About the time of Mara's departure from England Mrs. Billington was
wonderfully popular. No fashionable concert was complete without her,
and the constant demand for her services enabled her to fix her own
price. Her income averaged fifteen thousand pounds a year, and at one
time she was reckoned as worth nearly one hundred thousand pounds. She
spent her large means with a judicious liberality, and the greatest
people in the land were glad to be her guests. She settled a liberal
annuity on her father. Having no children, she adopted two, one the
daughter of an old friend named Madocks, who afterward became her
principal legatee. Her hospitality crowded her house with the most
brilliant men in art, literature, and politics; and it was said that the
stranger who would see all the great people of the London world brought
together should get a card to one of Billington's receptions. Her
affability and kindness sometimes got her into scrapes. An eminent
barrister who was at her house one night gave her some advice on a
legal matter, and sent in a bill for services amounting to three hundred
pounds. Mrs. Billington paid it promptly, but the lawyer ceased to be
her guest. As a hostess she was said to have been irresistibly charming,
alike from her personal beauty and the witchery of her manners.
Her kindness and good nature in dealing with her sister artists Avere
proverbial. When Grassini, who at first was unpopular in England, was
in despair as to how she should make an impression, Mrs. Billington
proposed to sing with her in Winter's opera of "Il Ratto di Proserpina,"
from which time dated the success of the Italian singer. Toward Mara
she had exerted similar good will, ignoring all professional jealousies.
Miss Parke, a concert-singer, was once angry because Billington's name
was in bigger type. The latter ordered her name to be printed in the
smallest letters used; "and much Miss Parke gained by her corpulent
type," says the narrator. Lord Mount Edgcumbe tells us that the operas
in which she specially excelled were "La Clemenza di Scipione," composed
for her by John Christian Bach; Paesiello's "Elfrida"; "Armida,"
"Castore e Polluce," and others by Winter; and Mozart's "Clemenza di
Tito." For her farewell benefit, when she quitted the stage, March 30,
1806, she selected the last-named opera, which had never been given in
England, and existed only in manuscript form. The Prince of Wales had
the only copy, and she played through the whole score on the pianoforte
at rehearsal, to give the orchestra an idea of the music. The final
performance was immensely successful, and the departing _diva_ sang so
splendidly as to prove that it was not on account of failing powers that
she withdrew from professional life. It is true that Mrs. Billington
continued to appear frequently in concert for three years longer, but
her dramatic career was ended. A curious instance of woman's infatuation
was Mrs. Billington's longing to be reunited to her brutal husband; and
so in 1817 she invited him to join her in England. Felican was too
glad to gain fresh control over the victim of his conjugal tyranny, and
persuaded her to leave England for a permanent residence in Italy. Mrs.
Billington realized all her property, and with her jewels and plate,
of which she possessed a great quantity, departed for the land of song,
taking with her Miss Madocks. She paid a bitter penalty for her revived
tenderness toward Felican, for the ruffian subjected her to such
treatment that she died from the effects of it, August 25, 1818. In such
an ignoble fashion one of the most brilliant and beautiful women in the
history of song departed from this life.