Kate Williams Read online

  Twenty or so women, children, and elderly men (younger men traveled on horseback) bundled themselves into the wagon around bags of vegetables and crates of chickens. Children took the most uncomfortable spots over the wheels or at the very back. Then they had to hold tight to their money. A passenger couldn’t pay until he or she left the wagon, and anyone who failed to cough up would be arrested. Emma’s journey cost around six shillings, with extra money needed for food and lodging along the way—over two months of Sarah’s wages. If Mary had not been mistress to a man of means, Emma would have been unable to afford the fare.

  The journey from Chester to London usually took just over five days but could last seven or even nine, depending on the traffic, the state of the roads, and the frequency of stops. Traveling south through Nantwich to Lichfield, then Birmingham and Northampton, the passengers were usually too uncomfortable to marvel at the unfamiliar towns. Battered by the wind and the rain, they felt every clatter as the wagon bumped over unkempt, pitted roads littered with rubbish and the detritus of broken carts, the wheels splashing into the deep streams of mud. Post chaises swept past (so fast that their horses had a life span of only two years) at about ten miles per hour, and aristocratic carriages overtook them as swiftly as their coachmen could whip. The horses drawing Emma’s wagon would never move faster than a walk. On many journeys a horse collapsed, and the passengers had to wait while the carter hunted for another. Every time the wagon halted to load and unload goods, the travelers had to disembark, sometimes for hours, passing time perhaps by swapping tales about drunken carters and robbers before battling for a place back on board.

  At night, the wagon stopped and the passengers slept where they had been sitting all day. If they were lucky, a landlord at an inn might, for the price of six-or ninepence, give them a supper of cold boiled beef and bread in the kitchen followed by a bed in the straw of the stables. Hardened traveling salesmen, soldiers, and sailors stalked the inns on the lookout for easy prey, and many girls never reached their destinations.

  The town of Barnet was the main coaching center for passengers arriving in London from the north. Like any eighteenth-century coaching inn, the courtyard under the rooms was covered by a large wooden roof (the only remaining example is The George, on London’s Borough High Street). Passengers had to leave their original wagon and push through crowds of sightseers, prostitutes touting for clients, horsekeepers, waiters, and hawkers selling cheap ribbons, papers, jewels, and pencils to find a cart to take them into the city. To country ears such as Emma’s, the London accent sounded entirely unfamiliar.

  Finally crammed into a coach bound for the city, they joined the long queues waiting for hours to enter the Great North Road. Sometimes up to 130 coaches a day rattled through the gate, along with horses, wagons, and herds of cows and sheep from as far away as Wales. Emma’s wagon would have taken the route through Finchley Common, seven miles of thick undergrowth colonized by robbers. Not long before her arrival, eleven carriages were ransacked there in a single night. One unfortunate man was even mugged on his way into London and accosted by the same highwayman on the way out. Closer to the city, market gardens and nurseries flourished. In greenhouses, exotic fruits such as melons and pears grew under human manure brought every morning from the town by the night-soil men. Nearby were the holes in the ground where the bodies of the poor were thrown. The hogs destined to become London’s bacon roamed freely, and at the brickworks, smoking kilns towered over the piles of warm bricks, under which the workers ate their food and slept.

  Farther along the Great North Road lay the rural villages of Highgate and Islington, home to pleasure gardens busy with Londoners at the weekend enjoying wine, tea, cakes, and music. Looming nearby was every poor traveler’s greatest fear: the holding prison for migrants. With hundreds of new people from the provinces arriving in London every day and the population complaining about overcrowding and crime, immigration was a controversial political issue. Since factories, sweatshops, and building sites depended on low-paid labor from out of town, the government could not ban immigrants. Instead, ministers attempted to assuage the fears of the public by claiming to get tough on the criminals and work dodgers—which meant locking up large numbers of innocents. Officers scanned the new arrivals from Barnet and arrested those they thought looked drunk, work-shy, or even slightly untidy.

