Kate Williams Read online

  At Versailles, Marie-Antoinette built the Petit Trianon, a little palace surrounded by a Jardin Anglais. Not to be outdone, her sister Maria Carolina planned an even larger English Garden on fifty acres near the royal playhouse, and she asked Sir William to organize it for her.2 Joseph Banks recommended a British garden designer John Andrew Graefer to oversee the project, and he arrived with his family just after Emma. Maria Carolina had never visited England, but she desired the ultra-fashionable landscaped garden of paths, flower beds, hedges, and shrubs, and spent thousands of pounds on erecting an elaborate waterfall and a small valley, as well as nearly a million exotic plants that had to be imported and then watered in shifts by hundreds of servants. Now the most popular attraction in Caserta, the English Garden is a shady alternative to the exposed main grounds. At the time, its construction was a headache for Sir William, for the queen could not understand why it all seemed to be taking so long.

  Nowadays, Italian families enjoy ice cream near the fountain and travel around the gardens on a special bus. Then, ordinary Neapolitans could not enter, and no foreigner could attend court functions before he or she had been presented to his or her own sovereign. Emma waited at Sir William’s lodge until he returned from his hunting parties, covered in blood. As Sir William reported to the Foreign Office, the king’s “Hunting and Shooting Parties are carried on with all the usual Ardour and Success.“3 The royal army, gangs of peasants, and around four hundred dogs flushed out the animals, and Ferdinand and his chums killed on average forty or fifty of the “largest and fiercest boars” every day, as well as deer, hares, birds, foxes, wolves, and bears. Twelve dogs died or were wounded every day4

  Caserta was then a straggling poor town, and Sir William’s lodge was freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, and plagued by mosquitoes. Emma, knowing that Sir William had been disappointed in Catherine Hamilton’s aversion to the house, was determined not to complain. Instead, she set about “fitting it up eleganter” with a music room. Sir William paid for the costly alterations and encouraged her to invite her singing master to stay.

  Sir William also summoned friends to keep her company while he was at court in the evenings. John Graefer, struggling with his poor Italian and Maria Carolina’s confusing demands, visited to play whist or cribbage, along with the German painter, Philip Hackert, then the court artist. Playing the role of respectable hostess, Emma sang to her new friends almost every night and probed them for gossip about the queen. Catherine had described herself as a “bad courtier,” and her doctor decided her lack of interests made her “a prey to ennui.“5 Emma aimed to prove herself very different.

  Anxious that the Palazzo Sessa regain the reputation for musical excellence it had enjoyed when Catherine Hamilton was alive, Sir William encouraged Emma to sing and play on the harpsichord and guitar. She took classes with the queen’s dancing master three times a week. The expensive Signor Gallucci coached her at eight, one, and before supper with scales, exercises, and music he had written. Sir William soon engaged him as her exclusive tutor and Gallucci brought his musicians to play the guitar and harpsichord and singers to blend with her soprano. Her many songbooks, painstakingly designed and colored by Gallucci’s assistants, filled the shelves at the palazzo. When she went to dinner with English visitors and Neapolitan grandees, she was nearly always asked to sing. By August, Emma received “great offers to be first whoman in the Italian opera at Madrid where I was to have six thousand pounds for three years” and heard that she might be offered £2,000 to sing at the London opera house and at the Hanover Square concert rooms.

  Sir William delighted in his makeover of his mistress. As he sighed, “Who can scarcely believe she has only learnt 5 months.”

  I find my house comfortable in the evening with Emma’s society. You can have no idea of the improvement she makes daily in every respect— manners, language, & musick particularly. She has now applied closely to singing 5 months, & I have her master (an excellent one) in the house, so that she takes 3 lessons a day; her voice is remarkably fine, & she begins now to have a command over it. She has much expression… there is no saying what she may be in a year or two; I believe [her] myself of the first rate, & so do the best judges here.

