Jane Austen

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

  Jane had written to Frank and played battledore1 and shuttlecock (an early version of badminton) with Edward’s seven-year-old son William. ‘We have frequently kept it up three times and once or twice six,’ she told her brother.

  The ‘two Edwards’ had been to Canterbury to see Mrs Knight, who was cheerful but weak. Edward’s eldest boy, Edward, was unwell. His younger brothers were expected to return to school without him while he went to Worthing with the grown-ups, in case the fashionable cure of sea-bathing should be recommended. Jane had found Cassandra’s white mittens. Jane’s sister-in-law Elizabeth had proposed that Jane should take Cassandra’s place at Goodnestone for a few days and Jane intended to turn up there. If her presence was inconvenient she could return in the carriage with Cassandra.

  We learn that Mr Hall the hairdresser charged Elizabeth five shillings to do her hair and five shillings for every lesson to her maid. Jane considered he went off with ‘no inconsiderable booty’, to say nothing of the pleasures of being at Godmersham with food, drink and lodging, the benefit of country air and the company of the servants. He charged Jane only half a crown to cut her hair. Jane commented that he clearly respected either her youth or her poverty, adding that she had been looking into her affairs and was likely to be very poor. She could not afford to tip Sackree, the children’s nurse deputed to look after her as temporary lady’s maid, more than ten shillings. Strictly speaking, on a country house visit she should have distributed about £5 among the servants but this was totally beyond her means. She said wryly that as she was about to meet Cassandra at Canterbury, she need not have mentioned this. ‘It is as well, however, to prepare you for the sight of a sister sunk in poverty, that it may not overcome your spirits.’

  When Jane wrote again three days later on 30 August 1805, the sisters had changed places: Cassandra was at Godmersham, Jane at Goodnestone farm with Harriot Bridges. Jane did not want to stay too long, for fear of running out of clothes. She hoped Edward would be able to fetch her on Monday (she was writing on Friday) or Thursday if wet. She was glad young Edward was better.

  It was Elizabeth’s unmarried brother Edward Bridges who paid her hospitable attentions, ordering toasted cheese for supper specially to please her, but if he did propose to her, he was refused.

  She enjoyed walking over the house and grounds at Rowling. That day the First and Second Grenadier Guards marched from Deal for Chatham, the First Coldstream and First Scots Guards from Chatham for Deal. Edward was nervous that the partridges would be disturbed, as shooting was due to begin on the Monday. Jane thought the ‘evil intentions of the Guards’ were certain. Troop movements on this scale are not surprising. The danger of invasion was only just past, as Napoleon’s orders for the march from Boulogne back to the Danube were not issued till 22 August and the camp at Boulogne was being abandoned on the day Jane Austen was writing. She thanked Cassandra for recommending the Revd Thomas Gisborne’s Inquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, which she was rather surprised to find she liked.

  Early in September Cassandra and Jane stayed with Elizabeth’s sister Sophia, Mrs William Deedes, at Sandling, near Folkestone. Sandling had an unusual feature: one of the sitting rooms was oval in shape, with a bow window at one end. There was a fireplace with a window, the centre window of the bow, exactly over the mantelpiece. William Deedes was Colonel of the South Kent volunteers and from 1807-12 Member of Parliament for Hythe.

  By mid-September Godmersham was full again, and the sisters left for Worthing to join Mrs Austen and Martha Lloyd. They bought fish on the beach and Jane won seventeen shillings in a raffle.

  Meanwhile Frank on the Canopus had won the approval of Admiral Horatio Nelson, who described him as an excellent young man. Frank was involved in the blockade at Cadiz and after Nelson arrived in the Victory on 28 September, the Canopus was ordered to ‘complete supplies’ at Gibraltar. Then she protected a convoy en route to Malta. Hearing that the enemy fleet was coming out of Cadiz, Frank made haste to rejoin the main British fleet but contrary winds prevented his reaching the battle of Trafalgar, fought on 21 October 1805. Although he did not care for fighting for its own sake he was disappointed. He wrote to Mary Gibson on 27 October:

  Alas, my dearest Mary, all my fears are but too fully justified. The fleets have met, and, after a very severe contest, a most decisive victory has been gained by the English… but I am truly sorry to add that this splendid affair has cost us many lives, and amongst them the most invaluable one to the nation, that of our gallant, and ever to be regretted, commander in chief, Lord Nelson, who was mortally wounded by a musket shot, and only lived long enough to know his fleet successful … To lose all share in the glory of a day which surpasses all which ever went before, is what I cannot think of with any degree of patience …

  In January 1806 Mrs Austen, Jane and Martha went to Steventon, where Jane gave her seven-year-old nephew James-Edward The British Navigator, or, A Collection of Voyages Made in Different Parts of the World.

