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

by Stella Tillyard

  In the uproar several men stood up, amongst them Lord Edward Fitzgerald, solid and small, with closely cropped hair and a pock-marked face. Silence fell and one by one they solemnly renounced their hereditary titles. Glasses were raised and Republican wine replaced the holy water of baptism. Edward Fitzgerald was renamed le Citoyen Edouard Fitzgerald, Sir Robert Smythe the plain Robert Smythe. For one heady moment, casting privilege aside, they believed in their new identities, reborn into a new life.

  PART ONE

  ‘Nothing can ever diminish my domestic comfort and happiness but illness and death’.

  Sarah to Susan, 25 February 1783.

  THE NAPIER FAMILY grew fast. Emily, George, William, Richard, Henry, Caroline and Cecilia, named either for sisters or for kings, had joined Charles James by 1791. The family income did not increase in the same way. By Sarah’s old standards it was very small. She had five hundred a year, the interest on her fortune which she was allowed as part of her divorce settlement with Sir Charles Bunbury. Napier, having sold his commission in the 80th Regiment of Foot, had nothing. Napier’s poverty allowed Sarah to campaign for preferment on his behalf. In between confinements she devoted herself to her husband’s cause, haranguing relatives and friends who might have commissions, sinecures or salaried employment at their disposal.

  Napier did not stay without a salary for long. In March 1782, Lord North’s government, weakened by years of battering from the opposition over the American war, finally collapsed. In the new administration, Charles Fox was Secretary of State and the Duke of Richmond Master of the Ordnance. General Conway, the Duke of Richmond’s stepfather-in-law was Commander-in-Chief of the army and Charles Keppel, Sarah’s cousin, was made 1st Lord of the Admiralty. With relatives so thick on the government benches, Sarah hoped for a juicy sinecure. Indeed, Richmond quickly found Napier a job, Superintendent of the Woolwich Laboratory, in charge of gunpowder production for the nation. Equally quickly, Sarah identified its defects: hard work, low pay and the need to live in London. ‘His place will never exceed £300 a year, which being a most uncertain income and requiring such close attendance that he must not quit London for one week even, makes it pas grande chose,’ she grumbled to Susan. Comparing Napier’s salary with her brother’s easy income of £20,000 a year she became daily less grateful for his patronage. Very soon she was writing round her relatives in search of a better place for him. But her blunt approaches were misplaced anyway: the King so hated the coalition that took office after Rockingham’s death in July 1782 that he refused every appeal for patronage. All Sarah could expect was an office directly under the control of one of her relatives and these Napier sought only as a last resort.

  Before long Sarah was putting together a new philosophy of life to go with her lack of funds. Now that she was remarried and newly respectable once more, Sarah could expect to re-enter some (if not all) of the drawing-rooms that had been closed to her for so long and there she might talk her way into a place for her husband. But Napier refused to play the game of favours given and received upon which preferment depended. Poverty for him was a matter of pride. So Sarah, too, began to turn against using her connections for profit. As doors slowly opened to her she declined to step through them, scorning those who had cut her off when she left Sir Charles Bunbury. She rejected aristocratic, drawing-room life, except within her immediate family, and set up, in justification, two contrasts. One was between ‘degenerating or rather bending to the times’ as she put it, and upright and unflinching probity. The other was between the world of the drawing-room, and what she called her own ‘domestic comfort and happiness’. By the mid-1780s these two contrasts had bcome partly fused. The first fusion produced a cliché: aristocratic culture, with its dependence on sinecures and places, was ‘degenerate’; the family, ‘domestic happiness’ offered a far more secure foundation for happiness. The second produced a new definition of manliness. The honest man, devoted equally to his family and his country, who lived to serve rather than to profit, became Sarah’s new ideal. Gone were the ‘foppish’ aristocrats she had admired in her youth. Gone too the wild imprudence of men like Lord William Gordon, whom she now saw as unprincipled and a wasted talent. In their place was Napier, six feet tall, active in the service of his country; a man who wore his poverty as a badge of virtue. ‘Mr. Napier would not take anything on the score of perquisites,’ she explained to Susan in 1782, adding in a later letter, ‘Mr. N. has the esprit and rage du service beyond imagination … He has served near 20 years, is a deserving officer.’ Napier had inscribed one of his journals with the motto ‘acti laboris jocundi sunt!’ (sic) and this determination to find joy in work was eagerly seconded by Sarah, who saw herself as Napier’s partner, a soldier’s wife prepared to share every exigency demanded in the nation’s service.

