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By Root 1448 0

or speak to government ministers on her behalf, nor did they invite her to court. Although the Duke of Clarence had wept copiously at Nelson's funeral and displayed a bust of the hero and a mast of the Victory in his dining room until he died, he was not prepared to help the admiral's struggling mistress in any way. Clarence and Sussex had no concept of financial hardship and actually thought themselves poor, while the Prince of Wales was concerned only with gratifying his many extravagant desires. He was, in the words of the Times, "of all known beings the most selfish," a spoiled brat who cared only to squander money and indulge "the most puerile caprices."

Within three years of Nelson's death, Emma was more than £15,000 in debt. A few months after the royal princes left, her creditors were threatening to send officers to arrest her. Emma was in desperate straits. Merton would have to be sold.

CHAPTER 51

Selling Nelsons Legacy

Emma was bitterly disappointed with the surveyor's valuation. He assessed the house and grounds as worth £10,430, with an extra £2,500 for the effects and furniture, including the wines and Nelson memorabilia. Although his estimate was £1,500 more than the purchase price, Emma's projects to build new rooms, a kitchen, landscape the gardens and drive, add stables and a tunnel, redecorate, stock the ponds and canal with fish, and build pens and coops had cost more than £8,000. When a reasonable estate sold for at least £50,000, and the grand estate of Standlynch near Salisbury, which became Earl Nelson's palatial Trafalgar estate, cost £120,000, Nelson and Emma had been mad to attempt to turn a £9,000 ruin into a magisterial country home.

In June 1808, Merton failed to sell at auction, and in July, Emma moved out for good. The house was put on the market. Heartbroken to leave it half finished, she wanted the next buyer to keep it intact—and to pay too much. Kitty Matcham comforted her that she would be happier in “constant residence” in London because “you can enjoy the society of your friends, without the immense expence of entertaining their servants, which you are obliged to do in the country.” She encouraged Emma to believe that a wealthy patron would appear. “I am delighted to hear of your going to all these great parties.”1 A despondent Emma consoled herself with socializing and making big donations to the Foundling Hospital.2 As Horatia later recalled, “Hardly a month passed but we used to drive to the Magdalen or the Blind School.”3

Aristocrats relished her dinners and applauded her dances, but they saw her as only a pleasant diversion. Hundreds had enjoyed her generous hospitality over the years, but they fled when she begged for help. From 1800 to 1805, William Beckford praised her and expressed passionate desires to see her, but in 1806, Britain's richest man would rather she left him alone. "You are justly aware, my dear Ldy Hamilton, that I know nothing about money matters—Mr Pedlers is the Money Man and if you will send to him I dare say he will do what he can." He tried to shunt her onto another relation of Sir William's, the eighty-four-year-old Duke of Queensberry, notorious for his colossal wealth and fond eye for the ladies. Why, he wondered, "did you not think of old Q in the midst of those Merton Plagues?—He is wallowing in gold and a few hundreds could not be missed from his Heap—my treasury is at a very low ebb."4 But Emma had already turned to Queensberry, and she still needed more.

Emma was losing her old friends. The Duchess of Devonshire, whom she had tried so hard to court, died in 1806, and when Bess Foster married the duke, her position was too insecure to allow her to give her burdened friend much help. Emma's most loyal friends were actresses and singers, such as Mrs. Billington, Dora Jordan, and Madame Bianchi, but they could not fund her or supply government contacts. In a time when only just over 1 percent of the population owned land and there were no rich foreigners to buttonhole, someone hoping for charity had only a few possible benefactors. Emma