England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (4 page)

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mma 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.

The men breakfasted at four in summer and five in winter. Sarah and Mary were up half an hour or so before to fetch water for cooking, supplementing the rainwater they gathered in a barrel. Men's work began and ended at set hours and it gave them time for leisure. Women's chores were never finished. At least twice a day, Sarah or Mary walked through the rain or cold to stand in the long queue at the pump. If it was functioning, they worked the stiff handle until there was a gallon or so in the bucket and then carried it back. They also had to find fuel for the fire. Sarah probably did not risk pocketing more than a few pieces of coal from the sacks she carried to Chester, for if her neighbors spotted a different type of smoke from the chimney, they could report her. Wood was not an option, for Glynne and other landowners owned the surrounding forests. Most poor
families used gorse, sticks, or furze, but Sarah had no time to scour the hills. Luckily, however, she had privileged access to one of the most efficient domestic fuels: horse dung. Sarah, like most carters, would have collected the hods of manure in a bucket, mixed them with pieces of straw, kneaded them into lumps, and left them in the sun to dry (or inside if the weather was stormy) before storing them in a bucket by the fire. The Kidd cottage was filled with horse dung in various stages of assemblage, and the hods released an acrid, meaty smell as they burned. As it was necessary for heat, light, cooking, water heating, and rubbish disposal, the fire would be continually lit when the family was awake. Emma grew up in a house so dependent on dung that her clothes, hair, and even skin carried the stench of manure.

In the eighteenth century, a house was considered hygienic if there were no lice or insects visible in its eating and sleeping areas. People washed their bodies infrequently and then usually only in the milder summer months. Even the genteel rarely bathed more than their faces and hands. There was no toilet, and newfangled inventions such as piped water were a novelty for the adventurous urban rich. At night, the family used an indoor chamber pot, usually kept in the kitchen area (which it was Mary's task, as the family's domestic worker, to empty). Otherwise, they may have used a rudimentary privy—a hole in a wooden bench over the ground shared between three or four houses—or relieved themselves behind hedges or in fields. They ate and drank off wooden trenchers and basins, and it was the woman's job to wash the dirty dishes with grit in the local stream, along with the family's clothes and linen. As the stream was the main place for bathing, and an occasional toilet for the village as well as the animals grazing upstream, typhoid and diphtheria were rampant, inevitably killing the weakest children.

Everything Emma ate was cold or boiled. Meat, potatoes, and even puddings were dropped into a smoke-blackened iron pot suspended over the fire. Her staple diet consisted of bread, lard, and potatoes (which were cheaper than bread), eked out with the water in which meat had been cooked, and varied with a little oatcake or porridge. When the family felt rich she might enjoy a breakfast of oat bread and Cheshire cheese, bacon and potatoes for lunch, and a Sunday meal of beef and stewing vegetables followed by a dumpling or boiled roly-poly pudding. Ovens were the preserves of the wealthy, and the Kidds could not afford to pay the baker the few pennies he charged to cook pies or meat. In times of real hardship, every meal might be cold potatoes and dripping, and some country families
sank to eating horse bran or even straw. Rural poverty was so terrible that young people ran away to the city, hoping to find more food by foraging in the busy alleyways or in the piles of waste from the great houses. The only way to supplement a diet was to grow vegetables or rear a pig. In the days before freezers, it was customary to retain about half the meat and share out the rest among the neighbors, who would do the same in return when they killed their animal. But the Kidds were too chaotic to rear a pig.

Although Sarah was the earner, meat would be given first to the men and then the boys. As the most expendable member of the family, the youngest girl was last in line for food. As hostilities with Spain and America increased the price of wheat, Emma, like thousands of little girls across Britain, would have felt the pinch. One-third of girls died by the age of five, and the more siblings a young girl had, the more likely she was to die. Malnourished from childhood, only one in seven girls who survived till five reached twenty-five, and these rates were worse in poor villages. If Emma had playmates, they probably changed from summer to summer as the other girls weakened and died.

Emma was not the dying kind. Her spirit was irrepressible. In a rare reference to her childhood, later in life she described herself as "wild and thoughtless" as a little girl. She was so incompetent as a servant that it seems unlikely that she grew up habituated to domestic work. The dilapidated, insecure life of the Kidds left Emma comparatively unburdened by hours of cleaning, carrying, washing, and cooking; free to dream of a different life.

There is an apocryphal tale of the young Emma, at about the age of nine or ten, selling coal by the side of the Chester road. It would have been very dangerous if she had done so. Any woman standing beside the road— particularly a young one—would be considered a prostitute. Women sold their goods at market or in the village and never walked alone. Moreover, Sarah was not authorized to sell coal, only deliver it to middlemen. If the story is true, Emma had stolen the coal and was endangering herself. It is more likely that she simply liked to stand by the road in the village to watch the glamorous coaches calling at Broad Lane Hall. Hardly old enough to go out alone, she was already intent on escape.

The only highlights in her year were the three annual fairs. After the morning sale of livestock, the fields were taken over by stalls selling trinkets, posies, wine, and gingerbread for a few pennies, as well as puppet plays, musicians, and performers of all kinds. Every feast ended in dancing and drinking, and many young couples crept behind hedges (the records
show most women fell pregnant on a holiday). Other parties occurred on St. Deniol's Day, the saint's day of the local church, and there was usually a week of celebration beginning on the Sunday following Holy Cross Day in September. On Christmas Day, John Glynne would invite all the laborers and their families to a heavy Christmas meal of beef or turkey and plum pudding. The May Fair crowned a queen, who was carried around the village in a cart decorated with ribbons; the harvest festival feted a queen adorned with corn dollies.

