The Paper Garden
Page 15
The woody, stiffer sort of energy creating the other vine that twined through these ten years was social, political, and economic. This was the hunger for a court position that took Mary Pendarves to assemblies again and again, in a round of attempts and disappointments that persisted year after year after year. Her capacity for this social perseverance is astounding. A less diligent, less intrepid social butterfly would have been chloroformed by the hours she spent inquiring, requesting, delicately contriving, and entreating her connections for a court position. If 95 percent of life is simply showing up, then to court she showed up, sometimes twice a day. “Lady Dysart, Miss Dashwood, and I went together. My clothes you know. I was curled, powdered, and decked with silver ribbon, and was told by critics in the art of dress that I was well dressed.”2
You would think that a grandniece of Countess Granville (“the Dragon,” Mary and Ann called her), a cousin of Lord Carteret, a great-granddaughter of Sir Bevil Granville, and a niece of that rat Lord Lansdowne could obtain an appointment as a companion, say, to a nice little princess. But seeking this aristocratic job was like trying to poke an embroidery bodkin through a heavy leather coat. She could not do it. The surface of the court, with the charged atmosphere between the feuding Prince Frederick and his vindictive father, King George II, repelled any entry. By the late 1730s the prince was effectively banished from the court. “Tis now strongly reported,” Mary wrote to Anne, “that there is going to be a reconciliation between the King and the Prince, but the truth of that is doubted.”3 She seems to have been caught in a position of asking for something when the powers that be were far more interested in their own intense familial oppositions than in the needs of some minor Mary in the corner of the court assemblage. Complicating this was her cousin Lord Carteret’s entanglement in the feud. (Carteret, one of the few at court who could speak German to the German-speaking George I, was held in suspicion by George II, who quarreled with his father as well as his son.)4
But why was she seeking such an appointment in the first place? She didn’t quite need the money. Her widow’s settlement, if managed conservatively, would allow her to be on her own. Yet she did need the social anchor. As a woman alone, by choice not attached to a man (she continued to turn down suitors, likely even refusing John Wesley, that intense, intelligent founder of Methodism), she was adrift. A court appointment would have meant housing, a clothing allowance, and perhaps meals taken care of. For a person who believed in keeping busy, it certainly would have kept her employed. Without a court appointment, three of her options were to marry, to move in with relatives, or to retreat from society and live quietly. She crossed off the first two, and her buoyant, culture-seeking nature precluded the third.
Yet court life was the opposite of the rich creative life she led with her family and friends. One’s energy was directed purely toward others, not in imaginative ways but in prescribed ones. To compare her questing with her sister’s country life, she wrote Anne a rhyme, echoing the poetry games they sometimes played in their letters as they sent each other lists of words and created verse from them: “Your country entertainment delights me more in your description, than all that I saw at Court; and I assure you we had no such pretty sport. We had ogling and tweezing, and whispering and glancing; no eating or drinking, or laughing and dancing: there was standing and walking, and fine ladies airs, no smart repartee and not one word of prayers.”5 She makes the court sound like an American teen-movie school cafeteria, full of looking and judging. Without a drop of creative impulse, merely moving back and forth in a side-hooped gown, it seemed that such an assembly would prove a gilded deprivation chamber for a woman who required the daily exercise of her imagination. “After such a day of confusion and fatigue as yesterday, my dearest sister is I am sure too reasonable to expect my head should be composed …”6
However, it was hard for her to stop positioning herself, for that would have meant giving up. She had been tantalized by the idea of a court appointment since she was taken by Aunt Stanley to be trained for one as a child. To be promised something since childhood, to try to achieve that promise, and then to be stonewalled is a recipe for bitterness – and desperation. “My Lord Carlisle, his lady, son, and two daughters were all excessively fine. But I grow sick of the word ‘fine’ and all its appurtenances, and I am sure you have enough of it.”7
Sometimes, if one turns away from what one clearly cannot have, one can grow in another direction. But at that time Mary Pendarves simply could not see other options. Her self-pitiless refusal to diminish her efforts is like the insistence of a vine that climbs up its route even to the dimmest light source. In another way, she seems more like the Passion Flower bud in her mosaick, perennially about to open. The bud is absolutely packed with color beneath its hanging sepals. It is all formed underneath there and about to pop, though in the mosaick it’s as frozen in growth as Mary Pendarves was in these ten years.
