England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (15 page)

After birth, well-off women relaxed in their rooms, cosseted by the servants, showing off the new arrival to visitors while languidly sipping gruel, tea, and a special hot spiced wine mixture called caudle. Emma, however, had to return to Greville. Her daughter was boarded with a wet nurse, probably near the lying-in house. Greville aimed to ensure she would have few opportunities to journey into town and visit her child. He sent little Emma off to her great-grandmother in Hawarden as soon as possible. Emma knew what was expected of her: she had to pretend that her pregnancy had never happened. Within a week or so she was traveling in a coach to a new home in Paddington, West London. There, she began to reinvent herself. Amy Lyon, the flamboyant would-be actress and extroverted girl about town, became Mrs. Emma Hart, just arrived from Chester, Charles Greville's quiet and terribly shy new mistress.

Celebrity Mistress

CHAPTER 14
Charles Greville's Penitent

G
reville rented Emml, smill house on the rural outskirts of London. Surrounded by market gardens, the village of Paddington Green was a cluster of houses around an inn, a church, and a large hay barn. Londoners traveled over on summer evenings to enjoy the fresh air and watch the peasants at work. Emma's new home was truly "very retired."

When Emma arrived from the lying-in house, Greville would not have been there to meet her (when a man took a mistress, he left her to settle into her new home alone). Her mother, however, was already ensconced, eager to welcome her. Every kept mistress needed a chaperone, and Greville spared himself the expense of hiring one, as well as a housekeeper, by bringing in Mary. Emma's feelings as her coach drew up outside the house were mixed. After her rackety life with Fetherstonhaugh, she hoped to be able to settle into happy security as Greville's loving mistress. She was painfully aware, however, that she had not seen him for over six months, and she fretted that she was too changed by pregnancy to attract him. When he arrived later that evening, she flung herself at him, promising love, obedience, and anything else he wanted. Greville had to content himself with her caresses, for even by eighteenth-century standards (doctors seldom told new fathers to hold back), a few days after labor was too early for sex. Instead, he listened to her promises with pleasure. He intended to test her.

As Greville had instructed her, she had changed her name to Mrs. Emma Hart, perhaps a pun on
heart,
of which Greville tended to think
Emma had too much. But from the outset he made ever more demanding rules that she struggled to obey. First of all, her daughter had to stay in the north. Greville wanted to head off any chance of Emma trying to show Sir Harry the child when he was in London, in the hope that he might be softened by the sight of his daughter. Although all genteel women boarded their babies out of the home with a wet nurse (apart from aristocrats, who hired a nurse in), most used a local woman, and few had to endure being on the other side of the country from their child. Had the baby been male, both Greville and Harry (when he found out about the child) might have been more amenable toward offering support or assuming the responsibility of a father. As a girl, she was unwanted.

Emma's mother also had a new name: Mary Lyon was now Mrs. Cado-gan. The name sounds a little like Kidd, or even a blend of Kidd and Lyon, but it was usual for a woman to take the name of the man with whom she cohabited (as Emma's old friend Jane Powell had done when she called herself Mrs. Farmer), and Mary had perhaps been friendly with a man of the same name, though the registers contain no record of Mary's marriage.
¹
However, it is serendipitous that Cadogan is a rare surname. AJohn Cadogan was living in the Paddington area in 1773. He witnessed the marriage of his sister Judith to a Robert Lynn at St. Marylebone. At a time when nearly every bride and groom on the same register could sign their names, Judith signed with an
X,
which indicates that the Cadogans were poor.
²
Perhaps Mary left St. Giles to live with Cadogan in Paddington around 1775; after the relationship ended, she remained in the area, and Greville decided it would be an ideal place to keep Emma. Greville encouraged her to retain the name of Cadogan, to pursue his project of keeping the old Miss Lyon secret, quiet, and retired, hidden from her old friends and lovers.

Mary, only in her late thirties, was hardly older than Greville, but he relegated her to the position of unpaid housekeeper. Perhaps she felt guilty for abandoning Emma in her childhood, or maybe she simply saw that Emma was successful and wanted to hitch herself to her daughter's star. Although he was almost twice Emma's age and lacked Harry's looks, charisma, and wealth, Greville was still the second son of the Earl of Warwick. Emma had secured the protection of a scion of one of the country's most influential aristocratic families.

Charles Greville was born in May 1749 (on the same date Emma was christened sixteen years later). His father, Lord Brooke, was made Earl of Warwick in 1759 when Greville was ten. His mother, Elizabeth Hamilton,
was the daughter of Lord Archibald and Lady Jane Hamilton, and the elder sister of Sir William Hamilton. After a stormy marriage, his parents divorced. Shy and awkward, Greville delighted in his collection of rare minerals and jewels and, like most men of his class, lived beyond his means, spending his money on expensive girls of the town. When he visited Naples, his interest in the local courtesans astonished his host, his uncle Sir William Hamilton, who was himself a renowned hedonist. Greville had secured a cheap deal in Emma: the toast of the Temple of Health, Kelly's, and Uppark, his own beautiful courtesan, without having to foot a payoff to Madam Kelly.

