As Admiral Nelson prepares for Trafalgar, his public affair with Emma Hamilton has already scandalised Britain and damaged both their reputations.
After Nelson dies in battle, his final request for Britain to support Emma is ignored, despite her years of service.
Once celebrated in royal palaces, she faces debt, isolation, and a painful final chapter far from home.
Tap a purple word for its meaning. Tap a time to play from there.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the third and final part of our mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:00:29] In part one, we followed Nelson's rise from sickly Norfolk schoolboy to hero of the Nile. In part two, Emma Hamilton clawed her way up from a blacksmith's cottage to the top of European society.
[00:00:44] Today, their two stories become one: a love affair that scandalised Britain, a battle that made one of them immortal, and a dying wish that Britain chose to ignore.
[00:00:56] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:03] It is the morning of the 21st of October, 1805.
[00:01:09] Off the southern coast of Spain, near a cape called Trafalgar, the British fleet is preparing for battle. On board his flagship, HMS Victory, Admiral Horatio Nelson sits alone in his cabin.
[00:01:27] You will remember from part one how this day is going to end, but we must return to this morning, because Nelson has a few things to take care of.
[00:01:38] He knows the fighting will begin within hours. He knows, too, that there is a good chance he will not survive it.
[00:01:47] So he opens his private diary and writes one final request. It is a codicil, an addition to his will, and its subject is a woman.
[00:02:02] "I leave Emma Lady Hamilton," he writes, "a legacy to my King and Country, that they will give her ample provision to maintain her rank in life."
[00:02:13] He calls two of his captains, Hardy and Blackwood, into the cabin, and they sign their names as witnesses.
[00:02:23] A few hours later, he is shot. And among his last words, as he lies dying below deck, is a plea to the captain kneeling beside him: take care of my dear Lady Hamilton.
[00:02:40] The most famous man in Britain spent his last hours of peace, and then some of his last breaths, asking his country to look after a woman, a woman who was not his wife.
[00:02:54] This episode is the story of how Emma earned that dying wish, and of what Britain did with it.
[00:03:02] So, let's go back seven years, to September 1798, and to the Bay of Naples, where we left off.
[00:03:11] Nelson had just destroyed the French fleet at the Nile, and he arrived in Naples a hero.
[00:03:20] He was also physically wrecked, not just from his most recent battle, but by years of fighting. He had lost his right arm. He had lost most of the sight in one eye. He had a fresh head wound, few teeth left and a terrible cough.
[00:03:40] Emma organised his hero's welcome, nursed him back to health in the embassy, and threw a party for his fortieth birthday with almost two thousand guests.
[00:03:53] When news of the victory had first reached Naples, Emma had written to Nelson to tell him that she had fainted with joy. Now she made sure his name was everywhere: on ribbons, on buttons, on banners across the city.
[00:04:11] And Nelson, it must be said, loved every minute of it.
[00:04:16] He was brave and brilliant, but he was hopelessly vulnerable to praise. Everyone knew it. Emma certainly did.
[00:04:26] One woman who later watched the two of them together at dinner wrote that Emma blew flattery full in his face, and that he happily breathed in every last bit of it.
[00:04:40] And within a few months, Emma would show that she was much more than a glamorous hostess.
[00:04:47] In December 1798, the French army was advancing on Naples, and the royal family had to escape. They were loaded onto Nelson's ships at night, along with their treasure, and sailed for Palermo, in Sicily, straight into one of the worst storms Nelson said he had ever experienced at sea.
[00:05:10] Almost everyone on board was helpless with seasickness, including the King and Queen. Emma spent the crossing on her feet, nursing the royal children. And when the Queen's six-year-old son, Prince Alberto, sadly fell into convulsions, it was Emma who held him.
[00:05:31] He died in her arms on Christmas Day.
[00:05:35] For the rest of her life, Emma kept a small brooch containing a lock of his hair, engraved with the words "Prince Albert died in my arms".
[00:05:46] Emma and Maria Carolina were already close, but by the time they had arrived in Palermo, the blacksmith's daughter had become something like family to the Queen of Naples.
[00:05:59] And she had also grown a lot closer to the British admiral.
[00:06:05] Now, Nelson had a devoted wife at home in England: Fanny.
[00:06:11] While her husband had been spending his evenings at balls and card tables with Emma and the royal court, Fanny was living quietly in the English countryside. She spent much of her time caring for Nelson's elderly father, a Norfolk clergyman, and writing letters to her husband that increasingly went unanswered.
[00:06:35] Emma, for her part, had Sir William, her husband and the leading British diplomat to the Kingdom of Naples.
[00:06:44] It didn't seem to make a difference. Nelson and Emma fell completely in love and embarked on a very public affair, with the full blessing of Emma's husband, Sir William.
[00:06:59] It was a strange business. Modern, ahead of its time, you might think. In the late eighteenth century, it was certainly scandalous.
[00:07:10] What happened was that Nelson, Emma and Sir William began living together, openly, as a trio. They even gave themselves a nickname, a Latin motto meaning "three joined in one". Guests at their dinners would watch Emma sing songs in praise of Nelson's victories while her husband nodded along approvingly.
[00:07:34] Sir William, who was by now nearly seventy years old, seems to have accepted the situation with remarkable calm.
[00:07:44] Perhaps this was partly because the two men were devoted to each other. Nelson had long looked up to Sir William, this cultured, worldly man almost thirty years his senior. And Sir William, who had no children of his own, treated the great admiral almost like a son.
[00:08:05] He adored Emma, she adored him, and this arrangement seemed to suit everyone perfectly.
[00:08:13] Well, everyone in Sicily.
[00:08:15] In London, Nelson's superiors were increasingly frustrated: the hero of the Nile was idling at a foreign court, seemingly unable to tear himself away from the ambassador's wife.
[00:08:30] There was a particular flavour to the disapproval.
[00:08:34] To respectable English eyes, the courts of southern Europe were places of luxury, idleness and loose morals, places where a good, plain English hero could be softened and corrupted.
[00:08:50] People reached for an ancient comparison: Antony and Cleopatra, the great Roman general ruined by his foreign temptress.
[00:08:59] Although Emma was English, she was the foreign temptress, leading the British naval hero astray.
[00:09:08] He ignored more than one order to move on, and in 1800 he was, in effect, called home.
[00:09:16] The British press was no kinder. When the three of them finally returned to England, the newspapers and the cartoonists feasted on them.
[00:09:27] And underneath the mockery, there was class tension. The moment Emma opened her mouth in a London drawing room, everyone could hear exactly where she came from. In Naples her accent had been irrelevant; in England, it placed her instantly, and permanently, as an outsider.
[00:09:50] Nelson, for that matter, was not high society either. He was a country parson's son who had risen on talent and courage, and the aristocrats who ran Britain never entirely let either of them forget it. In their eyes, the affair was two upstarts making a spectacle of themselves.
[00:10:12] Nelson's loyal wife, Fanny, was humiliated, and Nelson treated her terribly, simply ignoring her and then separating from her entirely.
[00:10:24] And in January 1801, in secret, Emma gave birth to a daughter. The little girl was named Horatia, and the baby was smuggled out of the house to a nurse within days.
