Kate Williams

by Unknown

  I leave Emma, Lady Hamilton, therefore, a Legacy to my King and Country, that they will give her an ample provision to maintain her rank in life. I also leave to the beneficence of my Country my adopted daughter, Horatia Nelson Thompson; and I desire She will use in future the name of Nelson only. These are the only favours I ask of my King and Country at this moment when I am going to fight their Battle.4

  He had already written his final letters. He congratulated Horatia that “you are so very good a girl, and love my Dear Lady Hamilton, who most dearly loves you, give her a kiss from me.“5 He promised Emma he loved her “as much as my own life; and, as my last writing before the battle will be to you, so I hope in God that I shall live to finish my letter after the Battle.” All around him, men were packing his furniture and removing the pictures from the walls. The ship was being made ready for war.

  Before battle, most ordinary men removed boots, heavy coats, and unnecessary jewelry and exchanged socks for silk stockings, to give the surgeon less trouble. Because snipers tried to pick off commanders, officers divested themselves of decorations. Nelson was determined to wear his stars, despite the concerns of his subordinates that he was making himself a target. His officers begged him to assume the traditional position of an admiral, on a ship toward the back of the fleet, ensuring relative safety and a good overall view of the battle. He refused, resolving to lead the attack from the front, resplendent on the Victory. Aware this was probably his last battle, he wanted to head it like a hero: swathed in glory, an inspiration to his men.

  On November 6, Emma was in bed with a skin complaint and Susanna Bolton was visiting her. When they heard the sound of gunfire from the Tower of London (a signal that a battle had been won), Susanna wondered if it was “news from my brother.” Emma thought there could not be a result so soon and it must be a victory elsewhere. Five minutes later a carriage arrived, and Captain Whitby from the Admiralty was shown in. Emma believed he was bringing her letters. As she later told Lady Foster:

  He came in, and with a pale countenance and faint voice said, “We have gained a great Victory.” “Never mind your victory,” I said, “My letters— give me my letters”—Capt. Whitby was unable to speak—tears in his eyes and a deathly paleness over his face made me comprehend him. I believe I gave one scream and fell back, and for ten hours after I could neither speak nor shed a tear—days have passed on and I know not how they end or begin—nor how I am to bear my future existence.

  She had to steel herself to tell little Horatia about her father’s death. A week later, Lady Foster visited Emma in Clarges Street and found her weeping in bed with Nelson’s letters strewn across the coverlet. “She had the appearance of a person stunned and scarcely as yet able to comprehend the certainty of her loss. ‘What shall I do?’ and ‘How can I exist?’ were her first words.” Emma was eager for news about Nelson’s death, and Lady Foster told her what she knew, extrapolating her information from reports in the newspapers. Emma burst into further floods of tears, and when she was calmer, Bess asked her if she thought he “had any presentiment of his fate.” Emma replied, no, not until their parting. “He had come back four different times, and the last time he had kneeled down and holding up his hand had prayed God to bless her.” Nelson, Emma told Bess, had requested her to take the sacrament with him at Merton, “for,” he said, “we both stand before our God with pure hearts and affection.“6

  Emma lay in bed prostrate with grief for three weeks. She told anyone and everyone about her misery. A heartfelt lament landed on the desk of Alexander Davison:

  I have been very ill all Day my Heart Broken & my Head Consequently weak from the agitations I Suffer—I tell you Truly—I am gone nor do I wish to Live—He that I loved more than Life He is gone Why then shou’d I Live or wish to Live I Lived but for Him all now is a Dreary prospect before me I never lamented the Loss of a Kingdom (for I was Queen of Naples) for seven years, nor one Sigh ever Escaped me for the Loss I Sustained When I fell from Such a height of grateness & Happiness of Naples to misery and wretchedness—But all I lov’d have sustained with firmness but the Loss of Nelson under this Dreadfull weight of Most wretched Misery that I suffer.7

  She struggled out of bed to receive visits from Nelson’s steward William Chevailler, and his secretary and chaplain Alexander Scott, as well as Dr. Beatty, his surgeon. Nelson had begged his good friend Captain Hardy to give Emma his personal effects, and he sent, via Chevailler, Nelson’s “hair, lockets, rings, breast-pin, and all your Ladyship’s pictures.” Most sorrowfully of all, she received her letters to him about Horaria and Lord Douglas’s tobacco. The letters above are the only ones from Emma to Nelson that he did not burn, for he never saw them.

