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

his workers, and also the servants at the hall. If Mary was having an affair with a wealthy man, it was most likely with a senior servant at Broad Lane Hall or assistant steward of Glynne's estate, who would be able to slip her extra food and money.
    Mary was surely lover to a man with money for a sustained period of time, perhaps throughout Emma's childhood. It is unlikely that Emma survived on the potatoes and old cheese that made up the diet of herneighbors. Like all country people, Hawarden villagers were stunted and sunken-eyed through malnutrition. They suffered from rickets, and their hair, teeth, and skin betrayed their lack of protein. Emma grew tall, strong, and beautiful, with a thick mane of hair and strong white teeth. She had sparkling eyes, clear skin, voluptuous good health, and bounding energy. In the late 1760s and 1770s, England was racked with famines, a smallpox epidemic, and sweeping influenza, but Emma appears to have suffered no severe childhood illnesses. Thomas Pettigrew, one of Lord Nelson's early biographers, who knew Emma's London employer, Dr. Budd, noted that when she worked as a servant she had no "means to cultivate her intellectual faculties," so she must have learned to read, write, and do simple addition as a child. Somehow, Mary found money that protected Emma from the worst of village hardship and helped her grow into a beauty.
    It seems likely that Mary's lover was connected to Broad Lane Hall. Emma's fortunes appear to be in some degree dependent on Glynne's. Soon after Sir John's death on June 1,1777, Emma's childhood came to an abrupt end. Mary traveled to London, maybe to follow her lover, and Sarah, at nearly sixty, decided to rid herself of her hungry granddaughter. Emma began work for Dr. Honoratus Leigh Thomas, a Chester surgeon. He lived in Hawarden because his much younger wife, Marie, was sister to Glynne's land agent, Boydell. Emma's choice of employers is a clue that Mary's protector may have been an assistant to Boydell who perhaps lost his position on his master's death. However she came by the position, Emma was now on her own. She was, after all, twelve, the average age for girls to begin in service.
    Emma's poverty-stricken youth left her desperate for love, dogged by terrible insecurity, and determined to steal the limelight. Resentful of her treatment and dissatisfied with Hawarden, she so dreaded the future of a laborer's wife that she would do anything to escape. Emma was ambitious, and she craved sensation. She was not the type of girl to become a meek and deferential domestic servant.

CHAPTER 5

Traveling to London
    E mma's journey to London by coach would have been the most daunting experience of her young life. She left no record of her feelings about it, so we can only piece together her experiences from the reports of other coach travelers of the time. Wearing her best dress to save it from thieves, carrying a few belongings and some cheese and bread, she set off early in the morning for an inn on the outskirts of Chester. Unable to afford the stagecoach, she probably took the stage wagon, a goods vehicle that took poorer passengers. Parked at the back of the yard, behind the crowds of hawkers, passengers, and beggars, the stage wagon was a twelve-foot-long frame over four thick wooden wheels, covered only by a torn, dirty sheet. It would be pulled along the 180-mile journey south to London by six or eight horses in pairs. Old and worn out from years of dragging other carriages, they were less than half a year away from the slaughterhouse.
    Twenty or so women, children, and elderly men (younger men traveled on horseback) bundled themselves into the wagon around bags of vegetables and crates of chickens. Children took the most uncomfortable spots over the wheels or at the very back. Then they had to hold tight to their money. A passenger couldn't pay until he or she left the wagon, and anyone who failed to cough up would be arrested. Emma's journey cost around