[00:10:39] Officially, for years, nobody would admit whose child she was, although it didn't take much ingenuity to guess.
[00:10:48] Nelson bought a house in the countryside outside London, a place called Merton, and Emma threw herself into making it a home for the three of them, a kind of shrine to Nelson's victories.
[00:11:02] The house, the entertaining, the constant stream of guests: all of this cost money. And money was about to become a problem.
[00:11:13] For all his fame, remember, Nelson was not a rich man, not compared to the aristocrats of the day at least.
[00:11:22] He was a vicar's son living on his pay and his prize money, and he had to borrow money just to buy Merton.
[00:11:31] Emma, meanwhile, spent the way she had learned to spend in the palaces of Naples: as if money were no object.
[00:11:40] Sir William contributed to this lifestyle — after all, Emma was still his wife — but there were constant question marks about how things would be paid for, and how long this luxurious lifestyle could be maintained.
[00:11:55] Visitors described a house overflowing with portraits of Nelson, flags from his battles, and souvenirs of his victories. Some found it touching, others found it absurd.
[00:12:09] Nelson, by all accounts, loved it.
[00:12:12] Then, piece by piece, it fell apart.
[00:12:17] In April 1803, Sir William died, in Emma's arms, with her lover, Nelson, holding his hand.
[00:12:26] Whatever you make of their unusual three-sided household, it had ended with real tenderness.
[00:12:34] And assuming that Nelson would be able to support her, Sir William left Emma only a slice of his will: an income of eight hundred pounds a year. That is the equivalent of around fifty thousand pounds a year in today's money: enough for a comfortable life, of course, but Emma was used to the life of an ambassador's wife, a life of considerably more luxury than these eight hundred pounds could support.
[00:13:03] A few weeks later, war with France resumed, and Nelson went back to sea.
[00:13:09] He would spend the best part of the next two years at sea, keeping the French fleet trapped in its ports, while Emma waited at home with their young daughter.
[00:13:20] During those years, Emma gave birth to a second child by Nelson, another girl. The baby lived only a few weeks. Emma grieved almost entirely alone, keeping the news out of the papers and away from Nelson's family.
[00:13:37] In August 1805, he came home, and the family had twenty-five days together. Then the call came: the French and Spanish fleets were gathering at Cadiz.
[00:13:50] Nelson left Merton for the last time in the early hours of the 13th of September, 1805. He stopped at the door, and prayed over the bed of his sleeping four-year-old daughter.
[00:14:05] Five weeks later, on the morning of Trafalgar, he sat in his cabin and wrote the codicil we heard at the start of the episode, leaving Emma and Horatia as a legacy to his King and Country.
[00:14:19] The story of that day was the one you heard in part one, which ended with a French marksman spotting Nelson on the deck and killing him.
[00:14:29] The news reached Merton on the 6th of November. Emma gave one scream, fell back, and for ten hours could neither speak nor cry.
[00:14:42] And I'm sorry to say that if you are hoping the story becomes kinder to Emma from this point on, it does not.
[00:14:50] Britain gave Nelson the grandest funeral in its history. Thousands of people lined the streets of London as his coffin was carried to St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:15:02] Emma was not invited. The invitations went to the men of Nelson's family; the woman he had asked his country to care for, with his dying breath, was not welcome at his funeral.
[00:15:16] She spent the day at home with the women of his family, while Britain buried the man she loved.
[00:15:24] Then came the will, and the government's response to the codicil.
[00:15:29] Nelson's brother, William, was a clergyman.
[00:15:33] He was made an earl, and Parliament voted to give him an enormous sum of money to buy an estate, and a generous pension for life. Nelson's sisters received large payments too.
[00:15:47] Emma only received what Nelson had been able to leave her: the house at Merton, a lump sum of two thousand pounds, and 500 pounds a year from his estate in Sicily, money that his brother controlled and refused to hand over.
[00:16:04] From the government, from the King and Country to whom Nelson had left her as a legacy, she received nothing at all.
[00:16:13] No pension. No provision. Nothing.
[00:16:17] The men who ran Britain were happy to celebrate Nelson the hero. They were not prepared to reward his mistress, a low-born woman of scandalous reputation, whatever the great man's dying wishes might have been.
[00:16:31] Her services at Syracuse, the services Nelson himself had put in writing, were simply forgotten.
[00:16:40] Now, it has to be said that Emma did not help herself.
[00:16:45] She had learned extravagance in the palaces of Naples, and this wasn't something she could easily unlearn.
[00:16:52] She kept entertaining, kept spending, kept giving money away to relatives and hangers-on, people who attached themselves to her for what they could get. The income that might have supported a careful widow could not begin to support the lifestyle of Lady Hamilton.
[00:17:12] Within a few years she was deep in debt. Merton, her house, was sold. Her mother died. One by one, Nelson's friends stopped answering her letters.
[00:17:26] She petitioned the government again and again, reminding them of the codicil, reminding them of Syracuse. Polite refusals came back, when anything came back at all.
[00:17:39] By 1813, her debts had caught up with her, and she was confined within the area around King's Bench debtors' prison in London. She was not locked in a cell; she lived with Horatia in cheap rooms nearby, under a system that allowed debtors to pay for a little freedom.
[00:17:58] But she was, effectively, a prisoner, a debtor like any other.
[00:18:05] And then in 1814 came a final blow. Nelson's private letters to her were published. They were intimate and full of passion.
[00:18:17] She always insisted she had nothing to do with it, and quite possibly the letters were taken and sold by someone she trusted. Whoever was responsible, the public turned on her.
[00:18:32] Facing arrest for her remaining debts, she did the only thing left. In July 1814, she and thirteen-year-old Horatia slipped aboard a ship and fled to Calais, on the northern coast of France, with about fifty pounds to her name.
[00:18:49] She spent her last months in cheap rented rooms, ill, drinking heavily to dull the pain, and consuming increasing amounts of laudanum, which was a liquid form of opium that was the standard painkiller of the age.
[00:19:05] Horatia, then thirteen years old, nursed her mother, and pawned what little they had left when the money ran out.
[00:19:14] Emma died on the 15th of January, 1815, at the age of forty-nine.
[00:19:21] The most painted woman of her generation, the friend of a queen, the love of Britain's greatest hero, was buried in a simple grave in a foreign town, paid for by a kind acquaintance. The exact location of the grave was later lost.
[00:19:39] As for Horatia, she made it back to England, was taken in by Nelson's relatives, and went on to live a long, quiet, respectable life as the wife of a country clergyman.
[00:19:53] She raised ten children, and lived until the ripe old age of eighty.
[00:19:58] All her life, she proudly acknowledged Nelson as her father.
[00:20:04] And all her life, to the very end, she refused to admit that Emma Hamilton, the woman who had raised her, hidden her, fled to France with her, and died in poverty beside her, was her mother.
[00:20:18] Emma had climbed, against every rule of her society, from a blacksmith's cottage to the palaces of Europe.
[00:20:26] That society took its revenge in the end, and it reached even into her daughter's heart.
[00:20:34] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, and with that comes the end of this three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton. This, believe it or not, was originally a single episode, but there was so much detail and it got so long that I split it into three.
