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

by Stella Tillyard

  Knowing that politics played such a large part in Kildare’s proposal contributed to the Duke’s coolness. He also wanted Emily close by. Having lost one daughter to Fox, the Duke was reluctant to lose another to Ireland. But the Duchess was the real stumbling block, as Caroline had realised when she wrote to Henry from Bath. The Duchess was embarrassed about her Irish blood and the last thing she wanted was a connection which would perpetually remind her of it. Emily realised that her mother was hostile to Kildare, although at the age of fourteen she was uneducated in the anxieties of colonial identity. Ten years later she saw a parallel to her own case in another romance. ‘Sir James Lowther has desired Mr Fox to propose him for Lady Betty Spencer. He is violently in love, poor man, and they don’t behave quite well to him and are for putting it off two years … It is a vast match for her, but the Duchess is odd about it, the Duke would be reasonable enough if it was not for her, and, in short, the whole thing is just a second part of the affair between you and I, which makes me interest myself prodigiously about it.’

  Despite her mother’s objections, Emily was quite happy with Kildare’s proposal and, with her consent, it was hard to find any grounds for objection to the marriage. Kildare, a model of persistent propriety, had waited eighteen months for her by December 1746 and was no longer to be put off on the grounds that she was too young. For the Duke to cite Kildare’s Irishness would probably have resulted in a duel. It lingered, an unmentionable miasma, in the background of their negotiations, throwing a cloud of suspicion, prejudice and mistrust over everything. Family honour was at stake on both sides and there was no doubt that, strictly speaking, Kildare’s was the more august and ancient family. Irishness aside, nothing could be held against him. He was rich, young, well educated and obviously in love. The only way that Richmond could make his prejudice about nationality obvious was to drive a harder bargain than he would have done if Kildare’s land had been in Hampshire or Sussex, and Kildare tacitly accepted that his Irishness had to be paid for with a penniless bride.

  Kildare was prepared to pay the price. He offered very generous settlements, and wrote to the Duke, ‘I have flattered myself they are such as prove my value and esteem for Lady Emily … I hope and persuade myself that your Grace and my Lady Duchess have by this time considered and seen them in the same light too, and from reflection will be convinced that I desire with ardour and sincerity to make Lady Emily happy.’ In arranged marriages, paying money to the bride in the form of pin money and promises for a secure old age came perilously close to paying money for her. For Kildare, at any rate, money and desire were bedfellows. Emily and expenditure were always coupled together. Emily herself understood this straight away. When she needed money she played on Kildare’s lust, and potential criticism of her extravagance she diverted skilfully into desire.

  Just negotiating about money made Kildare want Emily the more, and some kind of sexual encounter took place between them on Christmas Day 1746, in the Duke’s empty summer house on the Goodwood estate, Carné’s Seat. Emily remembered it fondly when they were parted sixteen years later. ‘If you are at Goodwood, and the sun shines as bright as it does here, I hope you will take a walk up to Carné Seat, sit down in the little room and think of that you took with Lady Emily Lennox, just returned from Bognor Church, sixteen years ago, and believe that I love you sixteen times better now than I did then.’ This partially complete love making made Kildare, at any rate, long for the wedding which, the complex negotiations wrapped up to the satisfaction of both sides, took place at Richmond House on 7 February 1747. Gossips reported the ceremony as very magnificent, but Kildare later only remembered what followed. He reached a pinnacle of happiness that night and Richmond House was always associated in his mind with the first time he made love to Emily. ‘I don’t believe, if I was to lie at Whitehall, I could ever sleep, for thinking that in that house it was that I first took possession of that which for about fifteen years I have enjoyed.’ Dynastic and national considerations fled; Kildare adored his wife and was an ardent lover. His love making was given confidence by the belief that sex was, as he put it, ‘necessary to a woman’s health and happiness’. (Caroline disagreed; when Emily relayed what Kildare had said, she retorted, ‘its abominably indelicate and I don’t believe a word of it. I’m sure one sees many an old virgin mighty well and comfortable.’)

