The Lennox children were almost bilingual and read French as easily as English. In Caroline’s library and in those of her sisters, French books took up almost as much room as English ones. French was the language of philosophers and the language of romance. Cheap novels, or ‘story books’, as Caroline called them, books too ephemeral to merit binding and shelving in the library, were very often imported from Paris and stacked in Caroline’s dressing-room, and in them, romantic heroines, faced with moral and marital dilemmas, whispered, schemed and (usually) capitulated in the language of love and dalliance. So, for Caroline, dropping into French at amorous or difficult moments had both literary and family sanction.
On his trips to London and to Europe, Caroline’s grandfather put off boredom with long bouts of gambling, playing for large stakes with British officers and courtiers who thronged London and the Low Countries during the wars with Louis XIV. In The Hague in 1719, Richmond racked up a large debt to the Irish Earl of Cadogan, one of Marlborough’s staff officers and confidants. To pay him off and to seal his friendship, Richmond gave his heir, the Earl of March, as husband for Cadogan’s daughter Sarah, accepting a reduction of five thousand pounds in her marriage settlement to make up the difference. The wedding, as Caroline’s father was later fond of telling her and her siblings, was very quickly arranged. He was eighteen years old and about to embark on the Grand Tour. His bride to be was only thirteen. They were brought together and told by their fathers that they were going to be married straight away. The little girl was speechless but the horrified young man burst out, ‘surely they are not going to marry me to that dowdy!’ After this fruitless objection the ceremony was performed. When it was over, the Earl of March, accompanied by his tutor, set off for Italy. His wife went back to the nursery. Thus, in an extreme form, Caroline’s parents acted out the powerlessness of aristocratic children, who could become pawns in a parental chess game, who were sacrificed for family alliances or sold for money and prestige.
When he grew up, Caroline’s father developed a taste for practical jokes, and came to see his marriage as one of them. He loved to tell its story to his children because it ended happily. When he returned from his continental travels three years later, the Earl was very reluctant to call on and claim his wife. He went to the theatre instead. Like many of those present, he was more occupied in looking at the boxes and stalls than the stage. Noticing one particularly sumptuous young woman, he turned to his neighbour and asked who she was. ‘You must be a stranger in London,’ came the reply, ‘not to know the toast of the town, the beautiful Lady March.’
It was a dénouement as sentimental as Caroline’s father could have wished, and he followed it with a well publicised happy marriage. He was never ashamed to demonstrate, in portraits, letters and drawing-rooms his love for his wife and children. Horace Walpole, a voluptuary of gossip who for nearly half a century recorded the scandals of the Whig circle in which the Lennoxes moved, noticed his familial content. At a ball given by a family friend in November 1741, Walpole reported that Caroline’s father sat by her mother all night, ‘kissing her hand and gazing at his beautiful daughters’. The Duchess returned her husband’s feelings. After a quarrel in September 1740 she wrote to him, ‘of all the time that I have loved you, I never felt more love and tenderness for you than I did yesterday. I haunted all the places where you had been last. One was to go among your trees where you stood so long on Sunday … and as much as I love you I hate myself.’
The second Duke of Richmond’s marriage was the most dramatic event of his life. It was involuntarily undertaken, done to him rather than by him, and in it lay the seeds of Caroline’s own fascination with the institution of marriage itself. Caroline inherited a good deal of the first Duke of Richmond’s recklessness, although it was overlaid with her father’s prudence and carefulness, and she believed that love and impulsiveness went together. She championed marriages for love, but at the same time she knew that, although her parents’ marriage had been at best a matter of convenience, at worst a cynical sacrifice of youth to pleasure, it was a marriage that worked. She could neither condone nor condemn arranged marriages, and since that was what her parents wanted for her, she solved her dilemma first by remaining unmarried for much longer than most girls and then by making a spectacular choice that flouted her parents’ wishes.