[00:20:51] And even then, there was a lot of wonderful stuff I had to leave out, but perhaps it has whetted your appetite to discover more.
[00:21:00] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
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As Admiral Nelson prepares for Trafalgar, his public affair with Emma Hamilton has already scandalised Britain and damaged both their reputations.
After Nelson dies in battle, his final request for Britain to support Emma is ignored, despite her years of service.
Once celebrated in royal palaces, she faces debt, isolation, and a painful final chapter far from home.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the third and final part of our mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:00:29] In part one, we followed Nelson's rise from sickly Norfolk schoolboy to hero of the Nile. In part two, Emma Hamilton clawed her way up from a blacksmith's cottage to the top of European society.
[00:00:44] Today, their two stories become one: a love affair that scandalised Britain, a battle that made one of them immortal, and a dying wish that Britain chose to ignore.
[00:00:56] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:03] It is the morning of the 21st of October, 1805.
[00:01:09] Off the southern coast of Spain, near a cape called Trafalgar, the British fleet is preparing for battle. On board his flagship, HMS Victory, Admiral Horatio Nelson sits alone in his cabin.
[00:01:27] You will remember from part one how this day is going to end, but we must return to this morning, because Nelson has a few things to take care of.
[00:01:38] He knows the fighting will begin within hours. He knows, too, that there is a good chance he will not survive it.
[00:01:47] So he opens his private diary and writes one final request. It is a codicil, an addition to his will, and its subject is a woman.
[00:02:02] "I leave Emma Lady Hamilton," he writes, "a legacy to my King and Country, that they will give her ample provision to maintain her rank in life."
[00:02:13] He calls two of his captains, Hardy and Blackwood, into the cabin, and they sign their names as witnesses.
[00:02:23] A few hours later, he is shot. And among his last words, as he lies dying below deck, is a plea to the captain kneeling beside him: take care of my dear Lady Hamilton.
[00:02:40] The most famous man in Britain spent his last hours of peace, and then some of his last breaths, asking his country to look after a woman, a woman who was not his wife.
[00:02:54] This episode is the story of how Emma earned that dying wish, and of what Britain did with it.
[00:03:02] So, let's go back seven years, to September 1798, and to the Bay of Naples, where we left off.
[00:03:11] Nelson had just destroyed the French fleet at the Nile, and he arrived in Naples a hero.
[00:03:20] He was also physically wrecked, not just from his most recent battle, but by years of fighting. He had lost his right arm. He had lost most of the sight in one eye. He had a fresh head wound, few teeth left and a terrible cough.
[00:03:40] Emma organised his hero's welcome, nursed him back to health in the embassy, and threw a party for his fortieth birthday with almost two thousand guests.
[00:03:53] When news of the victory had first reached Naples, Emma had written to Nelson to tell him that she had fainted with joy. Now she made sure his name was everywhere: on ribbons, on buttons, on banners across the city.
[00:04:11] And Nelson, it must be said, loved every minute of it.
[00:04:16] He was brave and brilliant, but he was hopelessly vulnerable to praise. Everyone knew it. Emma certainly did.
[00:04:26] One woman who later watched the two of them together at dinner wrote that Emma blew flattery full in his face, and that he happily breathed in every last bit of it.
[00:04:40] And within a few months, Emma would show that she was much more than a glamorous hostess.
[00:04:47] In December 1798, the French army was advancing on Naples, and the royal family had to escape. They were loaded onto Nelson's ships at night, along with their treasure, and sailed for Palermo, in Sicily, straight into one of the worst storms Nelson said he had ever experienced at sea.
[00:05:10] Almost everyone on board was helpless with seasickness, including the King and Queen. Emma spent the crossing on her feet, nursing the royal children. And when the Queen's six-year-old son, Prince Alberto, sadly fell into convulsions, it was Emma who held him.
[00:05:31] He died in her arms on Christmas Day.
[00:05:35] For the rest of her life, Emma kept a small brooch containing a lock of his hair, engraved with the words "Prince Albert died in my arms".
[00:05:46] Emma and Maria Carolina were already close, but by the time they had arrived in Palermo, the blacksmith's daughter had become something like family to the Queen of Naples.
[00:05:59] And she had also grown a lot closer to the British admiral.
[00:06:05] Now, Nelson had a devoted wife at home in England: Fanny.
[00:06:11] While her husband had been spending his evenings at balls and card tables with Emma and the royal court, Fanny was living quietly in the English countryside. She spent much of her time caring for Nelson's elderly father, a Norfolk clergyman, and writing letters to her husband that increasingly went unanswered.
[00:06:35] Emma, for her part, had Sir William, her husband and the leading British diplomat to the Kingdom of Naples.
[00:06:44] It didn't seem to make a difference. Nelson and Emma fell completely in love and embarked on a very public affair, with the full blessing of Emma's husband, Sir William.
[00:06:59] It was a strange business. Modern, ahead of its time, you might think. In the late eighteenth century, it was certainly scandalous.
[00:07:10] What happened was that Nelson, Emma and Sir William began living together, openly, as a trio. They even gave themselves a nickname, a Latin motto meaning "three joined in one". Guests at their dinners would watch Emma sing songs in praise of Nelson's victories while her husband nodded along approvingly.
[00:07:34] Sir William, who was by now nearly seventy years old, seems to have accepted the situation with remarkable calm.
[00:07:44] Perhaps this was partly because the two men were devoted to each other. Nelson had long looked up to Sir William, this cultured, worldly man almost thirty years his senior. And Sir William, who had no children of his own, treated the great admiral almost like a son.
[00:08:05] He adored Emma, she adored him, and this arrangement seemed to suit everyone perfectly.
[00:08:13] Well, everyone in Sicily.
[00:08:15] In London, Nelson's superiors were increasingly frustrated: the hero of the Nile was idling at a foreign court, seemingly unable to tear himself away from the ambassador's wife.
[00:08:30] There was a particular flavour to the disapproval.
[00:08:34] To respectable English eyes, the courts of southern Europe were places of luxury, idleness and loose morals, places where a good, plain English hero could be softened and corrupted.
[00:08:50] People reached for an ancient comparison: Antony and Cleopatra, the great Roman general ruined by his foreign temptress.
[00:08:59] Although Emma was English, she was the foreign temptress, leading the British naval hero astray.
[00:09:08] He ignored more than one order to move on, and in 1800 he was, in effect, called home.
[00:09:16] The British press was no kinder. When the three of them finally returned to England, the newspapers and the cartoonists feasted on them.
[00:09:27] And underneath the mockery, there was class tension. The moment Emma opened her mouth in a London drawing room, everyone could hear exactly where she came from. In Naples her accent had been irrelevant; in England, it placed her instantly, and permanently, as an outsider.
[00:09:50] Nelson, for that matter, was not high society either. He was a country parson's son who had risen on talent and courage, and the aristocrats who ran Britain never entirely let either of them forget it. In their eyes, the affair was two upstarts making a spectacle of themselves.
[00:10:12] Nelson's loyal wife, Fanny, was humiliated, and Nelson treated her terribly, simply ignoring her and then separating from her entirely.
