England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (31 page)

The English gossip columnists used Emma to sell papers, snickering about her friendship with Maria Carolina and her influence over her husband. Only one aspect of Emma's life remained a secret. Little Emma, known as Miss Carew, now a young lady of twelve, was still living in Manchester. Greville transferred the cost of her upkeep for six months, just over £32, to his uncle. The money was a trifle to a man of Sir William's expenditures, and Greville gently suggested he might move the girl to an establishment befitting the stepdaughter of an envoy. She was already learning French, music, and dancing and had a maid, and he knew that the more education she received, the more likely William would be to bring her to Naples and the better were her chances of a good marriage. But Sir William preferred to forget about her, and she remained at the Blackburns'.

Visitors flocked to see the new ambassadress. As Emma sighed, "Our house at Caserta as been like an inn this winter, as we have partys, that have come either to see the environs, or have been invited to court." In the winter of 1792, Sir William collapsed with exhaustion and stomach fever, the first of his severe bouts of dysentery, although he did not know the cause of his illness. As one traveler reported, he had "been in some danger." Emma nursed him with the help of her mother. She declared, "I have been almost as ill as him with anxiety, apprehension, & fatigue," and was "eight days without undressing, eating or sleeping." She was "in hopes he
will be better than ever he was in his life, for his disorder has been long gathering."

In the hours of sitting by his bedside, Emma had dwelt on her good fortune. "What cou'd console me for the loss of such a husband, friend, & protecter," she wrote to Greville. "We live but for one another, but I was to happy, I had imagined I was never more to be unhappy, all is right, I now know myself again & I shall not easily fall in to the same error again, for every moment I feel what I felt when I thought I was losing him for ever." She gloated that Lady Plymouth, Lady Dunmore, Lady Webster, and others had offered to assist her, and even the "King & Queen sent constantly, morning and evening, the most flattering messages."
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The Hamiltons ended their first year of marriage with their bond sealed by a shared aim to gain influence at the Neapolitan court. Anxious to claim that Emma was worthy of her position and to ensure his friends knew she was more than his "private wife," Sir William wrote in the spring of the following year:

Emma goes on perfectly to my mind, but she has made our house so agreeable that it is more frequented than ever, &, of course, I am at a greater expence. However, I may safely say that no minister was ever more respected than I am here, & the English travellers… feel the benefit of our being so well at this Court, for Emma is now as well with the K. & Q. as I am, & of many parties with them. You will be glad to hear as I am sure you must from every quarter of the prudent conduct of Emma. —She knows the value of a good reputation which she is determined to maintain having been completely recovered. She knows that beauty fades & therefore applies daily to the improvement of her mind.

Emma endeavored to be his perfect hostess and courtier, always telling him how grateful she was for his kindness to her. She never stopped working to make herself the perfect lady, practicing singing and French and studying the exquisitely fashionable topic of botany, as well as developing her charitable interests.

The English saw Emma's effusively affectionate behavior toward her husband and watched for signs of a pregnancy. A baby would ensure her position with her "husband, friend & protecter" and be her financial security after his death. Sir William's family dreaded a pregnancy: he would not cut Greville's inheritance for Emma, but he would for their son. Motherhood would enhance Emma's endeavor to appear respectable and
would strengthen her position with Maria Carolina, mother of many. The Neapolitan court was child-friendly, and Emma had a willing nanny on hand in Mrs. Cadogan. Yet there was no suggestion of a pregnancy, and there is no evidence of any illness that might have been a miscarriage. It seems most likely that Sir William was infertile. Catherine Hamilton never conceived, and there is no trace that any of the courtesans he used did so either. Perhaps that was why he felt grateful to Emma for marrying him. Unlike many men his age, he had courted widows rather than young girls, knowing that his wife must sacrifice any wish to have a family.

