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

by Stella Tillyard

  Ogilvie was every bit as committed as Emily to the romance of their marriage. He deferred to his wife in matters of taste, offered her companionship and always loved her body. In 1783, when Emily was fifty-one and he a decade younger, he wrote to her from London: ‘I am really dying with impatience to see your beautiful face again and to hug your lovely person in my fond loving arms – to meet your warm tender embraces and to hang on your sweet balmy lips. I am dying to call you mine again, to feel you such and to assure you of my unalterable love and affection.’

  Despite such declarations, Ogilvie never gave way to jealousy and never doubted that his love was returned. Because of his self-control and confidence he maintained an emotional dominance in the relationship. Emily would always have the social distinction and most of the money, but Ogilvie’s control of her heart more than balanced any advantage birth and her jointure gave her. At times Ogilvie was ruthless in his control, using Emily’s love for him to extract gestures of submission. When they were parted in 1777, Emily, desperate to have him back, wrote abjectly, ‘believe there is nothing I will not do that you wish which I can do. I’ll drink no tea, eat no butter, I’ll ride.’ She even gloried in her submissiveness, writing a few days later, ‘dearest love, how I do long to have you scold me.’ But although she was eager to cede her emotional independence to her husband, Emily never abandoned her emotional rights. Ogilvie might control her feelings but she demanded a good price for them. So a finely balanced relationship developed, a fragile house of cards that stayed standing because each partner had the means to bring it crashing down.

  Inside this self-made mansion of love Ogilvie and Emily roamed freely. They were well aware that their situation was, as Emily put it, ‘an uncommon one’ and ‘uncommonly happy’. ‘Let me tell you ten thousand million of times that I love you to distraction,’ Emily wrote in 1777. She called her husband ‘joy of my heart, charm of my life, comfort of my soul’ and made much of their married state. ‘Come to my heart my dear husband, love, friend, all that is dear,’ she wrote in 1777, signing herself ‘ever your tender and affectionate wife,’ adding, ‘how pleasant to write those words!’ Ogilvie was her ‘sweet William’, her ‘dearest angel’. She was his ‘adorable angel’ and his ‘dearest rogue’.

  They had much in common besides love. Emily described Ogilvie as ‘one of us’, a man in the Lennox mould who united strong feeling with a dependence on reason. Like the Lennoxes, Ogilvie loved books, children and conversation. He was a committed Whig and a supporter of the rights of colonists. Like Louisa, Emily and Sarah he vehemently defended the rights of the Irish Parliament against encroachment from Westminster, and like all the Lennoxes he was a Francophile and a good French speaker (although as Sarah was quick to point out, his French emerged strongly salted with a ‘Scotch’ accent). Within this union of views there were differences. Ogilvie was less worldly and more religious than Emily. He condemned drawing-rooms and theatres as harmful to youthful minds and he insisted on daily religious observance. About the theatre Emily demurred. It never lost its allure for her; she continued to go whenever she could and she encouraged her children in amateur theatricals and their cult of Mrs Siddons. But she did go to church, if there was an Anglican service to be had, and read soothing psalms and sermons in troubled times. In the 1790s when family life and national politics came together with disastrous results, Emily read and re-read Blair and Prior, the most popular sermonisers of the day, comforted as much by their familiarity and ‘pretty expressions’ as by their sentiments.

  After their wedding in Toulouse, Emily, Ogilvie and their entourage continued south, stopping briefly at Montpellier before settling at Marseilles for the next eighteen months. Emily sat through the winter and spring at Marseilles, grumbling about the wind and growing larger. The children continued the pattern of their Black Rock life, mixing sea bathing with gardening and book learning. It was a tranquil life, but Emily was moody, swinging from joy to misery and back again in the space of a few days. Her equanimity was often upset by the arrival of the post from London and Dublin. Louisa’s weekly letters recorded the reactions of Emily’s friends to her wedding and her new life. Sarah wrote at length about her daughter and the families at Goodwood, Stoke and Holland House. In October 1774, Sarah wrote with news that Ste Fox, now Lord Holland, was ill. He died of dropsy in November leaving his year-old son Henry with a title he had held for less than six months. Still in mourning for Caroline and the first Lord Holland, the family was dismayed. Lady Mary Coke, who lived next to the Holland House estate, noted with gloomy enjoyment in her diary that above the great door of Holland House there were now three escutcheons emblazoned with the Holland crest, one for each death.

