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

by Stella Tillyard

  Dawn broke over the city. Ladies and gentlemen back from balls and masquerades flopped into bed. But in some houses the candles still burned, fading to blue flames as the white morning light filled the rooms. The clubs of St James’s were still crowded. Young men sat at baize-topped tables, piles of guineas to one side of them, glasses of wine and brandy to the other. In front of them and in their hands were cards. By the morning hours only these inveterate gamblers were left at the tables, men who lost (and occasionally won) hundreds or thousands of pounds a night. Stories circulated of their depravity; to a nation which became ever more addicted to risk as it became more commercialised, they epitomised both the lure and the shame of playing life itself for high stakes. These pallid young men, emotionally exhausted and financially ruined by night-long bouts of gaming, were only the visible representatives of a country in the grip of gambling fever.

  Almost everybody who had any spare cash, and many who did not, gambled. Servants and labourers put away part of their meagre wages to buy shares in lottery tickets, hoping against hope that chance would free them from a life of unremitting servitude. Farmers gambled at rural race meetings. Apprentices, merchants and their clerks held bets on political events, on which merchantman would arrive first at the Port of London, even on which woman would first turn the corner at the end of the street. Dowagers and gentlemen sat over games of faro or whist through long winter evenings, regularly losing twenty pounds a night to their hosts who took the bank. Virginal, unmarried women were not supposed to play – one loss, it was thought, might lead to another – but they did, out of the public gaze. ‘Sarah is fond of loo,’ Caroline wrote before Sarah’s marriage, ‘but I have desired her, except in private parties with the Duchess of R[ichmond] not to play.’ After her marriage Sarah came of age as a gambler. Caroline noticed with alarm that when Bunbury was not in London she played with the Duke and Duchess of Richmond and other young men at Richmond House. Emily regularly lost moderate amounts without a qualm. Caroline, drawn towards something she thought of as dangerous and wrong, was both attracted and worried by the idea of playing for considerable sums. In 1760 she wrote, ‘I can’t help when I play deep having an unpleasant feel about it, as if I did something wrong; perhaps a little vanity at not acting consistent with the rest of one’s character. In short, I don’t quite know, but ’tho I love it I don’t feel pleasant at it, and fear encouraging myself in it.’

  But it was those who played for very high stakes who held the nation transfixed. Everyone agreed that in moderation gambling was an innocuous pastime but that too much gaming was a vice. Parents and commentators alike puzzled over the cause of this excess, the more so because the line between enjoyment and ruin seemed so permeable. At the beginning of the century, writers regarded games of chance as a kind of pleasure. They trusted to reason and conscience to exercise moderation, and they saw excess as a failure of will, especially since in games like faro the players took turns at being the banker and thus at recouping their losses. Later on, the focus shifted from individuals to the larger world. The habits of gilded youth seemed to offer up a mirror to society; gambling became a symbol of national corruption and imperial decline. As troubles with the American colonists brewed, Horace Walpole wrote, ‘the gaming is worthy the decline of our Empire. The young men lose five, ten, fifteen thousand pounds in an evening. Lord Stavordale, not one-and-twenty, lost eleven thousand last Tuesday, but recovered it by one great hand. He swore a great oath – “Now if I had been playing deep, I might have won millions.”’

  Gambling on this scale was confined to a few dozen young men, habitués of Newmarket, denizens of Almack’s and White’s. They gambled to display their wealth, to identify themselves as part of a group and, increasingly, to indicate a way of life that had political as well as social parameters. Caroline’s sons were at the heart of this cadre. To her horror, Ste and Charles Fox, trading on the expectation of very large fortunes, were ostentatious in their huge gambling losses and others in their circle followed their lead. Lord Stavordale was their cousin. Lord Carlisle and Richard Fitzpatrick, Lord March and George Selwyn were the Fox brothers’ companions at the gaming table. These men, with their associates of club and turf, developed a culture of gambling. Winning was exhilarating but losing, and losing well, was equally important; a member of Brooks’s who left the club with winnings of £12,000 (probably gained as the banker) was vilified by those who remained. By his name in the club books they wrote, ‘that he may never return is the ardent wish of the members’.

