May, Lou & Cass

by Sophia Hillan

  As a boy, Lord George studied at the Royal Academy at Woolwich; then in late 1818, at about the same time as Edward and George Knight, he travelled for a year through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany with his older brother, Lord Augustus, and their tutor. In addition to mathematics, Latin and German, they studied drawing, dancing, fencing and flute playing; their list of expenses included not only clothes, books, blotting paper and sealing wax but also the presumably essential brandy, magnesia water and salt for foot baths. This expensive forerunner of the modern gap year was still considered essential for a gentleman’s son, even one without prospects, as ‘a sales point in favour of young men who were seeking a wife’.16 On his return from the continent, just following his eighteenth birthday, Lord George was gazetted a Cornet, and joined the Royal Horse Guards (the Blues). Over the next ten years, after transferring to the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, he reached the rank of Major.

  His eldest brother, the heir to the title and considerable property, would not come of age until 1809. In the meantime, it was left to the Marchioness of Downshire to act as a kind of regent, trying to restabilise the finances of the estates while making provision for her five sons and two daughters. Her marriage articles of June 1786 and a post-nuptial settlement of July 1789 had made provision for a jointure of £5,000 per year, if she survived her husband. In addition, because of the property she had brought to the marriage she was in a position to ensure that she had enough security to raise portions for her younger children.17 As it was left to his mother to decide how to divide the money, Lord George’s financial future depended on her approval of his choices, political and personal.

  Lady Downshire, able and formidable in the eighteenth-century female mould familiar to Jane Austen, was a lady of decided opinions. She was a figure of some note in her own right, having been politically active all through the later years of the eighteenth century. The brilliance of her marriage in 1786 to Arthur Hill had consolidated lands and power between their two families, and his inheritance of the title on the death in 1793 of his father, Wills Hill, the 1st Marquess, strengthened their political position even further. The 2nd Marquess, however, chose to live in England, visiting Ireland for only one week in the three years before the crucial debates over the proposed Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, which became law on 1 January 1801. When he did come, it was to make known his political opposition to the proposal, a stance which did not help him or his family after it was voted through. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, who had promoted the cause of the Union, made sure that Downshire paid, in a series of humiliations, for this perceived disloyalty.18 After her husband’s death, undaunted by any of the vicissitudes of the previous few years, Lady Downshire managed to revive her grandfather’s title so that, by the time Lord George was six months old, his mother had been created Baroness Sandys in her own right.19

  Politically, she remained a Whig, and the sworn enemy of Castlereagh, whose earlier battle with her husband shortly after the marriage for control of County Down had cost both men a vast sum, and contributed in no small part to the Downshires’ subsequent financial difficulties.20 She undertook to raise money through skilful, if ultimately limiting decisions over the granting of leases to tenants. Subdivision of small land holdings on the estates had ‘created a concealed class of occupiers, where it had not already added to the number of official tenants’: this intrepid lady was given the power in 1802, under a private Act, to grant and renew leases.21 This meant that after the enfranchisement of Roman Catholics in 1793 she could ensure that she had a greatly increased number of voters on her side, no small achievement, and vitally important to her conception of the role she was to play, for until her death in 1836, she remained a politically active force.22 Yet, though her eldest son, the 3rd Marquess, would make peace with Castlereagh three years after he attained his majority, she was never prepared to do so. Lady Downshire did not change her mind easily.

  Lord George was quickly reminded of this when he proposed marriage to Cassandra Knight, though it is unlikely that political and financial considerations dominated the minds of the two young people. Lord George and Cassandra wanted very much to marry: given their dependence on their families, however, without his mother’s consent there was no chance that they could afford to do so and, predictably, Lady Downshire seemed immovable. It is hard to decide whether she bears a closer resemblance at this point to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, or Persuasion’s Lady Russell. Jane Austen was ever conscious of the hard fact that money and the entailment of property decided more marriages than love: Lady Downshire may be closer in her intransigence either to Frank Churchill’s aunt who, holding the purse strings, indicated in Emma where Frank might or might not attach himself, or to Sanditon’s Lady Denham, ‘a great lady beyond the common wants of society – for she had many thousands a year to bequeath, and three distinct sets of people to be courted by’.23 Interestingly, while Jane Austen frequently satirises such an attitude, she never goes so far as to say that it is wrong, or unjustified. As Elizabeth Bennet asks her aunt, Mrs Gardiner, in Pride and Prejudice: ‘What is the difference in matrimonial affairs between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where does discretion end and avarice begin?’24 It came to this: Lord George at twenty-five was not independent, and could not expect to be so if he opposed his mother. Cassandra, not yet twenty-one, the youngest girl of a large family in which only her eldest brother might – and did – decide his future for himself, could expect very little unless she married well. As the heads of both families required financial security in partners for their children, the match between Cassandra and Lord George was clearly impossible.

