Tracing Emma’s Footsteps
Home Page About Us Her Story Emma’s Unsung Achievements
Portraits of Emma Shoebox News & Events Books and Media Free E-Books
LADY HAMILTON’S TWIN DAUGHTERS - A COLD CASE REVIEW
by Ken Williams, a retired Thames Valley Police crimes squad officer who has extensively researched the evidence for Horatia having had a living twin. Edited by Lily Style, and first published in The Nelson Dispatch, autumn 2022
Above: Horatia as an infant. Style Ward family collection
In a letter to The Times, dated 19th August 1999, a former director of the Coram Foundation (the modern name for the Foundling Hospital) said a man had visited the foundation in the 1970s and shown him a portrait of a young woman who was his ancestor: a former foundling named Emma Hamilton, and the twin sister of Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton’s daughter, Horatia.
This essay will explore available evidence for Horatia having had a living twin sister who was given to the care of the Foundling Hospital.
It’s accepted that Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton's daughter, Horatia, was born on 29th January 1801 in the London home of her husband, Sir William Hamilton, at Piccadilly.
In Winifred Gérin’s 1970 biography of Horatia Nelson she refers to a letter written to Lady Hamilton by Lord Nelson on 23rd February 1801, which contained an intriguing reference to twins. Writing after Horatia’s birth, in the guise of “Thompson” (a fictitious member of his crew) to his wife, Nelson said “I daresay twins will again be the fruit of your and his meeting. The thought is too dear to bear...”.
When Nelson biographer, Tom Pocock, published Nelson's Women in 1999, he referred to the issue of twins. Author and historian, Stella Tillyard’s, 12th August 1999 review of Nelson's Women retells Pocock’s account of Horatia being one of twins, of which the other had been deposited at the Foundling Hospital when only a few weeks old, and christened Emma Hamilton.
Tillyard’s review prompted Commander J.G.B. Swinley (RN Retired) to write to The Times on 19th August 1999 – as cited at the start of this essay – to say that in the 1970’s, when he was the Director of the Coram Foundation (the modern name for the Foundling Hospital), he had cause to examine the records but found that all girls born within three months of Horatia, appeared genuine [of accountable origin?]. Referring to the foundling child Emma Hamilton, he confirmed that she was fostered by Sarah Snelling, who wrote to the child’s sponsor, Lady Hamilton, some months later to tell her that the child was doing well.
Tom Pocock’s story of Lady Hamilton’s twins was heavily criticised by Lesley Edwards in volume 86:3 of the Mariner's Mirror. Edwards asserted that the origin of the twins story came from Winifred Gérin's 1970 book Horatia Nelson calling it “a myth so powerful that even Tom Pocock was taken in...”.
Edwards pointed out that the only reference to the existence of twins was made by Nelson in the aforementioned letter to Lady Hamilton of 23rd February 1801. Edwards agreed that the letter was evidence that twins were born but thought it more likely that one died at or shortly after birth. The foundling named Emma Hamilton was one of six infants baptised at the Foundling Hospital on 18th April 1801. Three of the four boys were named after Nelson's fellow officers at the battle of Copenhagen sixteen days earlier and the fourth after Lady Hamilton's husband, Sir William. The girls were named Emma Hamilton and Mary Thompson. Edwards quoted Pocock as saying that Emma Hamilton “was a name surely chosen by a mother who had given her to an orphanage...”, but took the opposite view that the last thing Lady Hamilton would have done would be to name her illegitimate child after herself.
Edwards said that Foundling Hospital records held by the London Metropolitan Archives showed that the foundling, Emma Hamilton, was the illegitimate offspring of Mary James and William Hughes, respectively a servant and a carpenter, and was born at Westminster Lying-In Hospital. All these details were assumed genuine as too many people would otherwise have had to have lied. Foundling Hospital records similarly refuted Mary Thompson being the missing twin as she was recorded as the daughter of Dianah Minnis, a servant, and John Hall, reiterating that far too many people would have had to lie to sustain the pretence.
