After Selling Napoleon Memorabilia, Sotheby’s Turns to His Enemy, Horatio Nelson, for $8 M. Auction

After selling Napoleon Bonaparte’s worn stockings and other “deeply personal relics that reflected the inner world” of the French emperor last year, Sotheby’s is now laying bare the personal life of his great adversary, Admiral Horatio Nelson, on the auction block.

The house will offer 415 letters, documents, and manuscripts connected to Nelson in a single-lot, sealed-bid sale with a high estimate of £6 million ($8 million). They include personal letters to his mistress, Emma Hamilton, and his painstaking attempts to learn to write with his left hand after losing his right arm at the 1797 Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

Bidding opens online on October 21 to coincide with Trafalgar Day and runs through November 18. Highlights will go on view at Sotheby’s New Bond Street HQ for a week when the sale kicks off.
The auction follows the 112 lots Sotheby’s Paris sold last summer from the collection of Napoleon enthusiast Pierre-Jean Chalençon, which raked in €8.7 million ($9.6 million).

They included Napoleon’s iconic bicorne hat, a heraldic sword associated with his 1804 coronation, his personal seal, a camp bed, and those worn stockings. Nelson’s archive transports the house back to the same era through the English commander, whose victory at Trafalgar in 1805 helped thwart Napoleon’s plans to invade Britain.

It’s the largest trove of Nelson’s letters in private hands, having been assembled over 40 years by the late British collector Clive Richards, who died in 2021. The archive includes 168 autograph letters by the naval commander, along with battle papers, family documents, naval logs, and books from Nelson and Hamilton’s libraries.

Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s books and manuscripts specialist, said the decision to offer the material as a single lot came from the strength of the archive as a whole.

“There are many wonderful highlights in the collection, but it is even more potent when considered as an entire collection,” he told ARTnews.

The material paints an intimate picture of Nelson away from the battlefield, revealing his personality, relationships, and the physical realities behind one of the UK’s most mythologized naval figures. “We see a man who has a grand sense of his own importance, we see emotion expressed without fear, we see exactly how he inspired his ‘band of brothers,’ and we have an intimate and privileged view as one of the great love stories unfolds through letters,” Heaton said.

The letters to Hamilton are among the most revealing parts of the archive. Nelson’s relationship with her started while he was married to Frances Nisbet and she was married to Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples. The affair was hardly a secret, and the trio eventually became embroiled in a ménage à trois, eventually living together. The correspondence shed light on their relationship, showing Nelson away from the public image of the decorated naval commander.

That being said, Nelson’s correspondence also tracks his movements through the Royal Navy and the major conflicts in which he fought, while naval logs and battle papers provide a documentary record of the campaigns that made him a national hero.

“In his own pen we follow his career from beginning to end,” Heaton said. “This collection provides an extraordinarily rich and complex portrait of one of the most compelling figures in British history.”

Richards’ widow, Sylvia, said her husband’s interest in Nelson came from a broader fascination with British history and figures such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel. “For some forty years, success in business enabled him to seek and purchase the very best and rarest letters of Nelson in his desire to ensure they were preserved and treasured in the future,” she said.

However, Richards never really saw himself as the owner of the material. “Clive truly believed he was only the custodian, and that they should be shared and studied by historians,” Sylvia said. He also wanted the letters to be sold after his death, with the proceeds benefiting the Clive Richards Foundation, the charity he established with Sylvia. It supports education, healthcare, heritage, and the arts.

Among the most historically significant material are Nelson’s handwritten reports on the battles of the Nile and Copenhagen, as well as his battle plans for Trafalgar. Historian and broadcaster Dominic Sandbrook described them as ranking “alongside the most sacred texts of our national history.”

But the archive also lays bar the less triumphant side of Nelson’s career. Letters written after he lost sight in one eye and later after the amputation of his right arm show the consequences of his injuries directly on the page. In one letter, Nelson admits that he has “not the hand of a ready writer,” a small but telling reminder of the physical price of the career that made him a national hero.

According to Heaton, the single-lot sale reflects a broader appetite for big historical archives, rather than one-off celebrity documents. Sotheby’s has brought major collections such as the Honresfield Library to market, and now the Nelson archive, asking buyers to take the whole story rather than cherry-pick a trophy letter.

There is also the question of whether the archive will remain in Britain. Richards was “proudly British,” Heaton said, and would have wanted the collection to stay in the UK. But, he added, Richards also understood that collectors and institutions around the world were capable of preserving it.

Nelson material has previously landed serious prices at auction. In 2002, a Sotheby’s sale of 93 lots from the Alexander Davison Collection brought £1.84 million ($2.5 million), including £300,000 ($410,000) for a sword given to Nelson by the Sultan Selim III and £240,000 ($330,000) for a bloodstained purse said to have been in his pocket when he was mortally wounded at Trafalgar. More recently, a Nelson order of battle for Trafalgar sold at Christie’s for £32,760 ($45,000) in 2024, against a high estimate of £20,000 ($27,500).