607. Nelson’s Lover: The Scandalous Lady Hamilton

Who was Emma Hamilton, Horatio Nelson’s strikingly beautiful, and famously fashionable mistress? How did she raise herself up from dire poverty, to become a model, actress, dancer, and even an international celebrity? And, why was theirs one of the most famous love affairs of all time? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss one of history's most remarkable woman - Lady Emma Hamilton - and explore her celebrated relationship with one of Britain's greatest, and most tragic heroes. Start generating your own greener electricity for less, with £500 off Solar. Visit https://www.hivehome.com/history for more information. T&Cs apply* *Output and savings varies by season, electricity usage and system size. Paid-for surplus requires an eligible SEG tariff. Offer for new customers only. Ends 17th November. Learn more at https://uber.com/onourway _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editor: Jack Meek Social Producer: Harry Baldwin Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude Producer: Tabby Syrett Senior Producer: Theo Young-Smith Exec Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.

• 0:12Tom Holland?

  Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee? You make it, add milk, drink it. Nothing more, except...

• 0:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Except, when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.

• 0:39Tom Holland?

  And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised. Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us? And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.

• 0:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Visit tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 1:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.

• 1:27Tom Holland?

  For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.

• 1:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.

• 2:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spend all my time working and in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could use to hire that clone for me.

• 2:27Tom Holland?

  Well, Dominic, you are in luck because if you are hiring, then ZipRecruiter is the great time saver. You can try it free at ziprecruiter.com/history. It shows you qualified candidates almost instantly. So save time with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

• 2:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/history. That's ziprecruiter.com/history. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 3:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by Hive. You know, history is full of transformations. The Romans shifted from republic to empire. The Tudors transformed monasteries into country houses. And do you know what? Hive has had one of its own. Everybody knows Hive for smart thermostats, but now they've evolved into something much greater.

• 3:35Tom Holland?

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• 3:48Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 4:00Tom Holland?

  So history's next great transformation may not be happening in parliaments or palaces. It may be happening in your home. A quiet revolution minus guillotines.

• 4:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hive, know your power. Visit hivehome.com to find out more. Subject to survey and suitability. Hive app compatible with selected heat pumps.

• 4:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  My dearest beloved Emma, the dear friend of my bosom, the signal has been made that the enemy's combined fleet are coming out of port. We have very little wind, so that I have no hopes of seeing them before tomorrow. May the God of battles crown my endeavors with success. At all events, I will take care that my name shall ever be most dear to you and Horatio, both of whom I love as much as my own life. And as my last writing before the battle will be to you, so I hope in God that I shall live to finish my letter after the battle. So that was a letter by Admiral Horatio Nelson. It was written on the 19th of October 1805,

• 5:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  two days before his climactic date with destiny, one of the great dates in the British calendar, Tom, the date of the most Titanic naval battle of the Napoleonic Wars, Trafalgar. And Emma, well, who was Emma?

• 5:38Tom Holland?

  Emma is Nelson's mistress, Lady Hamilton. And Horatio, who he also mentions in that letter, is a four-year-old girl that he had always pretended was adopted, but in truth was his daughter by Emma Lady Hamilton. And in HMS Victory, his flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, he had their portraits in his cabin. They were his most precious possessions. But two days on from his writing of that letter, so the morning of the 21st of October, they had been stored away with all the other effects that he had in his cabin for safety. And that is because by this point,

• 6:20Tom Holland?

  the French and Spanish fleet had come out from their harbor and lay 10 miles away off Cape Trafalgar in the south of Spain. And at 6:22 a.m. on the 21st of October 1805, Nelson gives the signal to his own fleet, "Prepare for battle."

• 6:43Tom Holland?

  And slowly, slowly, slowly, the British fleet with Nelson's own ship HMS Victory at its forefront advances towards the French and Spanish battle line, and it does so at no more than a walking pace, two to three miles an hour. And so people may be wondering, what was uppermost in Nelson's mind at this point? We know, because as Victory is beginning her advance towards the line of battle, Nelson invites the flag captain of his ship, Thomas Hardy, and a second captain, Henry Blackwood, to serve as witnesses to a codicil that he had just made to his will. And I will read it, it's, I think, one of the most moving documents in the whole of

• 7:28Tom Holland?

  British history. "October the 21st, 1805, then in sight of the combined fleets of France and Spain, distant about 10 miles." And obviously, Nelson has placed HMS Victory at the very forefront of the battle, and so he knows there is a very strong possibility, one might almost say probability, that he will die in the coming battle. And that being so, his thoughts are all of Lady Hamilton. And he writes in this will, therefore, that he leaves her, my quote, "A legacy to my king and country, that they will give her an ample provision to maintain her rank in life. I also leave to the beneficence of my country my adopted daughter, Horatio Nelson Thompson,

• 8:13Tom Holland?

  and I desire she will use in future the name of Nelson only. These are the only favors I ask of my king and country at this moment, when I am going to fight their battle."

• 8:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Righty, very moving, Tom. Now, we have, of course, done the Battle of Trafalgar before, and it is one of the best-known stories in all. British history. So most of our listeners, I am guessing, will know what happened to Nelson at Trafalgar. That was a mighty series, a mighty trilogy that we did about Trafalgar, wasn't it? Three hours on Trafalgar. We felt there was so much more to say, didn't we?

• 8:52Tom Holland?

  So much more. In fact, I think we should do the Battle of Trafalgar, maybe once every two years.

• 8:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  At least.

• 8:58Tom Holland?

  And we will be doing so, won't we? In, in what? Kind of two and a half weeks? Because we will be resuming our series on the life of Horatio Nelson, which we left, he'd just won the Battle of the Nile. And in the final episode of that, we will be returning to Trafalgar and following the course of the battle through the eyes of Nelson himself. But first, Dominic.

• 9:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Tom Holland?

  Emma Hamilton.

• 9:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Emma Hamilton is a very well-known name, even to people who are not, you know, massively familiar with society beauties of the 1790s. So what's made her famous is, I suppose, her association with Nelson. But I guess the question is, what is it about her specifically that makes her so compelling to Britain's greatest naval hero? What is it about her that means that he's thinking about her even as he sails into battle? And why is he's advancing towards the French and the Spanish guns and his final moments on earth? Why is he so anxious about what will happen to her after he is dead?

• 10:01Tom Holland?

  I thought we could try and answer those questions today and do an episode focused on the life of Lady Hamilton as she becomes, up until her meeting with Nelson. I think her story is an amazing one, fully merits its own episode. And I guess for two principal reasons. You said that she's best known for her relationship with Nelson, and that's undoubtedly true. But she's absolutely no appendage of Nelson. Because already, when they begin their affair, she's probably the most celebrated non-royal woman in Europe. I mean, she has a kind of Europe-wide reputation. And for various reasons. So to a really astonishing

• 10:43Tom Holland?

  degree, and bearing in mind that, you know, the invention of daguerreotypes of photography still lies several decades in the future at this point, she has one of the most recognizable faces of the age for reasons that we will come to. She is famously beautiful, but she is famous as well for what she termed her attitudes. And these were very distinctive, very original performances which were designed to bring to life for observers scenes from classical art. So you could imagine maybe a kind of an image on a Greek vase being brought to life. And she does this so vividly with such

• 11:25Tom Holland?

  a sense of authenticity that people who witness it are completely stupefied. I've always kind of read this and thought, well, you know, what was she doing? I mean, it sounds a bit like charades or something.

• 11:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  It does. It sounds bonkers.

• 11:36Tom Holland?

  But I think when you look into it, you get the sense that people are witnessing something that they had thought impossible. I mean, among the kind of probably the most famous person who witnesses this is the greatest intellectual of the age, Goethe, the great German writer. And he describes Emma's performance. She lets down her hair and with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, et cetera, that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. I mean, it doesn't sound that incredible to us.

• 12:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  No.

• 12:06Tom Holland?

