AMY LYON AKA "MRS. EMMA HART" AS THE MISTRESS OF HONORABLE CHARLES GREVILLE BECOMES THE MISTESS OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON

And then she met the one... 

But it did not start out as expected.

Amy Lyon had accepted to be called Mrs. Emma Hart while the Mistress of Charles Greville, who wanted to remake her into a meeker and more conservative woman - the "virtuous housewife" which meant repressing her true self and acting.  He had banished the daughter she bore with another man as a sixteen year old, rented her a house on the outskirts of London and installed her mother to keep her company.  Emma aimed to please him and keep his patronage and told him he made her happy and that she loved him; maybe she did. 

Greville had status in English society as a second son in the historical Warwick family but he had not attracted a wife who would bring her inheritance into the marriage. Perhaps for a time he thought that being known to have a Mistress might give him a desirable reputation among men. But his search for a wife did not end with having Emma and nor did it prevent him from having an affair with Elizabeth, Lady Craven. He was out of love for Emma and sought to find a way to send her on her way without drama.

The newly widowed Sir William Hamilton was a relative that Greville wished to court for money.  He fifty-five years old - much older than Emma - and as the fourth and youngest son of Lord Archibald Hamilton, worked as a diplomat assigned top Naples. He came to visit and they delighted each other but Lord Hamilton knew that Greville would soon get rid of Emma. Emma was ignorant of Greville's plans and continued to tell the man that she missed him and belonged to him and could only go so far in entertaining Hamilton.

Excerpt page 103 : Emma's new friend had grown up in the royal court with the future King George III.  His mother, Lady Jane Hamilton, had been the Mistress of Frederick, Prince of Wales, from about 1736 until 1745.  Frederick appointed her his wife's lady of the bedchamber.  Then, dizzy with lust, he also made her the queen's Mistress of the robes - not even the poor queen;s clothes were free from her rival's claws.  Lady Jane possessed the absolute sway over Frederick and his family thought her son's earl;y life.  Sir William called King George his foster brother, boasting that "my Mother reared us and the same nurse suckled us.  With this he hinted what many suspected: he was the Prince of Wales's son....

Greville negotiated for Sir William Hamilton to take on Emma.  He was calculating.  He claimed that having a Mistress was preventing him a good marriage, that he admired her and was attracted to her but that she was in love with Sir William. He said she had become obedient and of "good humor" and that considering all the advantages she might bring into a relationship, she was not one to demand a man spend on her. By pushing his lover Emma on Hamilton, he reasoned he was not abandoning her and she accepted the opportunity to travel and visit with Hamilton without knowing.  It took him two years to move Emma and her mother on, beginning with six weeks of tourist travel.

1786

Avoiding the problems in France that would result a couple years later in the French Revolution, they traveled to Geneva first and then Naples where the mother and daughter were to live at Palazzo Sessa, Hamilton's estate. Emma turned twenty-one.  Also there was Mrs. Anne Damer, a sculptress who Sir William Hamilton was thinking of marrying and twice Emma's age.  Hamilton quickly decided in favor of Emma, and he began to treat her like a princess but began to treat her mother like a servant.

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SO MANY WAYS TO LOVE

 

PREGNANT EMMA LYON - THE FUTURE LADY HAMILTON - WAS THROWN TO THE STREET and THE HONORABLE CHARLES GREVILLE RESCUED HER - TEMPORARILY

 

She was afraid... Maybe she had not used contraception or he had not wanted her to or she was unlucky. Or maybe she had hoped to make Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh give her a more formal arrangement or maybe even marry, her for it was not unheard of that a powerful or rich man would take a woman such as herself to be a wife. Harry did pay Madam Kelly to release her from any contract and set her up in one of many of the houses he owned in London. But she kept her pregnancy a secret for three months. Now that she was officially kept, she would only be able to go out on the town with a female chaperone or Sir Harry himself... But he was not much interested in visiting with her and was a no show while she waited.  Secretly, he was going broke... Emma became desperate and clingy when she did see Sir Harry and he was furious when she told him the truth. She was sixteen years old and Harry put her out, abandoning her. She had to go back to being an "independent companion." As her pregnancy advanced she increasingly appealed to Charles Greville to take her as his Mistress and be her savior.

Still hoping the father of her child, unmarried as he was, would change his mind and at least support her through the pregnancy, Emma took to being the tragic heroine of her own drama. Greville took to being the one who owed nothing and had all the power. He wanted her only on his own terms which meant that she be loyal and faithful only to him and sever contact with any old lovers and give up the life of an escort and prostitute. When she finally went to Greville, a servant took her to a "laying in house" where she was secreted to have the baby. 