  Mrs Austen left Steventon for Bath on 29 January, taking Anna with her, and found temporary lodgings in unfashionable Trim Street, meanwhile looking round for something better. Jane and Cassandra spent three weeks at Manydown, and came home to unexpected riches: Mrs Lillingston of Bath, a friend of Mrs Leigh-Perrot, had made Mr Leigh-Perrot her executor and left money to him, his wife and his nieces. Jane and Cassandra received £50 each. Jane’s share was stretched to last her a whole year. Mrs Austen had hoped to find lodgings in St James’s Square, but somebody else was negotiating for the whole house, so she expected disappointment.

  Frank came to the rescue. He had been in the action off San Domingo and when he docked at Plymouth early in May he had prize money, a gold medal and a silver vase presented to him in recognition of his achievements. He could now afford to marry, though still not rich. He offered them a share in his home at Southampton, then a fashionable watering place. He would not be far from the dockyard at Portsmouth. Jane would put her knowledge of Portsmouth to good use when she came to write Mansfield Park. She left the detested city of Bath with happy feelings of escape.

  13

  Stoneleigh Abbey, 1806

  FRANK MARRIED MARY GIBSON at Ramsgate on 24 July 1806 and came to Godmersham for their honeymoon on 26 July Fanny wrote in her diary on Tuesday 29 July 1806, I had a bit of a letter from Aunt Jane with some verses of hers, They read:

  See they come, post-haste from Thanet,

  Lovely couple, side by side;

  They’ve left behind them Richard Kennet

  With the parents of the bride!

  Canterbury they have passed through;

  Next succeeded Stamford-bridge;

  Chilham village they came fast through;

  Now they’ve mounted yonder ridge.

  Down the hill they’re swift proceeding,

  Now they skirt the park around;

  Lo! The cattle sweetly feeding

  Scamper, startled at the sound!

  Run, my brothers, to the pier gate!

  Throw it open, very wide!

  Let it not be said that we’re late

  In welcoming my uncle’s bride!

  To the house the chaise advances;

  Now it stops - they’re here, they’re here!

  How d’ye do, my Uncle Francis?

  How does do your lady dear?

  Fanny was just into her teens, an age when girls are hypercritical. If Jane’s reputation had rested on her talent as a poet we should never have heard of her. These doggerel verses may have had something to do with Fanny’s later conviction that her aunt was ever so slightly common.

  In August 1806 Jane and her mother visited their relative the Revd Thomas Leigh of Adlestrop. Mrs Austen was proud of being a Leigh. Her family had owned Adlestrop Park in Gloucestershire near the Oxfordshire border since the Reformation. The original house, built by her great-grandfather, was knocked down halfway through the eighteenth century and replaced with a neo-Gothic building in the newest fashionable style. T
he occupant was a first cousin once removed, James Henry Leigh, married to the Honourable Julia, daughter of Lord Saye and Sele. Mrs Austen did not look to these grand relatives for hospitality but, as always, feeling at home in clerical company went to the rectory alongside where her cousin Thomas, an elderly widower, lived with his maiden sister, Elizabeth, who was Cassandra’s godmother. Thomas, on visits to Steventon, had customarily tipped the children, and Jane and Cassandra had visited Adlestrop in July 1794.

  The Revd Mr Leigh had grandiose ideas. He had commissioned the famous improver, Humphrey Repton, to enclose the village green, move the cottages, make a new entrance to the rectory and open up the back of the house. A new garden had been landscaped, abutting the garden of Adlestrop House. A stream of water was diverted through a flower garden, down the hill over ledges of rock and into a distant lake. It was visible equally from the mansion and the parsonage. From Mansfield Park we learn that Rep ton’s fees were five guineas a day. Five pounds had been three months’ allowance for Jane while her father was alive and was a lower servant’s annual wage. The improvements at Adlestrop Rectory are remarkably similar to the ones suggested by Henry Crawford in the novel to Edmund Bertram, who drily answers that he will have to be satisfied with more use and less beauty.

