England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (7 page)

Short biographies of Emma's fellow maid Jane Powell were published after she became an actress, and all claim her work in Chatham Place was harsh. The Budds, like most employers, no doubt expected their servants to work like drones, show meek obedience whenever they encountered a member of the family, and accept punishment submissively. Servants were beaten for laziness, insolence, untidiness, slowness, or carelessness, and often if the master was simply irritated. One girl who became a maid of all work at the age of ten claimed she was regularly hit with sticks. Maids strove to avoid their mistresses, always ready to go to the pump or buy provisions at the market. Although the cook dealt with the tradesmen (a sought-after task, as it gave the opportunity for taking bribes), maids were allowed to buy milk from the milkmaids leading cows through the squares. Emma's lunch break came at around half past eleven, and then she resumed her laundry, polishing, and sweeping. After her supper at four she would assist with the preparation of the Budds' meal. A typical supper for middle-class families was pea soup, stewed carp or tripe, rabbit or veal, vegetables, and then ajam or fruit tart, usually taken at about five. Emma had to work longer in summer because of the light, but in winter, unless the Budds entertained at home, she was free by seven, after all the pans had been scrubbed and replaced and the bedrooms prepared for their occupants.

Mrs. Budd would have given Emma one of the many bestselling servants' manuals. Rather than assisting the servant to live on a tiny salary and cope with homesickness, a spiteful mistress, the sexual advances of a master, and the petty cruelties of the household's children, such books dwelt on how servants could be corrupted by dissolute behavior and drink. The authors preached that the "Town proves a school of corruption" and the streets "swarm with these servants of Iniquity, who are continually carrying on a trade of sin" and "subsist by the price of slaughtered souls."
⁴
Like most servants, Emma and Jane paid no attention to such instructions. In their room upstairs after work, they tried to beautify themselves, then ventured out to the city.

Neither girl had any desire to stay in domestic service and work her way up to becoming a cook. Emma would have tried to avoid putting her
hands in soap whenever possible, if she already suffered from the psoriasis that later plagued her.
⁵
Everywhere she saw women in fine clothes she could not afford. As one of the magazines that she might have read when she was in Chatham Place declared, "luxury was never at so great a height as at present."
⁶
Indignant with envy, she scrubbed the hearth, cherishing hopes of a better life.

CHAPTER 7
Temptations to Voluptuousness

A
fter seven o'clock, genteel families such as the Budds drank tea behind thick curtains that shut out the street. Elsewhere, the owners of gin palaces and taverns brushed the straw over the floor and set up tables for gambling as prostitutes began their toilette. The novelist Henry Fielding described the alleys of the City as "a vast wood or forest in which a Thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the Desarts
of Africa
or
Arabia.
¹
The backstreets of London were no place for a young girl fresh from the country. Emma was lucky to have Jane as her guide.

Jane Powell was Emma's first close female friend. She had a crucial influence on her new fellow maid, little Miss Lyon, fresh from the Welsh hills. Jane's contemporaries described her as restless, fond of pleasure, and ambitious from childhood to perform on the London stage. As she told the new maid at Chatham Place, she was desperate to be an actress. The darlings of the newspapers, actresses wore fabulous clothes, enjoyed the adulation of the public and the adoring advances of famous men, and—if they wanted—could marry into the aristocracy. Acting was essentially the only occupation open to women that paid a reasonable salary. Electrified by Jane's effusive descriptions, Emma shed her old self, the unsophisticated country girl, and became a sharp city maid, hungry for stardom in the theater.

We can reconstruct Jane's life by reading contemporary accounts of the theater, playbills, newspaper gossip, and the collections of biographies of the stars of the Drury Lane, Haymarket, and Covent Garden theaters,
Authentic Memoirs of the Green Room
and
Secret History of the Green Room.
The
authors of these early gossip magazines were usually struggling playwrights who knew the theater well, and since their sources were the actors, their friends and agents, or even the theater management, the pieces were fairly reliable. The
Green Room
books were reprinted frequently, and Jane never changed her entry, which suggests that she was reasonably satisfied with the contents.

According to her biographers, Jane's father was an army sergeant. After her mother died in childbirth, Jane, her siblings, and the new baby moved from their home in Kent to his London barracks in Blackfriars.
²
By the age of eleven or so, she had become the toast of the company, no doubt by acting in camp plays. Her father cut short her fun by sending her to work for Dr. Budd at Chatham Place, probably, like Emma, at the age of twelve or thirteen. Of "a romantic turn," Jane detested her work. As the writer puts it:

We find her in a menial capacity with a family in the vicinity of Chatham-square, an enthusiastic Spouter, and unable to attend her business, from a desire of seeing Plays, and studying Speeches. The confinement and slavery of her place did not agree with her temper.

Emma surely joined her in rehearsing tragic parts while they scrubbed the floor, spouting Ophelia when the cook was out of earshot. It seems as if Emma was dismissed first and Jane, perhaps finding the job unbearably dreary without her, "decamped her servitude," as her biographer put it, and fled the Budds' with a soldier called Farmer to Coxheath Camp. Private Farmer soon decided to be rid of her. Vainly pretending to herself that he had loved her, Jane called herself Mrs. Farmer, but she soon fell into "every distress and disgrace that can befall her sex." She first became the company laundress, and then a serial mistress-cum-prostitute or "conspicuous Character in the Camp." Finally, "despising a subaltern when she could charm his Commander, she eloped with the Captain to London, where they lived together in a style she had not been used to." When he deserted her, she was left at the age of fourteen to "forage for herself." She could not return to domestic service, for "she was now unfit, as well as from the habits she had lately been used to, as from a want of character [i.e., a reference], so necessary to persons of that description." No support came from her family, and Jane found herself bereft of "present subsistence, or even of a favourable prospect." She had no choice but to work as a streetwalker, probably in the Covent Garden area. As her biographer put
it, "we need not wonder at or explain the remedy she adopted to relieve her from embarrassment; —a remedy which, when embraced from necessity, deserves forgiveness, but when embraced from inclination deserves the severest reproach."

