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By Root 1295 0

liked her friends to be. She also had an innate sense of style, and Maria Carolina relied on her confidantes for assistance with her wardrobe and advice on dress. And, unlike many of the women at court, Emma had not slept with the king. The queen's motives were most of all strategic. The Neapolitan court, Sir William nervously reported, was "actively employed in preparing against any sudden attack," and Maria Carolina was flurried by "alarm and uncertainty" that the French would invade Naples.3 Intent on finding out the plans of the British government and suspicious of Sir William, she paid particular attention to the new Lady Hamilton, who seemed to have unlimited influence over her wily husband.

At the same time, she worried constantly about Marie-Antoinette and implored Emma for details about her sister's health. As Emma later wrote, "At Paris, I waited on the Queen there at the Tuilleries, who entrusted me with the last letter she wrote to her Sister the Queen of Naples; this led to an ascendency in Her Majesty's Esteem."4 Maria Carolina wept that she could not respond to her sister's plea for help. Emperor Leopold of Austria, their brother, refused to intervene, and if he would not act, she had no chance of encouraging Ferdinand to do so. Emma was her ally in her grief, and in the process she managed to gain the queen's sympathy. According to Sir William, she "very naturally told her whole story & that all her desire was by her future conduct to shew her gratitude to me, and to prove to the world that a young, beautiful Woman, tho' of obscure birth, could have noble sentiments and act properly in the great World."

Maria Carolina was attracted to Emma as a political ally and also as a personal friend. Surrounded by jaded aristocrats, cynical courtiers almost from the moment they were born, the queen took pleasure in Emma's genuine excitement about her new surroundings. By late 1792, to the shock of the jealous court, Lady Hamilton had become the queen's special favorite, a spy at the heart of plush Caserta.5 The queen began to sign her letters to Emma "Charlotte," as she did only to her siblings and closest friends. Sir William was thrilled. "Altho we have had many Ladies of the first rank from England here lately & indeed such as give the Ton in London, the Queen of Naples remarked that Emma's deportment was infinitely superior. She is often with the Queen, who really loves her."

Emma boasted that the queen esteemed her for being "simple and natural," but the friendship was political. They shed tears together over Marie-Antoinette, swapped fears about anti-monarchist riots and the advance of the French, and quickly began to plot to advance a relationship between Britain and Naples. To be the queen's friend, Emma needed an elaborate wardrobe of dresses, shoes, necklaces, tiaras, and bracelets of gold and diamonds worth thousands of pounds, a look very far from "simple and natural."6 The journalist from the Town and Country Magazine had been exactly right: the consequence of the marriage was a striking increase in Sir William's expenses.

The new Lady Hamilton became the ideal courtier: willing to be at the queen's beck and call, always ready to flatter and entertain, and attentive to her smallest concern. As an actress's maid, Emma had learned how to serve demanding women with sensitivity, and her skills came in doubly useful with the queen. Just as the king issued his commands on the hunting field, so the queen's affairs of state were intermingled with dressmaking, child care, and social gossip. Emma and the queen read together, talked in French, and exchanged mementoes and tokens of friendship. The Hamiltons were soon invited to every royal occasion and were in daily attendance. In private, she and the queen were very intimate, but in large assemblies, as she described to Greville, she pretended to be just one of the crowd, keeping a prudent distance. Discretion was crucial: the court was humming with spies reporting back to the French on whether the Neapolitans would capitulate, and the French ambassador was vigilantly