England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [65]
Emma was nearly twenty-one, and the passions and demons that would drive her far were firmly in place. Her childhood had made her ambitious, hungry for the limelight and afraid of rejection, always insecure and driven by a desire to please and win praise. Greville's strictures kept her on edge, aware that her position depended on correct behavior. Energy, kindness, and enthusiasm were her best features, an egomania born of insecurity the worst. When Emma later summarized her friend Lord Bristol as "very entertaining & dashes at every thing, nor does he mind King or Queen when he is inclined to show his talents," she described herself. Like many energetic, attention-seeking, and gregarious party lovers, she could be unreliable, tardy, and thoughtless. She had great self-confidence but little self-knowledge. Emma was a terrible judge of character, which made her generous but always vulnerable to exploitation. Often slightly tense, she was exciting but never relaxing company, and she threw herself into frenetic social activity to escape the low spirits that engulfed her when she felt alone.
Sir William was taking (in Greville's words) the "prettiest woman… in London," already famous for her beauty and her scandalous past. In her absence, prints of her as Magdalens, bacchantes, and goddesses circulated, and the legends about her grew. Everyone knew she was leaving. As the World newspaper tittered at the time of her departure, any of the "dozen portraits" of Emma by Romney "might have gone abroad with Sir W. Hamilton and answered his purposes full as well as the piece he has taken with him, a piece more cumbrous and changeable than any of the foregoing."
CHAPTER 18
Torn by Different Passions
After wishing a tearful good-bye to Greville, Emma set off for Naples with her mother and Gavin Hamilton on March 13, 1786. The trio traveled in a southeasterly direction through France, attempting to avoid the unrest that was beginning to overtake the country. As they scrimped along in hired coaches to eke out Sir William's gift of £50, English aristocrats swished past them in glossy, brand-new carriages equipped with maids, doctors, cartloads of furniture, and hampers of food and drink. Emma's party had only minimal comforts, and they feared the ordeal of crossing the Alps. Carriages had to be dismantled and carried over in pieces, while their inhabitants were bumped over the peaks in an "Alp Machine," a sedan chair attached by ropes to poles carried by two to four porters. Worried about her mother's weak state of health, Emma probably paid out to take a boat up the Rhone from Marseille to Geneva. Once they reached Switzerland, they could relax. Sir William's servant was waiting for them at Geneva, ready to whisk them into one of his master's most stylish carriages, equipped with a full purse to take care of their needs.
Eighteenth-century travelers dreaded southern Italy. James Boswell declared his bones almost broken by the roads. Henry Ellis, famous for attempting the Northwest Passage, grumbled he would rather circumnavigate the globe than travel from Rome to Naples. Horrified by the grubby hotels, most English rode straight from Rome, stopping only to change horses, a drive that took about twenty-five hours, arriving in Naples in the middle of the night. Hopefully, Emma also did so, sparing her mother the grimy hotel where, according to one traveler, the rooms shuddered to draughts while the windows were covered only with splintered, broken shutters, through which the rain splattered onto the beds.1 Unlike all the aristocrats, however, Emma had lived in slums and was