Too Great a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  I was still ill abed when I received a letter from Francis Oliver, who had been Sir William’s, and then Nelson’s, secretary for a time. Oliver had couriered our love letters, and his correspondence to me was full of dark threats to publish everything he knew about my relationship with Nelson. He had also tried to court me after Nelson’s death though I’d rebuffed him soundly. Now his attempt at blackmail sent me into a fury.

  “You’ll make yourself sicker if you worry it to pieces, y’nau?” As ever, Mam offered sage advice. “Tell the bastard you’ll send copies of Nelson’s letter about that ’ole East India business to the papers, and you’ll tell them as well about ’ow ’e came a-wooing after Nelson died saying as ’e’d ’ad designs on you all these years. That should scare the stuffing out of ’im. And if it don’t, it buys us a little time to come up with something else to affright ’im with.”

  She was right. I penned a very strong reply to Oliver and we never heard another word from him.

  Greville had invited me to call upon him toward the close of the previous year, but I had been feeling too ill to see him. I missed the chance to say good-bye, for he died on April 23, 1809, at the age of sixty—a bachelor to his last breath. I was overcome with regret when I heard the news, for I should have ignored my ailments and accepted the opportunity to compose the coda to our lengthy and complicated connexion.

  “Will you miss ’im?” Mam wanted to know.

  I dabbed at a tear. “I suppose this spells my answer,” I replied, referring to the moistness in my eyes. “With Greville, died a carefree, giddy girl ’oo changed her name to Emma to please ’im, and who scarce ’ad a worry in the wide world, as long as she believed ’erself beloved. I daresay I will miss ’er.”

  As 1810 dawned, Mam fell ill with pneumonia. Her poor body had endured two episodes of apoplexia over the years, and her joints had given her no end of troubles for decades. On January 14, she closed her eyes for the last time. I had lost the dearest friend in all the world, and the only person in my life who had known every single one of my secrets. Through it all, she had always placed my happiness above her own.

  I laid her to rest in a private manner within a vault beneath St. Mary’s Church in Paddington Green, built two years after Mam and I had departed Edgware Road. I could not afford an engraved entablature, but as the years passed I would visit the crypt from time to time, laying yellow flowers on the stone that marked her grave.

  Forty-five

  Within the Rules

  Emma Carew had sent me a heartrending note of condolence after she learnt of Mam’s death, expressing the hope that I would see her.

  “Sunday Morning”

  It might have been happy for me to have forgotten the past, and to have began a new life with new ideas; but my memory traces back circumstances which have taught me too much, yet not quite all I could have wished to have known—with you that resides, and ample reasons, no doubt, you have for not imparting them to me. That I should persevere in it is what I owe to myself and to you, for it shall never be said that I avail myself of your partiality or my own inclination, unless I learn my claim on you is greater than you have hitherto acknowledged. But the time may come when the same reasons may cease to operate, and then, with a heart filled with tenderness and affection, will I shew you both my duty and my attachment. In the meantime, should you really wish to see me, I may be believed in saying that such a meeting would be one of the happiest moments of my life, but for the reflection that it may also be the last, as I leave England in a few days, and may, perhaps, never return to it again. I remain, etc.

  Little Emma had guessed the truth, of course. Of that, there was now no doubt. And after all that had passed, with a heart so buffeted, she was still willing, nay, anxious, to be a loving and dutiful daughter to me. My firstborn was a veritable Cordelia, and like Lear, I did not deserve her unswerving devotion. I did not return her letter, nor agree to see her again, for it would have broke my heart even more to tell her all (since her letter left me little room for continued denials) than it did to take the decision to remain forever silent. My intention was never to be cruel; quite the opposite, in fact. Full of shame as deep as the Thames, I felt that I’d had naught to give the darling girl when, no better than I should be, I’d first brought her into this world, and now, when she wish’d to form a deeper attachment, my fortunes and estate were once more at an ebb. I wanted the very best for her. But with my constrained finances, and continual picking up and moving from pillar to post, I truly did believe that when all was said and done the dear young woman would be better off without me. More importantly, I thought she would attain a better position in society if her prospects, and her potential for happiness and security, remained entirely untainted by my own tarnished reputation.

  As the months wore on and Nelson’s death receded into memory, my numerous creditors began to lie in wait for me. Writs were served and for days remained tacked like a hatchment upon the door before I mustered the strength to remove them. Over Christmas, Horatia came down with the whooping cough and I was too afraid to summon a doctor for fear of divulging my presence to my dunners. What a ghastly predicament we were in! The Sword of Damocles, in the guise of myriad debts, hung perilously above my head. In my despair I ceased all correspondence, for I had no words of cheer to impart and was certain my friends wished to read no more of Emma’s unhappy straits.

  Yet the creditors located me all the same, for at the beginning of 1813, the sword finally fell. At a friend’s country home I was arrested for debt, bodily taken—along with Horatia—to live in a spunging house Within the Rules of the King’s Bench, a proscribed area two and a half miles in circumference of the prison itself.