Edwards reasoned that, if a twin had died it would have had to have been baptised in order to receive a Christian burial but said she’d found no record of either ceremony locally so presumed the child must have been buried in secret. Edwards concluded that, given Lady Hamilton's history, she would not have been beyond trying to hide its existence, but “there is no evidence she abandoned a surviving child of the great Admiral. The twin was laid to rest and so should be this myth.” Similarly, one of Lady Hamilton's more recent biographers attributes Nelson's reference to twins as just a sexual joke.
Pocock agreed with Edwards’ assessment and accepted Swinley's evidence that the foundling named Emma Hamilton was not Lady Hamilton's child. Swinley, however, drew attention to Lady Hamilton's involvement with the other foundling girl baptised on 18th April 1801, Mary Thompson, saying “who else would have chosen the name Mary Thompson, a nom de plume used in her private correspondence with Nelson...”
The parentage of the foundling named Emma Hamilton seems to be accounted for but, regarding Mary Thompson (foundling number 18641) matters are not so straightforward. As we’ve seen, Foundling Hospital records list her as the daughter of Dianah Minnis. She is described as a servant employed by Mrs Sharp at 21 Greville Street, Hatton Garden, London. In her petition she claimed the father of her child was John Hall, a carpenter lodging with Mrs Gennels at house number 4, opposite the church in Shoreditch, London. Minnis stated that she became pregnant following the promise of marriage, but Hall had abandoned her by returning home to Worcester and was never heard of again. In her deposition, Mrs Sharp said that she [Minnis?] was seldom out of her house and had no followers. She was at a loss to conceive how the misfortune happened and knew nothing of the father of the child. Enquiries by the Foundling Hospital found no trace of anyone named Gennels near Shoreditch church.
When contacted, Lesley Edwards said she’d found no record of Dianah Minnis being admitted to Westminster Lying-In Hospital. This was the closest of the four lying-in hospitals in Georgian London that accepted unmarried mothers. This poses several questions. Where did she have her child? Was she really pregnant at all? If she was not pregnant, why did she petition the Foundling Hospital to admit the child who was christened Mary Thompson on 18th April 1801?
It seems that, if Minnis had been pregnant, she likely either miscarried or the child was stillborn – a similar view held by some regarding Lady Hamilton's confinement – but there’s no trace of a baptism or burial of a child with the surname Minnis at this time, though it could have been buried with a different surname, or in secret. Minnis’s mistress, Mrs Sharp, seems to have believed her servant had been pregnant, but we can’t know if she actually saw her in that condition. Clearly Minnis went missing from the household at the relevant time, since Mrs Sharp’s deposition says she would be willing to take her back “when she is relieved”.
It’s of note that the Foundling Hospital’s officers were unable to find any trace of the alleged father, Hall, in Shoreditch. Of course, Hall may only have told Minnis that was his address and perhaps she never visited him there, but this is unlikely because she claimed to have known him for six months. It seems coincidental that she alleged Hall had absconded to Worcester, because she’d worked there prior to her employment with Mrs Sharp. It is also possible that, if pregnant, she made this story up wanting to conceal the true identity of her child’s father.
Minnis’s child was baptised Mary Thompson at the Foundling Hospital on 18th April 1801, but her date of birth was not recorded, just her age, which was given as three months. This could suggest a birth date of 18th January 1801 but, as a general usage, is more likely to encompass any date of birth from mid to late January, thus including the 29th - the day on which Horatia, and therefore any twin sister, was born. The only other record of a birth date for the child is given in her apprenticeship indenture when she is recorded as being fourteen years of age on 18th February 1815. This cannot be correct either, as it would mean she was two months old when admitted as a foundling, not three. She would later come to believe that her birth date was 18th January 1801.
Another researcher found Minnis’s story unusual. In 1989, Patty Sileski wrote a PhD dissertation at Stanford University entitled, The Women of the Laboring Poor : Love Work and Poverty in London, 1750–1820. She had studied numerous records at the Foundling Hospital, telling the stories behind their mothers becoming pregnant, including Minnis, not least because of the testimony of her employer Mrs Sharp.
