England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [193]
CHAPTER 54
Afflicting Circumstances
London society had been waiting for decades for the Prince of Wales to become regent. Everyone was disappointed. Declaring that he was only representing the king, he dismissed any requests he found tiresome and concentrated on wrangling with his estranged wife. For years, Emma had staved off her creditors with the promise that the prince would help her. When he refused her, she was lost.
Emma spent most of 1812 in fear of being arrested. Ill and anxious, she went into hiding at the comfortable Fulham home of Mrs. Billington, although she kept her apartment at 150 Bond Street and sometimes emerged for dinners and parties. When the author Thomas De Quincey met her with Samuel Taylor Coleridge at a supper party, he was smitten by “Lord Nelson's Lady Hamilton—the beautiful, the accomplished, the enchantress,” declaring that she had “Medea's beauty and Medea's powers of enchantment.” After seeing her perform the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth, a favorite of Mrs. Siddons, twenty-seven-year-old De Quincey decided her “magnificent” and “the most effectively brilliant woman he ever saw.” Coleridge had long wanted to meet her, after spending a hot summer in Malta in 1804 hearing about Lady Hamilton and her efforts to help the starving people. Equally bewitched, he “admired her… as who would not have done, prodigiously,” and she appeared equally fascinated by him.1 She worked hard to dazzle and enchant, determined not to disappoint.
Not long after meeting Coleridge, Emma sparkled at the gala party for the Prince of Wales's birthday. In the midst of crippling debt, she had bought a magnificent new dress, still refusing to believe that he would never help her. By the end of the year, however, no money had arrived. Emma's bravado seeped away. The government had finally compensated Sir William's estate for his outlay in Naples, to the tune of £8,300, but it all went to Robert Greville, who was not about to hand out more money to his aunt.2 Nervous and tense, her petitions hopeless, her annuity from Sir William pledged to creditors, she fell into a profound depression. This was not how she imagined herself, Nelson's Britannia, to be living less than ten years after his death.
In December, Emma was so afraid of arrest that she resorted to desperate measures. She actually chose to commit herself to prison, lodging herself voluntarily in the area of the King's Bench Prison in St. George's Fields in Southwark. The general view is that Emma was actually convicted; however, her name does not appear in the King's Bench record books and there is no documentation of her appearance before the magistrate or any record of her discharge. Genteel prisoners of the King's Bench—usually debtors—could escape the squalor of the cells by buying the right to live and move "within the Rules," a three-square-mile area around the prison walls. Once in prison or "within the Rules," no debtor or criminal could be arrested again and many on the brink of capture sought refuge there. Dozens of shops, taverns, brothels, gaming dens, and cafés served the prison population. Guards stood on the street corners to prevent prisoners escaping, but they had no mandate to prevent the hundreds who had not been convicted from creeping into the Rules in order to avoid arrest. Emma sent Dame Francis, her old housekeeper from Mer-ton, along with four or five maids and footmen on ahead. Then, in the middle of the night so her creditors did not see, she and Horatia hurried into a discreet carriage and drove at