The Gentry

by Adam Nicolson

  Her love for Capel was undiminished – ‘had I wanted any thing to increase My attachment to My dear Capel his Conduct now would have done it’66 – but still he seems curiously absent. And Harriet’s obsession with Trip, even after he had tried to kill her father in the duel, was if anything on the rise.

  In early June, Napoleon was beginning to mass his armies on the Belgian border and Wellington and the Prussians were making their own dispositions between those invaders and Brussels. The speed of life in this strange, capsule city did not diminish. On the night of 15 June, Georgy, Muzzy and Capel went to the ‘sort of farewell ball’ given by the Duchess of Richmond at their rented house in the rue de la Blanchisserie. The heavily pregnant Caroline, Harriet and the younger girls stayed at home in the Château de Walcheuse.

  At this most famous ball,

  in the midst of the dancing an express arrived to the Duke with an account of the Prussians having been beat and the French having advanced within 14 miles of Bruxelles – You may imagine the Electrical Shocks of such intelligence – Most of the Women in floods of tears and all the Military in an instant collected round their respective leaders and in less than 20 minutes the room was cleared.67

  War had come, it was an ‘Awful moment’ and ‘to have one’s friends walk out of one’s Drawing Room into Action, which has literally been the case on this occasion, is a sensation far beyond description’.68 Napoleon’s brilliantly covert manoeuvring and concentration of his forces, and the failure of the British intelligence service, had humbugged the Duke. ‘This has indeed come upon us like a Thief in the Night’, Caroline wrote to her mother. ‘I am afraid our Great hero must have been deceived for he has certainly been taken by surprise.’69

  Over the next three days, the Capel women were tormented with the thoughts of what was happening to the men they loved. Caroline’s brother, Lord Uxbridge, all the clustering generals, the handsome young men and Baron Trip, who was with the Dutch forces, were all now to be exposed to the intense and murderous form of battle which the Napoleonic wars had devised.

  There was a pause the next day, as the British and Prussian armies pulled back towards Brussels, agreeing to join up and meet the French at Waterloo. The city was rife with rumour and panic. Capel tried to hire horses, a carriage or even a barge to take his family away in case the French won the coming battle. But there wasn’t a horse to be found and they waited in mounting anxiety:

  The Horrors of that night [17–18 June] are not to be forgot – the very elements conspired to make it gloomy – For the rain and darkness and wind were frightfull and our courtyard was filled the night with poor wounded drenched soldiers and horses seeking refuge and assistance which you may imagine we administered as well as we were able.70

  The following day, Sunday 18 June, the noise of battle rolled across the city all afternoon and deep into the evening. ‘To an English ear unaccustomed to such things’, Caroline wrote that day, ‘the Cannonading of a real Battle is Awful beyond description. Let us hope the best, my blessed mama – in the mean time We are all packed up and ready for a Start if necessary.’71 She waited to hear the worst, as about 48,000 people were being killed and wounded twelve miles to the south of her.

  Harriet had no idea where Trip was or what he was doing. On the day after the battle she went into the city from the chateau and must have encountered him, perhaps in the street, perhaps at Lord Uxbridge’s headquarters, to which he was attached. In a letter, ‘scrawled in an enormous hand and much stained by tears’,72 as Henry Anglesey has described it, she then wrote to him:

  Oh Ernest, Ernest – hearing the cannonading feeling that every shot had perhaps deprived me of all I love – of every prospect of future happiness, not daring to ask a question – never hearing your name mentioned – Oh God Oh God, every wrong thing I ever have done has been sufficiently punished! These are the first tears I have been able to shed – every vein has been burning my head – my heart, all, all – oh Ernest, am I never to be happy? Then in this dreadful state to come here to the scene of all my happiness, of all my miseries – to see all the rest of the staff – to know that you are close to me – and to be unable to throw myself into yr. arms, & at your feet to thank God for having preserved you!73

  Every day she was taking a hundred drops of laudanum. Her eyes were swollen with tears and she continued to write to him, now in a small notebook:

  Oh God, whatever my errors have been surely they are too severely punished! I must go – God, God bless you – may all the pains of Life be mine – all the pleasures yours, this is my only prayer – & if the moment ever comes when you no longer enjoy them, – then call on me to love you – give up the best days of yr life to others, I will be satisfied if you will let me stay with you when you are tired of the world. Oh Ernest, God bless you.74

  Waterloo had cut traumatic holes of many kinds in their lives. Edward Barnes had survived, even though two horses were shot from under him. Tens of thousands of others did not. Caroline’s brother Lord Uxbridge, who had led one cavalry charge after another, had his leg destroyed by grape shot in the last moments of the battle. Baron Trip was unscathed. It was a victory, ‘But what horror was it accompanied with!’ Caroline wrote. It was ‘the most glorious, but without exception the most bloody victory that was ever gained’.75 Wellington ‘never was known to be in such low spirits as he was in consequence of the blood shed at Waterloo’.76

  Trip was soon in Paris, with the conquering armies camped in the Bois de Boulogne like a fête gallante, cruising the expatriate society. On 4 August 1815, another Harriet, this one the mondaine Countess Granville, wrote to her sister Lady Georgiana Morpeth in England about a dinner party she had just held in Paris: ‘Baron Tripp and Henry Pierrepoint dined with us today, and the former was very agreeable, giving details, some of which I hope were true, of the battle.’77 You can imagine that scene, his modestly self-promoting account, his beautiful uniform, his ‘air pittoresque’. Later that month, Lady Granville told her sister that ‘The dandies are broken in hearts and fortunes,’78 and listed Baron Trip among them. The cause of his despair would not have been Harriet Capel.

  I wish I could give this story a happy ending, but it doesn’t have one. On 16 July 1815, Caroline Capel gave birth to another baby girl in Brussels, Priscilla Elizabeth. The family doted on her but by 25 September the baby had died. Capel himself and the ten-year-old Janey were both seriously ill in bed and they heard that the chateau they had rented was cheap because it had the reputation of making its inhabitants ill. Harriet went to stay with some friends in The Hague while the rest of the family took a sad holiday travelling up the Rhine. Harriet was no better than she had been in the summer. Caroline wrote to Lady Uxbridge: ‘It is a melancholy sight to see a young & fine Creature losing her best days in misery & regret; she speaks with the warmest gratitude of My kindness to her, but says it is daggers to her, & that she wishes I would hate her.’79

  By early November Caroline was back with the children in Brussels. At some time during that month she discovered what she must long have dreaded: Capel had been gambling heavily in Brussels and had lost. Once again, she wrote to her own mother:

  Never apologize to me, My dearest Mama, for anything you say – all that comes from you I must take kindly – But you are in error on a certain very painfull subject; Can you for one moment believe that I was aware of what was going on without interfering?80

  Capel had been pestered to join what was called the Literary Club by Lord Waterpark, ‘a steady Family Man … It was not considered at that time as a place where there was any gaming, but merely where the Newspapers were read.’81 Caroline had not the slightest inkling of what was going on. ‘No creature ever hinted it to me, & the only time I felt any alarm was during the time of the Races when a great deal of betting was going forward & I spoke to him in a warning voice, which he took very kindly & said I should have no cause for uneasiness.’82

  By December, Caroline was contemplating the possibility of moving furth
er on into Europe. Much as Brussels was ‘cheaper than England there are certainly parts of the Continent infinitely cheaper than this’.83 Their lease would run out in June and the landlord would let them renew it only at an inflated rent which they could not now afford.

  Harriet was also returning in desperation to the source of all her sorrows. In The Hague on New Year’s Day 1816 she wrote again to Trip, now in London.

  Do not think that I am going to attempt entering into a correspondence with you – No Ernest – I neither require nor expect an answer nor will I ever again take a step like the present – Not a Human being on earth knows of it, & nothing but peculiar circumstances should have tempted me to do it.84

  She would come with him not as a wife but as a sister, a friend.

  Sell your commission, Ernest, & let us depend but on each other, – in a middling situation our being together might cause you additional expence, but in a state of absolute poverty we should mutually assist each other. I have hands – strength, & some talents; all – all should be devoted to you, & the proudest as well as the happiest moment of my life would be that in which I laid at your feet, my little earnings.