  As Charles Fox made his way in Parliament in the 1770s, gambling became part of his political personality. Fox’s admirers lovingly repeated what Horace Walpole wrote about a great extempore performance in the House after a gaming bout. ‘Fox was dissipated, dissolute, idle beyond measure. He was that very morning returned from Newmarket, where he had lost some thousand pounds the preceding day, … had sat up drinking all night … had been running about the House talking to different persons,’ and yet spoke with ‘amazing spirit and memory.’ Where his rival Pitt was cautious and costive, Fox and his supporters were excessive and carelessly brilliant. By the time Fox took on the mantle of ‘Champion of the People’ in the 1780s, his gambling had been transformed by legend into an aspect of his populism, a form of generosity and symptom of political openness, English liberties and, eventually, for his supporters, of Liberty itself.

  Caroline, who was to see nothing of Charles’s deification, continued to think of her sons’ gambling as a corruption of reason. While Charles and Ste made huge inroads into their father’s fortune, and broke every resolution of better conduct, and while onlookers blamed their vice on a lack of childhood discipline, Caroline still trusted to reason and ‘confidence’ to get the better of their unbridled passion for cards. ‘Oh Ste,’ she burst out in 1773, ‘you have neither of you the excuse of having harsh or hard parents. Too indulgent ones is no excuse for bad conduct, as our indulgence never tended to, nor our example to encourage, sin; but we hoped to reclaim folly by gaining confidence.’

  When fortunes were lost and credit ran short, other amusements had to be found. A shilling a night took anyone to the theatre. There audiences asked over and over again the same questions that dominated the gambling dens: ‘What will happen next?’ and ‘how will it all end?’ Suspense and resolution were the stuff of the playhouse; in a melodrama everything might depend if not on the fall of the dice, then on an act of the gods or the flick of a tyrant’s wrist. Emily had a box in the Dublin theatre, Caroline one at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden. When she came to London in 1760, Sarah went to the play several times a week, often in the company of Charles and Ste Fox, who had been regular visitors since they were five or six years old. At home plays were read silently in the morning, out loud in the evenings and acted by the younger members of both the Fox and Fitzgerald families. Everybody joined in the cult of Garrick. Caroline invited him to assemblies, Louisa had him to dinner when she came to London and Sarah and Susan followed his career with minute attention until the day he died in 1779.

  Time spent at the playhouse and reading plays testified to the allure of the theatre not only as an oratorical training ground for budding politicians but also as a metaphor for life itself. It was, of course, an old metaphor, stretching back through Shakespeare to classical writers. But in the eighteenth century it was given new impetus. Actors and theatres were growing in popularity and commentators began to hint at the double role that everyone played in the world, at once actor and audience, all watching the unfolding drama. As early as 1719, Addison’s Spectator, weighing up the merits of the metaphors of life as a journey and life as a stage, plumped for the latter on the grounds that it was more suited to the bustling and crowded condition of modern life. For the younger generation of Foxes and Fitzgeralds, though, the theatre was more than metaphoric. They worshipped actors and actresses as minor deities, confused actors with their roles and cast themselves as heroes and heroines. In the spring of 1764 the social and metaphoric
al distance between the aristocratic and the theatrical house broke down altogether. Susan Fox-Strangways eloped with William O’Brien who compounded the error of being an actor by his Irish, Catholic descent.

  From the time she appeared in London society Susan had been regarded by her family as unpredictable, headstrong and ‘cunning’. ‘I fear Lady Suke,’ Caroline had written during the negotiations with the Bunburys over Sarah’s marriage settlement, afraid that Susan might induce Sarah to call off the wedding and damage her reputation. ‘She has too much of the reverse of humility in her composition,’ Louisa added. Susan said, ‘I thought myself fitter to advise and govern than to soothe and cultivate’, and when George III fell in love with Sarah, Susan had hopes of unprecedented influence in national affairs. ‘I almost thought myself Prime Minister.’ She was baulked in this ambition and unable as she said later ‘to talk, to confide’ in her family. She summed up her childhood thus: ‘my father in one room reading – my mother in another playing cards – the ennui I felt – then very little communicating of sentiments or opinions’. Susan turned her attentions to the theatre. There communication between actors and audience created a magic web of confidence and there, too, powerful women like Kitty Fisher stalked the aisles. Home was all reserve, the theatre all engagement.