  In the early 1780s, these connections were tenuous. But Charles James Fox added for Sarah a political dimension to her views and helped to translate them from a set of ideas into a way of life. From the mid-1780s onwards, Fox came to represent, for his family and for thousands of others, some kind of political equivalent to Sarah’s new ideal of disinterested service to the nation. Already, by July 1782, when Fox dramatically resigned from the government, citing undue royal influence, Sarah was writing, ‘I am so far from thinking he seeks greatness, that I am sure greatness pursues him into gaming houses.’ After Fox’s Bill for the reform of the East India Company was defeated in December 1783 she declared him to be ‘a great man’, saying, ‘’tis the cause of humanity he supported’. As the decades passed, Sarah saw an ever-closer connection between the honourable, impoverished Napier family and the disinterested popular politics of Fox.

  Sarah was not alone in advancing her husband’s claim to patronage. When Fox and Richmond came into office in July 1782, Emily lost no time in putting pen to paper on Ogilvie’s behalf. Since their visit to England in 1779, Ogilvie and Emily had been restless. They wanted to leave Aubigny but were unsure where to settle. Emily favoured Ireland. She wanted to enjoy her late motherhood at Frescati and to make ‘Black Rock children’ of her young brood – ten-year-old Lucy, eight-year-old George and little Cecilia and Mimi Ogilvie. But Ogilvie was worried about his return to a country he had left as a humble tutor, anxious enough about his new role as a gentleman to feel that his identity might slip if he was confronted in the Dublin streets by former pupils.

  Emily got her way. The family moved to Black Rock in the spring of 1781 and Ogilvie began gingerly doing the rounds of Dublin drawing-rooms. By now he was carefully dressed and could behave as gentlemen thought he should. But he remained guarded and suspicious with those he did not know well. Stupidity or inattention seemed to him to be deliberate neglect and he saw contempt for his origins and old life in the eyes of those he met. Many men, especially in Ireland, had made their way to dizzy heights from beginnings they wished to forget. But hardly any had done it solely by marriage.

  Emily thought that gossip about Ogilvie’s origins would be silenced by a successful entry into both the Irish House of Commons and Dublin’s best drawing-rooms. She had high hopes of Ogilvie’s entry into Dublin society. Like Sarah she had developed a new ideal of manliness. Hers was a cult, not of birth or service, but of ability. Ogilvie, she repeated over and over, was a man of ‘sense’, and she was determined that her choice should be vindicated in the only arena she knew, the world of politics and government. She wanted his intelligence to be rewarded with enough social and political influence to restore her to something like her former glory in Dublin. This time, though, she would be the wife not of the first man of birth but of the first man in ability.

  The family was also important. Emily wanted her sons to acknowledge Ogilvie as a man of influence and intelligence and it annoyed her that her older sons enjoyed political influence as a birthright. Ogilvie himself had little interest in politics. He was a canny investor and a good businessman. But Emily was determined that he should have a political career. So, to please his mother, the Duke of Lein
ster brought Ogilvie into the Irish House of Commons as Member for one of the Boroughs under his control.

  Once in Parliament, Ogilvie joined Charles, Henry and Edward Fitzgerald as one of the Duke of Leinster’s members. In the dying days of the North administration they were nominally in opposition, but the position changed radically when Charles Fox and the Duke of Richmond came into office in the Marquis of Rockingham’s administration. While Irish ‘patriots’ like Leinster and Conolly could not be seen to be in open alliance with Dublin Castle, they sensed that there could be tremendous advantages to working with an administration that was both personally and politically sympathetic. Emily saw opportunities for Ogilvie. She despised both Conolly and her own son as ‘très médiocre’ and hoped that Ogilvie could step in and command the MPs returned by her son and brother-in-law. She also hoped that he could get a lucrative office out of the London government.

