EMMA WAS NOT SHY ABOUT LETTING SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON KNOW SHE WANTED TO MARRY HIM and AT LAST SHE BECAME LADY EMMA HAMILTON

Emma did not shyly wait around for a proposal like an 18th century woman was supposed to do. She told Sir William Hamilton that she loved him and wanted to marry him. Famous now as a beauty, a model, a dancer - and an intellect - faithful and loyal to him, she pledged to continue to make him happy.

While Sir William denied to all to his friends - who asked for the truth - that he had married her, there were those who believed he already had. By 1790 it was the gossip in fashionable London that the Ambassador to Naples and his mistress were about to arrive. It was a bit of the kind of scandal people loved. Those of his rank imagined that he was not her sexual partner, perhaps because he was, in fact, a senior. So it went with the English.

However, those of his friends who lived in Naples and had seen them as a couple thought otherwise. They encouraged him to marry Emma. Even the Queen Maria Carolina of Naples and the Two Sicilies encouraged marriage.

Emma traveled England with Sir William and his entourage. Her mother was part of the entourage but the daughter she had been forced to send away by Charles Greville, now nine years old, went unvisited by Emma. (Instead her mother, Mary, called Mrs. Cadogan, went.)

His family had a reason to discourage a marriage besides Emma's background and that was that they wanted his estate intact to inherit it. He claimed her to have made him extremely happy. He suggested that they would be "engaged for life" but proudly seeing how popular she was, he began to reconsider. Ultimately, and by my way of thinking, much to his credit, the man began to follow his heart.

Excerpt page 158 : 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 beautiful young Woman of 24 ad whose character on her first onset of 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 [resent 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.

On August 28, Sir William attended court at Windsor and gained the king's consent to the marriage. Two days before her marriage, she sat for artist George Romney for the last time.  The artist had created dozens of paintings of Emma, but for the first time he wrote Lady Hamilton rather than Mrs. Emma Hart in his record of models who sat for him.

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"MRS. EMMA HART'S" EXTRAVAGENT HOLIDAY IN NAPLES : EMMA IS SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON's NEW HOBBY and SHE LEARNS THE TRUTH THAT GREVILLE IS OVER HER

1786

Naples was the third largest city in Europe after London and Paris and a playground for the rich. There were glamorous parties, operas, exclusive shopping areas and amazing cuisine. A sort of boom town, it was also considered to be built quickly, with gorgeous but controversially colorfully painted architecture. Author Kate Williams compares it to an "eighteenth century Las Vegas" also because people gambled stayed up all night, drank, and womanized. It was a place to let go and get loose, to swim nude or forgo stiff protocols. Emma became Sir William's new hobby, showering her with gifts including a new wardrobe and a horse, and showing her off. However she continued to write to Greville, as though she were only aware of being on a vacation.

Excerpt page 127 : In July, Emma wrote to Greville, eager to share the excitement of her summer holiday.  They had visited Pompeii and Posillipo and planned to sail to the islands of Ischia and Capri.  She has been been bathing daily and her 'irruptions" were gone, leaving her, as she claims, "remarkably fair." Sir William had invited every artist and sculptor in Naples (apart from Mrs. Damer*) to portray her.  One, possibly Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, was painting her in a "Bacchante setting, in a turban, a Turkish dress," and she was modeling for another in blue silk gown and a black feathered hat. The young Swiss-German Angelica Kauffman, and two others planned to paint her, and the cameo maker Marchmont would soon carve her head into a stone that could be set into a ring.  Sir William already had five portraits, and he had asked for more from Romney.

Finally in August, Greville told the truth and she was shattered and both admonished him and begged him to take her back. He urged her to be Sir William Hamilton's mistress. Six months later she was still refusing to do so. She was faithful to Greville, her first lover. (The men she had sex with as a sex worker were not.)

Excerpt page 129 : Emma could not believe his hypocrisy. Exploited from the age of fourteen, she had thought that Greville had saved her, and she had grown proud of her hard-won respectability.  As she knew, mistresses tended to be passed on to progressively poorer protectors, and she expected that Sir William would keep her for no longer than a year and then pass her on.

But Sir William also proved to be a good shoulder to cry on. And by Christmas their relationship was an affair. Her letters were full of love and lust for him. He forgot his plan to also have her as a temporary mistress. She found herself more secure than ever but he, like Greville, aimed to make her over and improve her. Emma learned to sing, dance, and play the harpsichord and guitar and her coaches were those who taught the highest in society.

She was often asked to sing at dinners and even received an offer to sing at the opera in Madrid. Exposed to his extensive library of English literature, she read and then began to try to learn Italian. Sir William was proud of her.

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*Mrs. Damer was the sculptress who Sir William Hamilton was considering marrying after the death of his wife and whom Emma met when she first visited with Sir William while with the Honorable Charles Greville.

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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All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

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

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