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

by Stella Tillyard

  Bolstering Sarah’s flagging sense of her own worth in this way was one of Louisa’s roles within the family. Whenever there was a period of difficulty Louisa had always offered unconditional love. But such expressions of affection were integral to the Lennox sisters’ idea of themselves; very few of their letters were without them. In spite of their marriages and children, Caroline and Emily, Louisa and Sarah continued to think of themselves as sisters, whose lives were complementary and entwined. ‘It is such a pleasure to have a dear sister one’s friend,’ Emily wrote once to Caroline. Sarah cherished the idea of her sisters being her friends in old age, saying ‘nothing but a mother or a sister can inspire that sort of friendship that occupies the mind so much late in life.’ Sisterhood and the love it brought was always there. They thought of one another in good and bad times alike; in disaster they wanted to be close together.

  Louisa’s position amongst her siblings was the most serene. In her long life she never had any lasting quarrel with any of them. None the less, Emily held the emotional high ground. Caroline loved Emily with great intensity; she was her confidante and childhood companion. Caroline, unlike Emily, had known very little of Louisa and Sarah as they grew up at Carton, and she tended to see Emily and herself as a pair to which the younger sisters were subsidiary. There were twenty years between Caroline and Louisa and, for Caroline, they made a distance which could be greatly lessened by familiarity but never erased. Emily was the bridge between Caroline and the younger members of the family. Caroline was her special friend, and yet she also commanded the affections of her younger sisters as second mother and sister. Louisa was eight when she came to Carton, Sarah six and little Cecilia scarcely a year old. Emily became the linchpin of their lives, mother and sister combined. Louisa, writing to her brother the third Duke of Richmond in 1768, when she was twenty-four, he thirty-three and Emily thirty-seven, explained their feelings. ‘It is one of my sister’s pleasures, the being with her, but if it was not my inclination, I should think it my duty to contribute as much as possible to make her comfortable, for added to the love I have for her as a sister, I owe her that due to a mother and do feel it for her. I must say that I do find her everyday more deserving and more comfortable and more pleasant than anybody.’ Sarah felt the same. Cecilia, born in 1750, had no memory of her English life, and simply called Emily ‘Mama’.

  When it came to sharing secrets, Caroline confided in Emily. Everyone else confessed to Louisa when the burden of their own lives became too heavy. But sisterhood was not simply a matter of sharing troubles; sometimes it was found not in confidences but in lies. Nobody, for instance, told Louisa what they thought of Conolly. When she first arrived in London with her husband in 1759, Louisa wrote to Emily: ‘Pray, my dear sister, let me know honestly what my sister Caroline, and Mr. Fox say and think of Mr. Conolly … Though I have watched them I have not cleverness enough to know how it is with them.’ In her heart Louisa knew the answer. She called her husband ‘poor dear Tom Conolly’ as well as ‘my angel’ and ‘my dear Thomas’. But she would never hear these epithets offered by one of her sisters. Thus a fiction of regard was created, a fiction that maintained Louisa’s self-respect and cordial sisterly relations and, in the course of time, allowed fondness to supersede initial disdain. This fictitious web bound the sisters together; by 1768 Caroline could say of Conolly, ‘he seems to have the best heart in the world.’ So love grew on a carefully nurtured bed of concealment. Hoping for a similar transformation, Louisa constantly expressed a fondness for Sir Charles Bunbury which she did not feel, saying, ‘my love to Mr Bunbury’, ‘I beg you will give my love to him.’

  Despite several serious rifts the Lennox children never surrendered their closeness. It was tested and strengthened by their parents’ early death and it survived the sisters’ absorption into other families. Even Lord George Lennox, often abroad with the army, was welcomed by his siblings whenever he returned to the family fold, although few of his sisters spent much time with him and Sarah said he had ‘a remarkable, obstinate, vain and ponderous mind’. During serious illness or moments of danger like childbirth, the siblings called on one another for comfort and distraction. In crises the family closed ranks and did its best to stay together. Even comparative strangers noticed and commented upon what Louisa called ‘the Lennox affection for one another’.

