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

by Stella Tillyard

  The Napiers’ arrival at Castletown signalled a new phase not just in Sarah’s life but in those of Louisa and Emily too. For the first time in many years the sisters were together; ‘we three’ Sarah called them, as if they were Macbeth’s witches, sitting over the fire concocting plans. They all had similar preoccupations. Emily and Ogilvie were at Frescati with Sophia, Lucy, Cecilia and Mimi (but without Lord George Simon, who had died in 1783). Edward Fitzgerald, on leave from the army since the end of the American war, was often there. Until the summer of 1786, Ogilvie wrote later, ‘he was with us, indeed, wherever we went, and those were the happiest years of our lives.’ Louisa was happy too. When Sarah had given birth to a girl in 1783, Louisa had asked to adopt her, saying that Sarah was far more interested in boys than girls. Sarah refused at first but then repented, telling Susan O’Brien that consideration of the child’s prospects if Louisa adopted her had changed her mind.

  Emily Napier arrived at Castletown in December 1784, ‘given away’ as she bitterly described it later. Louisa became everything but her legal mother to her. Children had lived at Castletown before: Louisa had given a home to two of her nieces, Conolly’s sister’s children, whose mother had died. But Emily Napier was different. She was Sarah’s child, a blood relation. Two weeks after she arrived, Louisa wrote delightedly to Sarah: ‘Mr. Conolly says she will be the prettiest Lennox that ever was seen, and I really do see a likeness to my sister Leinster. The first look struck me to be that of Cecilia’s but now I think it is my sister Leinster.’ Louisa felt guilty taking Sarah’s child, knowing that Emmy came as much for money as for love. But she washed away her guilt with an outpouring of love that, she hoped, would make up for Sarah’s sacrifice. ‘The moment I awake I long to see her and dote on her to a ridiculous degree.’ ‘I beg you will kiss the blot on the word immediately three lines back because it is her dear little finger that made it.’ Emily was ‘the pretty Emmy, the blessed lovely Emmy.’ ‘She loves dancing … and has a notion of turning her little arms over her head as I have taught her. You would laugh at seeing what an old fool I am when by ourselves, dancing with her till I’m out of breath.’

  Emily Napier gave Louisa a new emotional focus. She felt, at the age of forty-one, like a first-time mother and wanted both her sisters to see her with her ‘treasure’ as she called Emmy. ‘I quite long that my sister Leinster should see her,’ she wrote to Sarah soon after Emmy arrived, and when the rest of the Napier family accepted her invitation to come to Castletown she was overjoyed.

  So began a short, relatively settled period of domestic concerns. Emily and Sarah, bringing up their second families, shared with Louisa a late motherhood. At ages when their contemporaries were saying goodbye to children who were leaving for matrimony or a separate life, they were worrying together over new teeth and inoculation. Emily settled back happily into her old position as the Lennox matriarch. If not queen of Ireland she was still queen of her own family. When Sarah arrived at Castletown in 1785, Emily was nearly fifty-four. She was a grandmother many times over, of both legitimate and illegitimate children. In the eyes of her husband and family she was still a beautiful woman. The soft fashions of the 1780s, with their plain gowns, bright sashes and billowing neckerchiefs, suited her ample form. Sore eyes (alleviated by the application of leeches) bothered her, she complained of a rheumatic leg and her periods were now troublesome. But she had, as she said later, a constitution of iron and, despite her aversion to exercise, she had fewer ailments than Sarah, who was fourteen years her junior. She was passionately in love with her husband. When Ogilvie went to London in 1782, she wrote to him, ‘Dr Mimi was in bed an hour with me this morning and so like you! Guess if I kissed and mumbled her, dear little thing.’

  Emily still regarded herself as a woman of fashion. She retained her love of novelty in literature and dress and she kept her cosmopolitan outlook. As the 1780s wore on and especially after the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, anti-Gallic chauvinism swept the British Isles, even creeping into Emily’s family. The Duke of Leinster might just as well not have gone on his long and expensive Grand Tour in the 1760s. Since inheriting he had stayed put in Ireland and now confessed to his mother ‘I hate Monsieur’. But Emily kept her Francophilia. She was more likely to go to Nice than Brighton for a dose of sea air, she filled Frescati with French furniture and fireplaces and when Rousseau’s Confessions appeared from 1781 she reverently put each volume beside his other works on her library shelves.

