“Would to God I had dined alone with you. What a dessert we would have had”
The relationship between Horatio Nelson and Emma Lady Hamilton is one of history’s most notorious love stories. Over the course of their affair – which began in Naples in 1799, produced a daughter, Horatia, in 1801, and ended with Nelson’s death at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805 – the couple exchanged hundreds of letters.
Due to repeated and often prolonged spells of separation, one of which stretched to two years, these intimate messages were a vital means of communication between the two lovers. Sadly, Nelson appears to have burned nearly all of his letters from Emma in order to keep them from being discovered on board ship. (Both were married – Emma to Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to Naples, and Nelson to the patient Frances.)
Lady Hamilton, however, kept all the letters she received – for as long as she could. On falling into poverty after Nelson’s death, she gave them as pawns to friends who lent her money. Over the course of the centuries since, the letters have been leaked.
The first selection was published in 1814, when Lady Hamilton was still alive. The damage that its publication inflicted on her reputation hurried her to an early death in 1815, in Calais, where she had fled from her creditors. It had a significant impact on Nelson’s posthumous and one in 1892-93 in a two-volume work that was merely printed for private circulation and thus hardly noticed in public. By the end of the 19th century, as he was reimagined as a figurehead of the naval arms race with Germany, Nelson’s relationship with this great beauty and celebrated artists’ model had been brushed under the carpet.