Childbirth killed one woman in ten in those days but Emma made it through the birth to a daughter she also named Emma...

Excerpt page 80 : After birth, well-off women relaxed in their rooms, cosseted by the servants, showing off the new arrival to visitors while languidly sipping gruel tea, a special hot spiced wine mixture called caudal.  Emma, however, had to return to Greville.  Her daughter was boarded with a wet nurse, probably near the laying-in house. Greville aimed to ensure she would have few opportunities to journey into town and visit her child.  he sent little Emma off to her great-grandmother in Hawarden as soon as possible. Emma knew what was expected of her; she had to pretend that her pregnancy never happened.  Within a week or so she was traveling in a coach to a new home in Paddington, West London. There, she began to reinvent herself. Amy Lyon, the flamboyant would-be actress and extroverted girl about town, became Mrs. Emma Hart, just arrived from Chester, Charles Greville's quiet and terribly shy new Mistress.

In a village on the rural outskirts of London, Greville rented Emma a small house where she was to be retired and become exclusively his.  Her mother Mary, only in her late 30's herself, was already there to live with her. Not only was Emma to go by Mrs. Hart, but her mother was to assume the name of Mrs. Cadogan. Greville had not the money or standing of Sir Harry but he was still a second son of Lord Brooke, who was made Earl of Warwick in 1759, and he still had the reputation of a man who spent money on women. He had been unable to attract a wife, especially not a wife who would bring money into the marriage from her family. He aimed to reform or inhibit or control Emma.

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FALLEN

 

MADAM KELLY'S BROTHEL ATTRACTED ACTRESSES and POWERFUL MEN : EMMA DIDN'T STAY LONG : THE FIFTEEN YEAR OLD'S TEMPORARY FORAY WITH TWENTY-SIX YEAR OLD SIR HARRY FETHERSTONHAUGH

1780ish.

Madam Kelly had been a prostitute herself, as young as the age of ten when she started. She became a Madam who made her prostitutes who worked at her brothel go into debt to her by supplying them fabulous clothes and expensive jewelry and she had no mercy in collecting money owed her. Aspiring actresses and other women who were accepted to work there had their chance to earn far more money than they could anywhere else but that was not always the ultimate goal. Some of them became the Mistresses of these powerful men. But to do so, a man had to "hire her out," pay off the clothes, and ultimately pay off the contract the prostitute had with Madam Kelly.

Excerpt page 68 : Emma was beginning to make friends, and she soon found a protector.  Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, a spoiled young squire, was characterized by gossip columns as the brothel regular "Sire Harry Flagellum" and "The Sporting Lover." Kelly listed him as Baron Harry Flagellum in a daybook for another of her brothels. He had become interested in Emma and asked to take her for a long-term hire at his house, Uppark, to entertain him and his friends  He would have had to shell out a lot of cash to Kelly to cover Emma's "debts" and the madam's loss of earnings, and he had to agree to buy her clothes.  Many girls, after being rented out, became kept mistresses.  Kelly expected to be able to extract an even larger amount when Fetherstonhaugh demanded Emma's ultimate release.

Emma hoped that Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh might be her escape. In her year or so at Kelly's, Emma had found out about glamour and the kind of tricks to tempt a man's passion, and she had also learned to rely on herself and to hide her emotional needs. Her hard, brilliant exterior hid a secret longing for a man to cherish her, who she could believe loved her for herself.

As I read these passages in Kate William's book about Emma Hamilton, and the women at Madam Kelly, though hundreds of years passed to the days of Hollywood Madam, Heidi Fleiss, I'm reminded of Heidi because she bragged at how well paid and beautiful the women who worked for her as prostitutes were. 

Excerpt page 69 : Emma found herself on long-term hire to a stag party set to last the entire summer....  Fifteen year old Miss Lyon was hired to entertain the host and his guests, serve at dinner, dance, and smile.  She meant to work hard, confident that she would persuade Sir Harry to take her as his long-term mistress. 

Sir Harry was only twenty-six years old. He was good looking, a charming bad boy who was not much interested in study but rather drinking and hunting. Some called him effeminate and author Kate Williams uses the term fluffy headed.  He lived beyond his means and troubled his family.  His house was beautiful and rich and his estate workers were industrious.  Emma had her own cottage and exposed to this level of wealth unlike ever before. Servants - more than one hundred - worked tirelessly to keep it up. Though officially she was hired as a Lady's Maid, the other servants found reason to be jealous and resentful of her position.

In order to be more pleasing to Sir Harry, Emma, still called Emma Lyon, learned to ride horses and became an excellent side-saddle equestrian who accompanied him on the hunt.

After the hunt the men would become boisterous and gluttonous. She would dance for them and sing, giving a performance but feeling personally neglected by Harry.

