Kate Williams

by Unknown

  At Dresden, celebrity spotters, autograph hunters, and ordinary people craving a glimpse of Nelson surrounded the hotel. According to the newspapers, the Electress of Saxony refused to receive them on account of Emma’s rakish past, although the truth was that the elector was worried about antagonizing Napoleon. Nelson did not care, blustering cheerfully that if there was “any difficulty of that sort, Lady Hamilton will knock the Elector down,” socializing instead with the recently appointed British envoy, Hugh Elliot, his wife, and their guest, Melesina St. George Trench. Elliot became rather a fan, admiring Emma for her lack of airs and graces, comparing her to King Charles IPs mistress, Nell Gwynn, recalling the story in which she allayed the anger of the masses by identifying herself as “Protestant Whore.” Like many, he decided her a second Cleopatra, manipulating her Antony, and he believed she had bigger fish to fry than Nelson: “She will captivate the Prince of Wales, whose mind is as vulgar as her own, and play a great part in England.”

  Melesina was in love with Elliot and painfully jealous of Emma’s electrifying effect on him, resenting her flamboyant behavior and her efforts to steal the limelight by flattering her lover. “It is plain that Lord Nelson thinks of nothing but Lady Hamilton, who is totally occupied with the same object,” declaring him “a willing captive, the most submissive and devoted I have seen.” Emma, she mocked, “puffs the incense full in his face; but he receives it with pleasure, and snuffs it up very cordially.” Sir William was dismissed as “old, infirm, all admiration of his wife,” and Mrs. Cadogan was a trial: “Lady Hamilton’s mother, is what one might expect from the purlieu’s of Dr Giles’s whence she really comes”—an accusation so shocking that it was cut from the version of her journal later published by her son, but remains in the original manuscript in Hampshire Record Office.

  Melesina wished she had Hugh Elliot and his malleable wife to herself, but she could not deny Emma’s beauty. “She resembles the bust of Ariadne, the shape of all her features is as fine as her head, and particularly her ears,” and even the brown spot in one light blue eye “takes nothing away from her beauty of expression.” The pregnancy was now obvious: her feet were heavy and swollen and she was “exceedingly embonpoint,” or bosomy, a phrase used to signal pregnancy. Although she admitted that Emma was entertaining and that she “did not seek to win hearts, for everyone’s lay at her feet,” she complained she was more “stamped with the manners of her first situation than one would suppose, after having represented Majesty and lived in good company, for fifteen years.”

  Melesina was, however, won over by her Attitudes, for which Emma cunningly made them wait five days.

  Several Indian shawls, a chair, some antique vases, a wreath of roses, a tambourine, and a few children are her whole apparatus. She stands at one end of the room with a strong light to her left, and every other window closed… her gown a simple calico chemise, very easy with loose sleeves to the wrist. She disposes the shawls as to form Grecian, Turkish and other drapery, as well as a variety of turbans. Her arrangement of the turbans is absolute sleight-of-hand, she does it so quickly, so easily, and so well…. Each representation lasts about ten minutes. It is remarkable that, though coarse and ungraceful in common life, she becomes highly graceful, and even beautiful during this performance.7

  In the cold light of morning, Melesina judged her dress “vulgar, loaded, and unbecoming.” Emma preferred an obvious look—bright colors, cleavage, heavy jewelry, and tight drapes—but there were few men who were not attracted by it. Melesina’s scornful remarks are often quoted, but she was acerbic about everybody she met (apart from Hugh Elliot). And Melesina’s pen did not reflect her behavior to her visitor’s face: she was a frequent visitor to Emma’s homes after both had returned to England. While Emma flattered Hugh Elliot, Nelson ordered Dresden porcelain in his honor and arranged for Saxony’s foremost artist, Johann Schmidt, to paint him and his Emma. He was determined to have his own set of portraits of her in which she was herself, not a model playing glamorous roles, tainted by the paw marks of William or Greville.

