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from Napoleon, she saw his arrival as an opportunity to propel herself onto a bigger stage. Nelson was exhausted after weeks of fighting the French and in pain from his shot eye and the wound where his right arm had been amputated. As soon as the great man boarded the welcome boat, Emma threw herself upon him, weeping with happiness. To the sounds of cheers and cannon fire resounding across the bay, she gathered Nelson into her arms and, leaving the astonished royal entourage and her husband, Sir William Hamilton, in her wake, supported the triumphant but exhausted hero into the ship's cabin. The man fêted as England's bravest man had collapsed onto the bosom of Europe's biggest female celebrity. Emma Hamilton was already legendary as the girl from nowhere who had catapulted herself into high society. Her consummate piece of stage management on that July day marked the start of her passionate affair with Nelson—and the beginning of her ascent to a level of fame we would find breathtaking even today.

How did Emma, a girl born into terrible poverty and exploitation, reach the position where she was able to seduce and charm England's most famous man? What did she have to do to get there?

If it were fiction, Emma's life story would be dismissed as improbable. It is a story that takes us through the grand sweeps of eighteenth-century history to reveal all the glory and horror of her age. To understand how Emma turned herself into the most famous woman of her time, we must first go back thirty years and more than a thousand miles from the glittering Neapolitan court and the duties of an ambassador's wife to her poverty-stricken birth in the slums of northwest England.

Battle to Escape

CHAPTER 1

Harsh Beginnings

Emma Hamilton was born Amy Lyon on Friday April 26, 1765, into squalid poverty. Ness was a ramshackle huddle of thirty or so miners' hovels set in scrubby, stony, infertile land. Moored on the Wirral peninsula in Cheshire, just over twelve miles from Liverpool, near England's northwest coast, the village now gleams with luxurious houses for commuters, but for a girl-child in the eighteenth century, it was a one-way ticket to misery. The Stanley family, the owners of the area around Ness, reclined in elegant splendor at nearby Hooton Hall, ignoring the miners and the few fishermen scraping out a miserable living by the bleak shore. Ness was at the forefront of the burgeoning industrial revolution, and Amy was destined for a cruel and meager life: backbreaking labor by the age of ten, a hard marriage, and an early death.

Baby Amy owed her very existence to coal—the black gold of the eighteenth century. For the first half of the century, the factories, sweatshops, and businesses in nearby Chester and the surrounding area had been powered by coal shipped in from North Wales along the connecting Dee estuary, but the waterway was silting up and Welsh coal was growing very expensive. When reserves were discovered in 1750 at nearby Denhall, the landscape of Ness changed forever, from an area only sparsely populated by fishermen and the odd farmer to a mini Wild West town teeming with investors and get-rich-quick merchants. After the Stanleys finally opened their mine to huge excitement in the late 1750s, cartloads of brawny young colliers arrived from Lancashire, Staffordshire, and North Wales. Others trekked over from Ireland to build a quay for exporting the coal, and laborers came to build the Stanleys' new mansion on the banks of the River Dee. Ness was designated as the village to house them, and quickly built, cheap cottages mushroomed on the stony fields. In this brand-new village, much of it still a building site, twenty-one-year-old Mary Kidd arrived in 1764. Since there were five men to every woman in Ness, she was guaranteed to be popular.

Ness's men were hardened by dangerous work. Conditions at the Den-hall mine were notoriously poor, and they had to crouch in muddy, icy water and hack at the sides of the flooded tunnels. Mice and cockroaches scampered into their pockets to eat their food, especially