  It seemed that Cassandra’s chance of marrying for love had gone. She had not refused Lord George, as Marianne had John Billington. She had not eloped, like her eldest brother Edward and her former schoolmate Mary Dorothea. It had all been decided for her, and there was nothing she could do. Her last brother was gone from home, stationed far away in Ireland and, now, so was the man she had expected to marry. Fanny, nearly fourteen years older, was very much more her mother than her sister, and Marianne, though only five years Cassandra’s senior, was by 1827 so much occupied with the care of their father and the running of the Great House at Godmersham that no one thought of her any more as a young woman. Where was Cassandra to find company of her own age? Fortunately, she still had her sister Louisa, only two years older and, like her, unmarried and unburdened by family responsibility.

  Yet, not long after Lord George went away, it seemed that Louisa might be the next to marry. Like Cassandra, she received two proposals, refusing the first in June 1828 from a gentleman named Sir William Young.25 Her next proposal, which came the following year, was from a family friend which, of itself, made it more difficult to address. George Chichester Oxenden was the gentleman’s name, and his sister, Mary, had been, since 1811, one of Fanny’s close friends.26 George and Mary Oxenden were the children of Sir Henry Oxenden of Broome Place, Barham, near Canterbury and Mary, who had married shortly after recovering from a serious illness in 1814, had once been the subject of one of Jane Austen’s acerbic asides: ‘Instead of dieing [sic] [she] is going to marry Wm. Hammond.’27 George Oxenden was well known not only to the Knights but also to the Rices. In 1825, he had accompanied Lizzy, her husband Edward and Edward’s mother Mme Sarah Rice on a trip to Scotland, where they all stayed with the Duke of Montrose at Braehaven.28 He was seven years older than Louisa, and they shared an interest in botany and natural science: later in life he would correspond with Charles Darwin on the subject of orchids. He had gained some fame through the publication of poetry.29 It may or may not be coincidence that in a collection of his works, published at the time of his pursuit of Louisa, several love poems are included. One of these, dated 1829, is wistfully entitled ‘Pourquoi Pas’:

  Because I see thee young and bright,

  Yet lovelier, purer far

  Than glittering flash of Polar Light,

  I love thee —
Pourquoi Pas?—

  Because my life has waned away

  In many a wayward scene,

  And thou art like the spring of day,

  Unsullied and serene,

  By yonder stars — which seem

  To bless the spot

  Where thy soft glances gleam,

  And grief is not,

  And by that crested wave,

  Struggling to lie

  Where its white wreath might lave

  Thy feet — and die,

  By all of joy or love

  That life can give,

  By every hope above,

  For thee — I live.30

  Why not? Whatever his gifts and attractions, they were not enough for Louisa. Fanny recorded in 1829 that ‘the affair remained unsettled’ and by 1830 was writing, decisively: ‘the affair between Mr G.C. Oxenden and my sister Louisa entirely put an end to this summer’.31

  A silhouette which seems, judging from styles of hair and dress, to date from the late 1820s shows the three youngest Knight sisters against a pencilled sketch of a drawing-room in Godmersham.32 Louisa and Cassandra sit upright, almost at attention, one holding needlework, the other a book or paper, their gaze intent upon Marianne who, standing with what may be a ruler, a pointer or a skein of wool in her hand, appears to be instructing them. In 1827, when Cassandra and Lord George met and parted, Marianne was still only twenty-five, Louisa twenty-two, and Cassandra twenty. Strangely, not one of the figures in this silhouette looks young, though they do seem entirely self-sufficient. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, the Knights of Godmersham did appear to be content with their own company. Once the excitement of regular proposals had passed, they settled into a comfortable pattern with their father and their brother Charles who, though ordained, still lived at home, assisting the Rector in his parish work. He also kept a diary. This account, in which Charles displays a gift for description and dramatic narrative not unworthy of a nephew of Jane Austen, gives a unique picture of the years when he, Marianne, Louisa and Cassandra were all together at Godmersham.33 Charles was not a natural clergyman, as he would later concede: his real life seemed to begin when he spent time outdoors, shooting with his brothers or his neighbours, or walking and listening to birdsong with his father or sisters. ‘I walked with Lou & Cass down the river to East Stowe & by Winnigates & Coneybro home,’ he wrote at the end of January 1832, ‘then with my father to Ripple. Saw many hen Chaffinches at Winnigates. Robins chirped. Saw a Yellow Wagtail on the banks of the River by the Church.’34

