England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [195]
Although the Matchams begged her to allow them to take Horatia, Emma was afraid that if she gave up her daughter even for a short period, she would lose her for good. But Horatia was becoming a teenager and the strain of living together was showing. Resentful over the loss of their home and terrified that they might have to return to the Rules, she grew angry with her mother. Emma saw any demonstration of independence as an insult.
Listen to a kind, good mother, who has ever been to you affectionate, truly kind, and has spared no pains to make you the most amiable and most accomplish'd of your sex…. I have weathered many a storm for your sake, but these frequent blows have kill'd me…. I lament to see the increasing strength of your turbulent passions.7
Emma promised Horatia that their lives would soon be more secure, but she was slowly realizing that she would never get her pension. The Prince Regent passed her pleas to the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, who communicated through Lord Sidmouth that he could not help, as he had received "representations of difficulty and distress, in many other quarters." In June three creditors threatened to have Emma arrested. Agitated and afraid, she advertised the sale of "The Property of a Lady of Distinction" and sold dozens of her belongings, including the diamond star, the gold box, and the four-poster bed she had shared with Nelson, her Domesday Book, portraits of Nelson, French chintz curtains, heavy Grecian-style mahogany furniture from Merton, fine commemorative services of china including a fifty-piece white and gold tea set, goose-feather beds, chintz hangings, and a piano. She also auctioned her copy of Rehberg's Lady Hamilton's Attitudes, Hayley's Life of Romney, and another book that owed much to her, Thomas Baxter's illustrated book of ancient costumes. In other boxes were magazines and fashionable novels, including Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph and her beloved The Wife and the Mistress.9 Emma had clung to her most treasured possessions, rather than leave them to be sold with Merton, and now they went for a pittance. One lucky lady snapped up six dining chairs, cases, earrings, bracelets, a miniature and a reading chair as well as other items for £22. Joshua Smith kindly took many of the Nelson relics, but even then the auction did not raise enough.
On June 28, for a debt of £400, Emma was publicly seized by officers of the court and bundled into a carriage.∗ She was taken first to an officer's house and then to appear before the court. Still proud, she was arrested as Lady Hamilton, and demanded when she made her appearance in court to be called by her grandest title, Dame Emma.9 She still had her gold and diamond Maltese Cross. Sentenced to imprisonment until she could pay, Emma chose to live once more at 12 Temple Place, taking Horada with her. In the autumn she fell ill; in addition, her spirits were crushed when Susanna Bolton died and she was not permitted to attend the funeral. In a letter to Sir Richard Puleston, she was almost incoherent with distress about "the scenes of plunder, Robery & villainy which has been practised on my unsuspicious Heart & pocket."
Emma wrote that she was determined to "act with firmness, Fortitude, Honor, and Prudence." But prison sapped her strength, and soon she was describing herself as "broken… with grief and ill health." She became so weak that the authorities permitted her to take some fresh air in a carriage outside the Rules. Terrified that her daughter might desert her, she was unable to handle Horatia's bouts of anger. "Your cruel treatment of me is such that I cannot live under these afflicting circumstances; my poor heart is broken," she protested. Always grasping after the dramatic, she described an imaginary scenario in which she would defend herself against Horatia's accusations before a tribunal of their servants and friends.
Horatia