  Their relationship had become even closer. Emma was now living in his apartments, leaving Mrs. Cadogan downstairs in the first-floor rooms. She could not attend court, but Sir William took her to every other meeting, party, assembly, and outing. Neapolitans and English tourists alike were willing to socialize with her—a testament to Sir William’s popularity and her efforts to make herself cultured and elegant. “He goes no whare without me, he [h]as no diners, but what I can be of the party, no body comes with out the[y] are civil to me; we have allways good company,” she wrote to Greville. Moreover, she pointedly added, Sir William “is in raptures with me; he spares neither expence nor pain in any thing.”

  Sir William and Emma spent every spare moment together. Emma had never been a tourist in her life, and Sir William felt as if he was rediscovering his home city. Emma applied herself to learning from her new and scholarly lover; he, in his turn, was melted by her maternal fussing over him, and her playful sense of fun lightened his previous seriousness. She had never been happier: she had a lover who adored her and a secure, stable home for her and her mother. Her only struggle was hiding her sadness when she thought of her daughter, little Emma, growing up without her in Manchester.

  Emma kept the local painters in work. “The house is full of painters painting me…. All the artists is come from Rome to study from me that Sir Wm. as fitted up the room that is calld the painting room,” she boasted to Greville. By mid-1787, Sir William had nine new paintings of Emma by various painters and two more under way, as well as a wax model, a clay sculpture, and various cameos. He invited dozens of guests to watch her model. Wilhelm Tischbein was so captivated by Emma’s beauty that her likeness recurred in his paintings for the rest of his life. Other nobles commissioned portraits of her, and soon a painting of Mrs. Hart on the wall was a marker that its owner was absolutely up with the fashion. Emma claimed to Greville that one painting of her was even to be sent to the Empress of Russia. She was so sought after that when the great French portraitist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun quickly sketched Emma’s head, Sir William immediately sold it. He also made a tidy sum from another head that Vigée-Lebrun sketched on a door, after he had his servants saw it off its hinges.

  Sir William had persuaded Vigée-Lebrun to meet Emma by extolling her ability to assume different poses. Marie-Antoinette’s portraitist was as eager as Romney had been for a model willing to portray moods. She wrote, “I painted Mme Hart as a bacchante, reclining by the side of the sea holding a cup in her hand. She had a beautiful, very lively face and voluminous tresses of fine chestnut, which could cover her body completely, so she looked wonderful.” The most exotic portrait of Emma ever produced, her Bacchante of Emma reclining on a leopard-skin rug, was one of Sir William’s favorites, and he hung it in a central place in his magnificent reception rooms.

  Vigée-Lebrun invited duchesses and princesses to watch Emma sit while he painted her as a sibyl, swathing her head in a turban.6 The Sibyl made painter and subject famous. Vigée-Lebrun sold Sir William one copy, auctioned others off to local grandees, and then took the painting on show around Europe, displaying it in Italy, Vienna, Russia, and Germany, keen to prove she could produce historical paintings as well as portraiture. Women demanded to be portrayed similarly to Emma in the Sibyl, and aristocrats in every city begged for copies. Emma, as the sibyl, confirmed the turban as one of the most modish trends, soon satirized by Jane Austen as a fashion for self-obsessed young women.

  In an effort to improve her minimal education, she browsed Sir William’s extensive library in English and, making rapid progress with her tutor, soon began to try to read in Italian. She tried hard to retain a light, engaging manner with the daunting nobles who visited the palazzo. “Her behaviour,” Sir William wrote, “is such as has acquired he
r many sensible admirers”; he declared that she had won over the city’s male aristocrats, and even “the female nobility, with the Queen at their head, shew her every distant civility.” Eager to see her dress in the opulent style befitting Neapolitan high society, he bought her satin and silk, lace from Paris, and feathers. He also gave her £200 a year for clothes, although she sent some of it secretly to her uncle, William Kidd, who was already demanding money. She found an excellent hairdresser, requested her hats and dresses from Greville, and prepared her outfits days in advance. To attend a royal gala at the opera house, she “had the finest dress made upon purpose as I had a box near the K & Queen. My gown was purple sattin, wite sattin petticoat trimmd with crape & spangles, my cap lovely from Paris, all wite fethers.”

