Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind.1
The family stories in this book are all lingerings of that ancient scent, easily blown away by the turns of life and chance: the natural declension of the soul, too much business with the passing hour, too much play, or marriage with a fool. Those are all Yeats’s phrases and any one could bring the curtain down.
The paired gentry stories here embracing the nineteenth century come from opposite ends of the spectrum. The Capels were a family that plummeted into the gentry from the disintegrating aristocracy above them; the Hugheses came bursting up into it from the realm of huge, stumbled-on industrial wealth. The Capels were victims of fecklessness; the Hugheses drove in the opposite direction, on untold quantities of money, towards an overblown and self-important fantasy.
It was not difficult in the early years of the nineteenth century for a junior branch of an aristocratic or upper gentry family to slip down and out of the world into which it had been born. Strict settlement of estates, by which the vast bulk of a family’s fortune remained in the hands of a single heir, condemned many younger brothers to an unenviable condition.
That predicament lies behind the history of the Capels. If the gentry can be defined as the class that absorbed its members from the social layers that surrounded it, this is a story of a family bursting chaotically through the upper membrane. It was not an easy landing and a sense of desperation colours the whole process. Everything the Victorians would find alien in the age that preceded them is here: luxury, a gambling attitude to life and other people, nothing earnest, an openly sexualized world.
Victorian novelists made hay with the squires who failed to move on from that Regency world into the stricter, more highly moralized environment of mid-nineteenth-century England. None was more ludicrous or disgusting than Thackeray’s filthy Sir Pitt Crawley in Vanity Fair (1848), MP for the rotten borough of Queen’s Crawley, ‘an old, stumpy, short, vulgar, and very dirty man, who smokes a horrid pipe and cooks his own horrid supper in a saucepan’.2 This was the rump of the gentry, absurd, degenerate, mendacious, self-indulgent, occasionally endearing but a class that had lost touch with the nation and with its political purpose, made irrelevant by the power of the aristocracy above them, a pod of beached whales on a dropping tide. They remained a constant feature of English life through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sir Tatton Sykes, 4th Bt, was their late embodiment, arriving booted and spurred at his London house in the 1850s, ‘hating the smart world but impressed in spite of himself that his son “knoa’s oo t’hond leadies in curriage”’.3
As part of their love affair with the Middle Ages, and contempt for the self-indulgence of the age that preceded them, the Victorians re-summoned a vision of the squire as the generous, religious, community-minded father of his people. More often than not, this fantasy of the old was dependent on money made in the great industrial cities of the Midlands and the north. Thackeray had described the squire of thirty years earlier but R. S. Surtees’s bouffant Squire Jawleyford of Jawleyford Hall became the magnificent, full-blown Victorian embodiment of community-conscious Gentry-as-Fraud. Hundreds of newly gothicized manor houses take flight in his appalling rhetorical displays. Jawleyford’s
communications with his tenantry were chiefly confined to dining with them twice a year in the great entrance-hall, after Mr. Screwem-tight had eased them of their cash in the steward’s-room. Then Mr. Jawleyford would shine forth the very impersonification of what a landlord ought to be. Dressed in the height of the fashion, as if by his clothes to give the lie to his words, he would expatiate on the delights of such meetings of equality; declare that, next to those spent with his family, the only really happy moments of his life were those when he was surrounded by his tenantry; he doated on the manly character of the English farmer. Then he would advert to the great antiquity of the Jawleyford family, many generations of whom looked down upon them from the walls of the old hall; some on their war-steeds, some armed cap-à-pie, some in court-dresses, some in Spanish ones, one in a white dress with gold brocade breeches and a hat with an enormous plume, old Jawleyford (father of the present one) in the Windsor uniform, and our friend himself, the very prototype of what then stood before them.4
The story of the Hugheses, awash with mineral and banking money, describes an attempt to recreate that style. They enjoyed the Indian summer of the 1860s, but life became difficult in the 1880s and ’90s as the effects of newly globalized markets in grain and meat destroyed British agriculture for a generation. A deep and long-lasting agricultural depression had struck in 1879, as corn imports from Australia and the USA, combined with the new highly efficient production of bacon in Denmark and the new refrigerated ships that could bring frozen beef from South America, all began to cut holes in the British food market. Rents dropped by an average of 22.6 per cent between 1878 and 1893.5 The capital value of land crashed. When death duties were added to the burdens, the gentry’s long love affair with the land came to an end. As Lady Bracknell put it in 1895,
What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land.6
By the end of the nineteenth century, the gentry were no longer central to the social, political, economic, philosophical, aesthetic or entrepreneurial aspects of national life. For all but the most superbly well funded, gentrydom was over.