  Ste’s widow, Mary, decided to let Holland House until her son came of age and to auction off, for the sake of economy, all its contents except for family portraits and a few treasured objects. For twelve days in the middle of November 1775, friends, enemies and relatives who wanted to salvage a memory or just browse amongst the family’s possessions, crowded into the house and moved with the auctioneer from room to room, through the out-houses and stables to the orangery where even the trees in their tubs were sold off. Laid out to view were Henry’s well thumbed volumes of Catullus and Horace, Livy and Martial, Caroline’s poems, novels and plays, the furniture and porcelain they had amassed together in Paris and even the inkstand and pens she had used to write her letters. Beds, window curtains, commodes, carpets, grates and tongs, prints and statues, vestments and cassocks in the chapel, kettles, cooking stoves, egg spoons and hair brushes: everything was sold off. The material accumulation of Caroline’s life was dissolved. Her knicknacks and collections of Sèvres, her cheap novels and luxurious carpets were dispersed. The ‘high varnished French grey chariot’ in which she had gone visiting and to Court, ‘the crane neck post chariot’ she had used for longer journeys and the ‘neat phaeton’ for jaunts to town and in the park were no longer needed. All that remained were the portraits she had accumulated, stowed away to wait for Lord Holland’s majority, her sons Charles and Harry, and her letters, bundles tied in other people’s chests and drawers.

  Buyers at the Holland House sale were unsentimental. Mary, now Lady Holland, bought a few things from her infant son’s estate for common use. Sir Charles Bunbury, who in 1770 had given Henry Fox a bust of Democritus, the laughing philosopher, now saw it knocked down to the highest bidder. He strolled round and, at the end of the sale, took away a catalogue in which all the prices were scrupulously recorded and added up. The effects in Holland House, accumulated by Henry and Caroline layer by layer over thirty years, fetched £4499 7s. 1d., from which Mr Christie, the auctioneer, carefully deducted his commission of £449 2s. 4d.

  News like this was not conducive to the calm Emily had promised herself when she embarked for France. She was often low and nervous and looked back at her time in Marseilles with mixed emotions. Despite her happiness she was oppressed with a ‘disorder’ which she attributed to ‘the dreadful scenes I had gone through the last two to three years’. In the spring of 1775, five-year-old Fanny Fitzgerald fell ill and died. Six weeks later another child was born. Still in a nervous state, overcome with memories of death, Emily called her daughter Cecilia in memory of her sister Cecilia Lennox.

  Cecilia Ogilvie, like her putative brother, was dark and good looking. ‘The most beautiful little creature it was possible to see,’ Charlotte wrote in her diary. Ogilvie was delighted that he could now acknowledge a child of his own; the older Fitzgeralds treated Cecilia as a precious toy. Gradually Emily’s spirits lifted. ‘Did we not dote upon one another?’ she later wrote to Ogilvie, remembering their time in Marseilles.

  Marseilles was hot and uncomfortable, despite the sea bathing. Even though friends passed through and the town was big enough to have a social season of its own, it never seemed to Emily more than a temporary home. During the winter of 1775, the Duke of Richmond, reconciled to his sister’s marriage and as eager as ever to support the interests
of the family, offered Emily the use of the château at Aubigny where Louise de Kéroualle had spent her last years. The château was gaunt and splendid, built of stone with round, bulging towers, steep roofs and small mullioned windows. It stood in forested hunting country west of the Loire in the middle of a large estate.

  The château at Aubigny had been uninhabited since Louise de Kéroualle’s death forty years before, and it was still full of her paintings and furniture. It was the sort of old-fashioned house that Caroline had loved, but which to Emily, with her taste for comfort and modernity, was full of defects. Its thick stone walls kept it cool in summer but, as she pointed out, no amount of wood from the forests could warm its chilly expanses in the winter. None the less, Emily gratefully accepted her brother’s offer. She and Ogilvie, with Charlotte, Sophia, Edward, Robert, Gerald, Lucy, Louisa, George, Cecilia, Mrs Lynch the housekeeper and Rowley, Emily’s maid, arrived there in May 1776, to be greeted by the Duke of Richmond himself. The household was soon supplemented by two footmen, a tutor, and several local menservants and maids. Soon after the family had settled in, the Duke persuaded Emily and Ogilvie to go with him to Paris and float themselves into French society. Emily went to Court and together she and Ogilvie went to salons and drawing-rooms, favouring Walpole’s friend Madame du Deffand over Caroline’s favourite Madame Geoffrin.

