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Although Emma Hamilton has been disparaged, I have been startled by the hundreds of people who claim to be her descendants. Most were people I simply happened to meet, such as an estate agent or a friend of a friend; others contacted me directly after seeing me speak on television programs. Surfing on the Internet revealed many more, and it seems that thousands of people around the world believe themselves to be descended from Nelson and Emma, based on perceived physical resemblances and family myth. Punch once printed a cartoon about the one man on earth who had not had an affair with Emma Hamilton. The satire is spot on: nearly everyone whose male ancestor passed within a mile of Emma (and some female relations too) claims he had a torrid affair with her, and often that she bore his child. Nelson and Emma are probably the most cited ancestors in British history. Historians may condemn the pair, but, enchanted by the glory and tragedy of their lives, scores of us wish to be related to them.

Even more of us wish we owned some of their belongings. I have been shown hundreds of items that dealers and owners assert originally belonged to her, including shoes, dresses, musical instruments, and furniture, and nude pictures that families say she gave to Nelson's captains. Very few of these items date from the early 1800s, and most were made later in the nineteenth century. Almost all of her belongings were sold, and those she gave away were lost or even destroyed, for the belongings of most of her friends were also destroyed after their death. The Prince of Wales did keep his mementoes of Emma, in a bizarre, secret collection. After George IV died, his executor, the Duke of Wellington, was shocked to find a stash of “a prodigious quantity of hair—women's hair—of all colours and lengths, gages d'amour,” or love tokens.3 Stuffy Wellington reeled at the “Volumes of love letters… trinkets of all sorts, quantities of women's gloves,” even pocket handkerchiefs he had used to wrap up old “faded nosegays… in short, such a collection of trash as he had never seen before,” in the words of a friend. He decided the best thing would be to burn the whole lot.4 Locks of Emma's chestnut hair and her gloves and letters were tied up in these bundles, along with those of other society beauties such as Maria Fitzherbert, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Billington, Lady Jersey, and Lady Conyngham.

Emma's life was intense, dazzling, and soon over. She fought for her celebrity by constantly re-creating herself and directing her image. When society had little to offer a woman of her class other than exploitation by men, she struggled to establish her own identity. Emma refused to be beaten, but she was destroyed by her mix of overconfidence and a wish to please, desires that made her vulnerable in a society that had no place for a woman like her. Despite all her charisma, intelligence, and charm, Emma had no rights and had to rely on what she could win from men—and when men would not give it to her, she had nothing. Striving for success, she was always tormented by what she had achieved and what she had sacrificed. Glamorous, open-minded, optimistic, and showy but also undisciplined, unaccustomed to compromise, and overreaching, she epitomized the high Georgian age. And yet she also showed its limitations as she struggled to forge her own destiny, ignore social prejudice, live independently, and survive without a protector. Today, when women have more opportunities than ever before to realize their ambitions but still feel terrible compunction about doing so, her strong will and attempts to follow her heart have even more resonance. A woman who both embodied and transcended her age, she was, truly, England's mistress.

NOTES

This book is based on the original documents of letters by Emma, as well as letters, diaries, and reports by those who knew her. These are contained in archives across the world, at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, the