Born into poverty, Emma Hamilton was passed between wealthy men before becoming a celebrated performer, diplomat’s wife, and friend of Naples’s powerful queen.
Her influence helped Nelson’s fleet prepare for a decisive battle, before their lives finally came together in Naples.
Tap a purple word for its meaning. Tap a time to play from there.
[00:00:05] 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.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's part two of our three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:00:30] In part one, we followed Horatio Nelson from a Norfolk parsonage to the Battle of the Nile, losing an eye and an arm along the way.
[00:00:40] In the rest of the mini-series, today's episode and the next one, we turn to the woman he loved, Emma Hamilton.
[00:00:49] It's an amazing story of adaptation, love, desire, cunning, and how one woman rose from nothing to become the most famous woman in Europe.
[00:01:02] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:09] It is the autumn of 1785, and a letter is making its way slowly across Europe, from London to Naples.
[00:01:19] It is addressed to Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples. The sender is his nephew, a well-born young Englishman called Charles Greville.
[00:01:34] The letter is long, polite, and very carefully worded. And underneath all the politeness, is a business proposal.
[00:01:46] Greville has something he would like to send his uncle. He describes the merchandise in glowing terms. Delivery can be arranged in the spring, and he is confident that his uncle will be delighted once the goods arrive.
[00:02:05] The goods in question are not a painting, or a case of wine, or a thoroughbred horse.
[00:02:11] They are a twenty-year-old woman.
[00:02:15] Her name is Emma. And at that moment, in a small house on the edge of London, she is going about her life with no idea at all that her future is being negotiated, by post, between her lover and his uncle.
[00:02:33] So, how does a human being end up as goods to be traded between two English gentlemen?
[00:02:41] To answer that, we need to go back twenty years.
[00:02:45] "Emma" was born Amy Lyon, on the 26th of April, 1765, in a small village in Cheshire, in the northwest of England.
[00:02:58] Her father was a blacksmith, but he died when she was two months old.
[00:03:05] Her mother found herself suddenly a widow with a baby to look after, which was not a great position to be in in eighteenth-century England.
[00:03:15] She took Emma to live with her grandmother in a village in north Wales. There was very little money. There was no school. The young girl never got a formal education, and her spelling would remain famously chaotic for the rest of her life.
[00:03:35] At twelve years old, she was sent out to work as a maid, cleaning and looking after other people's children.
[00:03:43] And at fourteen, she moved to London.
[00:03:48] Now, the London of the late 1770s was a dangerous place for a poor teenage girl with no family connections and no money. There were semi-respectable jobs, as maids and shop girls, that paid almost nothing.
[00:04:07] And there was another world, of theatres, pleasure gardens and wealthy men.
[00:04:14] Emma existed in both, but naturally gravitated towards the latter.
[00:04:22] She was, by all accounts, stunningly beautiful. But not just beautiful in a traditional, good-looking way; she was mesmerising, striking.
[00:04:36] She found work at a theatre, looking after the actresses. And, the story goes, she posed as the "Goddess of Health" at a strange establishment run by a showman who claimed electricity could cure all illnesses.
[00:04:54] The details of these years are a little murky, and some of the stories were probably invented later by her enemies.
[00:05:03] But what is certain is that by the age of fifteen, Emma had been noticed.
[00:05:12] The man who noticed her was Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, who was a rich young aristocrat with a large country estate called Uppark. He installed her there as a kind of entertainer and hostess for his hunting parties. One story has her dancing on his dining room table naked for his guests.
[00:05:37] She was fifteen years old, surrounded by men twice her age, and entirely dependent on her host's continued interest.
[00:05:47] Within a year, she was pregnant.
[00:05:50] And Sir Harry did what rich men in his position generally did in the eighteenth century when a teenage mistress became pregnant. He abandoned her.
[00:06:02] Emma, in her desperation, wrote to another man she had met at Uppark, a quieter, more calculating aristocrat called Charles Greville. She begged him for help.
[00:06:17] Greville agreed to take her in, but he had conditions. The baby, a girl, would be sent away, to be raised by Emma's relatives and later by strangers. And Emma would get a new, settled identity: from now on, she was to be plain "Mrs Emma Hart". The "Mrs" was pure fiction; it was the polite way of keeping a mistress.
[00:06:46] She would live quietly in a small house on the edge of London, see nobody from her old life, and belong to him alone.
[00:06:57] She was sixteen, and with no other options, or at least no other good options, she agreed.
[00:07:05] Now, it's not exactly clear why Greville took her in, but one hypothesis is that he thought he could make money from her. Specifically, as an artist's model. She had this stunning look, remember, and people wanted portraits of beautiful people on their wall. He took her to be painted by one of the most fashionable portrait painters in London, George Romney. Whether or not Greville ever made any money from it is unclear, but what certainly did happen is that George Romney, the portrait painter, became utterly obsessed with Emma.
[00:07:50] Between 1782 and 1786, Emma sat for him more than a hundred times. He painted her as goddesses, as saints, as characters from mythology: as Circe the enchantress, as Cassandra, as Joan of Arc.
[00:08:11] And Emma was far more than a pretty face to be copied. She had a natural gift for performance, she could hold an emotion for hours on end, which made her an ideal artist's model.
[00:08:26] Prints of the paintings were copied and sold across the country, and lo and behold, the blacksmith's daughter became one of the most recognisable faces in Britain.
[00:08:38] She was, in effect, the eighteenth-century version of a supermodel, a woman whose face everyone knew, attached to a person almost nobody had actually met.
[00:08:52] But to Greville, Emma had become a problem.
[00:08:58] He had expensive tastes and not enough money to sustain them. The solution, he decided, was to marry a rich heiress. But no respectable heiress would marry a man who openly kept a famous young mistress, so this meant finding a way of getting rid of Emma.
[00:09:21] So Greville came up with a plan, and this is where the letter from the start of this episode comes in.
[00:09:30] His uncle was Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador in Naples. At the time, Naples was the capital of its own country, the Kingdom of Naples, which covered the southern half of Italy. The same king also ruled the neighbouring island of Sicily, and both kingdoms were run from his court in Naples.
[00:09:53] Sir William was in his mid-fifties, recently widowed, charming, cultured, and, most importantly, rich.
[00:10:03] He had lived in Naples for more than twenty years, and had become Europe's leading authority on volcanoes. He had even climbed Vesuvius dozens of times to peer inside. He was a collector, too, and had an extensive collection of ancient Greek vases.
[00:10:23] Crucially, from Greville's point of view, he was also childless, and Greville hoped to inherit his fortune.
[00:10:31] So Greville sat down and wrote that long, polite, carefully worded letter, proposing, in the most roundabout language possible, a deal.
[00:10:43] Sir William would take Emma off his hands. She would live in Naples as the old man's companion, and, in time, his mistress.
[00:10:53] Greville would be free to marry his rich heiress, and would stay in his rich uncle's good books.
[00:11:02] Emma was told none of this.