Passiflora laurifolia, detail (illustration credit 8.1)
Even in this atmosphere of frustration, she remained reluctant to gain security by marrying. After she’d likely refused the upright John Wesley, she fled a future with her wealthy cousin Thomas, Viscount Weymouth, the stepson of her Uncle George, Lord Lansdowne. Thomas was about ten years younger than Mary and the inheritor of Longleat, the stately home that his mother and stepfather had deceived him into thinking belonged to them. In the comfy romance of growing up with an age difference, Thomas was half in love with Mary in a way that she never felt toward him. “I looked upon him as my younger brother.… I really had the affection of a sister for him.”8 She didn’t take him seriously when he persisted and asked her to marry him, but “He repeated it so often, adding so many fine compliments, that I thought it time to let him see I had no view of engaging him for myself.”
Instead of letting the matter drop after she said no, she found a delectable moment of psychological repair. In between rushing to court, socializing with Ann Donnellan, the Duchess of Portland, her brother Bernard, and countless others, in between designing her embroidery, taking her drawing lessons, japanning her frames, and petting her cats (or roaming the streets looking for her lost cat, which was found), she up and decided that she would take charge of Thomas’s love life. “I often told him he must let me choose him a wife, which he said I should.” Becoming his matchmaker, she disdained her aunt’s “indiscretion” and her Uncle George’s “indolence” by steering the child of those who had betrayed her toward a deeply satisfactory union – not toward a repeat of her own disastrous coupling. She used the opportunity to make a shining counter-example to what they had done.
The wife she found Thomas was Louisa Carteret, the second daughter of her cousin Lord Carteret, priding herself on matching not only Louisa’s small fortune with Weymouth’s huge one, but also Louisa’s personality with Thomas’s. He was “good-natured and affectionate” but “could not bear contradiction,” though Louisa, she felt, could deal with him. “Her fortune was small, but she had been bred up in magnificence, and knew how to spend a large one gracefully and manage it prudently.” Thomas married Louisa.
And his cousin Mary was left deliciously solo, her beliefs her own. In 1739 she swept herself into a group of nine other women friends to hear the debates in the House of Lords about whether England should go to war with Spain. Instead of being admitted, they were turned back. She spent the rest of the day with them, hammering her fists on the doors for entrance, going without dinner and getting nowhere until one of her friends hatched the idea that they should stop pounding, stay quiet, and trick the ushers into believing they’d given up and gone home. It worked. The doors swung open, and in a whoosh of skirts, Mary Pendarves and the other women blew in.
But the full-skirted power of the Passiflora laurifolia certainly was not what Mary Pendarves had achieved by April 23, 1743, when, exhausted and gathering herself up for a tenth year of humble pie, she wrote to her sister from her house on Clarges Street in London. “I dined at Carteret House last Thurs
day; nothing passed concerning my affairs.”9 Her cousin was unable or unwilling to return the favor of Mary’s brilliant matchmaking, despite the fact that “the Dragon,” his formidable mother Dowager Countess Grace Granville, had written to Queen Caroline’s Lady-in-Waiting Mrs. Clayton (a relative of Ann Donnellan’s brother-in-law Bishop Clayton) that Mary deserved an act of kindness, if only because she had been “married at seventeen to a drunken monster.”10 But Mary’s struggle now was to find an hour to write a letter in a “city, where everybody cuts and carves one’s time as they please, without considering the preciousness of the commodity, and that they cannot restore what they rob us of.”11 Her life at this time resembled a kind of permanent waiting room, with all the attendant boredom and anxiety a waiting room breeds.
