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Fanny, alone in her empty Suffolk home, Roundwood, needed to be reassured about her husband's meeting with the woman the newspapers declared no man could resist or forget. "Lady Hamilton has been wonderfully kind and good to Josiah," he wrote, carefully concealing his attraction to her. "She is a young woman of amiable manners and who does honour to the station to which she is raised." Sexual guilt always prompted Nelson to buy Fanny a gift, and he found time in his hectic few days to purchase some rich sashes of Naples silk. One of Emma's trademark fashions was a thick, colored silk sash tied tight around a muslin dress, an almost childish style. Romney painted her in the same outfit for The Ambassadress, and she wore a similar style for her wedding and then repeatedly in Naples. Nelson was even thinking of Lady Hamilton as he bought his wife a gift.

The English gossip columnists rushed to exploit the meeting between the ambassadress sex bomb and the virile captain. The scandalous Bon Ton Magazine made fun of Sir William, Nelson, and Emma in a tale about “the lovely Syren.” A young, newly married woman who is sexually unsatisfied by her elderly husband, Lord E, who, like Sir William, has a “violent rage for private theatricals and dramatic representations,” falls in love with a captain when he visits. A cartoon depicts a small man who looks like Nelson helping a lady descend down a wall to him, accompanied by the scurrilous tale of how the visiting captain becomes a

professed adorer of the lovely Syren, whose beauty, about three years ago fascinated Lord E—— in such a bewitching manner, that his lordship, actually forgetting what he owed to himself, his family and rank, after a courtship of a few months, led her… a willing victim to the Temple of Hymen [i.e., he married her, a joke on Emma's work in the Temple of Health]. But though Lord E—— may be as great an admirer of female charms as most of his compeers, he is certainly but ill qualified to do homage to the power of beauty, in that way that the ladies generally expect.

The “reports in general circulation” imply that Lord E “sleeps at night with a pound of raw beef stakes clapt on each cheek, to give them a fresh and ruddy appearance,” and wears silver thimbles to “render his fingers conical and tapering.” Although, however, he “might secure the appearance of youth and vigour… we greatly doubt whether the whole Materia Medica can recall the actual enjoyment of those enviable blessings,” for he is impotent. After a few weeks, the new wife was deeply disappointed by the failure of her husband's “bag-pipes” (the Hamiltons were Scottish) and, because women are “ill qualified to put up with crosses and disappointments,” frolics with the handsome captain.2

Infatuations with married women were Nelson's specialty. “This Horatio is for ever in love,” he had once imagined himself described, although his amorous obsessions were not generally matched by success. Small at just under five foot six, thin, and pale, he had a shock of unwieldy ginger hair, and his Norfolk drawl was very pronounced. Nelson's sharp, chiseled face and small, sunken eyes disappointed when the ideal of male beauty was Lord Byron with his limpid eyes and sensual plump mouth. At least two young ladies had snubbed his offers of marriage, and his friends derided the courtesans and mistresses he chose after his marriage. When he took up with a young opera singer, Adelaide Correglia, when stationed in Leghorn (now Livorno), a strategic port on Italy's Tuscan coast, his colleague Captain Fremantle complained he made himself "ridiculous" with his excessive devotion to her, ruining the whole dinner by gazing devotedly into her eyes.

Horatio Nelson was born in 1758, the third son (he was technically the fifth, but two elder brothers had already died) of a country rector in Burn-ham Thorpe, a small village in Norfolk, ten miles from England's east coast. When he was nine, his mother died, aged only forty-two, after