Emma set her sights on an older, poorer man, Charles Greville, second son of Earl of Warwick and MP for Warwick, in the Midlands, who hated hunting, thirty-two, still unmarried, and not the life of any party.

Unfortunately, Emma's boredom with Harry and unhappiness with her life was further complicated by her pregnancy. Sir Harry was the father.

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BACCHANTE

Image from New York Public Library

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs

A START IN THE THEATRE : ACTRESS JANE POWELL INFLUENCED THIRTEEN YEAR OLD EMMA HAMILTON TO DRURY LANE : PORTRAIT MODEL EMMA IS HIRED BY THE TEMPLE OF HEALTH

1778-1779ish

While a servant in London for the Budd's, the thirteen year old Emma Hamilton met another servant - Jane Powell - who wanted to be an actress and would eventually succeed as one; the surname Powell came to her in marriage. Jane had also been fatherless and the two became best friends. Jane's big break in the theatre came after she attracted a rich patron who arranged for her to graduate from the minor roles she had accomplished on her own. Therefor, she, like Mary Lyon, Emma's mother, had the benefit of being a Mistress. The servant girls enjoyed free events such as parades and fairs and the parties that emerged and they were both fired from the Budd's after staying out all night. There was no security at all in being a servant girl. Meanwhile it is likely that Emma had to grow up fast and had probably lost her virginity as a twelve year old.

Excerpt page 39: Thirteen year old Emma already had the energy, beauty, and self-confidence that would carry her far, but such qualities had a darker underside - an addiction to glamour, a hot temper, and a desire to please by winning attention. There was no way that her life of drudgery could continue: she was too pretty and ambitious. On leaving the Budds, equipped only with a few dresses and one or two trinkets from admirers, Emma headed straight for the Drury Lane theater in Covent Garden, the most sensational spectacle in London. 

Emma didn't start as an actress at Drury Lane. She was a dresser, a maid, carried props - a servant for an actress, though she might have been used in a crowd scene or two.

In the eighteenth century in London, it's estimated one woman in eight worked as a prostitute. Prostitutes were part of the party around the theater scene. The price range for sexual services ranged from a few 18th century cents to thousands of dollars. Emma could not have been innocent of this fact. Author Kate William's description of the prostitution scene is one of street and tavern. It's implied that Emma may have been one of them as a teenager. 

Painters also went looking for models and as it turned out, she was considered a perfect English beauty.

Excerpt page 52: ... She was snatched up by the two greatest portrait painters of the time: bitter rivals George Romney and Joshua Reynolds. Sir Joshua, foremost portrait painter of the age and president of the Royal Academy from 1768 to 1782, was well known for hunting in the brothels of Covent Garden for models, and it seems that he found Emma, perhaps before Romney. His Cupid Unfastening the Girdle of Venus shows a dark-haired, pale-skinned model who looks very much like Emma, her bosom exposed, wearing an almost transparent dress, languishing in bed while Cupid unties her sash... .... Emma appears to have modeled for one of Reynold's greatest paintings, Thais.... Thais being the Mistress of Alexander the Great...

The painting was such a sensation that the public demanded to know who the model was and was identified as "Miss Emily"... Emily hardly the typical name for a prostitute, the name implied a higher status. There is a possibility that already she was a Mistress, to Honorable Charles Greville. It was said that she had sat for the painting at his request.

At the time, according to author Kate Williams, modeling was undesirable work and possibly paid worse than prostitution. Artists were not especially kind to models and there were other painters and paintings which looked a lot like Emma. 

As a result of her new found fame of sorts, Emma got a new gig. James Graham, a London entrepreneur, sex therapist, and showman, who believed in "the power of electricity" hired her for his Temple of Health. The spectacle at his townhouse, where people went for a cure, included electrical shocks, fireworks and explosions, music, and, also glamour girls in flimsy white dresses who danced around the treatment bed. Dancing at the temple is something Emma never denied as she did other suggestions once she was a Mistress to aristocratic men. The Temple featured a cure for infertility and Graham is credited with suggesting that a woman needed to orgasm to become pregnant at a time when many women saw sex as dutiful and only for procreation.

The Temple of Health itself attracted not just husbands and wives, but men and their mistresses. It might have become one more place of low paid prostitution. Emma quickly moved on to a brothel, Madame Kelly's, which was London's most exclusive.

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EMMA HAMILTON (AMY LYON) : HER MISTRESS MOM PROVIDED A BETTER LIFE FOR THE BOTH OF THEM : EMMA GREATLY EXCEEDED ALL EXPECTATIONS FOR SOMEONE BORN TO BE A DOMESTIC SERVANT

England's Mistress is a beautifully written book by Kate Williams that was a delight to read, beginning with the descriptions of life in 18th century England for the poorest of the poor. I began to see the sights and smell the smells.

