England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [177]
Backlash
CHAPTER 49
Mistress of a Mourning Nation
Nelson had told Emma he wished her to sing during his funeral. They had even made plans to be buried together. The public agreed that Nelson and Emma were inseparable: print shops were full of etchings, drawings, and engravings in which Emma was depicted as mourner, a Britannia figure draped in white. One popular engraving showed Emma crowning Nelson's bust with a wreath. Even James Gillray produced a sentimental caricature of Nelson taken to the sky while Emma wept over him. The Admiralty took a quite different view. Nelson might have been Emma's in life, but now he was the property of the nation, and he would be commemorated in a service led by men.
The hero's body was preserved in a cask of spirits and shipped home, not to Fanny, not to Emma, nor even to his brother, but to the state. Emma had tried to view the body when it landed, but Captain Hardy discouraged her, knowing the sight of the swollen corpse would distress her. On December 24, Nelson, now laid in his coffin, was transferred to an official yacht and then taken along the Thames to Greenwich Hospital. He was placed in the Painted Hall on a platform six feet high, adorned with a black canopy spangled with gold and a wreath bearing the word Trafalgar. Emma probably queued with the crowds to enter the Painted Hall with Horatia, swathed in the huge black veil that Vigée-Lebrun had seen her wear to mourn Sir William. When the doors were open for two days on January 5, more than thirty thousand people surged past, pushed by overstressed guards.
The funeral was one of the most lavish commemorations in British history. Emma was firmly excluded. On January 8, 1806, Nelson's body was taken upriver on a giant barge from Greenwich to the Admiralty at Whitehall, escorted by a procession of boats. Thousands gathered on the banks of the Thames to catch a glimpse of the coffin. The following morning, Nelson was driven to St. Paul's Cathedral in an opulent funeral car shaped to resemble the Victory, trailed by a procession of carriages two miles long. Hysterical crowds thronged the route, controlled by thirty thousand soldiers. Inside St. Paul's, seven thousand admirals, politicians, and aristocrats in their finest dress coats had been shivering in the pews since early morning. Although many of them had disparaged Nelson's reckless behavior while he was alive and mocked his lack of aristocratic pedigree, they were not about to miss out on the funeral of the century. A few fashionable ladies stole into the loft, but most contented themselves with watching the procession in the streets. At half past five the coffin was lowered into a crypt below the stone floor. The men of the Victory had been ordered to unfurl the flags of the ship over the grave. Instead, the church resonated with the sound of tearing as the forty-eight sailors ripped the largest flag apart with their bare hands, desperate to keep some small scrap of Nelson for themselves.
Emma spent the day in tears over her letters, accompanied by her mother, daughter, and Nelson's female relations. The men of the Bolton and Matcham families were invited to the funeral, and Emma gave both families dinner and breakfast, accommodated the Boltons, and probably also received William and Horace Nelson. A weeping female figure who looked very like Emma was carved on the coffin. Otherwise, she was absent, carefully written out of the heroic story. Nelson's body was interred in a ten-foot high slab of ornately carved porphyry—a huge grave for such a diminutive man. Ever thrifty, when asked to donate in the memory of Nelson, George III sent over a sarcophagus that had been hanging around in the cellars of Windsor Castle ever since Henry VIII seized it from scheming Cardinal Wolsey Still, as it cost only £6,300 to dedicate it to Nelson, the