England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (18 page)

Romney made
Sensibility
and
Circe
the focus of his gallery, and Emma became the star attraction. Her presence was everywhere—in the extravagant
portraits in the gallery, the half-finished canvases in the studio, and the engravings in the book. Visitors were titillated by the idea of being in the same room as her. People jostled to see her portraits; some even hoped to catch a glimpse of her in the morning. Men asked if they could take her as a mistress. Women demanded to be painted in a similar fashion, hoping that they might appear as gorgeous as she did. The pictures sold quickly. A Mr. Crawford bought
Emma Hart in a Straw Hat,
and Admiral Vernon paid sixty guineas for
Alope Exposed with Her Child.
A head of a
Bacchante
was bought by Sir John Leicester, and Mr. John Christian Curwen, one of Romney's best patrons, snapped up another
Bacchante,
a version
of Serena,
as well as
Spinstress
when Greville was unable to pay the price. To satisfy demand, Romney painted copies of his originals. Charles Greville was surprised and not pleased by his mistress's newfound popularity. He had wanted to sell paintings, but he had never imagined that Emma and her past would become the point of interest.

Romney's sketch of his studio. Greville (standing) and William Hayley look on as Romney consults with Emma, posing for The Spinstress. Romney later declared that his other models “all fall short of The Spinstress, indeed, it is the sun of my hemisphere and they are but twinkling stars.”

As engravings filled print shops, Emma's flowing shifts, which followed the line of the body, and the way she wore her hair loose and without powder encouraged English women to question their stiff brocaded
suits and coiffures. At the same time, pictures of the looser dress fashionable in Paris were circulating, and the press began to denounce encumbering hoops, corsets, and rigid petticoats, blaming them for heart attacks, miscarriages, short breath, and hysteria.
⁶
Fashion magazines contained few pictures, and so prints of Romney's portraits of Emma in her figure-hugging drapery became a primary source of fashion ideas for genteel and upper-class women across England.
^∗
The trend took time to spread. In 1786, a German visitor to London was surprised, after seeing portraits by English painters such as Reynolds and Romney, to find women still attired in rigid dresses and wearing their hair in powder. But as the most stylish women took to wearing shifts, drapery, and simple muslin gowns, and as fashion plates appeared of Marie-Antoinette resplendent in similar outfits and later Empress Josephine (who, it was said, dampened her muslin so it would cling to her curves), the brocaded look fell out of favor. Women welcomed the autonomy of movement allowed by the draped style, delighted to be able to sit down, bend over, and even walk quickly.

Everybody gossiped that Romney and Emma were lovers. They were half right: shy, emotional Romney was infatuated with his model, and she dominated his private thoughts as well as his public gallery. Emma had been schooled in encouraging men to talk about themselves, and he responded to her breathless interest in him. He liked to think that she, who comprehended his creative aims so well, might also understand him as a man. After twenty years living apart from his wife, he was lonely but still too conscious of his humble roots to flirt with the smart women he painted. However, unlike men like Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, he did not believe women existed only for his own pleasure, and he restrained himself, knowing that any attempt to seduce her would wreck her newfound security. He poured out his passion in agitated notes to Hayley Emma, in her turn, felt affectionate toward him and was deeply grateful for his interest in her. But the edgy workaholic painter was not her type, and she was well aware that her relationship with Greville and his willingness to care for her mother and child was conditional on her absolute fidelity. The relationship was an unrequited passion, predicated on her unavailability and his restraint; she was a natural exhibitionist and he was something of a voyeur. She was learning how to keep a man's attentions by resisting him.

Romney's obsession with Emma pervaded his paintings for the rest of
his life. He filled dozens of sketchbooks with pictures of her—nude, clothed, and in various poses. Even when he painted other women, he made them look like her: dark hair, pale skin, pink cheeks, full mouth, oval face, tall, long-legged. He showed both her exuberant, sensual personality and her pleasure in life, and he never equaled the vibrancy and grace of his portraits of her in his other work. As he complimented her, “I have had a great number of ladies of fashion siting to me since you left England but they all fall short of The Spinstress, indeed, it is the Sun of my Hemisphere and they are but twinkling stars.”
⁷

^∗
Although ostensibly based on a simpler style, the dress, like the pastel suit for men, served the purpose of elite fashion: a long white dress in flimsy material was impractical and showed off the wearer as someone who did not have to work and could travel by carriage.

Many portraits were ruined. Some rotted away in the damp rooms of his Hampstead home, where he moved in 1798, and others have been destroyed. Lost are paintings of Emma as Iphigenia, Joan of Arc, a Pythian princess, and a picture of how he guessed she was in childhood. Hundreds more canvases of Emma were begun than ever completed.

As a result of Romney's devotion, Emma became the most painted woman ever in Europe, and there are more portraits of her than Queen Victoria or any English or European actress or aristocrat. Thanks to Romney's interest, other painters began to demand a sitting from her, including Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, Alexander Day, Guy Head, and Gavin Hamilton, as well as European artists such as Angelica Kauffmann, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Johannes Schmidt, and Wilhelm Tischbein. If he had not painted her so often and with such skill, they would not have been so eager to capture her likeness. Even those who caricatured her borrow their vision from Romney by reworking the poses he used.

