Emma Hamilton: Victim of the Goldsmid Family

Emma Hamilton (nee Lyon) was the infamous mistress and lover of Admiral Horatio Nelson (of Trafalgar fame). In and of herself was a remarkable woman who worked her way up from being the daughter of a blacksmith (who committed suicide when she was very young) to the status of being the première social attraction of the age and the long-term mistress to several influential and powerful men.

Having read Kate Williams' biography of her: I happened to notice that she, like many others throughout history, fell prey to jewish knavery when the circumstances of her life took a turn for the worse. In Emma's case the specific vultures concerned were the Goldsmids - a jewish banking dynasty and one of the rivals to the Rothschilds - who began their attempted shakedown of Emma right after Nelson's death.

The Goldsmid family - led by the then patriarch Abraham Goldsmid - came over to comfort Emma: who was hysterical with grief and clutching Nelson's bloody uniform. (1) After this performance and no doubt with full knowledge aforethought: Abraham Goldsmid offered to help Emma out.

His ostensible reason for doing so was the fact that Emma had requested (quite rightly as it happens) a pension from the British government to support her (and her daughter) after Nelson's death during the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. However the British government had studiously ignored her, because she was not a fully paid up member of the aristocratic upper class. (2)

Williams claims that Goldsmid was helping Emma because he was a kind man. We can throw serious doubt on this supposition when we note that Goldsmid doesn't have appear to have donated any money to Emma at all (or even helped) with her financial situation. The true kind benefactor to Emma was the Duke of Queensberry who loaned her the use of one of his houses and donated several thousand pounds to help her out of her financial troubles. (3)

Goldsmid merely acted as financial middleman between the Duke of Queensberry and Emma: as, for example, he is known to have been the case for one donation by Queensberry of £2,500 in order to pay off some of Emma's creditors. (4) Goldsmid also let her have £800 of this to get into further financial trouble by going on a spending spree. (5)

Goldsmid also put together a group of financiers (probably jewish given Goldsmid's contact base in the City of London) who loaned Emma some £3,700 on the speculation that they could use her claim on Nelson's life and death to get an annual pension paid to her by the British government. (6)

The creditors would then get the money plus some hefty interest from the loan to Emma from the public purse and then presumably they counted on Emma to continue her lavish spending and thus rack up even more debt.

The result of this would then be that the British government's pension would then fall into their hands as 'loan repayments' from Emma and they could then squeeze the British government to give Emma a larger pension so that they could get even more money and so on.

In essence: Goldsmid was using Emma to create a flow of government money into his purse and those of his financier friends.

Evidence that this was Goldsmid's intent is provided by his brother Asher Goldsmid who snapped up Emma's London house Merton Place at a knock-down price and thus acquired a valuable piece of property for a fraction of its true worth. The money from the sale was predictably enough swallowed up in the gaping maw of Emma's seemingly eternal creditors. (7)

Such behaviour by Abraham Goldsmid's brother hardly suggests that the Goldsmids were being charitable towards Emma, but rather saw her as a business proposition and as a means to an end.

This later point we can see in the fact that Emma - probably at Abraham Goldsmid's instigation - used her social influence to get the Dukes of Clarence, Sussex and Cumberland to stay at Goldsmid's London house and attend a musical concert at a synagogue with him (all of which was a sign of social acceptance by some of the major figures in high society). (8)

This was clearly an attempt to make Goldsmid's family respectable in London elite society and also increase the likelihood of Goldsmid's many children marrying into the British aristocracy. As such it throws much needed light on Abraham Goldsmid's true motives in regards to his 'assistance' to Emma: Emma was little more than tool and a means to an end for the Goldsmid family.

Goldsmid's predation on Emma only ceased when he was subject to two massive reversals on the London stock market and ended up owing some £350,000 to the West India Company. The net result of which was Goldsmid's suicide (after that of his brother). (9)

It is as simple as that.

References

(1) Kate Williams, 2007, 'England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton', 1st Edition, Random House: London, p. 316

(2) Ibid., p. 325

(3) Ibid., p. 336

(4) Ibid., p. 346

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ibid., p. 340

(7) Ibid., p. 343

(8) Ibid., p. 342

(9) Ibid., p. 346