[00:11:05] She was told she was going to Naples for a holiday, six months or so, while Greville sorted out some business up in Scotland.
[00:11:14] She arrived in April 1786, on her twenty-first birthday, and settled into the ambassador's residence to wait for the man she loved, Charles Greville, to come and collect her.
[00:11:27] He never came.
[00:11:29] Slowly, over months of unanswered letters, Emma worked out what had happened. She had been passed from one man to another, like a parcel, without anyone thinking to ask her.
[00:11:44] In her letters to Greville, you can get a sense of what was going through her head. And it's not particularly surprising. She rages, she pleads, and she threatens. Greville's reply was cold and simple: be sensible, and oblige my uncle.
[00:12:04] Emma was twenty-one, alone in a foreign country, and entirely dependent on yet another man she had been handed over to like a piece of property.
[00:12:16] So she made a decision. If this was the hand she had been dealt, the situation life had given her, then that was that. She would make the most out of it.
[00:12:30] She learned Italian, and then French, well enough to charm diplomats and translate at court. She trained her singing voice until professional musicians turned their heads.
[00:12:43] Sir William was a passionate collector, his house was filled with classical statues and paintings.
[00:12:49] Emma studied them all. She climbed Vesuvius with Sir William, sang for his guests, and slowly, an arrangement that had begun as a cynical transaction between two men started to look a little more equal.
[00:13:05] And out of all this, she invented something entirely new. She called them her "Attitudes".
[00:13:16] In front of an audience, wearing simple flowing dresses and using nothing but a couple of shawls, she would strike a series of poses, transforming herself from one figure of ancient history or mythology into another.
[00:13:32] One moment she was Medea, the Greek sorceress. The next, Cleopatra, then a dancing nymph, then a grieving mother, then a Neapolitan street seller.
[00:13:44] It might sound like a simple game of charades, where you act something out and everyone else has to guess. But clearly it was much more powerful than that.
[00:13:56] This was the late eighteenth century, so there are no live recordings of her performances, but we have the written accounts, and drawings of her poses that were sold as prints across Europe. Audiences were clearly mesmerised.
[00:14:13] The German writer Goethe was travelling through Italy in 1787, and he watched one of these performances. He wrote that the spectator could hardly believe his eyes, that here was in living movement what the greatest artists had only managed to capture in stone.
[00:14:33] The Attitudes made Emma a celebrity across Europe, one of the sights that visitors touring the continent simply had to see.
[00:14:43] Fashionable women began copying the simple, flowing, ancient-Greek style of dress she performed in. Without meaning to, the girl from Cheshire had become one of the most influential women in European art and fashion.
[00:15:00] And Sir William, to the dismay of his aristocratic relatives, fell in love.
[00:15:07] Emma was a beautiful, younger woman, that much is clear, but she was intelligent, great company, and she began to share in his interests.
[00:15:19] It wasn't a one-way thing, though; the feeling was mutual. It had been an arranged relationship, and there was a thirty-four-year age gap between the pair, but they got on fabulously, and she became deeply fond of him.
[00:15:37] In 1791, during a visit to London, the sixty-year-old ambassador and the twenty-six-year-old blacksmith's daughter were married.
[00:15:48] Amy Lyon, then Emma Hart, was now Lady Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples.
[00:15:58] The girl who had scrubbed floors as a twelve-year-old maid, the girl who had quite possibly sold herself on the streets of London, she was now the hostess of one of the most glamorous diplomatic houses in Europe.
[00:16:13] And she was exceptionally good at it; even the snobs who sneered at her background admitted that she ran the embassy brilliantly.
[00:16:23] One thing she never lost, though, was her accent. Emma spoke English with the strong accent of the northwest of England. In Naples, it simply didn't matter though; she charmed the aristocracy of Europe in Italian and French, where her accent simply sounded "foreign", and she was somewhat immune to the snobbery that would have existed had she been speaking English with English aristocrats.
[00:16:51] More surprising still, she became the best friend and closest confidante of Maria Carolina, the Queen of Naples. The two women saw each other constantly and wrote to each other sometimes several times a day.
[00:17:08] And Maria Carolina held real power. Her husband, King Ferdinand, was a bit of a fool, and preferred hunting and fishing to the business of government. Most of that he left to his wife. She sat on the royal council, and in practice she ran much of the kingdom.
[00:17:29] Now, business between two countries normally flowed from king and ministers to ambassador. In Naples, much of it now flowed through this friendship between two women, Maria Carolina and Lady Hamilton.
[00:17:48] By any measure of her world, Emma had reached the top.
[00:17:53] Meanwhile, there was a revolution going on in France. In 1792, the revolutionaries threw the French royal family into prison, including Marie Antoinette, who just so happened to be Maria Carolina's sister.
[00:18:10] To state the obvious, Maria Carolina had little time for France and its revolution, and this would become the driving force of Neapolitan politics.
[00:18:21] By 1793, the revolutionaries had executed Louis XVI, and France was at war with Britain and with most of its neighbours.
[00:18:31] In September 1793, a short, slight, ambitious young navy captain sailed into the Bay of Naples, asking for Neapolitan soldiers to help in the fight against the French.
[00:18:46] His name was Horatio Nelson.
[00:18:49] On that first visit, nothing of particular note happened. He stayed for a few days, was entertained at the embassy, and sailed away again.
[00:19:00] Five years later, in the summer of 1798, Nelson was back in the Mediterranean, hunting Napoleon's fleet.
[00:19:10] We touched on this in the last episode, but let me give you the full story.
[00:19:16] Nelson's ships were running dangerously low on food and water. He needed a friendly port, somewhere to get fresh supplies. The obvious place was Sicily, which was ruled by the King of Naples.
[00:19:32] But there was a problem: Naples was officially neutral, and a neutral kingdom could not openly supply a British war fleet.
[00:19:44] Emma went to the Queen, Maria Carolina, and asked her to help.
[00:19:50] We don't know exactly what was said. But we know the Queen trusted Emma completely, and we know she was willing to take risks for her friend that she might not have taken for an ambassador.
[00:20:04] Exactly how much difference her influence made is still argued over by historians, but the outcome is clear. Orders went out to Sicily, Nelson's ships were allowed to dock at the port of Syracuse. They were given everything they needed, and the hunt continued.
[00:20:25] A week later, Nelson found the French fleet anchored at the mouth of the Nile, in Egypt, and destroyed it almost completely. It was one of the greatest naval victories in history, and it left Napoleon's army completely cut off.
[00:20:42] Nelson believed that without Emma's assistance, this would not have been possible.
[00:20:49] So, in September 1798, the most celebrated man in Europe sailed back into the Bay of Naples, wounded, exhausted, and looking for somewhere to recover.
[00:21:03] Waiting for him on the quayside, at the head of the biggest welcome party Naples had ever thrown, was Emma Hamilton.
[00:21:12] The blacksmith's daughter and the parson's son were about to collide.
[00:21:17] And that is what we will leave for part three.
