England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [191]
Emma had paid the Blackburns and then her aunt, Mrs. Connor, to look after her daughter, Emma Carew, but she could no longer afford to do so. Miss Carew realized she had no choice but to go into service as a governess or companion. She wrote to her mother begging her for sympathy, asking for the identity of her father, in the hope that he might intervene to save her. "My memory traces back circumstances which have taught me too much, yet not quite all I could have wished to have known—with you that resides, and ample reasons, no doubt, you have for not imparting them to me. Had you felt yourself at liberty so to have done, I might have become reconciled to my former situation and have been relieved from the painful employment I now pursue." Emma never told her daughter that Sir Harry was her father. She was keeping an old promise to her ex-lover, but she also dreaded that her daughter would be caused even more pain if she found her father was alive and did not want her. Fether-stonhaugh was so unpredictably volatile that he might cut her off for good if she confirmed the secret—and she needed every friend she could get.
Ill and fighting off her creditors, there was nothing Emma could do to save her daughter. Miss Carew's chance of marriage was much higher as a governess than as a relation of Lady Hamilton. She sailed away alone. The rest of her life remains a mystery. Too sickly to work when she was only in her mid-twenties, she probably died young.
In early July, twenty-two-year-old Charlotte Nelson married Samuel Hood, Baron Bridport, grandson of Nelson's old superior, Lord Hood. Emma had introduced them at Merton back when Charlotte was still a schoolgirl, and reported in delight to Sarah that Sam had "seemed to devour her with his eyes. That would be a good match." Although Emma had tried to encourage the relationship, neither she nor Horatia were invited to the wedding or a reception. To rub salt into the wound, the ceremony took place at St. Marylebone, where Emma had married Sir William. The new Baroness Bridport paid a bridal visit to Fanny, Viscountess Nelson.
Emma's debts were still not public knowledge. Gossip columns reported on her parties, and fashion commentators continued to promote the Grecian look her Attitudes had perpetuated.3 Out of the public eye, she shot off begging letters. Relaxing amid commemorative bronzes of the Battle of the Nile, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh replied, "No one better deserves to be happy,” but he would only send her baskets of game.4 In debt himself, he later tried to coerce the nation into buying Uppark for the Duke of Wellington, and he may have strengthened bonds with Emma after 1805 in case she could have encouraged the government to choose Uppark as the Trafalgar estate.
The Duke of Queensberry advanced £2,500 to Abraham Goldsmid to pay Emma's debts and instructed that “Lady Hamilton herself is to have no control over or to have any interference with any part” of the sum, for it must be devoted to payment of “abovementioned debts & for that purpose only”5 But Goldsmid let the news slip, and Emma seems to have wangled £800 of the money. It was the last of Abraham's many kind acts to Emma. He had battled depression since the suicide of his brother in 1808. In September, he suffered two massive losses on the stock market, and he was left owing £350,000 to the East India Company, as well as being partly responsible for a £13 million loan. On the morning of September 28, the day his payment to the East India Company was due, instead of jumping into his coach and setting off to his office in the City, Abraham walked into the grounds of his house and shot himself. The coachman found him dying, the pistol still clutched in his hand.
In December, Queensberry died. Emma had hoped for a legacy— William Beckford calculated he could be bled of “5 or 600,000.”6 Susanna Bolton, looking forward to lots of presents when Emma got her half million, was quivering