  While Emily maintained the demeanour and establishment of a metropolitan hostess, Louisa cultivated a determined eccentricity in dress, manner and acquaintance. Castletown was very much a country house. Dogs trotted about and lolled in the long gallery with the family in the evenings, ‘perfuming the air not a little’ as Louisa put it. The Conollys entertained on Sundays, which Sarah called ‘a kind of public day’ at Castletown. Louisa rarely went out except to occasional official functions, to Carton and to Black Rock. Friends came to stay at Christmas when there was still a round of entertainments and parties. Louisa spent most of the day, weather permitting, outside, wearing sturdy boots and a riding habit. After Emily Napier arrived, Louisa carried her around in her arms, accompanied by a footman who took turns with the plump little burden.

  As time went on Louisa began to look beyond the Castletown gates and to take an interest in the ‘middling sort’ and the poor. She started to visit the labourers and their families who lived in Celbridge, on the edge of her estate. On journeys away from Castletown she studied the lives of others with anthropological fervour. In September 1782 she sent Sarah a report of one such field trip in the north of Ireland, dinner with a family ‘in the middling rank of life’. ‘They played on the flute, guitar, musical glasses and sung, and seemed so happy that it was a pleasure to see them. “So,” thinks I, in my own mind, “here are a sort of people totally unknown, but just in their small neighbourhood, and of course not sought after, and whom probably in the great world, would not only pass unnoticed but would be reckoned vulgar (and which I believe they are) that to me are very pleasant people and at a venture (if I must decide) I should prefer to Lady Melbourne, Lady Jersey, the Duchess of Devonshire etc, etc, etc …” In short, my dear Sal, merit is the thing to admire, and whatever station we find it in we must like it, approve of the possessors of it.’ Louisa also went about incognito using her reading as a guidebook to help her place people she met from other walks of life. In 1783 she and Conolly dined at the Ordinary Inn at Matlock in Derbyshire, ‘where the company was completely mixed. Some rich looking traders from Sheffield, some housekeepers, some second rank fine people, a quiet lawyer and his wife, and us. We arrived at the Inn before suppertime, … [and] for the fun of it joined the company. I saw some of the company very curious to know who we were, a prating lady attacked Mr. Conolly and gave her opinion about all the beauties in London. She was exactly the character of the witty ladies in a vulgar story book.’ Louisa stood the company at her end of the long table a bottle of wine and ‘quite enjoyed seeing the good people so comfortable’. But eventually a servant revealed that Louisa was connected to the Duke of Richmond and their secret was out. ‘The prating Miss immediately held her tongue, my Sheffield friend looked at me with respect, and the fun ended. So I went to bed, but had been much entertained first.’

  Such adventures were exciting exploits rather than part of everyday life. Louisa did not develop a politics to go with her cult of the ordinary. Rank had to stay, she believed, because through it God allowed men to exercise charity and loving kindness. But poverty could, and should, be alleviated. Louisa insisted that the material gap between rich and poor was too wide, leading to excess on the one hand and thieving on the other.

  Like Emily, Louisa stayed plump as the years went by, and her complexion, roughened by hours out of doors, kept its rubicund glow. A pastel drawn in the 1780s shows her hair falling in big curls round her neck, still showing brown through the powder. Her chin filled out as she grew older and her nos
e sharpened. A white gauze neckerchief encircles her shoulders and with an informality that she insisted upon for all but the grandest occasions, she wears a soft white ‘dormeuse’ cap trimmed with lace.

  Sarah cultivated an even more matronly air, dressing with self-conscious modesty. When she was drawn in the late 1780s or early 1790s she wore her hair simply drawn back, topped by a mob cap with a dark velvet trimming, which was held on by a handkerchief tied under the chin. A white gauze handkerchief chastely covered her shoulder and chest, tucking carefully into the front of her gown. For good measure she added a lace mantilla or shawl. This modest portrait was a far cry from the voluptuousness of her portrait by Reynolds of 1764–5 in which she was scantily clad, with her hair uncovered, her neck, chest and even her foot almost bare. Sacrificing to the Graces in 1764, Sarah was herself the sacrificial centre of the painting, offering her body to the world. Her later portrait was drawn to fit a much smaller pocket, of course. But Sarah’s aims were different too. Contentment, serenity and modesty were the qualities she now wanted to show the world.