Festivals and fairs were scant consolation for Mary, miserable at being seemingly stuck in Hawarden for good. Her neighbors relished the opportunity to gloat, and the young widow was lonely. She was pretty, but no young man wanted a wife without a dowry who was the subject of salacious gossip and saddled with a child. Despite this, circumstances suggest Mary found a protector—and a powerful one.

Stories abound that Mary was mistress to Sir John Glynne or even grand Lord Halifax at nearby Stansted Hall. This is romantic fiction: Halifax would never have pursued a long affair with such a lowborn woman. Although Mary might have caught John Glynne's eye in between the death of his first wife in 1769 and his marriage to his daughters' governess in 1772, it seems unlikely. The records show that Glynne attended Parliament less punctiliously after 1764, even though he had previously been conscientious about showing his face and volunteering for committees. He was surely, however, flirting with the governess, not Mary. Notions that Mary was a mistress to Glynne betray a misunderstanding of rural life: the squire and his sons spent summers hosting hunting parties and passed their winters in town. They ignored their tenants, and Mary could not have met Sir John unless she worked as an upper servant for him (and she was never a lady's maid). As we may see from Sir John's letters and diaries now in the Hawarden record office and the National Library of Wales, he paid scant attention to the dull minutiae of land rents, yields, and the wages of footmen.
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In Hawarden, the real controllers of patronage, favor, and money were the squire's steward or land agent, who managed Glynne's estate, his workers, and also the servants at the hall. If Mary was having an affair with a wealthy man, it was most likely with a senior servant at Broad Lane Hall or assistant steward of Glynne's estate, who would be able to slip her extra food and money.

Mary was surely lover to a man with money for a sustained period of time, perhaps throughout Emma's childhood. It is unlikely that Emma survived on the potatoes and old cheese that made up the diet of her
neighbors. Like all country people, Hawarden villagers were stunted and sunken-eyed through malnutrition. They suffered from rickets, and their hair, teeth, and skin betrayed their lack of protein. Emma grew tall, strong, and beautiful, with a thick mane of hair and strong white teeth. She had sparkling eyes, clear skin, voluptuous good health, and bounding energy. In the late 1760s and 1770s, England was racked with famines, a smallpox epidemic, and sweeping influenza, but Emma appears to have suffered no severe childhood illnesses. Thomas Pettigrew, one of Lord Nelson's early biographers, who knew Emma's London employer, Dr. Budd, noted that when she worked as a servant she had no "means to cultivate her intellectual faculties," so she must have learned to read, write, and do simple addition as a child. Somehow, Mary found money that protected Emma from the worst of village hardship and helped her grow into a beauty.

It seems likely that Mary's lover was connected to Broad Lane Hall. Emma's fortunes appear to be in some degree dependent on Glynne's. Soon after Sir John's death on June 1,1777, Emma's childhood came to an abrupt end. Mary traveled to London, maybe to follow her lover, and Sarah, at nearly sixty, decided to rid herself of her hungry granddaughter. Emma began work for Dr. Honoratus Leigh Thomas, a Chester surgeon. He lived in Hawarden because his much younger wife, Marie, was sister to Glynne's land agent, Boydell. Emma's choice of employers is a clue that Mary's protector may have been an assistant to Boydell who perhaps lost his position on his master's death. However she came by the position, Emma was now on her own. She was, after all, twelve, the average age for girls to begin in service.

Emma's poverty-stricken youth left her desperate for love, dogged by terrible insecurity, and determined to steal the limelight. Resentful of her treatment and dissatisfied with Hawarden, she so dreaded the future of a laborer's wife that she would do anything to escape. Emma was ambitious, and she craved sensation. She was not the type of girl to become a meek and deferential domestic servant.

CHAPTER 4
Scrubbing the Stairs

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welve years old and already beautiful, Emma began work for Dr. and Mrs. Thomas. With her mother in London and her grandmother's interest in her at an end, Emma might have felt sufficiently worried to devote herself to work. Instead, she hated her newjob and tried her hardest to fail.

As a maid of all work, Emma was at the very bottom of a household of seven or so servants. Forty-eight-year-old Dr. Thomas was an important man: he had had the honor of witnessing Glynne's marriage to his children's governess, Augusta, in 1772.
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Emma's contact with such a distinguished family would have been minimal: her orders came from the cook and the housemaids. As an adult, she romanticized her early life by claiming that she was a nursemaid, and biographers have continued to perpetrate the myth, but there was no such division of labor in the lower ranks of an eighteenth-century household. Moreover, the parish registers show that there were no babies in the house: Josiah Thomas was born in 1773, and no more children appeared until Sophia in 1780, after Emma had left. Like many thousands of girls across Britain between the ages of about eleven and sixteen, Emma was an unpaid child laborer carrying out the most physically demanding work in the household. Since female servants under sixteen were unsalaried and paid only with bed and board, families employed as many young maids as possible to cut costs. By the age of twenty-one, most had fallen ill from the round of heavy manual labor, become pregnant, married, or turned to prostitution. A tax had been introduced on male servants in 1767, and so in all but the richest families, girls
such as Emma took on the jobs that we would consider the preserve of men: hauling coal, moving furniture, carrying and splitting firewood, and caring for the family's pigs.