Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (3 page)

Only two sisters of Emma's mother are generally mentioned. Both of these seem also to have risen above their station. The one married a Mr. John

Moore, afterwards, it would seem, successful in business at Liverpool, but at one time addressed by Emma at the house of a Mr. Potter in Harley Street. The other was a Mrs. Connor, who had six children, all of them long supported by Lady Hamilton: one of them, Sarah, to be the governess both at Merton and Cran-wich, was well educated; another, Cecilia, became an accomplished singer, and also a (though a less capable) preceptress. Ann, the eldest, and Eliza both rose above their sphere, though they proved most ungrateful ; while Charles, who entered the Navy under Nelson's protection, could write an excellent letter, but unfortunately went mad, for, as Lady Hamilton recorded in a very curious statement regarding four of them, " there was madness in the family." Ann's showed itself in eventually asserting that she was Lady Hamilton's daughter, for which there is no evidence; indeed, to her must be traced the unfounded rumour spread by the chronique scandaleuse of the time that Ann, Eliza, and Charles were Greville's three children. Mary, too, was to be popular, and with all her sisters intimate with the whole Nelson and Hamilton family, as well as with Sir William Hamilton's relations.

Lady Hamilton's mother had also a third sister, Ann, who married " Richard Reynolds, Whitesmith," in 1774. The Sarah (misspelt "Reynalds") who finds a mention as grateful to her titled cousin in the Morrison correspondence, was probably his daughter. She may further have had another brother or cousin, William, an entry regarding whom and his wife Mary finds place also in the Hawarden parish books. There were the " Nicolls," whom, just before her own bankruptcy, Emma is found continuously maintaining with the rest of her connections. And finally there are traces of friends—of her Parkgate landlady in 1784,

Mrs. Downward, and of a Mrs. Ladmore whom she seems to have known.

When we remember the bright and intelligent letters that remain of this Connor family, their acquirements, and the way in which they were treated and received, the fairy-tale of Lady Hamilton's conquest over circumstance seems to have extended also to her relations.

Nothing can be proved of Emma's childhood but that it was passed at Hawarden in extreme poverty, that she was a madcap, and that she blossomed early and fairly into stature and ripeness beyond her age. At sixteen (or perhaps thirteen) she was already a grown woman, which explains the puzzled Greville's inquiry for the register of her baptism. The most ridiculous romances were spread during her lifetime and after it. Hairbreadth escapes and Family Herald love-stories, regardless of facts or dates, adorn the pages of a novel published in the fifties, and professing to be circumstantial;* while Alexandre Dumas has embroidered his Souvenirs d'Une Favorite with all the wild scandals of a teeming imagination. The earliest certainty is that at some thirteen years of age she entered the service of Mr. Thomas of Hawarden, the father of a London physician, and brother-in-law of the famous art patron, Alderman Boydell of London. Miss Thomas was the first to sketch Emma while she was their nurse-maid. The drawing survives at Hawarden, and the Thomases always remained her friends. Whether it is possible that the roving Rom-ney may have seen her there must be left to fancy. It is at least a curious fact that she came so early into indirect touch with art. The loose rumour ascribing her departure from Hawarden to the severity of her first master or mistress is entirely without foundation. 1 Nelson's Legacy.

A far more probable conjecture is that she left Hawarden for London because her mother left also. It seems probable from the letter to Greville, already quoted, as well as from Greville's answer, which will soon follow, that Mrs. " Cadogan " was already in some London situation known to and approved of by Greville.

About the end, then, of 1779 or the beginning of 1780, when Emma was some fifteen years of age, she repaired with her mother to the capital; and there seems little doubt that she found employment with Dr. Budd, a surgeon of repute, at Chatham Place, near St. James's Market. A comrade with her in this service was the talented and refined woman afterwards famed as the actress, Jane Powell, who is not to be confused with the older Harriet Powell, eventually Lady Sea-forth. When Sir William and Lady Hamilton returned home in 1800, they attended a performance at Drury Lane, where Emma and her old fellow-servant were the cynosure of an audience ignorant of their former association. When Lady Hamilton was at Southend in the late summer of 1803 she again met her quondam colleague. Pettigrew possessed and quoted a nice letter from her on this occasion. It is assuredly not among the least of the many marvels attending Emma's progress that an eminent surgeon should have harboured two such belles in his area.

And now Apocrypha is renewed. Gossip has it that she served in a shop; that she became parlourmaid elsewhere, and afterwards the risky " companion " of a vicious " Lady of Quality." The Prince Regent, who was years afterwards to solicit and be repulsed by her, used to declare that he recollected her selling fruit with wooden pattens on her feet; but he also used to insist, it must be recollected, on his own presence at the battle of Waterloo. It was said, too,

that she had been a model for the Academy students. For such canards there is no certainty, and for many rumours there is slight foundation. But there is a shade of evidence to show that somewhere about 1781 she was in the service of the manager of Drury Lane Theatre, Sheridan's father-in-law, Thomas Linley the elder, and that she suddenly quitted it from grief at the death of his young son, a naval lieutenant, whom she had nursed. Angelo in his Reminiscences has drawn the pathetic picture of his chance meeting with her in Rathbone Place, a dejected figure clad in deep mourning; he has added an earlier encounter and an allusion to her brief sojourn with the " Abbess " of Arlington Street, Mrs. Kelly, who may be identical with the " Lady of Quality." If so, destitution must have caused her downfall. Hitherto this girl of sixteen, so beautiful that passers-by turned spellbound to look at her, had rejected all overtures of evil. Writing to Romney after her marriage, in a letter which seems to imply that she had known him even before her acquaintance with Greville, Lady Hamilton thus recalls her past: " You have seen and discoursed with me in my poorer days, you have known me in my poverty and prosperity, and I had no occasion to have lived for years in poverty and distress if I had not felt something of virtue in my mind. Oh, my dear friend, for a time I own through distress my virtue was vanquished, but my sense of virtue was not overcome." Some two years earlier, when she had insisted on accompanying Sir William on a shooting expedition, and he had evidently remonstrated about hardship, rough lodging did not deter her; she had been accustomed to it.

From Angelo's story it would appear that her earliest admirer was Fetherstonehaugh, who will soon cross the scene, and who in her later years was to

emerge friendly and even respectful. But the name of her first betrayer has been so constantly given as that of " Captain," afterwards Rear-Admiral, " Jack " Wil-let-Payne, man of fashion, member of Parliament, and eventually treasurer of Greenwich Hospital, that the story cannot be wholly discredited. Tradition has added that she first encountered him in a bold attempt to rescue a cousin from being impressed into the service. This may or may not be. The sole sidelight, afforded by an unnoticed letter from Nelson of 1 801, which proves that she had confided much of her past to her hero, more probably refers to Greville: " That other chap did throw away the most precious jewel that God ever sent on this earth."

Her relations with the Captain can scarcely have lasted more than about two months. If she was his Ariadne, he sailed away in haste, nor does he darken her path again. It was perhaps on his sudden departure that this lonely girl fell in with Dr. Graham, the empiric and showman. How she met him is unknown: that he was anything to her but an employer has never been suggested; that he ever employed her at all rests merely on a story, so accredited by Petti-grew, who had known several of her early contemporaries, that one can hardly doubt it. The sole evidence that she ever "posed" for him.is to be found in Greville's reply to Emma's appeal already cited: in it Greville speaks of the last time you came to " G.," which Mr. Jeaffreson guesses to mean " Graham." It may, however, at once be noted that his living advertisement of the goddess of health and beauty, " Hebe Vestina," did not figure in his museum of specifics until 1782, when he had removed from the Adelphi to Pall Mall, and had there opened his " Temple of Hymen " in the eastern part of Schomberg House, the western side of which had been leased to Gainsborough

by the eccentric artist and adventurer, Jack Astley. The strong probability is that Emma was first engaged by him as a singer in those miniature mock-oratorios and cantatas, composed by himself, which played such a part in his miscellany, and were supposed to attune the souls of the faithful; while her expressive beauty may have soon tempted him to exhibit her as the draped statue of " Hygieia," or Goddess of Health, though certainly not as his later tableau vivant of " Hebe Vestina."

