Horatia Nelson

Born in a house rented by Sir William Hamilton (Emma's husband) at 23 Piccadilly in London, as Nelson was at anchor in Torbay preparing to sail to the Battle of Copenhagen (news reached him before he set sail), she was given to a wet nurse called Mrs. Gibson, who was informed that the child, about a week old, was born six weeks earlier, at a time when Emma was in Vienna.

Once Emma's husband had died on 6 April 1803, and 5 days before Nelson had to board HMS Victory on 18 May that year, Horatia was christened, aged two, at St Marylebone Parish Church as Horatia Nelson Thompson, with Emma and Horatio as the 'godparents' and a cover-story naming her as the daughter of Vice-Admiral Charles Thompson of Portsmouth Dockyard (with his agreement).

The Combined Fleets of the Enemy are now reported to be coming out of Cadiz; and therefore I answer your letter, my dearest Horatia, to mark to you that you are ever uppermost in my thoughts.

She was good at languages (Emma had taught her Italian, French and German and she also managed Spanish), music and needlework, had a lively temperament and was an animal-lover.

[7] Their ten children— seven boys and three girls, with the former educated by their father at home before going to university or the professions[citation needed]— were: Residence at Stanhoe in Norfolk was next granted to Philip, and it brought a better income in tithes and glebe lands, and then fairly shortly afterwards the family moved to another living at Bircham Newton.

She was involved in protracted negotiations to buy Nelson's uniform coat and waistcoat (eventually bought by The Prince Consort for Greenwich Hospital in 1845, later passing from there to the National Maritime Museum).

At Horatia's insistence, the money thus raised was divided between her three sons in military service (Marmaduke, Philip and William), and so that same year (1854) Queen Victoria stepped in and allocated public funds for a £100 annual pension for each Nelson-Ward daughter.

[12] Philip died of liver disease soon after returning to England from India (he is commemorated by a plaque near the altar in St Mildred's, on the south wall), and her eldest daughter, Eleanor Philippa (while still unmarried), was knocked down by a horse bolting from an innyard – the Queen's Head in Pinner High Street, carried into a draper's shop near to where the accident occurred, and died there.

Horatia was also predeceased by her husband who died suddenly on 16 January 1859 and was buried at the east of St Mildred's Tenterden with his children, Caroline Mary and Edmund Nelson (a memorial stained glass window was also put up to him in the church).