England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton Read Online Free PDF Page A

childhood, only one in seven girls who survived till five reached twenty-five, and these rates were worse in poor villages. If Emma had playmates, they probably changed from summer to summer as the other girls weakened and died.
    Emma was not the dying kind. Her spirit was irrepressible. In a rare reference to her childhood, later in life she described herself as "wild and thoughtless" as a little girl. She was so incompetent as a servant that it seems unlikely that she grew up habituated to domestic work. The dilapidated, insecure life of the Kidds left Emma comparatively unburdened by hours of cleaning, carrying, washing, and cooking; free to dream of a different life.
    There is an apocryphal tale of the young Emma, at about the age of nine or ten, selling coal by the side of the Chester road. It would have been very dangerous if she had done so. Any woman standing beside the road— particularly a young one—would be considered a prostitute. Women sold their goods at market or in the village and never walked alone. Moreover, Sarah was not authorized to sell coal, only deliver it to middlemen. If the story is true, Emma had stolen the coal and was endangering herself. It is more likely that she simply liked to stand by the road in the village to watch the glamorous coaches calling at Broad Lane Hall. Hardly old enough to go out alone, she was already intent on escape.
    The only highlights in her year were the three annual fairs. After the morning sale of livestock, the fields were taken over by stalls selling trinkets, posies, wine, and gingerbread for a few pennies, as well as puppet plays, musicians, and performers of all kinds. Every feast ended in dancing and drinking, and many young couples crept behind hedges (the recordsshow most women fell pregnant on a holiday). Other parties occurred on St. Deniol's Day, the saint's day of the local church, and there was usually a week of celebration beginning on the Sunday following Holy Cross Day in September. On Christmas Day, John Glynne would invite all the laborers and their families to a heavy Christmas meal of beef or turkey and plum pudding. The May Fair crowned a queen, who was carried around the village in a cart decorated with ribbons; the harvest festival feted a queen adorned with corn dollies.
    Festivals and fairs were scant consolation for Mary, miserable at being seemingly stuck in Hawarden for good. Her neighbors relished the opportunity to gloat, and the young widow was lonely. She was pretty, but no young man wanted a wife without a dowry who was the subject of salacious gossip and saddled with a child. Despite this, circumstances suggest Mary found a protector—and a powerful one.
    Stories abound that Mary was mistress to Sir John Glynne or even grand Lord Halifax at nearby Stansted Hall. This is romantic fiction: Halifax would never have pursued a long affair with such a lowborn woman. Although Mary might have caught John Glynne's eye in between the death of his first wife in 1769 and his marriage to his daughters' governess in 1772, it seems unlikely. The records show that Glynne attended Parliament less punctiliously after 1764, even though he had previously been conscientious about showing his face and volunteering for committees. He was surely, however, flirting with the governess, not Mary. Notions that Mary was a mistress to Glynne betray a misunderstanding of rural life: the squire and his sons spent summers hosting hunting parties and passed their winters in town. They ignored their tenants, and Mary could not have met Sir John unless she worked as an upper servant for him (and she was never a lady's maid). As we may see from Sir John's letters and diaries now in the Hawarden record office and the National Library of Wales, he paid scant attention to the dull minutiae of land rents, yields, and the wages of footmen. 1 In Hawarden, the real controllers of patronage, favor, and money were the squire's steward or land agent, who managed Glynne's estate,