Sarah’s fear had grown up swiftly after the ceremony. The wedding night, the slippery loss of virginity in the flickering candle-light, had terrified her. Between the removal of the gown that Caroline had given her and the squawking of the peacocks and pheasants on the Holland House terrace, Sarah was transformed. Innocence gave way to experience, the maiden to the wife and the bibulous optimism of the wedding breakfast to the settled despair of ‘real dislike’. As soon as they became man and wife the couple dropped their courting characters. Bunbury’s flood of letters and verses abruptly dried up and Sarah’s lively flirtations were overcome by a melancholy restlessness.
To everyone’s surprise, Sarah took to following Bunbury about like a dog. Through the long summer recess she stayed at his side as he went about his daily life as county MP and country squire. ‘I am in a constant fear of making him angry,’ Sarah confessed to Emily in September, ‘for though he loves me, yet not one in ten like to have their wives tagging after them constantly; and that is what I cannot help doing, for, whenever he is absent an hour even, I am watching for his return and follow him to the stables etc, and, in short, am vastly troublesome … I can see he don’t like it and I will get the better of it.’ Sarah eyed her husband incessantly, scrutinising him for signs of tenderness, appalled at his distant beauty. She attributed her vigilance to jealousy and interpreted her jealousy as a sign of love. ‘Pray do not tell anybody of my jealousy, for if it came to Mr. Fox’s ears – Lord have mercy upon me!’ she begged Emily, adding, ‘I don’t know if, in the main, it is not better for me, as it will keep up my love for him.’
Already Sarah was edging towards unpleasant conclusions. If her jealousy was a sign of love, what did Bunbury’s complete lack of jealousy mean, and what could be the reason for her own sudden disinclination to flirt? For Sarah’s hound-like shadowing owed less to jealousy than to a need for signs of love; even a hint of tenderness on Bunbury’s part would do. As the summer of 1762 wore on, Sarah stopped writing and she stopped flirting. Her need to act flamboyant parts and to tell stories was squashed under a larger fear that Bunbury might treat coquettish behaviour with a benign indifference. That might confirm what Sarah already suspected – that her husband neither loved nor desired her.
At first her sisters were sanguine about Bunbury’s equanimity, hopefully attributing it to the new fashion for homeliness. Caroline told Emily that ‘Mr. Bunbury is sobriety itself, and very domestic, and don’t appear to have any little teasing ways with him, so that she may be just as happy with him as if he was more lively.’ Louisa reported back to Sarah herself that Bunbury ‘has, by all accounts, one of the most amiable dispositions that ever was; is very sensible and good natured.’ But to the third Duke of Richmond, she passed on a very different report. ‘Don’t say I said so, but I hear terrible accounts of his coldness and reservedness.’ None the less, she qualified her anxiety by asserting, ‘he is vastly fond of her though and I know she dotes upon him.’
Thus it was that Sarah’s marriage rapidly became an experience of collective self-deception by her siblings. Everyone maintained that Sarah’s marriage had been a love match forged in freedom, but they all knew that Sarah had been forced into a quick choice by familial as well as social pressures. So all the sisters dulled their foreboding with recitations of Bunbury’s good nature and Sarah’s happiness. But everyone – Caroline, Emily, Fox, Kildare and Louisa – had created Sarah’s marriage, commending Bunbury and urging her on; and everyone would bear responsibility if the fragile ship of her felicity was swept towards the rocks.
No one connived more eagerly in this act of collective delusion than Sarah herself. Like her sisters, Sarah was determined not to delve behind the façade of her cheerfulness and jealousy. She began to live a life of the surface, busy at Barton and in Bury St Edmunds. She entertained friends and neighbours and set about planning flower gardens, walks and shrubberies. ‘I must be in pursuit of something,’ she said. But she was running rather than chasing, fleeing from the spectre of a lonely life and trying frantically to escape from herself. She lacked money, which in big enough doses could keep aristocratic marriages alive, so her distractions had to be modest. First she asked Emily to send her an Irish wolfhound. Then she found a loquacious parrot. She abandoned reading alone and, in the summer evenings, worked feverishly on handkerchiefs and a gown while Mr Bunbury’s sister read volumes of French memoirs. She tried to make Barton feel like home, tending her garden as a way of rooting herself in her new environment. ‘I have set my heart upon being settled,’ she said. To Susan Fox-Strangways she wrote, with her accustomed note of supplication, ‘I have planted all the trees you bid me and others that I have thought of. I have fished out two cedars as high as a chair and flourishing charmingly; is not that a treasure?’
