During the War of Austrian Succession, Cumberland, or the Captain-General, as he was called, was in charge of a British army that was busy but not notably successful. By 1747, seven years after the outbreak of war, there was a military stalemate and Henry Pelham was determined to end the war. In 1747 he decided to call a general election before making any pacific overtures to the French. Capitalising on the anti-Jacobite mood after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie, he campaigned on an anti-Tory rather than an antiwar ticket, and was returned with an increased majority. Secret negotiations had in fact been under way for over a year and in 1748 they were successfully wound up in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
After Aix-la-Chapelle, Pelham and his ministers quickly cut the size of the army. Fox was busy moving troops back to Britain and disbanding regiments. When the first flurry of decommissioning subsided, dust began to settle again on the ledgers at the War Office and Fox had time for Holland House and family life.
The Duke of Richmond had been keeping a shrewd eye on the career of the Secretary at War. As Fox rose in prominence he also rose in his father-in-law’s estimation. By the early spring of 1748, Richmond was prodding his friend Newcastle to move Fox up from the War Office. ‘I have but one word to trouble you with,’ he wrote during a Cabinet reshuffle in February 1748, ‘which is to tell you that if Harry Fox should be Secretary of State, the Duchess and I should be vastly happy, though we still wish him the Paymaster’s place, as it is less precarious and a better thing for his family’s sake.’ Fox had been changing in the Duke’s mind. ‘Mr. Fox’ now sometimes gave way to ‘Fox’ and even to ‘Harry Fox’. Fox was successful, popular and no longer a man to scorn. The Duke acknowledged as much, writing, early in 1748, to an ex-mistress from whom he had been separated for many years. ‘My family is numerous; four girls and two boys. The eldest girl, Caroline, married against our wishes a man infinitely beneath her, so we do not see her; but I must tell you this man by his merits and talents is bound to make a name for himself in this country.’ Now that he was a grandparent, Richmond felt that second-hand news about the family in Holland House, passed on by Emily, was no longer enough. He wanted to see Ste and to chat with Fox. So the Duke and Duchess admitted defeat, swallowed their pride and allowed Henry Fox into their family. The preceding four years had turned the tables of affection and need. The Duke’s long letter to Caroline, sent via Fox on 26 March 1748, was ostensibly a gracious offer of reconciliation. But although Caroline and Fox were careful to send grateful replies that fell in with this fiction, both the Foxes and the Richmonds knew that the contest between Henry and the Duke had finally been settled in Fox’s favour.
Because his letter to Caroline was in effect a declaration of love and a document of surrender, Richmond was as careful to lay out the ways in which Caroline had delayed the reconciliation as he was to emphasise that he was prepared to forget the past. The Duke began his letter with a résumé of Caroline’s faults, a face-saving device that did little to make her feel loved. His long letter opened: ‘My dear Caroline, Although the same reason for my displeasure with you exists now, as much as it did the day you offended me, and that the forgiving you is a bad example to my other children, yet they are so young, that was I to stay until they were settled, the consequence might in all likelihood be that we should never see you as long as we lived, which thoughts our hearts could not bear. So the conflict between reason and nature is over, and the tenderness of parents has gotten the better, and your dear mother and I have determined to see and forgive both you and Mr. Fox.’
Richmond went on to criticise Caroline’s attempts at reconciliation through the intercession of her grandmother Lady Cadogan and then of Emily and Kildare. He warned her not to corrupt the morals of his remaining children and then finished his letter with hopes of seeing little Ste and holding his daughter in his arms once more. ‘One thing more of greatest importance to the future happiness of your family I must mention and recommend to you, which is that I trust to Mr. Fox’s honour, probity and good sense, as well as to yours, that your conversation ever hereafter with any of my children, especially my dear March, may be such as not to lead them to think children independent of their parents. We long to see your dear innocent child, and that has not a little contributed to our present tenderness to you … When we meet, let our affection be mutual and you may be sure that seeing you is proof of the sincerity of ours. So, my dear child, you and Mr. Fox may come here … and both be received in the arms of an affectionate father and mother.’