  But I think that what he is describing is a sense of astonishment that prefigures by a century, the astonishment that people felt watching cinematography for the first time. So in other words, seeing a frozen image come to life, that is Emma's skill. And I think it suggests something of what made Emma so remarkable a figure is that she is like a kind of 20th century silent movie star on an 18th century stage. So she's kind of Lilian Gish or Greta Garbo avant la lettre.

• 12:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 12:42Tom Holland?

  And I think when you see her in those terms, you can understand why her attitudes have the kind of, you know, impact that they do.

• 12:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So a lot of people may be a tiny bit skeptical about this. And Tom, I have to admit, I was quite skeptical when I read about Emma Hamilton's attitudes because I thought they sounded remarkably similar to charades. But you're very evangelical about this, aren't you? You think that this is a kind of prefiguring of modernity.

• 13:04Tom Holland?

  Again and again, you read people saying from Goethe and people who are incredibly knowledgeable. Again and again, they are stupefied. And I think what they again and again emphasize is the sense that something that they had always thought of as stationary, so a statue, an image on a vase, is being brought to life for them. And it is being done through something about Emma's ability to turn the static into motion and emotion that they find incredible. And obviously, you know, there is no cinematography, so we can't witness it. But we just have to rely on the sense of stupefaction that people felt when watching it. And I think take on trust that Goethe and everybody else, they're not completely mad. They're not just watching charades.

• 13:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 13:47Tom Holland?

  I think.

• 13:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, we'll come back to the charade. That's a Freudian slip. We'll come back to the attitudes later on. But there's a political side to Emma, right? She's an important kind of political person.

• 13:58Tom Holland?

  Yeah. So in his codicil that he's writing on the morning of Trafalgar, Nelson praises Emma as a kind of great British patriot who has done her country noble service, just as Nelson himself, of course, has done. She becomes the wife of the British envoy to Naples, Sir William Hamilton. So that's where she gets her title and name. And while she's there, she has become the confidant of Maria Carolina Habsburg, the Queen, and a very formidable figure in her own right. And Emma exploits this friendship for Britain's benefit. And Nelson in his codicil specifically praises, and I quote, Lady Hamilton's influence with the Queen of Naples. Now, whether that's entirely for good, we will be discussing

• 14:43Tom Holland?

  in our next episode.

• 14:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, because Nelson's relationship with the Queen of Naples, which we'll come to next week, turns out to be probably the most controversial element of his entire career.

• 14:53Tom Holland?

  However, from the point of view of Emma's significant, you know, this is a woman who is admired by philosophers. She's intimate with queens. So she has a kind of glamour, I think, that Fuses very potently with Nelson's own. And I think that's why she's so celebrated as a mistress, as an enamorata. And in fact, the moment they begin their affair and throughout their relationship, and long after both of them are dead, people compare them to one couple from history more than any other, and that is Antony and Cleopatra.

• 15:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, there are loads of cartoons on this. And when they go back to England later on, there are loads of cartoons produced showing, I have to say, quite disobliging cartoons, showing Emma as a kind of an enormous Cleopatra. But we should come to this, I guess. And when people mean that comparison, they don't mean it kindly. They don't mean, oh, you're a woman who has navigated through difficult seas and actually has kept her head above water and all this. They mean, you're a bit of a, I mean, listeners will forgive me for paraphrasing, you're a bit of a strumpet, as Cleopatra was. I know that's not right, but it's what people say.

• 16:02Tom Holland?

  And also Cleopatra seduces Antony from his duty.

• 16:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, of course.

• 16:07Tom Holland?

  As a great warrior, which I think people also say about Emma, that she's seducing Nelson from his responsibility to go out and defeat the French in naval battles. And I think the reason why it's so easy for cartoonists and satirists, and indeed people throughout high society, to sneer at Lady Hamilton as a strumpet, is because she is not an aristocrat. She is not well bred in the slightest. I mean, the absolute opposite. So she is born, not Emma, not Lady Hamilton, she is born Amy Lion, and she was born into absolutely desperate poverty. And in her time, in her childhood, growing up, she had scrubbed floors,

• 16:51Tom Holland?

  she had sold her body for scraps of food. She emerged from the absolute depths of The emerging industrial society of late 18th century Britain.

• 17:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, well, she's, I mean, this is your, you know, it's be your argument, isn't it? That actually people always see Emma Hamilton as a monster, but it would be better to see her, you're going to argue, as not just a victim, I suppose, that's the wrong way of putting it, but as a survivor, as a fighter, who's somebody who makes her own way and then becomes the victim of snobbery for having done so. That's about the long and short of it, isn't it?

• 17:24Tom Holland?

  She is absolutely a fighter, and I think there's no doubt that that's kind of a massive part of what Nelson admired in her. But also, you can see why he's so nervous for her fate on the eve of Trafalgar, because without him, what will become of her? This kind of rags to riches, and then perhaps riches back to rags story is the second reason for telling the story of her life, because it is, I mean, it's like a novel.

• 17:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 17:47Tom Holland?

  It's kind of a cross between, you know, it fuses Oliver Twist with Vanity Fair. But I think also it's impossible to tell her story and not also think of certainly a couple of obvious 20th century icons, women who capitalized on an age of mass media to haul themselves up, as Emma did, from kind of terrible grinding poverty. And we've covered two of them, Marilyn and Evita. And again, I, you know, I compared Emma to a silent movie star. She is a trailblazer as well for women who are able to use mass media in an industrial

• 18:28Tom Holland?

  age to promote themselves and to kind of escape the slums. So I would say that she's probably the first great female celebrity of the emerging industrial age.

• 18:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know what she is? This is an excellent observation that Theo has made. She is the link between the lives of Marilyn and Evita in the modern world and a great friend of the rest is history, Huang Jinyi, who was, if you remember, on the other side of the world, Korea's greatest courtesan turned poet.

• 18:56Tom Holland?

  That's an interesting historical observation there from Theo.

• 18:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Don't underestimate Theo's, A, knowledge of the rest is history, and B, knowledge of Korean history.

• 19:05Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, let's get back to Britain, to Emma and her story. So.

• 19:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  She comes of age in a world that has been absolutely transformed by the Industrial Revolution, doesn't she? So she comes from the north west of England. She's born on the Wirral Peninsula, which is just across the river from Liverpool. And she could have been destroyed by the advent of industrial modernity, couldn't she?

• 19:32Tom Holland?

  Yeah. So the kind of the process of industrialisation that she ultimately turns to her own ends. I mean, this is at its most destructive. It's pretty much the kind of the birth pangs of industrialisation. And when she's born on the 26th of April, 1765, a great seam of coal has only just been discovered, kind of running below the Wirral. And the place she's born, it's a village called Ness, which today I gather is a very pleasant commuter village with a botanic garden next to it. But back then, and I'm quoting here Kate Williams in her fantastic biography of Emma Hamilton, England's mistress, The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton.

• 20:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, TV's Kate Williams.

• 20:12Tom Holland?

  TV's Kate Williams, but also Kate wrote her PhD on Emma Hamilton Williams. She describes Ness back in 1765 as a ramshackle huddle of thirty or so miners' hovels set in scrubby, stony, infertile land. Her father, Henry Lyon, is the blacksmith for the coal mine. And her mother, Mary Kidd, is an exceedingly pretty girl from Hardham. And this is a village near Chester, so it's about 12 miles away from Ness. Again, now, very attractive. I looked it up and it was named in 2012 by the Sunday Times as one of the best places to live.

• 20:52Tom Holland?

  But back in the 18th century, it was so dead end and boring that Mary had run away from it to join a coal mine.

• 20:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you know who lived in Hardham, Tom?

• 21:01Tom Holland?

  Who?

• 21:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Gladstone. And Gladstone would very much have enjoyed Emma Hamilton's attitude, but he then would have flagellated himself afterwards.

• 21:09Tom Holland?