  The Chester coaches arrived at the Golden Cross Inn on London’s busy Strand. On the southern end of the area that would later be a square named Trafalgar, the Golden Cross was a gambling hut and a museum of freaks. A live human centaur had apparently been displayed there only a few years before Emma’s arrival. Procuresses for brothels prowled the inns that received coaches from the provinces, looking to recruit young girls fresh from the country by feigning motherly concern and promising honest work. Emma managed to avoid the bawds and find a position as a maid for a Mrs. Richard Budd.

  The Budds were probably the first or second couple to make Emma an offer. Every girl knew that the standard of proposals would decrease as she waited. They all craved positions in aristocratic homes, where the work was less arduous because the family was often away and it was easy to pick up dresses, candles, and tips, but they hoped in vain. Aristocrats recruited servants by personal recommendation. Girls arriving from the country were crammed into the homes of the middling classes. Doctors, tradesmen, and merchants considered country girls less corrupt and more willing to accept low pay than Londoners. They and their wives met the wagons when they arrived in the inns to pick their own servant and to avoid paying commission to an employment agency. Emma was young, healthy, and had worked as a maid before, and the Budds had no teenage sons, so perhaps they did not mind employing such a pretty girl. They packed Emma into their carriage and headed for their newly built home in Chatham Place, Blackfriars.

  After passing through Temple Bar, one of the two remaining gateways to the City (until four years previously, the heads of traitors were pinned up on the gates), Emma saw her first sight of her new home: the City. The Budds’ cart bumped past shops, slaughterhouses, slums, and vertiginous, toppling houses flanked by great stacks of refuse. Wagons, coaches, and rubbish carts jostled to overtake herds of animals driven by farmers toward the market at Smithfield or the abattoir at Tower Hill. Errand boys wove through swarms of shoppers and servants. Tradesmen headed through for the markets: Billingsgate for fish and coal; Mark Lane, Bear Quay, and Queenhithe for grain; Blackwell Hall for cloth; and Leadenall for leather and poultry. The air hung heavy with the sticky, astringent smell of the sugar-processing plants and coal fumes from factories working from dawn to dusk to make the luxury goods that adorned the West End and were exported all over the world. Bricklayers and laborers were everywhere, carrying materials, clambering over rubble and foundations, and assembling in groups to be recruited for work. Thousands of houses were built in London between 1762 and 1779. Many more were abandoned when the money ran out, to be looted for timber by children. Crowded into the slums or “rookeries” in the alleyways were the workers who built houses for the wealthy and wove the material for their clothes.

  Although London was the world’s largest city, it was small by modern standards.1 Even by the 1760s, a lady could have traversed it on foot in half a day. Knightsbridge marked one limit, Bloomsbury the other. Aristocrats hunted in the surrounding areas, and stray hounds and deer hurtled through the areas now occupied by Harrods and the British Library. Kensington was market gardens, Belgravia was mostly rural, while families visited the pretty village of Paddington on summer evenings to watch farmers bringing in the hay. The compact nature of the city created particular concentrations within certain limits: shops in Cheapside and the Strand, brothels and theaters in Covent Garden, palaces in St. James, wealth in Mayfair, and poverty in St. Giles. Visitors marveled at the difference between gracious west London, with its elegant, newly built stucco mansions and straight open streets, and the narrow dark streets, overhung by signs, in the eastern part of the city.

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bsp; One-eighth of the British population, 850,000 men, women, and children, lived crowded into the seven square miles of land that marked London’s main environs. One in six inhabitants of Great Britain had lived in the capital at some point, when only one in forty French citizens lived in Paris. Thanks to immigration, London doubled in population from nearly 700,000 in 1700 to 1.3 million in 1820. In the 1770s, hundreds of souls like Emma arrived in London daily from the provinces, searching for work. The population swelled when the aristocracy arrived in carriages from the country to houses in Mayfair for the social season and the sessions of Parliament in spring. Trooping in their wake came all those who lived off the rich: servants, robbers, sellers, and prostitutes. Foreign tourists and investors crammed the city, along with spies and diplomats monitoring the activities of Lord North, the prime minister, and King George III. Dubbed the “farmer king” for his love of blunt speech, plump George was already struggling with the mental strain that would later become a devastating mental illness.