[00:10:24] And in January 1801, in secret, Emma gave birth to a daughter. The little girl was named Horatia, and the baby was smuggled out of the house to a nurse within days.
[00:10:39] Officially, for years, nobody would admit whose child she was, although it didn't take much ingenuity to guess.
[00:10:48] Nelson bought a house in the countryside outside London, a place called Merton, and Emma threw herself into making it a home for the three of them, a kind of shrine to Nelson's victories.
[00:11:02] The house, the entertaining, the constant stream of guests: all of this cost money. And money was about to become a problem.
[00:11:13] For all his fame, remember, Nelson was not a rich man, not compared to the aristocrats of the day at least.
[00:11:22] He was a vicar's son living on his pay and his prize money, and he had to borrow money just to buy Merton.
[00:11:31] Emma, meanwhile, spent the way she had learned to spend in the palaces of Naples: as if money were no object.
[00:11:40] Sir William contributed to this lifestyle — after all, Emma was still his wife — but there were constant question marks about how things would be paid for, and how long this luxurious lifestyle could be maintained.
[00:11:55] Visitors described a house overflowing with portraits of Nelson, flags from his battles, and souvenirs of his victories. Some found it touching, others found it absurd.
[00:12:09] Nelson, by all accounts, loved it.
[00:12:12] Then, piece by piece, it fell apart.
[00:12:17] In April 1803, Sir William died, in Emma's arms, with her lover, Nelson, holding his hand.
[00:12:26] Whatever you make of their unusual three-sided household, it had ended with real tenderness.
[00:12:34] And assuming that Nelson would be able to support her, Sir William left Emma only a slice of his will: an income of eight hundred pounds a year. That is the equivalent of around fifty thousand pounds a year in today's money: enough for a comfortable life, of course, but Emma was used to the life of an ambassador's wife, a life of considerably more luxury than these eight hundred pounds could support.
[00:13:03] A few weeks later, war with France resumed, and Nelson went back to sea.
[00:13:09] He would spend the best part of the next two years at sea, keeping the French fleet trapped in its ports, while Emma waited at home with their young daughter.
[00:13:20] During those years, Emma gave birth to a second child by Nelson, another girl. The baby lived only a few weeks. Emma grieved almost entirely alone, keeping the news out of the papers and away from Nelson's family.
[00:13:37] In August 1805, he came home, and the family had twenty-five days together. Then the call came: the French and Spanish fleets were gathering at Cadiz.
[00:13:50] Nelson left Merton for the last time in the early hours of the 13th of September, 1805. He stopped at the door, and prayed over the bed of his sleeping four-year-old daughter.
[00:14:05] Five weeks later, on the morning of Trafalgar, he sat in his cabin and wrote the codicil we heard at the start of the episode, leaving Emma and Horatia as a legacy to his King and Country.
[00:14:19] The story of that day was the one you heard in part one, which ended with a French marksman spotting Nelson on the deck and killing him.
[00:14:29] The news reached Merton on the 6th of November. Emma gave one scream, fell back, and for ten hours could neither speak nor cry.
[00:14:42] And I'm sorry to say that if you are hoping the story becomes kinder to Emma from this point on, it does not.
[00:14:50] Britain gave Nelson the grandest funeral in its history. Thousands of people lined the streets of London as his coffin was carried to St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:15:02] Emma was not invited. The invitations went to the men of Nelson's family; the woman he had asked his country to care for, with his dying breath, was not welcome at his funeral.
[00:15:16] She spent the day at home with the women of his family, while Britain buried the man she loved.
[00:15:24] Then came the will, and the government's response to the codicil.
[00:15:29] Nelson's brother, William, was a clergyman.
[00:15:33] He was made an earl, and Parliament voted to give him an enormous sum of money to buy an estate, and a generous pension for life. Nelson's sisters received large payments too.
[00:15:47] Emma only received what Nelson had been able to leave her: the house at Merton, a lump sum of two thousand pounds, and 500 pounds a year from his estate in Sicily, money that his brother controlled and refused to hand over.
[00:16:04] From the government, from the King and Country to whom Nelson had left her as a legacy, she received nothing at all.
[00:16:13] No pension. No provision. Nothing.
[00:16:17] The men who ran Britain were happy to celebrate Nelson the hero. They were not prepared to reward his mistress, a low-born woman of scandalous reputation, whatever the great man's dying wishes might have been.
[00:16:31] Her services at Syracuse, the services Nelson himself had put in writing, were simply forgotten.
[00:16:40] Now, it has to be said that Emma did not help herself.
[00:16:45] She had learned extravagance in the palaces of Naples, and this wasn't something she could easily unlearn.
[00:16:52] She kept entertaining, kept spending, kept giving money away to relatives and hangers-on, people who attached themselves to her for what they could get. The income that might have supported a careful widow could not begin to support the lifestyle of Lady Hamilton.
[00:17:12] Within a few years she was deep in debt. Merton, her house, was sold. Her mother died. One by one, Nelson's friends stopped answering her letters.
[00:17:26] She petitioned the government again and again, reminding them of the codicil, reminding them of Syracuse. Polite refusals came back, when anything came back at all.
[00:17:39] By 1813, her debts had caught up with her, and she was confined within the area around King's Bench debtors' prison in London. She was not locked in a cell; she lived with Horatia in cheap rooms nearby, under a system that allowed debtors to pay for a little freedom.
[00:17:58] But she was, effectively, a prisoner, a debtor like any other.
[00:18:05] And then in 1814 came a final blow. Nelson's private letters to her were published. They were intimate and full of passion.
[00:18:17] She always insisted she had nothing to do with it, and quite possibly the letters were taken and sold by someone she trusted. Whoever was responsible, the public turned on her.
[00:18:32] Facing arrest for her remaining debts, she did the only thing left. In July 1814, she and thirteen-year-old Horatia slipped aboard a ship and fled to Calais, on the northern coast of France, with about fifty pounds to her name.
[00:18:49] She spent her last months in cheap rented rooms, ill, drinking heavily to dull the pain, and consuming increasing amounts of laudanum, which was a liquid form of opium that was the standard painkiller of the age.
[00:19:05] Horatia, then thirteen years old, nursed her mother, and pawned what little they had left when the money ran out.
[00:19:14] Emma died on the 15th of January, 1815, at the age of forty-nine.
[00:19:21] The most painted woman of her generation, the friend of a queen, the love of Britain's greatest hero, was buried in a simple grave in a foreign town, paid for by a kind acquaintance. The exact location of the grave was later lost.
[00:19:39] As for Horatia, she made it back to England, was taken in by Nelson's relatives, and went on to live a long, quiet, respectable life as the wife of a country clergyman.
[00:19:53] She raised ten children, and lived until the ripe old age of eighty.
[00:19:58] All her life, she proudly acknowledged Nelson as her father.
[00:20:04] And all her life, to the very end, she refused to admit that Emma Hamilton, the woman who had raised her, hidden her, fled to France with her, and died in poverty beside her, was her mother.
[00:20:18] Emma had climbed, against every rule of her society, from a blacksmith's cottage to the palaces of Europe.