  Certainly would, because there is, and this is an important part of the story, there is a big house just outside Hardin. Yeah. So Hardin is a village from Old England with a big house and grateful villagers. And Ness is a place where the process of industrialisation is kicking in very, very violently. And so for Mary, her move to Ness turns out not entirely to be a wise one. Her marriage to Henry seems to have been forced on her by a pregnancy. And as the wife of a miner, I mean, her life is not going to be a pleasant one at all. It's going to kind of be relentless drudgery. Many wives of miners, they're kind of beaten, whatever. So we don't know whether that happened with Henry, but I mean, it's a possibility.

• 21:54Tom Holland?

  But then, just a few weeks after Emma is born, Henry dies. And the circumstances are mysterious. Emma's mother and Emma herself always very pointedly keep quiet about her father. They don't talk about how he died. And so this kind of speculation, did he drink himself to death? Did he die in a brawl? Did he commit suicide perhaps? I mean, we just don't know. So on one level, you know, this is a disaster for the little baby Amy. She's been deprived of the potential breadwinner in the family. But I think on another, actually, it spells a certain measure of freedom because it liberates Mary to escape the life of a worker's wife in an industrial slum.

• 22:36Tom Holland?

  Return to her native village, work there in the family house. For Mary, it's endless chores. But Amy seems to have kind of grown up fairly unburdened by domestic responsibilities, I think. So later in life, she described her childhood as wild and thoughtless. And what's also striking, again, to quote Kate Williams, is that she grows up strikingly statuesque. So Kate writes, "She was tall, strong and beautiful, with a thick mane of hair and strong white teeth. She had sparkling eyes, clear skin, voluptuous good health and bounding energy." And this is all the more striking because her childhood was marked by repeated famines, smallpox epidemics.

• 23:22Tom Holland?

  But Emma is, you know, very clearly. Not a girl who's been stunted by rickets.

• 23:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 23:28Tom Holland?

  Pocked with sores and spots. She also seems to have learned very cursory reading and writing skills. But I mean, cursory is better than nothing, which is what probably most girls of her standing would have had.

• 23:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 23:40Tom Holland?

  And so the Kate Williams explanation for this is that perhaps Emma's mother, Mary, was having an affair with someone up in the local big house. So she writes, somehow Mary found money that protected Emma from the worst of village hardship and helped her grow into a beauty.

• 23:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, hold on, there's no evidence for that, right? I mean, the only evidence is the fact that Amy, who becomes Emma, is not kind of stunted and unable to read and write.

• 24:04Tom Holland?

  And she has reading and writing, yeah.

• 24:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. But if that's true, then that would be a model, then the young Amy slash Emma would see that as a model to follow, no? Would draw the conclusion that actually, you know, trading on her physical charms was the way to get social and kind of cultural advancement. Which would make sense, given what she later chooses to do.

• 24:27Tom Holland?

  Yeah, and I think also what encourages her to be ambitious is probably her kind of fleeting and disastrous experience of the career that was most readily open to working class girls, which is to go into domestic service.

• 24:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Tom Holland?

  So Emma does work in the big house at Hardon. So in seventeen seventy seven, when she's twelve years old, she goes there for a few months and then she gets sacked. Basically, I think because she's completely hopeless at housework.

• 24:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 24:57Tom Holland?

  It's not her vibe at all. And then the following autumn, she travels to London, to the big smoke. And again, she secures a job as a housemaid there. And again, she gets sacked. And this time it's for staying out late with a friend. So kind of, you know, very teenage behaviour. Clearly, she's not cut out to be a maid of all work. But what that experience does is to open her eyes in a way that she wouldn't have done if she'd just stayed in her village, to the kind of entire dimensions of luxury and leisure and fine living. And the kind of beautiful clothes and the plentiful food that it can provide you with. And I think it gives her a desire to have that for herself.

• 25:42Tom Holland?

  But the question, of course, she's thirteen years old, she's penniless, she's an out of towner provincial in London. She doesn't have a patron, she doesn't have anything beyond the most rudimentary education. And so the question then is, how is she going to fulfil her dreams?

• 25:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, but obviously if her mother has had an affair with somebody in the big house, that would give her an example to follow. So for one thing, she has a show business side to her, and that's a question of temperament as much as anything, isn't it? She loves, London is the place of public entertainment.

• 26:12Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 26:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Theatres, you know, dances, pleasure gardens and so on, and clearly by temperament.

• 26:18Tom Holland?

  That's why she gets sacked from her job, because she's been out late at a fair.

• 26:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 26:23Tom Holland?

  She's very keen on kind of all the entertainments that London has to provide.

• 26:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Tom Holland?

  And which London probably more than anywhere else in the, you know, the face of the planet at that time, provides in plentiful numbers.

• 26:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Tom Holland?

  So she's a great one for the smell of the grease paint and all that.

• 26:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, but then the other thing, which is, let's say, an asset that a lot of girls would not have had, is her physical appearance. So everything we ever read about her says, she's very tall, she's extremely striking. Everybody says, you know, she's got brilliant hair, you know, you don't, you don't forget her. So at this point, what is she, 12, 13 years old?

• 26:57Tom Holland?

  13.

• 26:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  13 years old. And this is an age where a 13 year old girl would already have been prey to predatory men, do you think?

• 27:08Tom Holland?

  There's no age of, legal age of consent, um, you know, she's been working as a housemaid, alone in rooms. I would suspect that absolutely by this point she has suffered, um, you know, a fair degree of sexual harassment, maybe even abuse. She turns it to her advantage, I think, by feeling a sense of confidence in her ability to turn men's heads.

• 27:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 27:33Tom Holland?

  And kind of confident that she can turn it to her own ends. And that being so, she takes the very bold and conscious decision, when she's sacked from her post as a housemaid, to head to

• 27:53Tom Holland?

  London's most glamorous, most notorious, most exciting playground, and this is a place where women have long outnumbered men, and it's a great centre of pleasure called Covent Garden.

• 28:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 28:08Tom Holland?

  And this is a piazza that had been designed back in the 1630s by the great architect Inigo Jones. It's been ringed by stately streets, but beyond them, there's a kind of entire kind of doughnut of slums. And probably the most notorious of these is the rookery of Saint Giles. And this is where Hogarth, in his great satirical cartoon, sets Gin Lane. So, you know, drunk mothers, babies falling to their doom down steps, absolute scenes of squalor. I mean, but satire draws on kind of horrific reality. So what you have in Covent Garden is wealth and squalor, highbrow entertainments and lowbrow entertainments. To quote Vic Gattrell, the great historian of Georgian culture, what developed in Covent Garden's square half mile in the second half of the century was the world's first creative

• 28:52Tom Holland?

  bohemia. And it is the absolute epicentre of Georgian culture. So you have London's two great theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. You have coffee shops that are filled with writers and playwrights and artists, and you have the best shopping in the world. This is where, you know, the nation that Napoleon will mock as just shopkeepers, this is where they're really honing their art. Covent Garden offers probably the best shopping in the entire world.

• 29:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  But not just shopping, right?

• 29:21Tom Holland?

  Well, I mean, there are lots of things for sale. Let's put it like that.

• 29:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. So there's a, what we might see is a seediness to Covent Garden. It's basically a massive red light district.

• 29:31Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 29:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it's full of cut purses and ruffians and streetwalkers and prostitutes.

• 29:37Tom Holland?

  Yeah. And so Kate Williams, in her biography of Emma, quotes one very excited visitor who says Covent Garden is the great square of Venus and its pearlyus are crowded with the practitioners of this goddess.

• 29:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 29:50Tom Holland?

  Which is to say, there are lots of prostitutes and spanning the entire social range. So you have very high end brothels, but you also have kind of gin rattled, streetwalkers of the kind that you see in Gin Lane. The healthier girls even have their own kind of almanac. They have their own guide, which is published annually called Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, which gives descriptions of the form.

• 30:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  So give people a sense. I mean, many of these people would also be actresses, right? And they'd also be kind of professional models.

• 30:21Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  So there's no, you know, there's no clear divide between those different, you know, you could easily slip from one of those roles into another one.

