Kate Williams Read online

  Mary, only in her late thirties, was hardly older than Greville, but he relegated her to the position of unpaid housekeeper. Perhaps she felt guilty for abandoning Emma in her childhood, or maybe she simply saw that Emma was successful and wanted to hitch herself to her daughter’s star. Although he was almost twice Emma’s age and lacked Harry’s looks, charisma, and wealth, Greville was still the second son of the Earl of Warwick. Emma had secured the protection of a scion of one of the country’s most influential aristocratic families.

  Charles Greville was born in May 1749 (on the same date Emma was christened sixteen years later). His father, Lord Brooke, was made Earl of Warwick in 1759 when Greville was ten. His mother, Elizabeth Hamilton, was the daughter of Lord Archibald and Lady Jane Hamilton, and the elder sister of Sir William Hamilton. After a stormy marriage, his parents divorced. Shy and awkward, Greville delighted in his collection of rare minerals and jewels and, like most men of his class, lived beyond his means, spending his money on expensive girls of the town. When he visited Naples, his interest in the local courtesans astonished his host, his uncle Sir William Hamilton, who was himself a renowned hedonist. Greville had secured a cheap deal in Emma: the toast of the Temple of Health, Kelly’s, and Uppark, his own beautiful courtesan, without having to foot a payoff to Madam Kelly.

  Greville needed to hunt down bargains. In 1773, his father died and left him merely £100. His elder brother gave him nothing, the allowance from his father of £200 a year ceased, and he had to subsist on only £500 a year, an inheritance from his mother. He took the seat for Warwick in the House of Commons and assumed his brother’s position at the Board of Trade. Not a natural politician, he failed to join a faction in the Commons or network other positions or kickbacks at the Board, and consequently his income remained insufficient. Sir William Hamilton advised him to seek a rich wife, and Greville attempted to present himself as a man of substance to the papas of rich young women by building an expensive house in the new and fashionable Portman Square (a strategy so common that Tobias Smollett satirized it in his novel, Peregrine Pickle). Greville required a wife who could bring in around £20,000 per annum. But hundreds of younger and richer gentlemen were similarly ambitious. His passion for keeping mistresses did not enamor him to the fathers of genteel girls, many of whom had raised their daughters to expect love and companionship rather than the typically distant aristocratic marriage, in which a man gained children and social respectability from his wife but took a mistress for sexual gratification and affection.

  By the time Greville met Emma, he had burned fingers. An impoverished second son for over ten years, he had failed to find a wife or a lucrative position at court and had wasted his money on women of the town. In 1780, he had gained a job with the Admiralty, which brought a rent-free house in King’s Mews (now covered by Trafalgar Square), where he lived. The house at Portman Square still unsold, he rented a small house for Emma on a discreet side road off Edgware Row, the main street running through Paddington Green. Since he had Mrs. Cadogan to carry out the domestic drudgery, he only needed to appoint a few extra maids. Trapped in the country, Emma would not require clothes or a hairdresser, and he would ensure she spent the minimum on food, wine, travel, and candles—beeswax was one of the greatest household expenses at the time.

  Greville wished to keep Emma all to himself. As he threatened, “I will never give up my peace, nor continue my connexion one moment after my confidence is again betray’d.“3 But he desired more than her fidelity. As his letters to her and Sir William show, he tried to school the self-confessed “gay wild Emily” to be a completely new woman: submissive and penitent for her earlier hectic life. Every aspect of her existence was to be different: her occupation, dress, food, friends, hobbies, and even speech. A spendthrift with a wandering eye, he wanted Emma to behave like a mouse.

  In styling his mistress as his pupil, Greville was at the forefront of fashion. After the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’sjw/ie, which pivoted on the sexualized relationship between the heroine and her teacher, novelists, playwrights, and artists were keen to show how a relationship in which a man taught a woman to behave correctly could be gratifying for both parties. Jane Austen joined the craze in Nonhanger Abbey, probably written in the 1780s, in which giddy Catherine Morland falls in love with Henry Tilney as he schools her in proper judgment. One man even took two poor washer maids and devoted himself to training them to be modest, intending to marry the one he preferred—he was somewhat piqued when both rebelled and ran away. In France at about the same time as Mrs. Hart was practicing her deportment in Edgware Row, the husband of the sixteen-year-old future Josephine Bonaparte was haranguing her to improve her writing, education, carriage, and behavior. Emma, always desperate to please, tried very much harder than Josephine. More was asked of her than simply writing good letters. Greville had a role in mind for her.

