The future Lady Hamilton was affectionate and impulsive, good-humored, with generous instincts and a quick temper; but she was also ambitious and exceptionally clever. She loved Greville warmly; but she took to heart the hard truths of his teachings, and they sank deep in a congenial soil. Under the influence of the two motives, she applied herself to gain, and did gain, a certain degree of external niceness and self-control. Her affection for Greville made her willing, for his sake, because he was not rich, to live quietly, to accept modest surroundings, and to discard whatever was coarse in associates, or unbecoming in her own person or conduct. He, while relaxing none of his requirements, repaid her with courtesy and increasing admiration, than which nothing was dearer to her; for, if not appreciative of the satisfaction of self-respect, she was keenly alive to the delights of homage from others, though extorted by purely adventitious qualities. Glory was to her more than honor. This love of admiration, fostered, yet pruned, by Greville's shrewd precepts, was her dominant trait. To its gratification her singular personal advantages contributed, and they were powerfully supported by an unusual faculty for assuming a part, for entering into a character and representing its external traits. Thus gifted by nature, and swayed by vanity, her development was for the time regulated and chastened by the disinterestedness of her passion for her lover. Her worse qualities were momentarily kept in abeyance. Naturally lovable, not only in exterior but in temperament, she became more and more attractive. "Consider," wrote Greville, referring to her surroundings before she passed into his hands, "what a charming creature she would have been, if she had been blessed with the advantages of an early education, and had not been spoilt by the indulgence of every caprice."
Unfortunately the restraining influence, probably ephemeral in any event, was about to be rudely removed, permitting to flourish in unrestrained vigor the natural tendency to compel admiration and secure advantage by the spell of physical beauty, and by the exertion of natural aptitudes for pleasing in the only path to success open to her. In 1782 Hamilton's first wife died, and in 1784 he came to England on leave. There he met Amy Lyon, now known as Emma Hart, in the house provided for her by Greville. His admiration of her was extreme, and its tendency was not misunderstood by her. He returned to his post at Naples at the end of the year. In the course of 1785 Greville, who was now in his thirty-sixth year, decided that the condition of his fortune made it imperative for him to marry, and that as a first step thereto he must break with Emma Hart. Hamilton's inclination for her provided a ready means for so doing, so far as the two men were concerned; but her concurrence was not sure. After some correspondence, it was arranged that she should go to Naples in the spring of 1786, to live there under Hamilton's care, with the expectation on her part that Greville would join her a few months later. Placed as she then would be, it was probable that she would eventually accept the offers made her; though it would be less than just to either Greville or Hamilton, to allow the impression that they did not intend to provide sufficiently for her needs, whatever her decision.
In this way she left England in the spring of 1786, reaching Naples on the 26th of April. When the poor girl, after many of her letters to her lover remained unanswered, fully realized, that the separation was final, her grief was extreme, and found utterance in words of tenderness and desolation, which, however undisciplined in expression, are marked by genuine pathos. But anger struggled with sorrow for the mastery in her soul. She was too keen-witted not to have had an inkling of the possible outcome of her departure from England, and of the doubtful position she was occupying at Naples; but her wishes had made her willingly deaf to any false ring in the assurances given her by Greville, and she resented not only the abandonment, but the deceit which she, justly or unjustly, conceived to have been practised, while her womanliness revolted from the cold-blooded advice given by him to accept the situation. The conflict was so sharp that for a time both he and Hamilton expected she would return to England; but Greville had not labored in vain at what he was pleased to consider her education. By the end of the year she was addressing Hamilton in words of very fairly assumed affection, but not until she had written to Greville, with a certain haughty desperation, "If you affront me, I will make him marry me." The threat was two-edged, for Hamilton intended Greville to be his heir; but the latter probably gave little heed to a contingency he must have thought very unlikely for a man of fifty-six, who had passed his life in the world, and held Hamilton's public position.
