Authors: John Sugden
It was Catherine who in a great measure had given Sir William the resources to amass his magnificent collections, treasuries of antiquities that would one day be a foundation for the British Museum. He was forever collecting and selling. By 1771 Hamilton had more than eight thousand vases, terracottas, ancient glasses, bronze, ivory and gold pieces, and antique gems and coins. A sumptuous description of only part of this remarkable hoard, published in 1766 and 1767, extended to four volumes, and gave impetus to the neo-Classical movement already then underway. He had no sooner sold one collection than he began another, and by 1798 he owned more than two hundred paintings and drawings by old masters such as Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, Velasquez and Van Dyck.
Though Hamilton had little intrinsic interest in politics, his conversation was informed, direct and populated with a dazzling range of friends and acquaintances. Nelson listened to anecdotes of luminaries as varied as the Emperor Joseph II of Austria, Tsar Paul of Russia, Goethe and Voltaire. Hamilton had served under the victor of Culloden in the Netherlands, and met the loser drinking himself into decline and death in Rome. He had entertained the infant Mozart. He mused in one breath about Banks, Reynolds and Wedgwood, and in another detailed the antics of his pet monkey, Jack, which peered at ladies in closets and learned to use a magnifying glass. Nelson presented as a rather serious young man, but we can imagine the suggestion of one of his uncommon but charming smiles.
Then, at some stage, Sir William introduced Nelson to a person of whom he was extrovertly proud – Emma, the new Lady Hamilton.
Nelson said little about her at the time, but she was helpful to his boys. Hoste was packed off with tickets to the King’s Museum and the ruins of Herculaneum, while Fanny read that ‘Lady Hamilton has been wonderfully kind and good to Josiah’. The Hamiltons must have told Nelson something of her bizarre past, because the captain added, ‘She is a young woman of amiable manners and who does honour to the station to which she is raised.’ Nevertheless, nothing in this simple testimony betrayed that its writer had met the great love of his life.
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More than fifty books have been written about Emma Hamilton and they vary greatly in the portrait they present of her. Few people have been so damned and so sainted. Her powerful compound of
strengths and weaknesses led contemporaries to extol or detract vigorously. That potent cocktail should not be forgotten, for we will shed little light on Emma simply to reproduce the prejudices of one side or another. Traducers considered her low-born, and therefore coarse, vulgar and graceless; she spent much of her life in Naples, imbibing its liberality, and was consequently indecorous; she was beautiful, forward and infectious, and therefore a magnet for the jealous and envious. Above all, perhaps, she was something of an outsider. Her experiences transcended classes and kingdoms, and though she was raised to that threatened order of aristocracy she never quite fitted into it. Emma wore her faults on her sleeves. Talented rather than intelligent, ridiculously theatrical, tempestuous, vain, attention-seeking and ruthless in pursuit, she was a spendthrift and trivial socialite. But she was also warm-hearted, humane, generous, loyal, energetic and brave. We will never understand her blistering impact on a succession of individuals, be they painters, diplomats or naval officers, if we do not realise that first and foremost she was a most remarkable woman.
Her beauty would have struck Nelson immediately. Emma was tall, strong and almost Amazonian – too much so for some men’s tastes – but she also sported a voluptuous figure no clothes could disguise. Her form may have been at its best that first time Nelson saw her, for it expanded disastrously in the following years, when it seemed to grow by the day. Classically moulded, her commanding and expressive countenance was lit by lively blue eyes and surmounted by an immense chestnut mane. Some men spoke of her as ‘one of the most beautiful creatures’ they had ever seen, though not everyone agreed. Certainly she entranced painters, who had made her a leading model of the time. Chief among them was the fashionable English artist George Romney, for whom Emma was ‘superior to all womankind’ and worthy of the dozens of canvasses he devoted to her. In Italy such was the scramble for her services that as many as half a dozen or more sculptors and artists might be working on her likeness at any one time.