[00:20:26] That society took its revenge in the end, and it reached even into her daughter's heart.
[00:20:34] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, and with that comes the end of this three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton. This, believe it or not, was originally a single episode, but there was so much detail and it got so long that I split it into three.
[00:20:51] And even then, there was a lot of wonderful stuff I had to leave out, but perhaps it has whetted your appetite to discover more.
[00:21:00] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the third and final part of our mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:00:29] In part one, we followed Nelson's rise from sickly Norfolk schoolboy to hero of the Nile. In part two, Emma Hamilton clawed her way up from a blacksmith's cottage to the top of European society.
[00:00:44] Today, their two stories become one: a love affair that scandalised Britain, a battle that made one of them immortal, and a dying wish that Britain chose to ignore.
[00:00:56] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:03] It is the morning of the 21st of October, 1805.
[00:01:09] Off the southern coast of Spain, near a cape called Trafalgar, the British fleet is preparing for battle. On board his flagship, HMS Victory, Admiral Horatio Nelson sits alone in his cabin.
[00:01:27] You will remember from part one how this day is going to end, but we must return to this morning, because Nelson has a few things to take care of.
[00:01:38] He knows the fighting will begin within hours. He knows, too, that there is a good chance he will not survive it.
[00:01:47] So he opens his private diary and writes one final request. It is a codicil, an addition to his will, and its subject is a woman.
[00:02:02] "I leave Emma Lady Hamilton," he writes, "a legacy to my King and Country, that they will give her ample provision to maintain her rank in life."
[00:02:13] He calls two of his captains, Hardy and Blackwood, into the cabin, and they sign their names as witnesses.
[00:02:23] A few hours later, he is shot. And among his last words, as he lies dying below deck, is a plea to the captain kneeling beside him: take care of my dear Lady Hamilton.
[00:02:40] The most famous man in Britain spent his last hours of peace, and then some of his last breaths, asking his country to look after a woman, a woman who was not his wife.
[00:02:54] This episode is the story of how Emma earned that dying wish, and of what Britain did with it.
[00:03:02] So, let's go back seven years, to September 1798, and to the Bay of Naples, where we left off.
[00:03:11] Nelson had just destroyed the French fleet at the Nile, and he arrived in Naples a hero.
[00:03:20] He was also physically wrecked, not just from his most recent battle, but by years of fighting. He had lost his right arm. He had lost most of the sight in one eye. He had a fresh head wound, few teeth left and a terrible cough.
[00:03:40] Emma organised his hero's welcome, nursed him back to health in the embassy, and threw a party for his fortieth birthday with almost two thousand guests.
[00:03:53] When news of the victory had first reached Naples, Emma had written to Nelson to tell him that she had fainted with joy. Now she made sure his name was everywhere: on ribbons, on buttons, on banners across the city.
[00:04:11] And Nelson, it must be said, loved every minute of it.
[00:04:16] He was brave and brilliant, but he was hopelessly vulnerable to praise. Everyone knew it. Emma certainly did.
[00:04:26] One woman who later watched the two of them together at dinner wrote that Emma blew flattery full in his face, and that he happily breathed in every last bit of it.
[00:04:40] And within a few months, Emma would show that she was much more than a glamorous hostess.
[00:04:47] In December 1798, the French army was advancing on Naples, and the royal family had to escape. They were loaded onto Nelson's ships at night, along with their treasure, and sailed for Palermo, in Sicily, straight into one of the worst storms Nelson said he had ever experienced at sea.
[00:05:10] Almost everyone on board was helpless with seasickness, including the King and Queen. Emma spent the crossing on her feet, nursing the royal children. And when the Queen's six-year-old son, Prince Alberto, sadly fell into convulsions, it was Emma who held him.
[00:05:31] He died in her arms on Christmas Day.
[00:05:35] For the rest of her life, Emma kept a small brooch containing a lock of his hair, engraved with the words "Prince Albert died in my arms".
[00:05:46] Emma and Maria Carolina were already close, but by the time they had arrived in Palermo, the blacksmith's daughter had become something like family to the Queen of Naples.
[00:05:59] And she had also grown a lot closer to the British admiral.
[00:06:05] Now, Nelson had a devoted wife at home in England: Fanny.
[00:06:11] While her husband had been spending his evenings at balls and card tables with Emma and the royal court, Fanny was living quietly in the English countryside. She spent much of her time caring for Nelson's elderly father, a Norfolk clergyman, and writing letters to her husband that increasingly went unanswered.
[00:06:35] Emma, for her part, had Sir William, her husband and the leading British diplomat to the Kingdom of Naples.
[00:06:44] It didn't seem to make a difference. Nelson and Emma fell completely in love and embarked on a very public affair, with the full blessing of Emma's husband, Sir William.
[00:06:59] It was a strange business. Modern, ahead of its time, you might think. In the late eighteenth century, it was certainly scandalous.
[00:07:10] What happened was that Nelson, Emma and Sir William began living together, openly, as a trio. They even gave themselves a nickname, a Latin motto meaning "three joined in one". Guests at their dinners would watch Emma sing songs in praise of Nelson's victories while her husband nodded along approvingly.
[00:07:34] Sir William, who was by now nearly seventy years old, seems to have accepted the situation with remarkable calm.
[00:07:44] Perhaps this was partly because the two men were devoted to each other. Nelson had long looked up to Sir William, this cultured, worldly man almost thirty years his senior. And Sir William, who had no children of his own, treated the great admiral almost like a son.
[00:08:05] He adored Emma, she adored him, and this arrangement seemed to suit everyone perfectly.
[00:08:13] Well, everyone in Sicily.
[00:08:15] In London, Nelson's superiors were increasingly frustrated: the hero of the Nile was idling at a foreign court, seemingly unable to tear himself away from the ambassador's wife.
[00:08:30] There was a particular flavour to the disapproval.
[00:08:34] To respectable English eyes, the courts of southern Europe were places of luxury, idleness and loose morals, places where a good, plain English hero could be softened and corrupted.
[00:08:50] People reached for an ancient comparison: Antony and Cleopatra, the great Roman general ruined by his foreign temptress.
[00:08:59] Although Emma was English, she was the foreign temptress, leading the British naval hero astray.
[00:09:08] He ignored more than one order to move on, and in 1800 he was, in effect, called home.
[00:09:16] The British press was no kinder. When the three of them finally returned to England, the newspapers and the cartoonists feasted on them.
[00:09:27] And underneath the mockery, there was class tension. The moment Emma opened her mouth in a London drawing room, everyone could hear exactly where she came from. In Naples her accent had been irrelevant; in England, it placed her instantly, and permanently, as an outsider.
[00:09:50] Nelson, for that matter, was not high society either. He was a country parson's son who had risen on talent and courage, and the aristocrats who ran Britain never entirely let either of them forget it. In their eyes, the affair was two upstarts making a spectacle of themselves.
[00:10:12] Nelson's loyal wife, Fanny, was humiliated, and Nelson treated her terribly, simply ignoring her and then separating from her entirely.
[00:10:24] And in January 1801, in secret, Emma gave birth to a daughter. The little girl was named Horatia, and the baby was smuggled out of the house to a nurse within days.