  For a determined girl like Susan it was an obvious step to move from aping Kitty Fisher’s clothes and worshipping actors from the distance of her box to falling in love. O’Brien epitomised the glamour of the stage: he trod the boards in major roles and lived on friendly terms with Garrick and Foote. Each night he pandered to the romantic dreams and sexual longings of a thousand adoring fans. Susan wanted his stage declarations of love to become real and she wanted him for herself. Wrapped in the lascivious gaze of the Covent Garden crowd, O’Brien seemed to her more desirable and a greater prize than all the dukes of St James’s.

  William O’Brien was a rising star, a protégé of Garrick who had come from Dublin in the late 1750s taking leading roles in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer and one of the century’s smash hits, Townley’s High Life Below Stairs. High Life Below Stairs was, like Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Foote’s Mayor of Garrett, a comedy which used low life to criticise high society. O’Brien played Lovel, a rich young colonial, who disguised himself as a servant and took employment under his own butler. Thus O’Brien, who was an actor pure and simple, took the part of a West India merchant who played the role of a servant. For Susan, who had already toyed with reversing the roles traditionally played by men and women, this confusion was at the heart of his attraction.

  O’Brien could impersonate a gentleman just as well off the stage as on it. As a result of his success he quickly found his way into his audience’s houses. By the early 1760s he was at Holland House helping out with private theatricals, and he and Susan came face to face. Susan was already in love with O’Brien’s stage persona. Now that he was at Holland House the socially disruptive nature of his presence in her world, a mocking commentary on the supposedly separate milieux of drawing-room and stage, made him irresistible. On a visit to Barton in the summer of 1762, Susan seized the initiative. With Sarah’s connivance she wrote O’Brien a note which invited him to contrast the reserve of her world with the enchanting expressiveness of his. It ran:

  In my silence see the lover,

  True love is by silence known

  In my eyes you’ll best discover

  All the power of your own.

  O’Brien responded to this verse with a torrent of language which exactly suited Susan’s desire. ‘There never was a more eloquent, unaffected mark of love than your last letter – the tender simplicity of it enchants me – I have done nothing but write and tear answers to it continually – I can’t find language strong enough to express the feeling of my heart. What return can I ever make you for your economy … Can my whole life spent in attention to you be any kind of equivalent – take it – do what you will: I shall resign my whole soul to your keeping. I will hear, see, and believe nothing but what you would have me. You was determined to fix me yours to the last period of my days, and you have.’

  O’Brien recognised immediately that Susan wanted to overturn the notional sexual order. She would ‘govern’, he would ‘cultivate’ and sign over his will to hers. Everything about the affair overturned accepted principles of courtship and social order. Instead of a gentleman picking up an actress, as was the accepted custom in the theatres, a woman of fashion was seducing an actor. Through the winter season of 1763–64, Susan and O’Brien met often. O’Brien would check each night in the theatre appointments book to see whether the Foxes’ box was filled by the family or whether they had sold on their seats to somebody else. Trusted theatre employees smuggled Susan notes in the box as she sat apparently attentive to the show before her. O’Brien also often appeared at Miss Read’s studio, where Susan was sitting for her portrait clad in a fur-trimmed gown and a wide-brimmed hat.

  In the spring of 1764, Susan’s parents discovered the affair. O’Brien’s reaction was suitably histrionic, and his subsequent letter to Susan was a skilful blend of sexual directness and the sorts of gestures expected of a tragic hero. ‘I am distracted – I don’t know what I do or say. I sit down ten times in a day [and] write a sheet of paper full of incoherencies and almost madness which when I read over I throw into the fire – start up and walk ten miles in the hour in my room, backwards and forwards with you in my heart, in my hand, in my mouth … Do forget me, give me up at once – don’t let me dishonour the happiness and elevated joys that you were born to – let me despair and die – it’s no matter. I was born to be unfortunate – to know you, to love you, to lose you – to – and to lose you? No, I must not, cannot, will not give you up … Can’t I supply the place of father, mother? You would be that and more to me, and what is all the world if the mind’s unhappy, if we must sigh for something unpossessed?’

