England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [100]
Emma and Sir William conducted their visitors around the city, to court, to dinners and to assemblies, and to their box at the opera. Scattered in archives and collections across the country are dozens of affectionate invitations from Emma to her guests. In one warm letter, she promised Lady Throckmorton that had the Countess of Plymouth come to visit, "I wou'd have ciceronised her all day & at night music and attitudes wou'd have diverted her."5 All self-respecting tourists called on ciceroni, famously learned and devoted guides, to show them the city and to take care of their every need. Most of her visitors required "ciceroning" to shops and dealers, as well as help with buying and bargaining, and many sent requests to the Palazzo Sessa for the envoy and his wife to pick up souvenirs they had forgotten and send them on. Some important visitors behaved like film stars, accustomed to constant attention. Many traveled to improve their health, and Emma was called upon to tend the ill and comfort the bereaved. Lady Spencer had fond memories of Emma's assiduous nursing of her daughter, Harriet, Lady Duncannon, who was suffering from pneumonia.6 When they recovered, they wanted to see the attractions Emma had visited tens of times—the ceremony when the holy blood held at San Gennaro Church liquefied, the coast and islands, the king's china factory at St. Leu-cio, the court, and one of the king's country seats, Carditello, where Ferdinand pressed his guests to spend hours examining his cows and pigs.
Emma was excited to entertain the Devonshire set, and she sympathized with Georgiana, for her husband had exiled her for giving birth to Charles Grey's child, but she was less entranced by the many other dreary and boorish guests, sometimes up to eighty at a time. Many times a week, Emma, radiating smiles and sparkling with diamonds, presided over a bout of gambling or whist, sang Handel, and presented her Attitudes. One astute squire spotted that Emma was weary of performing her famous poses, but most had no recognition of how much their visits drained Emma's patience and Sir William's purse. Hamilton continued to spend, believing that the English government would compensate him in due course and also hoping the same aristocrats would repay him with hospitality when he returned to England.
Everyone was eager to judge Emma, particularly the younger women. Lady Palmerston thought her not as beautiful as she had expected, but exquisitely dressed and "very good humoured," and decided that "her desire to please and her extreme civility is very uncommon." She thought—like everyone else—that the couple was "rather too fond." Emma hosted a dinner for the Palmerstons and more than fifty others, and Lady Palmerston decided she looked "extremely handsome, and really does the honours exceedingly well… Sir William perfectly idolises her and I do not wonder he is proud of so magnificent a marble, belonging so entirely to himself."
Lady Palmerston gives us a rare insight into how the guests perceived Emma's mother. Mrs. Cadogan, she wrote to her brother, "looks like a lady you have more often found useful than I could ever have done." Her brother was a terrible reprobate and the women he found useful were prostitutes, madams, and the odd cookshop owner as he was stumbling home. Perhaps Mrs. Cadogan put Lady Palmerston in mind of all three occupations at once. The English were perhaps a little insulted, for many had heard that Sir William permitted Mrs. Cadogan to attend the English parties but not those of his Neapolitan friends. Lady Palmerston slipped in a note of Emma's background: "Lady H. is to me very surprising, for considering the situation she was in, she behaves wonderfully well. Now and then to be sure a little vulgarness pops out, but I think it's more Sir William's fault, who loves a good joke and leads her to enter into his stories, which are not of the best kind."7
Most people describe Emma similarly: she was a friendly hostess and eager to please, well mannered and attractive, and Sir