England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [161]
In the following year, an even more uncompromising defense of the affair appeared in the Lady's Magazine. Emma, Nelson, Horatia, Sir William, and Fanny all had starring roles, and Emma was triumphant. The hero, Horatio, a figure of Nelson, is a perfect man, "not more respected for his immense wealth than his amiable and gentle manners." He has a toddler daughter, who is "the most perfect of nature's children," but his shrewish, "cruel, treacherous, and resentful" wife "embittered" his life with "peevish jealousies." The "manly Horatio scorned to use a husband's power towards her," but his "soft rebukes" have made "not the least impression on her adamantine heart." He gains his only happiness from a virtuous friendship with a beautiful, innocent girl, Miss Emily Lewis, the daughter of his sister, Emma Lewis. The journalist perhaps had an inkling about Emma's daughter, Emma Carew, who had been to stay with Emma at least once, and the suggestion that Horatio derived his only pleasure from talking to young Miss Lewis verges on implying an incestuous attraction.
If this was not enough, Emma Lewis's early life reflects that of Emma Lyon's experience as a courtesan, mistress to Greville, and wife. As a young girl, Emma travels to London and "pursues with eager avidity its luxuriant pleasures." After her lover abandons her, she meets gentle Mr. Lewis, who, like Emma's real-life Sir William, has a "prepossessing and mild exterior, joined to the most profound knowledge, which he had improved by travelling, and the sensible converse of the most enlightened men." Emma confesses that "for him I felt not that ardent passion I had done for the regretted Alfred, no the passion which the worthy Lewis inspired was respect, which soon ripened into a pure attachment, never to be severed till death should part us."
There could hardly be a more blatant version of the story of Emma Lyon, Greville, Sir William, and Nelson, in which everything happens just short of Emma Lewis herself actually enjoying Horatio's admiration, which instead went to her daughter, Emily. In case any particularly slow reader had still failed to spot the resemblances to England's favorite love triangle, the author has the entire party go to watch Horatio's wife act Elvira in Pizarro (a play indelibly associated with Nelson and Emma since the shocking spectacle at Drury Lane of Fanny's humiliation, eighteen months before). The point is simple: Emily (Emma) gives Horatio (Nelson) optimism and relief from his sufferings from his cruel and spiteful wife. Poor Fanny could not pick up even a magazine without reading about Emma's triumphs. The years 1801-1803 were truly her years of despair. The mistress had won a resounding victory.
CHAPTER 44
Changes
I was sensible, & said so when I married, that I should be superan-nuated when my wife would be in her full beauty and vigour of youth," lamented Sir William in September 1802. "That time is arrived, and we must make the best of it." Exhausted by the recent tour, he was tired of watching her indulge Nelson's grasping family and preside over the social whirl of Merton, "seldom less than 12 or 14 at table, & those varying continually." Her energy, her appetite for society, and her excellence as a hostess had once excited him. Now he wanted only to live quietly.
Emma tried to please her husband by holidaying with him in the fashionable beach resort of Ramsgate on England's southeast coast. But everywhere she went, she was pursued by the press and besieged by crowds, people hunting for a favor, and crazed obsessives, greedy for a touch of the star's mantle. As the Morning Herald reported, "A Lady swimmer at Ramsgate, who is said to be a perfect attitudinarian in the water, is now the morning gaze of the place." The reporter claimed she was such an excellent swimmer that she was "secure against any marine