Rank Speculation: The Unknown Fiance

From Emma's Autobiography:

I had a certain and somewhat solemn engagement in "the Old Country," as I had learned to call England, and one day, in answer to a letter from the party in question, urging my return, I sat down to write, purposing to inform my correspondent of my intention to be with him again in a month's time. In place of making this announcement, however, I deliberately wrote, and that whilst in the full possession of my senses, a description of a very rich lady who had herself made my correspondent an offer of marriage. I told him of some heavy financial difficulties he was then in, and bid him at once marry the lady who had offered herself to him, and think no more of me, for "I should never return to England for many long years to come." Although deeming myself infatuated, if not insane, to write such a letter, write it I did, and sent it.

Despite the faux coyness, it's clear that EHB is alleging a fiance in England in this passage. The question is -- as with the question of her keeper when she was an actress -- who?

I'm posting this to remind myself as much as anything else, and it's a rank (as in stinking) speculation, but...

It may be Howard Staunton, the famous mid-Victorian chess master. Why? (1) If Emma Harding = Ernest Reinhold, then they were both writers for the Court Gazette at the same period; (2) Staunton was a Shakespeare editor, and a good one, and claimed to have been a Shakespearean actor in his youth; (3) Staunton married a rich widow (of an attorney) with a large brood of children at a time in his life when he was in financial difficulties.

Problem: he married the widow in 1849.

The theory works only if this passage from the Autobiography is another example of Emma's loose handling of time. An engagement made and broken in the 1840s, followed by a period as the kept woman of a "baffled sensualist" and "millionaire" with significant pull among theatre company owners, and who may also have been a practicing occultist (if "sensualist" should be read "sex magician", for example), isn't out of line.

Rank.