Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832

by Stella Tillyard

  London was already marching relentlessly westwards when the Foxes leased Holland House. But the mansion still stood, a decaying anachronism, in a large park of sixty-four acres. When Henry and Caroline arrived, the park was unenclosed, bounded to the south and east by the gardens of Kensington Palace and its satellite cottages, to the north by the Acton road and to the west by open country dotted with artisans’ dwellings and small vegetable gardens, gravel pits and farms.

  Holland House appealed to Caroline because she had a passion for antiquities and although it was only a century and a half old the style of the house had been relegated to the scrap heap by most aristocrats and merchants who were building on any scale. It also reminded her of her father’s house at Goodwood, from which she was now banished, which had survived only because he had spent a huge amount of money on Richmond House in London and plans to rebuild in Sussex had so far come to naught. Because Caroline’s taste was for the old-fashioned and she was scornful of warmer, more modern, house plans, the Foxes renovated rather than rebuilt. When they first took it, Holland House was empty. Half a century earlier it had been split into apartments and rented out, but even these had proved unfashionable and the house had slipped into disrepair. It was built, like Goodwood, albeit on a much larger scale, in the H-plan common to many Jacobean mansions. The centre block rose, in gables and turrets, to four storeys; the two wings, running north to south, rose two imposing storeys high. A grand portico ran all the way around the inner walls of the house on the ground floor of the main, south-facing front, from which steps fell to an old-fashioned formal garden.

  Holland House was so big that relatives and favoured friends could have their own apartments. Stephen Fox habitually stayed there on the increasingly rare occasions when he came up to London for parliamentary sessions. Charles Hanbury Williams, already renting his house in Conduit Street to the Foxes, was also given a room and took the precaution, made necessary by the tomb-like cold of the house, to pay for his own furnishings. Hanbury Williams had refused an embassy posting to northern Europe on the grounds that the weather there was too frigid and he was determined that Holland House would not prove a similarly inhospitable outpost. ‘I have ordered my upholsterer to get my room in order at Holland House, where I am sure of being pleased and happy,’ he wrote to Henry in 1746. His hosts, however, were notoriously careless of the cold, often leaving the doors open in the dead of winter. Less close friends were often scared into staying in town by tales of room temperatures that no hospitality, however warm, could mitigate. ‘I can’t venture to go to stay at Holland House yet awhile,’ wrote Caroline’s sister Emily one autumn day in 1761 while she was recovering from childbirth. ‘I should be killed there, I know, for I could not (even for my first visit, which I thought a little unkind) get them to keep the doors and windows shut. I really found it very cold, but I saw it was thought affectation and fancy.’

  Luckily, Holland House was near enough to Westminster to allow dinner guests to travel home at night, and big enough to accommodate both hardy souls and those too incapacitated to take to the road. Domestic and political life could thus go hand in hand. Fox could entertain in a manner normally only possible in the country and attend to government business the next day. Caroline could be with Ste and with Henry at the same time; in her own apartments she could read, write letters, entertain callers and play with her son. In the garden she could saunter about, supervise planting and muse amongst the flowers. Caroline frequently complained that their closeness to town brought all Fox’s political associates to their door: ‘Indeed when he is in business this place is quite like a coffee house.’ Jealously, she felt that Holland House was too well placed for Fox’s casual social life. ‘Holland House is so convenient for his intimate friends to be constantly with him, that they take up all the time I could see him alone, and plague me ten times more than people who have real business with him.’ But Caroline could and did retire from late-night carousing, and she realised that because Holland House allowed them to combine the spaciousness of the country with the business of the town she enjoyed a good deal more of Henry’s company than politics might otherwise have allowed her. Fox became such a famous family man partly because his cronies and political associates saw him amongst his children at Holland House. For his children, equally, politics and nursery life were mixed together and the child and adult worlds fused hard and fast.

  PART THREE

  ‘The Lord Kildare is not the most clever man in the world’.

  Caroline to Henry, 15 January 1747.

