Kate Williams Read online

  Lady Hamilton as Circe

  I must sin and love him more than ever.

  It is a crime worth going to Hell for.

  —EMMA HAMILTON ON NELSON, 1804

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Text art

  Lady Hamilton as Circe, by George Romney, c. 1782, copyright © Tate, London

  Waltzing!—or, a Peep into the Royal Brothel, Spring Gardens, by Isaac Cruikshank, c. 1816, copyright © Guildhall/Heritage-Images

  The Honourable Charles Greville, William Hayley, George Romney and Emma Hart, by George Romney c. 1784, copyright © The Trustees of The British Museum

  Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante, engraving by Charles Knight after George Romney’s copy, 1797, copyright © The Trustees of The British Museum

  Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, by Pietro Antonio Novelli, 1791, copyright © National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

  Dress Flounce—Nelson Bronte, c. 1799, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London

  A Mansion House Treat—or, Smoking Attitudes!, by Isaac Cruikshank, 1800, copyright © The Trustees of The British Museum

  A Cognocenti Contemplating the Beauties of the Antique, by James Gillray published by Hannah Humphrey, February 11, 1801, copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London

  LAssemblée Nationale—or, Grand Cooperative Meeting at St Ann’s Hill, by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey, June 18, 1804, copyright © The Trustees of The British Museum

  First color insert

  Emma Hart as Circe, by George Romney, 1782, copyright © The National Trust, Waddesdon, The Rothschild Collection (Rothschild Family Trust), photographer: Mike Fear

  Cupid Unfastening the Girdle of Venus, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1788, copyright © Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Mrs. Cadogan (Mother of Emma, Lady Hamilton), by Norsti, c. 1800, copyright © Royal Naval Museum

  Portrait of the Hon. Charles Francis Greville, by George Romney Private Collection, copyright © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Emma Hart as the Spinstress, by George Romney, 1782-86, copyright © English Heritage Photo Library/Kenwood: Iveagh Bequest

  Lady Hamilton as Nature, by George Romney, 1782, copyright © Francis G. Mayer/Corbis

  A View of the Bay of Naples, Looking Southwest from the Pizzofalcone Towards Capo di Posilippo, by Giovanni Battista Lusieri, 1791 (watercolor, gouache, graphite, and pen and ink on six sheets of paper), copyright © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

  Sir William Hamilton, by David Allan, 1775, copyright © The National Portrait Gallery, London

  Emma Hamilton as a Bacchante, by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, c. 1790-92, copyright © Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool

  Le Signorine Napoletane, or Una Casa di Tolleranza nella Napoli del 1945, by Mario Carbone, copyright © Archivio Carbone/Prima Pagina

  Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante, engraving by Henry Bone after Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s copy, c. 1803, copyright © Wallace Collection, London/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Autograph letter of Lady Hamilton, 1798, copyright © British Library

  Detail from Portrait of the Family of Ferdinand IV, by Angelica Kauffmann, 1783, copyright © Museo di Capodimonte, Naples/Scala Archives

  Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, by Lemuel Francis Abbott, c. 1798, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London/Greenwich Hospital Collection

  Second color insert

  Admiral Nelson Recreating with His Brave Tars After the Glorious Battle of the Nile, by Thomas Rowlandson, c. 1800, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London

  Frances, Lady Nelson, by Henry Edridge, c. 1807, copyright © Royal Naval Museum

  Modern Antiques, by Thomas Rowlandson, 1806, copyright © The Trustees of The British Museum

  Dido in Despair, by James Gillray published by Hannah Humphrey, February 6, 1801, copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London

  Commemorative silver pair-cased verge pocket watch, copyright © Christie’s Images Ltd., 2005

  Derby large cylindrical mug showing Britannia holding a picture of Nelson, copyright © Sotheby’s, London

  Fan celebrating the Battle of the Nile, 1798, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London

  Dresses a la Nile Respectfully Dedicated to the Fashion Mongers of the Day, published anon, by W Holland, October 24, 1798, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London

  Baron Nelson of the Nile ribbon, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London

  Six patch boxes and anchor necklace, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London

  Three gold vinaigrettes, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London