  Five roads converged upon an obelisk on the Surrey side of the Thames across Blackfriars Bridge, the same bridge Jane Powell and I had sneaked across in the dead of evening on our way from the Budds’ house to our nocturnal balladeering escapades at Cocksheath Camp. I was set up at No. 12 Temple Place, one of the terrace houses in the Magdalen Circus area, which when all was said and done—apart from the disgrace of being thrown into debtors’ prison—was better than some of the lodgings Horatia and I had been compelled to let since the death of her father. Saddest of ironies was that one reached my new address by passing the recently christened Nelson Square.

  The King’s Bench prison itself was three blocks away from Temple Place. Also within a stone’s throw were the Magdalen Hospital for penitent prostitutes and the Westminster Lying-in Hospital, which was open to all women, regardless of their ability to produce a marriage certificate. The nearby orphan asylum took in the children of Irish parents or of those whose parish was not easily determined. Also close at hand lay the Philanthropic Institution, whose mandate was to prevent vice by educating the children of convicts so they might not be tempted to follow in their parents’ criminal footsteps. In short, the entire neighborhood was a little ghetto for society’s outcasts and undesirables.

  The air seemed even browner and heavier there, the miasma thick with sorrows. In the Magdalen quarter one could not escape the stench of refuse. Even the nearby brewery of Barclay & Perkins gave off an unpleasant odor that threatened to put me off porter forever.

  Not only was I charged a daily rent of four shillings, sixpence, payable to the marshal of the King’s Bench, but for each additional mouth to feed within my establishment—which included two serving women and Miss Wheatley, Horatia’s singing mistress—I would have to forfeit a fee to the keeper of the spunging house. If I wished a fire, I had to purchase coal, another expense, for I began my sentence in January. Naturally, all food, beer, and spirits had to be bought as well, and a washerwoman had to be hired. It was a near-impossible challenge to pay off one’s debts while still being compelled to make so many expenditures necessary for subsistence. The only consolation about being placed Within the Rules for one debt was that the debtor could not be arrested for any others.

  A number of my possessions and effects were auctioned off tha
t I might begin to diminish my encumbrances. But what truly ruptured my heart was the painful relinquishing of my two most treasured assets: Nelson’s bloodstained coat and the inscribed silver christening cup that he had given to Horatia. The latter I brought to a Bond Street silversmith for sale. During every painful minute of the transaction, I felt like I was betraying Horatia, but she was still whooping; what else could I do but sell it to purchase a doctor’s care? Nelson would never have preferred a corpse to a cup.

  Inspecting the treasure for flaws, the merchant turned the cup over and over in his hands. “It’s a beautiful piece, I’ll warrant you that,” he said. “A shame you have to part with it, for I’m sure that its provenance is quite precious to you. Tell me,” he added with a wink, lowering his voice and leaning over his glass and mahogany countertop, “who was the girl’s mother, then?”

  I had inclined my head to hear his whisper, but his words caused me to rock back upon my heels. My carriage stiffened. “Horatia Nelson’s mother is too great a lady to be mentioned,” I told him firmly. When I pocketed the money from the sale of Horatia’s cup and left the silversmith’s, I felt as though I had sold my soul.

  Nelson’s younger sister, Katty Matcham, wrote to say that she was worried at not receiving a line from me in some time, and to express her concern for Horatia’s whooping cough. It embarrassed me greatly to have to reply to her letter from Within the Rules, but I explained our situation in detail. She responded with great delicacy, first informing me that she was sending down some food, then inviting me to send Horatia to live with them, at least until I could regain my financial footing, for they loved her as dearly as if she were one of their own daughters and would surely care for her with all the love it was possible to bestow. It was a magnanimous gesture and one that I am certain, knowing the Matchams, came straight from their hearts, but I could not give away Nelson’s daughter as if she were a coat or a cup. I had promised Nelson that I would be the one to raise and educate Horatia; never had there been a discussion of sending her away to live with his family, even to the dearest of his relations. She was all I had left in the world of him—and of course she was my flesh and blood, too.

  To my astonishment, I discovered that I had friends in high places Within the Rules. Alderman Joshua Jonathan Smith had been lord mayor a few years earlier, and in fact we had celebrated Horatia’s sixth birthday in his presence. Much enchanted with her, Smith had allowed her to climb upon the table and deliver a speech. Now Smith was president of the Borough Council of Suffolk, and the Rules were within his district’s purview.

  Soon after my possessions had been sold off, Alderman Smith brought me a parcel wrapped in brown paper tied with a length of twine. “I hope you won’t think ill of me for having taken the liberty of purchasing you a gift, Lady Hamilton.”

  “A gift? For me?” My smile was as puzzled as it was grateful. “What does Mrs. Smith ’ave to say about it?”

  It was the alderman’s turn to smile. “I think Mrs. Smith would understand.”

  I opened the package to find Nelson’s bloodstained coat. “Oh—dear God! Oh, my—his—” I bosted into tears on the spot, raining kisses on the treasure I had thought lost to me forever. “Oh, sir, there is assuredly a place reserved for you at God’s right ’and, for you are the kindest man on earth!” In thanking him, I learnt that Smith’s esteem for Nelson was unbounded and unalloyed—as well as long-standing. The alderman was a senior partner in a firm of sugar refiners and had known Nelson back when he was just a young captain on commission in the West Indies. Sometimes the great wide world is smaller than one could ever imagine!

