England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [101]
The Kidds were living reminders of Emma's squalid background, and Sir William rather wished they might disappear. Emma felt guilty about her grandmother, sickly and infirm, and struggling for money, and she was trying to help her without Sir William discovering. She fretted to Greville that she wore a court dress in November that cost £25 and felt "unhappy all the while I had it on," since she had "2 hundred a year for nonsense, & it wou'd be hard I cou'd not give her twenty pounds when she as so often given me her last shilling." She begged him to send her grandmother £20 at Christmas, and asked him to "write to her a line from me or send to her & tell her by my order" for "if the time passes without hearing from me she may imagine I have forgot her & I wou'd not keep her poor old heart in suspense for the world."
Emma vowed to send her grandmother money every Christmas. But throughout the first half of 1793 Sarah Kidd grew frailer and finally died in July, at the age of seventy-eight. Her grave is nowhere to be found in the large graveyard of Hawarden Church. She was probably buried very simply with only a wooden cross marking where she lay. Mrs. Kidd's life could hardly have been more different from that of her granddaughter. She could never read or write, married young, and brought up a large family in a mining village, moving from village to village as her husband tried to find work as a collier. After his death, she supported her entire family. Throughout her life, her mind was focused on finding the next meager meal, and her days were almost entirely limited to the four walls of her hovel and the mile or so around. She had never seen London, or any more of England than Chester for the last sixty years, and Emma's adventures in London and beyond were something like a fairy tale: far away and utterly bewildering. She could not comprehend the lives of her daughter or granddaughter, but she understood all too well the sad situation of poor lonely little Emma, deemed too genteel to live with her but not genteel enough to stay in the palazzo with her mother. Humbly marked down in the parish register as "widow of Thomas, Collier," the grandmother of England's most famous woman was given a simple funeral and burial at Hawarden, where she had lived for all of Emma's life.
Emma had not seen her grandmother for ten years. But there was no way she and her mother could journey across revolutionary Europe for a funeral—at least not on their own. Mrs. Cadogan and Emma had to comfort each other in private.
In January 1793, Louis XVI of France was executed and Ferdinand commanded the court to go into mourning. The queen was doubly determined to encourage her husband to fight the French and declared that she hoped Louis's death "will implore a striking and visible vengeance… and that on this account the Powers of Europe will have no more than a single united will." She wrote to Emma that she looked to Emma's generous nation to provide this vengeance.9
In February, the new government of France, determined to be respected as the European superpower, declared war on England and Holland. The English government began sending envoys to Naples to encourage the king and queen to ally with England. At the end of the previous year, the French had sent out warships