  On October 10, Nelson and the Hamiltons caught a barge along the Elbe. Spectators crowded along the bridge and the shore, and the crushes when the party disembarked were so intense that those at the front almost fell into the river. When they disembarked at Magdeburg, farther up the Elbe, Emma was the star of their lunch engagement, interpreting for her lover, showing where he had been wounded, and boasting about his 120 sea battles. Onlookers jostled to peer in while Nelson dined, and boats full of cheering spectators escorted his vessel as it set off once more.

  On October 21, they finally reached Hamburg. The frigate that Nelson had requested the Admiralty send to transport them home was nowhere to be seen, and they had to buy places on a ship transporting mail. Amongst the dignitaries they met in the ten days they waited to depart was the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Utterly charmed by Lady Hamilton, the elderly intellectual would not let her out of his sight. He enjoyed a private performance of the Attitudes and wrote to a friend that she had given him a kiss.

  The English in Hamburg put on a play depicting the Battle of Aboukir and then threw a party in Nelson’s honor for over a thousand guests, including a twelve-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer, already showing hints of the genius that would make him the age’s most respected philosopher. Nelson was so carried away by the riotous celebrations that he lost a giant yellow diamond from the sword that Ferdinand had only recently given him. Just before they embarked on the King George on October 31, the hung-over hero sheepishly bought his wife a black lace cloak and a package of fine lace to decorate a court dress. None of the fashion reports ever noted that Fanny wore it.

  They arrived home on November 6. The triumphal journey was only a trial run. Emma was about to become the most famous woman in England.

  Scandal and Stardom

  CHAPTER 37

  Cleopatra Arrives

  The whole of East Anglia seemed to have arrived at Yarmouth, on England’s eastern coast, to welcome the hero of the Nile and his friends. It was Emma’s first glimpse of her home country in nearly ten years. Boats flying every color came out to meet them, and excited crowds teemed on the shore. When they landed, burly men removed the horses from Nelson’s carriage and dragged it to the inn themselves. There, to the delight of the crowd, Nelson and Emma waved from the balcony as the local infantry struck up a congratulatory march. No representative from the Admiralty was present to greet the hero, but the mayor of Yarmouth staged a lavish banquet in their honor and offered Nelson the freedom of the city.

  Despite the raw November chill, crowds in Nelson hats and badges thronged their route to Norfolk, waving flags, singing, and weeping with joy. Though Emma delighted in the adulation, she dreaded meeting Fanny. Nelson vowed that he adored Emma because she was so different from his wife, but she was anxious that he might feel a twinge of guilt when he saw Fanny again. She was nervous that Nelson at heart was too conventional to abandon his marriage.

  Nelson had written to Fanny telling her to anticipate them for dinner on Saturday. He expected her to put the servants to work and welcome him and his friends with a sumptuous meal. But Fanny had not received the letter. Unsure of what to do, she had hurried to London with Nelson’s father to wait for him. The homecoming hero’s party reached Roundwood to find only a few servants in the kitchen, little food, no fires, and hardly any candles. Nelson flew off the handle, suspecting his wife had left his home cold and empty to humiliate him.

  After a dismal and anticlimactic evening, the party set off for London the next morning, narrowly avoiding the worst storm since 1703, in which trees were torn out of the ground, signs flew off shops, and houses collapsed. They arrived in London by early afternoon, and Nelson, Emma, and Sir William took suites at Nerot’s Hotel in St. James. Mrs. Cadogan and the others went to a cheaper lodging house nearby. Admirers surrounded the hotel and cheered through the rain to see the hero of the Nile and the Cleopatra who had won his heart and, some said, directe
d the English fleet. Gossip columnists and reporters skulked at the back doors, recording their every move. After lightning visits from the Duke of Queensberry, Fanny arrived, accompanied by Nelson’s father, the seventy-eight-year-old Edmund Nelson. Realizing from the newspapers that Nelson had first been to Roundwood, she was almost paralyzed by nerves. Every print shop she passed was selling images of Emma, and the newspapers were churning out jokes about her Attitudes and the same old story about her meteoric rise to fame. Fanny shrank from meeting the tabloid celebrity. Forty-two and conscious that she was aging, she had lain awake through long, lonely nights seething with hatred for her younger rival. She was painfully aware that she had put herself at a terrible disadvantage by missing the chance to receive Emma on home ground.