  From the time he went to Paris with the Duke of Richmond, Ogilvie was welcomed into the family circle, although the Duke never allowed him to pass beyond the barriers of politeness into friendship. Henceforth, when Emily and Ogilvie went to England, they stayed at Goodwood and Richmond House. But on the few occasions that Ogilvie went alone to London, he stayed at a hotel, only going to Richmond House to dine. The women of the family rapidly succumbed to Ogilvie’s self-confidence and sexual charm, although Louisa was initially hesitant about how to behave towards him and Sarah thought him insufficiently handsome for her sister. But the men – Conolly, Lord George Lennox and the Duke of Richmond – for whom Emily was not a mother, but simply a close relation, had less to lose by her disapproval. They were intimidated by Ogilvie’s intelligence and lack of polish, pronouncing him rough and ill at ease. Ogilvie was always an anomaly in the family circle. For Emily’s sake, nobody, particularly Louisa and Sarah, wanted to offend him. But only Louisa was on an intimate footing with him; everyone else was, to varying degrees, ill at ease in his company.

  Once they were settled at Aubigny, Emily and Ogilvie lived a life of domesticity that was disturbed only by occasional trips to Paris and England. They hired a tutor for the children and Ogilvie retired to a gentleman’s life. He attended to family business, hunted in the forest during the winter and read in what Emily called his ‘dear little closet’. Emily was ambitious for her husband, anxious to display his intelligence to the world and keen that worldly success should paper over the obscurity of his origins. But for Ogilvie this life was enough. ‘I hate going anywhere at night and dislike being by myself,’ he wrote to Emily when he was away on a trip in 1782, ‘so that, upon the whole, I am not sure but a wife and a parcel of brats, though troublesome, is as good a way of spending one’s time as another.’

  Children and the prospect of children dominated life at Aubigny. There were young ones to educate, older ones to launch into the world and, just as she had been for the last thirty years, Emily was constantly announcing pregnancies. The children, Charlotte excepted, were cheerful enough. The older boys, Henry, Robert and Edward, studied with the tutor, Mr Thompson, walked in the château’s formal gardens and played in the grounds with the children of Aubigny’s more prosperous inhabitants. They grew up bilingual and as Francophile as their mother. Charlotte and Sophia read, sewed, practised music, drawing and dancing and waited on their mother, living in a kind of limbo between childhood and coming out into the world as marriageable young women. The youngest children ran and toddled in and out of Ogilvie’s closet and Emily’s apartment. After dinner, when Mrs Lynch had put the babies to bed, the older children read with their mother and stepfather and, if Ogilvie was in indulgent mood, might play a few hands of ‘commerce’ or other games of cards.

  Emily’s health cast a cloud over this domestic routine. By the mid-1770s she was well past forty and, although she continued to have periods into her late fifties, her body’s cycle had become a source of misery to her. Her period now ‘often affects me some days before, particularly my spirits,’ and was ‘a time when I can enjoy nothing and feel myself a plague to everybody.’ She had repeated miscarriages which made her weak and tearful, compounded her natural indolence and confined her to the château for weeks on end.

  In 1777, after Emily had another child, Charlotte, (who did not survive infancy), and three miscarriages, Ogilvie insisted they part for several months, saying they could not risk another pregnancy and that he could only resist passion’s call if they put at least one sea between them. He left in mid-June for Paris, London and Dublin. Almost as soon as she had lost sight of his carriage on the Paris road, Emily was writing to him. ‘But a few hours are past, my dearest, kindest, best of angels, and already it seems as if we had been separated for an age! Let me tell you ten thousand million of times that I love you. Yes, my dear angel, if ever human creature adored another I do you … You are gone, but you love me, this fills my heart with thankfulness to the supreme being.’ A few days later she collapsed, desperate for Ogilvie, enmired in ‘distressing thoughts’, imagining him unfaithful and then dead. On 20 June she wrote to him: ‘in short my love, it is plain we cannot bear this separation; our hearts are torn to pieces by it.’ Despite her weak state she planned to set off for Paris immediately, dismissing the advice of Charlotte and Mrs Lynch as the counsel of ‘cold, prudent advisers’. In Paris, Ogilvie contemplated returning. But he had a variety of motives for his journey. Besides Emily’s health there was the need to settle a good deal of business at Black Rock and the need, too, to assert his emotional dominance. On the back of Emily’s letter announcing her wish to join him, Ogilvie noted that he left for Dieppe immediately after receiving it, ‘being now convinced that it was not possible to continue so near my dearest love as Paris without forgetting every other consideration to fly to her.’