After his own marriage Caroline’s father continued to take what life had to offer with gratitude and restraint, seeing no reason to become a man who seized the initiative. As a result his career was dignified rather than spectacular. After the accession of George II, the Duke was appointed a Lord of the Bedchamber, while Caroline’s mother became Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Caroline. Once ensconced in his post, Caroline’s father pursued his earnest desire to erase any lingering traces of wild roistering, whoring and gambling from his family’s reputation. He was a model grandson to Louise de Kéroualle, soaking up without complaint the emotion and expectation she diverted on to him from her unsatisfactory son. When the first Duke died in 1723, Louise shed what she described as ‘very bitter’ tears. After all, she told the new Duke, it was her son that she had lost. But she recovered quickly, and added that she would survive her bereavement because she knew her grandson loved her. ‘I dare flatter myself, my dear boy, that you have a sincere tenderness and affection for a grandmother who has the most lifelong devotion to you; and I shall not consider myself so unhappy, my dear Lord, if you are just a little bit sensible of it.’ She felt that to make an adequate demonstration of his love, the second Duke should produce an heir. The Richmond line needed securing and, besides, she said, she wanted another portrait to hang in her château alongside the previous Ducs d’Aubigny. She was pleased enough with the birth of Caroline in 1723, but disappointed with the Duchess of Richmond a year later. Sarah’s second child, a boy, lived only a few hours. Louise wrote and, in a perfunctory way, thanked God that Sarah hadn’t died too. But, she went on relentlessly, ‘She has not kept her promise to me though. For in her last letter she promised me a son, but – the dear child – I’m sure she is very sorry to have failed in her promise! But I hope that her third will be an increase of the right sort in your family.’
The Duke and Duchess worked tirelessly to gratify this hard taskmistress. They had twelve children, seven of whom lived to maturity. After Caroline’s birth in 1723 came Emily, in 1731. Charles, who eventually became the third Duke, was born in 1735, too late for Louise de Kéroualle, who battled on in hopes until she was eighty-nine, but had finally died a year before. George, in homage to the King, arrived in 1737, then Louisa in 1743, Sarah in 1745 and Cecilia in 1750.
Throughout her childhood Caroline was continually hustled from place to place as the Court moved about, disbanded and reformed. If the King was at St James’s, the Lennox family could live in the comfort of Richmond House a mile or so away. But if the King moved to Kensington, Hampton Court or Windsor the whole Lennox family went too. Each move of the Court was like an army decamping: the crush and chaos of wagons piled high with family furniture, silver and clothes chests; the barking of dogs, neighing of horses, crying of children and shouting of courtiers and servants; the noisy rumble through the streets; the undignified scramble for the best lodgings at the other end.
During the social and parliamentary season when the Court was assembled, Caroline might not see her parents for days on end. She lived in their lodgings, chattering in French to her nanny and later doing her lessons with her French governess, while her parents went to work. Caroline’s mother waited on the Queen, carrying out tasks whose humbleness was barely mitigated by her salary of £500 a year or the dignity of her office. She ordered meals and clothes, dispatched servants to fetch books, cards, prints, workbags or pastimes, and rationed visitors. Caroline’s father performed similar jobs for the King. In compensation for the dullness of their days, Lords and Ladies of the Bedchamber were the monarchs’ companions and perhaps their friends.
For a woman at Court, waiting on the Queen was
the highest available position. It marked the limit of her possible career. But for men, the Bedchamber was only the beginning: an ambitious courtier used the job as a jumping off point. He saw and perhaps helped determine who was in and who was out of favour and he was ideally placed to lobby the monarch for a better position. Caroline’s father, however, was ambitious not for advancement but for sobriety and dignity. He stayed on for seven years, the picture of steadiness but not of success. The King called him an affectionate and sincere friend, and in 1735 rewarded him with the Mastership of the Horse, a step up in rank but sideways into the royal stable. There Richmond managed the monarch’s movement from palace to palace and from England to the Continent faithfully until his death. It was his job to accompany the retinue wherever it went in England. When George departed for Hanover at the beginning of each summer, the Duke went as far as Harwich, where he handed the King over to the Royal Navy and to his Hanoverian counterpart and gratefully departed for Goodwood and other pursuits.
