England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [73]
Emma could not believe his hypocrisy. Exploited from the age of fourteen, she had thought that Greville had saved her, and she had grown proud of her hard-won respectability. As she knew, mistresses tended to be passed on to progressively poorer protectors, and she expected that Sir William would keep her for no longer than a year and then pass her on.
Oh Greville, you cannot, you must not give me up, you have not the heart to do it, you love me I am sure & I am willing to do everything in my power that you shall require of me & what will you have more and I onely say this the last time, I will either beg or pray, do as you like.
How could he treat in such a way "a girl that a King etc etc is sighing for"? She begged him to let her "live with you on the hundred a year Sir Wm will give me." "I have ever had a foreboding, since I first begun to love you, that I was not destined to be happy with you," she wrote. As she cried in her room, Sir William began to regret his part in the whole affair. He admitted to Joseph Banks that he thought it was a "bad job to come from the Nephew to the Uncle."8
By November, Greville realized he had underestimated his mistress. After six months, Emma was still refusing to become Sir William's mistress. Unable to admit to himself that Emma was distressed by his cavalier behavior, Greville decided she considered Sir William too old. He instructed his uncle to find her a middle-class protector, no "boy of family," but a gentleman from "25 to 35, & one who is his own master," which implied married, rather than subject to parental control. He was willing for her to return home and live off a hundred pounds a year, but only if she lived nowhere near him. Emma's choices looked bleak. She knew very well that pensions promised by men tended to dry up when the woman had no male relatives to pursue the debt. Greville's cruel treatment finally induced Emma to fall out of love with him. Deciding herself "poor, helpless and forlorn," she understood that she could never win him back, however much she promised to be good.
In the months that followed Greville's brutal August letter, Emma saw Sir William anew. He comforted her and tried to distract her from her sadness, and she became more dependent on him as a shoulder to cry on. She already had affectionate feelings toward him as a friend, and soon she found herself increasingly attracted to him. He was interesting, kind, and still handsome, and he treated her with tact and respect. In even her most vehement letters, she had never suggested she found him unattractive or unlovable, but stressed that she was not looking for another man since she was a faithful mistress to Greville. Now that her first lover had abandoned her, there was a vacancy in her heart. Emma was always looking for someone to love, and she longed to be needed—and lonely, Sir William seemed to need her so much. It would not be the first time a woman fell in love with a friend she knew desired her.
Sir William courted Emma intensely, and just before Christmas their friendship developed into a full-blown affair. Almost as soon as they became intimate, Emma fell heavily in love with Sir William, surprising herself with the strength of her feelings. "I love you & sincerely," she confessed to him on Boxing Day. On Christmas night, Sir William had left her in Caserta and traveled to Naples to attend court, and she was missing him dreadfully. "Yesterday, when you went a whey from me," she told him, "I thought all my heart and soul was torn from me." She was intent on becoming the type of woman he desired. "If sometimes I am out of humer," she entreated, "forgive me, tell me, put me in a whey to be grateful to you for you[r] kindness to me." She pledged that "in a little time all faults will be corrected" and promised, "you will have much pleasure to come home to me again, and I will setle you and comfort you."9
In January, she returned to Naples and he followed the king and queen to Caserta. She wrote