[00:10:39] Officially, for years, nobody would admit whose child she was, although it didn't take much ingenuity to guess.
[00:10:48] Nelson bought a house in the countryside outside London, a place called Merton, and Emma threw herself into making it a home for the three of them, a kind of shrine to Nelson's victories.
[00:11:02] The house, the entertaining, the constant stream of guests: all of this cost money. And money was about to become a problem.
[00:11:13] For all his fame, remember, Nelson was not a rich man, not compared to the aristocrats of the day at least.
[00:11:22] He was a vicar's son living on his pay and his prize money, and he had to borrow money just to buy Merton.
[00:11:31] Emma, meanwhile, spent the way she had learned to spend in the palaces of Naples: as if money were no object.
[00:11:40] Sir William contributed to this lifestyle — after all, Emma was still his wife — but there were constant question marks about how things would be paid for, and how long this luxurious lifestyle could be maintained.
[00:11:55] Visitors described a house overflowing with portraits of Nelson, flags from his battles, and souvenirs of his victories. Some found it touching, others found it absurd.
[00:12:09] Nelson, by all accounts, loved it.
[00:12:12] Then, piece by piece, it fell apart.
[00:12:17] In April 1803, Sir William died, in Emma's arms, with her lover, Nelson, holding his hand.
[00:12:26] Whatever you make of their unusual three-sided household, it had ended with real tenderness.
[00:12:34] And assuming that Nelson would be able to support her, Sir William left Emma only a slice of his will: an income of eight hundred pounds a year. That is the equivalent of around fifty thousand pounds a year in today's money: enough for a comfortable life, of course, but Emma was used to the life of an ambassador's wife, a life of considerably more luxury than these eight hundred pounds could support.
[00:13:03] A few weeks later, war with France resumed, and Nelson went back to sea.
[00:13:09] He would spend the best part of the next two years at sea, keeping the French fleet trapped in its ports, while Emma waited at home with their young daughter.
[00:13:20] During those years, Emma gave birth to a second child by Nelson, another girl. The baby lived only a few weeks. Emma grieved almost entirely alone, keeping the news out of the papers and away from Nelson's family.
[00:13:37] In August 1805, he came home, and the family had twenty-five days together. Then the call came: the French and Spanish fleets were gathering at Cadiz.
[00:13:50] Nelson left Merton for the last time in the early hours of the 13th of September, 1805. He stopped at the door, and prayed over the bed of his sleeping four-year-old daughter.
[00:14:05] Five weeks later, on the morning of Trafalgar, he sat in his cabin and wrote the codicil we heard at the start of the episode, leaving Emma and Horatia as a legacy to his King and Country.
[00:14:19] The story of that day was the one you heard in part one, which ended with a French marksman spotting Nelson on the deck and killing him.
[00:14:29] The news reached Merton on the 6th of November. Emma gave one scream, fell back, and for ten hours could neither speak nor cry.
[00:14:42] And I'm sorry to say that if you are hoping the story becomes kinder to Emma from this point on, it does not.
[00:14:50] Britain gave Nelson the grandest funeral in its history. Thousands of people lined the streets of London as his coffin was carried to St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:15:02] Emma was not invited. The invitations went to the men of Nelson's family; the woman he had asked his country to care for, with his dying breath, was not welcome at his funeral.
[00:15:16] She spent the day at home with the women of his family, while Britain buried the man she loved.
[00:15:24] Then came the will, and the government's response to the codicil.
[00:15:29] Nelson's brother, William, was a clergyman.
[00:15:33] He was made an earl, and Parliament voted to give him an enormous sum of money to buy an estate, and a generous pension for life. Nelson's sisters received large payments too.
[00:15:47] Emma only received what Nelson had been able to leave her: the house at Merton, a lump sum of two thousand pounds, and 500 pounds a year from his estate in Sicily, money that his brother controlled and refused to hand over.
[00:16:04] From the government, from the King and Country to whom Nelson had left her as a legacy, she received nothing at all.
[00:16:13] No pension. No provision. Nothing.
[00:16:17] The men who ran Britain were happy to celebrate Nelson the hero. They were not prepared to reward his mistress, a low-born woman of scandalous reputation, whatever the great man's dying wishes might have been.
[00:16:31] Her services at Syracuse, the services Nelson himself had put in writing, were simply forgotten.
[00:16:40] Now, it has to be said that Emma did not help herself.
[00:16:45] She had learned extravagance in the palaces of Naples, and this wasn't something she could easily unlearn.
[00:16:52] She kept entertaining, kept spending, kept giving money away to relatives and hangers-on, people who attached themselves to her for what they could get. The income that might have supported a careful widow could not begin to support the lifestyle of Lady Hamilton.
[00:17:12] Within a few years she was deep in debt. Merton, her house, was sold. Her mother died. One by one, Nelson's friends stopped answering her letters.
[00:17:26] She petitioned the government again and again, reminding them of the codicil, reminding them of Syracuse. Polite refusals came back, when anything came back at all.
[00:17:39] By 1813, her debts had caught up with her, and she was confined within the area around King's Bench debtors' prison in London. She was not locked in a cell; she lived with Horatia in cheap rooms nearby, under a system that allowed debtors to pay for a little freedom.
[00:17:58] But she was, effectively, a prisoner, a debtor like any other.
[00:18:05] And then in 1814 came a final blow. Nelson's private letters to her were published. They were intimate and full of passion.
[00:18:17] She always insisted she had nothing to do with it, and quite possibly the letters were taken and sold by someone she trusted. Whoever was responsible, the public turned on her.
[00:18:32] Facing arrest for her remaining debts, she did the only thing left. In July 1814, she and thirteen-year-old Horatia slipped aboard a ship and fled to Calais, on the northern coast of France, with about fifty pounds to her name.
[00:18:49] She spent her last months in cheap rented rooms, ill, drinking heavily to dull the pain, and consuming increasing amounts of laudanum, which was a liquid form of opium that was the standard painkiller of the age.
[00:19:05] Horatia, then thirteen years old, nursed her mother, and pawned what little they had left when the money ran out.
[00:19:14] Emma died on the 15th of January, 1815, at the age of forty-nine.
[00:19:21] The most painted woman of her generation, the friend of a queen, the love of Britain's greatest hero, was buried in a simple grave in a foreign town, paid for by a kind acquaintance. The exact location of the grave was later lost.
[00:19:39] As for Horatia, she made it back to England, was taken in by Nelson's relatives, and went on to live a long, quiet, respectable life as the wife of a country clergyman.
[00:19:53] She raised ten children, and lived until the ripe old age of eighty.
[00:19:58] All her life, she proudly acknowledged Nelson as her father.
[00:20:04] And all her life, to the very end, she refused to admit that Emma Hamilton, the woman who had raised her, hidden her, fled to France with her, and died in poverty beside her, was her mother.
[00:20:18] Emma had climbed, against every rule of her society, from a blacksmith's cottage to the palaces of Europe.
[00:20:26] That society took its revenge in the end, and it reached even into her daughter's heart.
[00:20:34] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, and with that comes the end of this three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton. This, believe it or not, was originally a single episode, but there was so much detail and it got so long that I split it into three.
