Kate Williams

by Unknown

  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 Marylebone 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 envoy12 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.“13 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.“14 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.“15 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.“16

  CHAPTER 25

  A Difficult Part to Act

  Am I Emma Hamilton? It seems impossible,” Emma marveled as she journeyed to Naples. “Surely no person was ever so happy as I am.” The new Lady Hamilton arrived in Paris in September 1791. Like all visitors to the city, she and Sir William hoped to see the revolution at first hand. Emma also had a plan: she wanted to meet Queen Marie-Antoinette.

  Only a year before, Romney and his friends had reveled in Paris, deciding it the most splendid place in Europe, but since then much blood had been shed. Sir William and Emma took rooms in the expensive and very central Hotel de l’Université, where Lord Palmerston, William’s old friend, was also staying. He secured them seats at the Assembly on September 14, when the king was forced to accept the constitution, which classed him as a constitutional monarch and his family as commoners. The king was humiliated because he had to sit on an ordinary chair and everyone retained their hats. Few sympathized: public support for the royal family was at an all-time low after they had attempted to escape in June.

  After the constitution was passed, the city was thrilled. Elite Parisians planned to seize positions in the new republic, and everybody else hoped that the settlement would bring the bloodshed to an end. A large hot-air balloon was raised above the city center in celebration, buildings blazed with illumination, and relieved citizens flung themselves into music, feasting, dancing, and cooing at a grand display of fireworks. Palmerston, the Hamiltons, and the Marquis de Noailles, an ex-courtier, wandered around until ten o’clock, surprised by the widespread “Enthusiastical attachment to the new Constitution,” as Sir William put it.1 Over the next few days, Emma visited the many English nobles in town and sang or performed her Attitudes. Palmerston was appreciative: “I have seen her perform the various characters and attitudes which she assumes in imitation of statues and pictures, and was pleased beyond my expectation, though I had heard so much. She really presents the very thing which the artists had aimed at representing.” He commissioned Thomas Lawrence to alter a painting by Reynolds in order to put Emma in the center, and he kept the painting until he died. He decided Emma “very handsome,” “very good humoured, very happy, and very attentive” to her new husband.2

  All the while, Emma was pressing for an introduction to Marie-Antoinette. If Emma could meet the queen, she would score an amazing coup and increase her chances of being received at the Neapolitan court. Like every woman in Europe, she was fascinated by the glamorous French queen, who was doubly appealing now that she was imprisoned at the rambling palace of the Tuileries. Marie-Antoinette had once animated pampered Versailles with her gaiety, and her extravagant dresses and coiffures had led European fashion. The novelist and antiquarian Horace Walpole had described both Emma and Marie-Antoinette as statues of beauty, but Emma was very different from the queen: she knew how to satisfy her husband but had no idea how to please a court. Meeting Marie-Antoinette would prove a crucial stage in her training.

  Under her mien of graceful resignation, the queen was begging her brother, Leopold, the Emperor of Austria, to threaten the French into reinstating Louis XVI as monarch. Throughout September, she wrote letters in code and sometimes in invisible ink to Leopold and various European royals, collaring passing aristocrats to pass them on. She was intent on winning the support of her favorite sister, Maria Carolina of Naples, only three years her junior. Emma’s visit came at an opportune moment. Marie-Antoinette neither knew nor cared that Queen Charlotte had not received Emma: she wanted a favor from the woman she believed to be an ambassadress.

  Few women (and no man other than her husband) could resist Marie-Antoinette. Trauma had wrecked her beauty: she had grown gaunt, and her luxuriant hair had thinned and turned white at only thirty-six. But her limpid blue-gray eyes were still enticing, her sweet, hesitant voice was still tempting, and her soft smile—once able to charm the most embittered courtier—had won the hearts of her guards. Deeply emotional, she kissed and embraced frequently. Ardent revolutionaries faltered when they thought of Marie-Antoinette, and Emma fell in love with her on sight. Ambitious to be at the center of politics, she dreamed of a queen restored to the throne, thanks partly to her efforts. Despite her impoverished childhood, Emma believed in opulent courts and thought, like many others, that the king was vital to maintain the correct order of society. She saw the French political conflict in personal terms as the bloodthirsty Jacobins against her beautiful, victimized new friend. When she heard that peasants had thrown stones at the royal family when they were caught trying to escape from Paris, she was utterly incensed. She left her meeting bursting with indignation, desperate to be of service to the queen.3

  Marie-Antoinette’s letter safely stowed, the Hamiltons departed for Geneva, Rome, and then Venice. In every city Emma performed her Attitudes, and in Rome she made her final sitting for Angelica Kauffman’s Lady Hamilton as the Comic Muse, which became her wedding portrait. Then they rolled on to Naples.