  Entertaining my old Neapolitan friends was the only thing that brought me any comfort, but this, too, made it near impossible for me to continue to economize. My bankruptcy was the laceratingly painful price of some little cheer. As I insisted on comporting myself as though I were still the mistress of the Palazzo Sessa, Sua Eccellenza l’Ambasciatrice, few, including those of Nelson’s extended family, believed I was in such dire straits. But it was the only way to preserve my dignity. Could I allow the princes of the blood, my frequent guests the Dukes of Clarence and Sussex, to learn that the woman they fancied to be all music and sunshine, all shimmer and starlight, had been reduced to penury? No! It would never do! If nothing else, my pride prevented me from showing them the dark side of the coin; perhaps it was an old habit from my days at Mrs. Kelly’s in Arlington Street: never let them see you suffer.

  In February, I began to compose a series of open letters to the prince regent and the king. These “memorials,” lengthy recitations of my numerous services to king and country during my years in Naples—which had still gone unacknowledged and uncompensated after all these years—were published in the Morning Herald.

  On March 6, as I had amassed enough capital to settle my debts, Alderman Smith secured my release from the Rules, and I became free to quit the squalor of Temple Place. My little distaff ménage was once more ensconced at Bond Street, my lodgings at No. 150 having remained empty since our departure at the end of 1812. On that same day, I received two letters in response to my memorials. The first was from George Rose, and the second letter was from Lord Sidmouth, the home secretary. The messages were essentially the same: the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, had made it clear to them that my pension would not materialize, as the money was needed for matters of national importance—though he regretted all the embarrassment Lady Hamilton had been put to of late. My arse, he did! A paltry thousand pounds or so a year would scarce bankrupt the government. Boney would not be prevented from invading Albion because Parliament had deigned to finally furnish Emma’s remuneration!

  Infuriated, I sent another letter to the Prince Regent. As time progressed, my debts were remounting. I am harassed by extreme embarrassments; tradesmen are clamorous and cruel, I told him, spelling out all my expenses in Naples and Palermo, including the thousands of pounds taken from my privy purse to supply corn to the starving Maltese so that they might remain allies of the British Crown. I begged the prince to grant me the funds necessary to properly raise and educate the only issue of Nelson’s blood.

  A reader of this memoir should not form the misapprehension of my character that I was grasping or greedy. ’Twas nominated in Nelson’s will and codicils—instruments that had been properly witnessed—that Horatia and I be provided for; and to ignore his dying wishes was to flout the law. The legacy was legitimate. Not only that, I had earned a pension for all my years of service to the Crown; verily, it was my due.

  In my despair I sought solace in the temporary comforts of the bottle, though Dr. Heaviside had cautioned me against the consumption of too much wine and champagne. I had never been one for spirits, despite the caricaturists’ enjoyment of depicting me with a gin bottle in my hand.

  Horatia and I began to quarrel with increasing frequency. Now twelve years old, she resented my—as she put it—dragging her hither and yon, dwelling in occasional squalor and perpetual embarrassment, whilst she might be living happily and comfortably at Ashfold Lodge with the well-to-do Matchams. “You give and give to people like the earl’s family,” she said, “and all they do is take advantage of your bounty; yet you are fundamentally incapable of accepting real love and generosity when it’s offered to you by the likes of the Matchams and Miss Carew, who, for all your faults, think the world of you!” She accused me of being both blind and selfish. If I loved her as much as I professed to, I should not be ruining her young life, she insisted. What claims had I upon her anyway? I was merely her guardian whilst Katty Matcham was her aunt! And not only was I naught but her guardian; I was an embarrassment to her, a fat and slovenly tippler who dwelt in the past, caring more about my private memories of Lord Nelson, whatever they might be, than about his own daughter who lived and breathed before her eyes!

  On Easter Sunday 1813, at the end of my tether with her continual moping and whining, and wounded to the quick by her churlish insults, I took a leaf from Sir William’s book, expressin
g my anger and disappointment in her conduct by writing her the sternest possible letter.

  18 April, 1813

  Listen to a kind, good mother, who has ever been to you affectionate, truly kind, and who has neither spared pains nor expense 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. Listen, then, from a mother who speaks from the dead! Reform your conduct, or you will be detested by all the world, & when you shall no longer have my fostering arm to sheild you, whoe betide you! You will sink to nothing. I grieve & lament to see the increasing strength of your turbulent passions; I weep & pray you may not be totally lost. I shall go join your father & my blessed mother & may you on your death-bed have as little to reproach yourself as your once affectionate mother has, for I can glorify, & say I was a good child. Can Horatia Nelson say so? I am unhappy to say you CANNOT. No answer to this?

  P.S. Look on me now as gone from this world.

  She had no need to know that at her age I was in truth just as petulant and twice as wild. At first, upon reading this letter, Horatia was not contrite, as I hoped she would be. “You’re so awfully dramatic,” she said, almost sneering, then added, “and you’re not my mother. Not my real mother, anyway, and it’s cruel and evil of you to say so.”