  It was left to Horace Walpole to hint at the wedding’s political dimensions. ‘Lord Kildare is married to charming Lady Emily Lennox, who went the very next day to see her sister, Lady Caroline Fox, to the great mortification of the haughty Duchess mother. They have not given her a shilling, but the King endows her by making Lord Kildare a Viscount Sterling; and they talk of giving him a pinchbeck Dukedom too, to keep him always first peer of Ireland.’

  Kildare had no objection to Caroline and Emily being reunited. On the contrary, their intimacy would pave the way to his political alliance with Fox. This alliance was by now worth risking the Duke’s displeasure for: once again Richmond was made to realise that the political as well as the emotional initiative had passed to his son-in-law. None the less Kildare did not leave Caroline and Emily long to catch up on the missed years and interrupted confidences. By June, Emily was in Ireland.

  In the minds of English visitors and observers, Ireland was a chimerical land, an island floating mistily in the sea of the imagination. Irish peasants and Catholic landlords alike seemed as unstable and deceptive as the foggy bogland itself. The Irish themselves clouded this picture by creating personae that exploited their capacities for theatrical, overblown and ironic narrative. Visitors confronted with the fantastic cloak of words within which the Irish hid themselves retreated, baffled, to their own prejudices and preconceptions. On the London stage overt Irish theatricality and the covert English sense of life as drama came together and an international reconciliation, smoothed by pleasure and profit, took place. Irish playwrights like Richard Brinsley Sheridan went so far, later in the century, as to pander to English prejudice with ironic creations of caricature Irishmen like Sir Lucius O’Trigger, and got hard cash and social cachet into the bargain. But in Ireland itself, particularly in the countryside, English rural fantasies replete with cosy cottages and happy swain could not be squared with the cottagers’ way of life and domestic architecture. Turning their eyes away from the pockets of sophisticated agriculture and industry, observers fastened a horrified gaze on rural poverty, with its huts of wattle and thatch and scantily clad Gaelic-speaking families that subsisted on a diet of vegetables, milk and potatoes. Measured against an imaginary English rural idyll, this unregulated, uncertain and incomprehensible way of life seemed horrifying. After ten years in Ireland, Emily still measured the countryside against some notional English landscape of the south coast. Staying at Brockley Park, a small country house outside Dublin, she felt temporarily transported to that imaginary English land and wrote delightedly to Lord Kildare: ‘You can’t imagine anything more like the country of England than it is all round here; shady lanes with oak trees in the hedges, a river just under the windows, fields and meadows with paths through them, no stone walls, no miserable cabins near it – in short, just this spot is vastly pretty.’ Like many English commentators, Emily looked at the countryside and saw it without any people. It was years before she noticed the poor around her, and when she did it was to register their change from the ‘mob’ (as Caroline always called it) to the ‘people’ as radicals described them.

  Emily found the Irish nobility as unappealing as their countryside. She derided the interiors of their houses, her own included, as less well appointed than their English counterparts. To her mind no amount of well-fed, bibulous Irish hospitality compensated for run-down, badly furnished rooms. ‘I wish to have our house look sprucish,’ she wrote to Kildare from London in 1757, ‘Every mortal’s house here is so pretty and smart, and well furnished, that I do long to have ours too a little … How do people here, who can’t afford it half so well as us, contrive to have things so pretty
in their houses? I do believe the case is as Lady C[aroline] Duncannon said t’other day with a good deal of truth: “that everybody in Ireland spend all they have in eating and drinking and have no notion of any other sorts of comfort in life; they don’t care whether their houses or anything in them is fit to receive company. Provided they can stuff them, that’s enough.” After all, my Dear Lord K., there is a good deal of reason in what she says. I own, it struck me – it’s so generally the case amongst us.’ The Irish nobility were, by the time Emily wrote this, working hard to rectify any lingering traces of seventeenth-century austerity from their domestic surroundings. Kildare had already started the massive landscaping and decorating project at Carton, his country estate outside Dublin, and other noble houses would rival anything in England for magnificence within the next thirty years. New building in Dublin was providing wealthy Irishmen with sumptuous modern town houses.

