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

by Stella Tillyard

  Sarah was completing the first letter of her widowhood to Susan when a messenger arrived. ‘Just as I had finished writing new misfortune comes on me! The poor Duke of Leinster is no more! … Ah me! What havoc does death make in a circle where I enjoyed all happiness. Death comes remorseless and sinks them in the tomb.’

  In destroying some bonds death reminded everyone of the importance of others. Sarah and Louisa turned to Emily in their distress and she turned to them for comfort when the Duke of Leinster died. Their old relationship, at once sisterly and maternal, was reaffirmed. In November 1804 they all met in London and used the comfort of old certainties to alleviate new distress. ‘I passed three hours yesterday with my two dear sisters,’ Emily wrote to her daughter Lucy. ‘All hearts opened to each other’s griefs. Our sorrows and our comforts all passed in review before us from their early childhood. Oh what a heartfelt satisfaction to hear them say as they both held me in their arms that the precepts I had early instilled had been of such use to them and been the comfort and support of their lives, that they owed more to me than to any human being … I found both these dear hearts in perfect unison with my own. Griefs have this effect!’

  Sarah inherited all Napier’s debts. They were small compared with Conolly’s, but so were his assets. Sarah economised by moving in with Louisa; on the one hand she made light of her poverty, on the other she listed all the calls upon her income. ‘I have no right to complain, for nobody need starve with £500 pr. anm; tho’ I certainly cannot do justice to my six unprovided children, nor can I assist in the smallest degree my three eldest … In short, I want help very much.’ Very soon she was looking around for a way of increasing her income. Believing firmly that Napier had died in the King’s service just as surely as if he had fallen in battle, Sarah decided to lobby the Crown for a pension as a reward for his exertions. She wrote a long memorial to the King extoling Napier’s virtues and had, for some time, high hopes of success. But as 1805 wore on without any reply, she decided that a more personal approach might yield dividends and planned to appeal to George III as a fellow sufferer from failing sight. ‘Do you think,’ she asked Susan in July, ‘that if I S.N. wrote you S. O’B. a letter full of details of my situation with some remarks on the sympathetic feelings of one blind person for another … do you think you could with natural propriety send it to Lady Ilchester as an interesting letter to you and without a word more? Do you think she would talk of it (I desire no more) before the King?’ Sarah was careful to insist that she must be talked of before the Queen as a fat old lady down on her luck. Her friend Lady Charleville was instructed to tell the Queen that Sarah was ‘still well looking and pleasing – but she has quite given up figure and appearance and dresses in all respects as an old woman.’ This pathetic picture was painted to disguise the real nature of Sarah’s supplication, a blatant attempt to reap a reward for the humiliations she had suffered at the King’s hands forty years before. Her appeal to sentiment worked. The King granted her £800 a year, a sum she always insisted was in recognition of Napier’s services, but which was none the less granted directly to herself and her children.

  Just over £100 of Sarah’s pension went to Emily Napier, the portions for Louisa, Cecilia and Caroline Napier who all lived with her were added to Sarah’s own share, and brought her income up to a grand total of something like £1,200 a year. Some of this was invested to provide money for the Napier girls after Sarah’s death. Some went to pay off debts. Celbridge was sold, and although she was never paid in full for it, the house was no longer a drain on Sarah’s income. So with Louisa Napier in charge of domestic economy and household accounts, Sarah and her daughters could live in comfort, if not splendour. None the less she often borrowed money. Charles Napier lent, or gave, his mother £475 in 1808, £136 in 1814 and small sums thereafter.