To effect this, however, Emma Hart now bent her personal charms, strong purpose, and the worldly wisdom with which Greville had taught her to assure her hold upon a man. Love, in its unselfishness, passed out of her life with Greville. Other men might find her pliant, pleasing, seductive; he alone knew her as disinterested. She followed out her design with a patience, astuteness, and consistency which attest the strength of her resolution, and her acute intellectual perception of the advantages at her disposal. Ambition, a natural trait with her, had been trained to self-control, in order to compass a lowly, colorless success. Unlooked-for opportunity now held before her eyes, distant and difficult of attainment, but not impossible, a position of assured safety, luxury, and prominence, which appealed powerfully to the love of pleasure, still dormant, and to the love of conspicuousness, which became the two most noticeable features of her character.
With all her natural advantages, however, the way was hard and long. She had to become indispensable to Hamilton, and at the same time, and by the same methods, an object the more desirable to him because of her evident attractiveness to others. Above all, she had to contend with her own temper, naturally lively and prone to bursts of anger, which the prolonged suspense of the struggle, acting upon a woman's nerves, tended peculiarly to exasperate. Hamilton was of an age when he might be enslaved by fondness, but not constrained by strength of passion to endure indefinitely household tempests, much less to perpetuate them upon himself by lasting bonds. In all this Emma Hart showed herself fully equal to the task. Tenderly affectionate to him, except when carried away by the fits of irritability which both he and Greville had occasion to observe, she complied readily with all his wishes, and followed out with extraordinary assiduity his plans for her improvement in education and in accomplishments. The society which gathered round them was, of course, almost wholly of men, who one and all prostrated themselves before her beauty and cleverness, with the same unanimity of submission as did the officers of Nelson's division after the Battle of the Nile. But, while giving free rein to coquetry, and revelling in admiration, she afforded no ground for scandal to the world, or dissatisfaction to Hamilton. In the attitude of outsiders towards her, he had reason to see only the general testimony to her charms and to his own good fortune. At the end of 1787 he wrote to Greville: "I can assure you her behaviour is such as has acquired her many sensible admirers, and we have a good man society, and all the female nobility, with the queen at their head, show her every distant civility."
Thus she persisted, keeping her beauty, and growing in mental acquirements and accomplishments, but making little apparent headway towards the great object of her ambition. "I fear," wrote Hamilton towards the middle of 1789, when she had been three years with him, "her views are beyond what I can bring myself to execute; and that when her hopes on that point are over, she will make herself and me unhappy. Hitherto her behaviour is irreproachable, but her temper, as you must know, unequal." He underrated her perseverance, and exaggerated his own strength of reluctance, innate and acquired. Impossible as it would seem, with his antecedents and with hers, his friends and acquaintances became alarmed for the result, and not without cause. "Her influence over him exceeds all belief," wrote a mutual friend to Greville in March, 1791. "His attachment exceeds admiration, it is perfect dotage." Shortly after this letter was written the two went to England, and there they were married on the 6th of September, 1791. By the end of the year they were back in Naples, and did not again leave Italy up to the time of Nelson's arrival in 1798.
Lady Hamilton did not abuse the security of the place she had won with so much pains, nor on the other hand did her ambition and love of prominence permit her to settle down to inert enjoyment of it. The careful self-restraint with which she had observed the proprieties of her former false position facilitated the disappearance of prejudices naturally arising from it. Many English ladies of rank, passing through Naples, visited her, and those who refused to ignore the past of the woman, in the position of the British minister's wife, were by some sharply criticised. "She has had a difficult part to act," wrote Hamilton, six months after their return, "and has succeeded wonderfully, having gained, by having no pretensions, the thorough approbation of all the English ladies. The Queen of Naples was very kind to her on our return, and treats her like any other travelling lady of distinction; in short, we are very comfortably situated here." "We dined yesterday with Sir William and Lady Hamilton," wrote Lady Malmesbury, whose husband was among the most distinguished diplomatists of the day. "She really behaves as well as possible, and quite wonderfully, considering her origin and education."