Caroline and Henry duly displayed the contrition and gratitude that satisfied the demands of family etiquette. Although Caroline never lost a trace of bitterness towards her parents and although the Duchess never fully forgave Fox, the benefits of reconciliation outweighed their nagging grievances. Caroline was reunited with her siblings and saw Sarah, who was born in 1745, a year after Caroline’s elopement, for the first time. The Duke and Duchess happily assumed the role of grandparents. Caroline and her mother were mothers together. The Duchess gave her daughter advice about Ste, who was only five days older than Sarah, and consoled her during the new pregnancy she soon announced.
Within a few months Richmond was a regular guest at Holland House. Fox once again played a masterly hand. In the hour of victory he adopted a flattering attitude of deference and gratitude towards his father-in-law. ‘I beg your Grace the moment you arrive to let me have your orders touching this turtle, which is now alive in salt water in Long Acre, and pray tell me what cook I must have.’ He sent the Duchess an expensive present, a snuff-box – both she and Caroline were fond of snuff – ordered from the Meissen factory by the devoted Hanbury Williams whom Fox seemed determined to include in both the beginning and the end of his rejection by the Richmond family. The little box, roughly two by two-and-a-half inches, had a gently domed lid. Its porcelain panels, set in Dresden gold, were painted with bouquets of flowers and the box was sealed with a shell-shaped clasp. But Fox’s present had a secret. Inside the lid was a portrait of Caroline herself, copied in the Meissen factory from a miniature Fox sent Hanbury Williams. But it was only Caroline’s image Fox gave back to her mother. Its original, he hinted, he kept for himself.
The Duchess accepted Fox’s present, but was never at ease with her son-in-law. Richmond and Fox, in contrast, were soon on excellent terms. They already knew one another well and their political interests were broadly similar. Notionally separated by a generation, there were in fact only four years between them and both were devoted fathers of young children. Richmond, fonder of his girls than his boys, liked to boast of his toddlers’ precociousness. Of Sarah he wrote delightedly to Fox at the end of 1749, when he was forty-eight and she four, ‘There is a cursed hard frost which is very hard upon fox hunters and planters. You are one of those I know that don’t comprehend anybody’s loving hunting, so I must entertain you with a question. Sha Sha ask’d her Mama, upon my being gone out in a bad rainy day, “Esceque Papa est obligé d’aller à la chasse ou escequ’il en a envie?” [sic].’ Henry was for the moment unable to compete with this infant bilingualism. But he had happily reported, at the beginning of that year, the birth of another son born on 24 January 1749. The baby was christened Charles James in honour both of his Stuart ancestry and his grandfather, and his name was a public declaration of the reconciliation between the Fox and Richmond families.
Peace was officially declared in February 1749 and celebrated in late April with the first performance of Handel’s ‘Fireworks Music’ and fireworks in Green Park. The display was a failure. Huge Catherine wheels, nailed to posts near a specially constructed pavilion, obstinately refused to turn. Part of the building, replete with colonnades, statues of Greek gods and a bas-relief of the King, caught fire and burned to the ground. The Duke of Richmond, in an uncharacteristically economical gesture, bought up all the unused and unsuccessful fireworks and used them for a gigantic entertainment of his own. Richmond’s fireworks were a codicil to the peace and a declaration of his new happin
ess. Caroline and Fox, Emily and Kildare, and Richmond’s own younger children were all together for the first time. Emily had just presented her father with another grandson, born at the beginning of March, bringing his total to four. Fashionable London, invited to Richmond House, celebrated peace, fecundity and family unity.
