A Most Unsettled Man

The triumphs and tribulations of George Matcham, an East India Company merchant an brother-in-law to Lord Nelson

RELEASED JULY 2024

Winner of the 2024

Coffee Pot Book Club bronze medal for historical nonfiction

A Most Unsettled Man

hardback 

A Most Unsettled Man

paperback

A Most Unsettled Man

ebook

George Matcham was born in East India Company controlled Bombay and undertook three epic overland treks between Asia and England before marrying the favourite sister of the not yet famous Horatio Nelson. Intimate details about George's life have been preserved because of his close relationship with Nelson and his famous paramour Emma Hamilton, whose rises and falls he observed first-hand.

Packed with period press clippings and eyewitness accounts, A Most Unsettled Man provides an unprecedented glimpse into the private life of a modest 18th century English gentleman, as well retelling the enduring love story of Nelson and Emma from an entirely new perspective.

Nelson Society’s review by John Maynard 

A MOST UNSETTLED MAN: The triumphs and travails of George Matcham, an East India Company merchant and brother-in-law to Lord Nelson. By Lily Style, 2024, Historium Press, 360 pages, b&w illustrations. ISBN 978-1-962465-47-2. Also available as paperback and ebook.

Readers of the 'Nelson Dispatch' will be familiar with Nelson's naval career and his immediate family. But the wider network of siblings and cousins, in-laws and offspring are probably a foreign country. Among them probably none is more significant than George Matcham. George was born in Bombay in 1753, the second son of Captain Simon Matcham of the Bombay Marine (the East India Company's defence force). After education in England, he returned to Bombay and aged 19 was a senior merchant for the East India Company, exporting textiles to Europe. After his father's death in 1776 George and his mother returned to England. Despite poor health George decided to travel overland at considerable risk from Ottoman hostility. He returned to Bombay overland in 1780, and by 1786 had sufficient wealth to buy a country estate for his mother and himself, again travelling home overland. He was 32 and very eligible, and in the social life of Bath found his wife in the person of Catherine (Kitty) Nelson, aged 19, Nelson's favourite sister. Compared to his early adventures, the undemanding social round of a landed English gentleman left him wanting to do more with his life. It is in this sense that he is a 'most unsettled man'. His restless mind turned to various engineering projects, never with the success they deserved. But he had a growing family to attend to, between 1789 and 1811 Kitty bore him fourteen children. Within the context of East India Company life, George had grown up with a strict sense of morality and found it hard to cope with the Emma Hamilton relationship. He was the last of the family to make his way to Merton, no doubt urged on by Kitty and her affection for her favourite brother. But it was George who escorted Nelson from his beloved Merton to the awaiting chaise on the fateful night of Friday 13 September, on his way to Trafalgar. We are accustomed to viewing Nelson's heroic death from a national and historical aspect. Lily Style takes us inside the family to deal with it from a personal point of view and I found this quite moving. Despite financial support from some of her friends, Emma's reckless spending brought her to a debtors' jail. On release in July 1814 she fled to Calais but died there the following January, leaving 13-year-old Horatia stranded. It was George Matcham who immediately went to her aid but had to smuggle her out disguised as a boy, bringing her back to the safety of the Nelson family. She stayed with the Boltons while George, driven by his restless spirit, travelled with his family between England and France, Portugal and Italy. On one of their visits to Paris, George and Kitty spent time with Fanny who was there visiting her granddaughters. In 1823 this unsettled man finally settled back in London, adored by his children and grandchildren until his death in 1833. George Matcham's story has been exhaustively researched from contemporary documents, with over 1000 references backed up by 100 pages of notes. There are another 40 pages of assorted Appendices dealing with marriages, deaths and family relationships. These include a timeline of George's life which is a brilliant way of seeing it in perspective (and a huge help in writing this review). There is more to the Nelson story than sea and ships. Lily Style has done us a great service in opening a window into Nelson's wider family and shining a light on this key figure. It is well worth taking a look.

John Maynard

From Emma Hamilton biographer, Sylvia K Robinson

REVIEW OF ‘A MOST UNSETTLED MAN’, A BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE MATCHAM, BROTHER-IN-LAW OF LORD NELSON

Lily Styles biography of George Matcham is ‘a tour de force’, an object lesson in how to piece together exhaustive research from original documents, letters and possibly every other publication that is relevant to the narrative, however marginal. 

George Matcham comes to life on the page, as does the social history of the time. Lily has carefully researched the history of the East India Company, George’s long-term employer, and its influence on the lives of so many young English men. She follows George as his restlessness leads him from country to country, town to town, hobby to hobby. 

He falls in love with Lord Nelson’s favourite sister, Kitty, well before that brother becomes ‘England’s Hero’ and they remain devoted to each other for life. Indeed Kitty gives birth to 14 children, the majority of whom survive the perils of the childhood illnesses of the time.

Lily manages to keep the focus of the narrative on George, despite the over-bearing attention of the English and international media of the time becoming fixated on Lord Nelson’s naval victories and the curiosity and salacious rumour-grinding about his relationship with Emma Hamilton. 

She escapes the temptation to prioritise myth over fact and is even-handed in her portrayal of both Lord Nelson and of Emma. It would have been easy to fall into the trap of making Nelson the unsullied hero led astray by Emma, the manipulative mistress. George Matcham, not a character who has attracted particular attention hitherto, is never far from the epicentre of the historical upheaval of the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. We are treated in this book to the flavour of those years, through his eyes, his experiences abroad and in business, his disastrous financial adventures, the wavering loyalties of family members out for themselves and his support for both Fanny, Nelson’s wife and for Emma, Nelson’s flawed but beloved companion. 

What emerges is a man of many virtues with a strong Christian faith, inventive, devoted to friends and family, generous, most apparent in his and Kitty’s semi-adoption of the 14 year-old Horatia Nelson, after the death of her mother in exile in France, a loving husband, father and grandfather. This biography is an unexpectedly fascinating read.

Sylvia K Robinson

A big thank you to all the generous contributors, including: