England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (30 page)

She begged him to ask for "anything I can do for you." "Come to Naples, and I will be your model, anything to induce you to come, that I may have an opportunity to show my gratitude to you." Emma offered her services and solicited his pity because she wanted him to keep her secrets now that she had new "innocence and happiness."
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Although there had been jokes about her life as a courtesan and a prostitute in Covent Garden, Romney was the only person who could confirm the rumors without impugning himself, and he could also provide information about her daughter. Emma wanted to sustain good relations with the English aristocracy, but she also had a bigger prize in view. She wanted to win Queen Maria Carolina.

CHAPTER 26
Loving Maria Carolina

M
aria Carolina was the most influential queen in Europe. Although her room was adorned with a tapestry depicting Innocence and Ferdinand's room was bedecked with one portraying Conjugal Fidelity, her husband was a lascivious layabout and she was a sharp political operator. In aiming to supplant the Marchesa di San Marco, the queen's longtime friend who had controlled the court indirectly for years, Emma was aiming high.

Charismatic and ruthless Maria Carolina was ten years Emma's senior. She had arrived in Naples at 1768, at the age of fifteen, eighteen months younger than her royal bridegroom. Stately and mature beyond her years, she had been raised in the backbiting Austrian court, while her mother, Queen Maria Theresa, ruled the country. She grew up accustomed to seeing women obeyed. Maria Theresa demanded that her daughter be allowed a place on the Neapolitan state council after she gave birth to a son, and when she took her position in 1777, Maria Carolina quickly assumed power over her childish husband and the hidebound court. Napoleon mocked the monarchs of Europe as useless puppets but made an exception for her, praising her intelligence and vigorous appetite for work. She knew, as Sir William put it, that "unless she applied to the business which the King avoids, the whole state would fall into confusion," and she gave "the greatest part of her time in looking minutely into every paper."
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She had little help other than from John Acton, the stolid English general and de facto prime minister. Her aim was to ensure she controlled the distribution of patronage, favors, and positions in the Neapolitan court and that Europe continued as it always had: reigned over by her relations and offspring.
It was the type of absolute monarchy Britain had endured in the Tudor period, in which ritual took the place of decision and the only way to achieve any influence in government was to flatter the king or queen.

The queen was no great beauty, but she embodied majesty in every sense of the word, awing courtiers with her terrifying grandeur. Her exquisitely jeweled silk dresses made the most of her abundant pale chestnut hair, brilliant blue eyes, and famously white and delicate hands. Underneath her glamour, she was often suffering. She went through eighteen pregnancies and was often sick with migraines, and endured the pain of what the surgeon decided was a benign tumor in her breast. Her children were weak, and many died in early childhood. Ferdinand hunted every day, leaving her alone, and she relied on her female confidantes for support. The wives of ambassadors and daughters of powerful families fought bitterly for the position of Maria Carolina's favored female friend. Sir William was close to the king and John Acton, but his relationship with the queen was uneasy and tainted with distrust—she hated the intimacy he gained with her husband through hunting with him.
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He encouraged his new wife to win the queen's favor. Catherine Hamilton had been reluctant to fawn over Maria Carolina, but Emma, adaptable as ever, jumped to refashion herself as a courtier.

Emma had a significant advantage over her rivals, for she was feminine and warmly emotional, as the queen liked her friends to be. She also had an innate sense of style, and Maria Carolina relied on her confidantes for assistance with her wardrobe and advice on dress. And, unlike many of the women at court, Emma had not slept with the king. The queen's motives were most of all strategic. The Neapolitan court, Sir William nervously reported, was "actively employed in preparing against any sudden attack," and Maria Carolina was flurried by "alarm and uncertainty" that the French would invade Naples.
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Intent on finding out the plans of the British government and suspicious of Sir William, she paid particular attention to the new Lady Hamilton, who seemed to have unlimited influence over her wily husband.

At the same time, she worried constantly about Marie-Antoinette and implored Emma for details about her sister's health. As Emma later wrote, "At Paris, I waited on the Queen there at the Tuilleries, who entrusted me with the last letter she wrote to her Sister the Queen of Naples; this led to an ascendency in Her Majesty's Esteem."
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Maria Carolina wept that she could not respond to her sister's plea for help. Emperor Leopold of Austria, their brother, refused to intervene, and if he would not act, she had no
chance of encouraging Ferdinand to do so. Emma was her ally in her grief, and in the process she managed to gain the queen's sympathy. According to Sir William, she "very naturally told her whole story & that all her desire was by her future conduct to shew her gratitude to me, and to prove to the world that a young, beautiful Woman, tho' of obscure birth, could have noble sentiments and act properly in the great World."

Maria Carolina was attracted to Emma as a political ally and also as a personal friend. Surrounded by jaded aristocrats, cynical courtiers almost from the moment they were born, the queen took pleasure in Emma's genuine excitement about her new surroundings. By late 1792, to the shock of the jealous court, Lady Hamilton had become the queen's special favorite, a spy at the heart of plush Caserta.
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The queen began to sign her letters to Emma "Charlotte," as she did only to her siblings and closest friends. Sir William was thrilled. "Altho we have had many Ladies of the first rank from England here lately & indeed such as give the Ton in London, the Queen of Naples remarked that Emma's deportment was infinitely superior. She is often with the Queen, who really loves her."

Emma boasted that the queen esteemed her for being "simple and natural," but the friendship was political. They shed tears together over Marie-Antoinette, swapped fears about anti-monarchist riots and the advance of the French, and quickly began to plot to advance a relationship between Britain and Naples. To be the queen's friend, Emma needed an elaborate wardrobe of dresses, shoes, necklaces, tiaras, and bracelets of gold and diamonds worth thousands of pounds, a look very far from "simple and natural."
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The journalist from the
Town and Country Magazine
had been exactly right: the consequence of the marriage was a striking increase in Sir William's expenses.

