England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (16 page)

The new Magdalen made little headway with Greville's recommended books, so addicted was she to women's magazines, such as the popular
Lady's Magazine,
a mix of puzzles, stories, songs, embroidery patterns, and a little news. She did, however, enjoy
The Triumph of Temper,
William Hay-ley's long narrative poem that instructed women to be meek and good by showing the heroine, Serena, retaining a sweet temper and a “wish to please” throughout various obstacles. When Emma was separated from Greville, she wrote that parting with him made her so unhappy that she failed to keep up the stoic temper of Serena; as she put it, “I forget the
Book."
⁵
In July 1782, the "Man Milliner" gossip column of the
European Magazine,
a magazine to which Greville subscribed and sometimes contributed, offered a tantalizing tidbit of information about Emma while joking about the hobbies of fashionable ladies. Most of them cared only for "Admiration," but Greville's mistress ("Mrs. Greville") was apparently solely interested in "Poetry."
⁶

In the evenings, she entertained Greville with little anecdotes about her docile days. They may have sung together or were perhaps joined by a maid, for it seems that Mrs. Cadogan had no gift for music. Pleased by her progress, Greville began to invite some of his friends over to meet her. He knew not to make the same mistake as Sir Harry by leaving his lover alone, bored and desperate for male attention. Emma's new admirers included William Hayley and the playwright Richard Cumberland, as well as the painter Gavin Hamilton (no relation to Greville), and various minor aristocrats. More cultured than the loutish Uppark set, they flirted with her in a friendly, respectable way. Emma flourished under their attention, delighted that her new admirers seemed to be as interested in her opinions as her beauty.

Emma threw herself into the role of the penitent prostitute. Courtesans were fascinated by the Magdalen House, and many pretended to have been inmates in order to enhance their earning power. The "Magdalen" look was in fashion. The
European Magazine
noted that the essential hat for the stylish lady at the Ranelagh pleasure gardens was "the Religieuse or Nun's cap." A light hat of "Italian gauze, crimped to a point, before coming down at the sides" was hugely popular.
⁷
Emma perhaps was wearing such a cap when she attended Ranelagh with Greville on one of the few occasions she went out in the evening. Excited by the illuminations and the music, she burst into song. Apparently the crowd loved it, but a furious Greville hauled her back to Paddington Green in disgrace. At home, she hurried to change into a plainer dress and knelt, begging him to retain her as his penitent or abandon her out into the street. Mollified, Greville agreed to retain her and continue his course of instruction.

Emma did not seem to resent her lover inspecting her expenses, checking her dress, and searching for evidence of vanity and giddiness. Like any good pupil, she found gratification in excelling at her examinations. She showed him stringent accounts for even the most inconsequential expenses: apples, coal, eggs, stockings, cotton, and needles. In this, she was sharper than Greville, who knew little about the cost of provisions. The prices charged for the commodities are high, particularly for a small
household consisting of Emma, her mother, a cook, and only one or two maids. Like clerks in countinghouses across the City, she inflated the prices slightly and siphoned off a little for herself

After the debacle at Ranelagh, she found her way around the rules but was careful never to break them. Greville was supporting Emma, her daughter, and her mother, and he had rented her a sweet little house and was kind to her as long as she obeyed him. Few canny girls would demur to dress up as a nun and feign the mien of a fashionably penitent prostitute in exchange for such security. But most of all she followed Greville's rules because she had fallen in love with him after a few months as his mistress. More engaging and good-natured than he seems in his pompous letters, Greville's standoffish exterior hid a warm sense of humor. He was a reflective man, with a shyness and vulnerability that melted Emma's heart. Believing her lover's boasts that he was Sir William Hamilton's heir and so would soon be rich, she hoped she might be established as his permanent mistress.

Although Greville was uninterested in the Warwick landowners that he represented, he was involved in London politics, particularly, like all Whigs, in the fight between Charles James Fox and Sir Charles Wray for the seat of Westminster in the elections of 1784. Fox had been a minister, but a row over a bill that concerned the East India Company so incensed the king that he dissolved Parliament and appointed the twenty-four-year-old William Pitt as prime minister. In the elections that followed, voting for Fox was, to a certain extent, a vote against the king. Fox's many female supporters wore a special uniform, blue dress and yellow petticoat (after the colors of George Washington's armies in the American war of independence), blue hat with yellow lining, and "elegant balloon ear-rings of three drops, blue and gold, together with elegant gauze sleeves and tippets, with wreaths of laurel, having gilt letters on the leaves inscribed ‘Fox, Liberty, Freedom, and Constitution.’ "
⁸
As her letters reveal, Emma certainly owned many blue dresses and hats while living at Edgware Row, and perhaps Greville encouraged her to dress as a supporter of Fox—in vain, as it happened, for Wray won the seat.
⁹

Greville was pleased with his experiment. His little Magdalen was turning out excellently. As he wrote, she "avoided every appearance of giddiness, and prides herself on the neatness of her person and the good order of her house… She has vanity and likes admiration but she connects it so much with her desire of appearing prudent that she is more pleas'd with accidental admiration than that of crowds which now distress her." Apparently
she would rather have Greville's measured praise for buying meat at a bargain price than a crowd of men admiring one of her sensuous dances. As she put it in a letter to him later, "You have made me good."