Yet someone else was growing: her younger sister Anne, now a spinster of thirty-three living with her mother in the country. It was Anne who received an invitation for a position at court! But unlike her older sister, who would have snapped it up, Anne knew she was the wrong fit. She clung to her country life: the brown cows lowing in the fields were more satisfying to view than the silver and cerise bovine herd at court. Intelligent, introverted Anne gloried in her solitude in a letter to her very good friend Miss Kitty Collingwood, later Lady Throckmorton, who was also a friend of the Duchess of Portland. “You are a creature just to my own goût, ” Anne said to Kitty; “you are lively without romping, and have the tenderness of sentiment requisite in friendship.”12 But Anne had reservations about the demands the sophisticated Kitty might make on her simple life:
I wish you were near me, but could you support this solitary life; which really gives me great pleasure? Can birds and poultry delight you? and a nosegay of wild flowers entertain you for half a day?
Small-town Gloucester chafed at Anne, and she couldn’t stand the company of narrow people: “there cannot be greater unhappiness to a person of sense, than to be forced to live with those of a small capacity! ”13 Anne was curling her quieter passion around an idea. Could she find a life companion, someone smart and sympathetic, someone who would make it possible for her to leave her mother’s house but not go too far, and someone who would support the solitude she thrived in? She didn’t pursue the answer to this complicated question with her sister, who had written: “Matrimony! I marry! Yes, there’s a blessed scene before my eyes of the comforts of that state. – A sick husband, squalling brats, a cross mother-in-law, and a thousand unavoidable impertinences.”14
Instead, in the frosty February of 1740, blowing her nose from “a very disagreeable succession of colds,”15 Anne ferreted out some confidential information:
I have a question to ask you, my dearest Kitty, that requires all your secrecy and prudence, (which I depend upon,) and for your truth I cannot doubt it; therefore without any preamble I desire you will inform me what Sir Robert’s [Kitty’s husband] real opinion is of Mr. Dewes and your’s, if you know him.
Anne won’t say why she craves the info. She makes up a friend who needs her to perform this recognizance. “There is a person he is recommended to, but she is quite a stranger to him and is my friend, and therefore … I must entreat that not a word of it be mentioned to anybody, because the thing is an entire secret.” Her friend is an innocent who “has no notion of happiness in a married life,” and is desperate to know whether Mr. Dewes “has agreeable conversation, generous principles, and is not a lawyer in his manners.” Anne desired a real companion, someone capable of “agreeable conversation,” a comrade to share the “great pleasure” of her retiring life – and someone generous. If this possible husband was going to hold the purse strings, she didn’t want the grip to be too hard. Most endearingly, she didn’t want a strict constructionist in matters of behavior – not a “lawyer in his manners.”
“I remember Sir Robert told me something about him at the Bath,” she wrote to Kitty, “but I have forgot what?” Anne was the kind of person who went to Bath not as a happy spa-seeking socialite but as someone in frail health who required the waters. This cold that she had, or series of colds, lasted throughout the whole month of letters with Kitty.
My friend thinks a chez nous with a man of sense and worth is preferable to the unsettled life she now leads, and being continually divided in her heart what friend to remain with; for while she is with one the other wants her, and makes a perpetual uneasiness in her mind.”16
A single woman at this time became a kind of social floater, the houseguest at the edges of others’ lives. At these country distances, married women had to import their friends, requiring them to pack their bags and rumble in coaches over the pitted roads to stay for weeks at a time. Mild, intelligent Anne was in demand as a friend-in-residence, yet she suffered as a perennial houseguest. She wanted to live chez nous.
