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

by Stella Tillyard

  But it wasn’t just Edward who confided in his mother. Charles, Henry and Robert told her all their secrets long after they were grown up. Charles’s letters were vain and literary, Edward’s loving (and eventually lovingly deceitful), Henry’s self-effacing and Robert’s discursive and explanatory. Charles Fitzgerald’s letters home set a tone of frankness that all his brothers followed and they, like him, were to see the world through books and rhetorical flourishes. ‘Going through Somersetshire always reminds me of Tom Jones,’ Charles wrote in 1770. ‘I imagine I see Allworthy’s and Western’s houses in every vale; as to Sophias they are scarce, for I think the western part of England is remarkable for ugly women.’

  Emily encouraged in her sons a morality closely akin to that which had operated at Carton. Her sons’ amours were a compliment rather than a betrayal, an indication that no serious attachment had displaced her in their hearts. Charles Fitzgerald recognised very soon that sexual banter was the currency of filial devotion and he filled his letters with it. In 1775 he wrote from Spanish Town, Jamaica, ‘the jet black ladies of Africa’s burning sands have made me forget the pale unripened beauties of the north,’ and he added a few months later, ‘among the number of your grand children you’ll soon have one of a copper colour.’ In return for their confidence Emily gave her sons love without censure and their self-esteem flourished in the confidence of her devotion.

  The filial duties of Emily’s daughters were much more arduous. From them Emily demanded companionship as well as frankness and love. Charlotte’s position at Aubigny was especially difficult. Emily acknowledged that Charlotte was old enough to be married, but she was reluctant to relinquish a companion who read to her and helped with the children. ‘The sweet babes, though lovely at times, are often too much for me, particularly the sweet Ciss, unless I have somebody to manage her, lift her up and down and supply all her numberless wants; now to have a servant always in the room is tiresome, I think. This Charlotte supplies often.’ Charlotte did get away briefly to Ireland in the summer of 1777, but her visit was not a success. She quarrelled with the young Duchess of Leinster, failed to find a husband and fell disastrously in love. Soon she was back in Aubigny, angrily fetching and carrying for her mother, censured by everyone for her plainness and petulance. ‘Pray has she no desire to overcome her temper?’ Sarah asked in 1776. It was not until 1789, when she was thirty-one, that Charlotte married and left home. After that Sophia took over her duties, and although she eventually had a house of her own, Sophia never married.

  Beyond expecting devotion, however, Emily was not demanding of her children. She rapidly abandoned any hope that William would cut a figure in the Irish Parliament and any worldly ambitions she had for her other sons were lost in her sense that they existed to serve her. Her children, both girls and boys, she said, ‘have shown me on all occasions how much they prefer being with me to anything else.’ The most expressive children became the most loved. ‘I get bored of everything and want to have you to go and talk to; you are, after all, what I love best in the world,’ Edward wrote in 1787, when he was twenty-four. She loved him back and accepted his devotion as her due, noting, ‘In Edward, nothing surprises me, Dear Angel; he has always loved me in an uncommon degree from childhood.’

  In the summer of 1779, Emily and Ogilvie returned to England together for the first time, running the gauntlet of both the Court and family opinion. Sarah cavilled at Ogilvie’s looks and manner but was in no position to criticise her sister. Since Emily’s departure for France five years earlier, Sarah’s world had contracted, making her feel her isolation in Sussex more than ever. The deaths of Caroline and Henry and then of Ste ended visits to Holland House and Kingsgate. Harry Fox was in America and Charles Fox, busy with politics, gambling and women, rarely visited his family. If she went up to London after 1775, Sarah had either to stay at Richmond House or with her old aunt Lady Albemarle. Most of the time she remained in Sussex and spent her time with her brothers’ wives, Louisa Lennox at Stoke and the Duchess of Richmond at Goodwood.