Dr. Graham was no common impostor. He belongs to the class of charlatan that unites pseudo-mysticism and pseudo-piety to real skill—in short, a High Priest of Pompeian Isis. He was no mere conjurer; he effected genuine cures besides dealing in quack remedies. At this time he was about forty years of age. He may have qualified in Edinburgh University; he had certainly travelled in France and America, and received testimonials from personages at home and abroad. He knew his classics, which he quoted profusely in those curious " lectures " combining puff with literary, satirical, scriptural, philanthropic, and scientific allusion. His brother had married the " historian," Mrs. Catharine Macaulay, who often figures in his florid catalogues of cures. That authoress is depicted in mezzo-tints as a sickly-looking lady, pen in hand, with a row of her volumes before her, trying apparently to draw inspiration from the ceiling. He was never tired of assuring the public that she was own sister to " Mr. John Sawbridge, M.P. for London." He posed as a sort of prayerful alchemist, eradicating and healing at once the causes of vice, and its consequences. His advertisements are a queer union of cant earnestness, travestied truth, sensible nonsense, humour and the lack of it, effrontery and belief— especially in himself. After he had closed his costly:

and ruinous London exhibitions, he turned " Christian Philosopher " at Bath and Newcastle, anticipated the modern open-air . cure, " paraphrased " the Lord's Prayer for the public, the Book of Wisdom for the Prince of Wales, and hastened to lay on the pillow of the suffering George III. one of his numerous "prayers." His specialty in 1780 (and throughout his career) was the then derided but now accepted electricity and mud-baths. By their means he claimed to restore and preserve beauty, to prolong existence, to enable a decayed generation to repair its losses by a vigorous, comely, and healthful progeny. He had opened a pinchbeck palace enriched with symbolical paintings, gilt statues, and coloured windows, where up to ten o'clock nightly he advertised his wares to the sound of sweet music, in his " Temple of yEscu-lapius " at the Royal Terrace, Adelphi. His pamphlets, sermons, hymns, exhortations, and satires, were rained on the town. In one of these pieces of fulsome reclame he describes his museum of elixirs as Emma may have viewed it in 1780 or 1781. Over the porch stood the inscription " Templum ./Esculapio Sacrum." There were three gorgeously decorated rooms with galleries above, and pictures of heroes and kings, including Alfred the Great. Crystal glass pillars enshrined the costly electrical apparatus for reviving youth and strength. The third chamber was the tinsel " Temple of Apollo " with its magnetic " celestial bed," with its gilt dragons, overarching " Pavilion," and inscription, " Dolorifica res est si quis homo dives nullum habet domi suse successorem." " But on the right of the Temple," he says, " is strikingly seen a beautiful figure of Fecundity," holding her cornucopia and surrounded by reclining children; and above all, an " electric" " celestial glory," which, mellowed by the stained windows, shed a dim and solemn light. Strains of

majestic melody filled the air; and here also were sold his " Nervous Balsam " and " Electrical ^Ether "; while in the mornings this reverse of " seraphic " doctor punctually attended consultations in the dwelling-rooms adjoining.

Whether such ambrosial tomfoolery yielded Emma an intermittent livelihood at all, and whether before she loved Willet-Payne or after, remains doubtful; the latter is more probable. The blatant novelty-monger offered prizes for emblematic pictures, and it is possible that Tresham, or even his friend Romney, might have been pressed into his service. It may well be, too, that here the young blood and baronet, Sir Henry Fetherstonehaugh, became her admirer. As we see him in his letters some thirty years afterwards, this worthy appears as a silly old beau and sportsman, indulging in compliments pompous as his political reflections, and interlarding his correspondence with superfluous French. In his old age he educated and married a most worthy peasant girl, and brought her sister (also educated in France) to reside with them at Up Park, while from Lady Fetherstonehaugh the estate passed into that sister's possession.

Up Park (like Willet-Payne) was fraught with dreams of the fleet, for from its lofty position on the steep Sussex Downs it commands a prospect of Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. Here this erring and struggling girl, for a brief space, it may be in 1781, became the mistress of the mansion and its roystering owner, both Nimrod and Macaroni. Here she " witched the world with noble horsemanship," for she was always a fearless rider. Here, among rakes, she could not rest, as she sighed for the artistic admiration which her tableau vivant in the Adelphi had already aroused among clever Bohemians. Here, perhaps in despair, she became so reckless and capricious,

so hopeless of that peace of mind and happy innocence which, ten years later, she joyfully assured Romney had been restored to her by marriage, that she was ejected and cast adrift at the very moment when she found herself soon to become a mother. That she was " a girl in reall distres " for the first time (and not, as has often been presumed, for the second) will be shown when we come to " little Emma," and it is here evidenced by her entreaty that Greville would spare her mother any knowledge of this fresh and crushing blow.