  The Magdalen hospital for penitent prostitutes was established in 1758. Girls who showed a desire to reform were taught to eschew vanity and love of finery and to embrace meek behavior. Dressed in uniforms of thick brown cloth (men thought that women turned to vice because they loved fine clothes), the inmates or “Magdalens” ate plain fare (it was also thought that a simple diet cured venereal disease) and passed the day sewing. They soon became national obsessions featured in magazines, plays, and novels. So many wanted to sit in the public gallery overlooking the ranks of girls at chapel on Sunday mornings that the authorities had to issue tickets. Greville was titillated by the idea of his own Magdalen, and he fell hook, line, and sinker for the myth: regulation, sober dress and diet, industry, and housework could make a flighty girl virtuous and submissive.

  At Edgware Row, Emma had to live in “a line of prudence and plainness,” as Greville reported to friends. Later, he declared he had reformed her “pride and vanity” and taught her to be “totally clear from all the society & habits of kept women,” so she did “not wish for much society” and “has avoided every appearance of giddiness, and prides herself on the neatness of her person & of the good order of her house.” Greville visited daily and often stayed there, supervising every aspect of his mistress’s life. Emma dressed in new modest outfits in subdued colors, wearing less makeup and styling her hair plainly. George Romney’s son claimed that she dressed always in her penitential maid’s outfit while with Greville, and when Henry Angelo happened to see her, he declared she was dressed so drearily that she might as well have been a nun. Instead of her Uppark feasts of game and sugary puddings, she ate small portions of meat, bread, and vegetables. Her diet was very similar to those Graham had recommended, and his praise of apples as the ideal slimming food may have remained in Emma’s mind, for the receipts show she bought plenty of apples, even in January. Greville also trained her to enunciate more elegantly. She worried when she saw her child again that little Emma “speaks countryfied,” but she promised her lover “she will forget it.”4

  Emma spent her days playing at being a modest young lady in settled, pedestrian domesticity. Greville left her at home while he attended dinners and receptions, and he forbade her to go to the pleasure gardens or even to a local concert. Obsessed with order and cleanliness, he hectored her to improve her messy ways. Soon he was able to declare “there is not in the parish a house as tidy as ours.” Otherwise, he encouraged her to occupy herself with improving reading and with practicing singing and the guitar. He wanted to ensure his Magdalen could amuse him in the evening. Women were educated to sing and play because there was no other way of enjoying music at home unless someone in the family— usually the wife—could perform.

  The new Magdalen made little headway with Greville’s recommended books, so addicted was she to women’s magazines, such as the popular Lady’s Magazine, a mix of puzzles, stories, songs, embroidery patterns, and a little news. She did, however, enjoy The Triumph of Temper, William Hay-ley’s long narrative poem that instructed women to be meek and good by showing the heroine, Serena, retaining a sweet temper and a �
�wish to please” throughout various obstacles. When Emma was separated from Greville, she wrote that parting with him made her so unhappy that she failed to keep up the stoic temper of Serena; as she put it, “I forget the Book.“5 In July 1782, the “Man Milliner” gossip column of the European Magazine, a magazine to which Greville subscribed and sometimes contributed, offered a tantalizing tidbit of information about Emma while joking about the hobbies of fashionable ladies. Most of them cared only for “Admiration,” but Greville’s mistress (“Mrs. Greville”) was apparently solely interested in “Poetry.“6

  In the evenings, she entertained Greville with little anecdotes about her docile days. They may have sung together or were perhaps joined by a maid, for it seems that Mrs. Cadogan had no gift for music. Pleased by her progress, Greville began to invite some of his friends over to meet her. He knew not to make the same mistake as Sir Harry by leaving his lover alone, bored and desperate for male attention. Emma’s new admirers included William Hayley and the playwright Richard Cumberland, as well as the painter Gavin Hamilton (no relation to Greville), and various minor aristocrats. More cultured than the loutish Uppark set, they flirted with her in a friendly, respectable way. Emma flourished under their attention, delighted that her new admirers seemed to be as interested in her opinions as her beauty.

