England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (26 page)

Emma tailored her Attitudes to her audiences. To spectators in Naples, fresh from art history courses and tours of Pompeii, Emma showed classical postures. In England, she aimed for a populist audience by pretending to be a Neapolitan peasant woman, posing as a captive in a Turkish harem, or, capitalizing on her fame as a model, imitating famous statues and paintings. She also chose her Attitudes to promote her ambitions. As a mistress and then newly married, she performed a Magdalen, the woman penitent for her early life. After 1791, when she was advocating Queen Maria Carolina's desire to defend Naples against the French, she imitated figures from classical history who resisted tyranny and invasion. When she returned to England, she emphasized her pregnancy by performing postures of a mother and showed herself as Cleopatra, matching the media's representation of her as the sexy, powerful, exotic queen.

In 1794, the German painter Frederick Rehberg drew twelve of her poses, including a sibyl, Mary Magdalen, and Cleopatra. There was such demand for prints that his drawings were published as a book and distributed across Europe. Ladies in their salons, courtesans, and dancers had poses to copy and guidance on dress and they all tried to imitate Emma's performances. Soon guests were balancing on chairs to see the great beauty of Napoleonic France and intimate of the Empress Josephine, Juliette Re-camier, performing similar poses in her Paris salon. Her elderly banker husband trotted around placing napkins under their feet to protect the upholstery. Increasingly, women began to adopt Grecian dress in imitation of Emma's fashions in Rehberg's pictures and abandon their hobbling high-heeled, point-toed shoes for her signature flat pumps. The Attitudes were equally influential on styles of dance. As ballet in the eighteenth century was formal and stilted and the dancers paused frequently between positions, Emma's plasticity and rapid movement were revolutionary. When Isadora Duncan reworked her techniques a century later, performing sensual, fluid dances in classical garb, she set Victorian London on fire.

Incorporated into books, pictures, cartoons, and caricatures, the performances inspired artists and writers.
Corinne
by Madame de Stael, Europe's most influential writer during the Napoleonic Wars, features a tall, slightly plump Englishwoman living in Italy who has become the most famous woman in England through reciting poetry and performing her Attitudes. Wearing a white dress and a turban, like Emma, she performs the sufferings of a sibyl. Her performances entrance the English sailor and great leader Lord Nelvil (a name too reminiscent of Nelson to be coincidental). Corinne's performances underline her belief that Italy should resist
Napoleon's armies. By the 1790s, Emma too performed Attitudes that extolled the virtues of martyrs and those who resisted tyranny. Unlike Stael's heroine, however, Emma never subsumed herself in the figures she represented. She was constantly giving her audience a wink, always saying, "Look at me." Her aim was to showcase her talents.

Emma knew that the guests at the palazzo wanted to see her, the famous mistress and muse. She guessed that her notorious past meant that guests would be staring at her body and making suggestive comments about her. By developing the Attitudes, she exploited their attention and ensured that their reports about her focused on her performances rather than her previous behavior. Many arrived determined to judge her as immoral but left seduced by her skill.

Sir William's admiration for Emma deepened every day. He was allowing her to act as his hostess, and he gave her grand dresses and jewels in order to do so. On top of his basic allowance to Emma and her mother for clothes and washing of £200 a year, he bought her day dresses and formal gowns and "every now and then a present of a gown, a ring, a feather, etc." Once, he wrote, "she so long'd for diamonds, that, having an opportunity of a good bargain of single stones of a good water & a tolerable size, I gave her at once £500 worth," and then paid again to set them in necklaces and bracelets.

When he planned a trip to Puglia in 1789, she begged to join him, even though they would be walking and riding on "execrable roads" and sleeping in tents. Emma claimed that she could never be upset by poor accommodation, since she had lived in very rough lodgings in her youth. While Sir William Hamilton investigated the area's infrastructure and found the roads in ruins and the port of Brindisi abandoned, Emma watched the women in the town perform the tarantella, a dance inspired by the energetic movements of a tarantula.
⁷
The performer shook a tambourine as she twirled and danced in a circle. She became more and more frenzied and sometimes collapsed at the end. When Emma returned to the palazzo in May, she incorporated the tarantula into her Attitudes, much to the delight of her audience. The Comte d'Espinchal decided that the beauty and voluptuousness of her performance could inflame the "most insensible man." Sir William envisioned happy years ahead spent indulging his graceful mistress.

But Europe was changing.

On July 14, crowds stormed the Bastille in Paris and thrust its governor's head onto a pike. In October, the king and queen of France were
dragged from Versailles and imprisoned. Parisian nobles fled for their lives, and Sir William reported, "French refugees drop here apace."
⁸
Neapolitan aristocrats were terrified for the French royal family and worried that their own masses cherished similar revolutionary fervor. As Sir William worried, the revolution "cast a visible Gloom upon the face of this Court."
⁹
Ferdinand, however, quickly bored of the despondent mood of his acolytes and banned all mention of France at court. His ludicrous attempt to live in a happy bubble was a failure. France remained agonizing, "the only Topic in every Conversation."
¹⁰

Within three years, Emma had emerged as a talented performer and a confident hostess. Glittering with diamonds, she was the image of an ambassadress and she combined natural style with ladylike accomplishments of music and languages. Now all she needed was the title. "I will make him marry me," she had warned Greville in 1786. As revolution engulfed France and began to tear across Europe, Emma began to realize her desire.

