs. Cadogan and Greville in Paddington Green are also lost. Only Nelson’s magnificent tomb remains.

  Britain was at war throughout most of Emma’s life. Four million Frenchmen and hundreds of thousands of Russians, Austrians, Italians, and English were slaughtered, with 650 English sailors killed at Trafalgar alone. Emma died just months before the end of the wars that had made her famous, missing the days of celebration that greeted Lord Wellington’s cataclysmic win at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815.

  After 1815, public sympathies about England’s most notorious love triangle began to fall with Fanny. Jane Austen’s dearest brother, Frank, was one of Nelson’s favored captains, and his ship even took a dispatch to Nelson while he was living at Palermo with Emma and Sir William. In her novel Emma, the brazen, obsessively matchmaking Emma Woodhouse is taught a lesson: she must behave more like the restrained Jane Fairfax, a second Fanny. In Mansfield Park, quiet Fanny—whose brother brings her a cross in the fashion of Emma’s Maltese Cross from Italy—wins Edmund from sexy, blowsy Mary Crawford, an excellent actress who makes a scandalous joke in public about admirals and their fondness for “Rears and Vices,” just as Emma would have done. Another character worries that visitor numbers at his guesthouse have dropped because he called it Trafalgar and “Waterloo is more the thing now.”

  Soon Emma and all she stood for were out of fashion, replaced by Victorian piety. The time when a girl from nowhere could rise to become the most famous woman in England was over. Glamour was gone and mistresses were kept tucked away, not paraded around fashionable London. After the death of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Clarence, who became George IV and William IV respectively, Queen Victoria ascended the throne, and a new age of dynamic industry and public professions of virtue began.2