Kate Williams Read online

  Emma was baptized on May 12. On the register, her name looks like “Emy,” but Emma herself always claimed it was Amy, a common name in the Kidd family. It is likely that the registrar simply misspelled it: parents were at the mercy of the registrar’s choice of orthography, particularly if, like Henry and Mary, they could not read. One in three children like Emma died within infancy, but she was born in the best season for survival: disease was more virulent from June to September, and babies died of cold from November to February. There was hard work ahead for the infants who lived. Denhall employed most children over nine or ten as cheap labor. All the girls born in Ness were, by the age often, pulling baskets to the surface every day, covered in dirt and regularly harassed by the men. At the end of the day, they returned home to cook and clean for their family or, as was nearly as likely, since many women died in childbirth, stepmother.

  The grim cycle of Emma’s life seemed preordained. But two months after her baptism, Henry died suddenly. By June 21, 1765, he was buried. Mary and Emma were free.

  Emma never discussed her father, and her mother did not disclose any details. Research into death in the eighteenth century gives us some clues about the cause of Henry’s demise and his daughter’s refusal to discuss him: Emma and her mother might have been covering a scandal.

  Men who worked in or near a mine had a short life expectancy, but their deaths from respiratory diseases were lengthy and agonizingly protracted. If Henry had been tubercular, he would no longer have been working. He would have been visibly sick, and Mary would have been unlikely to marry him. There are no records of any pit disasters or smallpox epidemics in the summer of 1765. No cause of death is recorded, and in the yard of Great Neston church, there is no marker for his grave. Mary did not receive a pension or payout from the mine, which was usually awarded if the employee died on site. She had no contact with her husband’s family following Henry’s death. Instead, she fled back to Hawarden. If she had expected a pension or if there had been help forthcoming from the local community, she would have stayed.

  Only Mary knew the whole truth about what happened on that hot night in June. It is very likely that alcohol was involved. Alcohol killed more men than tuberculosis or smallpox and caused most accidental deaths. The gin sold in Ness was much cheaper and stronger than what is sold today, and a few pennies bought immediate oblivion. Nowadays, the majority of deaths from alcohol or other substance abuse occur in the first half of the month, after people have received their pay. More than 250 years ago, Henry was probably following a familiar pattern: he received his wages and drank them away.

  It is possible that Henry killed himself in a fit of drunken despair. If he had simply knocked himself out on the way home from the pub or fought with another man, Mary would have had less reason to flee in shame. Nowadays, suicides peak in the months of May and early June, and it is unlikely the eighteenth century was different, although suicide was hardly ever recorded as the cause of death. Many more men committed suicide than women (and the women who did so were generally driven to it by extreme poverty or unwanted pregnancy). Ness was an alienating place, Henry’s job was exhausting, life with his wife was difficult, and the sleepless nights with a new baby perhaps tipped him over the edge. Suicide was common, but it was considered a disgrace and a sin, and unless the local rector was particularly sympathetic, Henry would have been denied a funeral and a grave in the churchyard, incentive enough for Mary and Emma never to mention him.

  Alternatively, Henry’s death may have been the consequence of an argument. Exhausted and irritable after a day with the baby, Mary may have begun a bitter argument when her husband strolled in, squandered wages reeking on his breath. After a struggle, Henry might have fallen so violently that he died. There was no local police force or constable, so the law in Ness depended on the justice of the peace, presumably Lord Stanley at Hooton Hall. As the local landowner, he would have been most interested in protecting his property. In the eighteenth century, justice was dominated by the propertied classes, and an offense as trivial as stealing a handkerchief was punishable by hanging. Men such as Stanley dismissed fights between poor workers as the feuds of the lower classes. Death from a drunken fall was common enough, and without the medical science that exists today, the exact cause of death would have been impossible to determine.