  Emily’s eye settled on the vacant office of head of the Registry of Deeds in Ireland, a fat sinecure of £1,500 a year. Almost as soon as Richmond and Fox came into government in the new administration in March 1782, Ogilvie was enquiring about the place. Failing to extract it from the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Portland, he set off for London at the beginning of July.

  *

  Ogilvie could not have arrived in London at a less propitious moment. Rockingham’s death on 1 July sparked off eighteen months of turmoil that completely changed not only the political life of the nation but also the lives and loyalties of the extended Richmond–Fox–Leinster family. Political differences caused nearly irreparable schisms between brothers and sisters, and parents and children. As the 1780s wore on into the 1790s, the gulf widened. The Regency crisis of 1788, followed by the French Revolution which began the next year, broke up for ever the fifty-year-old alliance which had been set up with Emily’s marriage to the Duke of Leinster and Caroline’s elopement with Henry Fox.

  The Marquis of Rockingham’s death brought Lord Shelburne to power. Ogilvie expected to arrive in London and find that, in Shelburne’s new administration, Charles Fox was Foreign Secretary and the Duke of Richmond was Master of the Ordnance with a Cabinet place. But Fox refused to serve under Shelburne. He suspected Shelburne of answering first to the King and only second to the Cabinet. But he had not forgotten his parents’ belief in Shelburne’s treachery twenty years before, so he also hated him on their behalf. Fox resigned. Richmond stayed with Shelburne’s government. Relations between them, lukewarm for some time, cooled rapidly as Fox mercilessly attacked the government from the back benches.

  The split between Richmond and Fox determined the line along which family loyalties would divide in the next decade. Richmond believed that loyalty from his sisters was due to the family as an institution. But he also quickly came to see any affection for Fox, or any sympathy with Fox’s escalating hostility to the Crown, as a personal betrayal, reasoning that he gave his sisters sanctuary in difficult times and that in return they should offer him loyalty of both heart and mind. Emily agreed, saying that taking opposite sides from her brother seemed ‘unnatural’; she wished she could have supported him, both as her brother and as head of the family. But she did not. Politics was a matter of belief as well as of family alliances. If the family had ever taken precedence over principle, it could no longer do so by the 1780s, when divisions centred on such fundamental issues as the King’s relationship to Lords and Commons and the rights and wrongs of the French Revolution. Many families were torn apart by differences on these issues; women and many others who had no franchise were just as vociferous about their beliefs as those directly involved in the political process. Besides, Emily had never allowed her husbands or brothers to speak for her on political matters.

  Louisa and Sarah were initially cautious in deciding between Richmond and Fox. ‘I cannot submit my faith implicitly to the forecast of either my brother or nephew, each being liable to err in judgement,’ Sarah wrote. ‘I have at least the pleasure to think both act right in following their ideas of right.’ Louisa, as usual, took her brother’s side more eagerly, saying: ‘in regard to his present politics, I hear various opinions regarding them and am very sure I am no judge of them, but I have a feel that he is right.’ When Ogilvie came to London he was initially even-handed, waiting (without success) on Charles Fox, visiting Richmond House and presenting himself to Emily’s old aunt, Lady Albemarle. But when he had no success in his quest for a sinecure it was to Fox that he turned for help.

  Only a few years before Fox had transfixed the drawing-rooms with a Francophile outfit of red-heeled shoes and a wig of cascading blue curls. In opposition he still gambled, whored and drank, but he was gradually reshaping his persona from that of salon wit to that of ‘champion of the people’, a man who stood against Crown and Court. He abandoned salon dress for ‘undress’, a simple frock-coat and breeches, usually in the buff and blue of Washington’s army, and exposed his thinning curls to the wind. Gradually, as he lurched from indebtedness to bankruptcy, this outfit became more tattered. Yet Fox’s deliberate slovenliness made him seem like Dr Johnson, not so much an ordinary man of the people but an extraordinary, even saintly being. People marvelled at Fox’s honesty and simplicity and politely turned the other way when he indulged his habit of clearing his throat and spitting on the carpet.