  London was the biggest, most profitable, and dirtiest city in the world. Visitors complained that the buildings were coated in grime, and they declared the sky totally obscured by smog. Many of the roads were blocked with rubbish and awash with mud four inches deep. Even in the most beautiful part of the Strand, near St. Clement’s church, the thick mud from the street splashed those who forgot to shut their coach windows. Pedestrians tried to protect themselves from dirt by putting down large stones and hopping between them, blocking the route for carriages and animals. Since there were thousands of wooden houses with open fires but no public fire brigade (private firefighters could be secured for a huge subscription), the sky was red with flames most nights, and the ensuing messes of debris, molten lead, and ash flowed into the mud in the roads. Apprentices, unsurprisingly, spent most of their time cleaning silt off their master’s houses.

  London was the envy of Europe for its superior and glamorous shops. As one German tourist commented, “Everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, in such abundance of choice, as almost to make one greedy”2 All those who visited Cheapside were dazzled by the huge glass windows bursting with brilliant and varied luxury goods from far-flung countries. On one point visitors and inhabitants agreed: London was the most expensive city in the world. There were rich rewards offered to those able to tap its boundless sources of luxury and glamour.

  CHAPTER 6

  The School of Corruption

  Emma’s new home was a sparklingly new townhouse near Blackfriars Bridge over the Thames in southeast London. Although it bordered the Fleet prison and was not far from the seedy, notorious docks, the genteel square of Chatham Place epitomized bourgeois living. Merchants’ wives in fine day dress embarked on the trip to town, stepping into their waiting sedan chairs, chairs supported on poles carried by two footmen. Milkmaids and butchers’ boys hurried past them, eager to hawk their wares to the housekeepers.

  Built in the 1760s, the elegantly spaced red-brick houses let for high sums of between £60 and £100 a year and sold for thousands.∗ The businessmen and merchants who occupied them were inordinately proud of the street sign and house numbers, modern innovations were very rare in the 1770s. Chatham Place houses had the latest trappings: new roofs sealed with lead to guard against leaks, and state-of-the-art security with thick cast-iron railings around the front and heavy doors that bolted with chains. Convinced that crime was on the increase (a terrifying ten houses were burgled every month), Londoners expected their houses to be heavily protected. They were also a little nervous: it was only very recently, after Blackfriars Bridge was built, that the area had been gentrified, and shiny new townhouses arranged in squares had sprung up over patches that had been the dens of thieves.

  Houses like the Budds’ still remain in central London, particularly in the City and Bloomsbury areas. Above the vaults, cellar, and kitchen in the basement were three or four stories of elegant, high-ceilinged living quarters lit by large sash windows. New houses no longer included space for the occupant to carry on his trade downstairs, for they were built for the growing class of people who commuted to separate workplaces. The dining room, library, parlor, and perhaps two or three reception rooms were on the ground and upper floors, and the domestics slept in the attic or down by the kitchen. The design of the Georgian townhouse suited families like the Budds, who wanted to avoid seeing their servants.

  ∗ The value of the pound fluctuated throughout Emma’s lifetime, due to inflation during the wars, but to gain an approximation of values, sums should be multiplied by one hundred.

  No researcher on Emma has explored her life as a maid with the Budds, but her experiences of service in London were crucial in forming the woman she became. Although Emma never spoke about working for the Budds, we know she was in service because she later recognized the actress Jane Powell as her old friend from domestic work. Pettigrew, an early biographer of Nelson, confirmed with Budd that he had been her employer. It makes sense that Emma worked for a middle-class family, and Jane Powell’s biographers assert that she worked as a maid in Chatham Place. We can piece together Emma’s life with the Budds by delving into the history of the Blackfriars area and by collating all the sources on the life of a maid in a townhouse from contemporary servants’ manuals, diaries kept by mistresses, and handbooks for housewives. Emma’s disillusioning experiences of domestic service fueled her ambitions to be famous.