  While the Austens were at Adlestrop Rectory the grandest relative of all, the Honourable Mary Leigh, died on 2 July 1806 at Stoneleigh Abbey in Staffordshire. In her will she left the mansion and huge estate to the cadet branch of the family the Adlestrop Leighs. They were to go to the Revd Thomas Leigh for his lifetime, then to Mrs Austen’s brother James Leigh-Perrot, and eventually to James Henry Leigh of Adlestrop Park Neither Revd Thomas Leigh nor James Leigh-Perrot had any children and neither was young. The family lawyer expected that the two old men would relinquish their claims if paid off with reasonable sums. What, at their time of life, could they want with an ancestral pile? The lawyer, who should have looked at the rectory to see the scale of Thomas Leigh’s territorial ambition, had mistaken his man. The natural heir was James Henry Leigh but Thomas Leigh seized on his legacy as a piece of glorious good fortune and set off for Staffordshire at once, whirling his guests with him.

  Between Kenilworth and Leamington, the Stoneleigh Abbey estate is superbly sited, the Avon winding through its pleasure grounds and deer park. Originally a Cistercian monastery founded by King Henry II, whose escutcheon is on the gatehouse, it is still occupied. Abbeys and other religious houses passed into the hands of Protestant gentry in the sixteenth century when Henry VIII abolished the Roman Catholic monasteries. The Leighs, who had the place from 1561, had been on the Royalist side in the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, when the Cromwellians cut off the head of King Charles I. Seven years before he met his grim fate, the King rested at Stoneleigh Abbey in 1642. He had marched to Coventry on his way to Nottingham but found the gates of the city shut against him. Harassed and exhausted, the King tried his luck instead at Stoneleigh and received a warm and loyal welcome with generous hospitality from his devoted subject Sir Thomas Leigh. In 1836 a flower painting at Stoneleigh was found to have been painted over a portrait of King Charles I by Sir Anthony Van Dyck. The Leighs supported all the Stuarts and from the time the Catholic Stuart King James II fled from England in 1688, the successive Lords Leigh refused to sit in the House of Lords or have anything to do with public life. This fastidious aloofness lasted well into Jane Austen’s lifetime. In her History of England from the Reign of Henry IV to the Death of Charles I by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian’, written when Jane was fifteen, she followed family tradition in passionately defending the Stuarts, especially Mary Queen of Scots, and vilifying King Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth I.

  Stoneleigh had been added to between 1714 and 1726, when the huge west wing was built. The estimate for erecting it, exclusive of materials and gear such as ladders and ropes, the demolition of the old building and the digging of new foundations, was £545 for three storeys or £463 for two. The three-storey option was chosen. Sumptuous interior decorations cost extra.

  When Mrs Austen and her daughters visited in August 1806 they ate fish from the pond and venison from the park, with pigeons, rabbits and poultry from the estate, in a large and noble parlour hung round with family portraits. It was a long way from cold souse and orange wine at Steventon. Mrs Austen was impressed by the size of the house, so big that neither she nor the new owner could easily find their way about. Mrs Austen jokingly suggested setting up signposts. There were forty-five windows in the front and a long flight of steps leading to a large hall. On the right was the dining room and within it the breakfast room where the guests usually sat. The Austens enjoyed the spot as, together with the chapel, it had the best view

  Mrs Austen had expected grandeur but was overwhelmed by beauty. I had pictured to myself long avenues, dark rookeries and dismal yew trees,’ she wrote to James’s wife Mary. Instead, she found large and beautiful woods full of delightful walks. The kitchen garden and orchard, over four and a half acres, had so much fruit that it rotted on the trees despite the depredations of blackbirds and thrushes.

