Trip was ‘an agreeable boaster, swearing like a hussar, and speaking a sort of baragouin, half German, half French-English, which was very entertaining’.37 Walter Scott remembered him as ‘a dandy of the first water, and yet with an energy in his dandyism which made it respectable. He was one of the best-dressed men, and his horse was in equally fine condition as if he had had a dozen grooms.’38 His magnificent tailors’ and outfitters’ bills, often unpaid for a year or more, portray a beautifully appointed, sweet-smelling man. He was welcomed into London society above all as a waltzer, introducing that disturbingly intimate dance to an older generation filled with apprehensions and with it conquering English society. He and his dance were now in Brussels. ‘The Duke of Richmond’, Muzzy wrote to her grandmother, ‘will not let His daughters Waltz. But as hardly anything else is danced here he must soon give up the Point.’39 On 20 October Caroline wrote to her mother:
One of the People we see most of here, & like the best is – Guess who? Baron Trip himself, who I ever used to think the most self-sufficient odious man that ever breathed; he must be very much altered, or I was very much deceived, for now I find him most agreeable, amiable, & delightfull.40
A fascinating change of attitude becomes clear in these words of Caroline. Self-sufficiency is no virtue for her; only connectedness and openness to others can contribute to a man’s goodness. But she was surely wrong about one thing. Trip was not amiable, he was aimable. He understood the central point made by Lord Chesterfield, the great eighteenth-century apostle of deceit, that a man must ‘have a real reserve with almost everybody; and have a seeming reserve with almost nobody; for it is very disagreeable to seem reserved, and very dangerous not to be so’. ‘Whoever is not Aimable’, Chesterfield had written, ‘is in truth no body at all.’41 Of these difficult, subtle and cynical dance steps, Trip was a master.
The serious and passionate Harriet Capel, almost twenty-two, a reader of Byron’s most uncompromising hymns to love, ‘remarkable for a sort of Paget face’, as the diarist Thomas Moore later remembered her, ‘and very black piercing eyes’,42 could not take those eyes off the Dutchman. Soon Harriet and her favourite sister Muzzy were meeting the Baron away from the parental circle. A roughly written pencil note survives among his papers: ‘Nous nous rendrons a 5½ heure a la place sur le rempart ou Vous etiés hier au soir quand je vous ai rencontre avec Charles [?] & la D’ième inconnue.’ (At 5.30 we will be at the square on the ramparts where you were yesterday evening when I met you with Charles and the second woman, unknown to me.)43
She didn’t know what drew her to this glamour capsule, but was powerless in front of it. Much later, and alone, she wrote to him:
I will tell you what it is, Ernest, or rather I cannot tell you what it is, that is so dangerously attractive in you. I very often ask myself questions upon the subject but never can I answer them. I say ‘is it personal beauty – is it his manners – his conversation – his sentiments?’ No, all these of course help, but still, the danger does not lie in any of these, but in a sort of nameless indescribable something, that winds round and round & round one, as silk round a silk worm and entangles, irretrievably entangles one, before one is aware where one is – is it something which like [Byron’s] Lara ‘seems to dare you to forget’ –44
She was caught in a surging vision of romantic freedom with him: ‘Then above all that expression of mind, that liberality of feeling, that indulgence pour les faiblesses, that freedom from prejudice & that independence of principle & action, which amalgamates so completely with me.’45
It seems as if he was exercising some kind of self-control in front of this adoration, because on Christmas Eve 1814 Harriet wrote a letter to him and put it in an envelope on which she wrote ‘To be opened Christmas Eve 1815’:
I without hesitation commit to paper my sentiments and glory in them, – I am in full & perfect conviction that time will only add strength & fervancy to them – & that every Christmas day I may live to see, will find me equally devoted to the only Being I ever have or ever shall adore – faithful, unalterable, unchangeable devotion I feel & ever shall feel – I exult in being at the feet of one who has told me he can never be to me more than friend – Friend! What a cold word for what I feel – no let me be his slave – & I ask from him but pity & compassion –46
She knew what she was doing, that she was stepping out of the orderly, mother-governed realm of amiability into something more perilous, swapping the world of Jane Austen for something much more like that of the Brontës. Most of this remained below the surface, but not all. In the New Year, Caroline began to refer in her letters to ‘the Wretch’ on whom her beloved Harriet was throwing herself.
Nevertheless, Caroline ensured that the Capel household continued on its way. Still more generals joined the party. ‘General Maitland is another of our friends – very handsome – a Widower & therefore very moving, full of Accomplishments, & so good that of course some people call him a Methodist.’47
By the time she had written that, another disaster had already occurred: Muzzy had turned General Barnes down. ‘What you heard relative to a Certain Person’, Muzzy wrote sweetly to her grandmother,
is true, and though I am well aware that it would, in a Worldly Point of view, have been a desirable thing, yet with all his agremens [or grace notes] that I hear so much of, he is not indeed the Sort of Person, that would ever have made me happy. And I am too happy in my present situation to wish to change it unless to be still more so; I know my extraordinary taste, or rather want of taste, has caused, does now, Much astonishment to every body & more particularly to my own Family, which I am very very sorry for. – On this subject I am not I think very Romantic, for I do not think violent Love necessary to one’s happyness, but I think you will agree with me that a decided preference is absolutely so, and that, that preference even, I never could feel. Therefore there was but one way of acting.
