by Deryn Lake
“What happens if you sell this place quickly?”
“I saw a dear little house to let the other day.”
“Where?”
“In Blackheath, on the common itself. It was very romantic and Georgian. I thought it might appeal to you.”
“Was it the sort of place Sarah would have lived in?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me at all,” said Finnan with a laugh, “if it wasn’t where she went with her gallant Captain Napier.”
“I don’t suppose I shall ever find that out.”
“Perhaps it’s as well not to.”
Sidonie sighed. “I shall miss her, you know.”
Finnan walked to the window to gaze in the direction of Holland House, then looked back over his shoulder. Sidonie saw that he was smiling.
“I expect that somewhere, even now,” he said, “she is missing you too.”
Historical Note
It was in May 1990 that the idea for this book was first suggested to me and, indeed, it started life as a work devoted entirely to George III. However, as I got to know his girlfriend, the irrepressible Lady Sarah Lennox, I grew more and more intrigued with her until, eventually, the balance of the book changed, Sidonie came in and it became Sarah’s story rather than the King’s.
Sarah’s life is well documented through her letters but still one or two questions remain. Firstly, did she love George III and, secondly, did he propose to her or not? For the answers we must look to three sources; Henry Fox’s account of events, Sarah’s letters to Susan and the tale as told by Henry Napier, Sarah’s son.
That Sarah was more than capable of lying to Susan is abundantly clear, particularly when she protests too much. A prime example is the letter written when Sarah was expecting a child by Lord William Gordon in which she talks about going on holiday with Sir Charles Bunbury as if nothing was wrong with her marriage.
Bearing this in mind, how much credence should we give Sarah’s vehement insistence that she only liked the King and did not love him? Furthermore, one gets the impression from Sarah’s letters to her best friend that George never actually proposed, whereas Henry Napier tells us, “After her recovery and subsequent appearance in London the King’s joy was palpable, his conversations were renewed, his hopes revived, and once again he ventured to say, in allusion to the former conversation, ‘I hope you will think of it.’ She did so, and accepted him.” Which one, we wonder now, is telling us the true facts?
There is no question, however, about the details of Sarah’s promiscuous period, her affairs with Lauzun, Carlisle and Lord William Gordon, her elopement to Scotland, her love child and her divorce are therefore presented in this book exactly as they happened.
Sarah’s marriage to Captain the Honourable George Napier (Donny), proved to be a happy one, though throughout their life together they were perpetually short of money. Within the three years following her marriage, Sarah gave birth to three children, Charles, Emily and George. Two years later, William followed, then Richard, Henry, Caroline and Cecilia. Nine children in all, including Louisa Bunbury.
Nothing in Sarah’s life was ever quite what she anticipated. She had almost married the King of England and would have probably made a great success of it, but she ended up with a penniless soldier. She was old to start adding to her family when she remarried but had another eight children. Three of her boys became distinguished and heroic soldiers, one was a captain in the navy, another went into the Church and became a Fellow of All Souls. Of her daughters, Emily was adopted by Sarah’s childless sister, Louisa Conolly, while three died young; Caroline at the age of nineteen and Cecilia at seventeen, while poor little Louisa Bunbury, she of the big teeth and engaging manner, also died at the age of seventeen years.
And what of the men who loved Sarah? The King, as is well known, became desperately ill, suffering a state described as “madness” but now correctly diagnosed as porphyria by Dr Ida Macalpine and Dr Richard Hunter who published the findings of their extensive research in the British Medical Journal in 1966. Porphyria is an hereditary metabolic disorder the onset of which is frequently marked by a heavy cold — the King went down with just such a complaint at the time of Sarah’s marriage to Bunbury — and in the worst cases can produce mental aberrations, hallucinations and delusions. The clinching piece of evidence for the two modern doctors was the fact that George III passed urine described as being the colour of port wine or purple, a classic symptom of porphyria, which, they believe, also attacked Mary Stuart, James I, Frederick the Great, George IV, as well as several other of the King’s children, and his granddaughter, Princess Charlotte.
Sir Charles Bunbury appointed himself head of the Jockey Club and became immensely influential and genuinely popular. A contemporary wrote of him, “Whatever might be the faults and peccadillos of Sir Charles Bunbury, he was a man naturally benign, of compassionate and friendly disposition, and his plan for treating racehorses, without suffering them to be abused by the whip and spur … ought ever to be remembered in his honour.” At a meeting at Sir Charles’s house on 14th May, 1779, to celebrate the first running of the Oaks, it was decided to start the Derby, the name — a choice between the Derby or Bunbury Stakes — being chosen on the toss of a coin. Sir Charles was one of the few owners to win both the Derby and the Oaks in the same year, 1801.
Lord William Gordon became a fortune-hunter. Having returned from Rome — with or without the very large dog is not recorded — William persuaded his brother, the Duke of Gordon, to take him into his regiment. He then got into Parliament and planned to marry an heiress, a ward in chancery, the Honourable Frances Ingram Stewart. However, the Lord Chancellor ordered Lord William’s petition to marry to be dismissed and it was only by making sufficient money through playing faro, thus winning the support of Miss Ingram’s mother and sister, that he finally managed to get the bride to the altar. He had one legitimate daughter, Frances, who never married. His illegitimate daughter he never saw again. Interestingly, one of Lord William’s kinsmen was George Gordon, Lord Byron.
The Memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun were published during Sarah’s lifetime, once more bringing scandal in their wake. But Sarah, by this stage, was too old to care. She had outlived Armand, who had taught her about love and introduced her to adultety, his memoirs being published posthumously, presumably by some member of the Duc’s intimate circle.
As for Sarah’s second husband, George Napier, after years of wandering from home to home in order to accommodate his ever increasing family and with no occupation other than that of a captain on half-pay, he finally came into his own again.
In 1793, the French sent their King, Louis XVI, to the guillotine and Pitt ordered the French Minister to leave the country as England declared war on France. The Honourable George Napier went back on active service, rising through the ranks until in 1794 he once more reached the rank of colonel. After this, Donny remained on duty until his death of “a consumptive complaint” in 1804. Sarah was completely devastated and wrote to Susan that “one week’s fever has suddenly destroyed twenty-three years’ happiness!”
What became of the others? Louisa Napier, Donny’s daughter, remained faithful to Sarah after her father’s death but herself died unmarried; Lady Susan O’Brien spent most of her life attempting to find a job for her feckless husband, William, who had tried his hand at everything in America and failed, and had then been filled with an ambition to become a barrister in England, with singular lack of success. Eventually, he became Receiver-General of Taxes for the County of Dorset which no doubt kept everybody happy! William died in 1815 after fifty-one years of unbroken married bliss and equal devotion on both sides, which says a great deal for Susan’s patience. She herself followed him in 1827 at the age of eighty-four after only a few days’ illness and in full possession of her faculties.
Charles James Fox, after his dismissal in 1774, went into opposition and became leader of the Rockingham Whigs in the House of Commons. His vendetta against George III occupied m
ost of his life, yet no historian I know of appears to have made the connection between the jilting of his youthful aunt, Sarah, and Fox’s implacable dislike of the monarch. To me the matter speaks for itself and explains Charles James’s Draconian aim to curtail totally the royal power. Fox’s alliance with the Prince of Wales, later George IV, who in true Hanoverian tradition was completely at odds with his father, is yet another example of the bitterness the politican felt against the King.
Charles James secretly married his mistress, Mrs Armistead, in 1795. She had been a former lover of the wicked Duke of Dorset, to whose home Knole, near Sevenoaks, Sarah had first fled with Lord William Gordon. In a long parliamentary career, Fox only held high office for less than two years but despite that had two major reforms to his credit, the Libel Act of 1792 and, more importantly, the abolition of the slave trade. A supporter of the American Colonists and the French Revolution, he still thought “both property and rank of great importance”. A renegade to the end, Charles James died in 1806.
Sarah outlived all the men who had loved her, including the young Earl of Carlisle, who became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and later Lord Privy Seal, and died in 1825. She left this world in 1826, completely blind due to a cataract in either eye. Her first love, George, also died blind, also aged eighty-one, in January, 1820. During the previous Christmas he had endured the last onslaught of the royal malady, porphyria, and had talked for a period of fifty-eight consecutive hours without sleeping.
In his excellent biography of George III, Stanley Ayling says, “It may be idle to speculate how differently matters might have turned out if he had allowed himself, or been allowed, to marry his Lady Sarah, that delightful girl who became so charming and intelligent a woman.” All one can say, looking back on that pair of fine young people whom destiny brought together then thrust apart so cruelly, is, Who knows?
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks are due to Lorna Fulford, the musician, in whose company I spent an entire evening discussing the career of Sidonie Brooks. Lorna gave me tremendous help, encouragement and insight into the classical musician’s world and I could not have written about Sidonie without her. I would also like to thank Stephen Devine, who played the harpsichord especially for me during the summer season of 1991 at Finchcocks, Goudhurst, Kent, the instrument being part of their Historical Keyboard Instrument Collection. Stephen was only sixteen years old at that time, yet he played with a stunning brilliance that was quite unforgettable. My thanks are also due to Deborah McMillan, Deputy Manager of the King George VI Memorial Youth Hostel at Holland House during the spring of 1991. Deborah not only very kindly showed me round the interior of the building but also told me the legend of the ghost of Holland House, supposedly a former Lady Holland. On this occasion I was accompanied by the poet Beryl Cross, whose usual good humour made the research project most enjoyable. Thanks are due, too, to fellow author Derek Nicholls for supplying me with background information on the life of Sir Charles Bunbury. As always heartfelt gratitude to my agent Shirley Russell and my editor Anna Powell, not to mention the back-up team, Anna Foinette, Geoffrey Glassborow, Erika Lock, Rohini Patel, and Peter Jeffrey, whose retirement from Barclays Bank is yet another nail in the coffin of the good old days of considerate and friendly banking.
Bibliography
George the Third, Stanley Ayling
Lady Sarah Lennox, Edith Roelker Curtis
Timewarps, Dr John Gribbin
The Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox, edited by the Countess of Ilchester
The Home of the Hollands, 1606-1820, the Earl of Ilchester
The Sword Dance, Priscilla Napier
The Royal Malady, Charles Chenevix Trench