Enter Lady Hamilton, a woman born into poverty who endured class and gender discrimination and became a Dame of Malta; a self-taught woman, a polyglot; a singer; a dancer; the inspiration behind the “Jane Austen” fashion revolution; the most-painted woman of her day; the closest friend of the queen of Naples; a spy courier for the British during the Napoleonic wars; and the inventor of a completely new artform (her Attitudes). Would she have been capable of the subterfuge of having one of her new-born twins anonymously admitted to the Foundling Hospital under the guise of being Minnis’s child? Evidence is sparse, circumstantial, and peppered with conflicting opinions.
Pocock described Lady Hamilton as “being familiar with discreet ways of concealing pregnancies and births”, and his critic, Lesley Edwards, believed she wouldn’t have been beyond trying to hide a twin’s existence, because, in Gérin’s words, it “added yet more to Lady Hamilton’s sum of burdens” and “there would be obvious difficulties in hiding two illegitimate children”. According to Gérin, Lady Hamilton had a similarly throw-away attitude to her first child, Emma Carew, who’d been born when she was a young teen forced to make a living as a courtesan. Pregnant and destitute, Charles Greville, the second son of the Earl of Warwick, took her as a live-in mistress on condition that her baby was sent away. Greville changed her name to Emma, polished her up, and gave her to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton (who confounded convention by marrying her, thus making her Lady Hamilton). According to Gérin, Lady Hamilton’s first child’s “existence was at no time revealed to Lord Nelson.” However, this is challenged by Jacqui Livesey in a 2014 article, entitled Finding the Lost daughter of Lady Hamilton, who puts the case that Nelson was aware of her first-born daughter (by this point known as Miss Hart), but her husband, Sir William Hamilton, had blocked contact to preserve his family’s reputation:
Exchanging fraught letters in September [1801], Nelson responded with genuine empathy to Lady Hamilton’s very particular plight, ‘… if your Relation cannot stay in your house in Town, surely Sir William can have no objection to your taking her to the farm [Nelson’s newly-bought property at Merton in Surrey]… The pride of the Hamiltons surely cannot be hurt by sitting down with any of your Relations. You have surely as much right for your Relations to come into the house as his could have. It has vexed as I know it must give you great pain. Make use of me for your happiness.’ And a week later, roused by Sir William’s continued intransigence, ‘Tell me how I can do anything for you at this distance… I hope Emma, you take care of your relative; when you can get her well married & settled we will try and give her something…’
It was a pattern, while Sir William lived, that would repeat itself each time Lady Hamilton attempted to bring her daughter into the family fold. The delicate wording of ‘your Relative’ begs the question whether Nelson, by then, was aware of the true nature of Lady Hamilton’s relationship to Miss Hart. It was a discreet, tactful term he accorded to no other member of his mistress’ family.
In this light, Lady Hamilton’s separation from her first-born child was dictated by the men who controlled her life: first Greville, then Sir William (but not Nelson). Georgian society was highly sexist, classist and prejudiced against illegitimacy. Lady Hamilton had beaten the odds by rising to a social pinnacle despite her gender and lowly birth, but the taboo against unmarried motherhood was unassailable. She and Nelson were well aware of this, hence their pretence that Horatia was the daughter of Nelson’s crewman named Thompson. Lady Hamilton’s familiarity with – to quote Pocock – “discreet ways of concealing pregnancies and births” was, therefore, not something she’d learnt from personal choice. This begs the question of motivation: why would a loving mother consign one of two living, new-born babies to the Foundling Hospital?
Lady Hamilton employed a discreet and reliable nurse, Mrs Gibson from Little Titchfield Street, London, to look after Horatia. According to Mrs Gibson’s surviving correspondence, she judged Horatia to have been less than eight days when Lady Hamilton delivered her in an unmarked carriage. Lady Hamilton and Nelson maintained the pretence that Horatia was their goddaughter, and the child of the fictitious Thompsons. Gérin believed that Lady Hamilton had selfishly consigned Horatia’s twin to the Foundling Hospital because two babies would have been harder to conceal than one, but this seems illogical. Why would people be less likely to have believed Lady Hamilton’s account of Horatia’s origin if she had a twin sister?
