Nelson The Sailor

This is an extract from my upcoming book, The Lamented Hero. This piece covers the formative years of Emma Hamilton. Please share with friends – and subscribe to my blog to receive regular updates.

The great love of Horatio Nelson’s life was born in 1765, somewhere in a village called Ness on the Wirral peninsula.

The location of her birth was incomparable to the strange, glorified station to which she would rise. It’s perhaps suitable, then, that in these early years her name was similarly unrecognisable. In this Cheshire backwater, Lady Emma Hamilton – the soon-to-be famed beauty of the evening airs and palatial spaces of Naples – had been christened Amy Lyon. Or, rather, Emy Lyon, owing to her parents misspelling her name at the baptism.

Her father, Henry, had been buried in an unmarked plot when Amy was still in swaddling bands. The only flash of biographical light Lady Emma Hamilton would ever shine on him was that he was a blacksmith and a drunk. In truth, she never knew him.

That Amy’s father didn’t have, or wasn’t allowed, a Christian burial suggests he may have killed himself, or played his part in a village scandal. Sadly, rural 18th-century blacksmiths tend to leave behind little trace of their existence. Especially those like Henry Lyon, buried in an unmarked grave. His story is likely to be eternally condemned to the soil. The signing of his marriage certificate with an ‘X’ does provide one small detail: he was almost certainly illiterate.

By the time of Amy’s birth, Ness was in the midst of transformation. It was changing from a gruelling agricultural village into a gruelling industrial one. Where men once took scythes to crops, they now took candles into coal-mines. The lives of the villagers retained something of the medieval, though. They still washed their clothes – and themselves, should the mood take them – in the stream. Horse manure was regularly used to fuel hearth-fires, embedding its milky, sour scent into furniture and clothes. Food was, at best, scarce; at worst, non-existent.

Sensing that this corner of Cheshire might not be the comeliest locale in which to raise a baby, the widowed Mary Lyon – who had also signed her marriage certificate with an illiterate ‘X’ – took her daughter to live with family in Hawarden, north Wales. Mary’s kin were originally from Lancashire, and it is whilst living in their cramped cottage that Amy absorbed the north-west accent that would one day crack the air at embassy dinner parties in Naples.

Like most children of Georgian Britain, Amy was expected to earn a wage. She did so by toiling in various country houses, before settling, aged twelve, as a servant girl in the home of a doctor. Her duties included sweeping the chimneys, wiping grease off the walls, and pouring pots of urine onto the lawn each morning. Yet, for all these hours lost to labour, somebody taught Amy Lyon to read and write.

In addition to the mystery of her literacy, it remains unknown as to how Amy Lyon emerged from young childhood so physically healthy and voluptuous (a creepy enough word which manages to appear in practically every contemporary description of her). In an age where children from her background generally had sunken eyes, loose teeth, and yellowing skin stretched thin over bone, Amy’s good health further suggests that she benefited (if that is the right word) from the attentions of a wealthier suitor. She wouldn’t have been the first.

Lustful interactions between master and servant were so common that a handbook for Georgian homeowners warned gentlemen to avoid the temptation to ‘fall foul on the wench in the scullery’. To quell such desires at source, servant girls like Amy were encouraged to wear bland clothes and generally keep to the shadows. But that’s not to say the handbook’s advice was adhered to. Many young girls and boys were prey to the attentions of elderly landowners and their giddy sons. Their advances could be difficult to refuse. Doing so could not only render you unemployed, but unemployable.

In some instances, affairs between gentlemen and serving staff did lead to long-lasting relationships. Diarist James Boswell makes mention of a wealthy friend marrying his cook because she ‘dressed a lovely bit of collop’.

A more regular occurrence, though, was staff electing to avoid an economic mismatch and elope with one another. Not that this was a guarantee of happiness, either. Horace Walpole lamented how his ‘old cook as yellow as a dishclout’ had been ‘seduced by a jolly dog of a coachman’ and ended up with the ‘miscarry of a child’ and ‘dropsy’.

It’s unlikely that Amy’s literacy and voluptuousness were solely the result of the quality of Welsh air. An invisible hand looms over her narrative. Her mother may provide a clue here. Years later, when they were both living handsomely in Naples, Mary Lyon concocted a backstory that she and her daughter had always had money, but that an inheritance had further swelled their coffers prior to leaving Britain. The source of this alleged fortune was a chap called Mr Cadogan. Records continually refuse to provide evidence that Mr Cadogan ever existed. In an act of supreme dedication to the tale, and to preserving her daughter’s reputation among Neapolitan high society, Mary Lyon took the name Mrs Cadogan for the rest of her life.

May it be that there was a Mr Cadogan, of sorts, but that he went by a different name?

Regardless, in an age where the past left few fingerprints, Mrs Cadogan’s story of inherited wealth went largely unquestioned in Naples. To her face, at least.

However, sauntering along Mediterranean bays at sunrise was none of Amy Lyon’s business. For now, she was spending her childhood mornings pouring the local doctor’s warm urine onto a frosty lawn, stepping slightly to one side to avoid its weak plumes.

There was only so much she could take. In search of something more fulfilling, Amy Lyon decided to move to London. The cost of her coach ride south would have been substantial (and possibly covered by her benefactor).

In the autumn of 1777, still only twelve, Amy moved to the capital. She travelled down there on her own, squashed and sea-sick in the back of horse-dragged cabs, becoming yet another Georgian girl escaping the corridors of country houses and driving out towards the swelling industrial cities. One wit of the age lustily called this migration of young girls to London, ‘a sacrifice to the metropolis, offered by the thirty-nine counties’.

Presumably, someone laughed.

As Amy would soon learn, the City of London offered little else to laugh about.

This is just the beginning of a rather grisly story for Emma Hamilton. It will be continued in my upcoming book, The Lamented Hero. Please share and subscribe to this page for updates!