  In Ireland, Sarah’s prospects were brighter. The first Duke of Leinster’s death had removed the main obstacle to her rehabilitation there. When Louisa was able to persuade Tom Conolly to receive her at Castletown, a few of her old friends followed suit. Sarah went back to Ireland in the summer of 1775, fifteen years after her disastrous launch into the London marriage market. She was happy to be with Louisa, planning the decorations for the long gallery at Castletown, visiting Carton and helping to supervise the alterations to Black Rock. After a few weeks she wrote to Susan O’Brien: ‘I pass my time here very pleasantly; I live almost all the day long with my sister; Mr. Conolly seems to like my being here and shows me so much kindness that I hope it is not disagreeable to him; and I’m sure it makes Louisa happy for she scarce passes a day without telling me that having me with her is one of the greatest pleasures she has; there is something so pleasant in being so sincerely loved and welcome that it is not wonderful I should be perfectly content and happy here. We have a good deal of company … They come in a very pleasant way, dropping in at dinner time and going away soon after, so that they never interfere with any employment we have … Some of my old acquaintance among the ladies have been more than civil to me, quite kind indeed, and some of Louisa’s acquaintance have been very civil, but great part of both sorts have taken no notice of me.’

  Despite her forgiveness by Louisa and her partial social rehabilitation, Sarah was far from cheerful. Nothing could disguise the fact, especially after her divorce from Bunbury was finalised in 1776, that there was a vacuum at the centre of her existence. She tried to fill it with long letters to her sisters and a vicarious emotional life which centred around the inhabitants of Goodwood and Stoke, Susan O’Brien’s attempts to become reconciled with her mother, Emily’s troubles with William and the builders at Black Rock. Throwing herself into the lives of others gave her a sense of drama that was lacking in the dry, comfortless desert of her own inner life. The recipients of Sarah’s long letters of advice and disquisition were not always grateful for her efforts. Sarah’s dislike of herself rubbed off on her views of others, spicing her letters with a commentary that unwittingly raised the ire of their recipients. In August 1777 the Duke of Richmond reproached her for her indiscretion and she wrote sadly to Emily: ‘he says, what is very true, that one has no business to speak of other people’s affairs … poor peste publique is forever saying things they think wrong, and which I cannot for the life of me see the necessity of keeping secret; but in time I hope to mend my practice.’ ‘She is not one of those that drives away disagreeable thoughts, but indulges them,’ Emily wrote sharply, recognising that Sarah’s gloomy letters served a greater purpose for their sender than for those to whom they were addressed.

  But no letter could last for ever. Sarah always had to return from the paper world she had created to the damp Halnaker manor house, her winsome, untutored daughter and the routines of her dependent life. There were small improvements in her situation. The Duke of Richmond was building her a new house on the Goodwood estate and Sarah spent a good deal of time planning and supervising its construction. At other times she walked and sewed, read novels and the papers and made intermittent attempts to teach Louisa Bunbury French. Much of her time was spent with Lady Louisa Lennox and the officers of the 25th Regiment of Foot which Lord George Lennox commanded. Sarah was warming to soldiers, catching their turn of phrase, their belief in military glory and their sense of manliness. Military life, with its uniforms, musters, parades, advances, repulses and defeats satisfied her taste for drama and emotional extremity. Telling stories of military endeavour used all her talent for rhetoric and verbal extravagance.

  The dramatic events in the American colonies in the mid-1770s gave Sarah a focus for her unused emotions. She eagerly read news of the conflict and then the war and, after initial wavering, she was, like the rest of her siblings, firmly on the colonists’ side. The Duke of Richmond set the standard for the family�
�s opposition to the war, sailing through the British fleet in the Solent with an American flag tied firmly to his masthead. Louisa bought a bust of Washington and displayed it prominently at Castletown, despite her reservations about full independence for the colonists.