Lady Hamilton was an active supporter of the Foundling Hospital, so it’s theoretically possible she was involved with the admission of Minnis’s child, who was baptised Mary Thompson in April 1801. Four months earlier, on 21st January, the hospital had closed a loophole permitting illegitimate children to be admitted with no questions asked for a fee of £100. This was three days after the notional birth date of Minnis’s child. However, Horatia – and therefore any twin she may have had – was born a week after the loophole closed. Lady Hamilton's Coutts’s bank account (included in Sylvia K Robinson’s 2016 biography, In Defence of Emma) make no mention of a payment to Minnis, or of any unaccounted payments that might have been directed to her.
There is, therefore, no motivational or financial evidence to back the theory that Lady Hamilton gave a healthy new-born twin to the Foundling Hospital and chose the baptismal name of Mary Thompson.
There are, however, a few points of interest.
Firstly, Horatia was also baptised with the surname Thompson. It seems strange that, of the six foundling infants baptised on 18th April 1801, all but Mary Thompson were named for people connected to Lady Hamilton and Nelson. Three boys were named for officers at the battle of Copenhagen; the other boy was named William Hamilton; and the other girl was named Emma Hamilton. From whence did Mary Thompson’s name originate?
Secondly, Swinley’s account of a man visiting him in the 1970s with a portrait he claimed to be of his ancestor “Emma Hamilton” who was a former Foundling Hospital internee, is certainly intriguing. This mysterious visitor’s motivation can though be queried. There have been many people, past and present, with strongly held beliefs that Lord Nelson was their direct ancestor. Their stories, however, have invariably fallen flat for lack of concrete proof. So it might be that Swinley’s visitor had muddled the tale of the missing twin with a family myth of Nelson descent.
Thirdly, as we’ve seen, the foundling Mary Thompson’s admission documentation is shaky under scrutiny. There seems to be no record of her mother, Dianah Minnis, giving birth in any of London’s lying-in hospitals, and she seems to have lied about the whereabouts of the father, John Hall. Foundling Hospital investigators found no trace of him, and Minnis’s landlady seemed perplexed that she could have had the opportunity to meet and become intimate with any male friend.
Mary Thompson returned to the Foundling Hospital on 24th October 1805 at four-and-a-half years of age, after being cared for in Chertsey, Surrey, by a nurse named Elizabeth Woodhatch. This was the same town in which the other foundling, Emma Hamilton, had been nursed by Sarah Snelling. The Foundling Hospital’s inspector, Mr Living, had been responsible for both families. Returning to Swinley's reference to a note sent by Snelling to Lady Hamilton on 20th May 1801, it is worth quoting it in full: “Mrs Snelling takes the liberty to acquaint Lady Hamilton that the child she received from the FH [Foundling Hospital] is well and much grown...” This is strange wording because Lady Hamilton did not “receive” a child, and Snelling's charge, Emma Hamilton, is not named. As both the nurses must have known each other because they lived in the same small town and undertook the same role for the Foundling Hospital, under supervision of the same Inspector, could Snelling not have equally been referring to Mary Thompson? Unfortunately, the whereabouts of Snelling's original note is no longer known, and the National Maritime Museum only holds a copy.
Mary Thompson was apprenticed to Captain Levi Philipps of the Honourable East India Company’s Bombay Marine Service on 12th January 1816, to do “household business” at 55 Guildford Street, Bloomsbury, opposite the Foundling Hospital. Philipps lived there from 1813 to 1817 and in 1818 moved to Roper’s Buildings, Harrow Alley in the Portsoken ward of the City of London. He had spent years in India and was twice married, with a family, but how many of them were living at those addresses when Mary Thompson was learning “household business” is not known. The apprenticeship of a female to a single gentleman was not permitted by the Foundling Hospital, although records show there were those who could circumvent the rules. Mary’s apprenticeship to Captain Phillips expired on 18th January 1822.