Charles Frederick, Controller of His Majesty’s Fireworks, organised the show. In the middle of the garden stood a triumphal arch with lamps burning on its roof. It was a symbol of unity and of military might. At the four corners of the garden conical pyramids, like miniature helter-skelters lit up with spiralling lights, each supported an illuminated crown in honour of the Duke’s royal guests. Between them, ranged along the terrace, were huge Catherine wheels. Wooden rings, anchored to the river bottom, bobbed on the water. Further out into the river lay a barge laden with sky rockets, and from there Mr Frederick orchestrated the fiery performance: ‘200 water mines, 20 air balloons, 200 fire trees, 5000 water rockets, 5000 sky rockets, 100 fire showers, 20 suns and a hundred stars’ lent lustre to the occasion.
The show started on the river. Rockets shot dizzyingly into the black night sky. The hot jets sped upwards until their tops exploded into golden palm trees, whose leaves fell towards the water. At the surface they crashed into their reflections, hissed and expired. Their ghosts, wraiths of steam, drifted like white muslin handkerchiefs over the upturned faces of the crowd. In an interval the plop-plop of the roman candles, burning on the wooden rings beneath the railings, accentuated the calm. Then explosions from a battery of mortars reeled against the side of Richmond House, rebounded and collided with oncoming waves of sound. Noise sprays rose in the air and then followed the tracks of their fiery brethren towards the burning water. Next the Catherine wheels were lit on the terrace. As they turned faster and faster they whistled and creaked. Their whirling petals gave off showers of incandescent pollen that fell to the ground in shimmering arcs. Faces glowed and then faded away. Finally the triumphal arch was illuminated and, as the noise died down, light spread across the crowd packed into the garden and lit up the royal barge on the river. Music and dancing began. At two in the morning the Duke leant against the railings on the terrace and sang patriotic songs for his guests and family.
8 August 1750
With alternate thrills of hot and cold the Duke lay shivering in a fever at Godalming. Sedgwick, his secretary, sat anxiously by him. Wormwood, Artemisia absinthium, dark, bitter and oily, was prescribed to bring down the Duke’s temperature. The Duke drank it, hardly aware of his surroundings. He lay between damp sheets, confused by fever and weakened by dehydration. Days and nights passed blurrily in the darkened room. Gradually the house filled up. From London, Truesdale and Middleton, the family doctors, came with medicines and assistants. The Duke’s landau brought the Duchess and her servants from Goodwood. Relatives and friends came in and went quietly out. In the midst of this muffled commotion the Duke travelled alone into the dark extinction of death. Slowly but surely fever pulled him into the void from life, light and happiness. On the tenth day the Duke died.
A few hours later Middleton took off his frock-coat and rolled up his fine white cotton sleeves. He picked up his knife, pressed it against the dead Duke’s soft, resisting stomach and then pressed harder until the skin broke and parted. Middleton cut a deep, straight line down the Duke’s navel. He sliced through the pinky-grey skin, the gelatinous yellow layer of fat and the thick red muscle wall. From the thin skin of the peritoneum Middleton’s warm, gloveless hands pulled out the cold intestines and burrowed down into the pelvic cavity to reach the bladder. Picking up a small steel scalpel he slit the bladder open. The bladder was irritated and inflamed like a small balloon but there was no trace of any stones.
Left alone in the room to refine and practise his diagnostic skills, Middleton rummaged about amongst the dead Duke’s cold and solidifying organs. He split open a section of intestines and examined the stomach. After some time he carefully put the pieces back again, pressing down the grey, sausage-like intestines, and threaded a length of cat gut through the eye of a large needle. He tied a knot in the end of the thread and, pulling the severed skin together, sewed the body up with a line of stitches that ran in parallel down the abdomen. Then he washed his hands in a basin standing on the floor. The Duke’s body, cleaned and dressed, was prepared to make its final journey to a dark vault in Chichester Cathedral.