  Sarah’s attitude towards the American war was coloured both by her brush with the King and her prejudice against settlers from the north of Ireland. At first her dislike of the monarch and the Massachusetts Bay colonists was evenly divided. ‘In short,’ she wrote to Susan O’Brien, ‘I think there is no deciding who is precisely wrong and who is precisely right. Only two things, I think, won’t bear dispute; ist, that those who cause most lives to be lost are the worst people; secondly, that the Bostonians, being chiefly Presbyterians and from the north of Ireland, are daily proved to be very, very bad people, being quarrelsome, discontented, hypocritical, enthusiastical, lying people.’ By 1777, after the Declaration of Independence and the entry of France into the war, Sarah declared, ‘I grow a greater rebel every day upon principle’ and laid the blame for the war at the King’s door. But her attitude towards military conflict was changing. While she condemned this war, she had begun to find allure and glamour in soldiers and militarism. When Harry Fox returned from America in 1779, she took note of his opposition to the war, but dwelt lovingly on his qualities as a soldier, writing to Susan: ‘his looks, his manners are all delightful; he has the most true, good, military air … I think I can’t give you a better account of a young officer.’ A year later, after Admiral Rodney had destroyed the Spanish fleet off Gibraltar she wrote, ‘how splendid was our great and glorious success in Spain.’

  Behind Sarah’s orotund phrases lay a series of events that Louisa and the Duke of Richmond watched unfolding with foreboding. In 1776 Sarah met an officer of the 25th Regiment called George Napier. Napier, an impoverished younger son of a Scottish baron, the fifth Lord Napier, was partly Irish. His mother had Dublin connections, and he joined Lord George Lennox’s 25th Regiment with introductions from Tom and Louisa Conolly. Described as ‘the most perfect made man possible’ and ‘the most active and handsome officer in the British Army in America’, Napier was six foot two inches tall, Roman nosed and short sighted. Although he had received a gendeman’s education under David Hume, Napier was a career officer with little time for classical learning. Despite his looks he was conscientious rather than dashing, scrupulous rather than showy, a methodical and careful man, at home with muster rolls and account books as well as uniforms and swords.

  Napier quickly made his way into the inner circle at Stoke where Lord George Lennox frequently entertained his officers. His good looks and dedication to the military profession equally quickly impressed Sarah. By the autumn of 1776, their friendship, carried on under the gaze of Napier’s wife, had an evidently sexual element and Sarah had fallen into the familiar pattern of confession and self-recrimination in her letters to Louisa.

  Louisa responded in the old way too, with cryptic caution. At first it was Napier’s interest in Sarah rather than the other way round that gave her grounds for disquiet. Sarah disguised her feelings for Napier and told Louisa that he had fallen in love with her. In August 1776, Louisa replied: ‘I am now come to that part of your letter about yourself and your friend. I do believe, as you say, e’er long, all things will be forgot, at the same time that I believe it will be severely felt at the moment, and to show you how free I am from rancour on their account, I formed a most hearty and sincere wish, that those feelings might turn out to his advantage and be the means of regulating his conduct in the future.’

  In the months that followed, Sarah continued to see the Napiers at Stoke and to maintain that her own heart was not involved. Gradually both Louisa Conolly and Louisa Lennox realised that she was deceiving them and that her ‘assurances of not having that sort of liking’ for Napier were false. Sarah was immediately under a cloud, banned from Stoke and in danger of losing all the credit she had so laboriously built up over the years of dull days and good behaviour. ‘I am sadly out of favour at Stoke, partly by my own fault,’ she confessed to Emily. Louisa’s letters took on their old admonitory tone. On 23 December 1778, she wrote: ‘oh my dear, dear sister, if you could but know the satisfaction it would be to us all, to feel secure of you, I am sure you would never distress us again. Let your good nature from henceforth be appropriated to our use, and shut up all the avenues to vanity, which betrayed you into distress.’

  Sufficient pressure was put on Napier to make him transfer his commission from the 25th to the 80th Regiment, which was due to see active service in America. He left Sussex with his wife and children in the spring of 1779, going to Leith in Scotland and the Channel Islands before finally leaving for New York in a convoy of merchant and transport ships, accompanied by two fleets of warships, at the end of May. They arrived in Brooklyn at the end of August and stayed for the rest of the year. ‘I am happy to think you have so much reason to be satisfied with the Napiers as I find you are,’ Louisa told Sarah. ‘I pity you very much for having been obliged to refuse seeing him before he went. But it was certainly right, for it is impossible (I think) to keep the right medium upon such occasions.’ Once the Napiers had left, Louisa slackened her vigilance, reasonably certain that Sarah would not attempt a clandestine correspondence and would soon forget the affair.