  Charles’s diaries show that, among themselves, they were once more May, Lou, Cass, Charley and, when he was home on leave, Johnny – the same little group who had sat, excluded, on the stairs while Jane Austen read to their older sisters behind a closed door. They looked after one another: John contracted a form of smallpox in 1835, and Charles sat with him over many nights until he recovered. Afterwards, John seems to have been less than robust, and to have spent longer periods at home.35 Fanny and Lizzy visited when family commitments allowed, and Charles’s diary indicates that at least one other brother, the unpredictable George, came home regularly when his varying attempts at a career permitted it. George had not changed. Charles expressed his frustration with his brother’s continuing indolence in September 1832: ‘George went away not having done anything but stay in the house during his whole visit.’36

  Though Marianne, Louisa, Cassandra and even Charles were dependent on their father, their lives do not seem to have been unhappy. Charles and Marianne, now the eldest of those at home, maintained a quiet, unhurried companionship, visiting and caring for the poor of the parish. They found great satisfaction working in the garden, and identifying different kinds of birds and plants. ‘Herons flew about at night calling,’ Charles wrote on 18 March 1832. ‘Marianne found a longtailed tit’s nest by Crows.’37 Sometimes they went riding together, or visited an art exhibition, as they did at Lee in 1833: ‘We saw the pictures, a beautiful Herodias and daughter by Carlo Dole, and several others much inferior but very well.’38 They went to town, indulged their usual pleasure in shopping and, yet again, visited the dentist, where Marianne ‘agreed to give 35£ to Mallen for stopping and whitening her tooth’. Charles was appalled: ‘Amazing price!’ he wrote.39 They shared, as a family, a love of reading, writing diaries or letters, walking and riding and sometimes they all went out at night to study the sky: ‘Louisa & Cass’ra were out till very late stargazing,’ Charles wrote on 15 May 1833. ‘It is so lovely, so nobody likes to come in.’40 The younger sisters had a busy programme of social engagements, always beginning with the races in the late summer: ‘Louisa & Cassandra went to the ball at Canterbury,’ Charles wrote on 23 August 1832, ‘being the beginning of their race gaieties, & I follow’d in my gig’. He added, rather ungallantly: ‘There were very few pretty women.’41 Charles had not yet resigned himself to bachelorhood: his diary records not only his attempts to find a suitable, and preferably pretty, wife at these events, but also the barely concealed amusement of his three sisters at some of his less successful efforts.42 One of their brothers, however, had more success, and they had the joy of a family wedding when Henry married their cousin, Sophia Cage, in May 1832. Less than a year later, they mourned together when Sophia died of what was thought to be influenza, leaving an infant son, Lewis.43

  During the dead of winter, the Knights gathered at Godmersham, reviving the old tradition of the family Christmas. Like Jane and her siblings in the generation before, they enjoyed team games after dinner, often with the wider family:

  We acted charades, Lou, Cass & I, Band Box, A military band, a boxing match & a woman with lots of Bandboxes going by a coach. Cass, George & Edward — Dial. A dying scene, shoemaker & a sun dial. George, Gage & Lou. Infancy. A scene at an inn, a fancy ball & a number of Babies.44

  This was a typical party of between twelve and seventeen people, all staying for days or weeks on end around Christmas. The group included Fanny’s stepson, Norton Knatchbull, and his wife; the Cage cousins and Edward and Mary Knight for, though Mary remained unforgiven by her father, she and Edward were always made welcome at Godmersham, despite their scandalous elopement in 1826.

