Almost as soon as Emma Hamilton met and fell in love with Nelson, she wanted to set up home with him. She had, after all, lived in over 20 different rented rooms in England and Italy. Nelson, too, was frantic for a home, for he was weary of trailing after Emma and her husband.

After Emma gave birth to Nelson’s daughter in 1801, she set off in search of their perfect property. In an age when aristocrats inherited their homes and everybody else rented, Nelson and Emma embarked on a very modern project: to transform a cheap ruin into a fabulous home. They wanted to create a splendid nest egg for Nelson’s future and a beautiful home for their little daughter, Horatia, and the big family of children they intended.

Genteel eighteenth-century couples set up home young with the benefit of parental money. Emma and Nelson bought their first home when they were both, in eighteenth-century terms, close to retirement. He was nearing fifty and she was moving into her forties. Most couples with their precarious finances would have rented a property. He was sending half his money to his estranged wife, while Emma had no money of her own. But Nelson had his reasons for buying. He wanted to keep his lover to himself, away from London, and he anticipated a large win of prize money. Moreover, he desired stardom and for that he needed a mansion.

Nelson and Emma were so famous that the newspapers followed their efforts to find a home. The gossip column of the Times gleefully reported on Emma’s disastrous house hunting visit to Harrow with Sir William’s relation, the Marquis of Abercorn. The horses tipped Emma and the Marchioness into a hedge (The Times, 4 August 1801).

Emma found a ramshackle old house in the village of Merton, for only £9,000, the rough equivalent of £560,000 today. The horrified surveyor decided it the worst place he had ever seen. When the solicitor advised Nelson to demand a discount on the price, he exploded with frustration – and paid the asking price.

Confident that she could turn the shabby ruin into a multi-million pound mansion, Emma set to work on the renovations and installed long mirrors, mirrored doors and huge windows. Remembering the chill dreariness of Nelson’s previous house with Fanny, Roundwood, Emma crammed ‘Paradise Merton’ with brand new furniture, flashy decorations and Nelson souvenirs. There were Nelson tea sets, draperies, and hangings, as well as portraits of him and pieces of his ships. Every possible item was adorned with her face or Nelson’s – or a giant ‘N’.

Emma aimed to turn Merton Place into a representation of their great love affair. One visitor, Lord Minto, who came from a class who inherited houses ready furnished, was scandalised. As he reeled, ‘not only the rooms, but the whole house, staircase and all, are covered with nothing but pictures of her and him, of all sizes and sorts, and representations of his naval actions, coats of arms, pieces of plate in his honour, the flagstaff of L’Orient etc’(Minto III, 252). Emma had transformed a plain country house into a palace of Nelsonia.

Lord Minto may have hated the look, but Emma’s taste in decoration set the tone for the nation. Women expressed their admiration for the hero by decking their homes in Nelson dinner plates, jugs, jelly moulds drawer handles, plant pots, chests and pictures. They even hung curtains to pay tribute to the hero. Nelson and Emma clothes, jewellery, furniture, trinkets and china flew off shop shelves. Emma snapped up all such items and commissioned more. She was the high priestess of the Nelson personality cult and Nelson loved her for it. He adored a house in which everything he saw bore a picture of him.

Nelson wanted to look rich, even though by the beginning of April 1802 he was on half pay, thanks to the peace with France. Emma had to be the proof: fashionable, dripping with jewels and a generous hostess. But the act – and Merton was hard to keep up. Emma stuffed the stream and ponds with fish and populated the grounds with chubby pigs, poultry and sheep but she still spent the equivalent of thousands of pounds a week on food. Renovating the house while they were living in it caused problems. Nelson’s letters from sea to Emma are filled one half with passionate declarations of love, the other with worries over the unfinished kitchen, dusty halls and errant landscape gardeners.

Nelson had presented his home with Fanny as an empty shell, devoid of children or friends, and Emma was determined to fill their ‘Paradise’ with colour. Rural Merton saw a nightly traffic jam of carriages crammed with actresses, politicians, singers, socialites and aristocrats. Nelson’s friends were always visiting and his nieces and nephews were constant guests.

Sir William Hamilton soon tired of fourteen or more at the dinner table nearly every night, but everybody else thought Paradise Merton delightful. The fabulous dinners, courtesy of the expensive French chefs, were legendary. England’s most sought-after invitees were regulars - the Royal brothers, the Duke of Clarence (future William IV), the Duke of Sussex, and occasionally even, the Prince of Wales himself.

‘Paradise Merton’ was most famous for Emma’s extravagant after-dinner entertainments. She had made herself a European star by performing her Attitudes, but by her mid thirties she was bored of pretending to be Medea or Clytemnestra. Instead, she staged grand group tableaux dances reminiscent of a Hollywood – or Bollywood – dance scene. They were the outcome of weeks, if not months, of careful planning. For her extravaganza for Christmas 1802, the glorious ‘Favourite Sultana’, she designed every detail of the opulent dress for herself and the company. Even her hairstyle was minutely prescribed: loose, gathered with a diamond headband and braided with strings of pearls (although she popped a turban behind the scenes for dramatic moments). She wore bright silk trousers, with a coloured shift, and special square toed Turkish slippers and ankle bracelets, and then a coloured overcoat and rich satin jacket. Her arms glittered with bracelets, thick gold rings adorned her fingers, and her necklace was a long gold chain bearing a small perfume flask. Emma as a multicoloured Turkish Sultana was the most fascinating display that had taken place in rural Wimbledon for years.

She was flanked by gorgeously dressed assistants. Nelson’s two young nieces were ‘Moorish Ladies’. Emma’s dowdy mother, Mrs Cadogan, was dressed up as a Grecian lady, attired in a long white gown with wide embroidered sleeves, and a short bolero-type jacket. A mystery ‘Miss K’, perhaps the daughter of a neighbour or maybe even Emma’s daughter by Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, Emma Carew, played a Negro Sultana, dressed in a ‘negro mask’, a black dress, gold sandals, a coloured turban with a long veil, gold girdle and jewellery, and a rainbow train. Nelson’s secretary, Tyson and a visitor, Major Magra were commanded to be ‘as magnificent as they can dress themselves; whiskers and no beards’, neighbours Messrs Blow, Cumyng and Jefferson were ‘Moors of Quality’ and the artist, Thomas Baxter and any other spare gentlemen played slaves, wearing Negro masks, long, wide sleeves, shawls, and ‘long pipes and bags’ (‘Favourite Sultana’, Monmouth E206).

After a sumptuous dinner, the candles were lit against the glittering glass windows and Emma was the star of the show. She proved to everybody that Nelson was her faithful devotee, wholly absorbed in his own ‘Favourite Sultana’.

But within ten years of scenes of such high glamour, the laughter was gone. Merton was on the market.

Nelson willed Merton to Emma, but he did not leave her enough money to maintain it, bequeathing the rest of his estate to his brother. In the years after Trafalgar, Emma spent thousands of pounds on keeping Merton as Nelson would have wished it. But the state never gave her the money she expected and her finances were soon ruined beyond repair. Within just four years of Nelson’s death, she had to sell Merton and auction off her precious Nelson souvenirs.

The house was eventually demolished and London expanded out over Nelson’s once rural village. There were once guests, glamour, Princes and naval heroes; now there is a supermarket car park. A house that could have been turned into a museum to Nelson and Emma has no monument to mark the spot.

Kate Williams is the author of England’s Mistress: the Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton, published by Hutchinson on 5 October2006, and Ballantine in the US on 17 October 2006. The book is based on over five years of work and many new letters. It was serialised as a ‘Book of the Week’ on Radio 4 in mid October 2006.