QI The Book of the Dead

its upkeep but, already spending more than she earned, she felt duty-bound to continue decorating it obsessively. Pursued by creditors, blackmailed by family members and former servants, shunned by many of Nelson’s friends, her facade of wealth quickly began to crumble. Withinthree years of the Admiral’s death, she owed £15,000: more than £1 million at today’s value. The house went up for sale but the market was at its worst point in a generation and buyers were put off by the bizarre nautical decor.
    On 14 January 1809, Emma’ smother died. Apart from being an emotional body-blow, the funeral costs stretched her credit to breaking point. Then her private correspondence with Nelson was stolen and published, destroying the last vestiges of support from public opinion. A few remaining friends rallied round with gifts, loans and advice but it was never enough. In 1813 she was arrested and taken to the King’s Bench Debtors’ Prison in Southwark. Granted parole to live in nearby lodgings, Emma and Horatia escaped to France. They arrived in Calais in August 1814, with just £50 to their names. They found a shabby two-room apartment in the centre of town where Emma went back to bed and methodically drank herself to death. Horatia, then just thirteen, was smuggled back to England dressed as a boy and fostered by a family in Burnham Market in Norfolk, barely a mile from where her father had been born. She lived out the rest of her life uneventfully, marrying the handsome local vicar and raising a large family. The children’s mysterious grandmother was never mentioned.
    Emma was not without her faults, but she didn’t deserve the vilification and neglect she endured after Nelson’s death – nor after her own. Doing her best to survive a succession of self-regarding lovers, she was no mere gold-digger. By the time she met Nelson, Emma was already famous and the intensity and depth of their relationship went far beyond sexual intoxication. Nelson had lost his mother young. Emma, increasingly maternal in shape, was warm, witty, and endlessly adoring. She filled the emotional hole his mother’s death had left and gave him the solidplatform he needed. A happy Nelson was an unbeatable naval commander, as the nation came to realise. They made a contented and generous couple and, if their infatuation seemed desperate at times, it should be remembered that, in the seven years of their relationship, they only spent two and a half years together.
    Emma Hamilton’s reputation has recovered considerably since the Victorians. During the Second World War, Churchill calculated that the morale-boosting film Lady Hamilton (1942), starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, was worth four divisions. And, although she died in penury, Emma Hamilton was a remarkable woman. As the Morning Post obituary reminded its readers at the time: ‘Few women, who have attracted the notice of the world at large, have led a life of more freedom.’

     
    If Emma Hamilton was destroyed by love and war, Dr John Dee (1527–1609) was reduced to poverty by magic. One of the most brilliant men of his age, he would have called himself a philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and seeker after truth. History remembers him as the archetypal magician, the model for countless fictional characters from Prospero in The Tempest to Dumbledore in Harry Potter. And he certainly looked the part.
    He had a very faire cleare rosie complexion; a long beard as white as milke. He was tall and slender; a very handsome man … He wore a black gowne like an Artist’s gown, with hanging sleeves and a slitt .
     
    The seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey got this description from an old woman who knew Dr Dee in his final years. Add thisto the personal possessions he left behind – conjuring table, crystal ball, gold amulet, obsidian mirror – and it’s easy to see how he got his reputation. But just because John Dee looked like a wizard, it doesn’t necessarily mean he was one.
    Today we would call him a scientist, though the word ‘science’ didn’t exist then, and didn’t appear in anything like its modern meaning until 1725. In the sixteenth century, those who sought to identify the rules of nature were called ‘natural philosophers’. Like Pythagoras, John Dee believed that the universe was written in the language of mathematics (which he called ‘a ravishing persuasion’). His most important ‘scientific’ legacy was to edit and introduce (in