QI The Book of the Dead

disintegrated in the face of French aggression and Nelson was charged with escorting the royal family and their friends to safety in Sicily. On the way, they sailed into the worst storm Nelson could remember. He was amazed by Emma’s courage, in contrast to the complete panic of his other distinguished passengers. As SirWilliam prepared to shoot himself rather than drown, Emma gently tended the king’s young son, who had gone into convulsions and later died in her arms. By the time they reached Palermo, the flirtation had become a torrid affair. Emma and Nelson dropped all pretence of decorum, entering into a nonstop round of drinking, gambling and late-night partying that only ended with Nelson’s recall to London.
    By early 1800 Emma was pregnant with his child and Nelson had formally separated from his wife, Fanny, leaving her to fend for herself in Norfolk. He bought Merton Place, a ramshackle property on the outskirts of Wimbledon, and Emma started doing it up. She designed it as a home fit for a hero – as well as a hero’s mistress, a hero’s mistress’s husband and a hero’s mistress’s mother. Emma’s taste wouldn’t have looked out of place in Hello! magazine. The effect was a cross between one of those celebrity footballers’ mansions in Alderley Edge and the National Maritime Museum:

    The whole house, staircase and all, are covered with nothing but pictures of her and him, of all sizes and sorts, and representations of his naval actions, coats of arms, pieces of plate in his honour .
     
    The vulgarity and brazenness of it all provided an unprecedented feast for the popular press. Everything was avidly dissected in minute detail. In January 1801, Emma gave birth to twins, but only one survived. To avoid any doubt over the girl’s origins, the proud parents named her Horatia. Then, in a halfhearted attempt at discretion, they added the surname Thompson, the nom de plume used by Nelson in his secret correspondence with Emma. Polite society was shocked: ‘She leads him about like a keeper with a bear,’ commented one affronted hostess. Even Nelson’s closest friends were traumatised. Sir Gilbert Elliot, now Lord Minto, wrote angrily:
    Nothing shall ever induce me to give the smallest countenance to Lady Hamilton … She is high in looks, but more immense than ever. She goes on cramming Nelson with trowelfuls of flattery, which he goes on taking as quietly as a child does pap. The love she makes to him is not only ridiculous, but disgusting .
     
    Nelson and Emma were oblivious, busy making the most of their brief moments together. As she wrote to a friend:
    I love him, I adore him, my mind and soul is now transported with the thought of that blessed ecstatic moment when I shall see him, embrace him … I must sin on and love him more than ever. It is a crime worth going to Hell for .
     

    Eventually, even the gentle, indulgent Sir William lost patience. By the end of 1802, he was warning Emma that he might have to consider a separation if things continued as they were. But, in the spring of the following year, he died, much as he had recently lived, in his wife’s arms, holding Nelson’s hand. More or less at once, the war with France demanded Nelson’s attention again and he was on the high seas when little Emma, his second daughter, was born. She lived only a few days and her grief-stricken mother had to pay double for the undertaker to keep the details out of the press. The loneliness and the long separations from Nelson began to tell on Emma. She took to drinking heavily again, and gambling, and the debts soon mounted up. Nelson knew nothing of all this. He was fired by his love for her. ‘If there were more Emmas,’ he wrote, ‘there would be more Nelsons.’
    In September 1805, after barely a month’s leave, the newly created Viscount Nelson left home for the last time. Five weeks later, he fell at Trafalgar in the midst of his greatest victory. He was already the most famous man in England, and the deluge of public grief at his death was like nothing the country had ever seen. Emma retired to bed for three weeks, utterly bereft, but the powers that be had done with her and took their revenge. Ignoring Nelson’s specific requests in his will and on his deathbed for the nation to ‘look after Lady Hamilton’ and to allow her to sing at his funeral, they didn’t even invite Emma to the ceremony.
    Worse was to come. Emma had inherited Merton Place and a small annual income for