  Emma threw herself into the role of the penitent prostitute. Courtesans were fascinated by the Magdalen House, and many pretended to have been inmates in order to enhance their earning power. The “Magdalen” look was in fashion. The European Magazine noted that the essential hat for the stylish lady at the Ranelagh pleasure gardens was “the Religieuse or Nun’s cap.” A light hat of “Italian gauze, crimped to a point, before coming down at the sides” was hugely popular.7 Emma perhaps was wearing such a cap when she attended Ranelagh with Greville on one of the few occasions she went out in the evening. Excited by the illuminations and the music, she burst into song. Apparently the crowd loved it, but a furious Greville hauled her back to Paddington Green in disgrace. At home, she hurried to change into a plainer dress and knelt, begging him to retain her as his penitent or abandon her out into the street. Mollified, Greville agreed to retain her and continue his course of instruction.

  Emma did not seem to resent her lover inspecting her expenses, checking her dress, and searching for evidence of vanity and giddiness. Like any good pupil, she found gratification in excelling at her examinations. She showed him stringent accounts for even the most inconsequential expenses: apples, coal, eggs, stockings, cotton, and needles. In this, she was sharper than Greville, who knew little about the cost of provisions. The prices charged for the commodities are high, particularly for a small household consisting of Emma, her mother, a cook, and only one or two maids. Like clerks in countinghouses across the City, she inflated the prices slightly and siphoned off a little for herself

  After the debacle at Ranelagh, she found her way around the rules but was careful never to break them. Greville was supporting Emma, her daughter, and her mother, and he had rented her a sweet little house and was kind to her as long as she obeyed him. Few canny girls would demur to dress up as a nun and feign the mien of a fashionably penitent prostitute in exchange for such security. But most of all she followed Greville’s rules because she had fallen in love with him after a few months as his mistress. More engaging and good-natured than he seems in his pompous letters, Greville’s standoffish exterior hid a warm sense of humor. He was a reflective man, with a shyness and vulnerability that melted Emma’s heart. Believing her lover’s boasts that he was Sir William Hamilton’s heir and so would soon be rich, she hoped she might be established as his permanent mistress.

  Although Greville was uninterested in the Warwick landowners that he represented, he was involved in London politics, particularly, like all Whigs, in the fight between Charles James Fox and Sir Charles Wray for the seat of Westminster in the elections of 1784. Fox had been a minister, but a row over a bill that concerned the East India Company so incensed the king that he dissolved Parliament and appointed the twenty-four-year-old William Pitt as prime minister. In the elections that followed, voting for Fox was, to a certain extent, a vote against the king. Fox’s many female supporters wore a special uniform, blue dress and yellow petticoat (after the colors of George Washington’s armies in the American war of independence), blue hat with yellow lining, and “elegant balloon earrings of three drops, blue and gold, together with elegant gauze sleeves and tippets, with wreaths of laurel, having gilt letters on the leaves inscribed ‘Fox, Liberty, Freedom, and Constitution.’ “8 As her letters reveal, Emma certainly owned many blue dresses and hats while living at Edgware Row, and perhaps Greville encouraged her to dress as a supporter of Fox—in vain, as it happened, for Wray won the seat.9

  Greville was pleased with his experiment. His little Magdalen was turning out excellently. As he wrote, she “avoided every appearance of giddiness, and prides herself on the neatness of her person and the good order of her house… She has vanity and likes admiration but she connects it so much with her desire of appearing prudent that she is more pleas’d with accidental admiration than that of crowds which now distress her.” Apparently she would rather have Greville’s measured praise for buying meat at a bargain price than a crowd of men admiring one of her sensuous dances. As she put it in a letter to him later, “You have made me good.”