• 30:29Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so Jill Perry, again, describing this, Amelia, she says, pouring and acting were easily elided.

• 30:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 30:38Tom Holland?

  I mean, this provides a massive opportunity, of course. And so for a girl like Emma, who is beautiful, charismatic, high spirited, but also poor, provincial, without a support network, Covent Garden provides opportunity like nowhere else on earth. I mean, massive opportunity, but at the same time, massive danger. And essentially what she's embroiling herself in when she heads to Covent Garden is a kind of high stakes, red light district version of Pride and Prejudice.

• 31:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, because on the one hand, the prize, the goal is to get a patron. I mean, I guess even better would be if she could somehow persuade somebody very rich and well connected to marry her.

• 31:21Tom Holland?

  Imagine that.

• 31:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but that would be very difficult to imagine. Much more likely is that she'll become a kind of mistress, a kept woman, I suppose.

• 31:28Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  The downside is if you don't manage to do that, you know, over time, you descend the rungs of the ladder of the Ladies of Covent Garden. So basically in 10 years' time, you're the person with no teeth, who's just necking loads of gin.

• 31:39Tom Holland?

  Yeah, exactly. And throughout her teens, Emma is constantly kind of swinging between these twin poles. So she gets work at the Theatre at Drury Lane, Dominic, where you and I appeared very excitingly.

• 31:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 31:53Tom Holland?

  And she worked there as a wardrobe assistant. So she's dressing actresses and she gets a chance to study, you know, how they put on a performance. She gets a feel for the theatre. And then she gets made redundant. And this is the lowest point of her life. She's kind of briefly reduced to walking the streets. And this is something that Emma herself never denied. So later in life, she said, I owned through distress. My virtue was vanquished, but my sense of virtue was not overcome. She gets jobs in taverns. Again, the kind of the boundary between ar maid and tavern in this period is pretty, pretty narrow. And then she begins to supplement her work as an artist model. And her most improbable gig, which is so improbable that there are historians,

• 32:38Tom Holland?

  Vic Gatto among them, who doubt it ever happened, but I think Kate Williams makes the case very convincingly that it did. She ends up working for a notorious quack doctor called Dr. James Graham, who runs what he called a temple of health off the strand.

• 32:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, I can't believe this didn't happen. I've always believed this did happen.

• 32:56Tom Holland?

  I think it did.

• 32:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Tom Holland?

  I think Kate Williams' arguments on this, on the veracity are very convincing.

• 33:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 33:02Tom Holland?

  And also, I want it to have happened, so.

• 33:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 33:05Tom Holland?

  You go with that. So, so Dr. Graham is, is a massive enthusiast for electrotherapy. He was actually a kind of an associate of Benjamin Franklin. He loves a mud bath. And again, the kind of satirists always, they love drawing cartoons of enormously fat men being dropped into vats of mud. And to quote Kate Williams, "He was a supreme showman and his lectures were extravaganzas, featuring explosions, smoke, fireworks, music, and to London's utter delight, a phalanx of glamour girls posing in flimsy white dresses." And Emma's role was to pose on an absolutely enormous bed, dressed in a kind of very skimpy,

• 33:47Tom Holland?

  classical style costume, and pose as Vestina, the rosy goddess of health. And the bed itself is supported by 40 pillars of very finely worked glass. There are pipes that pump out perfume. There are kind of cranks that are operated by people lying under the bed to make the mattress jiggle. And every so often, there'll be a kind of jolt of electricity will go through the bed, just to keep people on their toes.

• 34:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  And hold on, you could pay to go and lie on this bed yourself and not just to lie on the bed, right?

• 34:19Tom Holland?

  You could. You pay £50 a night.

• 34:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's a lot of money.

• 34:23Tom Holland?

  You have to be very affluent to do that.

• 34:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 34:25Tom Holland?

  And essentially, it's meant to be for married couples, but of course it isn't. The prince regent inevitably takes his mistresses with him.

• 34:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Emma's role on the bed. You know, she's not, um, she's not sleeping with the married couples. She's exhibiting the, the pleasures of the bed. She's showing off what you would look like if you lay on the bed.

• 34:43Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 34:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  And saying, you can be like me and lie on this fantastic bed with the electricity. And, and then she gets off and these people get on it.

• 34:50Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 34:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, okay.

• 34:51Tom Holland?

  So outside this, um, temple of health, Graham has set up, um, naked statues, which are actually so titillating that he ends up being prosecuted for them. And Emma is a kind of living statue. So there perhaps you have a presentiment of the idea of the, the attitudes, the idea of a statue coming to life. And her, her goal is to lie there and look like, you know, a goddess. Um, but also to encourage, uh, the men to, to get on and, and do what they've got to do. And this is probably Emma's big break because it leads to her being talent spotted at the age of 14 by London's most exclusive and vampiric madam.

• 35:35Tom Holland?

  Um, a woman called Charlotte Hayes, who goes under the super cave, Mrs. Kelly. And her brothel is the classiest in London. It's not in Covent Garden. It's in much more, um, kind of upmarket area of St. James's. Um, Emma is only one of seven or eight girls who works there. Um, absolute world away from walking the streets. She has a carriage, all kinds of things. Um, she dresses up in very finely cut, low cut, um, pink dresses. Um, she, she will dress as kind of famous actresses. She's never going to be rich there, um, because she's pretty much indentured to Mrs. Kelly.

• 36:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Mrs. Kelly pockets all the winnings, basically.

• 36:11Tom Holland?

  Absolutely, and gets them in debt. You know, she'll kind of feed them, drink and then kind of run up a tab. But because the clients are all so rich, I mean, only the absolute kind of the, the top end of society can afford to go there. Obviously, there's always the hope for the girls in this brothel that they will hit the jackpot. You know, Emma can dream of finding a man who will buy her out. And that in 1781, at which point she is 16. That is the jackpot that Emma does seem to hit in the form of a very hard drinking, hard hunting squire called Sir Harry Featherstone-Haw. At least I think that's how you pronounce it. It ends H A U G H. And the question is, Dominic, who is this Mr. Darcy?

• 36:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, let's take a break and then after the break, we can see him emerging dripping with water from the lake of love. I don't know where I'm going with this analogy, but anyway, go to a commercial break quickly. Yeah, we'd better get to the break. Goodbye.

• 37:13Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 37:21Tom Holland?

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• 37:51Tom Holland?

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 38:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there, and it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions, and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 38:33Tom Holland?

  So they asked over 100,000 people, and what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 38:48Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 40:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hey, what shall I do? Good God, what shall I do? I've wrote seven letters and no answer. I can't come to town for want of money. I've not a farthing to bless myself with, and I think my friends looks coolly on me. I'm almost mad. Oh, for God's sake, tell me what's to become on me. Oh, dear Greville, write to me. Write to me, G. Adieu, and believe me, yours forever. Emily Hart. So that was an archive recording. That's actually the only North Western accent I can do, and it's not even, I don't even think it relates to a place. But actually, what I was trying to do was channel the girl born as Amy Lyon,

• 41:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  the woman who would become Emma Hamilton and who for now was calling herself Emily Hart. Those are her own words in the voice of the co-founder of Goalhanger, Tony Pasta.

• 41:44Tom Holland?

  Yeah, and just to say, this is the first time we get to hear her in her own words.

• 41:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow. And so I'm glad I've treated them with the sensitivity and respect they deserve. So she's now calling herself Emily Hart. She's saying, what shall I do? And she's in a terrible mess, isn't she? And why is she in such a mess? Because we left before the break. Mr. Darcy had entered the story dripping wet. What's gone wrong?

• 42:08Tom Holland?

  So Sir Harry Featherstone-Haw, who is 26 years old, he's the MP for Portsmouth, he's the owner of an absolutely splendid pile in Sussex. He has turned out to be an utter shit.

• 42:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, no.

• 42:21Tom Holland?

  It had not taken Emma long to realise this. So she has been basically bought out by Sir Harry. He takes her to his stately pile, Upark House on the South Downs, and just kind of keeps her there for his own entertainment and the entertainment of all his mates.