  The meeting was even worse than Fanny had feared. Emma swept in, overexcited and effusive, her dress outlining the now resplendent swell. Fanny finally saw what everybody had kept from her. Lady Hamilton had succeeded where she had failed. She could hardly retain her composure. Nelson received her politely but, although they had been apart for three years, he refused to retire and see her alone. He could not bear to leave Emma, the woman pregnant with the child he had longed for almost as much as he desired glory. Fanny withdrew into herself and seemed cold, and Emma claimed her eyes were icy, with an “antipathy not to be described.” In Sir William’s favorite hotel, surrounded by cheering crowds wielding flags, Fanny was faced with the bitter truth: she had lost her husband.

  Emma was comforted to see that Nelson’s ardor for her never faltered, but she knew she had to press her advantage. Lady Nelson joined the Hamiltons and Nelson for dinner at Nerot’s at five o’clock. Emma talked enthusiastically, making sure to attract all the attention, even though she had to let Fanny sit by Nelson’s side. He left in the early evening to report to Lord Spencer, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and Fanny followed him in her carriage, tormented that Nelson’s commanders had underplayed the affair as a mere crush.

  Nelson had hoped that his wife would behave like Sir William, recognizing that their marriage had ended and stepping back to allow the lovers to pursue their mutual adoration. But Fanny, disgusted by Sir William’s placid acceptance of the affair, had decided to fight. She was Lady Nelson, Baroness Nelson, and Duchess of Bronte, and she was not about to let her husband go. To the delight of the newspapers, the women began a contest for his heart under an increasingly flimsy mien of polite friendship.

  William Beckford offered the Hamiltons use of his mansion, 22 Grosvenor Square, and Nelson and Fanny took an expensive furnished house a comfortable walking distance away at 17 Dover Street. Relations between him and his wife rapidly deteriorated. As Fanny knew, if she had been the mother of his children, he would have treated her with greater respect, and more journalists would have taken her side. Childless, she was in a weak position. Nelson visited Emma daily and praised her endlessly to his wife and to anyone else who called at Dover Street. Fanny was too unhappy to pretend to be sweet and forgiving, and in retaliation Nelson refused to behave as her husband in public. He came to hate the sight of her. He tried to dispel his anger and frustration by walking for hours around London late at night before arriving at Emma’s house in Grosvenor Square. The autumn of 1800 was such a strain that he declared the following spring that “sooner than live the unhappy life I did when last I came to England, I would stay abroad forever.”

  Meanwhile, Emma was winning the media war. There were around fifty daily newspapers in circulation, and Emma, looking ever more resplendent, was the toast of every one. Many newspapers had a print run of over four thousand, and as editions were usually shared (Robert Southey estimated that every paper had five readers), we might make a conservative estimate that over a quarter of a million people read about her antics over their meals. Journalists followed her everywhere. The Morning Herald extolled Emma’s “singularly expressive face,” beautiful teeth, dark eyes, and “immensely thick” hair of the “darkest brown” that “trails to the ground,” and decided her “the chief curiosity with which that celebrated antiquarian, Sir William Hamilton, has returned to his native country”1 The Morning Post gallantly defended her against the Herald’s slur that she was forty-nine, declaring that she looked no more than twenty-five. She was only made more beautiful, according to another, by her mysterious “tawny tinge,” a quip alluding to Cleopatra. Comparisons of her with the Egyptian queen appeared almost every day2 The joke was on the difference between the two women as shown in Shakespeare’s play: Cleopatra, exotic, powerful, seductive, and fertile, versus Octavia, Antony’s dreary, childless wife (who, like Fanny, also came to him as a widow), able to offer only “a holy, cold, and still conversation.” Emma even took to wearing Turkish dress to capitalize on the associations with the exotic East.