  Charles and Louisa had been close since the days when they had said their prayers together as little children. They read, studied German and spent long hours examining and identifying wildlife, occasionally dissecting birds and animals whose remains they had found on their many walks. They shared a fascination with science and the new developments of technology. On Easter Monday of 1832, they ventured together on the new ‘rail road’, and Charles’s account conveys a vivid sense of the excitement of the early days of railway. They travelled at a heady twenty miles per hour, finding it all quite thrilling, though Louisa came to regret wearing her white bonnet:

  Lou & I went to Canterbury & thence by the rail road to Whitstable & back. We found it very pleasant. The day was fine & bright, wind fresh but mild S.E. We went in an open car with the world, and being Easter there was a good deal of company, chiefly shopkeepers & children. We were 38 minutes going the distance which I believe is 8 miles. The spitting from the steam boiler stained Louisa’s white satin bonnet, which was the only disaster which happened to us ... We stayed about 1 ½ hours & returned in an open car as before; but a better one for it had cushions to sit on & a backboard to lean against. We had to stop 4 miles from Whitstable for ½ an hour to wait for the returning train from Canterbury, that we might get the rope by which we were to be dragged up the next hill. This is badly managed. After we once started again we went very well into Canterbury, very fast thro’ the tunnel about the rate of 20 miles an hour. We did not get to the Fountain till nearly 5 and home soon after 6. Entry into the tunnel at a tremendous pace from the hot sun into the cold dank atmosphere, & quite dark, was a curious circumstance, & as the wind blew strait up it, it made the change more striking. The thing is not at all complete yet, but I have no doubt it will improve.45

  Cassandra, whose patience and sweetnes
s of temperament had endeared her to Jane Austen, was drawn more to water. During the summers, they often went as a family to Herne Bay, and enjoyed several weeks of sailing and, on occasion, sea-bathing. ‘Too rough to sail or bathe,’ Charles wrote on a mid-July day in 1833, adding without comment, ‘Cass’ra bathed’.46 Cassandra may have been gentle, but she did not lack spirit and, as subsequent events would prove, did not shirk a challenge. ‘Fanny, Cass’ra, Henry & I in the Victoria soon after breakfast to the shallow by the South Fields Bridge. The wind was not fair for sailing but we managed it,’ Charles wrote on 23 May 1833:

  After lunch, Lou, Marianne & I rested in the shrubbery & found several nice & pretty nests, particularly a nightingale with 5 eggs below the old iron gates — also a bullfinch near the house, a green linnet, white throat, gold crested wrens, common wrens, grey linnets, beside Blackbirds & thrushes ... After dinner Cass’ra took three young birds which she calls black caps & put them, nest & all into a cage to see what would come to them, as she wants to rear a blackcap on account of their fine singing...47

  Unlike Louisa, Cassandra preferred to study and cherish living creatures rather than analyse the dead. Charles’s vignettes of his youngest sister are both revealing and poignant: she is the only one to have left no fragment of letters or diaries and, apart from the single silhouette of May, Lou and Cass, no sketch or painting of her appears to have survived. In Charles’s diaries, however, she emerges as a quick, intelligent and intrepid young woman of independent opinions.

  In this family-centred life at Godmersham, however, the three sisters were not without admirers: on 25 February 1832, ‘old Valentine’s Day,’ Charles noted, ‘the 3 girls got 3 Valentines’.48 Among Charles’s friends and shooting comp- anions, he included his neighbours Mr Plumptre and Mr Wildman of Chilham Castle, both of whom had once been Fanny’s suitors, though by then they were long married and unlikely to have sent the valentines. There were others among the family’s acquaintance, however, who might have done so. Charles was in the habit of shooting with a Captain Stracey, one of his neighbours; at the end of 1833, Captain Stracey proposed to Louisa, and was refused. When the gentleman married not long afterwards, Charles expressed surprise: ‘We met Stracey and his bride coming out of C[anterbur]y. I was much surprised as I had no idea he was to be married so soon. They both looked very happy, very smart & were full of smiles & good humour. They were on their way to Tunbridge Wells to spend the honey moon.’ Charles’s next remark could have come from the pages of one of his aunt Jane’s novels: ‘I pity the bride because she is sick, & if he married her for her money, she will be an unhappy woman, or I am much mistaken.’49 It is a curiously cold observation, yet, whatever Captain Stracey had done to incur Charles’s displeasure, he cannot have proposed to Louisa in hopes of gaining a rich wife. Nor could money have been the motive of another prospective suitor of one of his sisters. Charles occasionally shot with two of the Harris family, near relatives of Mr Wildman: one of these would shortly express more than a passing interest in Cassandra, and his interest would not be unreciprocated.