When horticulture paled, Sarah turned to the opiate of country society. Bury was a thriving market town. Two small streams, the Lark and the Linnet, rippled past the ruins of an abbey sacked in the fourteenth century by a citizenry who had since settled into model constituents. Around the flinty remains were the town houses of local landowners, the assembly rooms and a theatre. Behind and above these grand buildings was a grid-based town with houses of brick and stucco; white, cream and yellowy pink, all wreathed in the heady smell of malt and hops drifting out from the town brewery. Just above the abbey stood the imposing Angel Hotel where successful local candidates, Charles Bunbury amongst them, distributed dark local ale to their cheering supporters. In October, Bury fair brought a noisy mixture of animals, performers and mountebanks to the town centre; for two weeks a closed and secretive rural society opened itself up to the latest scientific curiosities, the newest travelling quacks and a caravan of horse dealers, prize fighters, print sellers and trinket merchants. Away from the packed squares and streets the local gentry ate and drank in town houses and inns. ‘Sally in her letters seems quite worn out with visiting. She was engaged in no less than eight different turtle feasts in the town of Bury last time I heard from her,’ Caroline reported to Emily in October 1762.
Despite the turtles and the visits, life in Suffolk lacked the excitement and cosmopolitan diversity of both Carton and Holland House. Sarah fought isolation and self-knowledge with a string of visitors. Caroline and Fox came first, in the middle of July, barely six weeks after Sarah’s wedding. Although Sarah was ‘as pert or more so than ever’, delighted with Fox’s familiar and reassuring bawdy talk, Caroline was quickly bored with country life. ‘The people there pass their whole life in dining and visiting about,’ she complained. In August Bunbury went to a house party, leaving Sarah and his sister alone at Barton. Soon after his departure, thirteen-year-old Charles Fox came for ten days. Then Susan Fox-Strang-ways arrived and stayed until mid-October, when races at Newmarket and the Bury fair filled the house with gamblers and horse-fanciers. Gossiping and versifying with Susan and jaunting from track to town with Bunbury’s friends kept Sarah from watching her husband too closely. A little while after Susan left, Sarah felt courageous enough to put self-deception to paper. ‘You have made a mighty pretty discovery, Miss, truly! “I can think there is happiness in the country with a person one loves.” Pray now who the devil would not be happy with a pretty place, a good house, good horses, greyhounds etc for hunting, so near Newmarket & £2,000 a year to spend? Add to this that I have a settled comfortable feel that I am doing so right, that all my friends love me and are with me as much as possible; in short that I have not one single thing on earth to be troubled about.’
Missing from this catalogue of bliss was Bunbury himself. At the heart of Sarah’s life was a blank space where her love for her husband and his for her might have been; a no-go area of anxiety and unhappiness carefully cordoned off from mention or examination. The nearest Sarah came to admitting the existence of this emotional black hole which, in spite of her best efforts kept pulling everything towards it, was to complain of boredom or ‘wretched spirits’ that could be attributed to temporary domestic disappointment. ‘You need n
ot have envied me,’ she wrote to Susan in October, ‘for my devil of a horse is as lame as a dog and Mr. B. has been coursing, hunting and doing every pleasant thing on earth and poor me sat fretting and fuming at home.’ She longed to see Emily’s children and dreamed of Carton and home. ‘Believe me, dear sister, when I think of you it is not to be conceived how I long to go to you and see my dear little girls, and in short twenty people and things … I sit here and fancy myself there and think of what I shall do and where I shall go.’
At first Sarah hoped that Fox and Kildare might be able to fix Bunbury’s appointment as Secretary to the next Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, but his chances were destroyed by a change of administration. A later scheme that he should accompany the British Ambassador, Lord Hertford, to Paris also fell through. The historian David Hume took the job and also took Paris by storm, surprising and enraging his upstaged employer. Sarah and her husband stayed in England, she to dream of Ireland, he of training a Newmarket winner. Gradually she came to realise that her husband’s first love was for horses; the more indifferent he became to Sarah’s body the more absorbed he was by horseflesh.
Unable to go back to Emily, Carton and her childhood life, Sarah did the next best thing. As soon as she decently could, she left for Holland House. ‘Sal and Mr. Bunbury are here,’ Caroline reported to Emily on 7 December 1762. ‘She is just as she was, pretty and good humoured as an angel.’ The House was sitting; Conolly had come over (although he spent most of the time out with the Charlton hunt at Goodwood); Kildare was expected. Emily’s heir George, her second son, the slow and amiable William and Charles Fox were all about to come back from Eton. Susan Fox-Strangways was on her way up from the west country. Holland House was alive with political gossip and plans for the coming season. While Bunbury went to the House of Commons, Sarah plunged gratefully back into her former life.