• 42:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  But that was the plan, no? That was what she wanted?

• 42:38Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it is. The problem is that he's not really very romantic at all, because all he's really into is horses. So, you know, he's MP for Portsmouth, he never, he never once gives a speech because he's always off fox hunting or racing or whatever. And actually...

• 42:53Tom Holland?

  He loves racing so much that there's one female visitor who describes how at Uppet House, there are races of all sorts, fine horses, ponies, cart horses, women, men in sacks. He's the kind of guy that Peter the Great probably have got along with quite well.

• 43:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 43:07Tom Holland?

  So Emma, you know, she does her best. She learns to ride, which is an essential skill. And she's given a very tight riding habit, which she adores, like Skittles.

• 43:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course.

• 43:20Tom Holland?

  The great courtesan. But I think she's very lonely. And her only real friend is the one man among Sir Harry's coterie, who does not enjoy hunting. And all Sir Harry and his friends, they all find this hilarious. They can't understand it at all. And this is a guy who is very well connected, but relatively by the standards of the aristocracy, impecunious. He's the second son of the Earl of Warwick, and his name is Charles Greville. And that's the Greville who Emma was addressing in her frantic letter. His real passion is for collecting minerals.

• 43:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Like Wilfred Owen, the poet, the war poet.

• 44:00Tom Holland?

  But since he is often alone with Emma while all the others are out hunting, inevitably they're thrown together and he ends up very besotted by her. Meanwhile, Sir Harry has been behaving exactly as you would expect a late Georgian squire to behave. He gets Emma pregnant, he throws her out of the house without a penny, and he then refuses to answer her letters.

• 44:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, Sir Harry.

• 44:27Tom Holland?

  And this is why in January seventeen eighty-two, she writes the letter that you quoted to Charles Greville. And her situation is desperate. She's heavily pregnant by this point. She doesn't have any money. But when she writes that letter, you know, she clearly is in desperate straits, but she is also playing a part. It is the tone of kind of high wrought sentiment. She is deliberately exaggerating to appeal to Greville. She's framing it in the tones of a kind of a lady from a novel who has been badly treated.

• 44:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's an epistolary novel. She's been poorly treated by the vicomte, or whatever his name is.

• 45:02Tom Holland?

  Comte de Valmont.

• 45:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Valmont in Les Oms de Joie. And actually, it completely works, right? Because he, he reaches out to her.

• 45:10Tom Holland?

  He does. Well, he still massively fancies her.

• 45:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 45:12Tom Holland?

  So very chivalrously, a few years later, he, he will describe her as the only woman I ever slept with, without having ever had any of my senses offended. And a cleaner, sweeter bedfellow does not exist.

• 45:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, right.

• 45:24Tom Holland?

  So that's high praise indeed.

• 45:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, high praise.

• 45:27Tom Holland?

  But he imposes very strict terms on Emma. So she has to give up her baby the moment that it's born, hand it over to, to her great grandmother. She has to discard her old name, so no more Amy Lyons. So this is why Emily Hart is then born, she's Mrs. Hart. And she's to have no further dealings with any of her old acquaintances from Sir Harry, right the way down to her relatives. The only one that she can see is her mother, who effectively, from this point on, is employed as her kind of housekeeper.

• 45:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  On the one hand, that sounds very harsh, but I suppose Grevel would say, I'm cleaning up her situation. And she's going to be much better off. And actually, a lot of her old acquaintances are kind of rapacious madams and stuff. So she's better off without them.

• 46:10Tom Holland?

  Yeah, and Emma, I think instinctively understands this, that what Grevel wants from her isn't just sex, but also oddly, the kind of, almost the opposite, a kind of display of chastity and, and modesty. And so Grevel installs her just off the Edgeware Road in the village of Paddington, which is just a kind of semi-rural outskirts of London at this point. And basically, the role he wants her to play is that of a kind of repentant Magdalene. A sinner has been redeemed. And he seems to have found this titillating in the extreme. So he deliberately kind of molds her to his tastes. She's to be very.

• 46:53Tom Holland?

  Very modest, you know, she's cast off all the manners of the street. And Emma kind of absorbs this like blotting paper. So it is a kind of education.

• 47:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, he's Henry Higgins and she's the Liza Do Little to some extent.

• 47:05Tom Holland?

  I think that's exactly the parallel.

• 47:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, there are two ways you can view that. I would say you've taken a stance which is very quite cynical and hostile to Grevel. You know, he's doing this because he finds it titillating and stuff. He might also have done it because he genuinely likes her and wants to help her.

• 47:20Tom Holland?

  That two are not mutually exclusive.

• 47:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 47:21Tom Holland?

  I think both of those things are true.

• 47:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Tom Holland?

  He's not doing just out of charity. He wants to make money out of her. And so he does pimp her out, not as a prostitute, but as an artist model.

• 47:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 47:32Tom Holland?

  And he, he kind of basically sells her as a model to the man who is widely regarded by this point as the greatest portrait painter in Britain, even greater than Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the Royal Academy. And this is a man who's very emotional, very troubled, very brilliant guy called George Romney. And all his life he's been looking for his muse and he finds her in Emma. He becomes absolutely obsessed by her, by her beauty, by her intelligence, by her incredible emotional literacy, her ability to convey through her face kind of vast numbers of emotions. And again, the way in which she seems like a classical statue come to life. So this is kind of a theme that runs throughout her career.

• 48:16Tom Holland?

  To quote the poet William Hayley, who wrote a biography of Romney in 1809. So while Emma was still very much on the scene. And he wrote, her features like the language of Shakespeare could exhibit all the feelings of nature and the gradation of every passion with the most fascinating truth and felicity of expression. And that's very much how admirers of her attitudes will also describe her.

• 48:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 48:38Tom Holland?

  And it is Romney who paints this woman, who he calls his divine Emma, over 70 times, who makes her famous, or at least her face famous. Because even though Romney himself is, he doesn't exhibit paintings and exhibitions. People come to the studio and prints are made of these paintings and basically they go viral.

• 49:03Tom Holland?

  The opportunities for the printing press to reproduce images by this point is kind of expanding all the time. And Emma rides the crest of that wave. And she's exceptional in various ways. I mean, all kinds of reasons why she becomes so successful, but you can list them. She's obviously unbelievably beautiful. And her style of beauty, so she's got an oval face, she's got large eyes, she's got kind of very well-defined lips, thick auburn hair. This absolutely corresponds to the kind of the ideals of beauty of the age. And the way in which she she gazes directly at the viewer in the way that most models don't.

• 49:45Tom Holland?

  And some of the paintings, even those where she's kind of playing a part in a historical or a kind of literary tableau, they are amazingly vivid. They look like kind of Instagram shots. So there's one in particular where she's playing the part of Titania in Midsommar Night's Dream. And she looks like, you know, like a snap of a girl enjoying a picnic. Incredibly vivid. She's also very chameleon-like, so she can be painted as a nun, or she can be painted as a bacchanti, you know, one of those women out tearing people to pieces up on the uplands of thieves. And then there's the riddle of her identity. Now, who is she? Who is Emma Hart? This enigmatic woman.

• 50:30Tom Holland?

  Because most women who appear on prints are already famous. They are aristocrats, they are actresses or whatever. Emma isn't. And this generates an absolute obsession. People want to know more about her. You know, the chance to meet her is a kind of incredible thrill. And when people come and they watch her, and she's dressed in this kind of clinging classical styles of robes, very similar to the kind that she'd worn on the vast erotic bed.

• 50:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  And of course, hugely fashionable at this point, late 18th century, you know, everyone's everyone loves all the idea of the kind of new freedoms of dress and the classical lines and so on, no?

• 51:07Tom Holland?