  But if Napier did not write, Sarah followed his movements carefully. ‘I’ve had accounts that some friends of mine are safely arrived in New York,’ she wrote cheerfully to Emily on 15 December 1779. She also became uncharacteristically circumspect, saying nothing about Napier to Susan O’Brien and revealing little to Louisa. Early in 1780, Sarah learned that Napier had been ill in New York but had eventually recovered and gone down to Charlestown where his regiment was besieging the town. A few weeks later she had some more news. Mrs Napier, left in New York, had succumbed to the same fever, and died.

  Some time during the next year, Napier proposed to Sarah and she accepted. Louisa and Emily acquiesced in her choice, although the Duke of Richmond, unwilling to forfeit his role as protector, demurred. Only after all the arrangements for her wedding were complete did Sarah write to Susan, giving a highly selective version of the progress of her affair and going on to say: ‘he says he has known me long enough to judge of my character, that he has a peculiar turn of mind which prevents him being mortified about my character, that he don’t marry me out of vanity to brag of my merits, but because he is convinced that my character and disposition, such as it is, suits his, and that if I love him he has not the least doubt of our being happy. He knows I do love him, and being certain of that he laughs at every objection that is started for he says that loving me to the degree he does, he is quite sure never to repent marrying me.’

  At the age of thirty-six, Sarah came to her own decision. She was not swayed by her brother’s disapproval or Susan’s dismay and she and Napier were married in Goodwood parish church, with Lady Albemarle as their witness, on 27 August 1781. After the wedding she told everyone of her happiness and confidence in the future. Much later she said simply that Napier ‘made me like this world’.

  Napier reconciled Sarah to life. Through his eyes she saw herself and the world about her transformed. His temperament and career allowed her to inhabit the role of wife so completely that she ceased to live an inner and an outer life, one of fantasy, the other of day-to-day grind. She was an officer’s wife, living out dreams of her husband’s valour and glory; she was a household economist, managing their small income and modest quarters; and she was a mother, producing, year after year, children whom she bred up to revere their father and follow in his footsteps. Their first child, Charles James Napier was born on 10 August 1782; his arrival was open and joyful, very different from the birth of Louisa Bunbury fourteen years before. With a characteristic Gallic flourish, Sarah told Susan, ‘je suis enchantée de mon fils’.

  8 November 1792

  In White’s Hotel near the Petit Palais preparations for a grand dinner were almos
t complete. Swags of bunting in red, white and blue ran round the hall, fastened to panelling and picture rails with swirling rosettes. Tiny tricolores were arranged on the tables like bunches of flowers. Flags of the French Republic and banners of regiments in the Republican armies hung suspended from the ceiling swaying gently in the heat that rose from fireplaces and sconces. A military band tuned up in one corner of the room, strident piccolos and cornets celebrating French victories in the Low Countries in the first year of the Republic.

  The band struck up triumphal music – the Marseillaise, marching songs. A crowd of men and women poured into the hall: French, English, American, Prussian, Dutch, Austrian, Italian. They called themselves Friends of the Rights of Man, in honour of Tom Paine. Servants came in with food and wine; glasses clinked, laughter and conversation filled the room.

  Out of the noise, somebody called for silence. Toasts were shouted out from different tables, half heard in the applause. ‘Tom Paine and the new way of making good books known by royal proclamation and King’s Bench prosecution!’ ‘The English patriots, Priestley, Fox, Sheridan, Christie, Cooper, Tooke and Mackintosh!’ ‘The Lady Defenders of the Revolution, especially Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Barbauld!’ Cheering and stamping. ‘To the coming Convention of Great Britain and Ireland!’ ‘To the speedy abolition of hereditary titles and feudal distinctions in England!’ ‘To the people of Ireland; and may government profit by the example of France, and reform prevent revolution!’ Shouts, more cheers and a toast for the band: ‘May the patriotic airs of the German Legion (Ça Ira, Marseillaise, etc.) soon become the favourite music of every army, and may the soldier and citizen join in the chorus!’