  To the left of the hall was the best drawing room, with a smaller one inside. These rooms were rather gloomy, with brown wainscot and dark crimson furniture. Behind them was the old picture gallery and the state bedroom, also gloomy, with a high dark crimson velvet bed. This may have been the one in which the ill-fated King Charles I slept. Behind the hall and the parlours were a passage that crossed the house, three staircases and two small sitting rooms. There were twenty-six bedrooms in the new part of the house and many good ones in the old. Another gallery displayed modern prints on a buff-coloured wallpaper and there was a large billiard room. The house was kept spotless. If you were to cut your finger I do not think you could find a cobweb to wrap it up in,’ wrote Mrs Austen, alluding to an ancient remedy mentioned in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  They enjoyed their visit, enlivened by the arrival of their agreeable relative George Cooke, and Jane had many a good laugh at the irritating Lady Saye and Sele, a relative of theirs, who visited. She was the mother of ‘the adultress’. Lady Saye and Sele was the widow of Lord Saye and Sele, who had committed suicide by cutting his throat after stabbing himself with a sword and trying to drown himself.

  When Mrs Austen and her daughters were with her, Lady Saye and Sele was offered some boiled chicken. She refused, adding pathetically that after her husband had destroyed himself she had eaten nothing but boiled chicken for a fortnight, and had not been able to touch it since.

  Lady Saye and Sele was self-absorbed and less than tactful. In 1782 she had met the novelist Fanny Burney, already a celebrity, and insisted, ‘I must introduce you to my sister, Lady Hawke… She has written a novel herself, so you are sister authoresses! A most elegant thing! It’s called The Mausoleum of Julia. Lord Hawke himself says it’s all poetry!’

  Lady Saye and Sele, unaware that her sister’s outpourings were hardly comparable with Fanny Burney’s artistic and professional achievement, gushed to the best-selling author of Evelina that Lady Hawke’s effusion was to be privately printed, naturally Probably this crass woman was equally patronizing to the young Jane Austen, then totally unknown, but whose fame was to eclipse even that of Fanny Burney.

  While in Staffordshire, Mrs Austen and the ‘girls’ called on Mrs Austen’s nephew, the Revd Edward Cooper, who with his sister Jane had often stayed at Steventon (they had no mother, she having died in an epidemic). He became curate at Harpsden, Mrs Austen’s girlhood home. Unfortunately Edward was less than likeable and in his pomposity and insensitivity seems to have borne some resemblance to Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. When her brother Edward Knight’s wife Elizabeth died two years later Jane hoped that Edward Cooper would not send ‘one of his letters of cruel comfort’. He had recently published a volume of his sermons. His eldest son, Edward-Philip Cooper, although not yet twelve, was already precociously pompous, composing sermons and domi
neering over his brothers and sisters. When Edward-Philip was sent to Rugby in 1809 Jane hoped that being just one raw schoolboy among others would do him good and rub the corners off.

  While at Stoneleigh the Austens visited Warwick Castle. It was Stoneleigh Abbey, though, with its ancient grandeur, that offered Jane Austen ‘copy’. It became a partial model for Sotherton in Mansfield Park, Thomas Leigh held family prayers every morning in the old chapel, hung with black in honour of the departed owner. Then came breakfast, which consisted of chocolate, coffee or tea, plum cake, pound cake, hot rolls, cold rolls, bread and butter. Mrs Austen restricted herself to dry toast. Such matters were seen to by the house steward, a fine, large, respectable-looking man’. Mr Leigh was busy with his agent, Joseph Hill, a great part of the day. We think of Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, who spent the morning after his arrival from Antigua with his steward. Mr Hill was a correspondent of Jane Austen’s favourite moral poet, William Cowper.

  Mrs Austen was impressed with the dairy, doubtless looking back to the one she had managed during her early married life. Awed, she told James’s wife Mary that one servant was called the baker and did nothing but bake and brew beer. A household on this scale might employ as many as forty servants at an annual cost of some £7,000. Stoneleigh employed eighteen menservants, as well as a large complement of females. The new master had to fit them all out with mourning clothes.

  This visit to Stoneleigh was Jane Austen’s main experience at first hand of high life. Her relatives lived in a genuine stately home, even grander than Godmersham, with a lifestyle to suit. It was a far cry from lodgings at Bath or the small house in Southampton where Mrs Austen and the girls later shared a home with Frank and his wife. Mrs Austen must have hoped that this childless cousin, newly enriched, might do something for her, a struggling widow with two unmarried daughters past the age when they were likely to get husbands. She relied even more, however, on her brother James Leigh-Perrot, whom she had followed to Bath.