England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (28 page)

Emma did not dare visit her daughter. She could not risk the press discovering the existence of the little girl, and she knew that Sir William wanted her by his side. So Mrs. Cadogan, possibly accompanied some of the way by Greville, traveled to Manchester. Nine-year-old Emma had heard that Mrs. Hart and her husband-to-be were in England and hoped they might visit her, even take her away with them. Eager to show she was an accomplished young lady, she had spent days ornamenting a box with filigree. A complex and time-consuming task, especially for a child, filigree involved rolling up strips of colored paper into tight curls and sticking them over the box to create an overall picture of flowers. Her effortful display of her industry, patience, and feminine skills went to waste. When Mrs. Cadogan arrived alone, little Emma was deeply disappointed and blamed herself. After a difficult visit, Mrs. Cadogan battled the heat and traveled on to Hawarden. Emma's grandmother was seventy-six and wanted to see her daughter before she died.

Emma returned to London from Bath on August 22 after what one friend described as a "frenzy" for her, with people going "mad about her wonderful expression."
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"She is the talk of the whole town," Romney declared:

she really surpasses everything both in singing and acting, that ever appeared. Gallini [a master of the London Opera] offered her two thousand pounds a year if she would engage with him, on which Sir William said pleasantly, that he had engaged her for life.

Sir William confessed to his friends that he had decided to "make an honest Woman of her." He promised that he would never set her above visiting female aristocrats by allowing her to present them to Maria Carolina. Declaring himself entirely confident about the future, he cheerfully knocked two years off Emma's age. He wrote to his friend, Georgiana, Countess Spencer, mother of the Duchess of Devonshire:

A Man of 60 intending to marry a beautifull young Woman of 24 and whose character on her first outset in life will not bear a severe scrutiny, seems to be a very imprudent step, and so it certainly would be 99 times in a 100, but I flatter myself I am not deceived in Emma's present character— We have lived together five years and a half, and not a day has passed without her having testified her true repentance for the past.
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On August 28, Sir William attended court at Windsor and gained the king's consent to the marriage. It was always a good sign when George made jokes, and Sir William was quietly jubilant when the "King joked him about Em. at a distance" and teased him "that he was not quite so religious as when he married the late Lady H." Queen Charlotte was less easily mollified. She made it clear that she would not receive the new Lady Hamilton. Emma had damaged her cause by insisting on sharing hotels with Sir William, rather than maintaining propriety by living separately before the wedding. She could only console herself with the hope that when her admirer, the Prince of Wales, ascended the throne, she would be received at court with all the trappings.

Emma listened patiently to lectures about getting above her station. Mr. Dickenson, husband of Mary, advised her to remain intent on pleasing in order to maintain in Sir William "that warmth of attachment which he entertained for her." He hoped, sternly, he would "find Emma & Lady H.
the same.
" Even Sir William, Dickenson implied, who had risked his position to marry her, would never love her unconditionally
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He was right: she knew she had to flatter and cosset, not make emotional demands. She agreed to a small, secretive wedding. Sir William dreaded publicity and feared a mob at the church. He did not want people to hear the proof, when the names of the couple were read out, that Mrs. Hart had indeed been the notorious Amy Lyon.

Early in the morning of Tuesday, September 6, Mrs. Cadogan and Emma's maid dressed the bride in white muslin with a turquoise sash and arranged her hair loosely under a handsome blue plumed hat. They hired a carriage, and Emma traveled to St. Marylebone Church on the Maryle-bone Road, Greville's local church and conveniently distant from town. Once featured in William Hogarth's series of pictures,
A Rake's Progress,
as a ramshackle, unkempt church famous for clandestine marriages, St. Marylebone had smartened up its image; nevertheless, Emma would have to satisfy her passion for grandeur elsewhere. She said "I do" in a plain, small building, only slightly more impressive than humble St. Mary's in front of her old house in Paddington Green (then under renovation), bearing no resemblance to the graceful high late Regency church that now stands proudly across from Madame Tussaud's near Baker Street. Two
friends of Sir William were witnesses.
^∗
Mrs. Cadogan was probably present, and Mary Dickenson's husband (who was in London on business) and Greville. At about half past nine, the "Right Hnble Sir Willm Hamilton of this Parish, Widower and Amy Lyon of the same Parish, Spinster" were married.

While Sir William celebrated with his witnesses, Emma drove to Romney's studio and sat for the last portrait he would create of her from life. Frantic to capture her on canvas before she left, he had painted her on the two days before her wedding. On September 6, for the first and last time, he wrote "Lady Hamilton" rather than "Mrs. Hart" in the sitter's book.
The Ambassadress
is one of his most elegant portraits of her. He marks her marriage by allowing her, like a genteel lady, simply to represent herself, rather than Sensibility or a goddess such as Circe. Still wearing her wedding dress, Emma looks over her shoulder, her hands folded in front of her, Vesuvius behind her. Despite her elegant appearance, her position is still winsome, for she looks up at the viewer over her shoulder. Romney captures her at a moment of transition: from glamorous young muse to grande dame and ambassadress.

Emma's departure plunged Romney into depression. Although September was a busy time for portrait painting, he did not take another sitter for nearly six weeks. Locked up in his Cavendish Square studio, he tried to exorcise his feelings of loss by drawing Emma repeatedly in frenzied sketches, which grew increasingly nightmarish and sexual. In some she swirls her drapery like a goddess; in others, sometimes she is a nude, or weeping woman. In one, he let his tormented imagination flow and drew a nymph being stripped by a grimacing satyr who has Romney's face. Trying and failing to forget her with a French mistress, Thelassie, Romney began to work up the studies he had made during the summer of 1791 in to full portraits. Emma was becoming respectable as Lady Hamilton and moving toward her thirties, but in Romney's portraits she remained laughing and malleable, forever young.