This last phrase, used at the culmination of Lady Hamilton's good fortune and personal advance, was wholly good-natured; but it sums up the best of the not very good that can be said of her during the height of her prosperity, and in later years. Although, as has been remarked, she did not at this time abuse the security which as a wife she had attained,—for policy too clearly dictated the continuance of her previous circumspection,—the necessity for strenuous watchfulness, exertion, and self-restraint, in order to reach a distant goal, no longer existed; and, although a woman of many amiable and generous impulses, she had not a shred of principle to take the place of the motive of self-interest, which hitherto had been so peremptory in its exactions. What she was in delicacy in 1791, that she remained in 1796,—five years after the disappearance of her social disabilities; a pretty fair proof that what she possessed of it was but skin deep, the result of a diligent observance of Greville's proprieties, for her personal advantage, not the token of a noble inner spirit struggling from excusable defilement to the light. "She does the honours of the house with great attention and desire to please," wrote Greville's correspondent of 1791, before quoted, "but wants a little refinement of manners, in which, in the course of six years, I wonder she has not made greater progress." "She is all Nature and yet all Art," said Sir Gilbert Elliot, in 1796; "that is to say, her manners are perfectly unpolished, of course very easy, though not with the ease of good breeding, but of a barmaid; excessively good humoured, and wishing to please and be admired by all ages and sorts of persons that come in her way; but besides considerable natural understanding, she has acquired, since her marriage, some knowledge of history and of the arts, and one wonders at the application and pains she has taken to make herself what she is. With men her language and conversation are exaggerations of anything I ever heard anywhere; and I was wonderfully struck with these inveterate remains of her origin, though the impression was very much weakened by seeing the other ladies of Naples." "I thought her a very handsome, vulgar woman," curtly commented the lieutenant of a frigate which visited Naples in the summer of 1798, while hunting for Nelson in the game of cross-purposes that preceded the Nile.[70] Allowing for difference of observers, it is plain that the Lady Hamilton whom Nelson now met, had not improved in essentials over the Emma Hart of a half-dozen years before.
Two years afterwards, the verdict of these men was confirmed by Mrs. St. George,[71] a lady in London society, who viewed her possibly with something of the repugnant prejudice of a refined and cultivated woman, yet evidently measured her words calmly, even in her private journal. "I think her bold, daring, vain even to folly, and stamped with the manners of her first situation much more strongly than one would suppose, after having represented Majesty, and lived in good company fifteen years. Her dress is frightful. Her waist is absolutely between her shoulders." Nelson measured her by a different standard. "In every point of view," he tells herself, "from Ambassatrice to the duties of domestic life, I never saw your equal. That elegance of manners, accomplishments, and, above all, your goodness of heart, is unparalleled." The same lady describes her personal appearance, at the time when his devotion had reached the height from which it never declined. "Her figure is colossal, but, excepting her feet, which are hideous, well shaped. Her bones are large, and she is exceedingly embonpoint. The shape of all her features is fine, as is the form of her head, and particularly her ears; her teeth are a little irregular, but tolerably white; her eyes light blue, with a brown spot in one, which, though a defect, takes nothing away from her beauty or expression. Her eyebrows and hair (which, by the bye, is never clean) are dark, and her complexion coarse. Her expression is strongly marked, variable, and interesting; her movements in common life ungraceful; her voice loud, yet not disagreeable." Elliot's briefer mention of her appearance is at once confirmatory and complementary of that of Mrs. St. George: "Her person is nothing short of monstrous for its enormity, and is growing every day. Her face is beautiful."
To these opinions it may be not uninteresting to add the critical estimate of William Beckford, uttered many years later. Beckford was not an admirable character, far from it; but he had known good society, and he had cultivated tastes. Nelson accepted his hospitality, and, with the Hamiltons, spent several days under his roof, about Christmas time, 1800. In reply to the question, "Was the second Lady Hamilton a fascinating woman?" he said, "I never thought her so. She was somewhat masculine, but symmetrical in figure, so that Sir William called her his Grecian. She was full in person, not fat, but embonpoint. Her carriage often majestic, rather than feminine. Not at all delicate, ill-bred, often very affected, a devil in temper when set on edge. She had beautiful hair and displayed it. Her countenance was agreeable,—fine, hardly beautiful, but the outline excellent. She affected sensibility, but felt none—was artful; and no wonder, she had been trained in the Court of Naples—a fine school for an English woman of any stamp. Nelson was infatuated. She could make him believe anything, that the profligate queen was a Madonna. He was her dupe. She never had a child in her life."[72] As to this last assertion, Beckford was not in a position to have personal knowledge.