  After the pensions were announced, Sarah was in good spirits. ‘My dear sister and I pass our present time between preparations for going to England for a year and the pleasant prospect we have of the excellent situations of our nine children (for she calls them hers too),’ she told Susan in the spring of 1806. By May Louisa and Sarah were established at Hans Place off Sloane Street in Kensington. Sarah decided to stay on in London and bought a house round the corner in Cadogan Place for £1,600. This purchase fixed a pattern of life that changed little in the years to come. Sarah stayed in London, visited and cared for by her children. Louisa lived with Emily Napier at Castletown. Charitable activities took more and more of Louisa’s time, but she came to England occasionally. Emily spent her winters in London and her summers in Wimbledon, where Ogilvie had bought a cottage a few years before. ‘Quite a little thing,’ Emily told Lucy in 1799. ‘Can’t be called a place for it is merely a little bit of kitchen garden surrounded with roses and honeysuckles and one little field; … It is not at all the sort of thing you would like, nor should I some years ago; but it exactly suits me now, for I really cannot walk without feeling so much inconvenience afterwards from it that it takes off from all the pleasure in it.’ Ogilvie insisted that winters were spent in their new house, 44 Grosvenor Place. ‘In this I don’t entirely agree with him,’ Emily confided to Lucy. ‘For with the help of a good map and a story book, the evenings, I think, in winter go off very well. But certainly being in the way of seeing my friends, which one always is in London, is pleasant too; so perhaps he is right.’ She still kept to the timetable of the London season. ‘My sister Leinster is a point de reunion to many, and so well,’ Sarah noted in 1806. ‘She went to Mrs. Fox’s ball and she herself gives assemblies.’

  Old age brought new anxieties and rhythms. Instead of slowing down, as convention had it, life seemed to speed up. Atrophy of bodies, loss of friends and a concomitant sense of the past disappearing combined to heighten a sense of change. Not only family and friends were lost: surroundings changed and, as they did so, brought memory rushing back. Anything might bring the past out of forgotten experiences. In 1807, Louisa stayed a night in a Dublin hotel, Lennon’s, which had been constructed out of houses that she remembered from her youth. ‘I remember the rooms so well where we used to dance,’ she wrote to Emily. ‘It is so odd to look back at those distant times and the variety of feels are very very much missed. So many that we loved are gone and so many that we now know not then in existence.’

  For Sarah and Emily it was books rather than places which brought the past back. Sarah was being read Marmontel’s Memoirs in 1806. They reminded her not simply of her sojourns in Paris in the 1760s when ‘I knew the man a little’, but that her life, as she now thought of it, had not yet then begun. For her part, Emily read the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. They made her think of her long dead mother and of changing manners. Lady Mary, Emily noted in a letter to her niece Caroline Fox, had been ‘very gallant’ in her heyday of the 1730s and 1740s, and her conversation was blunt and direct. ‘I am apt to think that want of delicacy was very much the fashion in those days,’ although by the 1750s and 1760s it was ‘going off’, ‘but I still remember it was retained by all those who were reckoned wits among the old ones, and there was always a fan held up to the face when their jokes were repeated before any young people by those of middle age.’

  Emily was not sentimental; she did not find a golden age of aristocratic licence in past behaviour and she was inclined by temperament and principle to see a correlation between change and amelioration. But she did notice a difference in the way in which women of her class chose and were allowed to behave. She herself had been a convert to some of the changes brought about by notions of sensibility, particularly the idea of marriage as a union of love, and she had reaped the benefits of these ideas being taken up by men. But looking back to the days when Mrs Greville lay on a chaise-longue in ‘undress’ at Holland House and Lady Townshend paraded her command of ribald innuendo made her aware that she had lived to see the inner worlds of women of her class transformed.

  Occasionally and paradoxically however, change could emphasise continuity. Several
of Emily’s and Sarah’s children married within the family or within the family circle and with marriage came a sense of time coming round again. Lord Henry Fitzgerald married Charlotte, Baroness de Ros, the granddaughter of Henry Fox’s friend, Charles Hanbury Williams. Looking round the sumptuous de Ros estate at Thames Ditton in Surrey gave Sarah what she called ‘Holland House feels’. Mimi Ogilvie also married into the Holland House circle. Her husband was Charles Beauclerk, son of the notorious Topham Beauclerk and his saintly wife, Lady Di. Sarah’s fifth son, Henry, married Caroline Bennett, one of the Duke of Richmond’s illegitimate daughters. William Napier married Caroline Amelia Fox, daughter of General Henry Fox, Caroline’s ‘little Harry’. Richard Napier married into the extended Conolly family. The most unlikely circle was completed several years after Sarah’s death when her daughter Emily married Sir Henry Bunbury, the nephew and heir of her first husband, Sir Charles Bunbury.