1790s–1810s
Fecklessness
The Capels
London, Brussels and Lausanne
The Capel family began deeply embedded in the aristocracy. John was born in 1770, a younger son of the Earl of Essex by his second marriage, one of the richest men in England, with lands generously distributed across ten English counties from Hertfordshire to Herefordshire and Hampshire. At the time this story begins in 1814 John was forty-three, known to everyone as Capel and already on the slide. His much older half-brother (born in 1757) was the new Earl. Capel was married to the ethereally beautiful Lady Caroline Paget, four years younger than him, the sister of the great beau and cavalry commander Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge. Capel’s sister was Lady Monson, Caroline’s sisters Lady Galloway, Lady Erskine, Lady Enniskillen and Lady Graves. They belonged to the class which most people in this book spent their lives aspiring to join.1
Capel was ‘un bel homme’, as his daughter Harriet described him in 1815, ‘tall & large – a bald head – with dark eyebrows meeting in the Middle’.2 The one image of him that survives shows him a few years earlier, in 1803, in his mid-thirties, as a pugnacious blade wearing the uniform of the Light Company of the Sussex Militia, with a martial air, big sideburns, a sabre in his hand and a huge fur-crested ‘round hat’ emboldened with a dark green cockade. This was a glamorous uniform, worn by no run-of-the-mill infantry officer but a captain of skirmishers and sharpshooters.3 He was undeniably attractive, a ne’er-do-well, loved by women and his friends, despised by more serious members of society. He had run through what small legacy his father had left him. There was no sign that his half-brother the Earl would distribute any more. He was essentially propertyless but living in a culture which did not encourage a life of work or enterprise. The army might have been a source of glamour and prestige but it did not pay. His social milieu would not allow him to enter business. He was caught like a piece of porcelain in a cabinet: elegant, unused, irrelevant. The gambling boom, which overtook such men in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, might be seen as a rational response to this younger son predicament. If you had no money and could not bring yourself to work, the green baize table might well have looked like an oasis in the desert: money for free, money for daring.
Caroline’s father, the old Earl of Uxbridge, who was richly possessed of lands and mines in Staffordshire and Anglesey, had been appalled when she fell in love with him; and still more when Capel asked to marry her. As La
dy Uxbridge had reported to her son, old Lord Uxbridge had told Capel ‘he must give up all thoughts of Caroline, for no persuasion or any thing else could or would make him consent to his marrying her – nothing could be more violent or determined’.4 Uxbridge told his wife that ‘he had rather see Car dead than married to Capel’.5
Despite this, they got married and had eleven children. Now, in early June 1814, with the new peace after the defeat of Napoleon, Capel and Caroline were going abroad with their many sons and daughters. Four maids and Thorpe, the housekeeper-cum-nanny, were with them. The eldest son, Arthur, who was eleven, was already at Eton, where his fees were paid by an annuity from the will of his grandfather, the Earl of Uxbridge.6
This was no holiday outing. The Capels had long been in trouble. Ten years before, Caroline’s mother, Lady Uxbridge, wrote to her son Arthur, recently appointed British Ambassador in Vienna:
My heart is almost broke upon a subject that you are no Stranger to, tho’ you are to the Extent and dreadful Consequences that must ensue. You had not left this Country many days before I was acquainted by lady Essex [Capel’s mother] and her Lawyer of the Magnitude of [Capel’s] debt, amounting (I tremble to name it) to £20,000. Neither Ways nor Means to be found to discharge craving Creditors &c.7
Using average earnings as the multiplier, that is equivalent to about £15 million today. His brother-in-law Uxbridge found him a couple of sinecures – as Tax Collector in Staffordshire and the equivalent in British Guiana – neither of which places he had any need to go anywhere near. But the £2,000 income these offices produced was halved by the interest on the debt Capel owed, never mind any repayment of the capital. His own half-brother Lord Essex refused to help, except on the impossible terms that the Capel children should be removed from their parents’ care, a plan which ‘at present Caroline won’t listen to’.8
Life abroad was cheaper (and further from any creditors) but any earlier plans to escape the country – Naples and Dresden had been suggested – had come to nothing9 and they had staggered on, living either with Caroline’s mother at Surbiton or in a rented house at Horton in the Thames valley. Now, though, they were heading for Brussels, where there was the chance of cheap lodgings,10 cheap provisions and some distance from the debts.