I must acknowledge to you that, General F—son suited my taste and feelings much much more, but there was one very decided obstacle, in that way, & indeed the only one, (which was, want of that horrid Money.)48
Caroline wrote sagely to her own mother:
I assure you that it is no objection of Capel’s or mine that has prevented it, but her own decision – I think a Veto we have a right to, If Unfortunately it ever becomes necessary, but I am afraid of persuasion because if the thing did not turn out happily I could never forgive myself – She knows how much Capel & I love & value him. Her sisters quite doat on him & and rowe her from Morning till Night for her want of taste, & He, after keeping away for a few days after the sad reverse, has lived here as much as ever. – & People now ask me ‘which of your Daughters is Gnl. B to marry? Or is he to marry them all?’49
Capel himself seems to have been scarcely involved in these gyrations, half absent, shooting in the country outside Brussels, going to parties, or hunting for wolves in the Belgian forest. Caroline had found she was pregnant, again, for the thirteenth time, but she was left alone holding the family fort. The other girls continued with their flirtations but at some time early in 1815, Harriet’s love affair with Baron Trip plunged into new and wildly dangerous territory. Much later, in one of her letters to him, she remembered the moment when he stepped beyond friendship:
I am writing this, Ernest, from the room on the couch where you once promised to be Mine for ever –
This dear couch where I passed three such hours! Where I clasped on a throat whiter than snow the chain which you promised should never leave it.
I have been here above half an hour – recollecting every circumstance of those moments of bliss – de cet heure de Bonheur, too exquisite to last – I was determined to take one last view of this dear, dear room, – don’t be angry with me –
I have touched nothing except a little Vicar of Wakefield & a few old poems. Your dressing table drawer was open & I looked in hopes of finding a comb or brush which had touched that dear picturesque brown head – but only found two old c
ombs of my own, one which fell out one night on the Ramparts, the other I left in your room myself on that never to be forgotten night!50
It is difficult to tell, but these words surely mean that they slept together.
In Trip’s beautiful rosewood dispatch box, now preserved among Lord Anglesey’s papers, tiny objects remain which hint at the realities of the love affair. First, there is the case itself, stuffed to the brim with the letters he had received. Among them is the twist of paper on which Trip wrote ‘De celle qui chantait d’être aimé’ (From the one who used to sing of being loved). Inside its folds are two tiny fragments of jewellery, a broken gold ring and a jewelled cinquefoil in pink and white, with the words, in Harriet’s hand: ‘1814 The First proof of Ernest’s Love’.
In another, on which Trip has written ‘de celle qui j’ai la plus de raisons d’aimer Janvier 1815’ (from the one whom I have the most reason to love January 1815), Harriet has sent him a lock of her light brown hair, held with a mulberry-coloured thread. What could be more touching or more beautiful than this? But sadly the box reveals more than Trip himself ever could or would. There are four beautifully embroidered little pochettes, each with love letters from a different girl.
All of them sent Trip either locks of their hair or in one case her self-portrait. Harriet Capel was only the latest in a long string of conquests made by this beautiful, alluring and treacherous man.51
Then the whole world changed around them. In early March, news reached London and Brussels ‘of the Tyger having broke loose’.52 Napoleon had escaped from Elba and was on his way to Paris, the people and armies of France flocking to support him. War would begin again. Trip had to go Paris himself and before he left he said something disturbing but maybe wonderful to Harriet. She wrote to him, excited, anxious:
Thursday
Je suis si peu d’accord avec moimême – & am half distracted. – What you said last night made me so happy. Confirm it I beseech you – but be frank – You can perhaps call again before you go – If impossible, write. This uncertainty will kill me.53
He was to visit the Capel house before he left and she waited for him. Then, as the hours passed, on the bottom of the same piece of paper, she wrote again:
Thursday night
I had written the above, intending to give it to you when you called.
Why did you not come? It was not kind to disappoint me – I cannot now mention a time when you could find me alone; but I never go out till about 5, & would not go out at all if there was any chance of your coming – One decisive conversation à coeur ouvert is necessary for my repose; and after all that has passed, have I not a right to ask it?54
After all that has passed. He had left without a word to her. Nor did any letter come. The couriers to Brussels were arriving daily from Paris but they brought nothing for her. She was in a constant state of wretchedness and agitation. When they heard at the beginning of April that Napoleon had reached Fontainebleau outside Paris, she took it to mean that Trip would soon be back with her in Brussels.