  The English public was enthralled by Emma’s growing figure. The loose muslin fashions of the time made it impossible to hide the truth: the hero of the Nile was about to become a father, at the age of forty-two. Emma was hardly ever mentioned without a pointed comment on her “rosy health” and “plump figure,” and typically the term embonpoint. In the words of the Morning Herald, “Lady Hamilton has been a very fine woman; but she has acquired so much en bon point and her figure is so swoln that her features and form have lost almost all their original beauty.” As another journalist put it, “Lady Hamilton’s countenance is of so rosy and blooming a description that, as Dr Graham would say, she appears so far a perfect Goddess of Health.” It was traditional to lay straw outside the homes of women in labor. The Morning Chronicle published a story about Lady Hamilton next to a joke about ladies who were often “in the straw” and “laid in sheets.” Another noted how her “unfortunate personal extension,” was making her less quick and graceful than she had been.3

  Now that Emma was in England, every fine lady was experimenting with her look: either dresses in the Turkish style or white draped gowns, headbands rather than hats, and shawls and anchors “alia Nelson.” Those still wearing hoops and corsets gave them up. Emma’s pregnancy had led her to adopt the French fashion of the empire-line dress, and she pulled the waistline outrageously high. As Melesina Trench sniped, “Her waist is absolutely between her shoulders.” Women across the country were besieging their dressmakers, demanding copies of what was, technically, a maternity dress, all of them tying their dresses under their bosoms.

  Hundreds dashed to buy Rehberg’s book of her Attitudes to borrow ideas for the classical style of dress. The Lady’s Magazine noted English women’s “enthusiastic partiality for the forms and fashions which were preferred among the ancient Greeks and Romans.” They even modeled their footwear on Emma’s, buying “slippers in imitation of Etruscan ornaments.“4 The Maltese Cross, pinned to Emma’s now expansive bust, inspired particularly wild imitation. Cheap gilt versions of the cross were sold throughout England, and the very wealthiest ladies had their own made out of diamonds. Even Caroline, Princess of Wales, followed Emma’s fashion and wore a white dress with a Maltese Cross brooch to attract the attention of the newspapers. Her estranged husband, the prince, hated everything about the German princess he felt he had been forced to marry in 1795, except for the fashions she copied from Lady Hamilton.∗ He gave a diamond Maltese Cross to his youngest sister, Amelia, in 1806. Poor Fanny was surrounded by women imitating her showy rival in transparent dresses and heavy jewelry. She was utterly isolated.

  Printing presses worked overtime to produce cartoons, ballads, and bawdy pictures about the affair. The newspapers had suggested before Sir William’s marriage to Emma that he was infertile, even impotent, and it seems as if everybody agreed, for nobody assumed that the child she carried was his. On November 18, the windows of the print shops exploded with a new caricature by Isaac Cruikshank, Smoking Attitudes, in which Emma, Sir William, Prime Minister Pitt, Nelson, and the lord mayor are smoking pipes, following Nelson’s recent attendance at the lord mayor’s reception. Smoking was a particularly exotic habit of the upper classes, associated with th
e East, and the pipes suggest that they are louche and extravagant. Hamilton’s pipe is conspicuously unlit, and Emma, dressed in muslin and assuming an Attitude, effuses to Nelson that her husband’s “pipe is always out but yours burns with full vigour.” Her lover’s reply is characteristically blunt: “I’ll give you such a smoke I’ll pour a whole broad side into you.†

  Every time they opened a newspaper, Sir William’s family, friends, and ex-colleagues were shocked to see him represented as a cuckolded, bamboozled, out-of-touch old antiquarian. They were even more scandalized by his sanguine acceptance of the situation. Sir William ignored their complaints, perhaps because he thought them too concerned about whether he would leave his money to Emma. Lady Frances Harpur, Charles Greville’s sister, visited Grosvenor Square with every resolution to disapprove, but admitted, “She appears much attached to Sir Wm & He is in much admiration & I believe She constitutes his Happiness.” Lady Frances acknowledged that Emma was treating Sir William kindly, but had to “lament this Idolatory.”5 William’s motives in forgiving the affair were complex. He owed Nelson more than £2,000 for expenses accrued in Naples, Palermo, and the journey home. Unable ever to pay it back, he hinted that Emma was responsible for the expenses by complaining in front of her lover that she gambled too much and would make herself a pauper. He was also genuinely fond of Nelson; furthermore, he knew their friendship gave him social consequence.