  Merton Place, Surrey, copyright © The Nelson Museum, Monmouth

  Horatia Nelson, after Henry Bone, c. 1806, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London

  Silk picture in a frame, embroidery by Emma Hamilton, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London

  The Death of Admiral Lord Nelson—in the Moment of Victory, by James Gillray published by Hannah Humphrey, December 29, 1805, copyright © National Maritime Museum, London Moral Maxims from the Wisdom of Jesus, book inscribed by Emma Hamilton in 1809, copyright © Sotheby’s, London

  Lady Hamilton at Prayer, by George Romney c. 1782-86, copyright © English Heritage Photo Library/Kenwood: Iveagh Bequest

  Kings Bench Prison in London, depicted by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin, aquatinted by Joseph Constantine Stadler, published by Rudolph Ackermann on December 1, 1808, copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue

  Battle to Escape

  1. Harsh Beginnings

  2. Liquor and Honey

  3. Growing Up Poor

  4. Scrubbing the Stairs

  5. Traveling to London

  6. The School of Corruption

  7. Temptations to Voluptuousness

  8. Powder and Paint

  9. The Square of Venus

  10. Celestial Goddess

  11. Santa Carlotta’s Nunnery

  12. Life in the Country

  13. Desperate Letters

  Celebrity Mistress

  14. Charles Greville’s Penitent

  15. London’s Muse

  16. Entertaining the Envoy

  17. Negotiations

  18. Torn by Different Passions

  19. The Greatest Splendor in the World

  20. Painful Truths

  21. Sparing No Expense

  22. Brandishing Daggers

  23. Manipulating Sir William

  24. Engaged for Life

  25. A Difficult Part to Act

  26. Loving Maria Carolina

  27. A Very Extraordinary Woman

  Neapolitan Nights

  28. The Hero Visits

  29. War Approaches

  30. In Fear of Napoleon

  31. The Battered Hero

  32. Falling into His Arms

  33. Passions in Palermo

  34. Neapolitan Rebellion

  35. Days of Ease and Nights of Pleasure

  36. Baron Crocodile’s Road Show

  Scandal and Stardom

  37. Cleopatra Arrives

  38. Show Time

  39. A Pledge of Love

  40. The Prince and the Showgirl

  41. Precious Jewels

  42. Paradise Merton

  43. Keeping Nelson

  45. Nelson’s Lonely Mistress

  46. Money Is Trash

  47. Relighting the Fire

  48. Trafalgar

  Backlash

  49. Mistress of a Mourning Nation

  50. Fashion on Credit

  51. Selling Nelson’s Legacy

  52. The
Friends of Lady Hamilton

  53. Trouble with the Relations

  54. Afflicting Circumstances

  55. Reading the Herald

  56. “A Chance I May Live”

  57. Horatia Alone

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  Model, courtesan, dancer, fashion icon, actress, double agent, political hostess, mother, ambassadress, and hero’s mistress, Emma Hamilton performed many roles in her astonishing rise from poverty to wealth and fame. None would have greater consequence for her than the part she played in Naples on July 19, 1798. She had joined the welcome party for Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson as his fleet anchored off the Bay of Naples. Nelson had come to protect Naples from the advancing French, and the Neapolitans were determined to give him a welcome fit for a hero. Rehearsals had been going on for weeks, but no one had been practicing as carefully as Emma Hamilton. Ravishingly beautiful and still only thirty-three, she realized that Nelson’s arrival was a pivotal moment for her.

  Her life would never be the same again.

  Five years earlier, on Nelson’s first visit to the city, Emma had hardly noticed the unprepossessing naval captain. By 1798, however, after his amazing success at the Battle of the Nile made him the one man who seemed able to save Europe from Napoleon, she saw his arrival as an opportunity to propel herself onto a bigger stage. Nelson was exhausted after weeks of fighting the French and in pain from his shot eye and the wound where his right arm had been amputated. As soon as the great man boarded the welcome boat, Emma threw herself upon him, weeping with happiness. To the sounds of cheers and cannon fire resounding across the bay, she gathered Nelson into her arms and, leaving the astonished royal entourage and her husband, Sir William Hamilton, in her wake, supported the triumphant but exhausted hero into the ship’s cabin. The man fêted as England’s bravest man had collapsed onto the bosom of Europe’s biggest female celebrity. Emma Hamilton was already legendary as the girl from nowhere who had catapulted herself into high society. Her consummate piece of stage management on that July day marked the start of her passionate affair with Nelson—and the beginning of her ascent to a level of fame we would find breathtaking even today.