  Yeah. And Emma becomes the figurehead for that. She's basically the kind of Kate Moss of this revolution in fashion. And Romney, I think, is kind of playing the part of John Galliano or Alexander McQueen to her Kate Moss. But it is very collaborative, because of course, you know, Emma has absolutely her own sense of fashion. She knows what she looks good in. You can see why basically she becomes the pin up girl for this new style of fashion that will, you know, sweep Britain. But if Romney and the female shoppers of London adore Emma in her classical outfits, there is Dominic, another man who is even more bowled over by her.

• 51:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is Greville's uncle, right? Now we come to the other man, the third man of the Nelson Emma triangle. And this is Britain's envoy to Naples, Greville's uncle, Sir William Hamilton. And he first meets her when, I've just checked, he was 53. So he'd been away, he'd been in Naples for the last five years. He comes back to England 1783 and his wife has recently died. And Emma is 35 years his junior. So that would make her, what is she? She's in her late teens.

• 52:19Tom Holland?

  Yep.

• 52:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right? She's in her late teens. Um, and he's 53, but he thinks she is absolutely brilliant. I mean, he's completely, he's, it's infatuated too strong?

• 52:31Tom Holland?

  No, not at all.

• 52:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 52:32Tom Holland?

  He's absolutely blown away by her. Um, and Emma in turn, uh, you know, she's like the girl from the pop song. She has a thirst for knowledge and William Hamilton, you know, he's got a lot of knowledge because he's an unbelievable connoisseur.

• 52:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  He loves a vase, doesn't he?

• 52:45Tom Holland?

  He loves a vase. Um, Pompeii and Herculaneum are being kind of dug up at this point. He probably knows more about Greek and Roman, um, vases than anyone else in Europe at this point.

• 52:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Fascinating.

• 52:56Tom Holland?

  But he's also a very keen volcanologist, Dominic.

• 52:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 52:58Tom Holland?

  Um, so he's always climbing Mount Vesuvius and he is, he's fun. He's very stylish. He dresses well. He's witty. He's charismatic. You can see why they would get on.

• 53:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's the side of him that's always lost, isn't it? I, I was thinking about this. So later on, when Nelson enters the story, Sir William Hamilton is treated by cartoonists and by satirists as a total joke, as a doddery old fool who doesn't know what's going on.

• 53:22Tom Holland?

  Cuckold.

• 53:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Yeah, just as a sort of a hapless, wet, weak. Loser.

• 53:28Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 53:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually.

• 53:29Tom Holland?

  He's not.

• 53:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a much more serious and more charming and more sophisticated person than that.

• 53:36Tom Holland?

  Yeah, and Greville by this point doesn't mind a bit because he's getting a bit bored of Emma, I think. And also he wants to marry. He's very short of cash and no, Emma slightly gets in the way of that plan. You said, you know, does he, does he feel fond for Emma? I think he does. He doesn't want to do a Sir Harry and just dump her. He wants to secure her future. And so he comes up with a brilliant wheeze. Why doesn't he send Emma to Naples to Uncle William and she can become Sir William's mistress?

• 54:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Tom Holland?

  So he writes to his uncle and says, I've got this brilliant idea. What about it? And Sir William says, yeah, great. I mean, if she's on for it. And Greville lies and says, yeah, she's absolutely on for it. I've told her. He hasn't told her this at all because he knows that she won't go.

• 54:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 54:21Tom Holland?

  She's actually very devoted to Greville. So then he gets her to go with her mother by saying, you go out and join Sir William and I will join you a week later. So Emma sets off for Naples. It takes her a month to get there. She arrives on her 21st birthday, the 26th of April, 1786. And, you know, within days, she realizes that she's been tricked. Greville has completely sewn her up and Emma is devastated. And to the surprise of both uncle and nephew, she refuses to go to bed with Sir William. And I think both Greville and Sir William had assumed that she would, that she's a good time girl. Of course she will. But she doesn't. Actually, Emma is a romantic. She has plighted her troth to Greville.

• 55:03Tom Holland?

  You know, she, she wants the security that he provided, I think both emotional and financial. And she's not prepared to just kind of move on to the very aged Sir William. And that July, she writes to Greville and says, if I was with you, I would murder you and myself both.

• 55:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  And yet, over time.

• 55:21Tom Holland?

  And yet.

• 55:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and yet, over time, so six months, basically. She's still in Naples and eventually, you know, the flame of her ardor for greville dies out and she actually thinks, now, is this just calculation or what is it? She thinks, I will go to bed with William after all.

• 55:38Tom Holland?

  She has no real choice.

• 55:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 55:40Tom Holland?

  I mean, what, you know, the only choice she has, she's in a foreign country where she doesn't really speak the language, she will be penniless otherwise. Yeah, so by December, she is writing to Sir William saying, yes, I love you. Soon afterwards, it seems she begins sleeping with him. By seventeen eighty nine, she's dropping heavy hints to visitors that she and Sir William are married, which Sir William does nothing to deny. And then in seventeen ninety one, Sir William and Emma return to England and there Sir William, he's got the permission of the King himself to marry Emma. And on the sixth of September seventeen ninety one, in a private ceremony at Marylebone,

• 56:18Tom Holland?

  Sir William Hamilton, envoy of His Majesty to the Court of Naples, and the one-time housemaid and streetwalker Amy Lyon become man and wife. And obviously for Emma, this is the fulfillment of all her dreams because right from the moment of her arrival in Naples, Sir William had been lavishing her with horses and dresses and servants and houses and gorgeous views over the Bay of Naples and everything. And now, as his wife, she can be confident that all of these are hers by matrimonial right. But it's not just, you know, she's not just being materialist about this.

• 56:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  She surely, I mean, it's easy for people to see this as a purely mercenary and cold-blooded relationship. But all the evidence we have is that they actually were very fond of each other, they got on very well, that he is very nice to her, he's very encouraging, he is, I mean, people did mock him later on, they said, oh, he's infatuated with her, she can do no wrong, all of this kind of thing. But obviously, they lived together for many years.

• 57:23Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very successfully and very happily.

• 57:26Tom Holland?

  He's a very kind and loving husband. And I think that Emma, who had been denied.

• 57:34Tom Holland?

  Kindness and love for most of her life. This is what she'd wanted, perhaps even more than kind of fine horses and clothes.

• 57:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Emotional security, respect. She feels seen by him, all of those kinds of things.

• 57:46Tom Holland?

  Yeah, and that's really important. He respects her as well as adores her. He is angered by the snobbery with which his marriage to her is greeted. So Lady Holland, a wig,

• 58:00Tom Holland?

  very, very snobbish about it. That he should admire her beauty is not singular, but that he should like her society certainly is, as it is impossible to go beyond her in vulgarity and coarseness. That's the opinion of Lady Holland.

• 58:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 58:12Tom Holland?

  But Sir William, this kind of attitude infuriates him. I mean, maybe it's because he's a kind of connoisseur of female beauty and character as well as of, you know, Greek vases. He can recognize in her all kinds of qualities in addition to her incredible beauty. So those qualities would include the fact she's very smart. She's had no education as a child. And so she has that kind of autodidactic enthusiasm. She wants to learn. She wants to improve herself all the time. Sir William gets her French teachers. She picks up very fluent Italian very, very fast. She shares in her husband's passions. So she's always scrambling up Vesuvius with him. She studies classical art. So she becomes very familiar

• 58:57Tom Holland?

  with the classical statues and portraits on vases and things that Sir William loves. And this in turn is what then feeds into the attitudes.

• 59:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. Now, just before we come to the attitudes, just to remind people, there is a huge age gap here. I mean, Thea's just said in the chat, how old is she? She was 26 in 1791 when they got married. He was 61. So, you know, that's also part of the, and a really, really important part of the dynamic. But let's get back to the attitudes because this is the core, you think, of her appeal, and you have totally signed up.

• 59:30Tom Holland?

  I have.

• 59:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, Tom, let's be honest, you have completely drunk the attitude. I don't want to say drunk the Kool-Aid, but I just want to leave that image hanging there. Tell us why these attitudes are so revelatory and so radical and exciting.

• 59:44Tom Holland?

