England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (5 page)

When the twelve-year-old Emma was not carrying fuel, she was scrubbing or fetching water. The newest servant was given the most-detested tasks, such as scouring pans, dealing with the slops, and cleaning the chamber pots. Having grown up with the Kidds, anything else was probably beyond her. As one mistress complained, young girls could wash up, carry buckets, and scour floors but were incapable of dusting or washing delicate clothes and tea things, and they were hopeless at ironing. Most mistresses gave their servants negligible training because they expected to lose them within a year, and Mrs. Thomas was probably no different. She probably resented having to employ a wild, untrained young girl as a favor to her brother.

Emma's bed would have been a few blankets and a pillow in a cupboard or shared room, but most probably on the landing or kitchen floor, where she was vulnerable to the attentions of other servants, visitors, or family members. Servants were expected to sleep wherever they could, even with the family pigs or in the coal hole. Junior servants tended to curl up by the hearth, partly for warmth and also because their job was to stoke the fires in the morning. Wherever she slept, Emma would have been up before dawn. As there was probably no running water (even if there was, it would be cold, restricted to the scullery, and available only for a few hours a day), her first job was to fetch water at the pump and heat it for washing and cooking. Within a few months, the hands of most young maids were scarred with burns, and the most common cause of death for eighteenth-century girls was burns or scalds. Emma would have broken for her main meal at around eleven, eaten supper at four or five, and spent her evenings scraping the pots or perhaps carrying out basic mending.

Keeping a house clean was an enormous undertaking. Families such as the Thomases burned over a ton of coal every six weeks, and the walls, floors, ceilings, and furniture needed regular scrubbing to remove the black dust. It could take a whole day to clean a room properly. The open range in the kitchen needed scouring daily, and one of Emma's least pleasant tasks would have been scraping off its grease and grime. The chimney needed to be swept as far as she could reach twice a week. Laundry consumed three or four days every fortnight. City maids commonly emptied commodes down the sides of buildings, but a country maid had to carry
the chamber pot down the steep back stairs and throw the contents into the garden.

There was an impassable gulf between the upper and lower servants. Ladies' maids and companions were middle-class girls who could embroider, write neatly, play music, and often speak French. A very hardworking and lucky maid of all work in a miserly family might possibly be trained as a cook, but the others could look forward only to a future of the most tedious domestic labor. Worst of all, like all girls in her position, Emma had to feign servility and respectful admiration for her employers. One author of a manual for servants declared that since a maid's life was "one continued round of activity," "no girl ought to undertake, or can be qualified for such a situation, who had not been thus bred up." A servant should be from a "sober, well disposed family" and "of a tractable disposition."
²
Emma was nothing of the kind.

Masters saw their young servants as easy prey. Since most, like Emma, spent much of their day cleaning isolated rooms alone, they were easy to trap and grope. At night, there was even more opportunity, for they slept in unlocked rooms or on the floor. The master usually beat the servants (women were not legally permitted to punish them) and often backed up his physical violence with harassment—thinking it a good way to keep the girls in check. One man, Arthur Munby, even forced his maid, Hannah Cullwick, to wash his feet, lick his boots, and wear a collar with a padlock to which only he had the key (he later married her). Despite the harsh treatment meted out to them, girls often fell in love with their masters. The bestselling novel of the age was Samuel Richardson's
Pamela,
in which a pretty, clever servant resisted her master's advances and then charmed him into marrying her. Bored and overworked, servants longed to be the fine lady wife, or even the kept mistress living in luxury. However, it tended to be only elderly widowers who married their staff. The typical eighteenth-century man simply seduced his servants and fired them when he was bored of them.

Emma had been working for the Thomas family for only a few months before she found herself unemployed again. Mrs. Thomas probably dismissed her, no doubt weary of the inefficient, untidy, party-mad twelve-year-old she had taken on as a favor.
³
Although Emma was aggrieved to lose her position, her head was stuffed with romantic dreams and she was, as she later said, "wild and thoughtless when a little girl." Emma needed to move to a place where she could be a new person: free
from the stigma of the scandal of her parents' marriage, her father's strange death, and the disgrace of being a Kidd. She joined the hundreds of girls from across the country heading to London each year to seek money and sensation. As the
Carlton House Magazine
noted, "What lass, in the rural village, that hears the name of London, but wishes to be there?"
⁴

CHAPTER 5
Traveling to London

E
mma's journey to London by coach would have been the most daunting experience of her young life. She left no record of her feelings about it, so we can only piece together her experiences from the reports of other coach travelers of the time. Wearing her best dress to save it from thieves, carrying a few belongings and some cheese and bread, she set off early in the morning for an inn on the outskirts of Chester. Unable to afford the stagecoach, she probably took the stage wagon, a goods vehicle that took poorer passengers. Parked at the back of the yard, behind the crowds of hawkers, passengers, and beggars, the stage wagon was a twelve-foot-long frame over four thick wooden wheels, covered only by a torn, dirty sheet. It would be pulled along the 180-mile journey south to London by six or eight horses in pairs. Old and worn out from years of dragging other carriages, they were less than half a year away from the slaughterhouse.

Twenty or so women, children, and elderly men (younger men traveled on horseback) bundled themselves into the wagon around bags of vegetables and crates of chickens. Children took the most uncomfortable spots over the wheels or at the very back. Then they had to hold tight to their money. A passenger couldn't pay until he or she left the wagon, and anyone who failed to cough up would be arrested. Emma's journey cost around six shillings, with extra money needed for food and lodging along the way—over two months of Sarah's wages. If Mary had not been mistress to a man of means, Emma would have been unable to afford the fare.

