A passionate love affair between Viscount Nelson and Emma Hamilton led them to defy society - adding an extra twist to the already astonishing story of the hero of Trafalgar.
By Kate Williams
Last updated 2011-02-17
A passionate love affair between Viscount Nelson and Emma Hamilton led them to defy society - adding an extra twist to the already astonishing story of the hero of Trafalgar.
Nelson’s affair with Emma Hamilton was the biggest scandal of the age. Their actual liaison lasted only six years, but it transformed their lives, their respective positions in society, and the public's perception of them both.
Emma was a great beauty and a celebrated artists’ model ...
Horatio Nelson first met Lady Hamilton on 12 September 1793. He was a 35-year-old post captain and she was the 28-year-old wife of Sir William Hamilton, the British Envoy to Naples. Emma was a great beauty and a celebrated artists’ model, and she was also famous across Europe for performing ‘attitudes’, which were performances in which she moved quickly from one dramatic pose to another.
Mired in retirement in Norfolk for the previous five years, Nelson had hardly seen a woman since he had returned to sea six months before their meeting, and he was impressed by Lady Hamilton. He wrote to his wife Fanny that Emma was a ‘young woman of amiable manners who does honour to the station to which she is raised’.
The second meeting between Nelson and his future mistress was altogether more dramatic. By 1797 the Italian Court, including Emma and her husband, were terrified that Naples would be invaded by French troops. They were hugely relieved in the following year by Nelson’s victory over the French fleet at Aboukir, in the ‘Battle of the Nile’, and they craved the presence of the hero and his fleet in Naples. Emma wrote him a passionately admiring letter:
'Never never has there been anything half so glorious, so complete. I fainted when I heard the joyful news ... I walk and tread in the air with pride, feeling I was born in the same land with the victor Nelson … we are preparing your apartmen ... Sir William and I are so impatient to embrace you.'
In her postscript, she wrote:
'My dress from head to foot is alla Nelson ... Even my shawl is in blue with gold anchors all over. My earrings are Nelson’s anchors; in short, we are be-Nelsoned all over. I send you some Sonets, but I must have taken a ship on purpose to send you all written on you.'
When Nelson arrived in September, Emma welcomed him in spectacular fashion and he was immediately captivated by her. Emma’s husband was also fond of Nelson and, bonded in their determination not to allow Naples to capitulate to the French, the three dubbed themselves the 'Tria juncto in uno’. By the end of 1798, a French invasion seemed inevitable and the ‘Tria’, along with the Neapolitan royal family, their courtiers, hundreds of foreign travellers and many Neapolitan aristocrats, fled to Sicily.
Nelson, Emma and Sir William soon rented a large house in Palermo together, along with Emma’s mother and various English friends. The English press speculated about the close friendship between the 'national hero' - Nelson - and Lady Hamilton. Nelson’s wife begged to be allowed to visit him, but he rebuffed her harshly. Emma had encompassed all his attentions.
Emma had never been unfaithful to Sir William since becoming his mistress in 1787 and his wife in 1791. Nelson, too, had been loyal to his wife, in the way that the period defined male fidelity - he had restricted himself to courtesans. But their marriages had not given them the romance and excitement they craved, and both had fallen out of love with their partners. Nelson and Emma shared an emotional temperament and playful sense of humour, as well as boundless energy, ambition and hunger for fame. Their emotions were intensified by the flight from Naples and the struggle against the French, and they fell profoundly in love. By the beginning of May 1800, Emma was pregnant with Nelson’s child.
Concerned that Nelson was falling under Neapolitan influence, the Admiralty recalled him to England in 1800. At the same time, the Foreign Office asked 72-year-old Sir William to retire from his post. The ‘Tria’ and their friends proceeded home through Italy, the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Germany. Every city they stayed in feted them, and Nelson and Emma tasted the celebrity they would experience in London.
Mortified, she demanded Nelson give up his mistress.
The hero and his mistress returned to England in November to public clamour. Fanny Nelson, who had seen her husband for only seven months in the last seven years, had to trail behind the ‘Tria’ as they paraded around London’s parties and attended theatre performances. Mortified, she demanded Nelson give up his mistress. Her ultimatum so infuriated him that he decided to separate from her by moving out of her home and paying her half his income. He never saw her again.
Although the newspaper-reading public savoured every detail about Nelson and Lady Hamilton, others condemned their relationship and some friends and colleagues refused to visit them. Most aristocrats and rich men kept mistresses, and many, like the Duke of Wellington, humiliated their wives by flaunting courtesans in public. Nelson, however, was the first high-profile man to actually leave his wife and many were scandalised by his actions.
Afraid of exposure in the press, Nelson destroyed Emma’s letters to him and urged her to do the same with those she had received from him, but she could not bear to do so. She tried to overcome social disapproval by keeping up the appearance of a respectable lifestyle. Continuing to live in the same London house as her husband, she fostered close friendships with Nelson’s siblings and invited Charlotte Nelson, his brother’s teenaged daughter, for a permanent visit.