  Let's be upfront, there is absolutely an element of the dirty old man about Sir William in this, I think. He's the guy who kind of fixes the lighting, does the staging.

• 59:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, just pull your dress away a little bit more, my dear.

• 59:55Tom Holland?

  There's no question that it is erotic. But but it is also simultaneously learned. So in a way, it's Sir William's dream.

• 1:00:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 1:00:04Tom Holland?

  It's it's kind of sexy, but also redolent of, you know, antique vases.

• 1:00:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  I wish that Venus on my vase would come to life. Oh, she has.

• 1:00:14Tom Holland?

  But it's much more than that. You know, as I said at the beginning, a spectacle of a statue seemingly coming to life, an image from a vase, being given flesh and blood, it enthuses and enraptures and astonishes people from across the whole of Europe, including most famously Goethe. And Goethe's praise makes Emma's attitudes basically the kind of hottest ticket in Europe. She is an international star. She's a must see fixture for high society visits to Naples. And I will quote the historian Gillian Russell on this. She's a formative influence on the imagination of poets and artists, making Emma a key figure, Dominic,

• 1:00:53Tom Holland?

  in the fusion of neoclassicism with sensibility that was to characterize the European wide cultural movement later known as Romanticism. So she is taking that, you know, 18th century obsession with the classical, fusing it with the great cult of sensibility, and she is the great precursor of Romanticism. So in that, she's very like probably the two most famous men of the 19th century, Napoleon and Byron.

• 1:01:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're claiming that Lord Byron was one of the two most famous men of the 19th century?

• 1:01:22Tom Holland?

  Yes, of course.

• 1:01:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's a mad claim, but continue.

• 1:01:25Tom Holland?

  No, it's not. Absolutely not. We won't go into that.

• 1:01:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's more famous than Bismarck or Disraeli.

• 1:01:30Tom Holland?

  Yes, massively.

• 1:01:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Continue.

• 1:01:33Tom Holland?

  Napoleon and Byron are famous as cultural figures who haunt the imaginings of generation after generation after generation. Emma doesn't have that impact because what she is doing is dependent on on live performance. And so once she's gone, memories of it fade. But while she's doing these, it clearly does have a massive kind of influence on the way that poets and artists are starting to think of what will come to be called the Romantic. But the influence of these attitudes, obviously, you know, it's not just intellectual because it's also a huge influence on in the shops and the ballrooms of Britain. Emma is a massive influence on the kind of growing classical turn of women's dress. She'd been as an artist model, but even more now that she has these attitudes, the kind of the most famous floor show in Europe.

• 1:02:17Tom Holland?

  Her ability to serve as a muse for designers and indeed for shoppers is obviously being massively fuelled by industrialisation, which enables kind of rapid turnover of fashion. And so again, I think you could say that Emma is kind of one of the first great influencers. And I think we actually, we talked about her role in this in the episode on this we did with Hilary Davidson, the Regency Revolution. She is a major influence, both on, on culture and on shopping, basically. And you can tell her impact that as the years pass, even members of the highest society start to experience something of her star quality. You know, they start to dress like Lady Hamilton.

• 1:03:02Tom Holland?

  Some even compliment her personally. So here is, here's Lady Palmerston. Lady H is to me very surprising for considering the situation she was in. She behaves wonderfully well. Now and then, to be sure, a little vulginess pops out. But I think it's more Sir William's fault, who loves a good joke and leads her to enter into his stories, which are not of the best kind.

• 1:03:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Not of the best kind. I mean, that's very telling, isn't it? That's basically, he, he wants her to play a part in his sort of erotic fantasies, no?

• 1:03:28Tom Holland?

  I don't think it's just that. I think it reflects the fact in which they're very close as a couple and that they're always working as a team. And this in turn helps to explain the other way in which Emma is very useful to Sir William, which is as a kind of a political operator. And it's the measure of Emma's charm that she's able to befriend someone far grander than, you know, Lady Palmerston even, than Lady Holland. And this is the most powerful queen in Europe. Because Maria Carolina, she is Hapsburg, she is the elder sister of Marie Antoinette, and she is the wife of the Bourbon King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Sicily.

• 1:04:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 1:04:10Tom Holland?

  And she is effectively the ruler of his kingdom. And this is because Ferdinand is an absolute bore.

• 1:04:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's an oaf. He's an absolute oaf.

• 1:04:20Tom Holland?

  Yeah, John Sugden brilliantly describes him as a boisterous, big-featured buffoon. So like another Habsburg, Franz Ferdinand, he's absolutely obsessed with killing animals. He loves hunting.

• 1:04:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  He would chase his courtiers around the palace with throwing the contents of a chamber pot at them.

• 1:04:37Tom Holland?

  Yes.

• 1:04:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or throwing frogs at them and stuff like this. And that's his idea of a great laugh.

• 1:04:41Tom Holland?

  Yeah, absolute bants. He also has a very shrill falsetto, so he's like a Neanderthal. Unlike Maria Carolina, who has a very deep voice.

• 1:04:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 1:04:50Tom Holland?

  So they're an entertaining couple. But he's very dissipated and inevitably therefore had tried to seduce Emma. But she had pretended that she had no idea what he meant by these advances and rebuffs them. And Maria Carolina is very grateful for this and hails Emma as an absolute model of virtue. But obviously, for as long as Emma is not married to Sir William, she can't receive her. You know, that would just be an absolute no-no. But she's always encouraging Sir William to make an honest woman of Emma. They duly go to England and get married, as we've heard. And on their journey back to Naples from the time they spent in England when they got married, they have a stopover in Paris.

• 1:05:30Tom Holland?

  And this is 1791, and it's three months after the abortive escape made by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, which gets stopped at Varennes and they get brought back. And Sir William and Emma are in the assembly when Louis XVI is forced to accept the radical constitution, which classes him essentially as a constitutional monarch. And we've done this in our series on the French Revolution. You know, he's forced to sit on a kind of plain chair.

• 1:06:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Stuff with hats, a lot of hat action.

• 1:06:02Tom Holland?

  Lots of stuff with hats. Nobody takes their hats off. And he's very upset and humiliated, as of course is Marie Antoinette. Even though Maria Carolina had refused to receive Emma, Marie Antoinette doesn't care about this. She sees Emma and gives her a letter for her elder sister.

• 1:06:19Tom Holland?

  And for Emma, I mean, you can imagine, this is, this is amazing. And it enables her to rank as the, as the only person who meets both Marie Antoinette and sleeps with Nelson.

• 1:06:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  So. Oh, nice.

• 1:06:30Tom Holland?

  That is quite an achievement.

• 1:06:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Tom Holland?

  And a month after she's got back to Naples as Sir William's wife, as Lady Hamilton, she's invited to her first private audience with Maria Carolina and Emma talks to her about Marie Antoinette and she's so emotional about it. She's so overcome with sorrow for Marie Antoinette's situation that she bursts into tears. And Maria Carolina is incredibly touched by this. And soon after, Sir William and Emma are invited to spend the hunting season at Caserta, which is the kind of the great Neapolitan Versailles. And it isn't long before she and the Queen are absolute intimates.

• 1:07:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. And for Maria Carolina, the snobbery that would surround Emma in England is not quite the same in Naples. She's just a foreigner. And Emma is fun. Emma's a good laugh. Emma's not, you know, sort of tainted by the factionism of the court.

• 1:07:21Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Politically, they're on the same page, aren't they? Because Emma is a classic working class aspirational Tory. She's a big royalist and a big reactionary.

• 1:07:29Tom Holland?

  Yeah, she loves kings and queens. Absolutely. But also, you know, she has been a lady's maid to actresses. She has resources in her lived experience that enable her, I think, to get on very well with, with Maria Carolina. And as you said, the fact that they're communicating in Italian and French means that there's no opportunity for the Queen to sneer at Emma's Lancasterian accent, which she keeps all her life.

• 1:07:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 1:07:58Tom Holland?

