Footnotes

Emma Hamilton pledges 'Paradise Merton', the home she had shared with Nelson and which he had left her in his will, to a moneylender. The present deed, as well as pledging Merton as security on payment of the £300 annuity to Giffard, in return for his £3000, rehearses previous annuities which she had undertaken to pay him in return for sums advanced, namely £250 on 18 November 1806, £150 on 12 February 1807, and £100 on 5 May 1807 (the indenture for the last of these having been acquired by the Wimbledon Museum in 1991). The two characters who have signed as witnesses to Emma's signature are of some interest. Sarah Connor was Emma's cousin, and served as Horatia's governess. Her putative sister, 'Emma Connor', was in fact Emma's daughter by Sir William's nephew, Charles Grenville. The other witness, Francis Oliver, has been described by Michael Nash as "a shadowy bit-player in the Nelson story" and, it is thought, may well have been responsible for the publication of Nelson's love letters to Emma in 1814: "Oliver is first mentioned as a secretary to Sir William Hamilton in Naples, around the time that the young Emma Lyons arrived to stay with her lover's uncle. Later, when Nelson and the Hamiltons reached Vienna in their triumphal tour of Europe in 1800, they re-encountered Oliver who had settled there earlier and was clearly an accomplished linguist. He appears to have acted as a confidential courier and we know that later, at the time of the birth of Horatia, he carried between Nelson and Emma the very letters that were later published with such damning effect. Indeed, the most famous one, beginning, 'Now my own dear wife, for such you are in my eyes and in the face of heaven', which shows so clearly that the two were lovers, actually contains the phrase 'I daresay that Oliver will faithfully deliver this letter'. Later still, after Nelson's death, he resurfaces again as Emma's secretary and it is clear from surviving correspondence that they had a bitter and long-standing quarrel. Indeed, it appears that Oliver had threatened to publish something defamatory about Emma as early as 1808" (Michael Nash, 'Building a Nelson Library', in The Nelson Companion, edited by Colin White, 1995, p.184).