  Ernest – bear in my mind that my existence hangs upon you – Only be open – tell Papa your situation – I will tell him my determination, et nous irons où le destin nous ménera – Remember, Ernst, what we have been to each other – Oh my beloved friend, there are moments the recollection of which almost distract me – Le premier – le dernier baiser qu j’ai reçu de vous, brûle encore sur mes lèvres.85

  The first and last kiss that he had given her? Was all this about no more than a single kiss? Harriet Capel, and perhaps her mother, was contemplating the possibility of a descent straight through all the layers of a carefully graded society to the point where she had nothing but love. Baron Trip responded to this passionate and almost metaphysical hymn of adoration and self-abasement with silence.

  In June the family left for Switzerland, where they lodged in a cramped villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. In October, they moved into an apartment in Lausanne. And at the end of that month Baron Trip shot himself dead with a pistol when in Florence.

  Lady Granville described the on dit to her sister:

  There are various reports. One of pecuniary distress; one that he was in love with that pretty little Mrs. Fitzherbert, who was a Miss Chichester, and that he sent to her husband to borrow the pistols with which he destroyed himself; and another that upon Mr Capel sending to tell him he no longer would oppose his marrying his daughter, he avowed a secret marriage and said he had a wife and five children, and then, unable to reconcile the difficulties of his situation, shot himself. It was on returning from a party.86

  Within a few days the news reached Lausanne. Capel came as close as he ever had to Harriet and, as Caroline wrote to her mother, for ‘the first two nights he slept in her room because he could not bear she should be without one of us’.87

  Caroline heard the news with relief. She imagined ‘this fine creature … being one day restored to herself’.88 Trip had left a letter for Lord Uxbridge, Caroline’s brother, elevated since the Battle of Waterloo as the Marquess of Anglesey, but neither Caroline nor Harriet knew its contents. It may well be that Trip’s letter entrusted Harriet’s letters to Anglesey, which is the reason they have survived, as they are now in the muniment room of Lord Anglesey in Plas Newydd.

  Harriet was experiencing a strange calm:

  After two years of agitation and anxiety, of alternate hopes and fears, there is a kind of comfort even in such tranquility as this – my mind feels so stunned, so worn out, that at least it can never again suffer much of any sort, – its best – its warmest affections, have been torn to pieces, & all that resembles enthusiasm is annihilated for ever.89

  It was as if the crisis was over. The following March, Lady Uxbridge died, and on Boxing Day 1817, Harriet married a 43-year-old Welshman called David Okeden Parry-Okeden of Moor Crichel in Dorset; he had previously been called David Okeden Parry, but had changed his name to qualify for an inheritance from his mother’s father. He was distantly connected to this world of the dissolute aristocracy, but clearly provided for Harriet a destination that felt safe, good and secure. He was a member of the gentry, everything Trip and his kind were not. His first wife had died seven years before and he was the same age as Harriet’s mother. She had joined the ‘middling sort’. The next year, in October 1818, the cynical Thomas Moore dined at Bowood with his friend the Marquess of Lansdowne. Harriet and her husband were at dinner. There was music in the evening and she played the Ranz des Vaches, a Swiss cowherd’s tune, and some melancholy Italian variations on the piano. To his diary, not to the assembled company, Moore retold the story of the Baron’s suicide:

  Miss Capell upon hearing the catastrophe, put on mourning for him & has worn it ever since, notwithstanding a grave elderly gentleman has been kind enough to convert her into Mrs Oakden – they are both in mourning at this moment, le Mari being obliged, I suppose, to put it on in self-defence.90

  When Moore himself stood up to entertain the company with his singing,

  the most trumpery person of the company (as will always happen) Mrs Oakden, took her station in the remotest corner of the room, where she could not hear a note, and employed her wise self in writing letters – yet this creature likes her own bad playing amazingly.91

  Harriet was pregnant at the time and the following June 1819, in giving birth to a son, George Fitz-Maurice Parry-Okeden, she died. She was twenty-six. Her father, Capel, had died two months before ‘in Convulsions or in a state of Insensibility’.92 He was forty-six and his debts died with him.