There was no way of diagnosing infertility, and Emma might have thought that she, as a healthy young woman, could conceive by Sir William. If she was hoping to fall pregnant, she kept her efforts private. Her time was consumed by the work of an envoy's wife. "I literally have been so busy with the English, the Court, & my home duties, as to prevent me doing things I had much at heart to do," she wrote to Greville. When the Duchess of Devonshire blazed into town with her mother, Lady Spencer, and assorted children and hangers-on, there were "fifty in familly for four days at Caserta." She and Sir William had lived for eight months at Caserta to be near the royal family and commuted twice weekly to town, "to give dinners, balls, etc, returning here at 2 or 3 o clock in the morning after the fatige of a dinner of fifty, & ball & supper of 3 hundred, then to dress early in the morning, to go to court, to dinner at twelve a clock, as the Royal familly dine early, and they have done Sir William and me the honner to invite us very, very often."

Maria Carolina wanted to meet most of the English visitors, for many of them, such as the Devonshires, wielded considerable influence over key English ministers in Parliament. Aristocrats had heard of Emma's influence with the queen and demanded an audience. "Tis true, we dined every day at court, or at some casino of the King; for you cannot immag-ine how good our King and Queen as been to the principal English who have been here." She gave her visitors something more exclusive than an introduction at court: a private audience. "I have carried the Ladies to the Queen very often, as she permitted me to go to her very often in private, which I do. And the reason why we stay now here is, I have promised the Queen to remain as long as she does, which will be the tenth of July. In the evenings I go to her, and we are tete a tete 2 or 3 hours. Sometimes we sing. Yesterday the King and me sang duettes 3 hours."

Emma and Sir William conducted their visitors around the city, to
court, to dinners and to assemblies, and to their box at the opera. Scattered in archives and collections across the country are dozens of affectionate invitations from Emma to her guests. In one warm letter, she promised Lady Throckmorton that had the Countess of Plymouth come to visit, "I wou'd have ciceronised her all day & at night music and attitudes wou'd have diverted her."
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All self-respecting tourists called on
ciceroni,
famously learned and devoted guides, to show them the city and to take care of their every need. Most of her visitors required "ciceroning" to shops and dealers, as well as help with buying and bargaining, and many sent requests to the Palazzo Sessa for the envoy and his wife to pick up souvenirs they had forgotten and send them on. Some important visitors behaved like film stars, accustomed to constant attention. Many traveled to improve their health, and Emma was called upon to tend the ill and comfort the bereaved. Lady Spencer had fond memories of Emma's assiduous nursing of her daughter, Harriet, Lady Duncannon, who was suffering from pneumonia.
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When they recovered, they wanted to see the attractions Emma had visited tens of times—the ceremony when the holy blood held at San Gennaro Church liquefied, the coast and islands, the king's china factory at St. Leu-cio, the court, and one of the king's country seats, Carditello, where Ferdinand pressed his guests to spend hours examining his cows and pigs.

Emma was excited to entertain the Devonshire set, and she sympathized with Georgiana, for her husband had exiled her for giving birth to Charles Grey's child, but she was less entranced by the many other dreary and boorish guests, sometimes up to eighty at a time. Many times a week, Emma, radiating smiles and sparkling with diamonds, presided over a bout of gambling or whist, sang Handel, and presented her Attitudes. One astute squire spotted that Emma was weary of performing her famous poses, but most had no recognition of how much their visits drained Emma's patience and Sir William's purse. Hamilton continued to spend, believing that the English government would compensate him in due course and also hoping the same aristocrats would repay him with hospitality when he returned to England.

Everyone was eager to judge Emma, particularly the younger women. Lady Palmerston thought her not as beautiful as she had expected, but exquisitely dressed and "very good humoured," and decided that "her desire to please and her extreme civility is very uncommon." She thought—like everyone else—that the couple was "rather too fond." Emma hosted a dinner for the Palmerstons and more than fifty others, and Lady Palmerston
decided she looked "extremely handsome, and really does the honours exceedingly well… Sir William perfectly idolises her and I do not wonder he is proud of so magnificent a marble, belonging so entirely to himself."