  Emma pieced together the events of the battle from the newspapers and accounts from her visitors. By twenty minutes before noon on October 21, the French ships were firing, but Victory, with Nelson standing on deck, broke through their line of ships, and attacked the French vessel Bucentaure. Then Victory met the French ship Redoubtable. The French captain armed his men with guns, sent them to scale the rigging, and told them to aim for the officers. Covered in stars, walking around the main deck of a flagship, Nelson blazed through the smoke. At quarter past one, a single musket ball fired from a gun on the French ship struck Nelson’s left shoulder. He was carried down to the cockpit below the waterline, now the ship’s hospital, and laid on a sheet on the bare wood, painted red to disguise the blood. Nelson realized the ball was lodged in his spine and said he “felt it break my back.” He knew he was dying.

  “My sufferings are great, but they will be soon over,” he said, but he took until four o’clock to die. All around him, hundreds of men were dying while others screamed in agony as surgeons removed shrapnel, musket balls, and splinters and amputated mangled limbs. The only anesthetic was rum, and officers took laudanum. Fifteen minutes after Nelson was hit, the Redoubtable surrendered. Nelson ignored his purser’s promise that he would take the news of the victory home. Stripped to his shirt, his head resting on the discarded coat of a midshipman, he felt gushing in his chest and was numb in the lower half of his body. His lungs filled with blood as he slowly drowned in his own fluids. By three o’clock, fourteen ships had surrendered. Nelson begged Captain Hardy not to throw him overboard and to “take care of my dear Lady Hamilton, Hardy, take care of poor Lady Hamilton.” Although Hardy then heard him say “Kiss me, Hardy,” it seems likely that Nelson, already on the subject of Emma, was trying to say, “Kiss Emma for me, Hardy.”

  Alexander Scott and William Beatty rubbed his chest in an attempt to dull the pain. They helped him to drink a little and fanned him until he died. In a letter written in the previous May, Nelson promised Emma she was “my first and last thoughts.” She was his last thought. Dr. Scott dashed off the news to Mrs. Cadogan: “Hasten the very moment you receive this to dear Lady Hamilton, and prepare her for the greatest of misfortunes.“8

  It was some weeks before Emma heard that Nelson’s last words were of her and that he had begged the nation to care for her and Horatia. Dividing her time between London and Merton, she was overcome by grief In the absence of William, Sarah, and Charlotte Nelson, who were busy separating themselves from her, she relied on Nelson’s sisters. Kitty Matcham complained to her son, George, that Merton was “very dull; quite the reverse to what you knew it.” She wanted to leave, but “it really is cruel to mention our going to my Lady at present.“9 Emma often took to her bed with Nelson’s belongings, receiving her visitors in tears. Abraham Goldsmid, her neighbor, a wealthy Jewish banker, brought his large family to console her and found her sobbing and passing Nelson’s gifts of shawls, rings, and bracelets to a solemn group of fifteen, gathered theatrically at the bottom of the bed. She showed Nelson’s coat with a flourish, pointing out how the bullet hole was stiff with congealed blood. Emma found that elaborate expression helped temper her anguish. She took Horada to see the wax model of Nelson at Westminster Abbey and wept copiously as she rearranged the hair.

/>   Lady Foster tried to encourage Emma to focus on practical matters. She wondered if Nelson’s family had been kind. Emma praised George Matcham, Kitty’s husband, who “scarcely leaves me, but tries to make me take some food, or medicine—something to do me good—and with the greatest affection.” She was, however, surprised that William Nelson often seemed elated. Emma did not guess it, but William was exhilarated to hear that Nelson had died without changing his will. Bess thought Emma too trusting. Emma, she reported, told her that her lover had “left her Merton, that at first she would have given it up to [William Nelson] but then she thought not. I advised her not by any means.” Emma was plagued by worries. Nelson had promised that his last breath would be “occupied in leaving you independent of the World.” As she owed astronomical sums of money, she could only hope he had kept his word.

  Nelson’s will was read in November. William Nelson inherited the estate, excluding Merton but including Bronte, and he also received Nelson’s bank accounts and possessions. The government had already made William an earl and his son Horace a viscount, the titles Nelson had so desperately desired, and now he was also Duke of Bronte. Emma received £2,000, plus Merton with all its furniture and fittings and the seventy acres of land, including all the hay, and also £500 a year from the Bronte estate. She would have much less than she had when Nelson was alive.