  How did Emma, a girl born into terrible poverty and exploitation, reach the position where she was able to seduce and charm England’s most famous man? What did she have to do to get there?

  If it were fiction, Emma’s life story would be dismissed as improbable. It is a story that takes us through the grand sweeps of eighteenth-century history to reveal all the glory and horror of her age. To understand how Emma turned herself into the most famous woman of her time, we must first go back thirty years and more than a thousand miles from the glittering Neapolitan court and the duties of an ambassador’s wife to her poverty-stricken birth in the slums of northwest England.

  Battle to Escape

  CHAPTER 1

  Harsh Beginnings

  Emma Hamilton was born Amy Lyon on Friday April 26, 1765, into squalid poverty. Ness was a ramshackle huddle of thirty or so miners’ hovels set in scrubby, stony, infertile land. Moored on the Wirral peninsula in Cheshire, just over twelve miles from Liverpool, near England’s northwest coast, the village now gleams with luxurious houses for commuters, but for a girl-child in the eighteenth century, it was a one-way ticket to misery. The Stanley family, the owners of the area around Ness, reclined in elegant splendor at nearby Hooton Hall, ignoring the miners and the few fishermen scraping out a miserable living by the bleak shore. Ness was at the forefront of the burgeoning industrial revolution, and Amy was destined for a cruel and meager life: backbreaking labor by the age of ten, a hard marriage, and an early death.

  Baby Amy owed her very existence to coal—the black gold of the eighteenth century. For the first half of the century, the factories, sweatshops, and businesses in nearby Chester and the surrounding area had been powered by coal shipped in from North Wales along the connecting Dee estuary, but the waterway was silting up and Welsh coal was growing very expensive. When reserves were discovered in 1750 at nearby Denhall, the landscape of Ness changed forever, from an area only sparsely populated by fishermen and the odd farmer to a mini Wild West town teeming with investors and get-rich-quick merchants. After the Stanleys finally opened their mine to huge excitement in the late 1750s, cartloads of brawny young colliers arrived from Lancashire, Staffordshire, and North Wales. Others trekked over from Ireland to build a quay for exporting the coal, and laborers came to build the Stanleys’ new mansion on the banks of the River Dee. Ness was designated as the village to house them, and quickly built, cheap cottages mushroomed on the stony fields. In this brand-new village, much of it still a building site, twenty-one-year-old Mary Kidd arrived in 1764. Since there were five men to every woman in Ness, she was guaranteed to be popular.

  Ness’s men were hardened by dangerous work. Conditions at the Denhall mine were notoriously poor, and they had to crouch in muddy, icy water and hack at the sides of the flooded tunnels. Mice and cockroaches scampered into their pockets to eat their food, especially if they worked near the areas where the pit ponies were stabled. Once extracted, the coal was loaded into boats roped together in sets of four or five on the underground canals. Miners lay on the boats and “walked” their feet along the ceilings of the tunnels to push the boats to the bottom of the shaft, where the coal was hoisted up. Men of twenty were bent and crabbed within a few years of beginning work, and others were dead, poisoned by pockets of methane gas or killed by rock falls.

  Emma’s mother had traveled from Hawarden, a small village just outside Chester across the Dee. She was in Ness for a holiday of sorts. William Kidd, Mary’s elder brother, had moved to Ness and was working as a miner. Banns were published for his marriage to Mary Foulkes, a Chester girl, in January 1763, and their first son, Samuel, was born in the spring of 1764 and christened on April 15. In the eighteenth century, every available female relative was roped in to help with a new baby, and so Mary traveled to Ness around the time of Samuel’s birth to be an unpaid nursemaid, cleaner, and cook to her brother and a sister-in-law she hardly knew. On the ferry across the Dee between Flint, near Hawarden, and Parkgate, and then the walk to her brother’s home, Mary was excited, buoyant with holiday spirit. Ness was the first place she had seen other than her deadend hometown, and she was determined to make the most of it. Having escaped her other siblings, dreary cottage, and angry, resentful mother, she was intent on enjoying herself

