England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [150]
Nelson's sexual obsession with Emma was tinged with concern about Sir William's power. The law allowed Sir William to banish Emma and keep her daughter. Had he chosen to do so, neither Emma nor Nelson would ever have been able to see their daughter again, and after Sir William's death she would go to his heir—namely, Greville. Sir William might have owed his "dear friend" money, but he technically owned his child, and Nelson detested the uneasy balance of power. One hopes Emma's husband never found those letters in which his friend wished his rival would hurry up and die. Nelson busied himself with pursuing the dream of living with Emma by making provision in his will for her and Horatia. As he wrote, Sir William owed him £927 for expenses in Palermo, £255 lent him in 1800, and £1,094 as his half share of expenses of thejour-ney home in 1800. He left this debt in trust (i.e., William would pay it back to Emma, not to Nelson), as well as £1,000 a year for Emma in her lifetime. Nelson guessed that Emma would live for only another twenty years: she would, as it happened, live another fourteen, so he was prescient—strangely so, considering she was only thirty-five.
Nelson's provision for Emma was shoddy. Sir William could not reimburse the debt, and Nelson should have guessed that Greville, as Sir William's heir and executor of his will, would never pay it. In the eighteenth century, property and money, like votes and power, were the business of men, and they guarded them jealously. A man left his estate to his male heirs or relations, and they were supposed to care for his wife and female offspring. Nelson may have been sufficiently unconventional to desert his wife and have a child with Emma, but he was not independent-minded enough to leave her adequate money to live on after his death. Glowing with visions of them living together in his brand-new home on the Bronte estate, enjoying his fame after he had beaten Napoleon, he thought he was never going to die.
Nelson was breaking his ties with Fanny. The Admiralty was exasperated with Josiah's brawling, insubordination, and laziness, and not even Nelson's intervention could secure him another ship. Nelson raged to Fanny that he had done all he could for Josiah and commanded her to stop writing to him: "I neither want nor wish for any body to care what become of me, whether I return or am left dead in the Baltic, seeing I have done all in my power for you… my only wish is to be left to myself." She called it "Lord Nelson's letter of dismissal" but refused to take "the least note of it." She begged sympathy from Nelson's prize agent, Alexander Davison, as well as from Nelson's family and the Admiralty Board, declaring she found Nelson's behavior utterly incomprehensible.
Fanny did just as any other canny eighteenth-century woman would: she ensured that Nelson and all his friends knew he had no grounds to divorce her. She pursued a careful strategy by emphasizing to everyone how she was the perfect wife: "faithful, affectionate, desirous to do everything I could to please him."3 Divorce was difficult and costly. A husband could divorce his wife for adultery, but a wife could cite only non-consummation and cruelty. Fanny's letters made it clear: the marriage was "affectionate" and consummated, and she had been entirely faithful and always his deeply loving wife. She also stressed that she wished the marriage to continue: even if Nelson chose to present himself as cruel, she would refuse to divorce him on such