Although Holland House still belonged to the Mr Edwardes from whom it had been leased, the Foxes continued to make interior alterations, to buy up parcels of land around it and to plant the grounds in expectation of the estate eventually becoming their own. With the help of the naturalist Peter Collinson they moved walls and paths, laid down a bowling green and planted trees and shrubs throughout the sixty-four acres of the park. Caroline decorated the lawns with pheasants, peacocks and pedigree cows, whose white bulks moved slowly against the green of grass and trees, manuring as they went. Gardening, with its biblical overtones of Edenic tranquillity and its English associations with virtue and peacefulness, hardly needed literary justification. But Caroline quoted Candide all the same. Writing to Emily in the autumn of 1764 she said, ‘My chief work is now clearing and cutting down trees to let in peeps here and there, and also to prevent the trees killing and over-running one another as they did at Goodwood … nothing truer than il faut cultiver son jardin to relieve the many cares of human nature.’
No such philosophy dignified the accumulation of interior furnishings. Gratification, display and (in cases like Caroline’s) francophilia were the deities who presided over the decoration of great houses. But Caroline did not alter the interior of Holland House. She took an unfashionable delight in its heavily coffered plaster ceilings, dark oak panelling and mullioned windows. Emily privately disliked Holland House, decried Caroline’s taste and avoided commissioning her to buy furniture, wallpapers or chintz for Carton. Caroline resolutely went her own way. She was well aware that she was regarded as eccentric in her love not simply of the quaint (which might have been praised as newly fashionable Gothicism) but the outmoded. ‘I love these old-fashioned comfortable houses,’ she said.
Concessions to modernity were made in furniture and painting. Caroline chose fashionable Parisian furniture and accumulated, by commission and purchase, a large and up-to-date picture collection. Like many of her aristocratic contemporaries, Caroline favoured upholstered French furniture decorated with gilt or ormolu; pieces that were light but loaded with gold. In 1764 she told Emily that she was ‘all for the magnificent style – velvet, damask etc. I have three immense looking glasses to put in my drawing room, and propose hanging it with a damask or brocatelle of two or three colours.’ In niches and cupboards, on mantelpieces and bureaux stood curvaceous Sèvres nicknacks. ‘I hope Lord Kildare has made a good report of my blue gallery and my dressing room fitted up with a great deal of pea-green china and painted pea-green. I have been extravagant enough to buy a good deal of china lately, but I am in tolerable circumstances,’ she reported to Emily in 1759, adding a few years later, ‘My dressing room in London is thought pretty; with Horner’s paper and the carving, of which there is a good deal, painted two greens and varnished.’ As Fox’s fortune accumulated so did Caroline’s china. By the mid-1760s her dressing-room was chock-a-block and the mantelpiece was ‘covered with small pictures, china [and] Wedgwood’s imitations of antiques’. There were three large ‘mazarine china bottles’, two blue and one pea-green, their handles hung with chains and stoppers in their mouths. There were five ‘fish shaped’ Sèvres vases, painted in the bluer, less harsh ‘sea-green’, ornamented with ormolu and intricately painted. Their sharp bottoms rested on gold circular mounts. Four gold-spangled cups festooned with golden flowers completed Caroline’s collection of display pieces. But she also had a Sèvres tea and coffee service painted in blue wreaths of flowers from which to take breakfast and serve visitors. The whole collection was rounded off with a complete blue dinner service.
Caroline took a sometimes guilty delight in the accumulation and display of furniture and ornaments that were redolent of wealth. But she did not invest much of herself in them. They were not heirlooms, which came replete with ghosts and responsibilities. Neither were they gifts reminiscent of friendship. Some reminded her of jaunts to Paris in the mid-176os, others reassured her of her own wealth and taste. But for that one object could serve as well as another.
The picture gallery at Holland House was quite another matter. It was designed to show to the world the image of a happy and successful marriage, family and career. Caroline invested time, money and herself in it. It constituted a kind of self-portrait. Displayed on the gallery walls were those people, those lives, that made up her own life and personality. Everyone who really mattered to her was there.