Sir William's effort to avoid publicity by marrying in the early morning failed. The news was flashed around London. Sir James Burgess, the foreign undersecretary of state, was shocked that Emma, whom he had visited with William at Romney's studio, had married the king's envoy
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Beckford marveled that his friend had "actually married his Gallery of
Statues." An old school friend wrote to congratulate Sir William on the "manly part you have taken in braving the world and securing your happiness and elegant enjoyment in defiance of them." Sir William had no regrets. He declared robustly, "It has often been remarked that a reformed rake makes a good husband.
Why not vice versa?"

^∗
The Marquis of Abercorn, a distant relation of William, and Louis Dutens, rector of Elsdon in Northumberland and formerly secretary to the English minister at Turin, were witnesses.

Most couples spent the weeks after marriage paying wedding visits to relatives. Sir William ensured they left London for Italy after two nights. Their speedy departure only fanned the flames of press speculation. The three most popular magazines recorded the wedding: the
European Magazine,
the
Lady's Magazine,
and the
Gentleman's Magazine.
All called Emma "Miss Hart" rather than Amy Lyon, and the
Gentleman's Magazine
declared her "much celebrated for her elegant accomplishments and great musical abilities."
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The gossipy
New Lady's Magazine
noted the marriage and opened the same issue with "An Essay on Second Marriages," a virulent attack that suggested that the widower who remarried "must stand convicted in a deficiency of affection and gratitude."
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The journalist illustrated the stern advice with a prediction, disguised as a tale, of Emma's fate. Although the heroine's "only qualifications" were beauty and grace, she captured a top aristocrat at a ball but soon regretted marrying a man so much her social superior because she could never be his equal. The
Morning Herald
jibed how Mrs. Hart, "of whose feminine graces and musical accomplishments all Europe resounds, was but a few years back the inferior housemaid of Mrs Linley" Richard Hewton produced
The Wife Wears the Breeches,
a caricature of a newly married couple who look like Sir William and Emma: he waits in bed while she dons a pair of trousers, a reference to her theatrical past and a clear suggestion that she controlled him. One poetically inclined wit suggested that Emma would be unfaithful and might even return to work as a Covent Garden streetwalker:

O Knight of Naples, is it come to pass

That thou has left the gods of
stone
and
brass,

To wed a Deity
of flesh
and
blood?

O lock the temple with thy strongest key,

For fear thy Deity, a
comely
She,

Should one day ramble in a frolic mood—

For since the Idols of a
youthful
King,

So very volatile indeed, take wing;

If his to wicked wanderings can incline,

Lord! who would answer, poor old Knight, for
thine?

Yet should thy Grecian Goddess fly thy fame,

I think we should catch her in Hedge-Lane.

One of Sir William's friends had complained that Emma used to be a common streetwalker in Hedge Lane (an alleyway off Drury Lane); this wag implied she would take up the job again if she grew weary of her husband.

The
Times
weighed in more supportively, reporting that Lady Hamilton had departed, leaving "six portraits behind her which are done by Romney Two of these are for the Prince of Wales, in which she is drawn in her most elegant attitudes."
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In October, the paper published "To Lady Hamilton" by H.F. (perhaps a sly joke about her affair with Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh). The poet produced a eulogistic version of what was by now a hackneyed description of the relationship: Emma was a beauteous statue, desired by the impotent Sir William as an aesthetic object. The word
Aether
is a coy reference to the Temple of Health.

What time the surest Dame of Athens came,

To give the Artist's eye of the mould of grace,

The matchless texture of the harmonious frame

The perfect features and the beauteous face

One brilliant eye-ball shot a beam of fire

Another languished blue as Aether's light

Here Dignity and Heaven his touch Inspire

There dimpling laughing Beauty charms his sight.

In the poem, the Artist (Sir William) sees Emma and is thrilled by "a form by early majesty inform'd/O'er which the hand of Grace had passed from you!"

His eye had caught thy fascinating smile

Thy seraph eye and features touch'd by Heaven

Th'enamour'd Gods had left their thrones awhile

And deathless honours to thy name been given

The poem concluded generously with "sweet Stranger, Praise shall mark thy way." In England, she was not so much the object of praise as of gossipy
insinuation and sartorial imitation. Alerted by the
Times
and gossip columns, people flocked to see her portraits. Prints sold wildly, and more and more women adopted her signature look of a loose, draped white muslin dress and Grecian-style pumps. Emma's marriage and her busy schedule of shows of Attitudes in London and Bath had ensured she was headline news.

William's first wife had brought him a huge dowry and a life of ease. Emma, as the
Town and Country Magazine
had suggested, only increased his expenses. But she made him happy, which Catherine had been unable to do. Sir William would have found a genteel virgin tediously dependent. He soon recommended to Emma that she "harden" her "good and tender heart," admitting that, as for his own, "I will allow it to be rather tough." Emma knew she had a tricky job ahead of her, in both public and in private. As John Dickenson reported to his wife, Emma told him she knew that the "eyes of many people were upon her" and she promised that "gratitude, inclination, & every consideration wd compel her to do everything in her power to please him & She was certain she'd do it."
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