England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [90]
Emma's departure plunged Romney into depression. Although September was a busy time for portrait painting, he did not take another sitter for nearly six weeks. Locked up in his Cavendish Square studio, he tried to exorcise his feelings of loss by drawing Emma repeatedly in frenzied sketches, which grew increasingly nightmarish and sexual. In some she swirls her drapery like a goddess; in others, sometimes she is a nude, or weeping woman. In one, he let his tormented imagination flow and drew a nymph being stripped by a grimacing satyr who has Romney's face. Trying and failing to forget her with a French mistress, Thelassie, Romney began to work up the studies he had made during the summer of 1791 in to full portraits. Emma was becoming respectable as Lady Hamilton and moving toward her thirties, but in Romney's portraits she remained laughing and malleable, forever young.
Sir William's effort to avoid publicity by marrying in the early morning failed. The news was flashed around London. Sir James Burgess, the foreign undersecretary of state, was shocked that Emma, whom he had visited with William at Romney's studio, had married the king's envoy12 Beckford marveled that his friend had "actually married his Gallery of Statues." An old school friend wrote to congratulate Sir William on the "manly part you have taken in braving the world and securing your happiness and elegant enjoyment in defiance of them." Sir William had no regrets. He declared robustly, "It has often been remarked that a reformed rake makes a good husband. Why not vice versa?"
∗ The Marquis of Abercorn, a distant relation of William, and Louis Dutens, rector of Elsdon in Northumberland and formerly secretary to the English minister at Turin, were witnesses.
Most couples spent the weeks after marriage paying wedding visits to relatives. Sir William ensured they left London for Italy after two nights. Their speedy departure only fanned the flames of press speculation. The three most popular magazines recorded the wedding: the European Magazine, the Lady's Magazine, and the Gentleman's Magazine. All called Emma "Miss Hart" rather than Amy Lyon, and the Gentleman's Magazine declared her "much celebrated for her elegant accomplishments and great musical abilities."13 The gossipy New Lady's Magazine noted the marriage and opened the same issue with "An Essay on Second Marriages," a virulent attack that suggested that the widower who remarried "must stand convicted in a deficiency of affection and gratitude."14 The journalist illustrated the stern advice with a prediction, disguised as a tale, of Emma's fate. Although the heroine's "only qualifications" were beauty and grace, she captured a top aristocrat at a ball but soon regretted marrying a man so much her social superior because she could never be his equal. The Morning Herald jibed how Mrs. Hart, "of whose feminine graces and musical accomplishments all Europe resounds, was but a few years back the inferior housemaid of Mrs Linley" Richard Hewton produced The Wife Wears the Breeches, a caricature of a newly married couple who look like Sir William and Emma: he waits in bed while she dons a pair of trousers, a reference to her theatrical past and a clear suggestion that she controlled him. One poetically inclined wit suggested that Emma would be unfaithful and might even return to work as a Covent Garden streetwalker:
O Knight of Naples, is it come to pass
That thou has left the gods of stone and brass,
To wed a Deity of flesh and blood?
O lock the