Richmond’s life was not all courtly business. The Duke inherited his father’s interest in Freemasonry, enjoyed practical jokes and revelled in the theatre. When he sat to Philips in the late 1740s, he presented himself as both courtier and collector and a private man. He put on formal but by no means ducal dress, alluding to his station by wearing the royal-blue ribbon of the Order of the Garter. One hand he kept gloved like that of a courtier, the other left bare like that of a man about to greet his onlooker in an intimate and informal way. On the table he put a document referring to himself as Master of the Horse. Behind him, opening out of the formal drawing-room is the library at Richmond House, a secluded room with leather-bound volumes ranged along its shelves. In the doorway stands a draped classical figure, gesturing at once to the Duke’s status as a man of learning, his position in the Society of Antiquaries and his love of collecting.
Richmond collected ideas as well as objects. As a follower of Newton and something of a gentleman scientist, he patronised research into marine life in the Solent and built up a collection of exotic plants and animals. He belonged to the Royal Society and often entertained scientists and savants who toured Europe’s drawing-rooms explaining the latest theories and discoveries. Medicine was another of his hobbies and he was an eager participant in new operations and cures, believing that the body could be the site of learning as well as the home of the soul.
Objects of all sorts accompanied new ideas into Richmond’s houses. He amassed statuary and paintings, and became president of both the Royal Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Arts. But his special passion was for plants and animals. Newton had brought order to the physical universe, so the story ran, and now scores of collectors were trying to do the same for flora and fauna, with menageries and botanical gardens.
In the 1730s scores of animals were brought to Goodwood and many were eventually housed in heated catacombs under the park. In this menagerie were five wolves, two tigers, two lions, three bears, two leopards, a chimpanzee, three racoons, an armadillo and a host of lesser birds and beasts. The Duke was constantly on the look out for rarities and chafed at failure to secure them. His fellow courtier Lord Hervey, who was not an animal lover, joked that the erotic behaviour of Richmond’s animals was ‘an allegorical epitomy of the whole matrimonial world’. But the Duke’s interest in the animal kingdom was more than simply materialistic. He felt that capturing and cataloguing the beasts of the wild brought them out from disordered nature into the ambit of human rationality. By virtue of being studied, animals became almost human, and they certainly became beloved. When a lioness from the menagerie died, Richmond built her a magnificent tomb in the Goodwood grounds where she reposes in marble amongst the trees.
Owning a menagerie, then, involved much more than admiration of animals. Acquisition and taxonomy were forms of conquest, of bringing strange species under man’s control. Richmond’s collections were part of the explosion in consumption that accompanied industrialisation and the acquisition of foreign territories. The Duke wanted as many animals and plants (he was particularly keen on trees that could fit in with prevailing tastes in landscaping) from all over the world and he paid a lot of money for rare animals and seeds and hired experts to find and look after them. Tigers came from India, lions from Africa, monkeys from the East Indies, vultures and bears from Europe and North America, cedars from Lebanon and maples from New England.
The women of Goodwood also went on this journey of discovery and ownership. In the 1730s naval captains returning to Portsmouth often sailed home with sacks full of shells for the Duchess and her daughters. The Duchess, Caroline and, as soon as she was old enough to help, Emily spent hours arranging the shells into intricate patterns which were built into a grotto in the park. The shell grotto was a tiny, vaulted room where the discarded houses of sea-creatures, flung by the seas on to distant beaches, were carefully sorted and assembled into a rococo caprice that celebrated nature’s diversity, man’s seafaring prowess and women’s artifice. Cornucopias of shells were filled with shell fruits and shell sweetcorn. Shells covered the walls like stuccoed plaster. They were woven into ribbons and bows, twisted into ropes and written in initials: CR for the Duke, EL for Emily Lennox and CL for Caroline.