  As family matters like these became more important, politics loosened its hold on Sarah’s imagination. ‘I have no opinion on political subjects now,’ she told Susan in May 1806. This was an exaggeration, of course. She was excited when Charles Fox at last came back into government in 1806, but her high hopes of the new ministry were dashed by Fox’s death that September. When the Duke of Richmond died in December of the same year, one chapter in the family history was finally closed: political disagreement would no longer be so blatantly personalised within the family. Henceforth, for Sarah, international affairs became far more interesting than goings on at Westminster. It was war that held her attention now. Her new heroes were General Moore (under whose command her sons were enlisted) and Napoleon. All her anxieties were centred on her sons who left, one by one, for the Continent and the fighting.

  Louisa let politics slip more completely than Sarah. After Conolly’s death she stopped following Westminster affairs unless they dealt with Ireland. Her life had always had a religious rather than a political foundation and after the rebellion she had every reason to think about her relations with others (especially her tenants and labourers) in religious rather than political terms. Many of those Louisa lived amongst saw life in the same way, even those who had had great hopes of the rebellion, and many came to regard her philanthropic activities with admiration.

  Louisa had been known in the Castletown neighbourhood as a modest woman who carefully fulfilled the customary (if not customarily observed) duties as mistress of a great house. But now she began to give her life to these activities. Castletown’s public rooms were largely shut up. Louisa, Emily and their guests lived in the long gallery and its anterooms. Louisa entertained very little and dressed more severely than ever. An old Castletown servant wrote, ‘I remember often seeing her pass out of the garden to the house, dressed in her usual long, light-grey cloth pelisse, or surtout, having huge side pockets, and those pockets stuck full of the largest parsnips and carrots, their small ends appearing; these being doubtless for the poor, who were permitted to come to the house two or three times a week for food.’

  Louisa’s first charitable exercise was to build a church by the Celbridge gates at Castletown. ‘She is quite a child about building a church here and persuades herself it is a kind of duty in her to give up her time and thought to it as well as her money,’ Sarah wrote in 1805. The church, intended for Celbridge’s Protestants, was built by Castletown labourers with local stone. Before it was finally finished in 1813, Louisa had moved on to a much bigger project, a school for Celbridge’s children. ‘We have got quite a creditable school of 45 children held (as it was first thought) for Protestant children, but I have had the satisfaction of seeing many Catholics among them. I asked no questions, but examined their writing and spelling equally, and pleased myself with the thought that I had Catholics and Protestants all mixed up as they should be … and growing together in their childhood, in all probability will make them grow up with cordiality towards each other.’ In this way an educational project became a religious one, something that could, to Louisa’s mind, heal the rifts which the rebellion had brought so starkly into the open.

  At first the children were taught only reading, writing and arithmetic. But after 1814 the school began to expand. Two lodges were converted into quarters for cooks and teachers, and Louisa reroofed Conolly’s old kennels and began an ‘industrial school’ there. Boys were taught trades like carpentry, shoemaking, tailoring and basket making, while girls learned domestic husbandry and economy. All were encouraged to read, write and learn to keep simple accounts. Thrift, self-sufficiency and ecumenical religious observance were Louisa’s priorities. She spent a good deal of time and money on the school. She designed the buildings, engaged the masters, judged the children’s work and wrote rules and prayers for them all.

  By May 1820, 300 children were coming to the schools, staggered through the day in batches of 75. Louisa was surprised at these numbers, which proved, she said, ‘the necessity of these day schools, for we cannot say that Celbridge is a remarkably populous place.’ The cardinal lessons she wanted the pupils to learn were, she said, ‘the necessity of justice against the hardship of injustice, the necessity of truth against the mischief of lies’ and ‘the necessity of loving one another against that careless indifference about the happiness of others, which has been known to produce the sufferings of oppression, tyranny and even cruelty.’

  Louisa stressed that learning had two linked effects. It could produce individual prosperity and happiness and it could also make for an increase in general trade and thus bring about what Caroline Fox had called ‘the civilising effects of commerce’. Religious tolerance was what Louisa wanted most of all. One poem that she wrote ended, ‘no disrespectful word touching religion shall be spoke by Protestants to Catholics or from Catholics to Protestants.’

