Hamilton, EMMA, LADY, was born Amy Lyon or 'Hart,' most likely at Ness, in Cheshire, and on 26th April 1763. Her girlhood was passed at Hawarden. She had had three places in London, had borne two children to a navy captain and a baronet, and had posed as Hygeia in a quack-doctor's 'Temple of Health,' when in 1782 she accepted the protection of the Hon. Charles Greville (1749-1809), to exchange it in 1786 for that of his uncle, Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803). After five years at Naples, in 1791 she was married at Marylebone Church to her elderly ambassador, and, returning to Italy, was straightway admitted to the closest intimacy by Maria Caroline, the queen of Ferdinand I. (q.v.). Her 'eminent services' to the British fleet during 1796-98 in furnishing information and procuring supplies were extolled by Nelson, vaunted by herself, as deserving of peerage and pension; but they were much overrated, where, indeed, not purely imaginary. Nelson had first met her in 1793; and gradually Platonic friendship ripened to guilty passion, until, four months after the trio's return to England, she gave birth to a daughter (1801-81), 'our loved Horatia,' so Nelson writes of her in a holograph letter to 'my own dear Wife, in my eyes and the face of Heaven.' Her credulous husband's death, followed four years later by Nelson's, left Emma mistress of good £2000 a year; but by 1808 she was owing £18,000, and in 1813 was arrested for debt. Next year she escaped to Calais, where she died in penury, 15th January 1815. Her grave is obliterated; but her loveliness lives still in twenty-four portraits by Romney, to whom she was ever the 'divine lady.'
See NELSON; HAMILTON, SIR W.; ROMNEY; the spiteful Memoirs of Lady Hamilton (1815; new ed. 1891); Paget's 'vindication' in Paradoxes and Puzzles (1874); Jeaffreson's Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson (1888); and Hilda Gamlin's Emma Lady Hamilton (1891).