  By the mid-eighteenth century, Dublin was settling into a monumental grandeur. Town houses of the nobility – Leinster House, Tyrone House, the towering front of Powerscourt House, Charlemont House on the north side of the Liffey – dominated wide, boulevard-like streets lined with the regular red-brick façades of four-storeyed terraces. Some streets, like Fitzwilliam Street, led like avenues up to public buildings. Others ended in open spaces like Merrion Square and St Stephen’s Green. Occasionally, on fine days, the purple Wicklow Mountains offered a spectacular natural back-cloth to man-made modernity. Dublin’s public buildings were as splendid as its private houses. The Parliament House, begun in 1729, cost £95,000 to build and had a grandeur and completeness utterly lacking in its shambling Westminster counterpart. Trinity College, the focal point of Irish Protestant nationalism, was enlarged and rebuilt into granite impressiveness in the 1750s.

  The exteriors of Dublin’s terraced houses were as severe as anything going up on the Bedford and Grosvenor estates in London at the same time. But curvaceous fanlights hung with leaden swags and ribbons hinted at gorgeousness within. Wide halls led to generously turning staircases, top lit by fanlights, with smooth shiny mahogany rails and ornate banisters. In the grand public rooms upstairs, plaster work, white or particoloured, plump upholstery and rich carpets rioted in baroque splendour. In the grandest houses there was a hectic amalgam of pinks, purples and green, reflected and doubled in candelabra and chandeliers.

  Such overblown raciness behind a dour façade was a feature of Protestant life in Dublin in the second half of the eighteenth century. Order and elegance might be one side of Ascendancy society, but outsiders were quick to see that they were matched by a taste for party-giving and going, bouts of heavy drinking, gambling and theatricals. Quarrels were often settled with blows or, at the opposite extreme, lawsuits of labyrinthine complexity. Outward restraint vied with an excess whose vulgarity was its own ironic comment on the uneasy social status of many newly wealthy Protestants. Social relations in Dublin society were equally confusing and contradictory. On the one hand the Ascendancy was enclosed within the wagon-circle of the Pale, impenetrable to those who were not Protestant. On the other hand, within the Protestant world a casualness about social class and distinction prevailed and humble origins were quickly obscured under rich French silks and layers of gilding and ormolu.

  Emily settled down easily into the freewheeling raciness of Dublin society after her arrival in the summer of 1747. Dublin suited her theatrical and extravagant personality far better than it did Kildare’s solemnity. Dubliners were happy to fall in with the combination of lazy domesticity and hectic party-going that characterised Emily’s early married life. At Carton, Kildare’s huge, unfinished Palladian mansion a few miles west of Dublin, Emily surrounded herself with friends and companions. She read, sewed and took a gossipy interest in country customs and scandals. ‘We are mighty quiet and comfortable, live all day long in one room, muddle and dress in the morning for all day – in short,’ she wrote to her absent husband, it was ‘just the kind of life which you know once I get into I love mightily, and it is much better for you than if I was losing my money at loo in town.’ But Carton was only a couple of hours drive from Dublin, and Emily readily dropped domesticity for an invitation to cards, a party or the play. In Dublin she stayed at Kildare House, monumental, charmless and also unfinished. From there she reported her gambling losses to her husband without a hint of contrition: ‘Plagued by the servants, worried by the children, my dearest Lord Kildare, I have not been able to sit down and write to you till this minute. I did not stay to sup at Mrs. Hussey’s, but played till twelve and lost £20, which is a great deal at plain crown loo.’ As the losses and debts mounted, Emily took temporary refuge in gamblers’ dreams. ‘If I could have one good night … it would retrieve my broken fortune.’ Good nights never did come and Emily went on losing with scarcely a qualm, writing complacently to her husband, ‘amusement you know I cannot do without’.

