Kate Williams Read online

  Emma goes on perfectly to my mind, but she has made our house so agreeable that it is more frequented than ever, &, of course, I am at a greater expence. However, I may safely say that no minister was ever more respected than I am here, & the English travellers… feel the benefit of our being so well at this Court, for Emma is now as well with the K. & Q. as I am, & of many parties with them. You will be glad to hear as I am sure you must from every quarter of the prudent conduct of Emma. —She knows the value of a good reputation which she is determined to maintain having been completely recovered. She knows that beauty fades & therefore applies daily to the improvement of her mind.

  Emma endeavored to be his perfect hostess and courtier, always telling him how grateful she was for his kindness to her. She never stopped working to make herself the perfect lady, practicing singing and French and studying the exquisitely fashionable topic of botany, as well as developing her charitable interests.

  The English saw Emma’s effusively affectionate behavior toward her husband and watched for signs of a pregnancy. A baby would ensure her position with her “husband, friend & protecter” and be her financial security after his death. Sir William’s family dreaded a pregnancy: he would not cut Greville’s inheritance for Emma, but he would for their son. Motherhood would enhance Emma’s endeavor to appear respectable and would strengthen her position with Maria Carolina, mother of many. The Neapolitan court was child-friendly, and Emma had a willing nanny on hand in Mrs. Cadogan. Yet there was no suggestion of a pregnancy, and there is no evidence of any illness that might have been a miscarriage. It seems most likely that Sir William was infertile. Catherine Hamilton never conceived, and there is no trace that any of the courtesans he used did so either. Perhaps that was why he felt grateful to Emma for marrying him. Unlike many men his age, he had courted widows rather than young girls, knowing that his wife must sacrifice any wish to have a family.

  There was no way of diagnosing infertility, and Emma might have thought that she, as a healthy young woman, could conceive by Sir William. If she was hoping to fall pregnant, she kept her efforts private. Her time was consumed by the work of an envoy’s wife. “I literally have been so busy with the English, the Court, & my home duties, as to prevent me doing things I had much at heart to do,” she wrote to Greville. When the Duchess of Devonshire blazed into town with her mother, Lady Spencer, and assorted children and hangers-on, there were “fifty in familly for four days at Caserta.” She and Sir William had lived for eight months at Caserta to be near the royal family and commuted twice weekly to town, “to give dinners, balls, etc, returning here at 2 or 3 o clock in the morning after the fatige of a dinner of fifty, & ball & supper of 3 hundred, then to dress early in the morning, to go to court, to dinner at twelve a clock, as the Royal familly dine early, and they have done Sir William and me the honner to invite us very, very often.”

  Maria Carolina wanted to meet most of the English visitors, for many of them, such as the Devonshires, wielded considerable influence over key English ministers in Parliament. Aristocrats had heard of Emma’s influence with the queen and demanded an audience. “Tis true, we dined every day at court, or at some casino of the King; for you cannot immag-ine how good our King and Queen as been to the principal English who have been here.” She gave her visitors something more exclusive than an introduction at court: a private audience. “I have carried the Ladies to the Queen very often, as she permitted me to go to her very often in private, which I do. And the reason why we stay now here is, I have promised the Queen to remain as long as she does, which will be the tenth of July. In the evenings I go to her, and we are tete a tete 2 or 3 hours. Sometimes we sing. Yesterday the King and me sang duettes 3 hours.”

  Emma and Sir William conducted their visitors around the city, to court, to dinners and to assemblies, and to their box at the opera. Scattered in archives and collections across the country are dozens of affectionate invitations from Emma to her guests. In one warm letter, she promised Lady Throckmorton that had the Countess of Plymouth come to visit, “I wou’d have ciceronised her all day & at night music and attitudes wou’d have diverted her.“5 All self-respecting tourists called on ciceroni, famously learned and devoted guides, to show them the city and to take care of their every need. Most of her visitors required “ciceroning” to shops and dealers, as well as help with buying and bargaining, and many sent requests to the Palazzo Sessa for the envoy and his wife to pick up souvenirs they had forgotten and send them on. Some important visitors behaved like film stars, accustomed to constant attention. Many traveled to improve their health, and Emma was called upon to tend the ill and comfort the bereaved. Lady Spencer had fond memories of Emma’s assiduous nursing of her daughter, Harriet, Lady Duncannon, who was suffering from pneumonia.6 When they recovered, they wanted to see the attractions Emma had visited tens of times—the ceremony when the holy blood held at San Gennaro Church liquefied, the coast and islands, the king’s china factory at St. Leu-cio, the court, and one of the king’s country seats, Carditello, where Ferdinand pressed his guests to spend hours examining his cows and pigs.