[00:21:22] OK, then, that is it for part two of our three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:21:28] Next up, in part three, it's the love affair itself: the strange three-sided household, the scandal that gripped Britain, Trafalgar, and the dying wish that Britain chose to ignore.
[00:21:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:46] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
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Born into poverty, Emma Hamilton was passed between wealthy men before becoming a celebrated performer, diplomat’s wife, and friend of Naples’s powerful queen.
Her influence helped Nelson’s fleet prepare for a decisive battle, before their lives finally came together in Naples.
[00:00:05] 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.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's part two of our three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:00:30] In part one, we followed Horatio Nelson from a Norfolk parsonage to the Battle of the Nile, losing an eye and an arm along the way.
[00:00:40] In the rest of the mini-series, today's episode and the next one, we turn to the woman he loved, Emma Hamilton.
[00:00:49] It's an amazing story of adaptation, love, desire, cunning, and how one woman rose from nothing to become the most famous woman in Europe.
[00:01:02] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:09] It is the autumn of 1785, and a letter is making its way slowly across Europe, from London to Naples.
[00:01:19] It is addressed to Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples. The sender is his nephew, a well-born young Englishman called Charles Greville.
[00:01:34] The letter is long, polite, and very carefully worded. And underneath all the politeness, is a business proposal.
[00:01:46] Greville has something he would like to send his uncle. He describes the merchandise in glowing terms. Delivery can be arranged in the spring, and he is confident that his uncle will be delighted once the goods arrive.
[00:02:05] The goods in question are not a painting, or a case of wine, or a thoroughbred horse.
[00:02:11] They are a twenty-year-old woman.
[00:02:15] Her name is Emma. And at that moment, in a small house on the edge of London, she is going about her life with no idea at all that her future is being negotiated, by post, between her lover and his uncle.
[00:02:33] So, how does a human being end up as goods to be traded between two English gentlemen?
[00:02:41] To answer that, we need to go back twenty years.
[00:02:45] "Emma" was born Amy Lyon, on the 26th of April, 1765, in a small village in Cheshire, in the northwest of England.
[00:02:58] Her father was a blacksmith, but he died when she was two months old.
[00:03:05] Her mother found herself suddenly a widow with a baby to look after, which was not a great position to be in in eighteenth-century England.
[00:03:15] She took Emma to live with her grandmother in a village in north Wales. There was very little money. There was no school. The young girl never got a formal education, and her spelling would remain famously chaotic for the rest of her life.
[00:03:35] At twelve years old, she was sent out to work as a maid, cleaning and looking after other people's children.
[00:03:43] And at fourteen, she moved to London.
[00:03:48] Now, the London of the late 1770s was a dangerous place for a poor teenage girl with no family connections and no money. There were semi-respectable jobs, as maids and shop girls, that paid almost nothing.
[00:04:07] And there was another world, of theatres, pleasure gardens and wealthy men.
[00:04:14] Emma existed in both, but naturally gravitated towards the latter.
[00:04:22] She was, by all accounts, stunningly beautiful. But not just beautiful in a traditional, good-looking way; she was mesmerising, striking.
[00:04:36] She found work at a theatre, looking after the actresses. And, the story goes, she posed as the "Goddess of Health" at a strange establishment run by a showman who claimed electricity could cure all illnesses.
[00:04:54] The details of these years are a little murky, and some of the stories were probably invented later by her enemies.
[00:05:03] But what is certain is that by the age of fifteen, Emma had been noticed.
[00:05:12] The man who noticed her was Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, who was a rich young aristocrat with a large country estate called Uppark. He installed her there as a kind of entertainer and hostess for his hunting parties. One story has her dancing on his dining room table naked for his guests.
[00:05:37] She was fifteen years old, surrounded by men twice her age, and entirely dependent on her host's continued interest.
[00:05:47] Within a year, she was pregnant.
[00:05:50] And Sir Harry did what rich men in his position generally did in the eighteenth century when a teenage mistress became pregnant. He abandoned her.
[00:06:02] Emma, in her desperation, wrote to another man she had met at Uppark, a quieter, more calculating aristocrat called Charles Greville. She begged him for help.
[00:06:17] Greville agreed to take her in, but he had conditions. The baby, a girl, would be sent away, to be raised by Emma's relatives and later by strangers. And Emma would get a new, settled identity: from now on, she was to be plain "Mrs Emma Hart". The "Mrs" was pure fiction; it was the polite way of keeping a mistress.
[00:06:46] She would live quietly in a small house on the edge of London, see nobody from her old life, and belong to him alone.
[00:06:57] She was sixteen, and with no other options, or at least no other good options, she agreed.
[00:07:05] Now, it's not exactly clear why Greville took her in, but one hypothesis is that he thought he could make money from her. Specifically, as an artist's model. She had this stunning look, remember, and people wanted portraits of beautiful people on their wall. He took her to be painted by one of the most fashionable portrait painters in London, George Romney. Whether or not Greville ever made any money from it is unclear, but what certainly did happen is that George Romney, the portrait painter, became utterly obsessed with Emma.
[00:07:50] Between 1782 and 1786, Emma sat for him more than a hundred times. He painted her as goddesses, as saints, as characters from mythology: as Circe the enchantress, as Cassandra, as Joan of Arc.
[00:08:11] And Emma was far more than a pretty face to be copied. She had a natural gift for performance, she could hold an emotion for hours on end, which made her an ideal artist's model.
[00:08:26] Prints of the paintings were copied and sold across the country, and lo and behold, the blacksmith's daughter became one of the most recognisable faces in Britain.
[00:08:38] She was, in effect, the eighteenth-century version of a supermodel, a woman whose face everyone knew, attached to a person almost nobody had actually met.
[00:08:52] But to Greville, Emma had become a problem.
[00:08:58] He had expensive tastes and not enough money to sustain them. The solution, he decided, was to marry a rich heiress. But no respectable heiress would marry a man who openly kept a famous young mistress, so this meant finding a way of getting rid of Emma.
[00:09:21] So Greville came up with a plan, and this is where the letter from the start of this episode comes in.
[00:09:30] His uncle was Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador in Naples. At the time, Naples was the capital of its own country, the Kingdom of Naples, which covered the southern half of Italy. The same king also ruled the neighbouring island of Sicily, and both kingdoms were run from his court in Naples.
[00:09:53] Sir William was in his mid-fifties, recently widowed, charming, cultured, and, most importantly, rich.
[00:10:03] He had lived in Naples for more than twenty years, and had become Europe's leading authority on volcanoes. He had even climbed Vesuvius dozens of times to peer inside. He was a collector, too, and had an extensive collection of ancient Greek vases.
[00:10:23] Crucially, from Greville's point of view, he was also childless, and Greville hoped to inherit his fortune.
[00:10:31] So Greville sat down and wrote that long, polite, carefully worded letter, proposing, in the most roundabout language possible, a deal.
[00:10:43] Sir William would take Emma off his hands. She would live in Naples as the old man's companion, and, in time, his mistress.
[00:10:53] Greville would be free to marry his rich heiress, and would stay in his rich uncle's good books.