  Harriet’s sisters, with no dowry to boast of, married either English and Irish squires or into the minor French and Swiss nobility. As a whole, they stepped down from the high-octane and destructive world in which their father had lived, and which their mother had suffered, into something more settled and secure. In that way, the story of this Capel family is of the gentry becoming the harbour and refuge for children brought up surrounded by the risk and rootlessness of aristocracy. Every one of the Capel children transmuted, in effect, into Victorians. One of the sisters married a doctor. One of the brothers became a captain in the navy. Another became the 6th Earl of Essex in succession to his uncle and lived a blameless and uneventful life as a Victorian grandee. Harriet’s son, George Fitz-Maurice Parry-Okeden, changed his name to the more down-to-earth William Parry-Okeden and built himself a severely handsome Jacobethan manor house at Turnworth in Dorset. In the light of these outcomes, what does Victorian England look like but a return to gentry virtues, even among the aristocracy, after the moral anarchy and pain of their parents’ generation?

  After Capel’s death, Caroline herself entered a long and relatively burdenless widowhood. She never married again and lived in Rutland Gate on the edge of Hyde Park in London. In her drawing room, to entertain her many grandchildren, she kept tame canaries in cages and from time to time let them out to fly around the room so that for a moment or two they could enjoy the experience of freedom.93

  1780s–1910s

  Fantasy

  The Hugheses

  Kinmel, Denbighshire and Grosvenor Square, London

  This story of a slow Victorian dance between money and dignity – the dynamo of all gentry lives – begins long before on a hill just inland from the little port of Amlwch on the north coast of Anglesey. Parys Mountain is the most poisonous place in Britain. The rust-red streams that run down from it to the coast are the most polluted waters in the country; 40 per cent of all the heavy metals in the Irish Sea come from here. Any attempt to channel that water in metal pipes has led only to the pipes dissolving in the acidity. There is nothing artificial about this: Mynydd Parys is an acid mountain, thick with sulphur, made poisonous when its rocks were formed 440 million years ago. Almost nothing will grow there beyond sprigs of black heather, strange, acid-tolerant lichens, a few mosses and the beautiful, beaded fronds of Black Melick. W
here buildings have collapsed and the lime in the mortar has neutralized the soil, there is a patch of odd bright green grass. Otherwise, even on a sunny day, Parys Mountain is dark, Martian, metamorphic, orange and ochre, a mineral anti-world, made alien by the metals and chemicals it contains.

  It looks as it does because it has been robbed. Everything valuable it once contained, even 1,000 feet down, far below sea level, has been dug out, so that now it sits in the middle of Anglesey’s green pastures like a vast rotten tooth, more cavity than hill. More than five million tons of sterile spoil have been raised from its depths. Just as the story of the Throckmortons floated on grass and the Lascelles on sugar, the rise and fall of the Hughes of Kinmel begins in the money that Parys Mountain once contained.1

  In 1765, the 26-year-old Reverend Edward Hughes arrived in Anglesey to become curate to Robert Lewis, a vicar there. Hughes was an educated man. He had been to Jesus College, Oxford, as all the anglicized Welsh gentry did, where he had received his MA three years before, but he was no grandee. The origins of the family ‘had it seems given rise to considerable speculation, much of it patently malicious among the Anglesey and Caernarvonshire squirearchy. There were rumours that Edward’s father Hugh had been, variously, a cowman at Penrhos, Holyhead, a stable boy at Lleweni, a servant and a tailor.’2 That was jealous talk. Although there is some muddle over the genealogy, they were probably ancient, small-time, English-speaking Flintshire squires. Hugh had spent most of his life in England, as secretary to the Chancellor of the diocese of Hereford, and had finally bought himself a small estate in Anglesey near Beaumaris.3

  In the months after Edward arrived in Anglesey in 1765, he became engaged to his vicar’s third daughter, Mary Lewis – she was twenty-five – and that August they were married. She had as her inheritance a small farm called Llysdulas near Amlwch, which included on its margins the most unpromising of assets: half of half of a small ‘barren hill’ named after a man called Parys who had owned it in the fifteenth century. The grazing there was poor and its annual rental was £25. Her half of the mountain was shared with a man who owned the whole of the other half, Sir Nicholas Bayly, a rich and powerful baronet from the other end of the island.