Round the gallery hung the extended Richmond-Fox family, augmented by friends and mentors and presided over by ancestors. Charles II and Louise de Kéroualle looked down from the walls. So did Sir Stephen and Lady Fox, carefully painted by Kneller. Caroline’s parents, her brothers Lord George Lennox and the third Duke of Richmond, the latter painted by Batoni on his grand tour were also there. Fox’s brother, the Earl of Ilchester, his wife Elizabeth and their daughter Susan Fox-Strangways hung close by. Hoare had painted Ste as a little boy and Reynolds painted him as an adult. Caroline and Henry themselves, Charles and Harry Fox, Louisa, Conolly, Emily, and Kildare, Sarah and Bunbury: all those whom Sarah called ‘one of us’ eventually crowded on to the walls.
In a world where dynastic considerations counted for so much, reverently arranged family portraits were everywhere from the grandest nobleman’s house to the parlours of modest merchants and shopkeepers. But Caroline’s gallery was not simply a tribute to the Fox and Richmond families. It stressed particularly her beloved children and her sisters. Louisa’s full-length portrait by Ramsay hung over one fireplace. Over the other went Reynolds’s triple portrait of Sarah, Susan Fox-Strangways and Charles James Fox. This huge canvas celebrated the young Etonian’s poetic precociousness. Round the walls of the gallery connecting the two central portraits like beads on a necklace were all the other paintings, links in Caroline’s familial chain of alliance, love and friendship.
Of course paintings and sculpture were scattered throughout Holland House. Caroline had a portrait of her mentor Madame de Sévigné in her private rooms and Fox had a bust of his, Voltaire. There were paintings by Steen, Van Loo, Murillo, Salvator Rosa and Hogarth, as well as a very large collection of English, Flemish, French, Dutch and Italian
prints that the children used to dip into. But the gallery housed the family, the portraits of her relatives that Caroline thought ‘most like’ their originals and those that reminded her of past happiness. When she started the gallery in 1761 there was already a fine family gathering to be moved in. Caroline had been painted by Reynolds in 1758, Fox by Reynolds and by Hogarth. Louisa was there (in Ramsay’s sumptuous portrait of 1759), so were the third Duke of Richmond, Charles, Ste and all the august ancestors. But Caroline was choosy. She wanted only the best and she did not want pictures that no longer met the criterion of likeness to their originals. Her own portrait by Reynolds was a case in point. Reynolds had painted Caroline as a woman of fashion. She wears a ribbed and ruched bodice and sleeves with extravagantly deep ruffles. Around her neck is a tippet of shining blue ribbon which tucks into her bodice behind a nosegay of two fresh old-English roses, pink with yellow stamens and centres. Nestling between Caroline’s bodice and petticoat was the little water bottle in which the roses sat. With nervous determination Caroline stares out at the viewer as if she has looked up for a moment from the work on her lap: her right hand holds a needle which she is pulling through her embroidery.
Since the completion of Reynolds’s portrait in 1758, Caroline had decided she was getting old. Already in 1759, when she was thirty-five, she had written to Emily, ‘I never liked a racketing life, but now I grow old and I think when one is nearer forty than thirty, which is now my case, one has an excuse to indulge oneself in the way of life one chooses. That among many other reasons I think makes the middle age the happiest time of one’s life. I’m sure mine is; and middle age everyone must allow thirty-five to be, though many women choose to put themselves on the footing of being young at that time.’ By 1763, when she was forty, Caroline had settled into the persona of a woman of ripe years, looking forward to a ‘long and comfortable old age’ and declaring that she no longer need ‘drag un visage de quarante ans’ into the ballroom. Caroline asked Ramsay to paint her for the gallery in a manner that fitted this new image of herself. Ramsay obliged; Caroline sits in a gilded and upholstered French chair, turning her face and half turning her body towards us from her work-table. The intense gaze that Reynolds gave her has softened. Now she appears further away, deeper into the picture’s space and her own world, dignified and a little aloof. Her sewing – something Reynolds favoured for its sumptuousness, but Caroline rarely took up – has been discarded in favour of a letter. Reynolds painted Caroline as she thought she ought to be, a woman of fashion. Ramsay painted Caroline as a dignified grey-haired woman, a letter writer and reader, dressed in warming furs and distanced from us by her social position and experience of life. Both paintings contained elements of fantasy. Caroline was more bookish than Reynolds showed but far less comfortable and serene than Ramsay suggested. But this was Caroline as she liked to think of herself, and it was the portrait destined for the Holland House gallery.
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 Page 16