[00:20:51] And even then, there was a lot of wonderful stuff I had to leave out, but perhaps it has whetted your appetite to discover more.
[00:21:00] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the third and final part of our mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:00:29] In part one, we followed Nelson's rise from sickly Norfolk schoolboy to hero of the Nile. In part two, Emma Hamilton clawed her way up from a blacksmith's cottage to the top of European society.
[00:00:44] Today, their two stories become one: a love affair that scandalised Britain, a battle that made one of them immortal, and a dying wish that Britain chose to ignore.
[00:00:56] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:03] It is the morning of the 21st of October, 1805.
[00:01:09] Off the southern coast of Spain, near a cape called Trafalgar, the British fleet is preparing for battle. On board his flagship, HMS Victory, Admiral Horatio Nelson sits alone in his cabin.
[00:01:27] You will remember from part one how this day is going to end, but we must return to this morning, because Nelson has a few things to take care of.
[00:01:38] He knows the fighting will begin within hours. He knows, too, that there is a good chance he will not survive it.
[00:01:47] So he opens his private diary and writes one final request. It is a codicil, an addition to his will, and its subject is a woman.
[00:02:02] "I leave Emma Lady Hamilton," he writes, "a legacy to my King and Country, that they will give her ample provision to maintain her rank in life."
[00:02:13] He calls two of his captains, Hardy and Blackwood, into the cabin, and they sign their names as witnesses.
[00:02:23] A few hours later, he is shot. And among his last words, as he lies dying below deck, is a plea to the captain kneeling beside him: take care of my dear Lady Hamilton.
[00:02:40] The most famous man in Britain spent his last hours of peace, and then some of his last breaths, asking his country to look after a woman, a woman who was not his wife.
[00:02:54] This episode is the story of how Emma earned that dying wish, and of what Britain did with it.
[00:03:02] So, let's go back seven years, to September 1798, and to the Bay of Naples, where we left off.
[00:03:11] Nelson had just destroyed the French fleet at the Nile, and he arrived in Naples a hero.
[00:03:20] He was also physically wrecked, not just from his most recent battle, but by years of fighting. He had lost his right arm. He had lost most of the sight in one eye. He had a fresh head wound, few teeth left and a terrible cough.
[00:03:40] Emma organised his hero's welcome, nursed him back to health in the embassy, and threw a party for his fortieth birthday with almost two thousand guests.
[00:03:53] When news of the victory had first reached Naples, Emma had written to Nelson to tell him that she had fainted with joy. Now she made sure his name was everywhere: on ribbons, on buttons, on banners across the city.
[00:04:11] And Nelson, it must be said, loved every minute of it.
[00:04:16] He was brave and brilliant, but he was hopelessly vulnerable to praise. Everyone knew it. Emma certainly did.
[00:04:26] One woman who later watched the two of them together at dinner wrote that Emma blew flattery full in his face, and that he happily breathed in every last bit of it.
[00:04:40] And within a few months, Emma would show that she was much more than a glamorous hostess.
[00:04:47] In December 1798, the French army was advancing on Naples, and the royal family had to escape. They were loaded onto Nelson's ships at night, along with their treasure, and sailed for Palermo, in Sicily, straight into one of the worst storms Nelson said he had ever experienced at sea.
[00:05:10] Almost everyone on board was helpless with seasickness, including the King and Queen. Emma spent the crossing on her feet, nursing the royal children. And when the Queen's six-year-old son, Prince Alberto, sadly fell into convulsions, it was Emma who held him.
[00:05:31] He died in her arms on Christmas Day.
[00:05:35] For the rest of her life, Emma kept a small brooch containing a lock of his hair, engraved with the words "Prince Albert died in my arms".
[00:05:46] Emma and Maria Carolina were already close, but by the time they had arrived in Palermo, the blacksmith's daughter had become something like family to the Queen of Naples.
[00:05:59] And she had also grown a lot closer to the British admiral.
[00:06:05] Now, Nelson had a devoted wife at home in England: Fanny.
[00:06:11] While her husband had been spending his evenings at balls and card tables with Emma and the royal court, Fanny was living quietly in the English countryside. She spent much of her time caring for Nelson's elderly father, a Norfolk clergyman, and writing letters to her husband that increasingly went unanswered.
[00:06:35] Emma, for her part, had Sir William, her husband and the leading British diplomat to the Kingdom of Naples.
[00:06:44] It didn't seem to make a difference. Nelson and Emma fell completely in love and embarked on a very public affair, with the full blessing of Emma's husband, Sir William.
[00:06:59] It was a strange business. Modern, ahead of its time, you might think. In the late eighteenth century, it was certainly scandalous.
[00:07:10] What happened was that Nelson, Emma and Sir William began living together, openly, as a trio. They even gave themselves a nickname, a Latin motto meaning "three joined in one". Guests at their dinners would watch Emma sing songs in praise of Nelson's victories while her husband nodded along approvingly.
[00:07:34] Sir William, who was by now nearly seventy years old, seems to have accepted the situation with remarkable calm.
[00:07:44] Perhaps this was partly because the two men were devoted to each other. Nelson had long looked up to Sir William, this cultured, worldly man almost thirty years his senior. And Sir William, who had no children of his own, treated the great admiral almost like a son.
[00:08:05] He adored Emma, she adored him, and this arrangement seemed to suit everyone perfectly.
[00:08:13] Well, everyone in Sicily.
[00:08:15] In London, Nelson's superiors were increasingly frustrated: the hero of the Nile was idling at a foreign court, seemingly unable to tear himself away from the ambassador's wife.
[00:08:30] There was a particular flavour to the disapproval.
[00:08:34] To respectable English eyes, the courts of southern Europe were places of luxury, idleness and loose morals, places where a good, plain English hero could be softened and corrupted.
[00:08:50] People reached for an ancient comparison: Antony and Cleopatra, the great Roman general ruined by his foreign temptress.
[00:08:59] Although Emma was English, she was the foreign temptress, leading the British naval hero astray.
[00:09:08] He ignored more than one order to move on, and in 1800 he was, in effect, called home.
[00:09:16] The British press was no kinder. When the three of them finally returned to England, the newspapers and the cartoonists feasted on them.
[00:09:27] And underneath the mockery, there was class tension. The moment Emma opened her mouth in a London drawing room, everyone could hear exactly where she came from. In Naples her accent had been irrelevant; in England, it placed her instantly, and permanently, as an outsider.
[00:09:50] Nelson, for that matter, was not high society either. He was a country parson's son who had risen on talent and courage, and the aristocrats who ran Britain never entirely let either of them forget it. In their eyes, the affair was two upstarts making a spectacle of themselves.
[00:10:12] Nelson's loyal wife, Fanny, was humiliated, and Nelson treated her terribly, simply ignoring her and then separating from her entirely.
[00:10:24] And in January 1801, in secret, Emma gave birth to a daughter. The little girl was named Horatia, and the baby was smuggled out of the house to a nurse within days.
[00:10:39] Officially, for years, nobody would admit whose child she was, although it didn't take much ingenuity to guess.