  Nobody doubted Sarah’s happiness. On her birthday in 1783 she wrote to Susan, ‘Feby 25th, 1783 … this is my birthday. I am 38 and I see nothing “new under the sun” except that till I was past 36 I find I never knew what real happiness was, which from my marriage with Mr. Napier till now is much greater than I had any idea of as existing in human life … indeed, if I am to judge from the present of the future, nothing can ever diminish my domestic comfort and happiness but illness or death, for you know I mind poverty as little as anybody.’ Louisa had sealed Sarah’s happiness with sisterly approval, writing the year before: ‘I know full well, my dearest Sally, what that love is, and that nothing can ever equal it. I am going perhaps to surprise you by saying, that I don’t believe you ever experienced what I call real love before, and you never knew what the first of all happiness was, till now. I have perceived by several of your letters that you understand that point much better than you did, at least my vanity makes me think so, because your ideas correspond so much more to my own.’

  Sarah basked in her sister’s approbation. Her remarriage which, by mutual agreement, was described as a union of love in marked contrast to the mad passion of her affair with Gordon, rehabilitated her at Castletown and with many of Louisa’s friends. Napier astutely befriended Conolly, and their friendship swept away Conolly’s lingering doubts about having Sarah in his house. Sarah could never undo all the social damage of her adultery and separation. But, paradoxically, the increasingly conservative temper of the times came to her aid. Louisa and her friends pointed to Sarah’s handsome, ever-growing family as a justification of her actions. Without the separation and divorce, they could hint, Sarah would never have become the model of motherhood and domestic felicity that she now was.

  To begin with Sarah and Napier, who was waiting eagerly for the resumption of war, were only visitors at Castletown. but as the peace lengthened, they settled down and joined in the round of visits that was at the heart of family life. Between Dublin, Castletown, Black Rock and Carton there were constant journeys. At Black Rock, Edward Fitzgerald toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer. But he confessed to finding the Irish Parliament more exciting than Mansfield and Rousseau easier than Blackstone. Emily’s girls read French with her and travelled to Dublin to learn drawing and deportment.

  In 1787 Sarah and Napier decided to settle in Ireland for good. With Conolly’s help they bought a house in Celbridge a few hundred yards from Louisa’s gates. It was solid and unadorned, three storeys high and seven windows wide, set on a slope above the main street in a small park of its own. By her old standards it was modest – a house for a merchant with an income of a thousand pounds a year, redolent of prosperity rather than aristocracy. Sarah’s few acres hardly kept the town at bay; the local board school, which her boys attended, was just down the street.

  Looking back, the second half of the 1780s seemed to all the sisters a golden time of fecundity and tranquillity. ‘The happiest years of any of our lives,’ was how Ogilvie described them. But that happiness was remembered through the disasters that came afterwards. At the time, anxiety, grief and anger sometimes broke through into quotidian pleasures, blotting happiness out completely.

  Soon after Sarah arrived at Castletown in the summer of 1785, Louisa Bunbury’s consumptive symptoms got worse. By the autumn Sarah had given up hope. Louisa died at the end of the year. Sarah grieved openly and well; after three months the needs of other lives brought her back into the world. ‘My 4 little children have all had different illnesses and kept my mind much employed, and of course their recovery gives a new spring to my spirits, which has been very useful to me,’ she wrote in March.

  By May, Louisa Bunbury’s memory was less insistent. ‘In the same half hour I can laugh and in a few minutes feel un serrement de coeur, as if all nature was darkened before my eyes and I had no further business on this earth. I reproach myself for having, only for one hour, forgot my loss, and I revive it with all the strength of my imagination.’ Soon Louisa was an intermittent and less disturbing ghost, casting shade but not darkness, almost crowded out of memory by Sarah’s new family.