The new Lady Hamilton became the ideal courtier: willing to be at the queen's beck and call, always ready to flatter and entertain, and attentive to her smallest concern. As an actress's maid, Emma had learned how to serve demanding women with sensitivity, and her skills came in doubly useful with the queen. Just as the king issued his commands on the hunting field, so the queen's affairs of state were intermingled with dressmaking, child care, and social gossip. Emma and the queen read together, talked in French, and exchanged mementoes and tokens of friendship. The Hamiltons were soon invited to every royal occasion and were in daily attendance. In private, she and the queen were very intimate, but in large assemblies, as she described to Greville, she pretended to be just one
of the crowd, keeping a prudent distance. Discretion was crucial: the court was humming with spies reporting back to the French on whether the Neapolitans would capitulate, and the French ambassador was vigilantly alert to the burgeoning intimacy between the British envoy and the royal family.

Maria Carolina became more intent on developing relations with the British in 1792, after the sudden death in March of her brother, Emperor Leopold of Austria. Only twenty years before, it had all been wonderfully cozy—the monarchs of Europe intermarried into one big chummy family, devoted to hunting, squandering their fortunes on ludicrously enormous buildings, and parading their kingly roles in pompous processions. Now they were falling. The queen believed Leopold had been poisoned by French agents. With his death, another monarch with the power to resist her great enemy was gone.

The position of the French royal family deteriorated fast after Emma's visit to Paris with her new husband. In August 1792, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI were taken from the Tuileries and imprisoned. The mob began to attack their friends, beginning with the Princesse de Lamballe, Marie-Antoinette's close friend. In September, inflamed by scurrilous cartoons depicting her in lurid sexual positions with the queen, the crowd brought the princess before their tribunal and sentenced her to death. There was no dignified death by guillotine for the gentle, dippy princess. She was immediately knocked down by a hammer. The crowd then fell on her and hacked off her breasts and raped her to death, so frenzied that they continued to violate her corpse. Her head was torn from her body and plunged onto a pike, her body ripped open and the intestines hung on another pike. The people hoisted up the pike and paraded her head through Paris to show Marie-Antoinette in the tower. News of the princess's horrific fate swept across Europe in sensational reports and sickening cartoons depicting the mob eating her heart.

When the French republic was declared on September 22,1792, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina refused to recognize it and snubbed their new French ambassador. The queen was desperate to declare war against the French, but Ferdinand was doubtful. A proposed alliance against France of the Italian states, Spain, and Austria collapsed. The Neapolitan navy was weak, and the army had spent the last decade assisting with Ferdinand's hunting expeditions. It seemed to the queen that only Britain, with its huge navy and intimidating empire, had the power to protect them.

The Hamiltons spent much of 1792 at Caserta, often up and dressed for attendance as early as seven o'clock in the morning. Emma rambled around the English Garden with her husband, waiting for Maria Carolina to issue a summons. Despite her admission to the heart of Neapolitan affairs, she was intent on never losing her Englishness. As she reassured Greville, "we allways drink tea."

CHAPTER 27
A Very Extraordinary Woman

B
ack in England, Emma was a style leader. At Queen Charlotte's birthday gala a few months after Emma departed, almost every woman was dressed "á la Lady Hamilton" in flowing, simple white crepe and satin, embroidered in silver, gathered with a silver or diamond belt, with their hair arranged in a loose Grecian style, circled with a jeweled headband and a few feathers. The queen's birthday fashions had the influence of the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood today, and the style reports set women rushing to their dressmakers for copies. The Duchess of York's dress was, according to one reporter, "the most magnificent and tasteful which her Royal Highness has worn in Britain": a petticoat of white crepe "embroidered with lilac stones and silver spangles," drapery embroidered with flowers, edged with a deep fringe of lilac beads and silver, and ornamented with chains of diamonds falling across the body. She wore flat slippers and her hair was simply gathered and adorned with a feather and a few diamonds.
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The
Lady's Magazine
was the lead fashion magazine, consulted by fine ladies, dressmakers, and genteel women alike, and it began to promote the "á la Emma" look in earnest. In October, it declared the essential autumn outfit for the "most elegant women" was "white linen or muslin petticoats, scalloped at the bottom without any flounces," with flat slippers like those for dancing. The ensemble was topped with a cap similar to that worn by Emma in the
Town and Country Magazine
caricature of 1790: small, set low on the forehead, and short at the ears, with narrow borders of fine edging. The journalist sternly instructed readers that the Emma dress "has already been adopted by the Duchess of Rutland, Lady Anne
Fitzroy, Lady Smith, Mrs Robinson, Lady Charlotte Lennox, and many other elegant women, and it is to be hoped, will abolish the
enormous
headdresses of the
last three winters.
"
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A style Emma had developed to flatter her taller figure and wide hips became modish for women of all sizes. The fashion frenzy struck even Charles Greville. In June 1793, he reported to Sir William that all the dresses at the king's birthday gala in the same month "had been evidently an imitation of her." He declared his ex-mistress's style as the first and the most superior: "far more adorning than all the trappings of French milliners on awkward inanimate damsels." Emma's portraits, her performances, and her appearances in London had turned her into a fashion leader, even though she was many miles away. Some reports were more salacious. The
Times
declared Emma had begun a fashion for padding the bosom that had "lowered the character of many young ladies," for it was thought that they stuffed their cleavages to confuse suitors during heavy petting. Soon, the journalist joked, the Lady Hamilton vogue for "pads will not leave an unsullied female, married or unmarried, reputation in the circle of fashion."
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