  In Dublin Emily played the grande dame to the hilt, matching her behaviour to the hectic conduct of the Protestant élite. She and Kildare were objects of fascination in Protestant Dublin. Bursts of rhetorical satire sometimes greeted their extravagance. But satirical acerbity was mixed with admiration: the Kildares’ behaviour was too close to Dublin’s mood to elicit anything akin to Swiftian savagery. Ten years after her arrival, Emily cheerfully sent such a satire to Henry Fox, knowing that like its author, he was still intoxicated by her gaiety. ‘I send you a song that abuses us all and will divert you,’ she wrote delightedly, and copied out the stanzas for him:

  The Tenth of November the Governor’s ball

  My Lord Kildare of Carton,

  And there you shall see the Devil and all

  With Lord Kildare of Carton.

  For Bessborough’s peer is not to be here

  With Lord Kildare of Carton.

  There close by his side see her Ladyship sit

  My Lady Kildare of Carton;

  For the mimic of majesty none so fit

  As Lady Kildare of Carton.

  The beaux they all bow when her Ladyship nods

  My Lady Kildare of Carton,

  Who thinks herself raised to the state of the gods

  By Lord Kildare of Carton.

  Emily’s queenly behaviour was not, however, derived from her social standing so much as her sexual confidence. ‘If I was not your sister you would be in love with me,’ she wrote invitingly to Fox. Emily brazenly used her sexual charms as barter for affection and indulgence and with no one did she barter more than her husband. This manipulation had a multiple purpose. Kildare stayed devoted, Emily remained adored and she was able to spend all the money she wanted. The more money she asked for and disposed of, the more excited Kildare became. Everyone, bankers included, were satisfied by the arrangement. Huge debts and a very large family were the inevitable result. By 1773, Emily and Kildare had debts of £148,000 and nineteen children.

  Inevitably, when Emily and her husband were parted, money talk filled their correspondence and lust breathed hotly through it. Sometimes writing was troublesome for Emily because she had weak eyes; others were often inveigled into wielding the pen. But money was secret. In 1757 she wrote from Holland House to her husband, ‘I employ a secretary out of prudence, my right eye being a little weak.’ But after a paragraph about her debts and her need for a ‘birthday gown and perhaps one sack, or two at most, for the winter’, she forgot her blindness and seized the pen. ‘I cannot, my sweet Jemmy, end this by my secretary; for I cannot let anybody but myself tell you what I always feel in regard to money; indeed it is what I should not attempt to express. Your goodness, your kindness to me always affect me so strongly when I talk or think on that subject, that I am too much moved to let any other person be witness to it.’ Kildare was gratified by these tones of sexual conspiracy, and Emily got her debts paid. Sometimes Kildare was alarmed by the quantities of silk dresses, jewels, rolls of taffeta, yards of hand-painted wallpaper, bundles of books and expanses of carpet that Emily ordered. ‘My love, my love, it is very
great pleasure to write for things to be sent to one; but the paying is not so when it is inconvenient,’ he wrote in 1759. But a few days later he was reporting, ‘I have performed all the commissions that belong to you. As to pictures, tables, brooches, they have not been enquired after yet, and I am afraid to look for them. They will cost so much and this year I fear will be my ruin. Carton will cost so much and no money coming in.’ Pleading poverty gave Kildare no defence against Emily’s charms. If he said he could not afford something, she had only to hint that she might go elsewhere to procure it, and he capitulated. Once she set her heart on having some diamonds reset in the latest fashion and went slyly about getting her way. ‘You know, my dear Lord Kildare,’ she began, softening him up, ‘you did once consent to my altering my buckle. Now I wish it more than ever … such contrivances they have now got to pick one’s pocket, and you know your poor Emily cannot resist temptation. So, my dear, my sweet Lord Kildare, don’t be angry.’ Then she approached the problem indirectly, mingling flattery and teasing, raising the sexual temperature, ‘it was very polite and right in you to invite those ladies to Canon. I assure [you] I am not at all jealous of any of them, unless it is Mrs. Clements; who is so pretty, so young, so gentle and so unaffected that I think there is some danger of your falling in love with her. If you do, Mr. Clements shall be my lover and then I may afford to new-set my diamonds as often as I please.’ Expensively reset, the diamonds duly arrived. Emily declared them ‘charming’, and wrote to Kildare, ‘how good you are about the buckle’.