  Ogilvie got the subjection he wanted. Emily wept, cowered and hinted at suicide. ‘My mind is all distraction, my heart is broke. Oh William, William it is past. Nothing can now recall you to give me comfort! I must suffer this dreadful torment, it is the will of God … Don’t think I have not called reason and religion to my aid. I have indeed … When Rowley said he is gone, when she brought me that dreadful cruel letter, Oh William it was too much for me; no agitation you ever saw in me ever equalled it. I can neither sleep nor eat – My dear children, nothing gives me comfort; all, all is misery … and now, my William, see me at your feet, plunged in the deepest distress. I beg and implore you, return … for pity’s sake save a wretch from misery. There are times when I am capable of anything … Oh my William, you know too well the dreadful violence of my passions.’ Mrs Lynch the housekeeper also wrote to Ogilvie, unable to bear Emily’s wild unhappiness any longer. ‘I cannot disguise to you that I never saw her Grace worse nor indeed so bad as at present; the agitation on her nerves is very great and her health and spirits both much affected.’ Ogilvie landed in Ireland only to read this abject parcel of letters. Then he got back on the boat again. By the time he got home, Emily was calmer. She had recovered from her miscarriage; her period had come and gone and she was cheered by the knowledge that Ogilvie was on the way. But Ogilvie had made his dominance and her need for him quite clear. Henceforth he had only to threaten departure to bring Emily to his feet. As late as 1792, when she was sixty-one, Emily was still conceding emotional ground to her implacable husband, still worried about his anger and her response. ‘I can bear anything better than your being cross,’ she wrote.

  Despite the fact that Ogilvie’s journey in 1777 was purportedly undertaken to stop Emily getting pregnant too soon after her last miscarriage, she announced o
nly a few weeks after his return that she was pregnant again. This time the pregnancy prospered and in May 1778, when Emily was nearly forty-seven, Mimi Ogilvie was born, her twenty-second child. With Mimi’s birth, Emily ended half a lifetime of childbearing. Her first child George, Lord Ophaly, was born in January 1748, thirty years before. By the time Mimi Ogilvie was born, George had been dead for thirteen years and Emily was already a grandmother.

  After Mimi Ogilvie’s birth in Paris in May 1778, life at Aubigny settled into a routine around the hunting and shooting season, trips to Paris and abroad and emotional partings with children who left to marry or begin their lives in the professions. Charles Fitzgerald, always one of Emily’s favourite sons, had been the first, after William, her heir, to leave the family. He joined the navy before the family moved to France, serving in the Caribbean during the American war and eventually rising to the rank of Rear Admiral. Next it was Henry’s turn. He left Aubigny for Paris in 1777 and after studying at a military academy there he went to England and joined the army. Edward also bought an army commission. He trained in the Sussex Militia under the Duke of Richmond’s eye and then progressed to service in Ireland and America with the 96th and 19th Regiments of Foot.

  When her sons left home Emily kept their hearts. She was still their lodestar and confidante; many of them married late, as if they were unable to share her place in their hearts with another woman. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, in particular, was extravagantly fond of his mother. His letters after he left home were full of devotion and charm; they were, indeed, love letters. After reading the first volume of Rousseau’s Confessions in 1783 he wrote to her: ‘Dearest mother, what would I give that Jean Jacques had had a mother such as you are to me! What a happiness it would have been to him to have [had] such a heart to open himself to. By a few peeps into the second volume, I see he wants such a person; for, entre nous, your best male friend will not do. One is afraid to open all one’s weaknesses to a man. Let him be ever so closely united to you, one is afraid of his sense or of his advice, and I own I do not perfectly understand friendship with a woman without un petit brin d’amour, or jealousy, which I think is one of the passions attending love.’