Emma, Lady Hamilton

Biography

Emma, Lady Hamilton (born Amy Lyon; 26 April 1765 – 15 January 1815), was an English courtesan, remembered as the mistress of naval hero Lord Nelson and the muse of artist George Romney. Emma was born in the village of Ness in Cheshire, the daughter of a blacksmith. Her father died soon after her birth and she was raised by her mother and grandmother in the nearby village of Hawarden. At the age of twelve, she followed her mother to London and, after briefly working as a domestic servant, drifted into the capital's demi-monde. By the age of fifteen she was the mistress of a young aristocrat, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, who abandoned her when she became pregnant. She and her mother were taken in by Charles Francis Greville, who set them up in a house off the Edgware Road. Emma became known as Emma Hart and her mother as Mrs Cadogan. Emma's daughter was sent to Hawarden to be raised by her great-grandmother. It was during this period that Emma sat for numerous portraits by George Romney. After a few years, Greville tired of Emma and sent her and her mother to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples. She became Hamilton's mistress and a society hostess, famed for her performances of "Attitudes" where she struck poses from antiquity. In 1791, Hamilton and Emma were quietly married in St Marylebone Parish Church. With her new-found respectability as the ambassador's wife, she was able to attend the court in Naples and she became a friend of Queen Maria Carolina. Nelson arrived in Naples after his victory at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798 and soon embarked on an affair with Emma. The Hamiltons and Nelson returned to England in 1800 and set up a ménage à trois in London and at a country house in Merton bought by Nelson. Emma gave birth to Nelson's daughter, Horatia, in 1801. William Hamilton died in 1803, but Nelson and Emma were unable to marry as Nelson was still married to his wife Fanny. After Nelson's death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Emma, who had been provided for in the wills of both her husband and her lover, continued an extravagant lifestyle and fell into debt. In 1814, in order to escape her creditors, she fled to Calais with Horatia and died there six months later. Although largely ignored during the rest of the nineteenth century, Emma was the subject of biographies in 1888 and 1905. In more recent years, her rags to riches story and love affair with Nelson has inspired historical fiction, drama and films as well as further biographies.

== Early life == Emma was born Amy Lyon on 26 April 1765 in the mining village of Ness on the Wirral Peninsula. She was baptised on 12 May 1765 in St Mary's and St Helen's Church in Neston. Her father, blacksmith Henry Lyon, died when she was two months old, and her mother, Mary Kidd, took Emma to live with her family in Hawarden, across the River Dee from Ness. She was raised by her mother and her grandmother, Sarah Kidd, who ran a carrier's business. Little is known of Emma's childhood, but at the age of twelve she began work as an under-nursemaid at Hawarden, in the household of local doctor John Thomas, father of Honoratus Leigh Thomas

== London 1777–1785 == In late 1777, after several months working in Hawarden, Emma followed her mother to London and worked as a nursery maid at the house of Dr Richard Budd in Chatham Place, Blackfriars. Also working as a servant in the household was the future actress Jane Powell. Emma's positions in London after leaving the Budd household become more difficult to establish with any certainty. According to the reminiscences of Henry Angelo, written in 1828 and not considered reliable, she was for a time a servant in the Linley household. Her work took her to Drury Lane theatre in Covent Garden, where Mrs Linley was costume mistress. Angelo then claims that Emma worked at a brothel run by Mrs Kelly in St James's. There was also a story, denied by Emma's friends, that she had worked for a time at the Temple of Health of Dr James Graham. While Emma's exact route into the demi-monde of London remains obscure, her life from 1781, when she became a "kept woman", is well documented. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, in 1781, she came under the protection of a wealthy young baronet, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, who installed her in a cottage on his Uppark country estate on the South Downs. He taught her to ride and she took part in the private race meetings he held of the downs. She entertained his guests and is said to have danced naked on his dining room table. Fetherstonhaugh abandoned her when she became pregnant and she turned for help to one of his friends, Charles Greville, who was a Member of Parliament for the borough of Warwick and brother to the second Earl of Warwick. Greville agreed to take Emma under his protection on condition that she gave up her child and brought only her mother with her. Greville, for his part, undertook to provide financial support for Emma's child. Emma's daughter, Emma Hart (later Carew), was born in early 1782 and sent to live with Emma's grandmother Sarah Kidd in Hawarden. At the age of three, after a visit to her mother in London, she was moved to the household of John Blackburn, a schoolmaster in Manchester, where she stayed until 1800. She then came to London and was a frequent visitor to her mother at Merton, before going to Italy with the help of funds from Harry Fetherstonhaugh. Little is known about her later life; she appears to have settled in Florence, where she died in 1856.

Greville installed Emma and her mother in a house at Edgware Row in Paddington Green, London, at that time a village on the outskirts of London. Emma changed her name to "Mrs Emma Hart" at the request of Greville while her mother, who acted as housekeeper and chaperone, adopted the name of "Mrs Cadogan". Greville provided Emma and her mother with two maids and a gardener. He expected Emma to abandon her former "giddy" ways and lead a modest and retired life. There were music lessons for Emma, and occasional supper parties with Greville's brother, Colonel "Wellbred" Greville, and friends. In 1784, Greville's uncle Sir William Hamilton visited and referred to Emma as "The Fair Tea-Maker of Edgware Row".

Greville had an income of £500 a year, supplemented by dealing in art and antiquities. He commissioned a series of portraits of Emma from his friend, the portrait painter George Romney, in the hope of being able to sell the paintings at a profit. This hope never materialised and most of the paintings remained in Romney's possession. Emma first sat for Romney in the spring of 1782, soon after the birth of her daughter. On this occasion she posed as a figure from Greek mythology, Circe. Romney was impressed by Emma's beauty and ability to assume theatrical poses. Emma became Romney's muse and, over the next nine years, he completed over seventy paintings and sketches of her. Prints of Romney's portraits reached a wide audience and Emma became well-known. She was also painted by other artists, including Joshua Reynolds, John Hoppner, Thomas Lawrence and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

After a few years, Greville tired of Emma and saw her as an obstacle to his search for an heiress to marry, a search that was ultimately unsuccessful. He devised a plan to pass Emma on to his widowed uncle William Hamilton, who was the envoy extraordinary to the Kingdom of Naples. Hamilton was initially reluctant to agree to Greville's plan. While admiring Emma's beauty, he thought that, at the age of fifty-four, he was too old for her and offered an alternative, writing to Greville from Naples in June 1785: "My regard for E. is such that if she leaves you and retires to the country, which I suppose she would do was you to marry, I wou'd willingly make her an allowance of £50 a year till your circumstances eable you to provide better for her." Greville insisted, and Emma and her mother, who had recovered from a stroke, set off for Naples in March 1786. Emma had not been privy to the discussions between Greville, with whom she was still and love, and his uncle. She was under the impression that her stay in Naples would be a temporary one while Greville attended to business in Scotland, and that he would collect her from Naples in October.

== Naples 1786–1791 ==

Emma and her mother set off for Naples on 13 March 1786. After crossing the Channel, they travelled overland and arrived in Naples on Emma's birthday six weeks later. Hamilton provided Emma and her mother with their own apartment in his ambassadorial residence, the Palazzo Sessa. He arranged for her to sit for portraits and to have lessons in languages and music, took her sailing, and introduced her to Neapolitan society and English visitors. In spite of her realisation that Greville had no intention of coming to collect her in October, she refused Hamilton's advances, writing pleadingly to Greville that she was broken-hearted without him, and would never consent to be Hamilton's lover. Eventually, before the end of the year, she had a change of heart and became Hamilton's mistress.