Nelson and Lady Hamilton: A Very Public Affair

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• 1. First meeting
• 2. Captivation
• 3. Love in the public eye
• 4. Keeping up appearances
• 5. Final years
• 6. Afterwards: Emma and Horatia
• 7. Find out more
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First meeting

Nelson’s affair with Emma Hamilton was the biggest scandal of the age. Their actual liaison lasted only six years, but it transformed their lives, their respective positions in society, and the public's perception of them both.

'Emma was a great beauty and a celebrated artists’ model ...'

Horatio Nelson first met Lady Hamilton on 12 September 1793. He was a 35-year-old post captain and she was the 28-year-old wife of Sir William Hamilton, the British Envoy to Naples. Emma was a great beauty and a celebrated artists’ model, and she was also famous across Europe for performing ‘attitudes’, which were performances in which she moved quickly from one dramatic pose to another.

Mired in retirement in Norfolk for the previous five years, Nelson had hardly seen a woman since he had returned to sea six months before their meeting, and he was impressed by Lady Hamilton. He wrote to his wife Fanny that Emma was a ‘young woman of amiable manners who does honour to the station to which she is raised’.

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