  Meanwhile, of course, the French Revolution is starting to become bloodier. Louis XVI is sent to the guillotine. Marie Antoinette is sent to the guillotine and the storm clouds of war are gathering over Europe. And Marie Carolina understandably is terrified of the French. Emma wants to help secure ports in the Mediterranean for the Royal Navy. And basically, the interests of the two women coincide. And in 1793, when a young captain called Horatio Nelson arrives in Naples with the

• 1:08:37Tom Holland?

  task of recruiting from Ferdinand IV troops that can join the siege of Toulon, it is Emma who oils the wheels of power for him and sources him the reinforcements that the British need for the siege.

• 1:08:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, because Naples is crucial for the British in the Mediterranean because they have so few bases.

• 1:09:00Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And if they can get the support of Naples, which is obviously a reactionary, anti-revolutionary power, that would be a massive, massive boost. And that's where Sir William, who is basically the ambassador in Naples, and his wife are so important.

• 1:09:13Tom Holland?

  Yes. And Nelson is very, very grateful to Emma, very impressed by her. He sees her intimacy with the Queen, he thinks that's very impressive. Also, her command of foreign languages. Nelson's hopeless with languages, he's also very impressed by that. And he's impressed by her charm, by her beauty, and by her strong dislike of the French, which of course Nelson also has. And so I think he does leave Naples with a certain tendresse perhaps. Nelson then goes off, you know, he's sailing around the Mediterranean and the Atlantic all the time, doesn't have time for Emma at all, barely thinks of her. And meanwhile, Emma and the Queen huddle together, kind of dreading that revolution will come to Naples.

• 1:09:58Tom Holland?

  And by 1798, it seems that the revolution is kind of lapping at the gates of Naples because the streets of the city are absolutely seething, there are Jacobins out there. And in February 1798, the French occupy Rome, which is no distance at all from Naples. Meanwhile, news is sweeping Naples that a massive French task force under The greatest general of the Revolutionary Republic, Napoleon Bonaparte, is setting sail from Toulon, the great port on the south of the Mediterranean that the British had briefly captured and then lost again. And now a fleet is sailing out from it under Napoleon, and nobody knows where it's going.

• 1:10:43Tom Holland?

  And Emma is convinced that Napoleon is heading for Naples to conquer the south of Italy. And so she writes to the supreme commander of the British Navy, the Earl of St Vincent, and says, please come and rescue us. You know, we are, we are the target of this terrifying monster, Bonaparte. And Sir Vincent duly promises assistance. And he says it will come under the command of a knight of superior prowess in my train, who is charged with this enterprise and will soon make his appearance. And Dominic, who is this knight of superior prowess? It is Horatio Nelson.

• 1:11:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  But of course, Napoleon, I mean, they did think, you know, we talked when we did the Nelson series about how Nelson and his captains did wonder if Napoleon was heading for Naples. It was a real concern of theirs. But Napoleon and his armament are actually heading for Egypt, aren't they? And Nelson does, he does pass Naples and he sends Emma a note.

• 1:11:40Tom Holland?

  He does, he sends her a letter and says, I hope to kiss your hand very soon.

• 1:11:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  But that's just him being gallant, as he, you know, being polite and gallant, right? That's not, there's no significance there particularly.

• 1:11:50Tom Holland?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:11:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  But isn't there some story that she does have to grease the wheels again? Because he goes to Syracuse and he's not going to be let in.

• 1:11:59Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so, so people may remember that Nelson is looking for the French fleet and he can't find it. He's got the whole of the Mediterranean, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. And he sails all the way to Egypt on the assumption that Napoleon might be going there. There's nothing there. He then sails back to Sicily, to Syracuse, where he's told, oh yeah, Napoleon is just, you know, he is bound for Egypt. But it's like kind of a filling your car with petrol. He needs supplies to make that journey back. And the commander of Syracuse refuses to allow him in and refuses to give him supplies. And it is Emma who goes to the Queen, goes to the King, sources the supplies. And Nelson is then able to sail off eastwards.

• 1:12:40Tom Holland?

  And on the first of August, he duly wins his great comparable victory over the French at Abokia Bay. And that was the victory with which we ended our previous season.

• 1:12:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the Battle of the Nile. So that was an absolutely transcendent moment for Nelson. Just a crushing, crushing victory over the French, as he wrote to, he writes to Sir William Hamilton, doesn't he? Victory is not strong enough a name for such a scene as I have passed.

• 1:13:06Tom Holland?

  Yeah, he does.

• 1:13:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Sir William and Lady Hamilton are absolutely thrilled, aren't they?

• 1:13:11Tom Holland?

  Yeah. So Emma immediately passes the news on to the Queen, informing her of the joyful news of the great victory over the infernal French by the brave, gallant Nelson. And of course, she dresses up à la Nelson. She has a dress specially made for her decorated with gold anchors. She has a sea blue shawl. He wears a hairband inscribed Nelson and Victory. And when on the 22nd of September, Nelson arrives in the Bay of Naples on his flagship, the Vanguard. Rather embarrassing that the Vanguard has to be towed in because it's lost its mast. She and Sir William are basically the first to arrive on the deck. And Emma is

• 1:13:50Tom Holland?

  in an absolute lather of joy and patriotism. And she hurls herself onto the very battered and maimed Admiral. And Nelson, who is of course himself, as we saw in our previous season, a great enthusiast for histrionic emotion. I mean, he indulges in it himself and he enjoys it in other people. He's completely charmed. And he writes to Fanny, his wife, who is mouldering away in a rectory back in rainy Norfolk, "up flew her ladyship and exclaiming, Oh God, is it possible? Fell into my arms, more dead than alive." And Kate

• 1:14:29Tom Holland?

  Williams, in her biography of Emma, points out that so entranced was Nelson by Emma's display, that he had temporarily forgotten he had only one arm.

• 1:14:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, that's ominous. That's very ominous for those of us who are big Nelson fans. But Tom, where is this all leading? Well, we will find out on Monday because on Monday we will be resuming the great journey through the life and victories of Horatio Nelson. We'll be looking at Nelson in Naples. Does he cover himself in glory or not? We will find out. We will be examining the great romance of Nelson and Lady Hamilton. We'll be following him all the way to the Baltic and the Battle of Copenhagen. And then now some people may say, oh, what would they do then? Because they did a series about the Battle of Trafalgar. But Tom, we are nothing if not a patriotic podcast. The anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar is approaching.

• 1:15:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  And although we have done it, we did it very much from our perspective, didn't we? We never did it from Nelson's perspective.

• 1:15:32Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I don't know what you think, but I think we should probably do Trafalgar through Nelson's eyes.

• 1:15:38Tom Holland?

  I think we absolutely should.

• 1:15:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think that's what the people want.

• 1:15:41Tom Holland?

  Yeah, we're not only a patriotic podcast, but we're the people's podcast. And what the people want, we do.

• 1:15:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very much the people's podcast. And because we like people, we want to give people an opportunity to hear all that series early, to hear it straight away.

• 1:15:54Tom Holland?

  Because we're all heart, aren't we?

• 1:15:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  We are all heart.

• 1:15:57Tom Holland?

  Like Emma.

• 1:15:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I mean, yeah, you can liken yourself to Emma Hamilton if you like. I'm still a little bit more sceptical about the attitudes. Members of the Rest is History Club, our very own Attitudes audience, can get access to the entire upcoming Nelson series. You will get it all from Monday. And if you're not already a member and you're not enjoying the host of benefits that come with membership, then you can sign up at therestishistory.com. So while you go and do that, it falls to me to say, Tom, that was absolutely fascinating. A brilliant window into Georgian London and to the life of this extraordinary character with whom I have to say, I think you have, rather like Sir William Hamilton, I think you have, you have rather fallen in love, haven't you?

• 1:16:42Tom Holland?

  Rather like Horatio Nelson, as we will see in the next episode.

• 1:16:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  That is not the parallel.

• 1:16:49Tom Holland?

  Thank you very much, everyone for listening. Bye bye.

• 1:16:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Goodbye.

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