The more she considered this radical move from spinsterhood, the more she absolutely did not want her sister Mary (or “Pen,” as she called her) to know. “Don’t mention to Pen when you write.”17 She even gave Kitty exact mailing instructions. “Don’t enclose your letter to the Duke, but send it directly to me at Gloucester by way of London.” The person who was quietly brokering this marriage deal was probably their older brother Bernard, known to the family as “Bunny.” “The parties are to meet in about a fortnight to see if they like well enough on each side (for at present they are strangers),” Anne announced between sniffles. “I really have a bad cold.” Anne had never before met this John Dewes. When Bernard and Mary attended the glamorous wedding of their cousin Grace Granville, Bernard kept silent about this possibility for Anne.
But someone must have told.
When Mary found out, she composed a formal, chilly acknowledgment. She had not thought of Anne acting alone or even as having such divergent desires. Mary was stiffened by hurt but she breezed on, acknowledging Bunny’s collaboration:
Your letter to my brother has cheered my spirits a good deal; I think Mr. Dewes behaves himself like a man of sense, and with a regard for you that must recommend him to the favour of all your friends. My brother and myself will receive him with a great deal of pleasure.… As soon as we have met … then we may proceed to particulars, buying wedding clothes, and determining where the ceremony is to be.18
As a poultice for her injured feelings, Mary took herself to see Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry VIII, and then she went out to eat. After mentioning buying the wedding clothes in this letter, her usual chatty, ebullient voice breaks through with tales of someone’s smallpox, of the Holbein, and of that very new concept in 1740, an idea from France: the restaurant. She ate “a very good dinner” at Pontack’s in Abchurch Lane – the place Jonathan Swift quipped about (“What wretch would nibble on a hanging shelf, / When at Pontack’s he may regale himself?”) and Hogarth featured allusively in the third plate of The Rake’s Progress, when he substituted the restaurateur Pontack’s portrait for one of the Roman emperors on the wall.19
Anne, like the Passion Flower vine, sought an anchor. She was going to do what her older sister had so assiduously avoided. Mary’s friends discussed how uneasy it made her. A guest at Bulstrode, Elizabeth Robinson, later Elizabeth Montagu, founder of the bluestockings and one of the women who had banged on the doors of Parliament, wrote to Ann Donnellan. “Our friend Penny [Mary’s nickname] is under great anxiety for the change her sister is going to make. I do not wonder at her fears. I believe both experience and observation have taught her the state she is going into is in general less happy than that she has left.”20
There was a hiatus in the sisters’ letters because of Anne’s wedding in late August 1740. The one who resumed the correspondence was the newly married Anne, heartfelt, loving, struck with all the changes that had come to her. She wrote on the lonely morning when Mary left Bradley, her new home – made even lonelier by the absence of her new husband, who was traveling on business. “Melancholy forsaken Bradley,” Anne wrote to Mary, who had left without waking her that morning, “Thursday evening, 5 o’clock.”
; There is a kind of sorrow that enlarges the mind and dissipates all trifling occurrences beyond anything that we call mirth and merriment can do; such is the present sorrow that fills my heart at parting with the best of sisters and most amiable friend. I feel the sharpest pangs for the loss of her company, recollect every tender expression, endearing look and action, that by so many pleasing ways engaged my affection … 21
That ability to understand and to articulate what she was feeling underpins all their correspondence. Anne led by example. Her bright example may even have allowed her arty, stubborn older sister a moment of greater flexibility or balance. Mary had stuck to her guns about refusing distasteful marital unions. But what about the salutary ones? Her little sister, restrained, sickly, had her passions. One of them was for a life she might lead with a companion.
Botanical Politics Lesson:
Mary Delany’s flower of passion is so old that it might fall apart in your hands. She made it in 1777, at Luton Hoo, in Bedfordshire, five years after she began her great work at Bulstrode. Luton Hoo was the four thousand–acre home of Scottish John Stuart, Lord Bute (1713–92),22 King George III’s much-disliked former prime minister, who, though personally austere, was horticulturally besotted, even with unprepossessing wildflowers. He provided support to Quaker botanist William Curtis (1746–99) for the illustrations of English plants that became the Flora Londinensis, the first volume of which was published two years before Mrs. Delany dated her far more exotic Passiflora laurifolia.23