Kate Williams and Emma Hamilton

By Zoe Deleuil, Cheshire Life

Biographer Kate Williams was a PhD student at Oxford, surviving on a £7,000 grant, when she found the historian’s equivalent of a purse stuffed with rubies – an unpublished letter by Emma Hamilton, 18th-century fashion icon, artist’s model, ambassador’s wife and, most famously, mistress of Lord Nelson.

‘I was in the British Library, reading the letters of eighteenth-century women, and getting very disheartened,” she says. “I was shocked at how anodyne and boring they were. Then I stumbled upon Emma’s letters. They were completely unique. She’d never been schooled in formal letter writing, so had this incredibly passionate voice. I just fell in love with her.”

Thrilled at her discovery, Kate contacted a literary agent with an idea for a biography, the first in twenty years. Her agent was equally enthusiastic, and asked her to write a proposal. The book sold by auction in both the UK and America within a week.
“ I was wandering around Pompeii with my camera when my agent called. It was funny because I’d interned at Random House for £2.50 a day as an undergraduate student, thinking I might go into
publishing when I finished my studies, and came back as an
author!”

Kate now had the means to search for more of Emma’s letters, a process that took more than four years. “I found loads of unpublished letters in archives and record offices all over the country, and overseas. At Harvard and Yale, the librarians put giant boxes on the table in front of me and left me to sort through them. They all showed different facets of her personality, depending on whom she was writing to. After a while I was thinking, please, no more new discoveries!”

Kate uncovered many new letters. “I found a lot of new material by looking at the originals. Some had been published in the 1890s, but had been edited and bowdlerized, or toned down, to please their Victorian audience.” The original letters showed Emma to be ambitious, charismatic and a skilled networker.
“ There are lots of misconceptions about Emma,” says Kate. “That she was just a ‘tart with a heart’, for example. But she made it right from the bottom, where she would have spent her life as ballast for the industrial revolution, to a position of influence among the most powerful people. And she was touched by all the big historical events of her time.”

Kate firmly believes it was her squalid childhood in Northern England that made Emma so driven, and she is the first biographer to examine her childhood in detail.
“ Traditional biographies tend to only look at people in adulthood, but to me her childhood was integral to her story,” says Kate. “Out of thousands of female servants she was the one to pull herself out of poverty. It was so rare at that time for someone to have a vision of a better life. People would usually think, well I’m a prostitute or a servant, and there's nothing I can do to escape.”

Emma rarely spoke of her childhood, and her family did not leave behind the paper trail that people from aristocratic backgrounds did. However, Kate’s meticulous research goes some way to filling in the gaps, and building a vivid picture of life in the coal-mining village of Ness, where Emma was born in 1765. Previous accounts of Emma’s background have claimed she was the daughter of a fallen aristocrat, but Kate dismisses this as far-fetched, writing ‘no member of the gentry would have worked as a blacksmith or signed his marriage certificate with an X, as Emma’s father did.’

Emma’s father died two months after she was baptised, and Kate thinks it’s most likely he killed himself, due to a combination of exhaustion, despair and isolation, possibly after a drunken argument with Emma’s mother. “You can start to build up a notion of what was happened, even if you can’t come to definite conclusions,” she says.

After her father’s death, Emma and her mother moved to Emma’s grandmother’s house in Hawarden, North Wales, seven miles from Chester. Kate draws on letters, published works and crime reports (which are invaluable to historians, she tells me, for they contain so much detail) to show what life was like at that time. She skillfully weaves in the details of everyday life, from the fuel that Emma’s family would have used in their fire (horse dung – wood from the forests was only for the landowners) to Emma’s diet – meat, potatoes and puddings, all boiled in a pot over the fire. Kate also speculates that Emma’s mother may have found a wealthy protector for them at this difficult time, as Emma grew up tall, voluptuous and apparently untouched by disease.

At the age of twelve, after being dismissed from her position as a domestic servant, Emma was on her way to London to seek fame and fortune, and to live the kind of life that someone from her background could barely imagine, let alone aspire to. Her story gallops along like a gripping novel, with an utterly believable and sympathetic character at its heart, who Kate clearly adores. “You meet lots of biographers that are bored of their subjects by the end of their years of research, she says. “But I still find Emma’s energy and determination awe-inspiring.”

England's Mistress: the Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton will be published on 5 October. The book will be serialised on Radio 4 as 'Book of the Week' in October.