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By Root 1415 0

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