[00:11:02] Emma was told none of this.
[00:11:05] She was told she was going to Naples for a holiday, six months or so, while Greville sorted out some business up in Scotland.
[00:11:14] She arrived in April 1786, on her twenty-first birthday, and settled into the ambassador's residence to wait for the man she loved, Charles Greville, to come and collect her.
[00:11:27] He never came.
[00:11:29] Slowly, over months of unanswered letters, Emma worked out what had happened. She had been passed from one man to another, like a parcel, without anyone thinking to ask her.
[00:11:44] In her letters to Greville, you can get a sense of what was going through her head. And it's not particularly surprising. She rages, she pleads, and she threatens. Greville's reply was cold and simple: be sensible, and oblige my uncle.
[00:12:04] Emma was twenty-one, alone in a foreign country, and entirely dependent on yet another man she had been handed over to like a piece of property.
[00:12:16] So she made a decision. If this was the hand she had been dealt, the situation life had given her, then that was that. She would make the most out of it.
[00:12:30] She learned Italian, and then French, well enough to charm diplomats and translate at court. She trained her singing voice until professional musicians turned their heads.
[00:12:43] Sir William was a passionate collector, his house was filled with classical statues and paintings.
[00:12:49] Emma studied them all. She climbed Vesuvius with Sir William, sang for his guests, and slowly, an arrangement that had begun as a cynical transaction between two men started to look a little more equal.
[00:13:05] And out of all this, she invented something entirely new. She called them her "Attitudes".
[00:13:16] In front of an audience, wearing simple flowing dresses and using nothing but a couple of shawls, she would strike a series of poses, transforming herself from one figure of ancient history or mythology into another.
[00:13:32] One moment she was Medea, the Greek sorceress. The next, Cleopatra, then a dancing nymph, then a grieving mother, then a Neapolitan street seller.
[00:13:44] It might sound like a simple game of charades, where you act something out and everyone else has to guess. But clearly it was much more powerful than that.
[00:13:56] This was the late eighteenth century, so there are no live recordings of her performances, but we have the written accounts, and drawings of her poses that were sold as prints across Europe. Audiences were clearly mesmerised.
[00:14:13] The German writer Goethe was travelling through Italy in 1787, and he watched one of these performances. He wrote that the spectator could hardly believe his eyes, that here was in living movement what the greatest artists had only managed to capture in stone.
[00:14:33] The Attitudes made Emma a celebrity across Europe, one of the sights that visitors touring the continent simply had to see.
[00:14:43] Fashionable women began copying the simple, flowing, ancient-Greek style of dress she performed in. Without meaning to, the girl from Cheshire had become one of the most influential women in European art and fashion.
[00:15:00] And Sir William, to the dismay of his aristocratic relatives, fell in love.
[00:15:07] Emma was a beautiful, younger woman, that much is clear, but she was intelligent, great company, and she began to share in his interests.
[00:15:19] It wasn't a one-way thing, though; the feeling was mutual. It had been an arranged relationship, and there was a thirty-four-year age gap between the pair, but they got on fabulously, and she became deeply fond of him.
[00:15:37] In 1791, during a visit to London, the sixty-year-old ambassador and the twenty-six-year-old blacksmith's daughter were married.
[00:15:48] Amy Lyon, then Emma Hart, was now Lady Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples.
[00:15:58] The girl who had scrubbed floors as a twelve-year-old maid, the girl who had quite possibly sold herself on the streets of London, she was now the hostess of one of the most glamorous diplomatic houses in Europe.
[00:16:13] And she was exceptionally good at it; even the snobs who sneered at her background admitted that she ran the embassy brilliantly.
[00:16:23] One thing she never lost, though, was her accent. Emma spoke English with the strong accent of the northwest of England. In Naples, it simply didn't matter though; she charmed the aristocracy of Europe in Italian and French, where her accent simply sounded "foreign", and she was somewhat immune to the snobbery that would have existed had she been speaking English with English aristocrats.
[00:16:51] More surprising still, she became the best friend and closest confidante of Maria Carolina, the Queen of Naples. The two women saw each other constantly and wrote to each other sometimes several times a day.
[00:17:08] And Maria Carolina held real power. Her husband, King Ferdinand, was a bit of a fool, and preferred hunting and fishing to the business of government. Most of that he left to his wife. She sat on the royal council, and in practice she ran much of the kingdom.
[00:17:29] Now, business between two countries normally flowed from king and ministers to ambassador. In Naples, much of it now flowed through this friendship between two women, Maria Carolina and Lady Hamilton.
[00:17:48] By any measure of her world, Emma had reached the top.
[00:17:53] Meanwhile, there was a revolution going on in France. In 1792, the revolutionaries threw the French royal family into prison, including Marie Antoinette, who just so happened to be Maria Carolina's sister.
[00:18:10] To state the obvious, Maria Carolina had little time for France and its revolution, and this would become the driving force of Neapolitan politics.
[00:18:21] By 1793, the revolutionaries had executed Louis XVI, and France was at war with Britain and with most of its neighbours.
[00:18:31] In September 1793, a short, slight, ambitious young navy captain sailed into the Bay of Naples, asking for Neapolitan soldiers to help in the fight against the French.
[00:18:46] His name was Horatio Nelson.
[00:18:49] On that first visit, nothing of particular note happened. He stayed for a few days, was entertained at the embassy, and sailed away again.
[00:19:00] Five years later, in the summer of 1798, Nelson was back in the Mediterranean, hunting Napoleon's fleet.
[00:19:10] We touched on this in the last episode, but let me give you the full story.
[00:19:16] Nelson's ships were running dangerously low on food and water. He needed a friendly port, somewhere to get fresh supplies. The obvious place was Sicily, which was ruled by the King of Naples.
[00:19:32] But there was a problem: Naples was officially neutral, and a neutral kingdom could not openly supply a British war fleet.
[00:19:44] Emma went to the Queen, Maria Carolina, and asked her to help.
[00:19:50] We don't know exactly what was said. But we know the Queen trusted Emma completely, and we know she was willing to take risks for her friend that she might not have taken for an ambassador.
[00:20:04] Exactly how much difference her influence made is still argued over by historians, but the outcome is clear. Orders went out to Sicily, Nelson's ships were allowed to dock at the port of Syracuse. They were given everything they needed, and the hunt continued.
[00:20:25] A week later, Nelson found the French fleet anchored at the mouth of the Nile, in Egypt, and destroyed it almost completely. It was one of the greatest naval victories in history, and it left Napoleon's army completely cut off.
[00:20:42] Nelson believed that without Emma's assistance, this would not have been possible.
[00:20:49] So, in September 1798, the most celebrated man in Europe sailed back into the Bay of Naples, wounded, exhausted, and looking for somewhere to recover.
[00:21:03] Waiting for him on the quayside, at the head of the biggest welcome party Naples had ever thrown, was Emma Hamilton.
[00:21:12] The blacksmith's daughter and the parson's son were about to collide.