  When Emma visited the ostentatious San Carlo Opera adjacent to the palace in Naples, she saw the stardom she desired. The house was a brilliant spectacle, dazzling with glasses, mirrors, and thousands of candles. At the back of the theater, the king and queen were splendidly arrayed in their royal box (now reserved for the Italian prime minister). Every box contained a mirror, so the audience could follow the king’s signs of appreciation. The opera was a social occasion for the benefit of a small group of nobles, and they behaved in the same way as we do when watching TV with friends—they chattered, ate, and drank constantly, stopping only at particularly dramatic moments.7 The same opera would play for weeks in the expectation that the audience would talk through it but attend most nights. Performances could last up to five hours, and although the audience gossiped, they were still acutely sensitive to the slightest change in repertoire or a mistake. Singers able to produce impeccable solos were highly feted.

  Emma thought Greville had forgotten her. He had not. As he confessed to Romney, the “separation from the original of the Spinstress has not been indifferent to me, and I am but reconciled with it, from knowing that the beneficial consequences of acquirements will be obtained, and that the aberration from the plan I intended will be for her benefit.” Greville built a larger house near Emma’s old home in Paddington Green and lived there for the rest of his life. He hung her portraits on his wall and kept every one of her letters.

  In summer the Naples aristocracy and the most fortunate English travelers fled the desiccating heat to Posillipo, to the west of the city. Sir William kept a summer villa on a rock jutting onto the Mediterranean, near the modern-day Palazzo Donna Anna, now a grand apartment block. Emma’s summer home was surrounded with poplars and vines; trees bowed with figs, peaches, and nuts; and crimson cyclamen and honeysuckle.8 She spent hours gazing at the marvelous view of Vesuvius over the islands of the bay. “You have no idea of the beautes of it,” she wrote to Greville. “From this little Paridise, after breakfast we vewd the lava running down 3 miles of Vesuvua and every now and then black clouds of smoak rising in to the air, had the most magnificent appearance in the world.” She so loved the house that Sir William soon called it the Villa Emma for her.

  At Posillipo, Emma had a lesson in singing or Italian, then rode on horseback about the country, and dined at three. In the afternoon she sailed and swam, using the bathing machine Sir William brought from England to protect her complexion, and she usually sang in the evening. They traveled to visit a duchess friend of Sir William on the island of Is-chia, packing the sailboats for the short trip with Sir William’s entire band of musicians, her harpsichord, her music master, four servants, and her lady’s maid, as well as trunks of luggage. When Sir William paid calls, he always took his musicians with him, so intent was he that Emma’s singing should be heard.

  Emma’s greatest adventure was a ride up Vesuvius one evening, reaching the top by dark. She was bubbling with excitement beforehand, writing, “I fancy we shall have some very large eruption,” noting how already “the lava runs down allmost to Porticea; the mountain looks beautiful. One part their is nothing but cascades of liquid fire, lava I mean, red hot, runs in to a deep cavern that is beautiful.” The usual procedure was to ride as far as possible and then walk, with a sturdy Neapolitan guide fastening a rope to a girdle around the visitor and then pulling him or her along (it took five men to haul the fattest travelers to the summit, two in front and three pushing from behind).

  Unlike most other English travelers, Emma neither complained about the climb nor expressed fear. The final ascent was, as a guidebook advised, “very fatiguing to ascend it; for you sink up to the knees, and go two steps backward for every three,” for the ground was covered with loose ash and cinders.9 Boswell was more succinct: “on foot to Vesuvius. Monstrous mounting. Smoke; saw hardly anything.“10 Only the bravest were able to admire the view from the top—one lady was too shocked by the “dreadful chasms, through which appear gulphs of liquid fire billowing sulphurous smoke, throwing up stones as large as clothes-presses.“11

  Sir William had compiled his studies of the volcano into a book that every English traveler consulted, so Emma was in excellent hands. After her climb, she wrote, “In my life I never saw so fine a sight. The lava runs a bout five mile down from the top… when we got up to the Hermitage there was the finest fountain of liquid fire falling down a liquid precipice & as it run down it sett fire to the trees and brush wood so that the mountain looked like one entire mountain of fire. We saw the lava surround the poor Hermits house & take possession of the chapel, not withstanding it was coverd with pictures of saints & other religios preservitaves against the fury of nature.” Although less hackneyed than many other accounts, her description is exaggerated—the hut survived and the hermit continued to cook his famous omelettes for travelers, usually over the stream of lava.

