Nelson's Lady Hamilton by Meynell, Esther (cheapest way to read ebooks .txt) 📗

made some kind attempt to teach her how to write and spell decently ; but if this is true, the lady's efforts were not markedly successful, for even when the girl had become Lady Hamilton and an accomplished woman speaking several languages, she never moved securely among the complications of her native tongue.

An interesting fact in connection with this first situation of Emily Lyon's is that the daughter of the house was so taken with the already developing beauty of the young nursemaid that she sketched her. The picture, which still exists, is somewhat wooden and amateurish, but the features and fall of the hair are recognizable as those of the girl who so charmed and inspired Romney, while the little sketch is particularly interesting as showing how quickly she must have grown from childishness to the early blossoming of her beauty.

When Emily Lyon was about fifteen years old, she left the country and went up to London, where she entered upon a series of vicissitudes, and early came to grief. She began well enough in the service of a worthy surgeon, Dr. Budd, and this is the only fact that is quite authentically established about her life at this time. It is a somewhat curious circumstance that one of her fellow-servants in this situation was the charming and clever Jane Powell, who later became a

LADY HAMILTON AS A CHILD

GEORGEKOMNEY

A DAUGHTER OF THE PEOPLE 7

talented actress, and was playing nightly at Drury Lane when Emma returned to London, many years afterwards, with Sir William Hamilton on the eve of her marriage. The two girls, who began their careers thus humbly side by side, retained an affectionate feeling for each other, and met at Southend so late as 1803.

After leaving her first London situation, Emily Lyon is said to have served in a shop, then as companion to a "lady of quality" of somewhat doubtful reputation; and it is constantly stated, though never definitely proved, that a notorious quack doctor of the day, named Graham, engaged her to pose as Hygeia in his meretricious " Temple of Health."

But it is certain that during this unsettled and uncertain period of her life she was very poor, very unwise, unprotected, and dangerously lovely. Even in her humble guise of the Beggar-maid she drew all eyes after her. The Prince Regent —whose memory, of course, was not the most reliable—used to declare that he recollected seeing her selling fruit in the streets, with wooden pattens on her feet. There is a picture of her as a fruit-seller, probably painted by Opie. As she passed up and down, people used to stand still and stare after the poor pretty creature. Unfortunately for the Beggar-maid, it was no King Cophetua who made his appearance, but one of the sailors of tradition who lightly love and sail

8 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

away. The naval officer whose conduct was so unworthy of a noble body of men —of whom the heroic and steadfast Collingwood may justly be regarded as far more typical—was Captain John Willet-Payne, afterwards a member of Parliament and treasurer of Greenwich Hospital.

It was Emma's warm heart, and possibly, also, the first promptings of that love of influence which was so marked in her later on, that brought her in contact with the man who betrayed her inexperience. It is an odd coincidence that the girl who later on was to be called the " Patroness of the Navy " by grim old John Jervis himself, and who was always the friend of Nelson's seamen, should have got into her first trouble through a naval officer, and in the effort to help a sailor. The press-gang had seized a young man whom she had known during her Flintshire days, and carried him off to a ship lying in the Thames. Sympathy for distress was always marked in Emma, and this news and the thought of his poor wife's anguish of mind, so worked upon her that she was moved to an impulsive action. She went to see Captain Willet-Payne, and pleaded with tears and all her native eloquence and feeling for the release of the " pressed " man. The susceptible sailor could not resist her charm and her entreaties, but neither could he let her pass out of his life as easily as she had come into it Thus Emma's

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generous impulse, coupled with her ignorance and easy temper, was the cause of her undoing.

It was her first step down "the primrose path of dalliance," and by no means the last. The sailor left her after a few months, and went away to sea, and the unhappy girl was cast out upon the world, friendless and scorned. That she had strivings of heart, and struggled to maintain her foothold on the slippery ground she stood upon, is shown by a pathetic and sincere little passage in a letter she wrote to Romney many years later, when she had just become Lady Hamilton. " You have seen and discoursed with me in my poorer days," she reminds him, "you have known me in my poverty and prosperity, and I had no occasion to have lived for years in poverty and distress, if I had not felt something of virtue in my mind. Oh, my dear friend, for a time I own through distress my virtue was vanquished, but my sense of virtue was not overcome."

Young as she was, she early learned that a girl so beautiful as herself had " no occasion " to live in poverty and distress; so that in spite of the struggles she may have made after an honest living, she was again soon placed in easy, if insecure, circumstances. Exactly how and when she came across the next man