21st Century Mahan

Emma Hamilton, much maligned by her contemporaries and later by historians and commentators, rose from the most humble beginnings to play a startling role in Britain’s naval victory over France and Spain in 1805. In this new book Barry Gough draws on the letters between the protagonists, and the unpublished examination of her career by famed American historian of the Royal Navy Arthur Marder to strongly defend Emma. The author shows how this most talented of women and the beauty of her age fell victim to innuendo, slander and cruel caricature. She was to die in poverty in Calais in 1815, just months before Napoleon’s final defeat.

England’s greatest sailor fell deeply in love with Emma in the years before Trafalgar. This, together with his quest for glory and victory entangled him in an inescapable web of circumstances and slander. The author explores the evolving scandal, the high political stakes that were involved, and the love affair itself which so influenced the fortunes of England’s glory and the fate of her Wooden Walls.

Richly illustrated throughout, the book shows Emma, probably the most painted woman of her age, in all her glories; and it makes clear how heartlessly caricaturists treated her. Depicting Emma sympathetically as a woman trapped in circumstances of her own making, Gough places Emma as one of the forces that gave the Royal Navy its will to fight and conquer.