[00:10:48] Nelson bought a house in the countryside outside London, a place called Merton, and Emma threw herself into making it a home for the three of them, a kind of shrine to Nelson's victories.
[00:11:02] The house, the entertaining, the constant stream of guests: all of this cost money. And money was about to become a problem.
[00:11:13] For all his fame, remember, Nelson was not a rich man, not compared to the aristocrats of the day at least.
[00:11:22] He was a vicar's son living on his pay and his prize money, and he had to borrow money just to buy Merton.
[00:11:31] Emma, meanwhile, spent the way she had learned to spend in the palaces of Naples: as if money were no object.
[00:11:40] Sir William contributed to this lifestyle — after all, Emma was still his wife — but there were constant question marks about how things would be paid for, and how long this luxurious lifestyle could be maintained.
[00:11:55] Visitors described a house overflowing with portraits of Nelson, flags from his battles, and souvenirs of his victories. Some found it touching, others found it absurd.
[00:12:09] Nelson, by all accounts, loved it.
[00:12:12] Then, piece by piece, it fell apart.
[00:12:17] In April 1803, Sir William died, in Emma's arms, with her lover, Nelson, holding his hand.
[00:12:26] Whatever you make of their unusual three-sided household, it had ended with real tenderness.
[00:12:34] And assuming that Nelson would be able to support her, Sir William left Emma only a slice of his will: an income of eight hundred pounds a year. That is the equivalent of around fifty thousand pounds a year in today's money: enough for a comfortable life, of course, but Emma was used to the life of an ambassador's wife, a life of considerably more luxury than these eight hundred pounds could support.
[00:13:03] A few weeks later, war with France resumed, and Nelson went back to sea.
[00:13:09] He would spend the best part of the next two years at sea, keeping the French fleet trapped in its ports, while Emma waited at home with their young daughter.
[00:13:20] During those years, Emma gave birth to a second child by Nelson, another girl. The baby lived only a few weeks. Emma grieved almost entirely alone, keeping the news out of the papers and away from Nelson's family.
[00:13:37] In August 1805, he came home, and the family had twenty-five days together. Then the call came: the French and Spanish fleets were gathering at Cadiz.
[00:13:50] Nelson left Merton for the last time in the early hours of the 13th of September, 1805. He stopped at the door, and prayed over the bed of his sleeping four-year-old daughter.
[00:14:05] Five weeks later, on the morning of Trafalgar, he sat in his cabin and wrote the codicil we heard at the start of the episode, leaving Emma and Horatia as a legacy to his King and Country.
[00:14:19] The story of that day was the one you heard in part one, which ended with a French marksman spotting Nelson on the deck and killing him.
[00:14:29] The news reached Merton on the 6th of November. Emma gave one scream, fell back, and for ten hours could neither speak nor cry.
[00:14:42] And I'm sorry to say that if you are hoping the story becomes kinder to Emma from this point on, it does not.
[00:14:50] Britain gave Nelson the grandest funeral in its history. Thousands of people lined the streets of London as his coffin was carried to St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:15:02] Emma was not invited. The invitations went to the men of Nelson's family; the woman he had asked his country to care for, with his dying breath, was not welcome at his funeral.
[00:15:16] She spent the day at home with the women of his family, while Britain buried the man she loved.
[00:15:24] Then came the will, and the government's response to the codicil.
[00:15:29] Nelson's brother, William, was a clergyman.
[00:15:33] He was made an earl, and Parliament voted to give him an enormous sum of money to buy an estate, and a generous pension for life. Nelson's sisters received large payments too.
[00:15:47] Emma only received what Nelson had been able to leave her: the house at Merton, a lump sum of two thousand pounds, and 500 pounds a year from his estate in Sicily, money that his brother controlled and refused to hand over.
[00:16:04] From the government, from the King and Country to whom Nelson had left her as a legacy, she received nothing at all.
[00:16:13] No pension. No provision. Nothing.
[00:16:17] The men who ran Britain were happy to celebrate Nelson the hero. They were not prepared to reward his mistress, a low-born woman of scandalous reputation, whatever the great man's dying wishes might have been.
[00:16:31] Her services at Syracuse, the services Nelson himself had put in writing, were simply forgotten.
[00:16:40] Now, it has to be said that Emma did not help herself.
[00:16:45] She had learned extravagance in the palaces of Naples, and this wasn't something she could easily unlearn.
[00:16:52] She kept entertaining, kept spending, kept giving money away to relatives and hangers-on, people who attached themselves to her for what they could get. The income that might have supported a careful widow could not begin to support the lifestyle of Lady Hamilton.
[00:17:12] Within a few years she was deep in debt. Merton, her house, was sold. Her mother died. One by one, Nelson's friends stopped answering her letters.
[00:17:26] She petitioned the government again and again, reminding them of the codicil, reminding them of Syracuse. Polite refusals came back, when anything came back at all.
[00:17:39] By 1813, her debts had caught up with her, and she was confined within the area around King's Bench debtors' prison in London. She was not locked in a cell; she lived with Horatia in cheap rooms nearby, under a system that allowed debtors to pay for a little freedom.
[00:17:58] But she was, effectively, a prisoner, a debtor like any other.
[00:18:05] And then in 1814 came a final blow. Nelson's private letters to her were published. They were intimate and full of passion.
[00:18:17] She always insisted she had nothing to do with it, and quite possibly the letters were taken and sold by someone she trusted. Whoever was responsible, the public turned on her.
[00:18:32] Facing arrest for her remaining debts, she did the only thing left. In July 1814, she and thirteen-year-old Horatia slipped aboard a ship and fled to Calais, on the northern coast of France, with about fifty pounds to her name.
[00:18:49] She spent her last months in cheap rented rooms, ill, drinking heavily to dull the pain, and consuming increasing amounts of laudanum, which was a liquid form of opium that was the standard painkiller of the age.
[00:19:05] Horatia, then thirteen years old, nursed her mother, and pawned what little they had left when the money ran out.
[00:19:14] Emma died on the 15th of January, 1815, at the age of forty-nine.
[00:19:21] The most painted woman of her generation, the friend of a queen, the love of Britain's greatest hero, was buried in a simple grave in a foreign town, paid for by a kind acquaintance. The exact location of the grave was later lost.
[00:19:39] As for Horatia, she made it back to England, was taken in by Nelson's relatives, and went on to live a long, quiet, respectable life as the wife of a country clergyman.
[00:19:53] She raised ten children, and lived until the ripe old age of eighty.
[00:19:58] All her life, she proudly acknowledged Nelson as her father.
[00:20:04] And all her life, to the very end, she refused to admit that Emma Hamilton, the woman who had raised her, hidden her, fled to France with her, and died in poverty beside her, was her mother.
[00:20:18] Emma had climbed, against every rule of her society, from a blacksmith's cottage to the palaces of Europe.
[00:20:26] That society took its revenge in the end, and it reached even into her daughter's heart.
[00:20:34] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, and with that comes the end of this three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton. This, believe it or not, was originally a single episode, but there was so much detail and it got so long that I split it into three.
[00:20:51] And even then, there was a lot of wonderful stuff I had to leave out, but perhaps it has whetted your appetite to discover more.
[00:21:00] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
