My Favourite Londoner

20 September 2006, Time Out
Kate Williams on Nelson's mistress Emma Hamilton

From her very earliest childhood, Emma Hamilton was desperate to live in London. Travellers poured in to the biggest and most exciting city in the eighteenth-century world, attracted by its raw vibrancy and the sheer energy given off by nearly a million men, women and children from all over the globe living and working together. Those in other parts of England pined to visit - and the young Amy Lyon, as she was back then, was one of the most passionately hopeful. As a child in a poverty-stricken village in north Wales, she became notorious for standing at the side of the road, trying to catch a glimpse of the fine coaches speeding past on their way to the capital.

As soon as she could leave home, Amy was on a coach to London. Alone at the tender age of 12, she had to endure a terrifying seven-day journey through unfamiliar countryside populated by highwaymen and travelling salesmen looking for girls to rob. By strength of will and luck, she arrived in the capital and found a job as a scullery maid to a doctor in the recently gentrified area of Blackfriars. When dusk fell, she threw herself into the city's pleasures, hanging around Covent Garden's bars and pubs with her fellow maid. London was a city for the young and for the hundreds of teenaged maids, apprentices, labourers, and shop workers, the city was one big funfair. Amy had too much fun. Within two months of starting work, she was dismissed for staying out all night.

Amy gave up on respectability and set off to try to become an actress in the great Drury Lane. She gained a job as an assistant to the wardrobe mistress, but before long she was fired again. Unemployed and desperate, she moved to work in what was the biggest and most famous sex resort in the world: Covent Garden. She was a 13-year-old streetwalker in a piazza buzzing with tourists, rakes, performers and pickpockets. Then began her adventures in the darker side of London: as a barmaid and prostitute, a dancer in the city's most popular and ridiculous sex show, Dr James Graham's Temple of Health, and a courtesan in one of St James's finest brothels ...

The city she saw was not the epitome of elegance that we often believe in now. Eighteenth-century London was a chaotic building site where, for many young people like her, anything was allowed. It changed Amy from a shy country girl to a celebrity-seeking woman. When she was 18, she was taken up by a shy aristocrat, Charles Greville. Intent that her wild London past should not be discovered, he made her break off with all her friends and change her name to Mrs Emma Hart. But he could not prevent her desire for adulation, and she started modelling for painters, and became George Romney's best muse. By the time she was sent off to Naples at the age of 21, sold off by Greville to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, she was famous and one of the most painted women in England.

When Emma returned 12 years later, in 1800, she was Lady Hamilton, for Sir William had married her. She was a star. Her dance performances had charmed Europe's power brokers and her affair with Horatio, Lord Nelson, had set the world gossiping.

She was still obsessed with London. Nelson begged her to live at his mansion in Merton - now a suburb of Wimbledon, then a quiet rural village. But whenever his back was turned, she whipped back to her rented mansion on Piccadilly and shone at London's society balls, charming the Prince of Wales and his spendthrift, party animal brothers, and in the daytime spending outrageous amounts of money in the world's most expensive shops.

London's news editors used the glamorous Lady Hamilton to sell papers. Gossip columnists described her dinner party menus and detailed her fashions. Journalists mobbed her whenever she went outside. Wealthy members of high society generally tried to flee London for the country whenever possible, but Emma stayed put, addicted to life in the brash, vulgar, celebrity-obsessed city. After Nelson's death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Emma began to see another side of London. The money he had left her was not enough to cover the debts she had accrued before his death. Although he died begging that the nation would care for Lady Hamilton, the government would not help her and she was soon penniless. She could have survived if she had moved to cheap lodgings in the country. But she could not bear to leave London. She continued to overspend, convinced that the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales would rescue her from her predicament.

Before long, she was imprisoned for debt in the King's Bench prison in Southwark. She owed, in today's terms, more than £7 million, but she kept up the show in prison, throwing lavish dinners for the brothers of the Prince of Wales in the hope they might give her money. But no help came and she was forced to flee overseas, where she could not be arrested. She arrived in Calais utterly despondent. Her health quickly declined and she died within three months of arriving. It was the final irony: she had loved the city inordinately, but she died in exile in France.

Emma Hamilton experienced every aspect of eighteenth-century London from the lowest brothel to the most glamorous royal party, from exclusive shopping streets to the debtors' prison. She was utterly unique. In an age when many stayed put in their districts, she moved between the teeming, commercial world of the City and the elegant beauty of the West End.

She adored London, and her dramatic story shows us eighteenth-century London in all its grandeur.

Kate Williams' 'England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton' is published by Hutchinson at £20.

The Bare Facts

Emma Hamilton

1765 Born, the daughter of a blacksmith in north Wales.

1777 Travels to London.

1780 Has a daughter by her 'patron', Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, who is brought up by her grandmother in Wales.

1786 Her lover, Charles Francis Greville, packs her off to be the mistress of his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, whom she marries in 1791.

1793 Meets Nelson.

1801 Gives birth to Nelson's daughter, Horatia, on January 31. Nelson buys a house in Merton Place and lives there with Emma and Sir William in a menage a trois.

1805 Nelson dies. Emma falls into debt.

1815 Dies in Calais