England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [6]
In later years, Mary's brother, William, repeatedly demanded money from Emma and her mother. He always received it, perhaps because he threatened to tell scandal-mongeringjournalists the truth about Henry's death.
Emma never returned to Ness, but its legacy remained. She inherited her mother's impetuousness and her father's forceful personality. The poor daughter of a young bride whose husband had died in shady circumstances, little Amy Lyon was in the same class as thousands of other children who grew up to supply England with its beggars, criminals, and prostitutes.
CHAPTER 2
Liquor and Honey
Little Amy had to toughen up quickly. In her new home, money was sparse and the struggling Kidds resented Mary. Sarah Kidd took pity on her little granddaughter, seemingly so unlucky from birth, but few others did so. Emma always identified herself as a girl from the north of England, despite the fact that she had hardly lived there. Her twelve years in Hawarden was a period she tried hard to forget.
Hawarden (pronounced Harden) is now a prosperous village seven miles west of Chester, with a church, a family pub, and a post office. In the 1760s, however, the area was among the country's most impoverished. Hawarden served the estate and mine of Broad Lane Hall (now called Hawarden Castle), owned by Sir John Glynne, whose father had inherited Hawarden in 1721. About 3,500 villagers lived in stone cottages and mud hovels crammed around a dirt road about half a mile long. A church, a few shops, three or so public houses, and a makeshift jail or village lockup constituted their services. Sir John Glynne employed most villagers in his mine, dairy, fields, and farm or took on the lucky ones as house servants. The others scrabbled out a living as hired labor.
Britain was gripped by an agricultural depression caused by the industrialization of farm practices (reducing the need for workers) and a series of poor harvests in the 1750s. As the country became more dependent on grain imports, prices soared. It was impossible—as many commentators showed in careful sums—for even a skilled laborer to feed and clothe himself, a wife, and two children, and most men had at least four children. Families ran up debts they could never repay. The press whipped up hysteria about the spiraling cost of wheat, investors put their money into anything but land or farming, and the poor went hungry. Young men escaped to the mines or joined the army, leaving villages such as Hawarden inhabited by the unemployable, the sick, and women struggling to subsist. Households without a man in employment were the most destitute. Languishing at the bottom of the rural economy, Emma's new family had no food or money to spare and little room in their ramshackle cottage for a disruptive newborn baby and her wild-eyed mother.
Accounts of Emma's background have been promoted that the surviving records reveal as quite wrong. Most far-fetched of all is the notion that Henry Lyon gave up his life as an aristocrat to marry Mary. No member of the gentry would have worked as a smith or signed his marriage certificate with an X, the mark of an illiterate. The Kidds have also been misrepresented: Emma's mother was not seventeen when she gave birth but twenty-two. Her grandfather was not a drunken shepherd but a collier, and he was dead by the time Mary left for Ness. The family was poor because Sarah was widowed, not because her husband was feckless.
The parish registers in the period give an impression of Hawarden as a close-knit society: the same surnames and even first names recur. But Emma's grandparents, Thomas and Mary