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Most of all Emma loved to perform, to move and inspire. Confident in her looks and powers, she danced with ‘a volupte, a grace which would set on fire the coldest and most insensible man’, sang like ‘an angel’, and created ‘a new source of pleasure to mankind’ with her famous ‘attitudes’. The attitudes were costumed poses, most of them drawn from Classical mythology, the sort painters used but now endowed with movement and expression. Emma successfully plied
them before fashionable gatherings in Naples and London, but no one left a better description than Goethe, who sat through a performance in Caserta in 1787. Dressed in a Greek outfit, Emma:
lets down her hair, and with a few shawls gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express, realised before him in movements and surprising transformations – standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious – one pose follows another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a head-dress . . . This much is certain: as a performance it’s like nothing you ever saw before in your life.
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Her public thought the attitudes extraordinary, and men found them sexually charged, with Emma’s flimsy draperies and short male tunics revealing in art what would have been indecent in society. The applause only fired Emma’s ‘passion for admiration’ and made her work the harder. In fact, in her own way she was as much a perfectionist as Horatio Nelson, but whereas he hungered for the perfect naval victory she needed the ultimate public performance. ‘I sung after that one with a tambourin in the character of a young girl with a raire-shew [raree-show], the pretist [prettiest] thing you ever heard,’ she told a former lover in 1787. ‘I left the people at Sorrento with their heads turned. I left some dying, some crying, and some in despair.’ Emma, like Nelson, was bent upon conquest.
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Sir William doted on a young wife thirty-three years his junior, and proudly exhibited her talents. He stage-managed the attitudes, controlling the lighting, and finding the inspiration for many of her poses in the vases and sculptures of his vast collection and the pages of a well-stocked library. If he felt threatened he managed to hide it. Emma’s ability to captivate and her appetite for attention made her a formidable figure in any social gathering, in which she was a tireless hunter of the hearts of men and women alike, wooing them with generosity, warmth and endless attention. Sir Gilbert Elliot, who knew her well, said she had the ‘easy’ manners ‘of a barmaid, [was] excessively good humoured and wishing to please and [to] be admired by all ages and sorts of persons that come in her way’. Significantly he noticed that ‘with men her language and conversation are exaggerations of anything I ever heard’. But her ageing husband seemed only proud of her powers.
‘She makes me happy and is loved and esteemed by all,’ he wrote to a kinsman in Toulon. ‘Come and see, and my life for it, she will
gain
you!’
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Nelson, of course, was susceptible to being gained by anyone who fed his own huge ego, let alone one as overwhelming as Emma Hamilton. From the beginning he liked her, and since it was his nature to return goodwill extravagantly, whatever the station of its bearer, he had no time for those who whispered malignantly about Lady Hamilton’s background.
Still, that background was important and underpinned her behaviour. Always there was an insecurity in Emma, a need to prove herself worthy of the great station she had reached. And always there was another lurking in corners of her mind – that former lover whose work of rehabilitation she desperately wanted to consummate, and for whom she still nursed a suppressed jealousy and half-hidden need to please. Hers had been an eccentric rags-to-riches Pygmalion past that constantly leaked out. The fine gowns of the diplomat’s lady could not disguise the down-to-earth manner and Liverpudlian accent that made precious English women with cut-glass voices shake their heads. Nor did they, or their wearer’s infectious influence, match the careworn, homely, round-faced, retiring person usually found behind Emma, sitting quietly in the corners of rooms away from the more splendid company. A shadowy companion with the look of an elderly retainer recruited from the plain hard labour of another world, Mrs Cadogan, as she called herself, was actually Emma’s mother. She was, wrote one observer with scarcely veiled contempt, ‘what one might expect’.
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Nevertheless, the Hamiltons were not reluctant to admit Emma’s lowly origins, and viewed her progress with a degree of pride. Nelson learned something of Lady Hamilton’s story during his first days in Naples. She had been born on 26 April 1765 in Neston parish on the Wirral peninsula in Cheshire. Her father was an illiterate Ness black-smith, Henry Lyon, and to her dying day Emma’s letters betrayed her lack of formal education. Like many a girl of that class she entered domestic service, but there her life took a wholly individual turn and began to read like modern romantic fiction. Somehow the young woman found her way to London, and after a number of domestic situations ended up in the home of a noted ‘madame’ in Arlington Street. At her tender age she was probably being groomed for prostitution, but in 1781, when she was sixteen, she was whisked to Uppark
on the South Downs, the house of Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, an intemperate young baronet, and in the spring of 1782 gave birth to a child.