[00:21:17] And that is what we will leave for part three.
[00:21:22] OK, then, that is it for part two of our three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:21:28] Next up, in part three, it's the love affair itself: the strange three-sided household, the scandal that gripped Britain, Trafalgar, and the dying wish that Britain chose to ignore.
[00:21:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:46] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] 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.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's part two of our three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:00:30] In part one, we followed Horatio Nelson from a Norfolk parsonage to the Battle of the Nile, losing an eye and an arm along the way.
[00:00:40] In the rest of the mini-series, today's episode and the next one, we turn to the woman he loved, Emma Hamilton.
[00:00:49] It's an amazing story of adaptation, love, desire, cunning, and how one woman rose from nothing to become the most famous woman in Europe.
[00:01:02] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:09] It is the autumn of 1785, and a letter is making its way slowly across Europe, from London to Naples.
[00:01:19] It is addressed to Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples. The sender is his nephew, a well-born young Englishman called Charles Greville.
[00:01:34] The letter is long, polite, and very carefully worded. And underneath all the politeness, is a business proposal.
[00:01:46] Greville has something he would like to send his uncle. He describes the merchandise in glowing terms. Delivery can be arranged in the spring, and he is confident that his uncle will be delighted once the goods arrive.
[00:02:05] The goods in question are not a painting, or a case of wine, or a thoroughbred horse.
[00:02:11] They are a twenty-year-old woman.
[00:02:15] Her name is Emma. And at that moment, in a small house on the edge of London, she is going about her life with no idea at all that her future is being negotiated, by post, between her lover and his uncle.
[00:02:33] So, how does a human being end up as goods to be traded between two English gentlemen?
[00:02:41] To answer that, we need to go back twenty years.
[00:02:45] "Emma" was born Amy Lyon, on the 26th of April, 1765, in a small village in Cheshire, in the northwest of England.
[00:02:58] Her father was a blacksmith, but he died when she was two months old.
[00:03:05] Her mother found herself suddenly a widow with a baby to look after, which was not a great position to be in in eighteenth-century England.
[00:03:15] She took Emma to live with her grandmother in a village in north Wales. There was very little money. There was no school. The young girl never got a formal education, and her spelling would remain famously chaotic for the rest of her life.
[00:03:35] At twelve years old, she was sent out to work as a maid, cleaning and looking after other people's children.
[00:03:43] And at fourteen, she moved to London.
[00:03:48] Now, the London of the late 1770s was a dangerous place for a poor teenage girl with no family connections and no money. There were semi-respectable jobs, as maids and shop girls, that paid almost nothing.
[00:04:07] And there was another world, of theatres, pleasure gardens and wealthy men.
[00:04:14] Emma existed in both, but naturally gravitated towards the latter.
[00:04:22] She was, by all accounts, stunningly beautiful. But not just beautiful in a traditional, good-looking way; she was mesmerising, striking.
[00:04:36] She found work at a theatre, looking after the actresses. And, the story goes, she posed as the "Goddess of Health" at a strange establishment run by a showman who claimed electricity could cure all illnesses.
[00:04:54] The details of these years are a little murky, and some of the stories were probably invented later by her enemies.
[00:05:03] But what is certain is that by the age of fifteen, Emma had been noticed.
[00:05:12] The man who noticed her was Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, who was a rich young aristocrat with a large country estate called Uppark. He installed her there as a kind of entertainer and hostess for his hunting parties. One story has her dancing on his dining room table naked for his guests.
[00:05:37] She was fifteen years old, surrounded by men twice her age, and entirely dependent on her host's continued interest.
[00:05:47] Within a year, she was pregnant.
[00:05:50] And Sir Harry did what rich men in his position generally did in the eighteenth century when a teenage mistress became pregnant. He abandoned her.
[00:06:02] Emma, in her desperation, wrote to another man she had met at Uppark, a quieter, more calculating aristocrat called Charles Greville. She begged him for help.
[00:06:17] Greville agreed to take her in, but he had conditions. The baby, a girl, would be sent away, to be raised by Emma's relatives and later by strangers. And Emma would get a new, settled identity: from now on, she was to be plain "Mrs Emma Hart". The "Mrs" was pure fiction; it was the polite way of keeping a mistress.
[00:06:46] She would live quietly in a small house on the edge of London, see nobody from her old life, and belong to him alone.
[00:06:57] She was sixteen, and with no other options, or at least no other good options, she agreed.
[00:07:05] Now, it's not exactly clear why Greville took her in, but one hypothesis is that he thought he could make money from her. Specifically, as an artist's model. She had this stunning look, remember, and people wanted portraits of beautiful people on their wall. He took her to be painted by one of the most fashionable portrait painters in London, George Romney. Whether or not Greville ever made any money from it is unclear, but what certainly did happen is that George Romney, the portrait painter, became utterly obsessed with Emma.
[00:07:50] Between 1782 and 1786, Emma sat for him more than a hundred times. He painted her as goddesses, as saints, as characters from mythology: as Circe the enchantress, as Cassandra, as Joan of Arc.
[00:08:11] And Emma was far more than a pretty face to be copied. She had a natural gift for performance, she could hold an emotion for hours on end, which made her an ideal artist's model.
[00:08:26] Prints of the paintings were copied and sold across the country, and lo and behold, the blacksmith's daughter became one of the most recognisable faces in Britain.
[00:08:38] She was, in effect, the eighteenth-century version of a supermodel, a woman whose face everyone knew, attached to a person almost nobody had actually met.
[00:08:52] But to Greville, Emma had become a problem.
[00:08:58] He had expensive tastes and not enough money to sustain them. The solution, he decided, was to marry a rich heiress. But no respectable heiress would marry a man who openly kept a famous young mistress, so this meant finding a way of getting rid of Emma.
[00:09:21] So Greville came up with a plan, and this is where the letter from the start of this episode comes in.
[00:09:30] His uncle was Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador in Naples. At the time, Naples was the capital of its own country, the Kingdom of Naples, which covered the southern half of Italy. The same king also ruled the neighbouring island of Sicily, and both kingdoms were run from his court in Naples.
[00:09:53] Sir William was in his mid-fifties, recently widowed, charming, cultured, and, most importantly, rich.
[00:10:03] He had lived in Naples for more than twenty years, and had become Europe's leading authority on volcanoes. He had even climbed Vesuvius dozens of times to peer inside. He was a collector, too, and had an extensive collection of ancient Greek vases.
[00:10:23] Crucially, from Greville's point of view, he was also childless, and Greville hoped to inherit his fortune.
[00:10:31] So Greville sat down and wrote that long, polite, carefully worded letter, proposing, in the most roundabout language possible, a deal.
[00:10:43] Sir William would take Emma off his hands. She would live in Naples as the old man's companion, and, in time, his mistress.
[00:10:53] Greville would be free to marry his rich heiress, and would stay in his rich uncle's good books.
[00:11:02] Emma was told none of this.
[00:11:05] She was told she was going to Naples for a holiday, six months or so, while Greville sorted out some business up in Scotland.