  Louisa Bunbury’s death closed the saga of Sarah’s adultery and separation. But in doing so it revived her memory of her first marriage, the affair with Gordon and the changes in her life since Napier’s proposal. It reminded her, too, of her brother’s dislike of her marriage and the fact that he, the primary trustee of her divorce settlement, had control of her income. Sarah decided that she wanted Napier to have control of her annuity of £500 a year. The Duke of Richmond refused to cede it. A rancorous quarrel ensued, ostensibly about money, but really about Sarah’s new sense of herself.

  Sarah’s brother had provided for her from the time she left Gordon in the winter of 1769 until, and beyond, her divorce. Although she had an annuity (wrested with some difficulty from Bunbury), the Duke still housed her and gave her the protection of his good name. Sarah could not control her annuity herself, but she wanted Napier to have that role. She no longer saw herself as a ne’er-do-well aristocrat, but as a military wife and respectable mother. Richmond, well aware that Sarah was challenging his familial authority by her demands, refused to budge.

  Sarah lost her attempt to wrest her annuity from her brother’s control. Afterwards her dislike of him increased. She seized every opportunity of making him feel isolated and uncomfortable. As usual, Charles Fox and national politics were her chosen weapons. Events of the late 1780s gave her plenty of opportunities for fights.

  In late October 1788 George III went mad, so mad that ‘he called Mr. Pitt a rascal and Mr. Fox his friend’. The King became unable to carry out his constitutional duties and a Regency, which would put the Prince of Wales at the head of government, seemed likely. Charles Fox and his supporters, who had sided with the Prince in his oedipal struggle with his father, sensed that they might be able to seize the government from Pitt. The horizon seemed especially bright for the opposition in Ireland. If the Prince of Wales were appointed Regent he would be able to bring his supporters to power there, even if he failed to dislodge Pitt from Westminster, because the Irish government was directly under Crown control.

  In December 1788, while the King struggled and raved at Kew, Emily sent Ogilvie to London in the hope that he might become a go-between in negotiations between the English and Irish opposition. Emily called the Prince of Wales ‘tiresome’, although she sympathised with his extravagance and thought he had been badly treated by the refusal of both Parliament and the King to pay his debts. She expressed concern for the King’s sufferings, but she longed for a Regency that might bring Fox to power, explaining to her daughter Charlotte, ‘I am sure the Prince has been as unhappy as any of [the King’s] children, for he has an excellent heart. His situation is a very delicate one; we expect with impatience to hear that he is declared Regent.’ Ogilvie was nervous that Conolly and the Duke of Leinster might resent his unofficial mission. But E
mily brushed his worries aside. ‘They forget, dear souls, both of them, that they have not given reason by their conduct in politics to make it safe for people to trust them, and also that their abilities being esteemed with reason très médiocre, men of sense will always be applied to first, notwithstanding their greatness.’ Emily hoped that when the Prince became Regent and Charles Fox assumed power in London her choice of husband would be justified and that Ogilvie would, by virtue of his intelligence, take his rightful place in Irish government.

  Instead the opposite happened. In March 1789 the King recovered and the Foxites were execrated anew. The Fitzgerald family emerged from the crisis split by different loyalties, spreading the quarrel among the Lennox children down into the next generation. Sarah, fervently Foxite, described the politics of Emily’s sons soon after the King’s recovery. ‘The Duke of Leinster is stout … Charles Fitzgerald is a Pittite and is to have a good place, we hear. Henry is a valiant knight and scorns to change his buff and blue. Robert is a Pittite and chargé d’affaires, secrétaire et plénipotentiaire à Paris; … as he never was in Parliament, was a Pittite from choice, got this place from his uncle … I own I do not regret his being on that side; but I am provoked at Charles who does it only for a dirty thousand a year, a sinecure! Dear Edward is also a thorough Foxite.’

  Sarah did not write about Emily’s daughters. This was partly because she had what Louisa termed ‘a preference for boys’, which meant that, whatever the context, she was more likely to write about boys, her own or anyone else’s, than girls. But it was also because, despite her consuming interest in politics, Sarah professed to believe that women’s political views had no bearing on the political process. This was more a gesture to received opinion than a belief that she acted upon. Sarah herself had campaigned on behalf of her first husband, and she wrote sympathetically about the Duchess of Devonshire’s contributions to Fox’s campaigns in Westminster in the 1780s. None the less she did not write much about the political opinions of her nieces.