England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (22 page)

Neapolitans devoted their energies to socializing. During the "universaljubilee"
of the
camevak,
the royal family threw galas almost every night, and the San Carlo theater hosted a weekly masquerade teeming with shepherdesses, princesses, nuns, and oriental queens. On one day, nobles drove along the main street pelting one another and the spectators with balls of bread and plums frosted over with sugar. Ferdinand led the bombardment, gleefully ambushing his long-suffering ministers and ambassadors with sticky fruit.
⁶
The most famous event in
carnevale
was the repellent Cocagna festival. Over a few days, workers made a giant mountain of bread, grain, cakes, pasta, fruit, and vegetables, and used rope to tether freshly killed cattle and live birds and lambs to the mass, prettifying it with fountains of wine, grottoes made of fish, and rolling pastures of vegetables. Guards held off the looters. Then, when the nobles were all assembled to watch, the guards left the mountain to the hungry crowds. In the ensuing bloody frenzy, birds were torn away from their posts so ferociously that only their wings were left behind, and the people fought and crushed one another, with some even stabbed in the tumult.
⁷
The rich spectators then returned to their palaces to enjoy a sumptuous dinner, their hunger piqued by the sight of poor women fighting over a loaf of bread. Some were sickened, but the majority enjoyed Cocagna, telling themselves that the royal family was generously allowing their subjects to satisfy their brutal desires.

The author Laurence Sterne was entranced by Sir William's life of nothing but parties, operas, and masquerades. Drink flowed, everybody gambled, parties broke up at around five in the morning, thousands danced in the streets on a Sunday night, and even respectable families caroused late into the night. "If a young man is wild, and must run after women and bad company, this should be done abroad," proclaimed Dr. Johnson, and Naples was seen as the perfect place for womanizing. James Boswell admitted he chased girls unrestrainedly, his "blood inflamed by the burning climate."
⁸
Every gentleman who arrived in the city aimed to have an affair with one of its legendary demimondaines or even a singer or dancer from the opera.

The English were the most eager participants in the Neapolitan parties. There were not quite the three thousand English that Stendhal later complained filled every available hotel (he had to search for five hours for a room), but there were hundreds, wandering with guides around Pompeii, bartering for vases, and fanning themselves in their carriages.
⁹
As Sir William grumbled, "Go where you please on the continent, you are sure to find some straggling English tourists."
¹⁰
Emma's countrymen packed
hotels such as the Ville de Londres, which comforted with a stodgy full English breakfast those daring souls returning from Vesuvius.
¹¹
As one contented traveler reported, "Everybody else here might be English, and Naples has more the air of London than any place I have seen on the Continent."
¹²
Theaters even ran plays to please the English about the political scuffles between the Whig and Tory MPs.
¹³
But few amusements could drag the English from their main passion: shopping. Excited by the dozens of shops piled high with everything from fine art to tacky reproductions, they stuffed their bags with jewelry and souvenirs from the new excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, snapping up statues of Hercules or busts of Augustus at rock-bottom prices. After his tour, Lord Burlington filled nearly nine hundred trunks with souvenirs. Only Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, at thirty-seven the most famous author in Europe after the publication of his
The Sorrows of Young Werther,
and the continent's most hardworking and cultured man, managed to resist the temptation of bargain hunting on his visit to Naples. Already developing their reputation as the world's most determined shoppers, English travelers left the city weighed down with paintings, statues, carvings, jewelry, busts, manuscripts, and even a painter or sculptor to decorate their newly inherited mansions.

By the time they arrived in Naples, most tourists were suffering from museum fatigue, their brows furrowed by days of trying to appreciate the treasures of Rome and Florence. After a grueling six-day "Course in Antiquities and the Arts" in Rome, Boswell happily became a "slave to sensual pleasures" in Naples.
¹⁴
Even those who relished visiting the churches, buildings, and museums felt, like Goethe, uncomfortable admiring Catholic art. Fortunately, everybody agreed that, apart from Titian's
Danae
at the royal palace in Caserta, Naples had no worthwhile art and there was nothing to do but dance, drink, see shows, and hunt for bargains. As one jolly traveler exulted, "What is to be done at Naples, but to live and enjoy life?"
¹⁵

CHAPTER 20
Painful Truths

S
ir William loved the Palazzo Sessa for the breathtaking view it -Jo/ commanded of the bay. A monastery until the monks were evicted by Ferdinand's chief minister, Tanucci, the house had been given to a fellow courtier who rented out all of the southern side and most of the west to Sir William for about £150 a year. There were fifteen main rooms in the house. The envoy's private apartments were on the second floor, as were those of his late wife, Catherine, then occupied by Mrs. Damer. Sir William's staff had been busy in the first months of the year, dusting, tidying, and stuffing antiquities into boxes in the basement, clearing enough space to accommodate Anne Damer, Emma, her mother, and their maids. Visitors to the palazzo arrived in the antechamber and found it full of sellers and tourists. The chosen few were ushered in to wait in the gallery, where the envoy showed off his latest vases. When the paperwork became pressing, Sir William retired to the adjacent library, where his secretaries, Smith and Oliver, were busily planning parties and answering invitations. Perhaps the most exciting novelty for Emma and Mrs. Cadogan was the proper WC (the waste simply flowed into the bay). When Emma arrived, her host was attempting to convert the upper floors into one large room. After months of arguing with workmen and searching for the right materials (he had a particularly tedious hunt for the perfect window), as well as spending nearly $6,000, he transformed his room into one of the must-sees of the city. At the corner was a circular tower, half of which was a large bow window which curved around, giving his guests a fabulous view over the bay almost as far as Sorrento. He added a backdrop of mirrors across the other wall, so Vesuvius was doubly reflected. Dazzled by the view, the
painter Wilhelm Tischbein felt as if he was sitting "on the crest of a cliff above sea and earth." When Goethe visited, he was delighted by the rooms "furnished in the English taste," praising the view of Capri, Pasillipo, and the wonderful view of the coast. He decided "probably nothing comparable could be found in the whole of Europe."
¹