  It was soon after signing the lease of Holland House in 1746 that Caroline went to Bath, and it was from Bath that she sent Henry the news that her fourteen-year-old sister Emily was going to be married. For Caroline that meant a reunion, since Emily would now be free to see her as she pleased. But their intimacy would be short lived and henceforth at least partly epistolary, because Emily was marrying an Irishman who, unlike many Irish aristocrats, was determined to live in Ireland. His name was James Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare. Once again, the Duke and Duchess were opposed to the match; this time on the grounds of nationality rather than social standing or political antecedents. Still bitter about her own treatment, Caroline reported to Henry, ‘I think mother can’t prevent the match, but I think she will delay it for a month or two if she can. I don’t think she was ever so thoroughly mortified before as she is at this match for she must seem pleased with it in the eyes of the world at the time she would give her ears to break it.’ As for the Earl himself, Caroline went on, he ‘is not the most clever man in the world (and consequently not company for such a great man as you). Don’t decline being intimate with him because I shall like seeing my sister a good deal and that pleasure will be much greater if I can be with you both at a time.’

  Emily was the sibling Caroline knew best and in whom she had confided during the later stages of her courtship with Fox. Emily was also her parents’ favourite. When she was a baby some of her bones were misaligned and she was laced in a ‘swing’ to let them fall free. This frailty increased her parents’ adoration. She was a precocious child. ‘Em is admirable but horribly naughty,’ the Duchess of Richmond wrote with doting indulgence when Emily was a few years old. ‘I saw her go to bed last night and asked her if the bed was a good one. She told me “c’est ce qu’on apelle en Englois comfortable” [sic] I dote on her as much as you do.’ Elsewhere Emily’s status as favourite was confirmed. ‘Pray get the better of Emily if you can,’ the Duchess wrote. ‘I believe its very necessary she should be here for me to punish her, for you spoil her.’

  In the autumn of 1746 Emily was approaching her fifteenth birthday. Fairer than Caroline, she had thick, curling brown hair, light-blue eyes (although they were sometimes wrongly painted grey by lazy portraitists) and her sister’s small mouth that turned provocatively up at the ends. She was tall and well proportioned and, if the Earl of Kildare’s partiality is to be believed, had beautiful legs. Her beauty, though, owed as much to manner as to features. Joshua Reynolds said she had ‘a sweetness of expression’ that was difficult for a painter to capture. To this charm were added a mental liveliness and a physical langour which called simultaneously for attention and pampering. Emily secured the indulgence of her friends and admirers by flirtatious demands, extravagant gestures and judicious apology if she overstepped the mark.

  Emily was born in 1731 and was eight years younger than Caroline. When she was four, Charles, Earl of March, was born, and two years later the thankful Duchess produced another boy, Lord George Lennox. The family name and line was thereby secured and the second Duke and his wife were able to relax and enjoy their family. The atmosphere of sickness, death and anxiety that Caroline knew so well was dissipated as Emily grew up and she was entirely free from the sense of guilt and foreboding which haunted her sister. Her beauty and the obvious ease with which she manipulated her father and her two younger brothers endowed her with a lifelong sense of entitlement. Emily was complacent about others’ feelings
for her when she was young. ‘I love to be doted upon vastly,’ she wrote in her twenties and accepted devotion and adoration as her due. Yet while she never doubted her own powers of attraction, Emily was well aware of others’ needs and dispositions. Caroline, she knew, was slightly censorious about vanity, regretting that she had ‘more than a common share of that foible’. So Emily made her happy with loving flattery, writing on Caroline’s thirtieth birthday, ‘I think you are grown handsomer, younger and cheerfuller within these two years than ever I remember you, so pray don’t be affected and say you are old.’ Emily teased Henry Fox and was excited by his enjoyment of her company. ‘I love his villainous countenance,’ she wrote to her sister. To Fox himself she wrote high-spiritedly in 1756, ‘I am glad your brother is made an Earl. He is a sweet man, worth a thousand of you; much better humoured, ten thousand times better bred, much livelier, and I believe full as clever, only that you have a cunning, black, devilish countenance and he has a cheerful, pleasant one; you are an ambitious vain toad and he likes to live quietly in the country.’