While paintings of Emma hung on the walls of expensive stately homes, cheap prints of the same portraits soon adorned poorer homes across the country. She became a commodity, and versions of portraits of her began to appear on consumer goods: cups, fans, screens, and sometimes even items of clothing. Like frequently photographed women today, her image was seared onto the public consciousness. She became a fantasy figure for thousands of men and a fashion leader for women. Even if she had never become as celebrated as she did, the loveliness of her portraits would have ensured her lasting fame. By 1783, Emma had become the most wanted model in London. She had no idea of the storm clouds gathering behind her.

Charles Greville detested his new role as the lover of an icon. He was making plans to be rid of her.

CHAPTER 16
Entertaining the Envoy

I
t was the summer of 1783, and Greville was jumpy. His uncle, the wealthy, newly widowed Sir William Hamilton, was about to arrive in England for the first time in more than five years. Greville was intent on monopolizing his attentions, for he was in dire need of a loan. Emma flurried around her lover, promising to use her every wile to charm the middle-aged visitor, confident that she would soon have him eating out of her hand. Dressing herself in her prettiest outfit and arranging herself in the parlor at Edgware Row, she rehearsed topics of conversation suitable for a deeply depressed old man. When handsome, fashionable Sir William sprang into her home, full of jokes, eager to touch her hand and give it a long, lingering kiss, she was surprised—and excited.

Fifty-five-year-old Sir William had arrived to organize his late wife's estates and earn himself a few pounds by selling off the most precious vase from his collection of Greek and Roman antiquities, as well as to catch up with his dozens of friends. The fourth and youngest son of Lord Archibald Hamilton, Sir William became a diplomat after a stint in the army. Since 1764 he had been envoy plenipotentiary to Naples, fulfilling the role of an ambassador but denied the name and the salary because the British government considered the kingdom irrelevant to English trading and military interests and dismissed it as a close ally of Spain. Hamilton devoted himself to childish King Ferdinand and demanding Queen Maria Carolina in order to aggrandize his own position by developing closer ties between England and Naples. A natural hedonist, he flourished in the Neapolitan court, where decisions were made on the hunting field and in the ballroom. The only way to infiltrate the inner circle was by spending
huge amounts of cash, and so it was fortunate that he had married a splendidly wealthy Welsh heiress, Catherine Barlow. Thanks to the peasants planting wheat on her Pembrokeshire estates, he spent unrestrainedly on sumptuous horses and carriages, hosted lavish dinners, and ordered fittingly grand outfits of gold, silver, and silk.
¹
As the fashion for the grand tour expanded, the English flocked to Naples, attracted by its party-mad reputation, and Sir William expended vast sums on their accommodation and entertainment. Since the recent discovery of the ruined classical city of Pompeii, he had also earned a reputation as one of the biggest collectors in Italy, spending thousands of Catherine's pounds on statues, artifacts, vases, and art.

Emma's new friend had grown up in the royal court with the future King George III. His mother, Lady Jane Hamilton, had been the mistress of Frederick, Prince of Wales, from about 1736 until 1745. Frederick appointed her his wife's lady of the bedchamber. Then, dizzy with lust, he also made her the queen's mistress of the robes—not even the poor queen's clothes were free from her rival's claws. Lady Jane possessed the highest position open to a woman in the royal household and held absolute sway over Frederick and his family throughout her son's early life. Sir William called King George his foster brother, boasting that "my Mother reared us and the same nurse suckled us."
²
With this he hinted what many suspected: he was the Prince of Wales's son. Archibald Hamilton, fifty-eight at his birth, was neglected by Jane and, according to the wickedly accurate Lord Hervey, long reduced to the "passive character his wife and the Prince had graciously allotted him."
³
It may have been that Lady Jane achieved such spectacular influence over Frederick because William was his child.

Sir William mixed with the highest aristocrats in England—and some of London's most colorful men. He was a focal member of the Society of Dilettanti, a circle of genteel libertines fascinated by foreign sexual cults, led by Richard Payne Knight, a sensualist masquerading as a scholar. A more levelheaded friend was Sir Joseph Banks, celebrated naturalist and president of the Royal Society of Science. Sir William was attracted to wealthy eccentrics, and one of his closest friends was his second cousin William Beckford, novelist, collector, and the richest man in England, famous for his sybaritic lifestyle and profligate spending. Greville fitted in well with his uncle's raffish, cultured set. When Greville had visited Naples at the age of twenty, Sir William had been pleasantly surprised to find he was a man after his own heart, interested in both art and demimondaines.
They were immediately friends, and Greville was soon asking for money and favors.

Although he made extravagant use of her wealth, Sir William neglected Catherine. Quiet and accomplished, she reviled the shallow Neapolitans along with their boorish king and hypocritical queen. Sir William admired his wife's musical talents and prized her spotless reputation, but he found her company insipid and he was irritated by her frequent bouts of low spirits and illness. Dejected by Hamilton's boundless enthusiasm for everything but her, Catherine found comfort in a Neapolitan orphan she adopted as a daughter. After the child's death, probably from malaria, in 1775, she suffered further depression and her health deteriorated. In May 1782, Sir William realized that the city he loved had wrecked "Lady H's tatter'd constitution." Catherine was dying. In his Villa Portici, at the foot of Vesuvius, she lingered painfully until August. She left him a letter chiding him for his "dissipated life," writing that "you never have known half the tender affection I have borne you" and that she loved him "beyond the love of Woman."