  Emma was enjoying herself, but she was also making plans. Resentful that guests left her behind when they went to meet the king and queen, she had ambitions to become a rival attraction to the court.

  CHAPTER 22

  Brandishing Daggers

  On a warm night in July 1787, Sir William Hamilton assembled his most distinguished guests in his fine rooms looking out to the bay. After a lengthy dinner, he plied them with the finest wines from his cellars and made them a surprising promise. If they joined him upstairs in the reception rooms, there would be unlimited port—and something he vowed they had never seen before. When they were all assembled, he called them to hush and servants snuffed a few of the candles. In the gloom, they could just catch sight of a female figure draped in white, her dark hair flowing around her shoulders. As she came closer, they recognized Mrs. Hart, Sir William’s pretty, witty mistress, who had been laughing at their jokes, flushed with gaiety, entertaining them with anecdotes about England. But now she was pale and almost ethereally composed. Taking up the shawls that lay at her feet, she began to swathe them around her, to kneel, sit, crouch, and dance. They quickly realized that she was imitating the postures of figures from classical myth. First she pulled the shawls over her like a veil and became Niobe, weeping for the loss of her children; then, using them to make a cape, she was Medea, poised with a dagger, about to stab. Then she pulled the shawls around her into seductive drapes, becoming Cleopatra, reclining for her Mark Antony.

  Almost as soon as they had begun to predict her next pose, she disappeared. They sat openmouthed, as the servants relit the candles and offered more wine. Some of them shook themselves out of their dazzled state to nudge Sir William. Where had she learned it? they pressed him. Could she do it again? Behind the scenes, readying herself to come out and bask in their praise, Emma smiled as she heard her lover say that if they wanted to see her again, they would have to come on another evening—if he could find the space. There was already something of a waiting list to see Mrs. Hart’s Attitudes.

  Emma began developing her Attitudes soon after she settled at the palazzo. Early on, she asked Greville to send out for more shawls, as “I stand in attitudes with them on me.” Romney’s sketches had given her an awareness of Greek and Roman dress, and she had struck classical poses for Greville when she was not playing the repentant Magdalen. He boasted to his
uncle that “Lacertian or Sapphic, or Escarole or Regulus; anything grand, masculine or feminine, she could take up.” Sir William’s collection of statues, the paintings of nymphs on the wall of the Villa dei Papyri at Pompeii, and the antiquities for sale in Naples gave her the opportunity to study classical forms at first hand. She would also have noticed the modern Italian tradition of pantomime, often performed on street corners, in which the performer acted out moods with the use of masks. At the same time she took regular lessons in dance, learning ballet steps, including sweeping turns and bends. She naturally progressed to borrowing postures from the pictures and statues of nymphs and goddesses she had seen.

  She combined her dance training and her modeling at the Temple of Health and for Romney with influences she collected in Naples to create her Attitudes, an extraordinary fusion of eighteenth-century dance with classical costumes and references, and a truly innovative art form.

  Ballet dancers often practiced in plain shifts and shawls, and Emma would have worn a similarly loose dress that tied around the waist with shawls draped around her shoulders. When designing her outfit for the performances, she remembered the pattern of her tunic at the Temple of Health and the draped costumes she wore while modeling for Romney, as well as the local peasant costume, a Grecian-style dress, worn particularly on the islands in the Bay of Naples. Emma employed her dressmaker to produce dance dresses that were fuller at the waist and arms, giving a more gathered effect.

  For her first performances to friends, Emma held poses in a black box rimmed with gold. She soon made use of the whole room. By the spring of 1787, she felt ready to show Goethe, who was traveling through Europe to enjoy some of the celebrity of his smash hit Sorrows of Young Werther and to relax after a punishing schedule of work. The great man watched the Attitudes two nights in a row and was quite delighted, praising the Greek costume, her “beautiful face and perfect figure,” and dubbing them.