Soon they were afloat on the gaiety of the foreign capital, increasingly filled with other versions of ‘Lord and Lady Bare-acres’11 – Thackeray’s name for England’s self-indulgent aristocracy. Thomas Creevey, the politician and memoirist, ‘the only man … in society who possesses nothing’,12 registered their arrival: ‘There is at present a kind of click of your Capels, Grevilles and a few more stupid shattered grandees, who would willingly keep the young frogs and everything else entirely to themselves.’
The exchange rate was marvellous, silk and satin shoes for 4s. 6d. a pair, walking shoes for a shilling less. Caroline wrote to her mother:
It is wonderful how cheap every thing is here and the exchange is improving every day – two pounds of bread for three half pence – Mutton 3 pence, beef 4 pence per pound … Oh Mama, you would die of the Lace here, & the comparative cheapness of it.13
Orders were taken and goods shipped back to England.
An inveterate and reptilian gossip, the Duchess of Richmond, presided over the little local society, alongside the Austrian-Belgian Duchess of Beaufort, ‘a very amiable Ugly little woman’,14 as Caroline called her. Gossip burbled across the city. The governing classes of Europe had been militarized in the preceding quarter-century of war and the salons and drawing rooms were awash with officers. Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Craufurd Ferguson,15 the second-in-command of the British forces in Belgium, was a constant presence in the Capel household. ‘My dearest little darling grand Mama,’ the 21-year-old Harriet Capel wrote on 23 June,
We are all in love with General Ferguson. He is just the age when people (that is to say Men) begin to grow moving – he is two or three and forty – very handsome, very pale and lame from a wound he received – & his manners perfect – & to crown all a widower.16
In the heat of that summer, the émigrés partied, able to forget the debts back home, alive to a kind of extraordinary, febrile gaiety. ‘It is impossible to move till quite the Evening – or to bear anything but a loose Gown’,17 Caroline wrote. The temperature ‘exceeded West India hear [sic], we were all dying with it tho’ it did not prevent our dancing with real success’.18 Ball followed ball, in their own rented house, then at Lady Mountnorris’s and then at Lady Waterpark’s. Georgy, who was 19, was ecstatic. ‘We have been very gay lately’, dancing ‘without cessation for three nights. I think people appear to like us, at least a hundred times better than they do in England.’19
Brussels had melted the frost of impoverishment. Life itself felt like a holiday. There was a breakfast in the Bois Forêt: ‘I never saw a more animated scene or a more Motley Group, consisting of Ladies, brilliant Uniforms of various Colors, Hussars attendant upon general officers, Peasants and “Sprigs of gentility” from the Village of Soigny.’20
The Prince of Orange was ‘like a Boy just out of school’.21 Girls like Charlotte Greville ‘adopted all the Foreign Fashions & you cannot distinguish her from one of the most outré of the Natives’.22 Parades were held and feux de joie. Wellington arrived and then left. Lord Clancarty gave a ball for 500 people. On the Duke of York’s birthday the Guards ‘gave a Ball & Supper in the handsomest way possible’, an evening in which ‘the Supper Room was fitted up with Scenes to represent a Wood & hung with Flowers & lights’.23
The girls were living in a kind of love soup, an affection web, in which the most prominent aspects of reality were the emotional attachments they felt, for each other, for their mother, their father, their grandmother in England, the babies in the family, the gauche old men, the young officers, the other girls from other families swimming beside them. It was a culture of extraordinary openness. ‘My dearest Grand Mama I must now take leave of you’, Georgy wrote to her. ‘With all my Heart I love you. God bless you and make you as happy as I am sure you deserve to be.’24 The dull old commandant of the Brussels garrison could not be kept from the Capel house:
He is one of those odd beings that are seldom liked. A Perfect downright Honest Creature who tells us of our faults & of any thing he thinks wrong, with an openness and an interest in us that has gained all our hearts from Papa to Menii [the three-year-old Amelia]. It is quite amazing how we have unstiffened the German Formality of our two Foreign Friends, the Duchess of Beaufort and the Marquise D’Assche. The Ladies have learnt how to receive one without 5000 Curtseys.25
By the autumn Caroline had put up with enough. ‘My unfortunate Feet are in a state of Mortification.’ Having passed ‘a week of complete Racket & terminated with a most brilliant ball, Illuminations & Fireworks – I wish I could get into the Country for a little while – I sigh for perfect quiet & green Fields, If it was only for a Fortnight’.26 It was not to be. In September, another young general in his mid-forties arrived from England, Sir Edward Barnes,27 a veteran of the Peninsular War, where he had been on Wellington’s staff, and an old friend of the deeply admired General Ferguson. ‘He is likely to be a gt. favorite of ours’,28 Muzzy told her grandmother. Caroline adored him, as
one of the most amiable & best creatures I ever met with & doubly devoted to every individual of the Family from Capel to Adolphus [aged one] – he is very rich & most liberal minded … there is nothing handsome that Lord Wellington does not say of him in a Military point of view.29
His governing virtues, like Ferguson’s, were honesty, simplicity, integrity, all bound up in the one word ‘amiability’. It was a lovability which came from a truth of character. In the novel which Jane Austen was writing that summer, Emma claimed that her charming new friend Frank Churchill was amiable. ‘No Emma’, Mr Knightley said, ‘your amiable young man can be amiable only in French not in English. He may be very aimable, have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards t
he feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him.’30 Mr Knightley’s keen understanding of that difference was the measure of his worth, the sign that his character deserved his name.
The presence in the Capel household of these two amiable, beautiful, marriageable generals, replete with the noble understanding of emotional truth, created havoc. General Barnes fell in love with seventeen-year-old Muzzy, but Muzzy was already flat in love with General Ferguson. Nothing could be resolved. ‘The amusements [went] on with unabated ardor – Mr. Greville declares every body has been bit by a Tarantula.’31 Other marriage crises bubbled up and erupted. Lord John Somerset was to marry Lady Catherine Annesley even though ‘they cannot have above 1000 a year between them & without any Prospect of more and he used to Quiz & abuse her at all rates’.32 Miss Arden would not now marry Mr Warrender because her father, Lord Alvanley, had lost her £10,000 dowry at cards, ‘which is the preventative’.33 The Duchess of Richmond was trying to matchmake her daughter Georgiana with Lord Hotham, who was ‘quite young, in the Guards, hideously ugly, very stingy and has £20,000 a year’.34 Georgiana was not keen. Her sister Sarah told Harriet Capel that everything was off between herself and Lord Apsley ‘for want of that odious necessary thing called Money’.35
Meanwhile, in secret, another deeper and more desperate affair began.
Ernst Trip was glamour itself, a forty-year-old Dutch nobleman, a patriot, not the most conventionally handsome man, but dangerously attractive and captivating, ‘the most attaching, the most engaging person I know’, as one of the Capels’ acquaintances described him. ‘I can’t conceive his shewing the slightest degree of preference for any Girl, without her feeling a most lively one in return.’36 He was a reader of Oliver Goldsmith and had become deeply anglicized ever since the French invasion of the Netherlands in 1795, when he had escaped to England. In 1800 he bought himself a commission in the Prince’s Regiment, 10th Light Dragoons, the smartest in the British army, and in 1808 served as ADC first to Arthur Wellesley, not yet Duke of Wellington, and then to Caroline Capel’s brother, Henry Paget, the most inspiring cavalry commander in the Peninsular War. He did well and by 1814 when he was a lieutenant-colonel, he was appointed ADC to the Prince of Orange and came over to Brussels to join him.
The Gentry Page 29