Nelson eventually returned to sea, leaving Emma eight months pregnant. To avoid prying eyes, he wrote to her pretending his letters were on behalf of a seaman under his command called Thompson, whose pregnant wife was under Emma’s protection. On hearing early in 1801 that Emma had given birth to a girl, and that he was a father for the first time, he wrote deliriously:
I believe poor Mrs Thompson’s friend will go mad with joy. He cries, prays, does nothing but rave about you and her.
Emma named their daughter Horatia. A very rare name for a girl, it advertised that Nelson was her father, and Nelson encouraged Emma to find a property in which they could live with their child. By the following autumn, she had settled upon Merton Place, a ramshackle house in Merton, just outside modern-day Wimbledon. When the war was declared over in March 1802, Nelson returned to enjoy his new home.
In the following summer, Emma and Nelson decided to turn Sir William’s trip to check on his Welsh estates into a huge Nelson tour. Cheering crowds lined their way all the way to Wales, and they were celebrated with banquets in numerous towns. Soon after, however, the shaky truce with France was broken and Nelson returned to sea. Emma expected him to be home within six months. In the event, she did not see him for the next two years and three months.
As he died, he repeated his plea to the government to care for Emma and Horatia.
Nelson returned to England in August 1805. After a happy and busy three weeks, he was called out in September to engage the French fleet outside Cadiz, near Cape Trafalgar. Before the battle, he wrote a codicil to his will, leaving Emma and Horatia to the nation and requesting that the government should give Emma the money necessary to ‘maintain her rank in life’.
On the afternoon of 21 October 1805, Nelson was fatally wounded by a single musket ball. As he died, he repeated his plea to the government to care for Emma and Horatia.
Despite Nelson’s words, Emma’s life after Trafalgar was a catalogue of debt and betrayal. The government heaped moneys on Nelson’s family, whilst she and Horatia received nothing. Emma tried to help Nelson’s friends, captains and relations who begged money from her, whilst spending extravagantly to maintain Merton as a monument to her lost lover, and lobbying for an award from the government. By 1812, she was in debt for millions of pounds.
On her release in the autumn, she fled the demands of her other creditors by hurrying to Calais with Horatia.
When Nelson’s letters to her were stolen and published in 1814 as the 'Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton', she lost any chance of government sympathy or money, and by the following summer she was imprisoned for debt in the King’s Bench Prison. On her release in the autumn, she fled the demands of her other creditors by hurrying to Calais with Horatia. There, her spirit finally failed her. She grew progressively weaker, and died in January 1815, a few months short of her 50th birthday.
Horatia returned to England and lived with Nelson’s sisters. At 21 she married her neighbour, the Reverend Philip Ward, and died in 1881, the mother of eight and grandmother of many. She never forgot the harsh treatment Emma received from the press. Entirely disavowing her parent’s desire for fame, the daughter of Britain’s two biggest 18th-century celebrities lived out her life as a quiet clergyman’s wife in rural Norfolk.
Little remains of the lovers’ magnificent life together. The house on which Emma lavished so much attention was sold and later demolished, and most of the couple's belongings are lost. What could have been a grand monument to Nelson and Emma is now covered by a road and a car park.
Scholars have wrongly dismissed Emma Hamilton as irrelevant to Nelson, and have tried to overlook the affair. But, as a proper study of the hundreds of unpublished letters and papers scattered in archives across the world prove, she had a crucial influence over him. She encouraged him to seize his chance of glory and fame. Most of all, she was willing to sacrifice social approval and her hard-won respectability to set up home with him and their child.
Books
Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy by David Cannadine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson by Roger Knight (Allen Lane, 2005)
Nelson: A Personal History by Christopher Hibbert (Penguin Books, 1995)
Nelson: The New Letters by Colin White (The Boydell Press, 2005)
Nelson: Love and Fame by Edgar Vincent (Yale University Press, 2003)
Nelson's Women by Tom Pocock (Andre Deutsch Ltd , 2002)
Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton by David Constantine (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2002)
Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton by Flora Fraser (John Murray, 2003)
Nelson's Daughter by Miranda Hearn (Sceptre, 2005)
Nelson: The Man and the Legend by Terry Coleman (Bloomsbury, 2002)
Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1698-1798 by Paul Langford (Clarendon Press, 1989)
The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century by John Brewer (Harper Collins, 1997)
The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century by Jeremy Black (Macmillan, 1999)
Persuasion by Jane Austen (first published London, 1818)
The Bourbons in the Eighteenth Century by Harold Acton (Methuen, 1957)
Catalogue: Nelson and Napoléon edited by Margarette Lincoln (National Maritime Museum, 2005)
Catalogue: Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection edited by Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan (British Museum, 1996)
Horatia Nelson by Winifred Gerin (Clarendon Press, 1997)
Nelson: A Dream of Glory by John Sugden (Jonathan Cape, 2004)
The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery (Yale University Press, 1998)
Dr Kate Williams is the author of England’s Mistress: A Life of Emma Hamilton, based on hundreds of newly discovered letters, to be published by Hutchinson in 2006. She contributed to Admiral Lord Nelson: Contest and Legacy, edited by David Cannadine (Palgrave, 2005), and is a lecturer and TV consultant, appearing on BBC ONE's Trafalgar in June 2005.
BBC © 2014 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.
This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.