  Sexy abuse of this sort was only suited to a man like Fox who was confident of his charm and did not stand on his dignity. Towards her husband Emily had necessarily to behave very differently but she used the same manipulative skills and displayed a similar confidence about her relationships. When she was young Emily exuded a delight in herself that rubbed off on other people. She surrounded herself with people, Caroline noticed, and amongst them she always had a few especially favoured female friends. With one she wrote poetry, as she had done with Caroline at Goodwood; with another she read and sewed and chatted. A dead horse gave Emily and Lady Drogheda, an intimate friend in the years after her marriage, a whole day of fun. She reported their enjoyment to Caroline with teenage exuberance: ‘her verses are quite in our way and she and I writ poetry to one another all day long when she was here. Lord Kildare, who was in great grief (about the dead horse) begged they might be very serious and melancholy and suitable to such a subject, which accordingly they were, and I send them to Mr. Fox to show him I excel equally in the sublime as in the comical style. But my poetical genius can attain any height, nothing is either too high or too low for it.’

  Emily liked women friends for company and service, admitting, ‘as I … am lazy it is useful to have somebody to do a thousand little matters for me and give the many little assistances such as calling, fetching, ringing. All this you will say is very selfish and I allow it.’ Of a friend who nearly died Emily wrote in the same vein to the Earl of Kildare: ‘What should I have done without her? … that loves one as she does, that enters with such warmth into everything that interests one, all one’s little views of pleasure, profit or ambition, in short one that has such a heart?’ In her old age she looked severely upon her own self indulgence, writing, ‘every young person should be brought up to be helpful; I never was,’ but her youthful habits lasted her a lifetime.

  Emily did not stand on ceremony. She was less worried than Caroline about behaviour and etiquette, happy to receive friends in informal clothes or undress. ‘Colonel Sandford came here yesterday morning,’ she wrote to her husband while she was confined after childbirth, ‘I was in bed, but did not scruple seeing him.’ Nor did she worry too much about social convention, within the limits peculiar to Protestant life in Ireland. From the countryside outside Dublin she wrote to her husband, ‘Think how pleasantly Mrs. Crofton and Mrs. Crosbie surprised me Sunday night at nine o’clock. They were to go out and take the air after dinner together. One proposed coming here, the other assented and away they drove. They supped here, lay here and went away after breakfast again.’ Caroline said, ‘I should be miserable at the thoughts of a great many people in the house with me,’ but admitted, ‘I’m more personne d’habitude than you are.’

  Caroline was also more thoughtful. Emily, at the time of her marriage, was still an ‘engaging girl’ as Caroline called her, only just out of the schoolroom. She filled her time with reading rather than dreary thoughts. ‘I love to see everything new that comes out, either pretty or foolish,’ she wrote, and had a standing order with the London bookseller Mrs Dunoyer for ‘all the new books’. Like Caroline, she used books as an outlet for sentiment; she ‘perfectly sobbed’ at reading Murphy’s play The Orphan of China when it came out, and declared that she would be ‘killed’ if she saw it acted on the stage. At some point she started reading political pamphlets as well as the novels, poetry and plays that were her staple fare. Emily also demanded novelty of other kinds, developing an expensive taste in furnishings, clothes of all sorts, buckles and jewels set in the latest styles, new games of cards.

  As Caroline realised, Emily was still a child when she married, still searching for a comfortable personality to inhabit. She changed the way she signed her letters, she gave herself nicknames – her favourite being Patsy – and experimented with different sorts of handwriting. Her husband, in contrast, was already feeling all of his twenty-five years. His life was burdened with the heavy weight of an ancient dynasty and he took his familial duties tremendously seriously.

  By the eighteenth century the Fitzgeralds, or Geraldines as they were popularly known, had an identity that was both august and schizophrenic. They were, as Kildare said, the oldest surviving and thus the ‘first’ peers of Ireland. By virtue of their long residence there and the marriage alliances they had contracted amongst the pre-Norman inhabitants, the Fitzgeralds regarded themselves as Irish. But by the mid-eighteenth century they were sufficiently powerful amongst the Protestants – particularly those in and around Dublin, whose families may have been there for two hundred years – to have become figureheads for Irish Protestant nationalism which was fundamentally at odds with the interests and rights of the Gaelic and Catholic Irish. Protestants, many of them in commerce and the professions, tended to advance their claims to the exclusion of all other groups. They were hostile to any whiff of emancipation for Catholics and Dissenters and were suspicious of any dealings by the Westminster government that might lessen their autonomy or control over national finances.