  Yet the family operated within a distinct and carefully observed hierarchy, with the Duke of Richmond at the top and Sarah and Cecilia at the bottom. Sarah criticised her brother’s ‘high flown ideas of right, which are apt to soar above nature and of course never come to anything.’ None the less she and the rest of her siblings approached him with the deference owing to the head of the family. None of the Duke’s siblings ever referred to him, in letters at least, by his Christian name. They called him, ‘my brother Richmond’, ‘brother Richmond’ or sometimes ‘my dearest brother’. Lord George Lennox, on the other hand, was described as ‘Lord George’, ‘my brother George’ or simply ‘George’. Between themselves as well, the sisters also observed a hierarchy of deference that found expression in their forms of address. As the eldest, Caroline could refer to all her sisters by their Christian names. But they usually called their elders by their married names or titles. So Caroline called Emily ‘dearest Patsy’, ‘my dearest sister’ and ‘dear siss’, while her younger sisters were ‘Louisa’, ‘Sal’ and ‘Cecilia’. But Louisa usually called Emily and Caroline ‘my sister Kildare’ and ‘my sister Holland’, only occasionally using the more familiar ‘my sister Caroline’. Only with one another did Louisa and Sarah consistently use their Christian names.

  This hierarchy was based first on sex and then on age and thus position in the family. But it was potentially susceptible to shifts brought about by changing circumstances. If, for instance, Tom Conolly had acquired a title and some political stature, Emily and Caroline might have referred to Louisa less familiarly. But it so happened that outward events did not disturb the family’s own ordering. Even when, in 1766, the King fulfilled the long-standing promise to Kildare and made him a duke, Emily’s new title of Duchess of Leinster only confirmed her pre-eminent status amongst her sisters.

  Certain rights and duties attached to the family’s hierarchy. The Duke of Richmond was both allowed and bound to comment on his siblings’ behaviour. His opinion was sought as much because he was head of the family as for any perspicacity of his own. It was his duty to present his feelings on family matters to the world and to unite the family, if possible, in the face of public disapproval of any member’s conduct. Along with the Duke, older sisters had the right to comment freely on their juniors’ conduct. ‘So, dear sweet Louisa grows a little vulgar with her Irish companions,’ Caroline wrote to Emily in 1764. Louisa was temperamentally more circumspect than Caroline, but it was duty as well as character that lent caution to her pen. She felt she had no right to criticise Emily; when she did, in a letter to her brother of 1769, she immediately qualified her judgement away. ‘She is a valuable dear soul! I wish you were more with her. She would do you good, her humility about trifling faults (for indeed hers amounted to no more) is beyond what one can conceive.’ But she hastily added, ‘I feel myself quite culpable for saying such a thing as that my sister L[einster] had trifling faults.’

  The conventional family hierarchies of sex and age were broadly accepted and honoured by the Lennox children. But they could also be nullified and set aside – by great changes of fortune, for instance, and by love. Love shifted its focus and altered its forms. But as a trust given and returned it levelled family distinctions. Criticise as she might, Caroline called Sarah ‘a sweet companion’ and Louisa ‘one of the most rational, amiable and discreet women in the world’.

  In 1765 family duties and loyalties were put to the test by the unexpected illness and death of George, Lord Ophaly, Emily’s eldest son and heir to the new Leinster dukedom. Ophaly was seventeen, a year younger than Charles Fox, and had just left Eton. He was, by his parents’ own admiss
ion, the only one of their ever-growing brood, apart from ‘little Eddy’, who showed much intellectual acumen, and he was destined for the army. In the summer of 1765 he was lounging lazily in London waiting for a commission. He was past the age when children died suddenly; besides, disaster was far from everyone’s minds. Louisa and Sarah went on a six-week jaunt to Paris in the early summer, accompanied by Caroline and Charles Fox. What was uppermost in Emily’s mind then was not her son but the emporia of the French capital. ‘I have not yet heard from the Paris ladies,’ she wrote to Henry Fox in May, ‘and nothing could comfort me for not being of the party but thinking of all the fine china you intend they should buy there and make me a present of.’