[00:11:14] She arrived in April 1786, on her twenty-first birthday, and settled into the ambassador's residence to wait for the man she loved, Charles Greville, to come and collect her.
[00:11:27] He never came.
[00:11:29] Slowly, over months of unanswered letters, Emma worked out what had happened. She had been passed from one man to another, like a parcel, without anyone thinking to ask her.
[00:11:44] In her letters to Greville, you can get a sense of what was going through her head. And it's not particularly surprising. She rages, she pleads, and she threatens. Greville's reply was cold and simple: be sensible, and oblige my uncle.
[00:12:04] Emma was twenty-one, alone in a foreign country, and entirely dependent on yet another man she had been handed over to like a piece of property.
[00:12:16] So she made a decision. If this was the hand she had been dealt, the situation life had given her, then that was that. She would make the most out of it.
[00:12:30] She learned Italian, and then French, well enough to charm diplomats and translate at court. She trained her singing voice until professional musicians turned their heads.
[00:12:43] Sir William was a passionate collector, his house was filled with classical statues and paintings.
[00:12:49] Emma studied them all. She climbed Vesuvius with Sir William, sang for his guests, and slowly, an arrangement that had begun as a cynical transaction between two men started to look a little more equal.
[00:13:05] And out of all this, she invented something entirely new. She called them her "Attitudes".
[00:13:16] In front of an audience, wearing simple flowing dresses and using nothing but a couple of shawls, she would strike a series of poses, transforming herself from one figure of ancient history or mythology into another.
[00:13:32] One moment she was Medea, the Greek sorceress. The next, Cleopatra, then a dancing nymph, then a grieving mother, then a Neapolitan street seller.
[00:13:44] It might sound like a simple game of charades, where you act something out and everyone else has to guess. But clearly it was much more powerful than that.
[00:13:56] This was the late eighteenth century, so there are no live recordings of her performances, but we have the written accounts, and drawings of her poses that were sold as prints across Europe. Audiences were clearly mesmerised.
[00:14:13] The German writer Goethe was travelling through Italy in 1787, and he watched one of these performances. He wrote that the spectator could hardly believe his eyes, that here was in living movement what the greatest artists had only managed to capture in stone.
[00:14:33] The Attitudes made Emma a celebrity across Europe, one of the sights that visitors touring the continent simply had to see.
[00:14:43] Fashionable women began copying the simple, flowing, ancient-Greek style of dress she performed in. Without meaning to, the girl from Cheshire had become one of the most influential women in European art and fashion.
[00:15:00] And Sir William, to the dismay of his aristocratic relatives, fell in love.
[00:15:07] Emma was a beautiful, younger woman, that much is clear, but she was intelligent, great company, and she began to share in his interests.
[00:15:19] It wasn't a one-way thing, though; the feeling was mutual. It had been an arranged relationship, and there was a thirty-four-year age gap between the pair, but they got on fabulously, and she became deeply fond of him.
[00:15:37] In 1791, during a visit to London, the sixty-year-old ambassador and the twenty-six-year-old blacksmith's daughter were married.
[00:15:48] Amy Lyon, then Emma Hart, was now Lady Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples.
[00:15:58] The girl who had scrubbed floors as a twelve-year-old maid, the girl who had quite possibly sold herself on the streets of London, she was now the hostess of one of the most glamorous diplomatic houses in Europe.
[00:16:13] And she was exceptionally good at it; even the snobs who sneered at her background admitted that she ran the embassy brilliantly.
[00:16:23] One thing she never lost, though, was her accent. Emma spoke English with the strong accent of the northwest of England. In Naples, it simply didn't matter though; she charmed the aristocracy of Europe in Italian and French, where her accent simply sounded "foreign", and she was somewhat immune to the snobbery that would have existed had she been speaking English with English aristocrats.
[00:16:51] More surprising still, she became the best friend and closest confidante of Maria Carolina, the Queen of Naples. The two women saw each other constantly and wrote to each other sometimes several times a day.
[00:17:08] And Maria Carolina held real power. Her husband, King Ferdinand, was a bit of a fool, and preferred hunting and fishing to the business of government. Most of that he left to his wife. She sat on the royal council, and in practice she ran much of the kingdom.
[00:17:29] Now, business between two countries normally flowed from king and ministers to ambassador. In Naples, much of it now flowed through this friendship between two women, Maria Carolina and Lady Hamilton.
[00:17:48] By any measure of her world, Emma had reached the top.
[00:17:53] Meanwhile, there was a revolution going on in France. In 1792, the revolutionaries threw the French royal family into prison, including Marie Antoinette, who just so happened to be Maria Carolina's sister.
[00:18:10] To state the obvious, Maria Carolina had little time for France and its revolution, and this would become the driving force of Neapolitan politics.
[00:18:21] By 1793, the revolutionaries had executed Louis XVI, and France was at war with Britain and with most of its neighbours.
[00:18:31] In September 1793, a short, slight, ambitious young navy captain sailed into the Bay of Naples, asking for Neapolitan soldiers to help in the fight against the French.
[00:18:46] His name was Horatio Nelson.
[00:18:49] On that first visit, nothing of particular note happened. He stayed for a few days, was entertained at the embassy, and sailed away again.
[00:19:00] Five years later, in the summer of 1798, Nelson was back in the Mediterranean, hunting Napoleon's fleet.
[00:19:10] We touched on this in the last episode, but let me give you the full story.
[00:19:16] Nelson's ships were running dangerously low on food and water. He needed a friendly port, somewhere to get fresh supplies. The obvious place was Sicily, which was ruled by the King of Naples.
[00:19:32] But there was a problem: Naples was officially neutral, and a neutral kingdom could not openly supply a British war fleet.
[00:19:44] Emma went to the Queen, Maria Carolina, and asked her to help.
[00:19:50] We don't know exactly what was said. But we know the Queen trusted Emma completely, and we know she was willing to take risks for her friend that she might not have taken for an ambassador.
[00:20:04] Exactly how much difference her influence made is still argued over by historians, but the outcome is clear. Orders went out to Sicily, Nelson's ships were allowed to dock at the port of Syracuse. They were given everything they needed, and the hunt continued.
[00:20:25] A week later, Nelson found the French fleet anchored at the mouth of the Nile, in Egypt, and destroyed it almost completely. It was one of the greatest naval victories in history, and it left Napoleon's army completely cut off.
[00:20:42] Nelson believed that without Emma's assistance, this would not have been possible.
[00:20:49] So, in September 1798, the most celebrated man in Europe sailed back into the Bay of Naples, wounded, exhausted, and looking for somewhere to recover.
[00:21:03] Waiting for him on the quayside, at the head of the biggest welcome party Naples had ever thrown, was Emma Hamilton.
[00:21:12] The blacksmith's daughter and the parson's son were about to collide.
[00:21:17] And that is what we will leave for part three.
[00:21:22] OK, then, that is it for part two of our three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:21:28] Next up, in part three, it's the love affair itself: the strange three-sided household, the scandal that gripped Britain, Trafalgar, and the dying wish that Britain chose to ignore.