As I read the story of Emma Hamilton, I was reminded that she had much in common with other women - Courtesans and Mistresses - who rose up from humble or even devastating beginnings through beauty and intellect, to a more adventurous and unconventional life. I'm also reminded that it was and is possible to be shunned from acceptable society but never the less eventually prevail to be esteemed by it and also, finally, that a hard past doesn't excluded someone from love and marriage.

As I read the books about women's lives in previous centuries, I'm also glad that we women have more choices. Overall, we have been able to be more independent, to become educated, to volunteer, to hold jobs and have careers, to own our own money and property, to choose to be unmarried or not ... 

EMMA HAMILTON 

Amy Lyon 

Mrs. Emma Hart

Lady Emma Hamilton

1765 - 1815

Born into extreme poverty in the coal mining village not far from Liverpool, Amy Lyon had one great advantage - her mother Mary. Though her husband, Amy's father, died when Amy was an infant, somehow Mary provided for her daughter without remarriage. There was some mysterious scandal associated with Amy's father's death - alcohol poisoning or suicide perhaps, maybe mining accident or murder. Or perhaps the scandal was that Mary had become a  Mistress. After all, her mother was widowed at only twenty- two and Amy was fatherless - by those days standards, an orphan. 

Neither mother or daughter lived up to the expectations of suspicious and hateful neighbors. Were they witches? Mary moved the two of them in with relatives who weren't happy about it and navigated a class structure that intended to keep people in the position of their birth. The story was that Mary was Mistress to Sir John Glynne or Lord Halifax but that would be some stretch. It was probably one of Glynne's estate employees who kept Mary, someone who provided her with little extras.

Excerpts pages 18 - 19 : 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 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 sparking eyes, clear skin, voluptuous good health, and bounding energy. In the 1760's and 1770's, 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 (Lord Nelson being important to Emma's story...) 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.

After Sir John Glynne's death, perhaps because the estate employees had to move on, Mary and Emma traveled to London. Emma was twelve years old, the age poor girls then became domestic servants, and she obtained employment with Dr. Honorotus Leigh Thomas. She was likely an unpaid child laborer and may have done hard physical labor such as hauling coal, pumping water, and splitting firewood as she was at the very bottom of servility.

Excerpts: page 21 and 22 : ... Within a few months, the hands of most young maids were scarred with burns, and the most common cause of death for eighteenth century girls was burns or scalds.... Families such as the Thomases burned over a ton of coal every six weeks, and the walls, floors, ceilings, and furniture needed regular scrubbing to remove the black dust. It could take a whole day to clean a room properly... Worst of all, like all girls in her position, Emma had to feign servility and respectful admiration for her employers ...

Perhaps the worst plight of servant girls was what we call sexual harassment and rape today.

 

Excerpt page 22 : Masters saw their young servants as easy prey. Since most, like Emma, spent much of their day cleaning isolated rooms alone, they were easy to trap and grope.  At night there was even more opportunity, for they slept in unlocked rooms or on the floor.  The master usually beat the servants (women were not legally permitted to punish them) and often backed up his physical violence with harassment - thinking it a good way to keep the girls in check...  The typical eighteenth century man simply seduced his servants and fired them when he was bored of them.

Emma found herself unemployed after a few months with the Thomases and perhaps it was only that she could not keep up with the work. At the time servant girls were supposedly ones to fall in love with their masters (despite such treatment*) and to live on fantasies of becoming married. In Emma's case, escape to London, 180 miles south, was her dream and the coach ride was probably only possible because her mother gave her the fair. This ride in itself would have been rough, extremely uncomfortable, and shared with others. Hundreds came to London with hopes of a better life every day. There was an anti-immigrant sentiment and many were soon locked up into jails through innocent though there were criminals among them. Girls were procured for brothels by "motherly" types. Luckily Emma was hired by a middle class couple, the Budd's, who might have, like many of their status, hoped a country girl would be more easily manageable and accept lower or no pay. Servants for aristocrats were hired only through personal recommendations.

London was teeming with people who were desperate. It was filthy, and often on fire. London also had the royal, the rich; exclusive shopping and luxury living. So the new townhouse owned by the Budds and implied better status of servitude must have been a relief. But Emma was not to remain there for long and would bounce around from employers and brothels.

Stick with me as the story of this Mistress of the Month, who became beloved in England's late 18th century, as I unfold her story!

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* My opinion as this statement by the author leads me to think the girls were masochists. 

If interested in Mistresses of British or English aristocrats or royals, click on tabs such as London, or Royal Mistresses!

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