England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [201]
Emma's daughter was never rich. Even when her mother's old friend, the Duke of Clarence, became king, there was no money for her. She battled to raise her family on a clergyman's income. But she had Emma's natural style. A photograph of her in old age shows her wearing a rich crinoline dress of dark silk, perhaps purple, one of Emma's favorite colors, with ruffled sleeves and a full skirt. In a miniature of her at age thirty-six she looks captivating in a blue off-the-shoulder dress. She is slender, and her face is beautifully regular, with Emma's limpid eyes and Nelson's straight nose. Thanks to her mother's efforts, Horatia became a lovely, graceful, and accomplished woman, and her health was not impaired by her experience of misery during her teenage years.
One of the few possessions of Emma's that Horatia brought back with her from Calais was a dress of green and pink embroidered silk. The dress was altered many times and ended up in the dressing-up box of Horatia's great-great-great-granddaughter, but even years later the material was still thick and opulent, the embroidery delicate. Although she sold most of her fine clothes and lost others, Emma was still, in her last days, trying to keep up some of the style and beauty that had once set Europe alight.
Emma's obituaries were generally salacious. The Morning Post reported:
The origin of this Lady was very humble, and she had experienced all those vicissitudes in early life which too generally attend those females whose beauty has betrayed them into vice, and which unhappily proves the chief means of subsistence. Few women, who have attracted the notice of the world at large have led a life of more freedom. When, however, she became such an object of admiration as to attract the attention of Painters, she formed connections which, if she had conducted herself with prudence, might have raised her into independence, if not affluence. ROMNEY, who evidently felt a stronger admiration for her than what he might be supposed to entertain merely as an Artist, made her the frequent subject of his pencil. His admiration remained till the close of his life in undiminished ardour. The late CHAS GREVILLE, well known for his refined taste in VIRTU, and who was a prominent character in the world of gallantry, was the PROTECTOR, to use the well-bred language of the polite circles, of Lady Hamilton, for some years; and when his uncle, the late Sir William Hamilton wanted to take abroad with him a chere amie, he recommended the LADY with so good a character that Sir William took her with him and having a reliance on her fidelity, married her.
The journalist dwelt on the "friendship between Lady Hamilton and our great Naval Hero" and criticized her for being "intoxicated with the flattery and admiration which attended her in a rank of life so different from the obscure condition in her early days," but still admitted that in "private life, she was a humane and generous woman… obliging to all whom she had any opportunity of serving by her influence."1
Emma died just short of fifty, but she outlived many of her friends and contemporaries. A few remained: Sir Harry was bluff and dim-witted until the end, a living testament to the health-giving properties of killing foxes every day. At the age of eighty he married his young dairymaid and packed her off to Paris to be refined. Earl Nelson was so determined to have an heir that he married a twenty-eight-year-old at the age of seventy, his first wife, Sarah, hardly cold in her grave, but he died without a son. William, Sarah, and their son, Horace, were buried near Nelson in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral—even in death, the hero couldn't escape his officious brother and his family. Fanny Nelson outlived everybody. She lived comfortably near Exmouth until her death in 1832 at the age of seventy-six. Her beloved Josiah became a successful merchant and married happily.