  Emma was excited to entertain the Devonshire set, and she sympathized with Georgiana, for her husband had exiled her for giving birth to Charles Grey’s child, but she was less entranced by the many other dreary and boorish guests, sometimes up to eighty at a time. Many times a week, Emma, radiating smiles and sparkling with diamonds, presided over a bout of gambling or whist, sang Handel, and presented her Attitudes. One astute squire spotted that Emma was weary of performing her famous poses, but most had no recognition of how much their visits drained Emma’s patience and Sir William’s purse. Hamilton continued to spend, believing that the English government would compensate him in due course and also hoping the same aristocrats would repay him with hospitality when he returned to England.

  Everyone was eager to judge Emma, particularly the younger women. Lady Palmerston thought her not as beautiful as she had expected, but exquisitely dressed and “very good humoured,” and decided that “her desire to please and her extreme civility is very uncommon.” She thought—like everyone else—that the couple was “rather too fond.” Emma hosted a dinner for the Palmerstons and more than fifty others, and Lady Palmerston decided she looked “extremely handsome, and really does the honours exceedingly well… Sir William perfectly idolises her and I do not wonder he is proud of so magnificent a marble, belonging so entirely to himself.”

  Lady Palmerston gives us a rare insight into how the guests perceived Emma’s mother. Mrs. Cadogan, she wrote to her brother, “looks like a lady you have more often found useful than I could ever have done.” Her brother was a terrible reprobate and the women he found useful were prostitutes, madams, and the odd cookshop owner as he was stumbling home. Perhaps Mrs. Cadogan put Lady Palmerston in mind of all three occupations at once. The English were perhaps a little insulted, for many had heard that Sir William permitted Mrs. Cadogan to attend the English parties but not those of his Neapolitan friends. Lady Palmerston slipped in a note of Emma’s background: “Lady H. is to me very surprising, for considering the situation she was in, she behaves wonderfully well. Now and then to be sure a little vulgarness pops out, but I think it’s more Sir William’s fault, who loves a good joke and leads her to enter into his stories, which are not of the best kind.“7

  Most people describe Emma similarly: she was a friendly hostess and eager to please, well mannered and attractive, and Sir William was too fond of her. One minor squire reported, “As we knew her story you may conceive we did not expect so much.” Entranced by Emma’s spontaneous sense of fun and her actressy ability to mimic voices and personalities, he enthused that as well as her wonderful talent for Attitudes, she “has that of countenance to a great degree. I have scarcely know her look the same for three minutes together, and, with the study she has made of characters, she mimics in a moment everything that strikes her, with a versatility you have not a notion of”8 Everybody knew about Emma’s previous life as
wild Amy Lyon of the Temple of Health and Romney’s model, but they tended to treat her origins as proof that she was, in Lady Palmerston’s words, “a very extraordinary woman” to have escaped.

  The Kidds were living reminders of Emma’s squalid background, and Sir William rather wished they might disappear. Emma felt guilty about her grandmother, sickly and infirm, and struggling for money, and she was trying to help her without Sir William discovering. She fretted to Greville that she wore a court dress in November that cost £25 and felt “unhappy all the while I had it on,” since she had “2 hundred a year for nonsense, & it wou’d be hard I cou’d not give her twenty pounds when she as so often given me her last shilling.” She begged him to send her grandmother £20 at Christmas, and asked him to “write to her a line from me or send to her & tell her by my order” for “if the time passes without hearing from me she may imagine I have forgot her & I wou’d not keep her poor old heart in suspense for the world.”