From red-blooded Sir Harry, Emma passed to the Honourable Charles Greville, second son of the Earl of Warwick. It was Greville who put the girl on an upward course. He established Emma and her mother in his house in Edgware Row in London, undertook to protect and educate her, and to introduce her by and by into society. She unquestionably loved him deeply, but when Greville decided he wanted to marry an heiress and found Emma suddenly inconvenient, he palmed her off on his widower uncle, Sir William Hamilton. Tricked into going to Naples in 1786, she ultimately accepted her fate, though for long afterwards the bitterness and sense of betrayal was wont to slip from her pen. Sir William was middle-aged, but he was kind, and she eventually learned to love him. Moreover, she prospered in Naples, attacking the deficiencies of her education, gaining a rudimentary command of French and Italian, mastering the art of entertaining, and winning considerable acclaim for her social accomplishments. She married Hamilton in 1791 and was accepted at the Neapolitan court, where her growing friendship with the queen was fast making her a political force in the Kingdom. We still await a full assessment of her role in Italian politics, but the journey from Neston to the Neapolitan palaces was certainly the stuff of legend.
Her future was to be no less erratic. Since Emma and Fanny eventually competed for Nelson’s love and grew to hate each other, it is usual to compare them. They are depicted as fire and ice, with Emma vibrant, burning and passionate, and Fanny cold, controlled and correct. Emma wordly, ambitious, adventurous and extrovert, Fanny domestic, retiring and dull. Emma the exotic beauty, Fanny the plain sparrow. And most of all, Emma, who understood, nurtured and shared Nelson’s genius, and Fanny who stifled it with a blanket.
They were very different women, of course, but Fanny has suffered more from the exercise than she deserves. Until recently many Nelson biographers, concerned to defend their hero at all costs, enhanced the image of a loyal but cold and suffocating wife. What she did, particularly in caring for Nelson’s father during long years the captain spent at sea, has seldom been truly reckoned, and no one who reads her letters can doubt the passionate love she bore him or her pride in his achievements. Unlike Emma, there was nothing flamboyant or overstated about Fanny, but she had considerable charm and impressed
people. ‘I am more pleased with her if possible than ever,’ wrote Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy after breakfasting with her in 1802. ‘She certainly is one of the best women in the world.’ She was also a woman of silent strengths, and though ultimately defeated by Emma survived a sad old age with considerable dignity. The victor, on the other hand, self-destructed within a few years of her lover’s death.
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None of those shadows were there in 1793, when Nelson first set eyes on Emma Hamilton. She debuts modestly in his letters and journals for 14 September, and while Horatio happily added the Hamiltons to his list of regular correspondents it was to Sir William that he usually wrote. On their part they often spoke of ‘you and your good boy’ after Nelson’s departure, but there was no hint of the notorious triangle that would eventually develop.
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The fourteenth of September 1793 was another memorable day for Nelson, however. Leaving the
Agamemnon
preparing for the king’s visit, he accompanied Sir William to Acton’s for dinner. Among the dignitaries at the table were a Spanish naval captain and the Spanish ambassador, but Nelson eagerly recorded that he and Sir William were held behind when the others had gone, and personally shown around the first minister’s ‘most magnificent house’. That evening a contented Nelson retired to the Palazzo Sessa, where Emma received some ‘princess’ who doubled as first lady of the chamber to the queen. The princess promised to visit Nelson’s ship the following Monday, and flattered the captain with the queen’s good wishes.
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The next day was Sunday, and Sir William and Nelson were on board the
Agamemnon
at nine in the morning awaiting the visit from the king. Hamilton received a fifteen-gun salute as he arrived. Unfortunately, the swell was too great for Ferdinand to attend, but he asked the pair to dine with him again and Nelson found himself ‘placed’ at the king’s ‘right hand, before our ambassador and all the nobles present’. His Majesty promised to visit the
Agamemnon
the next day, but also told Nelson that the first two thousand men for Hood would be marched into town at dawn and he was welcome to review them. Consequently, Nelson and Hamilton pitched up early on 16 September and jostled their way to the front of a thin part of the large crowd that had gathered to watch as Ferdinand pompously led three battalions of the garrison of Capua through the town. When the king saw Nelson and Hamilton he halted the march and ‘dressed’ his men before parading them before the important observers.
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