  She tried to assuage her grief for her lover by helping others. Like her, the Boltons and the Matchams had spent lavishly in expectation of Nelson’s victorious return. Emma gave them money and deputized her mother to write to Mr. George Rose, Nelson died “leaving behind his favourite Sister with a large family unprovided for.” Mrs. Cadogan declared, “Lady Hamilton who’s situation is beyond description only prays that you good Sir will do all you can for this Worthy Family it will give the greatest Relief to her Mind… as a Mark of your true & Real attachment to our Lamented Hero.” She wrote that the Boltons “at this Moment surround her Ladyships Bed bewailing their sad loss & miserable state.” After Nelson’s death, his friends, relations, and colleagues were frantic to ensure they did not miss out when the government handed out honors and money. Most demanded Emma’s help.

  Emma had no idea of the intrigues that swirled around her. Many ordinary people blamed the war for inflation and high taxes, and there had been an outcry at the sheer numbers of servicemen who had lost their lives. The government wanted to make Nelson’s funeral into a rallying call for British patriotism. Apotheosized as the perfect hero, his love life and his personal flaws would be erased.

  Backlash

  CHAPTER 49

  Mistress of a Mourning Nation

  Nelson had told Emma he wished her to sing during his funeral. They had even made plans to be buried together. The public agreed that Nelson and Emma were inseparable: print shops were full of etchings, drawings, and engravings in which Emma was depicted as mourner, a Britannia figure draped in white. One popular engraving showed Emma crowning Nelson’s bust with a wreath. Even James Gillray produced a sentimental caricature of Nelson taken to the sky while Emma wept over him. The Admiralty took a quite different view. Nelson might have been Emma’s in life, but now he was the property of the nation, and he would be commemorated in a service led by men.

  The hero’s body was preserved in a cask of spirits and shipped home, not to Fanny, not to Emma, nor even to his brother, but to the state. Emma had tried to view the body when it landed, but Captain Hardy discouraged her, knowing the sight of the swollen corpse would distress her. On December 24, Nelson, now laid in his coffin, was transferred to an official yacht and then taken along the Thames to Greenwich Hospital. He was placed in the Painted Hall on a platform six feet high, adorned with a black canopy spangled with gold and a wreath bearing the word Trafalgar. Emma probably queued with the crowds to enter the Painted Hall with Horatia, swathed in the huge black veil that Vigée-Lebrun had seen her wear to mourn Sir William. When the doors were open for two days on January 5, more than thirty thousand people surged past, pushed by overstressed guards.

  The funeral was one of the most lavish commemorations in British history. Emma was firmly excluded. On January 8, 1806, Nelson’s body was taken upriver on a giant barge from Greenwich to the Admiralty at Whitehall, escorted by a procession of boats. Thousands gathered on the banks of the Thames to catch a glimpse of the coffin. The following morning, Nelson was driven to St. Paul’s Cathedral in an opulent funeral car shaped to resemble the Victory, trailed by a procession of carriages two miles long. Hysterical crowds thronged the route, controlled by thirty thousand soldiers. Inside St. Paul’s, seven thousand admirals, politicians, and aristocrats in their finest dress coats had been shivering in the pews since early morning. Although many of them had disparaged Nelson’s reckless behavior while he was alive and mocked his lack of aristocratic pedigree, they were not about to miss out on the funeral of the century. A few fashionable ladies stole into the loft, but most contented themselves with watching the procession in the streets. At half past five the coffin was lowered into a crypt below the stone floor. The men of the Victory had been ordered to unfurl the flags of the ship over the grave. Instead, the church resonated with the sound of tearing as the forty-eight sailors ripped the largest flag apart with their bare hands, desperate to keep some small scrap of Nelson for themselves.

  Emma spent the day in tears over her letters, accompanied by her mother, daughter, and Nelson’s female relations. The men of the Bolton and Matcham families were invited to the funeral, and Emma gave both families dinner and breakfast, accommodated the Boltons, and probably also received William and Horace Nelson. A weeping female figure who looked very like Emma was carved on the coffin. Otherwise, she was absent, carefully written out of the heroic story. Nelson’s body was interred in a ten-foot high slab of ornately carved porphyry—a huge grave for such a diminutive man. Ever thrifty, when asked to donate in the memory of Nelson, George III sent over a sarcophagus that had been hanging around in the cellars of Windsor Castle ever since Henry VIII seized it from scheming Cardinal Wolsey Still, as it cost only £6,300 to dedicate it to Nelson, the state saved some money. Now, Nelson’s sarcophagus is the grand focus of St. Paul’s Crypt, brilliantly lit, outdazzling the monuments to Wellington and Florence Nightingale, proudly on show to thousands of tourists every year.