[00:21:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:46] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] 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.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's part two of our three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:00:30] In part one, we followed Horatio Nelson from a Norfolk parsonage to the Battle of the Nile, losing an eye and an arm along the way.
[00:00:40] In the rest of the mini-series, today's episode and the next one, we turn to the woman he loved, Emma Hamilton.
[00:00:49] It's an amazing story of adaptation, love, desire, cunning, and how one woman rose from nothing to become the most famous woman in Europe.
[00:01:02] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:09] It is the autumn of 1785, and a letter is making its way slowly across Europe, from London to Naples.
[00:01:19] It is addressed to Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples. The sender is his nephew, a well-born young Englishman called Charles Greville.
[00:01:34] The letter is long, polite, and very carefully worded. And underneath all the politeness, is a business proposal.
[00:01:46] Greville has something he would like to send his uncle. He describes the merchandise in glowing terms. Delivery can be arranged in the spring, and he is confident that his uncle will be delighted once the goods arrive.
[00:02:05] The goods in question are not a painting, or a case of wine, or a thoroughbred horse.
[00:02:11] They are a twenty-year-old woman.
[00:02:15] Her name is Emma. And at that moment, in a small house on the edge of London, she is going about her life with no idea at all that her future is being negotiated, by post, between her lover and his uncle.
[00:02:33] So, how does a human being end up as goods to be traded between two English gentlemen?
[00:02:41] To answer that, we need to go back twenty years.
[00:02:45] "Emma" was born Amy Lyon, on the 26th of April, 1765, in a small village in Cheshire, in the northwest of England.
[00:02:58] Her father was a blacksmith, but he died when she was two months old.
[00:03:05] Her mother found herself suddenly a widow with a baby to look after, which was not a great position to be in in eighteenth-century England.
[00:03:15] She took Emma to live with her grandmother in a village in north Wales. There was very little money. There was no school. The young girl never got a formal education, and her spelling would remain famously chaotic for the rest of her life.
[00:03:35] At twelve years old, she was sent out to work as a maid, cleaning and looking after other people's children.
[00:03:43] And at fourteen, she moved to London.
[00:03:48] Now, the London of the late 1770s was a dangerous place for a poor teenage girl with no family connections and no money. There were semi-respectable jobs, as maids and shop girls, that paid almost nothing.
[00:04:07] And there was another world, of theatres, pleasure gardens and wealthy men.
[00:04:14] Emma existed in both, but naturally gravitated towards the latter.
[00:04:22] She was, by all accounts, stunningly beautiful. But not just beautiful in a traditional, good-looking way; she was mesmerising, striking.
[00:04:36] She found work at a theatre, looking after the actresses. And, the story goes, she posed as the "Goddess of Health" at a strange establishment run by a showman who claimed electricity could cure all illnesses.
[00:04:54] The details of these years are a little murky, and some of the stories were probably invented later by her enemies.
[00:05:03] But what is certain is that by the age of fifteen, Emma had been noticed.
[00:05:12] The man who noticed her was Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, who was a rich young aristocrat with a large country estate called Uppark. He installed her there as a kind of entertainer and hostess for his hunting parties. One story has her dancing on his dining room table naked for his guests.
[00:05:37] She was fifteen years old, surrounded by men twice her age, and entirely dependent on her host's continued interest.
[00:05:47] Within a year, she was pregnant.
[00:05:50] And Sir Harry did what rich men in his position generally did in the eighteenth century when a teenage mistress became pregnant. He abandoned her.
[00:06:02] Emma, in her desperation, wrote to another man she had met at Uppark, a quieter, more calculating aristocrat called Charles Greville. She begged him for help.
[00:06:17] Greville agreed to take her in, but he had conditions. The baby, a girl, would be sent away, to be raised by Emma's relatives and later by strangers. And Emma would get a new, settled identity: from now on, she was to be plain "Mrs Emma Hart". The "Mrs" was pure fiction; it was the polite way of keeping a mistress.
[00:06:46] She would live quietly in a small house on the edge of London, see nobody from her old life, and belong to him alone.
[00:06:57] She was sixteen, and with no other options, or at least no other good options, she agreed.
[00:07:05] Now, it's not exactly clear why Greville took her in, but one hypothesis is that he thought he could make money from her. Specifically, as an artist's model. She had this stunning look, remember, and people wanted portraits of beautiful people on their wall. He took her to be painted by one of the most fashionable portrait painters in London, George Romney. Whether or not Greville ever made any money from it is unclear, but what certainly did happen is that George Romney, the portrait painter, became utterly obsessed with Emma.
[00:07:50] Between 1782 and 1786, Emma sat for him more than a hundred times. He painted her as goddesses, as saints, as characters from mythology: as Circe the enchantress, as Cassandra, as Joan of Arc.
[00:08:11] And Emma was far more than a pretty face to be copied. She had a natural gift for performance, she could hold an emotion for hours on end, which made her an ideal artist's model.
[00:08:26] Prints of the paintings were copied and sold across the country, and lo and behold, the blacksmith's daughter became one of the most recognisable faces in Britain.
[00:08:38] She was, in effect, the eighteenth-century version of a supermodel, a woman whose face everyone knew, attached to a person almost nobody had actually met.
[00:08:52] But to Greville, Emma had become a problem.
[00:08:58] He had expensive tastes and not enough money to sustain them. The solution, he decided, was to marry a rich heiress. But no respectable heiress would marry a man who openly kept a famous young mistress, so this meant finding a way of getting rid of Emma.
[00:09:21] So Greville came up with a plan, and this is where the letter from the start of this episode comes in.
[00:09:30] His uncle was Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador in Naples. At the time, Naples was the capital of its own country, the Kingdom of Naples, which covered the southern half of Italy. The same king also ruled the neighbouring island of Sicily, and both kingdoms were run from his court in Naples.
[00:09:53] Sir William was in his mid-fifties, recently widowed, charming, cultured, and, most importantly, rich.
[00:10:03] He had lived in Naples for more than twenty years, and had become Europe's leading authority on volcanoes. He had even climbed Vesuvius dozens of times to peer inside. He was a collector, too, and had an extensive collection of ancient Greek vases.
[00:10:23] Crucially, from Greville's point of view, he was also childless, and Greville hoped to inherit his fortune.
[00:10:31] So Greville sat down and wrote that long, polite, carefully worded letter, proposing, in the most roundabout language possible, a deal.
[00:10:43] Sir William would take Emma off his hands. She would live in Naples as the old man's companion, and, in time, his mistress.
[00:10:53] Greville would be free to marry his rich heiress, and would stay in his rich uncle's good books.
[00:11:02] Emma was told none of this.
[00:11:05] She was told she was going to Naples for a holiday, six months or so, while Greville sorted out some business up in Scotland.
[00:11:14] She arrived in April 1786, on her twenty-first birthday, and settled into the ambassador's residence to wait for the man she loved, Charles Greville, to come and collect her.