  Emma preserved her newfound security by appearing to be happily acquiescent to her lover’s will. She channeled her energy into singing, dancing, and sticking to her strict low-sugar diet. The raw, blowsy girl was slowly transformed into an elegant performer and decorous hostess. Greville’s attitude toward Emma was complex: he wanted the real girl docile, retiring, and utterly under his control, but he was ambitious that images of her should be admired. Most of all, he wanted to make money off her. A number of aristocrats had attempted to turn a poor girl to profit through training her to go on the stage, but although Emma was the spitting image of Sarah Siddons, the great tragedienne who was driving Drury Lane wild, Greville had other plans. She would model for paintings, and he would receive a cut of the sale. Emma seized the opportunity to exploit her dramatic talent. As prime muse and model for George Romney she would become London’s biggest female celebrity.

  CHAPTER 15

  London’s Muse

  On a bleak, rainy Friday morning in March 1782, wrapped up so no one could recognize her, Emma clambered into a discreet carriage and set off for Mayfair. Still sore from giving birth, she wanted desperately to stay at home. Already the evenings of fussing around Greville, pretending she had not given birth while coddling his every need, were proving tiring. But she did not have time to rest. She was on her way to sit for George Romney, painter to the stars. Although only seventeen, she wanted to be famous—and she knew this was her chance.

  At his magnificent studio house in Mayfair, 32 Cavendish Square, fifty-year-old George Romney readied his paints for Mrs. Hart’s arrival and tried to calm his nerves. He set out various possible backgrounds and drapes and stoked the fire. For years he had been looking for his muse, for the woman who could embody modern beauty in a classical form. He had met Emma before, but she had been young, raw, and flippant. Charles Greville, his friend and intermittent patron for over ten years, had promised him that she now was hardworking and reliable. Romney hoped so, but he was more concerned that she was still beautiful. Despite his success, he still felt excluded from the artistic establishment, and he needed a model whose looks could transform his art. His career depended on it.

  When Emma arrived, she followed Romney’s servant through galleries crammed with paintings and then the sitters’ waiting room, the books of engravings of possible poses still open on the couch. In back rooms, disgruntled apprentices filled in backgrounds and cleaned paint pots. At the far end of the apartment was Romney’s large painting room, lit through the long windows by the pale morning sun. As his servant opened the door, she felt a surge of heat. Artists usually kept their studios
warm to dry the paintings and to keep their models warm, but Romney’s was stifling, for he was convinced that heat relieved his pain from varicose veins. He kept the windows shut and the fires blazing all day. Some of his sitters complained, but he ignored them all, knowing the heat encouraged women to remove more of their clothes. The fire was burning high for Emma’s visit.

  The painting room was chaotic, strewn with large mirrors and candles, unsold portraits, canvases whitewashed and ready for use, and piles of brushes and paints. Painted backgrounds of the countryside and sea views were propped along the walls, along with books and sticks for gentlemen to hold while posing, and harps, books, and pieces of needlework for their wives. Romney gently distracted Emma’s attention from the pretty instruments and books—they were for the squire’s wife who wanted to parade her virtue. He wanted his new visitor to pose as something far more daring.

  Wearing her best crimson dress with white gauze around the neckline, Emma sat on a chair raised from the floor, a couple of feet above Romney. As in the Royal Academy, she would use a rope hanging from the ceiling if standing, but all she could do on that Friday morning at eleven o’clock was sit and smile. He could not paint her figure, but Greville had promised him that she would soon be slim once more, thanks to her strict diet at Edgware Row. In his painting studio, shy Romney was transformed into an actor on a stage, flamboyant and overexcited. He painted best when he felt he was performing, and alternated between frenetic energy and languor, rushing up close to gaze at Emma’s face and then dashing backward to take in the general effect. He sketched her a little, encouraged her to smile, and tried to have her talk, but the icebreaker was his spoiled studio dog. When she spotted the little spaniel, like so many of his lady sitters, she cuddled it to her and soon broke out into a real, unforced smile.