  The English were still eager to hear about the fascinating Lady Hamilton, and on October 8 the Times reported that the newlyweds had arrived in Naples, although Sir William claimed to his managers in the Foreign Office that he did not arrive until the beginning of November.4 The newspapers argued over whether Emma had been received by Maria Carolina and whether she was introducing ladies at court, the role of an ambassador’s wife. One traveler, Lord James Wright, tried to inform the Foreign Office that the gossip in the newspapers was “wanton and false”: Lady Hamilton had not forced herself on the queen or the English travelers, and Sir William continued to present women as well as men.5

  Emma confided in Mary Dickenson, who, in a traditional courtesy to a bride from a member of the groom’s family, had solicited her as a correspondent, that “before the 6th September I was always unhappy and discontented with myself,” but now “I feel every moment my obligations to him and am always afraid I can never do enough for him since that moment. I say to myself Am I his Wife, and I can never separate more?”

  The codes of high society that Emma had to negotiate as Lady Hamilton were labyrinthine. The slightest mistake in dress or manner could mean disfavor, and she needed to train herself in the correct behavior and self-presentation for the Neapolitan court. Fresh-faced innocence was not enough. Ladies at court had precise standards of elegant movement and performance that required time and practice to perfect. A woman was expected to carry her head artfully, her arms curving gently away from her torso, and walk gracefully with small steps, without jostling her skirts or appearing stiff or inelegant. Even simple activities such as entering a room or exiting it, sitting, drinking tea, or waiting in line at a reception were highly embellished and ritualized.

  Sir William was blind to the minutiae of female fashion and behavior, and Emma had to discover the secrets of courtly speech and manners for herself She learned how to greet acquaintances with the right degree of formality and familiarity, speak subtly and softly, and when to listen attentively and when interruptions were permitted. More important still were the nonverbal skills, the touch of the hand, the curtsy and the subtle deployment of the fan. Ushering together all her energies, Emma worked hard to transform herself into a lady of distinction.

  A month after Sir William’s arrival, the queen communicated to him that, as she had heard much of Lady Hamilton’s “exemplary good Conduct and Humility,” she would receive her privately. At the meeting, when the queen invited her to sit beside h
er to discuss Marie-Antoinette, Emma was so overcome that she burst into tears and the queen was deeply touched.6 “I have been presented to the Queen of Naples by her own desire she [h]as shewn me all sorts of kind & affectionate attentions,” Emma wrote. She advanced her position in the queen’s favor by declining Maria Carolina’s first invitation: a dinner in honor of Prince Augustus, the youngest son of King George of England, to which only the most eminent English travelers were invited. Sir William went alone and introduced the aristocrats to Maria Carolina.

  When the Hamiltons were invited to spend the hunting season and Christmas at the palace at Caserta, Emma had her chance to become accepted as Lady Hamilton, rather than as the private wife of Sir William. Most courtiers had been steeped in courtly behavior since childhood, but Emma had been picking up every piece of gossip about the court over the last five years. She knew the power structures she faced and was ready for a treacherous environment where every conversation contained hidden dangers. By January, Sir William declared, the queen had “become quite fond of her & has taken her under her protection.”

  By March, Sir William was gratified by her success at negotiating the complex social codes. Aristocrats queued to visit her, and Emma was careful always to dress well, seem humble and obliging, and flatter her guests with attention. She described Lord and Lady Malmesbury, Lord and Lady Plymouth, Lord Dalkeith, and Lord Bruce as “very kind and attentive” and “remarkably civil to me.” Sir William enthused to Joseph Banks that the king and queen