  On arrival, Emma would have been taken to meet the cook, who organized the maids. The cook gave Emma her duties and instructed her in the house rules. She was forbidden to entertain visitors, have boyfriends, drink, gamble, or speak to the men of the house or to visitors unless necessary. She may even have been given a new name: few mistresses had the energy to learn names, and instead called a new girl the same name as her predecessor. After lunch in the kitchen and an hour to arrange her few belongings around the small bedroom she shared, probably with Jane Powell and another maid, Emma was set to work. Country girls, with no immunity to London germs, were renowned for falling ill as soon as they arrived in the metropolis, and a mistress had to extract her money’s worth. Even one as robust as Emma would have struggled with initial bouts of coughing, flu, or stomach complaints. The summer of 1778 was the first of four very hot summers, and diseases spread fast. From 1779 to 1782, the “Epidemic Ague,” a disease of fever, delirium, and quick death, swept through the damp, windowless, airless slums of London, killing thousands, becoming one of the most devastating diseases of the century.

  In 1775, one journalist estimated that one in eight of those living in London were servants, which would imply an astonishing eighty thousand domestics. Many, like Emma, had come from the country, and commentators believed they were drawn by the “pleasures to be enjoyed in the capital.“1 Female servants in London had more freedom than their country counterparts. In addition to the usual Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter, most London maids were allowed to take eight days off per year (ostensibly to view the public hangings at Tyburn). Over half of the population of girls between fifteen and twenty in London were domestic servants, and a veritable teenage culture sprang up to cater to them—shops, cafés, fairs, and cut-price early nightclubs, perhaps a band and a beer supply under an awning in the city center. Commentators grumbled about the “excessive” sums “expended in these Temples of Idleness” by maids, apprentices, and laborers.2 Otherwise, they hung around street corners and outside shops. Horace Walpole claimed that he had twice been about to “stop my coach in Piccadilly, thinking there was a mob, and it was only nymphs and swains sauntering or trudging.” Female servants did not have to wear livery, unlike male servants, and many wore good silk dresses cast off by their mistresses. They spent their wages on cheap entertainment.

  We can reconstruct the life of the Budds by reading the accounts of similar families. Chatham Place was convenient for Dr. Budd’s work at St. Bartholomew’s hospital in Smithfield, on the edge of London’s East End. Attachment to a hospital was a high-prestige posi
tion awarded only to the most esteemed doctors. After breakfast, Dr. Budd would take a sedan chair to his usual coffeehouse to read the papers and drink thick coffee from a pot that had been simmering for hours over the fire. At about ten o’clock, he took his chair to St. Bartholomew’s, a hospital newly rebuilt and completed in 1770. Four buildings around a courtyard, it probably held about two hundred of the sick and the infirm. More than seven thousand patients were treated there in 1748, a statistic that suggests they died soon after they arrived. All were poor. The comfortably off were treated at home.

  Nurses cared for the patients from day to day, and there were only three surgeons, who set broken bones, treated wounds, drained boils, bled patients, gave enemas, and pulled teeth. The leading surgeon was Percival Potts, an inspiring doctor who had the power to attract and appoint excellent staff Budd’s name does not appear on the registers of the hospital as a physician or surgeon, and so he was probably an associate physician and consultant. His job was more genteel, administration in the offices near to the Great Hall and then ward rounds or talks with rich visitors whose purses funded the hospital. Such contact earned him private commissions and the finances to run his expensive Chatham Place household. Budd lunched at his coffeehouse or at home on pies, stews, or delicacies such as sheep’s trotters, pig’s ears, and brains. On some days, he waited all day at his coffeehouse for an apothecary to attend and communicate to him the symptoms of the sick. It was probably just as well not to linger in London’s third biggest hospital—the beds were bug-ridden, the nurses were untrained, and infection was rife.

  In the morning, like most ladies of her class, Mrs. Budd busied herself with accounts, writing letters, planning menus, or attending to the children. At about half past ten, she took her carriage to buy cloth and paper in the City or fancy goods in Covent Garden and the Strand. She usually returned at midday to dress for dinner and then spent the afternoon making or receiving calls and administering accounts.