  The funeral cost the state £14,000. The Morning Herald derided the descent of Nelson’s body into the crypt as a tasteless “stage trick,” and the Morning Chronicle disdained the “meagre and monotonous music.” Many judged the cost obscene, considering the dire poverty of so many injured veterans and sailors’ widows and orphans.

  More than anything, the funeral was an opportunity for hundreds to make a profit. Guests sold their invitations for a fortune, both before and after the event. The vergers at St. Paul’s earned more than £40 a day allowing visitors to have a peep before the service, and accrued £300 a day after the funeral by charging a shilling to view the catafalque. London tradesmen sold special carriages, jewelry, and clothes to guests. Pie shop and tavern owners made massive takings from the crowds watching the procession. Thousands bought commemorative jewelry, prints, or boxes. Nelson relics—many fake—were changing hands for ridiculous prices. Emma, however, refused to sell any of her possessions. She was determined to be the keeper of Nelson’s dignity and maintain his heroic reputation for the rest of her life. It was not going to be easy.

  Nelson’s death and his funeral fired a spectacular market in outlandishly expensive fashions aimed at women. Embroiderers worked overtime sewing Nelson’s name onto drapery for tearful fine ladies to wear while they mourned the great hero. A sumptuous fashion plate in the February 1806 edition of Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine illustrated a “Trafalgar Dress,” which was another version of Emma’s habitual costume: a white satin gown trimmed with gold, silver, or lace along with a turban embroidered with “Nelson” and topped with feathers. According to the March edition, the Bronte hat and muff were ideal for the “higher order o
f fashionables.“1 Trafalgar even became the name of an embroidery stitch—perhaps a cross formation—which proved so newfangled and difficult that even experienced needlewomen (including Jane Austen’s sister-in-law) found it tricky. William Tassie, one of the foremost cameo makers of the day, worked feverishly to satisfy the demand for heads of Nelson for jewelers to set in rings and brooches. Shopkeepers could not stock up fast enough with black-edged, sentimental commemorative tablecloths, napkins, clocks, boxes, trunks, plant pots, and door handles. Emma was the heroine of most of the items. She starred in prints as chief mourner, and lockets, boxes, and other decorated items were painted with her figure, a dark-haired woman, weeping and dressed in white.

  Magazine stories and novels exploiting Nelson’s love life poured off the presses. In them, a virginal, beautiful heroine named Amelia, Amy, or Ellen was courted by a brave sea captain, Horace or Horatio, the affair often sponsored by older characters called Sir William and Lady Frances. In A Soldier’s Friendship and A Sailor’s Love (1805) by Anna Maria Porter, the lovely young musical heroine (who has a very common mother) is adopted by a Lady Frances and educated by her neighbor the aged Sir William Hereford, then courted by the handsome naval captain. In the second half of the book, another Nelson and Emma pair appears, but the hero may marry his beloved, Amelia, only after he meets a very rich widow with a young son in the West Indies, because she dies and leaves her money to him—an intriguing revision of Nelson’s marriage.

  Eliza Parsons’s The Navy Lieutenant (1806) was the most blatant attempt to support Horatia and extol Nelson. Parsons’s Henry Thompson, the “third son of a country curate” (Nelson was the fifth son, but two elder brothers died), goes to sea at eleven and is promoted to lieutenant, but although loved by his men, he offends his superiors and is retired on half pay. When he returns to sea, he meets a young woman, Ellen, who has suffered at the hands of men and begs him to care for her baby daughter. He calls the child Fanny Thompson and gives her to a nurse. Ellen’s surname is later discovered to be Thompson, and so the story is about Henry Thompson and Ellen Thompson—a piquant twist, as Nelson and Emma had taken almost identical pen names. Ellen’s history of exploitation by aristocrats resembles Emma’s—even the ages of her seducers match those of Fetherstonhaugh and Greville at the time. The nurse becomes troublesome and demands a huge bribe to relinquish little Fanny. Parsons’s novel implies that the public knew a lot about Emma’s life: her previous lovers, Horatia, the Thompson letters, and even the payoff to Mrs. Gibson.2