  Mary was slim, lively, and fond of fun, and men competed for her attention. She was the new belle of the village (although there was hardly much competition). Frantic to escape Hawarden and the iron grip of her mother, Mary flung herself at Henry Lyon, the blacksmith at the mine. Emma later implied that her father was from Lancashire; he was possibly from Skelmersdale or Ormskirk, where his surname is common in the parish registers. In order to have reached the position of a blacksmith, he would have to have been in his late twenties, and so was probably born around 1737. Judging from Emma’s stature and appearance, Henry was tall, broad, handsome, and dark. To impoverished Mary, he would have appeared impossibly wealthy and independent. Henry’s courtship was swift, perhaps rough. By May 27, perhaps less than two months after Mary’s arrival, the banns were published for their wedding.

  Emma’s parents were married on June 11, 1764, in Great Neston church. As the wedding was held on a Monday, it is unlikely that any relative, even William Kidd or his wife, attended. Like many workingmen, Henry was illiterate and signed the register with an X; Mary also signed with a cross. Henry probably had to return to the smithy soon after the ceremony. Even though working-class weddings were low-key affairs, Mary’s seems hurried. Most women were married in their late twenties— the average age was twenty-six—after their fiances had set aside sufficient money to set up a home. Mary, however, was unusually young. Pregnancy may have made marriage a necessity.

  First babies were often conceived outside o
f wedlock; indeed, many communities encouraged it to preclude the disaster of marriage to an infertile wife. As there is no birth certificate, we must assume that Emma claimed her birthday on the day her mother told her to do so. Henry and Mary were not religious, and there is no reason why Emma should have been any different from most of the first children born in Ness. Emma’s fondness for celebrating a birthday on April 26 and stressing 1765 as the year of her birth suggests she was concerned to emphasize her legitimacy. Only Mary and her brother William knew the actual date of Emma’s birth, but the possibility that Mary’s pregnancy had forced the marriage might explain the couple’s unhappiness. Mary came to Ness looking for a life more exciting than the one she had left behind, only to find herself trapped in poverty and despair in a part of England far harsher than Hawarden.

  Mary’s new home was a miner’s cottage near the road to Denhall, rented from the mine authorities. A low-built house, connected to two others, it was one of hundreds of similar workers’ cottages in the area. Sandstone steps skittered up to the low door. Now it is a pretty cottage and the subsidence gives it a picturesque appeal, but then it was a rackety, dirty, cramped place to live. At twenty-one, Mary was a drudge in a dirty hovel, her day consumed by domestic chores, in a village populated by people who were, in the 1850s, according to visitors, “as primitive as their village was secluded.“1 At four, she awoke to fetch water, light the fire, and prepare Henry’s breakfast. After he left at five, she began her daily battle against the dirt that silted up the windows and covered every surface with a grimy film. Outside her window lay a treeless expanse of scrub scarred by heaps of coal waste, and cheap stone cottages blackened by sooty rain. She knew that soon after she gave birth, she would be expected to work in the mine with the other women. There was little to look forward to and not much to enjoy. Henry returned in the late afternoon, exhausted by a day of laboring in hot and dangerous conditions, and like most men in Ness, he drank and probably beat his wife.

  Helped only by neighbors, women drank gin to dull the pain of birth or pulled on a knotted rag. Mary called the child Amy, her sister’s name and a Kidd family favorite. Perhaps Henry was not particularly interested in his daughter’s name. Many communities held a form of party for new mothers twenty-eight days after the birth, a version of the older “churching” ceremony, which was an attempt to combat postnatal depression and to celebrate the mother’s survival, but it appears that Mary had no such party. No relations came to assist her, and because there were so few women in the village, she had little companionship. Lonely and overwhelmed, the young Mrs. Lyon struggled not to vent her frustration on the child. She might have had a closer immediate bond to a son, but Amy was a burden and a seemingly inescapable tie to Ness. Mary’s life stretched out drearily before her, a monotony of children, domestic labor, and poverty.