  Emma vowed to send her grandmother money every Christmas. But throughout the first half of 1793 Sarah Kidd grew frailer and finally died in July, at the age of seventy-eight. Her grave is nowhere to be found in the large graveyard of Hawarden Church. She was probably buried very simply with only a wooden cross marking where she lay. Mrs. Kidd’s life could hardly have been more different from that of her granddaughter. She could never read or write, married young, and brought up a large family in a mining village, moving from village to village as her husband tried to find work as a collier. After his death, she supported her entire family. Throughout her life, her mind was focused on finding the next meager meal, and her days were almost entirely limited to the four walls of her hovel and the mile or so around. She had never seen London, or any more of England than Chester for the last sixty years, and Emma’s adventures in London and beyond were something like a fairy tale: far away and utterly bewildering. She could not comprehend the lives of her daughter or granddaughter, but she understood all too well the sad situation of poor lonely little Emma, deemed too genteel to live with her but not genteel enough to stay in the palazzo with her mother. Humbly marked down in the parish register as “widow of Thomas, Collier,” the grandmother of England’s most famous woman was given a simple funeral and burial at Hawarden, where she had lived for all of Emma’s life.

  Emma had not seen her grandmother for ten years. But there was no way she and her mother could journey across revolutionary Europe for a funeral—at least not on their own. Mrs. Cadogan and Emma had to comfort each other in private.

  In January 1793, Louis XVI of France was executed and Ferdinand commanded the court to go into mourning. The queen was doubly determined to encourage her husband to fight the French and declared that she hoped Louis’s death “will implore a striking and visible vengeance… and that on this account the Powers of Europe will have no more than a single united will.” She wrote to Emma that she looked to Emma’s generous nation to provide this vengeance.9

  In February, the new government of France, determined to be respected as the European superpower, declared war on England and Holland. The English government began sending envoys to Naples to encourage the king and queen to ally with England. At the end of the previous year, the French had sent out warships to threaten the king and queen with invasion, forcing them to recognize their new regime. Ferdinand and Maria Carolina were nervous about inflaming their enemies any further. Emma struggled to persuade the queen that the British could assist, and after a series of debates, an Anglo-Neapolitan treaty was signed on July 12. Britain would maintain a fleet in the Mediterranean, and Naples was required to provide ships and men and no longer trade with France. Sir William’s comfortable backwater was about to become crucial to the battle for dominance over Europe.

  Emma’s support for Maria Carolina’s aversion to the French would change her life. In August, Admiral Lord Hood, commander in chief of the British fleet in the Mediterranean, decided to call in troops from Naples, to assist his men in defending the French town of Toulon. As his messenger, he sent HMS Agamemnon and its young, ambitious captain, Horatio Nelson.

  Neapolitan Nights

  CHAPTER 28

  The Hero Visits

  Since 1787, Horatio Nelson had been retired and miserable, on half pay in muddy Norfolk, making model ships, reading the newspapers, and feigning patience with his sickly, unfulfilled wife, Fanny. When he arrived in Naples on the evening of September 10, 1793, at the age of thirty-five, he knew it was his chance to grab back the future glory that had seemed so secure before his marriage. “I have only to hope I shall succeed with the King,” he worried.

  Ferdinand came to meet Nelson’s ship, resplendent in full court dress, accompanied by the princes and princesses, numerous courtiers, and Emma and Sir William. Nelson had been on shore only twice since leaving Britain four months ago and had hardly seen a woman in that time. He described himself as “sick with fatigue,” but he soon perked up when he spotted Lady Hamilton, the glamorous star of the gossip columns, sparkling in her court finery. Emma ushered him back to the Palazzo Sessa and into the apartments prepared for him and his thirteen-year-old stepson, Josiah. They probably occupied the handsome suite with the sea view and the ceiling painted with stars that she first used when she arrived in 1786. Nelson slept in a room adorned with portraits of Emma as a bacchante and a goddess, as was every room in the palazzo, and Vigée-Lebrun’s celebrated portrait of Emma as a sibyl glowed softly over his bed.