But surely you will come back here? I do not know what I am doing or writing – Ernest, Ernest, have pity upon the most miserable wretch that ever breathed. Have you got a large packet I sent two days ago? In mercy write to me and tell me something! Will you see me privately when you do come back – you must indeed, you must I am quite, quite distracted – Oh Ernest.55
As the prospect of a renewed war became more likely, the life of the English in Brussels took on a more hectic air. It seems that Capel had taken a certain marquise as his mistress, or at least so Harriet thought. The French royal family passed through, seeming dowdy and defeatist, to general disparagement. Wellington arrived with Caroline’s brother and the rest of his staff. An exhausted Caroline wrote to her mother, ‘The balls are going on here as if we had had none for a year. Paget gave a Most magnificent Dinner to above 100 People, & Lord Hill a Breakfast.’56
Only the ever-loyal Sir Edward Barnes, with whom Caroline herself was half in love (he was only three years younger than her), acted the man of constancy. He would in time become the great road-building, system-building colonial administrator in Ceylon and India. In this flushed and feverish Regency world, he seems like a monument of calm, the proto-Victorian. Caroline wrote to her mother:
I know to a certainty that Harriet might marry at this moment, if she chose it, that bravest, most amiable, most excellent of Men. Who has already met with a disappointment from Muz; & what will perhaps make you laugh thro’ your annoyance, I am sure that if the latter were to give him any encouragement he is ready to renew the business again with her – But no such luck! He is infatuated with the Family & H, tho’ she made him her Confidant & that he is aware of all her errors he still thinks [her] the finest & most Superior of Creatures! … & yet would throw herself away upon a Wretch!57
Eventually, in April, the Wretch returned to Brussels and resumed with Harriet. The gossiping diarist Thomas Moore heard the stories:
Their private walks together at last became the talk of the place, and her father expostulated with the Baron, who gave his word these assiduities should be discontinued – He however was seen with her in the same way again, & the father wrote him an angry letter, which Tripp considered so insulting as to authorize his calling Capell out.58
Even the suggestion of sex with an unmarried woman, even in this loose and desperate atmosphere, remained enough in 1815 for a duel to become a possibility. Capel may well have discovered that the Trip affair had involved more than mere letter writing or the reading of Byron on moonlit ramparts, and said as much in his letter to Trip.
Whatever happened, there is no doubt that the whole of Brussels had been talking for months. The middle-aged Isabella Seymour had already told Harriet that ‘never were two people so completely cut out for each other, & that she was quite sure it would be the happiest ménage, that ever existed … then she said that it was much too late in the day to talk of friendship! Too late indeed!’59
Those are Harriet’s words to Trip. On 13 April, the challenge was issued and 16 Sunday was appointed as the day for the duel. ‘You may suppose what the blame must have been to have induced so peaceable a Nature as Capel’s, the Father of a Family, to have taken such a Step,’60 Caroline wrote to her mother. Capel said not a word to any member of his family about what he was doing, but arranged for the Duke of Richmond to be his second and a Dr Hyde to attend them. Trip found his own colonel and a surgeon in support.
On the Sunday morning, Capel said he was going to call on General Barnes and left the house for the duel. It is not clear where they met but Caroline gave an account to her mother:
They both fired (Capel within a hair’s breadth of his Antagonist’s Ear) and the astonishment of the Duke as well as even the Baron’s Second at his having fired at Capel is not to be described. I have suffered a great deal but God has given me Strength to go thro’ it all & will enable me I hope to bear with patience the reports & illnatured Stories that an Affair of this kind too often gives rise to.61
Rumours of the moral decline of the entire Capel family were now circulating in London and Brussels. Harriet had slept with a notorious seducer, Capel had taken a mistress, there had been the duel, Muzzy would not accept the general who loved her, nor would Harriet to whom his attentions were now transferred. Muzzy was in love instead with a hopelessly impoverished officer. It was said that all the Capel girls had embarked on a ‘Correspondence with Men’.62 Their financial situation was dire. And now twenty-year-old Georgy was also in an amorous ‘scrape’ and had been having ‘what is called a flirtation’ with a man who ‘has every thing to recommend him but that detestable article Money, A little of which, at least, one cannot do without’.63
Caroline had to write urgent denials to her mother, insisting that Georgy had behaved ‘with a degree of feeling & good sense that does her credit’, and had said to Caroline, ‘Mama may I die if I ever conceal a thought, word or look from you For I fully see the wretchedness it entails.�
�� It was Harriet’s ‘System of Concealment which so deeply wounded’ her. The grandmother was to have no fear: ‘I early saw the sort of Place this was & that certain restrictions were necessary; These have always been in force & I will defy any body to bring forward an Instance to the Contrary.’64
For all Caroline Capel’s anger, dignity and strength in these trials, there can be no doubt that the loucheness of Brussels in 1815, its temporary and war-heightened atmosphere, acted as a kind of solvent on manners and sexual mores. Caroline was outraged.
What would you say if you heard of your Grand-daughters riding out without Father, brother or Chaperone of any kind with 5 or six young Men? & this repeatedly – or if you heard of one of them siting [sic] in a public Ball room which had been a Theatre & where the Boxes remained, in one of these Boxes with a Captain Somebody who she was flirting with, for half the Evening! Or if you heard of them walking in the Public walks arm in arm with men & without any Chaperon with them?
Harriet, of course, had done all this and more. From the turmoil, Caroline looked back to her own mother as a kind of haven: ‘When I write to you, I feel so secure that I can almost say anything, So, dearest Mama, I can tell you the extent of my feelings of provocation.’65
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