The journey from Chester to London usually took just over five days but could last seven or even nine, depending on the traffic, the state of the
roads, and the frequency of stops. Traveling south through Nantwich to Lichfield, then Birmingham and Northampton, the passengers were usually too uncomfortable to marvel at the unfamiliar towns. Battered by the wind and the rain, they felt every clatter as the wagon bumped over unkempt, pitted roads littered with rubbish and the detritus of broken carts, the wheels splashing into the deep streams of mud. Post chaises swept past (so fast that their horses had a life span of only two years) at about ten miles per hour, and aristocratic carriages overtook them as swiftly as their coachmen could whip. The horses drawing Emma's wagon would never move faster than a walk. On many journeys a horse collapsed, and the passengers had to wait while the carter hunted for another. Every time the wagon halted to load and unload goods, the travelers had to disembark, sometimes for hours, passing time perhaps by swapping tales about drunken carters and robbers before battling for a place back on board.

At night, the wagon stopped and the passengers slept where they had been sitting all day. If they were lucky, a landlord at an inn might, for the price of six- or ninepence, give them a supper of cold boiled beef and bread in the kitchen followed by a bed in the straw of the stables. Hardened traveling salesmen, soldiers, and sailors stalked the inns on the lookout for easy prey, and many girls never reached their destinations.

The town of Barnet was the main coaching center for passengers arriving in London from the north. Like any eighteenth-century coaching inn, the courtyard under the rooms was covered by a large wooden roof (the only remaining example is The George, on London's Borough High Street). Passengers had to leave their original wagon and push through crowds of sightseers, prostitutes touting for clients, horsekeepers, waiters, and hawkers selling cheap ribbons, papers, jewels, and pencils to find a cart to take them into the city. To country ears such as Emma's, the London accent sounded entirely unfamiliar.

Finally crammed into a coach bound for the city, they joined the long queues waiting for hours to enter the Great North Road. Sometimes up to 130 coaches a day rattled through the gate, along with horses, wagons, and herds of cows and sheep from as far away as Wales. Emma's wagon would have taken the route through Finchley Common, seven miles of thick undergrowth colonized by robbers. Not long before her arrival, eleven carriages were ransacked there in a single night. One unfortunate man was even mugged on his way into London and accosted by the same highwayman on the way out. Closer to the city, market gardens and nurseries flourished. In greenhouses, exotic fruits such as melons and pears grew
under human manure brought every morning from the town by the night-soil men. Nearby were the holes in the ground where the bodies of the poor were thrown. The hogs destined to become London's bacon roamed freely, and at the brickworks, smoking kilns towered over the piles of warm bricks, under which the workers ate their food and slept.

Farther along the Great North Road lay the rural villages of Highgate and Islington, home to pleasure gardens busy with Londoners at the weekend enjoying wine, tea, cakes, and music. Looming nearby was every poor traveler's greatest fear: the holding prison for migrants. With hundreds of new people from the provinces arriving in London every day and the population complaining about overcrowding and crime, immigration was a controversial political issue. Since factories, sweatshops, and building sites depended on low-paid labor from out of town, the government could not ban immigrants. Instead, ministers attempted to assuage the fears of the public by claiming to get tough on the criminals and work dodgers—which meant locking up large numbers of innocents. Officers scanned the new arrivals from Barnet and arrested those they thought looked drunk, work-shy, or even slightly untidy.

The Chester coaches arrived at the Golden Cross Inn on London's busy Strand. On the southern end of the area that would later be a square named Trafalgar, the Golden Cross was a gambling hut and a museum of freaks. A live human centaur had apparently been displayed there only a few years before Emma's arrival. Procuresses for brothels prowled the inns that received coaches from the provinces, looking to recruit young girls fresh from the country by feigning motherly concern and promising honest work. Emma managed to avoid the bawds and find a position as a maid for a Mrs. Richard Budd.

The Budds were probably the first or second couple to make Emma an offer. Every girl knew that the standard of proposals would decrease as she waited. They all craved positions in aristocratic homes, where the work was less arduous because the family was often away and it was easy to pick up dresses, candles, and tips, but they hoped in vain. Aristocrats recruited servants by personal recommendation. Girls arriving from the country were crammed into the homes of the middling classes. Doctors, tradesmen, and merchants considered country girls less corrupt and more willing to accept low pay than Londoners. They and their wives met the wagons when they arrived in the inns to pick their own servant and to avoid paying commission to an employment agency. Emma was young, healthy, and had worked as a maid before, and the Budds had no teenage
sons, so perhaps they did not mind employing such a pretty girl. They packed Emma into their carriage and headed for their newly built home in Chatham Place, Blackfriars.

After passing through Temple Bar, one of the two remaining gateways to the City (until four years previously, the heads of traitors were pinned up on the gates), Emma saw her first sight of her new home: the City. The Budds' cart bumped past shops, slaughterhouses, slums, and vertiginous, toppling houses flanked by great stacks of refuse. Wagons, coaches, and rubbish carts jostled to overtake herds of animals driven by farmers toward the market at Smithfield or the abattoir at Tower Hill. Errand boys wove through swarms of shoppers and servants. Tradesmen headed through for the markets: Billingsgate for fish and coal; Mark Lane, Bear Quay, and Queenhithe for grain; Blackwell Hall for cloth; and Leadenall for leather and poultry. The air hung heavy with the sticky, astringent smell of the sugar-processing plants and coal fumes from factories working from dawn to dusk to make the luxury goods that adorned the West End and were exported all over the world. Bricklayers and laborers were everywhere, carrying materials, clambering over rubble and foundations, and assembling in groups to be recruited for work. Thousands of houses were built in London between 1762 and 1779. Many more were abandoned when the money ran out, to be looted for timber by children. Crowded into the slums or "rookeries" in the alleyways were the workers who built houses for the wealthy and wove the material for their clothes.