  When Sarah and Louisa returned they found Ophaly practising being a juvenile rake in London clubs and drawing-rooms. But by the beginning of September he was ‘very ill’, confined to Richmond House with a consumptive fever. They stayed with him until he died on 26 September, and all through his illness they sent letters to Carton in which hope and caution were carefully mixed. In this way they led Emily to expect Ophaly’s death without presenting it as a certainty. Cecilia reported to them that Emily was ‘quite resigned’, but Emily only half understood what was going to happen.

  It fell to the Duke of Richmond, as head of the family, to write to Ireland with the terrible news. Ophaly’s death was the first family crisis he had had to deal with; despite their political differences, notably over Wilkes’s attack on general warrants, Richmond wrote to his old mentor Fox, anxiously seeking to share his worry and responsibility. ‘Which ever way she hears it I dread the consequences. You know how much she had placed her affections on him in particular … I have been obliged to determine what was to be done about his burial. I told his servant it should be in a decent private way and in St. Martin’s church where my grandfather was buried. I hope I did right.’ Richmond also wrote to Kildare. ‘I tortured my brain to find out some soft and easy way of telling it simply, but at last resolved on the plainest way.’ Kildare got the Duke’s letter just as he was going to bed on the night of 13 October. He kept the news from Emily until the morning, ‘by which she slept well and was better able to bear what she was to go through.’

  Richmond and Kildare tried to protect Emily from the news of Ophaly’s death. But for her it was the fact and not the announcement that mattered, the creeping understanding that she would never again feel her child’s warm body against her own, that his voice, his smile and her hopes were gone. Years before, when George was a toddler and Emily a doting mother of nineteen, she had written to Caroline: ‘I just ask’d George if he had anything to say to you, and he says, no nothing to aunt Caroline but my compliments to Master Ste, ’cause ’e did send compliments to me, and me can say all my letters, and can master Ste say all his letters?’ Now the lisping student of two and the cheerful Etonian of fifteen were gone, rotting in St Martin-in-the-Fields hundreds of miles and an ocean away.

  PART TWO

  ‘This house stinks enough to poison one of paint’.

  Emily to Kildare, 15 May 1759.

  When Ophaly was buried, part of Emily went with him. She felt miserable and exposed, safe only at Carton in the company of those she trusted. Louisa and Sarah, who had been at her son’s bedside, hurried over to Ireland, arriving in mid-October. Emily was pleased to have Sarah at Carton (and Sarah was delighted to be back in her childhood home), but grief and the early months of a new pregnancy made her listless and torpid. She had no enthusiasm for life and at times, she told Louisa, ‘she wished her existence in this world at an end’. She had to go to Dublin, as she always did, for her lying-in, and the town plunged her into even lower spirits. Not until May, eight months after Ophaly’s death, was Emily able to tackle everyday life. Louisa told Sarah, ‘my opinion is, that she will [never] recover her spirits so as to enjoy a town life or what is called gaiety, but I think that, at Carton, where she is quiet, she will grow to have a contented calm feel and be very much amused with the improvements and works going on.’

  Louisa was mistaken. Emily did recover her ‘gaiety’ and her high-spirited sense of occasion. What she lost was her equilibrium. After Ophaly’s death, Emily was more anxious and less satisfied with life. Pray as she did, irritation, anger and a sense of incompleteness kept forcing themselves upon her. She worried about her children and became a victim of what she called ‘sinkings and horrors’ that seemed ‘at times to deprive one of every power but that of feeling wretched’.

