England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [50]
After the debacle at Ranelagh, she found her way around the rules but was careful never to break them. Greville was supporting Emma, her daughter, and her mother, and he had rented her a sweet little house and was kind to her as long as she obeyed him. Few canny girls would demur to dress up as a nun and feign the mien of a fashionably penitent prostitute in exchange for such security. But most of all she followed Greville's rules because she had fallen in love with him after a few months as his mistress. More engaging and good-natured than he seems in his pompous letters, Greville's standoffish exterior hid a warm sense of humor. He was a reflective man, with a shyness and vulnerability that melted Emma's heart. Believing her lover's boasts that he was Sir William Hamilton's heir and so would soon be rich, she hoped she might be established as his permanent mistress.
Although Greville was uninterested in the Warwick landowners that he represented, he was involved in London politics, particularly, like all Whigs, in the fight between Charles James Fox and Sir Charles Wray for the seat of Westminster in the elections of 1784. Fox had been a minister, but a row over a bill that concerned the East India Company so incensed the king that he dissolved Parliament and appointed the twenty-four-year-old William Pitt as prime minister. In the elections that followed, voting for Fox was, to a certain extent, a vote against the king. Fox's many female supporters wore a special uniform, blue dress and yellow petticoat (after the colors of George Washington's armies in the American war of independence), blue hat with yellow lining, and "elegant balloon ear-rings of three drops, blue and gold, together with elegant gauze sleeves and tippets, with wreaths of laurel, having gilt letters on the leaves inscribed ‘Fox, Liberty, Freedom, and Constitution.’ "8 As her letters reveal, Emma certainly owned many blue dresses and hats while living at Edgware Row, and perhaps Greville encouraged her to dress as a supporter of Fox—in vain, as it happened, for Wray won the seat.9
Greville was pleased with his experiment. His little Magdalen was turning out excellently. As he wrote, she "avoided every appearance of giddiness, and prides herself on the neatness of her person and the good order of her house… She has vanity and likes admiration but she connects it so much with her desire of appearing prudent that she is more pleas'd with accidental admiration than that of crowds which now distress her." Apparently she would rather have Greville's measured praise for buying meat at a bargain price than a crowd of men admiring one of her sensuous dances. As she put it in a letter to him later, "You have made me good."
Emma preserved her newfound security by appearing to be happily acquiescent to her lover's will. She channeled her energy into singing, dancing, and sticking to her strict low-sugar diet. The raw, blowsy girl was slowly transformed into an elegant performer and decorous hostess. Greville's attitude toward Emma was complex: he wanted the real girl docile, retiring, and utterly under his control, but he was ambitious that images of her should be admired. Most of all, he wanted to make money off her. A number of aristocrats had attempted to turn a poor girl to profit through training her to go on the stage, but although Emma was the spitting image of Sarah Siddons, the great tragedienne who was driving Drury Lane wild, Greville had other plans. She would model for paintings, and he would receive a cut of the sale. Emma seized the opportunity to exploit her dramatic talent. As prime muse and model for George Romney she would become London's biggest female celebrity.
CHAPTER 15
London's Muse
On a bleak, rainy Friday morning in March 1782, wrapped up so no one could recognize her, Emma clambered into a discreet carriage and set off for