  At this point, Susan had either to finish the affair or push it quickly to its logical conclusion, a dénouement in which O’Brien would become by proxy the sort of gentleman he had so often played on the stage, and Susan, sinking down to Kitty Fisher level, would be debarred from London drawing-rooms as a ruined woman. Once they had taken the decision, O’Brien provided the stage directions, complete with mysterious stranger. ‘Your coming away I have planned in this manner; for you to be at Miss Read’s at ten o’clock and send away your servants and bid your man go home and bring you a cap or something which may make him think you are sitting for your picture and will take him one way while you go the other. Then walk to the china shop at the corner of St. James St., where you will find a friend of mine who will put you into a chair, or if you think it better I’ll be there myself in a Hackney coach and bring you away to the church … my friend, if you think it the best way, will be dressed up in a plain green suit of clothes, by which you will be able to know him.’

  Susan and O’Brien were married on 6 April 1764, in St George’s Covent Garden leaving hastily as soon as the ceremony was over for the safety of O’Brien’s villa at Dunstable in Bedfordshire. There they stayed for a few days not knowing what to do: no script had been written for this sort of affair. Five years before, the Lennoxes’ cousin, Lady Caroline Keppel, had eloped with her doctor, Robert Adair. That had been smoothed over eventually. Adair was, after all, a popular and successful surgeon. But an actor provoked desperation in Susan’s relatives. Lord and Lady Ilchester immediately denounced their daughter. Sarah thought it prudent to deny her own part in the affair, telling Susan, ‘I hope you will own I try’d to prevent what I hope in God will turn out better than is likely (in all human probability) this unfortunate step will.’ Louisa with no guilt to bear was more charitable. As she told Sarah, ‘I cannot think her wrong; you know my opinion of them kind of things is not a usual one, and I know it is an opinion that does not agree with the common ways of doing well in the world; but I do think that marrying the person you like is so much the first thing to be considered that everything
else ought to give way to that.’ Henry and Caroline Fox, remembering their own elopement, said the same. Everyone else demanded that, as a first step, O’Brien leave the stage. Even when he had done so, however, nobody could countenance the newly wed couple in the family circle.

  The O’Briens considered moving to Ireland, but Kildare and Conolly refused to receive them. Next a scheme was canvassed to find O’Brien a job in the East India Company and then pack them off to Madras. Susan angrily rejected this suggestion and scandalised everyone not only by failing to show remorse for her actions but also by demanding support and money. Her parents refused both. After several tense weeks, Fox came up with a compromise that would placate his angry brother and satisfy the errant couple: he would give them a yearly annuity of £400 and buy them some land in New York if they would go to live in America and O’Brien left the theatre to set up as gentleman farmer. Outcast and penniless, Susan had little choice but to agree, but she made up for her capitulation by displaying the minimum of gratitude. The O’Briens landed in New York in September 1764 and for the next few years Sarah regularly received letters denouncing the philistine barbarity of the colonists, the lack of opportunity for newcomers, the harshness of the climate and their own extreme poverty. The O’Briens gradually came to share the colonists’ political views, but they disliked New York and failed to prosper. Most of their energy was dissipated looking eastwards, plotting their return.

  Crises like that of Susan’s elopement with O’Brien produced a flurry of letters. Letters went between Holland House and Carton, Carton and Goodwood, Goodwood and Castletown, Castletown and Barton; each day the post brought fresh outpourings of sympathy and anxiety. While the sisters did not express any kind of joint opinion, they wrote round to report the news and to reassure one another of their constancy, shocked into a renewed appreciation of their loving relationships and family solidity. Support was especially important in this case for Sarah, because she had been implicated in Susan’s affair. In the face of London gossip about her complicity, and in full knowledge of her guilt, Sarah needed her sisters to demonstrate their love for her. So she wrote to Louisa, expressing her distress at the reports that were circulating about her, trusting her sister to bolster her self-esteem. Louisa replied on cue: ‘if people’s cursed tongues go on talking, make yourself easy, for as ’tis impossible for anything to behave better than you did, you may be sure ’tis only spite and envy of your dear, sweet face; it can be nothing else when they find fault with the best heart, the most heavenly good mind and the strongest attachment to their husband and the best disposed creature in the world, all which I most sincerely think you are my dear sweet Sally.’ Ominously, only two years after Sarah’s marriage, Louisa felt it necessary to lay particular stress not only on Sarah’s innocence but also on her good wifely behaviour.