England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [146]
Emma had played a difficult game, ensuring everyone knew she was the mother of Nelson's child, but without suggesting she had intended to court newspaper attention. Aware that women could be elevated one day and eviscerated the next, Emma worked hard to keep the newspapers on her side by pretending not to actively court their attention but "allowing" it if it came her way. A flurry of gossip and jokes in the newspapers followed the birth. Caricaturists were just as quick. James Gillray worked overtime drawing Emma as the Carthaginian queen in Dido in Despair, and it was immediately displayed in pride of place in the print shops. A heavily pregnant Emma in her nightdress (a joke on her revealing muslin dresses) throws an attitude of misery. Out of the window, we see Nelson's ships sailing away9 Gillray portrays Emma's bedroom as littered with Sir William's broken statues, erotic art, and a book of her Attitudes. Sir William slumbers on in bed, oblivious. Emma's poor ankles are heavily swollen from pregnancy. It was impossible for anyone to misunderstand Gillray's point: Emma was massively pregnant and about to give birth as Nelson departs. Like Dido (and not Cleopatra), Emma weeps alone, keeping her grief to her bedroom, just as society believed a woman should.
∗ Women who wanted to give birth covertly hurried abroad or to a country retreat. Because she needed to prove she had been pregnant by showing herself off as swollen and then recovered, Emma had chosen to have her baby in one of the most conspicuous houses in London.
Five days later, Gillray produced another caricature exploiting the birth of Nelson's child. In A Cognocenti Contemplating the Beauties of the Antique a wizened Sir William hunches in his collection rooms surrounded by broken stone phalluses and cracked pots, examining a bust of Emma missing a nose. A pot was a figure for the (unsatisfied) woman in caricatures, and Gillray means his reader to infer that Emma's husband was impotent. On the walls in front of him are three portraits: a topless Emma in a version of Romney's Mirth, Nelson looking manly, and Vesuvius exploding with the fire Sir William lacked. He had, as everyone now knew, been well and truly cuckolded.
Emma quickly recovered her health. Convalescing in closed, hot rooms put women at severe risk of catching puerperal fever, and Emma's decision to venture out undoubtedly improved her health. A romantic man such as Nelson might hope that his children would be breast-fed, believing that breast milk carried spirit and character, but Emma could not keep the child at 23 Piccadilly. Everybody loved to joke about her baby, but no one would visit her home if they thought the baby was present, and she would be publicly reviled if she was ever seen with her child.
A few days later, Mrs. Cadogan wrapped her granddaughter in a muff and furs and, perhaps accompanied by Emma, hurried in a hired cab from 23 Piccadilly to the home of a Mrs. Gibson at 9 Little Titchfield Street, Marylebone. Mrs. Gibson seemed to be discreet. Her lack of a husband was a bonus, for men tended to be more alert to the opportunities for selling stories to the newspapers. Emma paid Mrs. Gibson handsomely to care for Horatia and hire a wet nurse. The gentry routinely sent children out of the home for the first eighteen months or so. Only the upper aristocracy had nannies and wet nurses living with them, and Emma's behavior would have been little different if her child had been legitimate. She had to express her milk at home to ease her discomfort, once again separated from a baby daughter only a few days after