  Castletown, contrary to Sarah’s gloomy prognostications, was still a busy place, just as full of people as it had ever been. But now less was consumed inside the house and more distributed to those beyond the gates. Instead of decorating indoors or building gazebos and temples for herself, Louisa constructed workshops and built a giant press for extracting oil from beech nuts, almonds and walnuts. When hard times hit during and after the Napoleonic wars she employed as many labourers as she could. Not everyone was interested in joining in her schemes for greater industry and prosperity. She berated Celbridge’s labouring women for their ‘idleness’ because, she said, they did not want to weave or spin to earn cash. But many of Celbridge’s inhabitants felt gratitude and even love for Louisa as they watched Castletown become, year by year, less of a centre for sport and entertainment and more of a monument to philanthropy.

  Louisa’s schools were her main occupation late in life. But they did not stop her travelling. She was in England in 1806, arriving too late for Charles Fox’s death, but just in time to be there when the Duke of Richmond died at Goodwood at the end of the year. Sarah thereafter claimed most of her attention when she came to England.

  Sarah’s increasing blindness made day-to-day life difficult and dull. She relied more and more on Louisa Napier and visitors to entertain her. But she endured her blindness stoically and described it almost as if it afflicted someone else. ‘Phipps tells me of a most charming cataract, which he is to rid me of when I am quite blind, so I wait with patience and no confidence,’ she told Susan in March 1807. She had already lost the sight of her right eye and with the left could only see in one blurred circle. She could write, word by word, but she could not read and needed a constant companion. In 1810 an oculist performed a gruelling and painful operation on the defunct right eye, working on the principle that organs responded sympathetically and that he might thus induce the left eye to work. The operation was a failure. Sarah insisted that her lack of sight was providential because it meant that she could not see the sufferings of her younger daughters, both of whom developed consumption. Cecilia Napier died in 1808 and Caroline in 1810. ‘Time and death rob me each day of the use I might put my eyes to and lessen their loss,’ Sarah sa
id.

  Sarah did not mind being read to, but she hated not being able to write. In 1808 Louisa devised a writing-table for her which was made, Emily told Lucy Fitzgerald, ‘very ingeniously and cleverly from Louisa’s directions and plans’ by a local carpenter. ‘By means of springs, grooves etc she can write; a scrawl as you may guess, but perfectly legible. And this is a very great pleasure to her and employs her hours. She hates it seems to dictate and it used to worry her and make her nervous. Now she writes all herself in her scrawly way and Caroline copies it afterwards into a fair hand.’ Soon special paper was added to the machine and Sarah’s letters were sent as they were written, the large words constrained to regularity by being written between pieces of wood which were moved, line by line, down the page. ‘By a most delightful invention of your aunt’ and Richard’s I am enabled to write this with my own hand upon carbonic paper, invented by Wedgwood for taking copies,’ Sarah explained to William Napier.

  After her sons left for the Continent in 1808, Richard Napier, who was the only one not in the armed forces, made Sarah a relief map of the Peninsula. Spain and Portugal were described by raised pieces of cardboard and, Emily said, ‘he has contrived by little pebbles to mark out the different places by feeling, very cleverly; the rivers by bits of twist. In short I find I can’t describe it well but the result is that she feels out any place she wants to find in a minute and diverts herself for hours with it.’ Emily was amazed at Sarah’s dedication to the ideals of militarism. ‘She is full of military ideas and Glory is what she principally looks for in her sons.’ In 1809 Emily noted that Sarah ‘is all anxiety for news from Spain, hopes the English army will not retreat and dreadful as it may appear to look to, she actually wishes a battle.’ The Peninsula campaign was a victory for the Napier cult of disinterested service and for the rarefied, literary militarism with which Sarah had inculcated her sons. George Napier lost an arm in the Battle of Cuidad Rodrigo; William Napier was badly wounded when a bullet lodged near his spine; both these injuries were worn with pride as evidence of their bravery. The laurels went to Charles James Napier, who was captured by the French at Corunna and presumed dead for three months. Sending word to his mother to tell her he was alive he quoted, ‘Hudibras, you lie. For I have been in battle slain/And yet I live to fight again.’