  Henry’s death was one of the greatest mysteries in Emma’s life. It seems most likely that he and Mary fought, but we will never know the truth about whether the cause of death was accident, suicide, ill health, or murder. Whatever the reason, the consequence was the same: Mary was a widow and Emma was fatherless. At the time, 80 percent of those accused of witchcraft were older women and widows. No longer controlled by their fathers and without husbands, they were objects of intense suspicion and hatred. A widow at twenty-two, Mrs. Lyon was not going to be popular.

  Mary was a determined girl, but within fifteen years she was working for free as Emma’s housekeeper. She remained submissive to her daughter’s every desire until she died. Her devotion was self-sacrificing by any standard, but particularly when most children made their own way through life; moreover, mother and daughter were very distant in Emma’s childhood and teenage years. Perhaps Mary’s willingness to cater to Emma’s every need and whim, like a servant rather than a mother, stemmed from guilt. In the eighteenth century, widows habitually bolstered their shaky respectability by wearing black dresses and veils, weeping over lockets of their spouse, and persistently recalling the days of their marriage in conversation, but nobody reports that Mary ever mentioned her husband. Emma never spoke of her father, and when she holidayed near Ness she did not visit the village. Once she was Lady Hamilton, Emma was praised for her reluctance to sponsor stories that she was the secret daughter of the gentry. But perhaps she knew it would be foolish to talk too much about her father, in case it reminded a few old miners about an unexplained death in June and a flighty wife who disappeared.

  In later years, Mary’s brother, William, repeatedly demanded money from Emma and her mother. He always received it, perhaps because he threatened to tell scandal-mongeringjournalists the truth about Henry’s death.

  Emma never returned to Ness, but its legacy remained. She inherited her mother’s impetuousness and her father’s forceful personality. The poor daughter of a young bride whose husband had died in shady circumstances, little Amy Lyon was in the same class as thousands of other children who grew up to supply England with its beggars, criminals, and prostitutes.

  CHAPTER 2

  Liquor and Honey

  Little Amy had to toughen up quickly. In her new home, money was sparse and the struggling Kidds resented Mary. Sarah Kidd took pity on her little granddaughter, seemingly so unlucky from birth, but few others did so. Emma always identified herself as a girl from the north of England, despite the fact that she had hardly lived there. Her twelve years in Hawarden was a period she tried hard to forget.

  Hawarden (pronounced Harden) is now a prosperous village seven miles west of Chester, with a church, a family pub, and a post office. In the 1760s, however, the area was among the country’s most impoverished. Hawarden served the estate and mine of Broad Lane Hall (now called Hawarden Castle), owned by Sir John Glynne, whose father had inherited Hawarden in 1721. About 3,500 villagers lived in stone cottages and mud hovels crammed around a dirt road about half a mile long. A church, a few shops, three or so public houses, and a makeshift jail or village lockup constituted their services. Sir John Glynne employed most villagers in his mine, dairy, fields, and farm or took on the lucky ones as house servants. The others scrabbled out a living as hired labor.

  Britain was gripped by an agricultural depression caused by the industrialization of farm practices (reducing the need for workers) and a series of poor harvests in the 1750s. As the country became more dependent on grain imports, prices soared. It was impossible—as many commentators showed in careful sums—for even a skilled laborer to feed and clothe himself, a wife, and two children, and most
men had at least four children. Families ran up debts they could never repay. The press whipped up hysteria about the spiraling cost of wheat, investors put their money into anything but land or farming, and the poor went hungry. Young men escaped to the mines or joined the army, leaving villages such as Hawarden inhabited by the unemployable, the sick, and women struggling to subsist. Households without a man in employment were the most destitute. Languishing at the bottom of the rural economy, Emma’s new family had no food or money to spare and little room in their ramshackle cottage for a disruptive newborn baby and her wild-eyed mother.

