England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [202]
In 1994, a group of faithful supporters erected a plaque in Emma's honor on the front of the rambling house in Calais. But many of her other friends, relations, and lovers have no monument. An owner of Slebech Castle demolished Sir William's grave, and his final resting place is unmarked. The graves of Mrs. Cadogan and Greville in Paddington Green are also lost. Only Nelson's magnificent tomb remains.
Britain was at war throughout most of Emma's life. Four million Frenchmen and hundreds of thousands of Russians, Austrians, Italians, and English were slaughtered, with 650 English sailors killed at Trafalgar alone. Emma died just months before the end of the wars that had made her famous, missing the days of celebration that greeted Lord Wellington's cataclysmic win at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815.
After 1815, public sympathies about England's most notorious love triangle began to fall with Fanny. Jane Austen's dearest brother, Frank, was one of Nelson's favored captains, and his ship even took a dispatch to Nelson while he was living at Palermo with Emma and Sir William. In her novel Emma, the brazen, obsessively matchmaking Emma Woodhouse is taught a lesson: she must behave more like the restrained Jane Fairfax, a second Fanny. In Mansfield Park, quiet Fanny—whose brother brings her a cross in the fashion of Emma's Maltese Cross from Italy—wins Edmund from sexy, blowsy Mary Crawford, an excellent actress who makes a scandalous joke in public about admirals and their fondness for “Rears and Vices,” just as Emma would have done. Another character worries that visitor numbers at his guesthouse have dropped because he called it Trafalgar and “Waterloo is more the thing now.”
Soon Emma and all she stood for were out of fashion, replaced by Victorian piety. The time when a girl from nowhere could rise to become the most famous woman in England was over. Glamour was gone and mistresses were kept tucked away, not paraded around fashionable London. After the death of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Clarence, who became George IV and William IV respectively, Queen Victoria ascended the throne, and a new age of dynamic industry and public professions of virtue began.2
Emma could have achieved her success only in the last years of the eighteenth century. She was a woman of her period. But her abilities and ambitions cried out for a different time, when there were more options available to a woman than marriage, motherhood, or the life of a courtesan.
Emma has been castigated as fat, drunk, extravagant, promiscuous, a prostitute. And yet she had a better figure than most women of her class, and her drinking, gambling, and spending were, although reckless and excessive, nothing unusual when compared with the habits of her friends. Most of her debts were incurred in an effort to improve Merton and make herself the glamorous, generous hostess Nelson so craved. If she was a courtesan, she was in good company: many female aristocrats had once been demimondaines, and at least one in eight women had worked as a prostitute at some period in their lives. She was a good wife to Sir William and a faithful mistress to Nelson, and her relationship with Horatia was spoiled only by the pressures of debt and illness. She cannot be held responsible for breaking Nelson's marriage: he had long since fallen out of love with his unhappy wife and resented her inability to have children. Nor was Emma a distraction from his duty. His pursuit of glory was in part motivated by his desire to win money and fame for his daughter and "wife in the face of heaven."
Emma's story is about ambition and heartbreak, beauty and pain. While writing this biography, I discovered that everybody knew about Nelson and his battles, but Emma provoked very different reactions from men. A pensioner at a friend's wedding told me she must have been a "fantastic fuck." Another guest said, "That's what happens to you when you don't live