The shell house was a microcosm of the Lennox family’s world, displaying a love for order, rationality and the modernity represented by the natural sciences. But it was also about impersonation and play, plain on the outside, riotous and eccentric within, a place where shells were turned into apples and pears and ribbons. Science and feeling, order and capriciousness mingled together. It was crucial to the family that rationality and sentiment were not exclusive; the Duke and his children always wanted to show both.
Growing up in this world of exalted sense and feeling, Caroline Lennox inherited her parents’ belief in rationality and politeness and openly stressed their emphasis on feeling and passion. But she also came to long for a world in which there could be, sometimes, if not privacy, then seclusion and time for private reflection.
From the very beginning, Caroline was an anxious little girl, living her life in what she later called a ‘hurry of spirits’. She loved reading and stories and, as a child, developed what became a lifelong taste for Roman history. From her parents she imbibed strong notions of probity, duty and family loyalty, and constantly worried that she might not live up to their expectations of good behaviour. None the less, she was a self-possessed and mature girl, assured in company and schooled in the art of polite conversation. Because her early years were spent without nursery companions, Caroline was the centre of the family world; attention was lavished on her both by her parents and by the ageing Louise de Kéroualle when the Lennox family visited her for the winter season of 1728. She got used to being painted, with her mother, with a pony or acting in Dryden’s Indian Emperor at the age of nine.
Yet it was not an altogether happy childhood. The Duke and Duchess had little success in producing a son and heir, and Caroline matured in an atmosphere of anxiety about childbirth and sadness about infant sickness and death. Two boys were born, in 1724 and 1730, but neither lived very long. These deaths devastated the household because each swept away the chance to secure the dynasty. Worse still, from Caroline’s point of view, her young sister Louisa, born in 1725, died of a fever at the age of three. By that time Caroline was five years old and well able to understand that death was unsparing and inevitable.
This early experience of death left Caroline pessimistic and fearful. She came to feel that any joy she had was bound to be snatched away, and she also became obsessed with the frailty of young children. ‘Want of spirits,’ she said, was her ‘natural disposition’ and she believed that because experience had told her that ‘joy and happiness’ were not to be had, her melancholy was fully justified. If she did feel happy she tended to regard her situation with mistrust and work herself back into a state of unease: ‘I can’t but always reflect how much more than my share of happiness I have enjoyed already, and that very re
flection makes me dread what is to come.’
Caroline tried to temper her habitual sense of foreboding with the consolations of religion. ‘For,’ she said, ‘without religion, the life of man is a wild, fluttering, inconsistent thing without any certain scope or design.’ But Caroline’s faith was no more than conventional and it never made up for life’s sorrows or obliterated her fear of death. It was in fact to men and women rather than God that she turned for understanding. She liked to study the behaviour of the ‘human species’ as she called it and she read constantly, at home, out of doors in the formal gardens at Goodwood or by the Thames at Richmond House. Histories, geography, philosophy, travels, letters, memoirs of courtly life, plays, novels, scandal sheets, criminal confessions were, in London and the country, her company and her education. Aristocratic girls got no formal schooling: a series of masters and intermittent parental instruction supplemented her own restless enquiry after knowledge. So it was from the word of man rather than of God that Caroline constructed her understanding of the world. ‘I love a likeness to a storybook,’ she exclaimed, and she found such likenesses in the intrigues and scandals of her parents’ circle. And to the inventors of movable type she was proportionately grateful; printing, she declared – along with the great savants of her day – ‘has made a more total change in this world than any other thing.’ Aphorisms of this sort appealed to Caroline, partly because she had a very good memory and could recall them at will, partly because she enjoyed the display of learning (though not, she always said, of wit) for its own sake.
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 Page 2