Greville needed to hunt down bargains. In 1773, his father died and left him merely £100. His elder brother gave him nothing, the allowance from his father of £200 a year ceased, and he had to subsist on only £500 a year, an inheritance from his mother. He took the seat for Warwick in the House of Commons and assumed his brother's position at the Board of Trade. Not a natural politician, he failed to join a faction in the Commons or network other positions or kickbacks at the Board, and consequently his income remained insufficient. Sir William Hamilton advised him to seek a rich wife, and Greville attempted to present himself as a man of substance to the papas of rich young women by building an expensive house in the new and fashionable Portman Square (a strategy so common that Tobias Smollett satirized it in his novel,
Peregrine Pickle).
Greville required a wife who could bring in around £20,000 per annum. But hundreds of younger and richer gentlemen were similarly ambitious. His passion for keeping mistresses did not enamor him to the fathers of genteel girls, many of whom had raised their daughters to expect love and companionship rather than the typically distant aristocratic marriage, in which a man gained children and social respectability from his wife but took a mistress for sexual gratification and affection.

By the time Greville met Emma, he had burned fingers. An impoverished second son for over ten years, he had failed to find a wife or a lucrative position at court and had wasted his money on women of the town. In 1780, he had gained a job with the Admiralty, which brought a rent-free house in King's Mews (now covered by Trafalgar Square), where he lived. The house at Portman Square still unsold, he rented a small house for Emma on a discreet side road off Edgware Row, the main street running through Paddington Green. Since he had Mrs. Cadogan to carry out the domestic drudgery, he only needed to appoint a few extra maids. Trapped in the country, Emma would not require clothes or a hairdresser, and he
would ensure she spent the minimum on food, wine, travel, and candles—beeswax was one of the greatest household expenses at the time.

Greville wished to keep Emma all to himself. As he threatened, "I will never give up my peace, nor continue my connexion one moment after my confidence is again betray'd."
³
But he desired more than her fidelity. As his letters to her and Sir William show, he tried to school the self-confessed "gay wild Emily" to be a completely new woman: submissive and penitent for her earlier hectic life. Every aspect of her existence was to be different: her occupation, dress, food, friends, hobbies, and even speech. A spendthrift with a wandering eye, he wanted Emma to behave like a mouse.

In styling his mistress as his pupil, Greville was at the forefront of fashion. After the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau'sjw/ie, which pivoted on the sexualized relationship between the heroine and her teacher, novelists, playwrights, and artists were keen to show how a relationship in which a man taught a woman to behave correctly could be gratifying for both parties. Jane Austen joined the craze in
Nonhanger Abbey,
probably written in the 1780s, in which giddy Catherine Morland falls in love with Henry Tilney as he schools her in proper judgment. One man even took two poor washer maids and devoted himself to training them to be modest, intending to marry the one he preferred—he was somewhat piqued when both rebelled and ran away. In France at about the same time as Mrs. Hart was practicing her deportment in Edgware Row, the husband of the sixteen-year-old future Josephine Bonaparte was haranguing her to improve her writing, education, carriage, and behavior. Emma, always desperate to please, tried very much harder than Josephine. More was asked of her than simply writing good letters. Greville had a role in mind for her.

The Magdalen hospital for penitent prostitutes was established in 1758. Girls who showed a desire to reform were taught to eschew vanity and love of finery and to embrace meek behavior. Dressed in uniforms of thick brown cloth (men thought that women turned to vice because they loved fine clothes), the inmates or "Magdalens" ate plain fare (it was also thought that a simple diet cured venereal disease) and passed the day sewing. They soon became national obsessions featured in magazines, plays, and novels. So many wanted to sit in the public gallery overlooking the ranks of girls at chapel on Sunday mornings that the authorities had to issue tickets. Greville was titillated by the idea of his own Magdalen, and he fell hook, line, and sinker for the myth: regulation, sober dress and diet, industry, and housework could make a flighty girl virtuous and submissive.

At Edgware Row, Emma had to live in “a line of prudence and plainness,” as Greville reported to friends. Later, he declared he had reformed her “pride and vanity” and taught her to be “totally clear from all the society & habits of kept women,” so she did “not wish for much society” and “has avoided every appearance of giddiness, and prides herself on the neatness of her person & of the good order of her house.” Greville visited daily and often stayed there, supervising every aspect of his mistress's life. Emma dressed in new modest outfits in subdued colors, wearing less makeup and styling her hair plainly. George Romney's son claimed that she dressed always in her penitential maid's outfit while with Greville, and when Henry Angelo happened to see her, he declared she was dressed so drearily that she might as well have been a nun. Instead of her Uppark feasts of game and sugary puddings, she ate small portions of meat, bread, and vegetables. Her diet was very similar to those Graham had recommended, and his praise of apples as the ideal slimming food may have remained in Emma's mind, for the receipts show she bought plenty of apples, even in January. Greville also trained her to enunciate more elegantly. She worried when she saw her child again that little Emma “speaks countryfied,” but she promised her lover “she will forget it.”
⁴

Emma spent her days playing at being a modest young lady in settled, pedestrian domesticity. Greville left her at home while he attended dinners and receptions, and he forbade her to go to the pleasure gardens or even to a local concert. Obsessed with order and cleanliness, he hectored her to improve her messy ways. Soon he was able to declare “there is not in the parish a house as tidy as ours.” Otherwise, he encouraged her to occupy herself with improving reading and with practicing singing and the guitar. He wanted to ensure his Magdalen could amuse him in the evening. Women were educated to sing and play because there was no other way of enjoying music at home unless someone in the family— usually the wife—could perform.