[00:11:27] He never came.
[00:11:29] Slowly, over months of unanswered letters, Emma worked out what had happened. She had been passed from one man to another, like a parcel, without anyone thinking to ask her.
[00:11:44] In her letters to Greville, you can get a sense of what was going through her head. And it's not particularly surprising. She rages, she pleads, and she threatens. Greville's reply was cold and simple: be sensible, and oblige my uncle.
[00:12:04] Emma was twenty-one, alone in a foreign country, and entirely dependent on yet another man she had been handed over to like a piece of property.
[00:12:16] So she made a decision. If this was the hand she had been dealt, the situation life had given her, then that was that. She would make the most out of it.
[00:12:30] She learned Italian, and then French, well enough to charm diplomats and translate at court. She trained her singing voice until professional musicians turned their heads.
[00:12:43] Sir William was a passionate collector, his house was filled with classical statues and paintings.
[00:12:49] Emma studied them all. She climbed Vesuvius with Sir William, sang for his guests, and slowly, an arrangement that had begun as a cynical transaction between two men started to look a little more equal.
[00:13:05] And out of all this, she invented something entirely new. She called them her "Attitudes".
[00:13:16] In front of an audience, wearing simple flowing dresses and using nothing but a couple of shawls, she would strike a series of poses, transforming herself from one figure of ancient history or mythology into another.
[00:13:32] One moment she was Medea, the Greek sorceress. The next, Cleopatra, then a dancing nymph, then a grieving mother, then a Neapolitan street seller.
[00:13:44] It might sound like a simple game of charades, where you act something out and everyone else has to guess. But clearly it was much more powerful than that.
[00:13:56] This was the late eighteenth century, so there are no live recordings of her performances, but we have the written accounts, and drawings of her poses that were sold as prints across Europe. Audiences were clearly mesmerised.
[00:14:13] The German writer Goethe was travelling through Italy in 1787, and he watched one of these performances. He wrote that the spectator could hardly believe his eyes, that here was in living movement what the greatest artists had only managed to capture in stone.
[00:14:33] The Attitudes made Emma a celebrity across Europe, one of the sights that visitors touring the continent simply had to see.
[00:14:43] Fashionable women began copying the simple, flowing, ancient-Greek style of dress she performed in. Without meaning to, the girl from Cheshire had become one of the most influential women in European art and fashion.
[00:15:00] And Sir William, to the dismay of his aristocratic relatives, fell in love.
[00:15:07] Emma was a beautiful, younger woman, that much is clear, but she was intelligent, great company, and she began to share in his interests.
[00:15:19] It wasn't a one-way thing, though; the feeling was mutual. It had been an arranged relationship, and there was a thirty-four-year age gap between the pair, but they got on fabulously, and she became deeply fond of him.
[00:15:37] In 1791, during a visit to London, the sixty-year-old ambassador and the twenty-six-year-old blacksmith's daughter were married.
[00:15:48] Amy Lyon, then Emma Hart, was now Lady Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples.
[00:15:58] The girl who had scrubbed floors as a twelve-year-old maid, the girl who had quite possibly sold herself on the streets of London, she was now the hostess of one of the most glamorous diplomatic houses in Europe.
[00:16:13] And she was exceptionally good at it; even the snobs who sneered at her background admitted that she ran the embassy brilliantly.
[00:16:23] One thing she never lost, though, was her accent. Emma spoke English with the strong accent of the northwest of England. In Naples, it simply didn't matter though; she charmed the aristocracy of Europe in Italian and French, where her accent simply sounded "foreign", and she was somewhat immune to the snobbery that would have existed had she been speaking English with English aristocrats.
[00:16:51] More surprising still, she became the best friend and closest confidante of Maria Carolina, the Queen of Naples. The two women saw each other constantly and wrote to each other sometimes several times a day.
[00:17:08] And Maria Carolina held real power. Her husband, King Ferdinand, was a bit of a fool, and preferred hunting and fishing to the business of government. Most of that he left to his wife. She sat on the royal council, and in practice she ran much of the kingdom.
[00:17:29] Now, business between two countries normally flowed from king and ministers to ambassador. In Naples, much of it now flowed through this friendship between two women, Maria Carolina and Lady Hamilton.
[00:17:48] By any measure of her world, Emma had reached the top.
[00:17:53] Meanwhile, there was a revolution going on in France. In 1792, the revolutionaries threw the French royal family into prison, including Marie Antoinette, who just so happened to be Maria Carolina's sister.
[00:18:10] To state the obvious, Maria Carolina had little time for France and its revolution, and this would become the driving force of Neapolitan politics.
[00:18:21] By 1793, the revolutionaries had executed Louis XVI, and France was at war with Britain and with most of its neighbours.
[00:18:31] In September 1793, a short, slight, ambitious young navy captain sailed into the Bay of Naples, asking for Neapolitan soldiers to help in the fight against the French.
[00:18:46] His name was Horatio Nelson.
[00:18:49] On that first visit, nothing of particular note happened. He stayed for a few days, was entertained at the embassy, and sailed away again.
[00:19:00] Five years later, in the summer of 1798, Nelson was back in the Mediterranean, hunting Napoleon's fleet.
[00:19:10] We touched on this in the last episode, but let me give you the full story.
[00:19:16] Nelson's ships were running dangerously low on food and water. He needed a friendly port, somewhere to get fresh supplies. The obvious place was Sicily, which was ruled by the King of Naples.
[00:19:32] But there was a problem: Naples was officially neutral, and a neutral kingdom could not openly supply a British war fleet.
[00:19:44] Emma went to the Queen, Maria Carolina, and asked her to help.
[00:19:50] We don't know exactly what was said. But we know the Queen trusted Emma completely, and we know she was willing to take risks for her friend that she might not have taken for an ambassador.
[00:20:04] Exactly how much difference her influence made is still argued over by historians, but the outcome is clear. Orders went out to Sicily, Nelson's ships were allowed to dock at the port of Syracuse. They were given everything they needed, and the hunt continued.
[00:20:25] A week later, Nelson found the French fleet anchored at the mouth of the Nile, in Egypt, and destroyed it almost completely. It was one of the greatest naval victories in history, and it left Napoleon's army completely cut off.
[00:20:42] Nelson believed that without Emma's assistance, this would not have been possible.
[00:20:49] So, in September 1798, the most celebrated man in Europe sailed back into the Bay of Naples, wounded, exhausted, and looking for somewhere to recover.
[00:21:03] Waiting for him on the quayside, at the head of the biggest welcome party Naples had ever thrown, was Emma Hamilton.
[00:21:12] The blacksmith's daughter and the parson's son were about to collide.
[00:21:17] And that is what we will leave for part three.
[00:21:22] OK, then, that is it for part two of our three-part mini-series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:21:28] Next up, in part three, it's the love affair itself: the strange three-sided household, the scandal that gripped Britain, Trafalgar, and the dying wish that Britain chose to ignore.
[00:21:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:46] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