In pride of place were the portraits of Emma: Romney's
Bacchante
of her in pink, the
Emma Hart in Morning Dress,
and the Reynolds
Bacchante.
He soon bought even more portraits—there were eventually fourteen adorning the walls of the Palazzo. A visitor in 1787 was impressed.

It is furnished with many pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Angelica Kauffmanfn]; a fine crucifix by Vandyke, and a most capital naked boy by Leonardo da Vinci in fine preservation. I could not but smile to hear what pains Sir William has been at to get commodious sash windows, in the English style.
²

Emma marveled at Sir William's "pack of servants." Benefiting from the low wages caused by massive unemployment, he employed around fifty men, as well as a large band of musicians to entertain him. Since men did the domestic work, the only females would probably have been Emma's and Mrs. Darner's maids. Senior staff lived out or had their own rooms, and the rest slept in the corridor or on the floor in the kitchens. They were fully occupied in cleaning the house and ornaments, tending to the visitors, assisting at the regular parties, and caring for the four or five carriages and fleets of fine horses. Like most eighteenth-century men, Sir William kept his servants busy buying new carriages, trading old ones, repainting, and trying to improve speed and suspension.

Sir William shared his government's disparaging attitude toward the politics of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Bickerings with Rome were, he complained, "the only occurrences in this remote corner of the World."
³
His letters to the foreign secretary in London described the life of a medieval courtier rather than a modern diplomat: he listed the sniffles of the princesses, glamorous parties, and the exact number of boars killed by the king and court.
⁴
He hardly ever needed to write in code. Sir William was bored, but he was grateful for the opportunity to develop his interests. Instead of competing with other envoys at dreary trade talks, he studied the volcano, hunted with Ferdinand, flattered Maria Carolina and her ever-growing band of belligerent children, and became the world's best tourist guide. Hoping to make an easy million, he collected cheap antique
vases and cleaned them up in the hope that there would soon be a demand (the market for statues and paintings was so inflated that they could no longer be bought and resold for a profit). After a few years in Naples, he was a man of culture, the acknowledged English expert on both classical vases and Vesuvius.

From spring 1786, Sir William had a new hobby: Emma. Devoted to his beautiful new distraction, he put off writing to the government, and his letters to the foreign office dwindled from around May. English visitors chivvied to see the gorgeous lady herself. The Duke of Gloucester, younger son of the king, arrived and straightaway desired to meet the envoy's "little friend."

Feeling guilty that he had plotted with Greville, Sir William showered Emma with gifts. He gave her a beautiful horse, treated her to fine dinners, took her to plays and operas, and to her amazement and delight ordered her a new painted carriage and a staff of liveried footmen and a coachman to match. He also bought her a whole new wardrobe. Gleefully stuffing her sober Edgware Row outfits at the back of the closet, she delighted in his present of a white satin gown (costing twenty-five guineas) and muslin dresses with "the sleeves tyed in fowlds with ribban & trimmed with lace." On top of this, she received a luxurious camel shawl and some of Catherine's jewelry and ornaments. Sir William had realized that if he wanted to please Emma and perhaps win her heart, he would have to court her with kindness and presents.

In July, Emma wrote to Greville, eager to share the excitement of her summer holiday. They had visited Pompeii and Posillipo and planned to sail to the islands of Ischia and Capri. She has been bathing daily and her "irruptions" were gone, leaving her, as she claims, "remarkably fair." Sir William had invited every artist and sculptor in Naples (apart from Mrs. Damer) to portray her. One, possibly Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, was painting her in "a Bacchante setting, in a turbin, a turkish dress," and she was modeling for another in a blue silk gown and a black feathered hat. The young Swiss-German Angelica Kauffman, and two others planned to paint her, and the cameo maker Marchmont would soon carve her head into a stone that could be set into a ring. Sir William already had five portraits, and he had asked for more from Romney

Every evening, Emma proudly paraded with Sir William along the Chi-aia and past the royal palace. As they did so, up to six hundred gilt carriages jammed along the seafront while actors, singers, dancers, and even preachers performed to the gathered crowd.
⁵
Each of the splendid carriages
was led by a footman carrying a flambeau and pulled by up to eight horses wearing ornate costumes of blue silk and silver, adorned with white ostrich feathers and strewn with flowers. The nobles waved graciously, dressed up in gold and silver lace and heavy gold jewelry. One traveler grumbled that the multitude of footmen, flambeau, and carriages looked like a "grand funeral procession," but Emma was deeply impressed and spent hours preparing herself
⁶
Excluded from the court and aristocratic gatherings, she aimed to catch the eye of the Neapolitan elite on their public outings. She quickly found a little circle of admirers. The debauched English aristocrat Lord Hervey became her devoted fan and the royal courtier Prince Dietrichstein begged for a portrait, promising he passed his time telling the queen about Mrs. Hart's amazing beauty.