England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [97]
Maria Carolina became more intent on developing relations with the British in 1792, after the sudden death in March of her brother, Emperor Leopold of Austria. Only twenty years before, it had all been wonderfully cozy—the monarchs of Europe intermarried into one big chummy family, devoted to hunting, squandering their fortunes on ludicrously enormous buildings, and parading their kingly roles in pompous processions. Now they were falling. The queen believed Leopold had been poisoned by French agents. With his death, another monarch with the power to resist her great enemy was gone.
The position of the French royal family deteriorated fast after Emma's visit to Paris with her new husband. In August 1792, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI were taken from the Tuileries and imprisoned. The mob began to attack their friends, beginning with the Princesse de Lamballe, Marie-Antoinette's close friend. In September, inflamed by scurrilous cartoons depicting her in lurid sexual positions with the queen, the crowd brought the princess before their tribunal and sentenced her to death. There was no dignified death by guillotine for the gentle, dippy princess. She was immediately knocked down by a hammer. The crowd then fell on her and hacked off her breasts and raped her to death, so frenzied that they continued to violate her corpse. Her head was torn from her body and plunged onto a pike, her body ripped open and the intestines hung on another pike. The people hoisted up the pike and paraded her head through Paris to show Marie-Antoinette in the tower. News of the princess's horrific fate swept across Europe in sensational reports and sickening cartoons depicting the mob eating her heart.
When the French republic was declared on September 22,1792, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina refused to recognize it and snubbed their new French ambassador. The queen was desperate to declare war against the French, but Ferdinand was doubtful. A proposed alliance against France of the Italian states, Spain, and Austria collapsed. The Neapolitan navy was weak, and the army had spent the last decade assisting with Ferdinand's hunting expeditions. It seemed to the queen that only Britain, with its huge navy and intimidating empire, had the power to protect them.
The Hamiltons spent much of 1792 at Caserta, often up and dressed for attendance as early as seven o'clock in the morning. Emma rambled around the English Garden with her husband, waiting for Maria Carolina to issue a summons. Despite her admission to the heart of Neapolitan affairs, she was intent on never losing her Englishness. As she reassured Greville, "we allways drink tea."
CHAPTER 27
A Very Extraordinary Woman
Back in England, Emma was a style leader. At Queen Charlotte's birthday gala a few months after Emma departed, almost every woman was dressed "á la Lady Hamilton" in flowing, simple white crepe and satin, embroidered in silver, gathered with a silver or diamond belt, with their hair arranged in a loose Grecian style, circled with a jeweled headband and a few feathers. The queen's birthday fashions had the influence of the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood today, and the style reports set women rushing to their dressmakers for copies. The Duchess of York's dress was, according to one reporter, "the most magnificent and tasteful which her Royal Highness has worn in Britain": a petticoat of white crepe "embroidered with lilac stones and silver spangles," drapery embroidered with flowers, edged with a deep fringe of lilac beads and silver, and ornamented with chains of diamonds falling across the body. She wore flat slippers and her hair was simply gathered and adorned with a feather and a few diamonds.1
The Lady's Magazine was the lead fashion magazine, consulted by fine ladies, dressmakers, and genteel women alike, and it began to promote the "á la Emma" look in earnest. In October, it declared the essential autumn outfit for the "most elegant women" was "white linen or muslin petticoats,