  Ogilvie, just learning to feel at ease with court dress and manners, was nonplussed by the mixture of manufactured disorder and unself-conscious eccentricity that Fox displayed. He grumbled to Emily that he waited in vain for hours to see him. But when he eventually had his audience, Ogilvie was completely charmed. Fox became Emily’s ‘dear nephew’. Soon he was more: a sinner-saint, a way of life, almost a religion. This kind of conversion – which the Duke of Richmond watched with growing frustration – was only partly political. People loved Fox because he made his friends and followers feel desired and benevolent. He was a shy man, Emily said, and one who wanted always to think the best of his friends. People mistook shyness for modesty, attention for affection. Arriving indifferent, they went away infatuated: Ogilvie, despite his capacity for reserve and domination, was no different. He went back to Ireland without the office he came for but with a new love, Charles James Fox.

  Sarah knew Fox’s charms of old. But in deference to Napier’s career she kept her distance from her nephew throughout the autumn and winter of 1782. In March of the following year she received a small reward. ‘Mr. Conway has at my request (not my brother’s) given Mr. N. a Captain’s commission in the 100th Regiment,’ which was stationed in the East Indies. ‘I confess I shall consider it a little hard,’ she concluded bitterly to Susan, ‘that having such connections in the last 2 ministries it ends, after one year, in sending my husband to the East Indies a Captain.’

  Before Sarah could ask for the major’s commission, Richmond was out of office and Fox, in alliance with his old enemy, North, was back in. The King, hostile from the start to the new regime, was determined not ‘to grant a single peerage or mark of favour’ as he put it. The 100th Regiment was disbanded and Napier, having given up his place at the Woolwich Laboratory, remained a captain on half pay. Louisa worried about him, writing to Ogilvie in 1783: ‘Mr. Napier hangs upon my mind. I wish very much that something was settled about him, for I see that they will have millions of children – and yet he is so army mad that I think one should run a great risk of making him uncomfortable by desiring him to give it up.’

  The general election of 1784 that followed the defeat of the East India Bill, and thus of the Fox/North coalition, ended any lingering hopes that Emily and Sarah had about preferment for their husbands. It also completed the first stage in what Emily’s son Charles Fitzgerald called ‘the revolution in our family politics’. Charles Fitzgerald was still a Foxite in the 1780s and he filled his letters during the election campaign with praise of Fox and denigration of the Duke of Richmond, secure in the knowledge that Emily took Fox’s side. Louisa warned Sarah to be on her guard if she met any Conolly relatives who were not Foxit
es and told her not to let out her true ‘sentiments’.

  Fox himself scraped back into Parliament in the election. But many of his supporters, including Sarah’s ex-husband Sir Charles Bunbury, did not. The Fox/North coalition was roundly defeated, and when William Pitt formed a new administration, the Duke of Richmond was rewarded for his support with his old office, the Ordnance. Emily and Sarah remained on Fox’s side. Emily was anxious to avoid disagreement with her brothers. So she shut up her new house in Harley Street, where she had frequently entertained Fox and his associates (including the ‘dear Duchess’ of Devonshire) during the election campaign, and went to Ireland for the summer. In June, Louisa offered the Napiers, who were still drifting without any home or prospect of augmenting their income, the use of Stretton Hall in Staffordshire. Stretton was not far from the road which took Dublin travellers to and from the packets at Park Gate. Conolly kept the house ‘as a place to retire to, in case of an unpleasant situation in this country, which is an idea that has possessed his mind these five or six years past.’ For forty years Stretton had been occupied by a few servants, a symbol of Conolly’s refusal to countenance an Irishness that, in English eyes, he could never lose. The Napiers moved into the Hall in August 1784, planning to stay until their campaign for a commission was successful. Despite her growing family, Sarah was bored in the country. ‘We are still here,’ she wrote to Susan sometime that winter, ‘and I fancy shall not stir, unless the dearness of the country shall drive us into Wales.’ A few months later they moved out, travelling to Castletown in search of even cheaper living and a cure for Louisa Bunbury, who had developed consumption.