  Kildare was very rich, with an estate that in 1820 was counted as 67,000 acres valued at £46,000. Lowlying fertile land spreading westwards from Dublin into the green heart of the country formed most of his estate. Fields of rippling wheat, scythed by cheap Irish labour for export to the lucrative English market, herds of milk cows and steers and rows of root vegetables represented high yields for tenant farmers and high rents for landowners. While England’s hungry population was soaring, Ireland had yet to see the explosion that would make for so much misery in the future; Ireland was, in mid-century, in the full flush of a temporary prosperity that reached its zenith in the Napoleonic wars and crashed spectacularly thereafter. When he proposed to Emily, Kildare had a rent-roll of getting on for £15,000 a year and virtually unlimited credit with Dublin’s bankers.

  Kildare was an important figure in Irish political life because he controlled a large block of MPs in the Irish House of Commons. He was determined to use this influence, writing bluntly to Fox that he wanted, ‘to be, if I can, of the first consequence here’. But his dynastic prominence carried him further in Irish politics than his own political talents. Confined to a totemic role as a figurehead of Protestant nationalism he might have been successful. But he lacked the acumen and flexibility that might have allowed him to make something of the active political role that he sought. Believing that the man of honour enumerated his grievances plainly and that plain justice would mitigate them, he appeared stubborn and unsubtle in the political arena. If officials side-stepped his demands, Kildare responded by asserting rank and taking the matter up with a higher authority, travelling, if necessary, as far as the King himself, and making enemies all the way up. He failed to understand that for men like Fox politics was a profession more than a dynastic responsibility and it was a profession which had increasingly complicated, subtle and devious rules of its own.

  In and around Dublin, Kildare could set the social pa
ce. In 1745 he chose a suburban site south of the Liffey for a grand new town house. It was not an area favoured by the nobility or by Dublin’s rich merchants, but Kildare declared that ‘they will follow me wherever I go’. Speculators, professionals and newly rich gentlemen poured across the river after him, sanctioned by nobility and credit to found a new fashionable centre for the city which gradually eclipsed the north side. In London Kildare was a much more uncertain figure. He had no lands in England and no English title that would give him social standing and a seat in the Lords. His wealth was to a large degree offset by his Irishness, because Ireland was already a focus for English anxieties about change and difference and colonialism. The Duke of Richmond for one made no distinctions among the heterogeneous population of Ireland, even though he himself had had Irish lands, preferring, in the interests of satirical prejudice, to lump them all together. The Duke declared, after Emily had a son, that his dark-headed hunter had more sense than any ‘white Irish heads’ and was slow to congratulate his daughter, prompting Caroline to write tartly (though without disagreeing), ‘surely reflections on the Irish stupidity is not so civil in his Grace?’ Prejudice of the same sort also dominated the Duchess’s response to Kildare’s proposal for Emily, the more so since she worked hard at forgetting the fact that she herself was of Irish extraction.

  For both the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, Ireland was a country far more remote from their actual and imagined experience than continental Europe. Into this imaginary void they now tried to place their daughter; all they could conjure up were bogs, stupidity and the theatricality for which Irish actors, impresarios and playwrights were already famous in London. When Kildare first proposed in the summer of 1745 they baulked at the proposal on the grounds that Emily was still too young to know what she wanted or what marriage meant. Stubborn persistence kept Kildare determined and waiting. When the Duke could no longer put Kildare off, and unable to pass on a definite refusal from Emily herself, he drove a hard bargain. Emily came only with the promise of £10,000 when her parents died and the Duke demanded a handsome annuity or jointure for her in the event of Kildare’s death. Richmond knew that Kildare was after the political rather than the financial advantage that went along with the bride and that his own part of the bargain would be to honour the political obligations that marital alliance brought with it. Especially galling was the knowledge that Fox, rising fast up the political ladder in the chaos after Walpole’s fall, was equally the target of Kildare’s overtures.