CHAPTER 23
Manipulating Sir William

A
ll my ambition is to make Sir Wm happy & you will see he is so," Emma wrote to Greville. She lied: she wanted to be more than his mistress. Emma sought to share his work as the ambassadress, to visit the English court, and to settle down with him for good. Eighteenth-century women were trained to wait modestly for a proposal, but Mrs. Cadogan was hardly able to play the role of the pushy mother, intent on wringing the question out of the envoy. In late 1788, however, after only two years of living with him, Emma was sure that she could persuade him to make her Lady Hamilton.

Emma never lost an opportunity to stress to Sir William how she loved him and longed for him to marry her. She emphasized that her sense of gratitude would make her an excellent wife and, as she put it, she would be the "horridest wretch in the world not to be exemplary towards him." In the hope of sprinkling rumor in the newspapers, she began to encourage gossip that they were secretly married (reports that reached the horrified ears of Sir William's family and friends). The English tourists who arrived in the winter of 1789 believed they were already married, and Sir William made no effort to stamp out the rumors, knowing that such illustrious guests would flinch from being entertained by a mere mistress. As he boasted, "many seek Emma's acquaintance, & we have the best company in Naples at our house. The Duchess of Argyle & that family doat upon Emma, & really she gains the heart of all who approach her." Sir William was so intent on promoting an intimacy with the new Spanish ambassador and his wife that he had implied to them he was married, enabling Emma to charm the stolid
señora,
gloating that "we are allways together."
Feeling newly respectable because everyone believed her married, Emma reveled in her role of hostess. "Every night our house is open to small partys of fifty and sixty men & women. We have musick, tea etc, etc." She welcomed guests to "the first great assembly we had given pub-lickly," a ball for nearly four hundred, "all the foreign ministers & their wives, all the first ladies of fashion, foreyners & neapolitans, our house was full in every room. I had the Banti, the tenor Casacelli & 2 others to sing." The other ladies dripped with diamonds and brocade, but she was proudly resplendent in white satin, with her hair loose and unpowdered in the fashionable Grecian look she herself had popularized.

When his friends wrote demanding the truth, Sir William declared they were not married and never would be. His mistress, he told Greville, was "welcome to share with me, on
our present footing,
all I have during my life, but I fear her views are beyond what I can bring myself to execute; & that when her hopes on the point are over, that she will make herself & me unhappy, but all this entre nous, if ever a separation should be necessary for our mutual happiness, I would settle £150 a year on her, & £50 on her mother." He explained to his friend Joseph Banks that "I have no thoughts of relinquishing my Employment and whilst I am in a public character, I do not look upon myself at liberty to act as I please."
¹
Marrying her might affect his position at court. Moreover, as he wrote to Mary Dickenson, "of all Women in the World, the English are the most difficult to deal with abroad. I fear eternal tracasseries, was she to be placed above them here, & which must be the case, as a Minister's Wife, in every Country, takes place of every rank of Nobility." The problem was Emma's famous reputation: every visitor knew about Amy Lyon of the gossip columns, and Mrs. Hart, star of Romney's studio, and the queen of Attitudes.

Women, Sir William claimed to Banks, were "subject to great change according to circumstances and I do not like to try experiments at my time of life. In the way we live we give no Scandal, she with her Mother and I in my apartment, and we have a good Society. What is to be gained on my side?"
²
Sir William told his friends what they wanted to hear—lying to Banks that Emma lived with her mother when in fact she was installed in his apartment. But the letters veer between declaring he would never marry and praising her excessively, emphasizing how she "really deserves everything and has gained the love of everybody" as well as "universal esteem." When he admitted that Emma "makes my house more comfortable," he inadvertently revealed the truth of the whole matter: he could
not bear to lose her and pension her off in the country. As the year wore on, Sir William realized she was not going to settle for being his mistress much longer. He had a choice: a comfortable house or the approval of his society friends in England. He began to plan a journey to England to check on his Welsh estates. Senior diplomats could not marry without the permission of their sovereign, and he aimed to test the waters with King George about the possibility of taking Emma as his bride.

By late 1790, all London was gossiping about the imminent arrival of the ambassador and his mistress. The
Town and Country Magazine
gave Emma and William starring roles in its scandal column, "Tete á Tete," as "The Consular Artist and the Venus de Mediéis." According to the article, Emma was a shrewd and beautiful artist's model with expensive tastes and Sir William was a buffoon, prone to making risque jokes that offended his guests. "Industry, without much taste or genius, has gradually conducted him to the top of the ladder," and he was conspicuous proof that "success is not always the result of great talents."

Although Sir William, the journalist declared, "may not be able to execute, he is said to be a competentjudge of the performances of others." In other words, he was neither an artist nor a sexual partner, able only to watch the acts of others (ajoke about his interest in penile cults). He had refused to marry because, the article continued, "the term
wife
was offensive to his ear, as it implied the natural consequences which would probably ensue—the immoderate increase of his expenses." He was obsessed by statues, and so his idea of a compliment, according to the article, was "Madam if you were mine, I would put you into one of my best frames." He saw Emma at a lubricious "exhibition, at which he is more than an indifferent spectator"—a quip about the Temple of Health. She "was in the last year of her teens and seemed to have been cast in perfection's mould." "Seized with a kind of infatuation, he presented her with one of his best catalogues and begged he might be permitted to attend her and explain to her the embellishments of his gallery. The fair one granted his petition, and May and January formed a temporary alliance." Emma was "not insensible of the honour conferred on her by a man of consular dignity," the article went on, and their mutual happiness was enhanced when she performed her Attitudes: