Lady Emma Hamilton

Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton affair: 'Clumsy' love letters reveal struggle ...

He may have been the nation’s greatest naval  genius, but Lord Nelson perhaps wasn’t so assured when it came to conducting his affair with Lady Hamilton.

In fact, the admiral’s efforts to be discreet appear positively clumsy.

Take for instance a letter in which he pretends to write on behalf of a certain Mr Thompson – supposedly a young sailor and father on board his ship – to the sailor’s lover. This young lady is ever-so-conveniently staying with Lady Hamilton.

Barely able to contain his yearning he writes: ‘Your friend is at my elbow and enjoins me to assure you that his love for you and your child is if possible greater than ever and that he calls God to witness that he will marry you as soon as possible.’

Nelson, aware of his mistress’s allure, adds: ‘He (Mr Thompson) desires you will adhere to Lady H’s good advice and like her keep those impertinent men at a proper distance.’

The note is one of four exchanges between the lovers, written between 1801 and 1806, loaned to the Nelson Museum in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. Curator Hannah Bentley said: ‘People often say Nelson was quite cold and austere, but the letters reveal the intense relationship he had with Lady Hamilton.’

In another letter, written on board captured Spanish warship San Josef in 1801, Nelson reveals his jealousy over the playboy Prince of Wales flirting with Lady Hamilton.

He married Frances Nisbet in 1787 and was given command of the Agamemnon when Britain entered the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793.

He lost his right eye in the battle at Calvi when he helped capture Corsica and lost his right arm in 1797 at Santa Cruz in Tenerife.  

He fell in love with Emma Hamilton in Naples in 1793 and they had a child in 1801 but they remained in their respective marriages.

In 1801 he destroyed the Danish Navy at the battle of Copenhagen as vice-admiral and in 1805 was victorious in the battle of Trafalgar off the southern coast of Spain, saving Britain from the threat of invasion from Napoleon.

He was shot and died whilst on his ship Victory.
In London's Trafalgar Square Nelson's Column was erected in 1840 at 170ft high and his crowned with a statue of him.

‘I am so agitated that I can write nothing,’ he writes but then warns: ‘Do not set long at table, good God he will be next you and telling you soft things...don’t let him touch you nor yet set next you. God strike him blind if he looks at you.

That Hamilton Lady: Why Emma Hamilton?

My choice in choosing Lady Emma Hamilton as the person who graces my header and avatars might be an odd one to a few of you (it's even a bit odd to ME) since I'm nothing like her. I most certainly am not a prostitute or stripper (and really would not like to be one anytime soon), not classically beautiful, not married to a rich, old man, have not mothered a child whose father's identity is kept a secret, am not a model, am not part of an elite world that shuns me, and does not speak vulgarly (although I do some some swears at times). So...I have about as much things in common with her as I do with any given object. and as browns are usually the color scheme of my blog, the portrait worked well with it). Moreover, I couldn't use an image of Andrew Hamilton, whom I mentioned I owe my last name to, and certainly not of Georgiana (for more than obvious reasons). It would be even more odd to have "That Hamilton Lady" grace the portrait of a man. Even weirder yet, have my blog be titled "That Hamilton Man".

Emma Hamilton

The letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, with a supplement of interesting letters

Memoirs of Emma, Lady Hamilton, The Friend of Lord Nelson and the Court of Naples

Emma, Lady Hamilton, a biographical essay with a catalogue of her published portraits

Emma Hamilton