Emma preserved her newfound security by appearing to be happily acquiescent to her lover's will. She channeled her energy into singing, dancing, and sticking to her strict low-sugar diet. The raw, blowsy girl was slowly transformed into an elegant performer and decorous hostess. Greville's attitude toward Emma was complex: he wanted the real girl docile, retiring, and utterly under his control, but he was ambitious that images of her should be admired. Most of all, he wanted to make money off her. A number of aristocrats had attempted to turn a poor girl to profit through training her to go on the stage, but although Emma was the spitting image of Sarah Siddons, the great tragedienne who was driving Drury Lane wild, Greville had other plans. She would model for paintings, and he would receive a cut of the sale. Emma seized the opportunity to exploit her dramatic talent. As prime muse and model for George Romney she would become London's biggest female celebrity.

CHAPTER 15
London's Muse

O
n a bleak, rainy Friday morning in March 1782, wrapped up so no one could recognize her, Emma clambered into a discreet carriage and set off for Mayfair. Still sore from giving birth, she wanted desperately to stay at home. Already the evenings of fussing around Greville, pretending she had not given birth while coddling his every need, were proving tiring. But she did not have time to rest. She was on her way to sit for George Romney, painter to the stars. Although only seventeen, she wanted to be famous—and she knew this was her chance.

At his magnificent studio house in Mayfair, 32 Cavendish Square, fifty-year-old George Romney readied his paints for Mrs. Hart's arrival and tried to calm his nerves. He set out various possible backgrounds and drapes and stoked the fire. For years he had been looking for his muse, for the woman who could embody modern beauty in a classical form. He had met Emma before, but she had been young, raw, and flippant. Charles Greville, his friend and intermittent patron for over ten years, had promised him that she now was hardworking and reliable. Romney hoped so, but he was more concerned that she was still beautiful. Despite his success, he still felt excluded from the artistic establishment, and he needed a model whose looks could transform his art. His career depended on it.

When Emma arrived, she followed Romney's servant through galleries crammed with paintings and then the sitters' waiting room, the books of engravings of possible poses still open on the couch. In back rooms, disgruntled apprentices filled in backgrounds and cleaned paint pots. At the far end of the apartment was Romney's large painting room, lit through the long windows by the pale morning sun. As his servant opened the
door, she felt a surge of heat. Artists usually kept their studios warm to dry the paintings and to keep their models warm, but Romney's was stifling, for he was convinced that heat relieved his pain from varicose veins. He kept the windows shut and the fires blazing all day. Some of his sitters complained, but he ignored them all, knowing the heat encouraged women to remove more of their clothes. The fire was burning high for Emma's visit.

The painting room was chaotic, strewn with large mirrors and candles, unsold portraits, canvases whitewashed and ready for use, and piles of brushes and paints. Painted backgrounds of the countryside and sea views were propped along the walls, along with books and sticks for gentlemen to hold while posing, and harps, books, and pieces of needlework for their wives. Romney gently distracted Emma's attention from the pretty instruments and books—they were for the squire's wife who wanted to parade her virtue. He wanted his new visitor to pose as something far more daring.

Wearing her best crimson dress with white gauze around the neckline, Emma sat on a chair raised from the floor, a couple of feet above Romney. As in the Royal Academy, she would use a rope hanging from the ceiling if standing, but all she could do on that Friday morning at eleven o'clock was sit and smile. He could not paint her figure, but Greville had promised him that she would soon be slim once more, thanks to her strict diet at Edgware Row. In his painting studio, shy Romney was transformed into an actor on a stage, flamboyant and overexcited. He painted best when he felt he was performing, and alternated between frenetic energy and languor, rushing up close to gaze at Emma's face and then dashing backward to take in the general effect. He sketched her a little, encouraged her to smile, and tried to have her talk, but the icebreaker was his spoiled studio dog. When she spotted the little spaniel, like so many of his lady sitters, she cuddled it to her and soon broke out into a real, unforced smile.

The sitting was a success. After two hours, with a break for tea or a little light wine and pauses for mixing paints, Emma was allowed to go home for lunch, exhausted but pleased by her day's work. Most people only modeled once or twice for the same painting, but within a week she was back. On March 20, she sat again. The outcome was the gorgeous
Sensibility,
now on show as
Lady Hamilton as Nature
in the Frick Collection in New York. Half turned to the viewer in her lovely dress, Emma cuddles Romney's dog so it covers her still rounded waist. Loosely pulled back from her
face with a gauze band, her thick chestnut hair streams over her shoulders. The rich crimson of the gown sets off her delicate pink cheeks, creamy neck, and décolletage. Emma's sparkling smile is infectious.

Aristocratic female sitters typically look away from the viewer, to the side or modestly downward, but Emma's eyes glitter mockingly up at us, locking us in her irresistible gaze. Romney captures a luminous sensuality entirely absent from more grandly remote society portraits. The representation,
Sensibility,
is borrowed from Emma's favorite poem,
The Triumph of Temper
by William Hayley about the heroine's “wish to please,” and it is possible that she suggested the subject. In
Sensibility,
Emma's pose reflects her familiarity with the subject: she radiates youthful sensitivity and innocence. If she was suggesting that she would try to please both Greville and Romney, it was a promise she would keep.

Almost as soon as it was finished,
Sensibility
became the most popular portrait in Romney's gallery. Many of his visitors wanted to buy it, but Greville preferred to keep it and bought it for £20.
¹
The painting was soon reproduced as a print and became inordinately popular, displayed in shops across London, sold to hundreds of ordinary people who wanted it on their walls. As Emma's figure returned, she became a regular.

Emma's journeys to Romney's studio in Cavendish Square began a determined entrepreneurial endeavor to disseminate her image across England. Greville's plan to make money by selling portraits of Emma was clever, but he underestimated just how famous it would make her.