  Accounts of Emma’s background have been promoted that the surviving records reveal as quite wrong. Most far-fetched of all is the notion that Henry Lyon gave up his life as an aristocrat to marry Mary. No member of the gentry would have worked as a smith or signed his marriage certificate with an X, the mark of an illiterate. The Kidds have also been misrepresented: Emma’s mother was not seventeen when she gave birth but twenty-two. Her grandfather was not a drunken shepherd but a collier, and he was dead by the time Mary left for Ness. The family was poor because Sarah was widowed, not because her husband was feckless.

  The parish registers in the period give an impression of Hawarden as a close-knit society: the same surnames and even first names recur. But Emma’s grandparents, Thomas and Mary (later Sarah) Kidd, were outsiders. The first Kidds in the registers, they arrived in the nearby village of Shotton, part of Hawarden parish, at some point before 1743. The family came from another part of England—perhaps the area around Manchester, where the surname Kidd is common—and Thomas began work in one of the area’s many mines. They already had at least one child, William, and a girl who died in 1745. Twenty-eight-year-old Sarah gave birth to a succession of children in Shotton, and then Ewloe, where they moved in about 1746. Mary was born in late 1742 or early 1743 and christened in 1743.∗ She soon became a standin mother to Anne, Sarah, Amy, Thomas, and John, two, six, eight, eleven, and fourteen years her juniors, respectively Some of them learned the basics of reading and writing, perhaps at a church school in Shotton. William Kidd could sign his name, although Anne and Mary signed with X. Men (and sometimes women) who could sign their names were called upon to witness weddings, and Thomas junior did so in 1780.

  ∗ Mary was christened on May 19, 1743, Anne followed in 1745, and a girl, Amy, was christened in 1748, but she died soon after and was buried in the same year. Sarah was christened in 1749; Thomas was baptized in 1750 and died soon after. Amy was christened in 1751, Thomas in 1754, and John in 1757.

  All those who met the adult Emma remarked on her strong Lancashire accent. Although she had lived near Chester since she was a baby, she did not have a Chester accent. It was an age when the poor traveled so little that rural accents and dialects were so pronounced as to be almost incomprehensible to outsiders, but Emma’s speech was seemingly untouched by the place in which she grew up. Her anomalous speech suggests that her family was not native to the area but originally from northern England and that she had little contact with the villagers around her.

  By 1771, Hawarden had become more salubrious. A traveling journalist, Nathaniel Spencer, declared it:

  A very considerable village, situated on the road leading to Chester, near the river Dee, and has still the ruins of a strong castle, although it does not appear by whom it was built. The village has some good inns, with three annual fairs, viz on the eighth of May, the first of October, and the twenty-fourth of December, all for cattle. The air of this county is very cold, but it is also healthy. There are lots of sheep on the mountains and the black cattle are fed in the valleys. There are great crops of rye, oats and barley, and although they have not much wheat, yet it is esteemed exceedingly good…. They prepare a sort of liquor from honey, called Metheglin, which was used by the ancient Britons.1

  The Kidd family moved to Hawarden from Ewloe sometime in the 1750s, presumably because Thomas had work in John Glynne’s mine. No doubt they soon became very fond of metheglin. Their cottage, now demolished, stood on the main road, near the church and the Fox and Grapes pub. When her husband died in 1761, marked in the register as “collier,” forty-six-year-old Sarah had to find a way to support her family. William was sent to work in Ness, Mary followed to assist with his baby in 1764, and the rest had to find the money to live. By the time Mary returned, Thomas junior may have been working as a shepherd, guarding his neighbors’ sheep on Saltney Marshes. But even his peppercorn salary was under threat. Glynne, like every landowner, was keen to fence off common land for his own use. Thanks to his efforts, fewer villagers bought sheep every year.