  Still stung by Queen Charlotte’s refusal to receive her, Emma strained to prove herself to the visiting captain by planning entertainments and trying to anticipate his every need. Nelson had not eaten fresh meat or vegetables for weeks, and he gleefully tucked into the silver plates of the finest fish, turtle, and exotic sweetmeats arriving regularly from the palazzo’s kitchens. Emma accompanied him to court and listened raptly to his stories of bravery, overwhelming the shy sailor with tricks of flirtation and allure she had perfected with hardened Neapolitan courtiers. Obsessed by social rank and terrible at languages, he was immediately impressed by her intimacy with the queen and by her fluent translation from Italian and French.

  In just four days, the king pledged Nelson his troops and wrote an obliging letter to Lord Hood. Nelson exulted that the king called him and his company “the saviours of Italy.” Exhilarated by his social success and Ferdinand’s cooperation, Nelson planned an elaborate Sunday breakfast on his ship. The king was to attend, along with the court, but the pregnant queen probably stayed behind. Also in attendance were Sir William and Emma and the most distinguished English visitors: the Bishop of Winchester and family, Lord and Lady Plymouth, and various other aristocrats. The meat was roasting in the ovens, the table laid with china borrowed from the Palazzo Sessa, and Sir William and Emma were already on board when John Acton sent the urgent message that a French man-of-war had arrived at Sardinia.1 Detecting a chance for glory, Nelson hustled his guests off the ship, rushed to raise the anchor, and set off in pursuit. He wrote to his hosts twelve days later, thanking Sir William for organizing some prints for him and apologizing for dashing off with the embassy’s butter pan.

  Fanny, alone in her empty Suffolk home, Roundwood, needed to be reassured about her husband’s meeting with the woman the newspapers declared no man could resist or forget. “Lady Hamilton has been wonderfully kind and good to Josiah,” he wrote, carefully concealing his attraction to her. “She is a young woman of amiable manners and who does honour to the station to which she is raised.” Sexual guilt always prompted Nelson to buy Fanny a gift, and he found time in his hectic few days to purchase some rich sashes of Naples silk. One of Emma’s trademark fashions was a thick, colored silk sash tied tight around a muslin dress, an almost childish style. Romney painted her in the same outfit for The Ambassadress, and she wore a similar style for her wedding and then repeatedly in Naples. Nelson was even thinking of Lady Hamilton as he bought his wife a gift.

  The English gossip columnists rushed to exploit the meeting between the amb
assadress sex bomb and the virile captain. The scandalous Bon Ton Magazine made fun of Sir William, Nelson, and Emma in a tale about “the lovely Syren.” A young, newly married woman who is sexually unsatisfied by her elderly husband, Lord E, who, like Sir William, has a “violent rage for private theatricals and dramatic representations,” falls in love with a captain when he visits. A cartoon depicts a small man who looks like Nelson helping a lady descend down a wall to him, accompanied by the scurrilous tale of how the visiting captain becomes a

  professed adorer of the lovely Syren, whose beauty, about three years ago fascinated Lord E—— in such a bewitching manner, that his lordship, actually forgetting what he owed to himself, his family and rank, after a courtship of a few months, led her… a willing victim to the Temple of Hymen [i.e., he married her, a joke on Emma’s work in the Temple of Health]. But though Lord E—— may be as great an admirer of female charms as most of his compeers, he is certainly but ill qualified to do homage to the power of beauty, in that way that the ladies generally expect.

  The “reports in general circulation” imply that Lord E “sleeps at night with a pound of raw beef stakes clapt on each cheek, to give them a fresh and ruddy appearance,” and wears silver thimbles to “render his fingers conical and tapering.” Although, however, he “might secure the appearance of youth and vigour… we greatly doubt whether the whole Materia Medica can recall the actual enjoyment of those enviable blessings,” for he is impotent. After a few weeks, the new wife was deeply disappointed by the failure of her husband’s “bag-pipes” (the Hamiltons were Scottish) and, because women are “ill qualified to put up with crosses and disappointments,” frolics with the handsome captain.2