We hear no more of Mary Thompson until 21st January 1821, when her husband to be, Robert Clark, applied for a Vicar General’s licence for them to marry, possibly because of Mary's difficulty as a foundling in proving her age. Both are recorded on the licence as being of 21 years of age or above but she was only 20, not 21, and not of “full age” to marry. Perhaps this was why they married a year later, on 22nd January 1822 (the day after her perceived birthday) in her own parish church of St Gregory by St Paul’s in the city of London. However, the delay could be explained by their wedding date being four days after the expiry of her apprenticeship to Levi Philipps. The surname of one witness is Thompson, suggesting he was relative of Mary’s, but he was the rector’s clerk and unrelated to the bride.
Swinley’s reason for searching through Foundling Hospital records in the first place was because of the male visitor who’d shown him a portrait of a young woman he claimed to be Horatia’s twin sister, the foundling Emma Hamilton, and his ancestor. However, the foundling, Emma Hamilton, never married so it would be unlikely, though not impossible, that she bore children. She can be found in the census records for Lambeth in 1861 and Chertsey in 1871 and 1881 living near members of her adopted family, the Snellings. She is shown as unmarried, living alone with the status of “annuitant” (although it is not known from whom she received a pension). She died in Chertsey in 1884 three years after Horatia. It may be that, although Swinley’s visitor believed he was descended from the foundling named Emma Hamilton, his family story muddled over the course of two centuries, and his ancestor may have been the foundling named Mary Thompson.
Nothing can be known with certainty unless further evidence comes to light. It would be good to see the portrait Swinley was shown and, better still, to find living relatives of the unnamed man who possessed it. An increasing number of people have submitted their DNA test results to genealogical databases, so it’s possible that a match will show up between someone who’s traced their ancestry to Mary Thompson and a confirmed descendant of Admiral Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
Main References
Colville, Q., Williams, K. (2016). Emma Hamilton: seduction and celebrity. (London 2016).
Edwards, L., Horatio Nelson and Lady Hamilton's Twins, (Mariner's Mirror 86:3 2000)
Gerin, W., Horatia Nelson, (Oxford 1970)
Livesey, J. (2014). Finding the Lost Daughter of Lady Hamilton (2014).
https://globalmaritimehistory.com/finding-lost-daughter-lady-hamilton/
Morrison, A.,The Hamilton & Nelson Papers, 2 vols. (London 1893-1894)
Peakman, J.. Emma Hamilton. (London 2005)
Pocock, T., Nelson's Women, ( London 1999) &
Lady Hamilton's Twins, (Mariner's Mirror, 87:1 2001)
Seleski, P., The Women of the Labouring Poor: Love Work & Poverty in London,
1750-1820 (Stanford University, California, USA. 1989)
Swinley, J., Nelson's 'Other' Child, The Times Newspaper (London 1999)
Tillyard, S., Book Review - 'Nelson's Women', The Times Newspaper (London 1999)
Williams, K., England's Mistress, (London 2006)
Also:
Ancestry:
• Baptisms & Burials search London, City of London, City of Westminster, (within 5 miles of), Jan-April 1801
• Land Tax Records search 1692-1932
• Parish Marriages in St Gregory by St Paul, London 1822
Asiatic Annual Register (1800-1835), Births, Marriages, Deaths & Obituaries 1800-1835
London Metropolitan Archives(on loan from Coram):
• Petition of Diana Minnis A/FH/A/08/001/002/010/02
• Westminster Lying in Hospital Admission Registers. H01/GLI/B/01/002
• General Register 5, A/FH/A/09/002/005 & Billet Book, A/FH/A/09/001/198
• Apprenticeship Register Disposal Book (No.2) A/FH/A/12/003/002
• Foundling Hospital Nursery Book 2, A/FH/A/10/003/007
• Inspection Book 2, A/FH/A/10/03/003
National Maritime Museum/Nelson-Ward Documents 9594/1.
Vicar General Marriage Licence Allegations 1821 (Society of Genealogists)