  The family depended on the little money Sarah Kidd earned from toiling as the village carter. Three or four times a week, she drove a cart to Chester carrying coal, agricultural produce, and sometimes people. She probably stabled her horses at the Fox and Grapes. Chester had two markets a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and fairs in February, July, and October; Chester was a wealthy city, with a population of about twenty thousand, complete with a handsome Theater Royal and elegant assembly rooms for balls and parties. Any traveler wishing to enjoy such graceful bourgeois charms had to battle terrible roads. Robbers and highwaymen so menaced the routes into Chester that the frequency of attacks was a subject of national concern. The roads were also treacherously pitted, and Sir John Glynne devoted himself at Parliament to agitating for their improvement. Armed with a whip and perhaps a gun, Sarah regularly dragged elderly horses over the mud in the pouring rain and returned to argue with the customers who refused to pay for their orders. In her mid-forties, she must have cherished hopes of working less. The sudden arrival of Mary and Amy quashed such plans.

  The Kidds hardly had the money for candles, boots, or clothes. Sarah was disappointed in Mary for burdening them with yet another hungry mouth. Even if Henry Lyon had died of natural causes, there would have been gossip about the demise of a man so soon after marriage. News traveled fast across the Dee, and if the Hawarden villagers had picked up rumors that his death had been suspicious, they would have ostracized Emma and her mother. Emma claimed that her grandmother brought her up, but Sarah had a full-time job and a large family. It is more likely Emma was farmed out to neighbors and a cheap wet nurse, then later bundled in the back of Sarah’s cart and quieted with sugared milk and a little gin. The aristocrats she later charmed were raised by armies of nannies, governesses, and tutors, but Emma had no one to stimulate her senses, structure her play, or teach her reading or sewing, and there was no institution to educate her. Fatherless children were usually the targets of bullies, and Emma probably struggled to make friends. She grew up hungry to be the center of attention.

  Parents often control their children by telling them to behave or not behave like someone they know. “You’ll turn out like your mother” rang in Emma’s ears throughout her childhood. A daughter in Mary’s position had to be a patient servant and accept insult, for many families would not allow a widow to return. Emma would have seen the Kidds and their neighbors humiliate and disparage her mother, and it would have been difficult for her not to align herself with them against Mary.

  William Kidd left Ness for Hawarden not long after his troubled sister and niece. Never one to take responsibility for his actions, he probably claimed that gossip about Mary had driven him away. Initially, he and his one-year-old son, Samuel, crammed into the cottage, along with Mary and her baby and the other Kidd children, Anne, Sarah, Amy, Thomas, and John. William’s first wife had died—possibly giving birth to another baby—and he married a Mary Pova in Hawarden in 1769, giving his profession as laborer. He had a daughter in the same year, and then Mary in 1771 and Thomas in 1773. Anne married one Richard Reynold in 1774. Until William and then Anne moved out, the house was full to bursting. It is possible that Sarah had to look after William’s children after he married. Perhaps remembering the strain, the adult Emma kept in touch with some of her aunts’ families but tried to avoid most of her other relations, particularly feckless
William.

  Full names were only infrequently used, as children were often called nicknames or a combination of their own and their father’s names, as in Sarah o’ John. Amy o’ Lyon could soon become Emily, the name that she seems to have used as a young adult. From the very first, she was made aware that she was a Lyon in a family of Kidds.

  CHAPTER 3

  Growing Up Poor

  Emma later claimed that she had lived in “very rough lodgings” in her youth. She was right: her home in Hawarden was a country slum, just like the hundreds of thousands that dotted Britain’s struggling rural districts. Constructed from bricks made of mud mixed with straw, her new house was covered in damp thatch. Like the other cottages, it would have comprised two rooms, one that served as a living room and kitchen and another for sleeping. Windows were stuffed with rags or closed with cheap shutters. Sarah Kidd had no time to beautify the house, and they relied on the few bits of furniture her husband had made them years before: a few wooden chairs, a table, and a couple of trunks. In the sleeping room, Emma and her mother shared a bed, or possibly a straw pallet on the floor. Mary found herself back where she had slept as a child and teenager, listening to the spluttering coughs and sniffs of her siblings.