  Emily came back to Carton with her new baby son in the summer of 1766. Gradually her grief receded and she began to take an interest in the alterations being carried out in Carton Park. An artificial lake had been constructed with an island and fashionable landscaping of hillocks and informal clumps of trees. Workmen had built a gently hump-backed bridge across one end of the newly dug lake. Raw piles of reddish earth from the lake bottom were covered in saplings, and a labourer’s house where Emily often dined with her children was being transformed into a shell cottage. Waterstone, as the shell cottage was named, was planned as a joyful re-creation of the shell grotto at Goodwood, a celebration of family continuum. But because of Ophaly’s death, it became the site and expression of Emily’s grief for her son.

  In the spring of 1766, Carton builders took the roof off the single-storey cottage and built a dome with a skylight that allowed light to filter into the single room below. The cottage was almost square, with a mullioned window looking out at the lake. Work on the interior began at the far wall opposite the window bay around the panel between two deeply embrasured gothic windows. Emily, with Louisa’s help, designed and oversaw the construction of the shell ornamentations. In the first section to be completed, sections of bamboo, stained and arranged in a geometric pattern, were surrounded by shining mussel and oyster shells gathered into flower heads.

  Although it had none of the rococo prettiness of the shell grotto at Goodwood, the back wall at Waterstone was ordered and regular, with its rows of concave oysters and fluted scallops angled up into petals. But as the workmen moved to fill in the segments of the dome, this regularity began to break down. Huge conches from tropical seas, corals with a myriad of tentative fingers, ceramic apples whose tips blushed red, twinkling crystalline specimens hewn roughly from their parent rocks, lumps of fool’s gold, smashed chunks of green-glazed pottery and fronds of seaweed like matted hanks of hair: all these were stuck into the walls, first in loose lines and rectangles, but then higgledy-piggledy. They were jammed together, smothering the walls in a thick array of nature’s offerings, as if an enraged collector had tipped out his cabinet of curiosities and pressed them feverishly into the waiting cement.

  Looking upwards into the dome visitors saw bulging cowries and conches like giant wrapped-up ears sticking out of the sides. Ceramic fruits, lumps of crystal as big as a child’s head and pieces of white coral, frozen stiff after their languid seabed life, hung from the dome’s rim, suspended loweringly, as if they might pull the whole edifice down.

  In the embrasure of the mullioned window, all attempt at panelling and floral patterning was abandoned. Shells and stones were crushed together. They overlapped and stuck on top of one another. One or two sponges were set in the walls, filamented, pursed, anus-like. Around them were slabs of crystal, like purple heaps of snow, lumps of ore, calcified worm cases, scallops shaped like ladies’ fans and, in the crevices, humble winkles from Dublin Bay. From out of the embrasure wall came four shell-encrusted candelabra, each sinisterly twisted like arthritic bony hands. In one rock-covered corner were three miniature ceramic Chinese villages, with tiny painted figures, pagodas and a wooden bridge. They sat in a grotto of their own, balanced precariously on seaweed-covered boulders, chiming with the broken porcelain stuck on the walls, but seeming otherwise remote and out of place.

  Emily worked on Waterstone with maniacal haste. As the walls were covered something brooding and irrational took over from the delicate floral surfaces of the original design. Rococo prettiness becam
e a solidified chaos whose patterns and broken surfaces were inscriptions of anger and grief, repeated over and over again, threatening to draw the visitor into the death-encrusted mouth of the tomb. Yet amongst this riot of morbidity were everyday objects: a seventeenth-century fireplace with blue-and-white tiles and barley-sugar columns supporting the mantelpiece; tables and chairs, a carpet, a dinner service and a spinning wheel belonging to Cecilia Lennox.

  Waterstone struck visitors as charming and commodious rather than intense or oppressive. They dined in the small room and out of the window watched the lake sparkle through the trees. On fine days they sat by the lawn outside. Louisa, for one, did not feel that Emily had lined the walls of the cottage with her anger and her grief. Writing to Sarah in September 1766, six months after the decorating had started, she said that Emily ‘has amused herself very much with Waterstone, which is just finished and a dear thing it is, as you never saw. I am sure you would dote upon it. Its the most comfortable looking place that can be.’