Lady Palmerston gives us a rare insight into how the guests perceived Emma's mother. Mrs. Cadogan, she wrote to her brother, "looks like a lady you have more often found useful than I could ever have done." Her brother was a terrible reprobate and the women he found useful were prostitutes, madams, and the odd cookshop owner as he was stumbling home. Perhaps Mrs. Cadogan put Lady Palmerston in mind of all three occupations at once. The English were perhaps a little insulted, for many had heard that Sir William permitted Mrs. Cadogan to attend the English parties but not those of his Neapolitan friends. Lady Palmerston slipped in a note of Emma's background: "Lady H. is to me very surprising, for considering the situation she was in, she behaves wonderfully well. Now and then to be sure a little vulgarness pops out, but I think it's more Sir William's fault, who loves a good joke and leads her to enter into his stories, which are not of the best kind."
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Most people describe Emma similarly: she was a friendly hostess and eager to please, well mannered and attractive, and Sir William was too fond of her. One minor squire reported, "As we knew her story you may conceive we did not expect so much." Entranced by Emma's spontaneous sense of fun and her actressy ability to mimic voices and personalities, he enthused that as well as her wonderful talent for Attitudes, she "has that of countenance to a great degree. I have scarcely know her look the same for three minutes together, and, with the study she has made of characters, she mimics in a moment everything that strikes her, with a versatility you have not a notion of"
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Everybody knew about Emma's previous life as wild Amy Lyon of the Temple of Health and Romney's model, but they tended to treat her origins as proof that she was, in Lady Palmerston's words, "a very extraordinary woman" to have escaped.

The Kidds were living reminders of Emma's squalid background, and Sir William rather wished they might disappear. Emma felt guilty about her grandmother, sickly and infirm, and struggling for money, and she was trying to help her without Sir William discovering. She fretted to Greville that she wore a court dress in November that cost £25 and felt "unhappy all the while I had it on," since she had "2 hundred a year for nonsense, & it wou'd be hard I cou'd not give her twenty pounds when she as so often given me her last shilling." She begged him to send her grandmother £20 at Christmas, and asked him to "write to her a line from me or send to her
& tell her by my order" for "if the time passes without hearing from me she may imagine I have forgot her & I wou'd not keep her poor old heart in suspense for the world."

Emma vowed to send her grandmother money every Christmas. But throughout the first half of 1793 Sarah Kidd grew frailer and finally died in July, at the age of seventy-eight. Her grave is nowhere to be found in the large graveyard of Hawarden Church. She was probably buried very simply with only a wooden cross marking where she lay. Mrs. Kidd's life could hardly have been more different from that of her granddaughter. She could never read or write, married young, and brought up a large family in a mining village, moving from village to village as her husband tried to find work as a collier. After his death, she supported her entire family. Throughout her life, her mind was focused on finding the next meager meal, and her days were almost entirely limited to the four walls of her hovel and the mile or so around. She had never seen London, or any more of England than Chester for the last sixty years, and Emma's adventures in London and beyond were something like a fairy tale: far away and utterly bewildering. She could not comprehend the lives of her daughter or granddaughter, but she understood all too well the sad situation of poor lonely little Emma, deemed too genteel to live with her but not genteel enough to stay in the palazzo with her mother. Humbly marked down in the parish register as "widow of Thomas, Collier," the grandmother of England's most famous woman was given a simple funeral and burial at Hawarden, where she had lived for all of Emma's life.

Emma had not seen her grandmother for ten years. But there was no way she and her mother could journey across revolutionary Europe for a funeral—at least not on their own. Mrs. Cadogan and Emma had to comfort each other in private.

In January 1793, Louis XVI of France was executed and Ferdinand commanded the court to go into mourning. The queen was doubly determined to encourage her husband to fight the French and declared that she hoped Louis's death "will implore a striking and visible vengeance… and that on this account the Powers of Europe will have no more than a single united will." She wrote to Emma that she looked to Emma's generous nation to provide this vengeance.
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