Jane never lost her ambition to act. She raved about plays and the theater so enthusiastically with her clients that she was "distinguished from others of the frail sisterhood by the appellation of the Spouter." Her fortunes improved when she gained an influential client, presumably a rich aristocrat with theatrical connections. After she left her profession to be his exclusive mistress, he pulled strings, negotiated with the theater management, and paid money for her to appear onstage; as well as buying her costumes.
³
Jane, as Mrs. Farmer, made her debut in 1787 at the Haymar-ket as Alixia, a tragic heroine in Nicholas
Rowe's Jane Shore.
Having worked as a prostitute for eight years, Jane was ready to play mature roles at twenty-two.

As the theater record books show, Jane had steady work in minor roles, often in tragedies and Shakespeare's history plays. She married William Powell, a prompter and minor actor at Drury Lane. Her advantages were her height (it helped her to be seen on the stage) and her expressiveness, but her face was not beautiful. She spent a long time working in secondary roles, striving after the tabloid celebrity so crucial to stardom. In the season of 1789-90, for example, her weekly salary was one of the lowest at £3, considering that Miss Farren earned £17 a week and Dorothy Jordan took home £10 a night. Gradually, however, Jane grew more popular.
⁴
By 1800, in her mid-thirties, she was seen as the second tragedienne after Sarah Siddons, and she was earning a decent salary of £8 a week. She appeared onstage for the last time in 1829 before dying in London five years later.

Emma and Jane would renew their friendship when they were in their thirties. In 1777, however, stardom was a dream. They were intent only on finding fun. The lamps attached to the Budds' door cast a light that reached no farther than the middle of the street, and once they left Chatham Place, they were in the dark. In the absence of a police force, with only decrepit watchmen as guards, the local area around Chick Lane and Field Lane to Turnmill Street and Cowcross (around modern-day Farringdon tube stop, just north of the City, about half a mile from St. Paul's Cathedral), was one of London's most dangerous places and a playground for criminal gangs.
⁵
Soldiers discharged from the war, laborers, and aristocrats used the cover of darkness to prey on maids. Dressed in
makeshift finery and already a little drunk on snatched gin, the girls had to walk quickly toward the center of town. High above them, in rooms poorly lit by tallow candles, younger girls worked late, five to a room, sewing shirts, while children in other garrets counterfeited coins in bowls of green acid.

Young servants tended to mill around Covent Garden, watching the cockfighting and the magicians, buying hot meat sandwiches from the all-night food shops, and looking for young men, laborers and servants like themselves. James Parry, later a friend of Emma's, claimed he met her and Jane when they were teenage maids, giggling on the streets.

Maids loved attending fairs. Henry Fielding thundered, "What greater Temptation can there be to Voluptuousness than a Place where every Sense and Appetite of which it is compounded, are fed and delighted," and where the lowliest might dress up and pretend to be rich gentlefolk?
⁶
One visitor decided that girls moved to London simply to attend the lord mayor's procession in early November; others complained that fairs left the young "debauch'd and corrupted." As each regional group brought different types of fairs to London, Emma had hundreds from which to choose. On May Day, dairymaids hired garlands of white damask decorated with ribbons and flowers and topped with a silver tankard to walk their cows around London. There were bonfires on Guy Fawkes Day and Oak Apple Day, which celebrated Charles IPs escape from the Parliamentarians. She was probably allowed a day or so for Bartholomew Fair, which took place in Smithfield Market, very near to Chatham Place. In the last week of August and the first week of September, the area was overrun with sideshows and stalls selling sweets. The year before Emma arrived, an edict to close the fair after three days caused riots. At Bartholomew Fair, there were wild men captured in Scotland, female wrestlers, fortunetellers, singers, early versions of fairground rides, and tents showing short plays of familiar stories from romance or legend. In one year, the most popular attraction was an elephant able to fire a gun. Emma and Jane hoped that they might be discovered. Everybody knew that the libertine Earl of Rochester had found a young Elizabeth Barry declaiming tragedy between food stalls at Bartholomew and transformed her into the most successful actress of her generation.

Young people grew up fast. Emma's path through life was so far very typical, and so we might hazard that, like most girls of her age and position, she lost her virginity at twelve (there was no legal age of consent), most likely during the holiday periods of Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, or
the Bartholomew fortnight. Fairs were an opportunity for the young to enjoy themselves, and pregnancy was often the consequence. Emma was enjoying herself, but Mrs. Budd was growing increasingly concerned about her behavior. The final straw came when Jane and Emma stayed out all night. Since it appears to have been in early autumn, they had probably been at Bartholomew Fair, enjoying the quacks, laughing at the puppet shows, and flirting with apprentices. When they returned, Mrs. Budd was waiting for them. What she had to say was short: Emma was fired. Something must have made the doctor's wife very angry, for she didn't dismiss Jane, and Emma, although not very industrious, was young, strong, and cheap. Mistresses had a perennial dilemma: if they gave notice to one girl, would the next be any better? Emma may have answered back, or perhaps Mrs. Budd suspected a pregnancy. Either way, her mind was made up, and Emma was turned out and sent straight to the streets.