Footnotes

A remarkable letter by Nelson to his wife, which later passed to Lady Hamilton, complaining that his father has not written to congratulate him on the Battle of the Nile, docketed by Nicholas Harris Nicolas, editor of The Dispatches and Letters of Lord Nelson (1844-46): "This Autograph letter was given to me by Mrs Smith of Richmond, who obtained it from Lady Hamilton./ N. Harris Nicolas./ Presented by him with his best respects, to Mrs Hudson Gurney, 5 October 1846". Mrs Smith was the widow of Alderman Joshua Smith, who in order to support Emma had purchased a substantial quantity of relics from her, including the Trafalgar coat (see lot 50) and many of the letters to her from Nelson; the bulk of the collection passing to T.J. Pettigrew and sold at Sotheby's in 1853. Quite how Emma got her hands on the present letter, addressed as it is to her rival in love, is not clear: the great majority of Nelson's letters to Fanny have otherwise ended up in the Nelson Museum, Monmouth. From his docket, it is clear that Sir Harris intended giving this letter to Mrs Hudson Gurney, wife of the well-known book and manuscript collector. However Gurney was to die, after long ill-health, on 9 November 1846, and this might explain why the letter has in fact remained in possession of the Nicolas family to this day. Nicolas himself printed it (with one readily apparent error in transcription) in the Dispatches and Letters, where the source is cited as "Autograph in the possession of the Editor" (vol.vii, Appendix). It has recently been quoted by Edgar Vincent, Nelson: Love and Fame (2003), p.336, in his analysis of Nelson's relations with his absent wife Fanny, with whom his father was then living and from whom he was to separate formally on his return to England a year and a half later. The great mass of congratulatory letters prompted by the Nile had reached Nelson that February. No doubt the lack of anything from his father's pen, accidental though it seems to have been, touched something akin to a sore spot during these months of ever deepening intimacy with Lady Hamilton.