cold shoulder in England by the Court and by society.  Nelson told his friend Collingwood of his own treatment, and added that, either as a public or private man, he wished nothing undone which he had done.  He told Collingwood of his cold reception by the King, but it seems quite obvious that he maintained his belief that his connection with Emma had no right to be questioned by His Majesty or any of his subjects, and he held this view to the last.  He would have none of the moralists’ cant lavished on him, and by his consistent attitude seemed to say, “Hands off my private life!  If I did introduce Lady Hamilton to my wife at her apartments on my arrival in England after two and a half years’ absence, when she was on the point of becoming the mother of Horatia, what business is that of yours?  I will have none of your abstract morality.  Get away, and clean up your own morals before you talk to me of mine.”  The above is what I think a man of Nelson’s temperament might say to the people who wished to warn him against the dangerous course he was pursuing.  Lady Nelson does not seem to have been a woman who could appeal to a man like Nelson.  The fact is she may have been one of those unamiable, sexless females who was either coldly ignoring her husband or storing up in her heart any excuse for hurling at him the most bitter invective with which she might humiliate him.  She does not appear to have been a vulgar shrieker, but she may have been a silent stabber, which is worse.  In any case, Nelson seems to have made a bad choice, as by his actions he openly avowed that he preferred to live with the former mistress of Featherstonehaugh, Greville, and Hamilton, rather than with his lawful wife; and he, without a doubt, was the best judge as to which of them suited him best.  The truth remains that Emma was attractive and talented, and although lowly born, she became the bosom companion of kings, queens, princesses, princes, and of many men and women of distinction.

Nelson must have been extraordinarily simple to imagine that his wife, knowing, as all the world knew, that Lady Hamilton was his mistress and a bold, unscrupulous rival, would receive her with rapturous friendliness.  The amazing puzzle to most people, then and now, is why she received her at all, unless she wished to worm out of her the precise nature of the intimacy.  That may have been her definite purpose in allowing the visits for two or three months; then one day she flew into a rage, which conjures up a vision of hooks and eyes bursting like crackers from her person, and after a theatrical display of temper she disappears like a whirling tempest from the presence of her faithless husband, never again to meet him.  This manner of showing resentment to the gallant sailor’s fondness for the wife of Sir William Hamilton was the last straw.  There was nothing dignified in Lady Nelson’s tornado farewell to her husband; rather, if the records may be relied on, it was accompanied by a flow of abuse which could only emanate from an enraged termagant.