A year later the Duchess, too, was dead. Two sons and three daughters passed into her eldest children’s care. Caroline and Emily were no longer daughters in the world’s eyes. They were mothers, wives, sisters. At first grief drowned out their parents’ voices and to bystanders the Duke and Duchess became paintings on the wall and remembered voices that faded to the written word as the years went by. But as their grief died down, Emily and Caroline, still daughters in their minds, began to hear their parents speak. So began a colloquy that would go on until they in their turn left the world to their grieving children. Caroline and Emily joined in the huge mute conversation humanity carries on with the dead that stretches back through the ages as, with silent self-justifications and voiceless wrangles, children whisper to parents and they, children in their turn, lisp confidences to lost mothers and fathers. On the walls of Holland House and Goodwood, the Duke and Duchess were immobile and mute. In their children’s minds they flitted in and out, watchful, loving, censorious, always listening, and still alive.
PART ONE
‘You have been very good indeed to the family on this occasion’.
3 rd Duke of Richmond to Henry Fox, 30 November 1750.
‘POOR DEAR LADY Kildare is in the utmost affliction, for she loved her father extremely, and is very unhappy about the poor Duchess of Richmond, whom I pity very much. I am doing all I can to keep her from sinking under her grief, as she can’t cry enough to ease herself. I have had her out in the one horse chaise alone three hours this morning, which I think she is the better for. I don’t leave her for a minute.’ The Earl of Kildare thus reported Emily’s misery to Fox after the Duke’s death in 1750.
Kildare deferred to Fox because Fox was now de facto head of the family. With the Duchess’s death in 1751, all family relations changed again. In his will, the Duke, who had forgiven but not forgotten Caroline’s elopement, passed over his eldest daughter in assigning homes and mentors for his younger children and entrusted the three little girls to Emily’s care if the Duchess died. So now Louisa, aged eight, Sarah six and Cecilia little more than a year old, were sent to Ireland. Carton House became their home and Emily became a second mother to them. The two boys, Charles, now third Duke of Richmond, and Lord George Lennox, continued their education in England and abroad. Richmond was an amorous and pedantic schoolboy of fifteen when his father died and he looked to Fox for guidance, calling him his ‘best friend’ and his ‘second father’.
Despite his youth, the third Duke had gradually to assume his father’s mantle. As he grew up his brother and sisters endowed him with the age-old rights accompanied by the duties and responsibilities that rested with heads of families. He would help search for suitable husbands for the younger children and reserved the right of veto over any they chose for themselves. Marriage settlements, annuities and wills were his to discuss and settle. In quarrels he acted as arbiter and at times of crisis he provided safe haven and money. Exasperated though they might be by his preachy stubbornness, his siblings deferred to their brother and depended on him to defend the family’s interests. Caroline was now a Fox and Emily a Kildare, but neither in their own minds ceased being a part of the Lennox family. So the Duke’s influence was considerable.
The third Duke went on the Grand Tour when his father died, and he stayed abroad until January 1756. Fox, sometime renegade and outcast, now protected the interests of an extended family created by two generations of Richmond marriages. For the moment the family was united. Kildare and the third Duke of Richmond joined Fox’s political circle as did Kildare’s brother-in-law the Earl of Hillsborough,
an Irish peer who lived largely in England and spent a good deal of time at Holland House, to Caroline’s occasional chagrin. At the periphery of political although not always of family affairs were Henry’s brother Stephen Fox and, from the other side, Lord Albemarle, a career soldier and diplomat who had married the second Duke of Richmond’s sister. Albemarle and Stephen Fox spent little time in London, but they lent weight to the Fox and Richmond interests in the west country. Other relations, Cadogans, Digbys and Brudenells, also stood within the pale. Beyond them the family branched into a plethora of ‘cousins’, as more remote relations were indiscriminately dubbed. Such relationships grew fainter with distance, spreading out like ripples in a pond, but the blood tie remained; Caroline and Emily even acknowledged the Old and Young Pretenders, descendants of their great-grandfather’s brother, as cousins.
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 Page 9