Not all the extended family were making such fortunate connections. Fanny’s son Astley had just married an Irish girl whose background was not acceptable, and letters flew about concerning the desirability of his living somewhere far away. Canada was chosen, and a great sigh of relief sounded round the family. William Knight, still rector of Steventon, and clearly prepared to overlook his own youthful indiscretions, was quite blunt in his letter to his sister: ‘No doubt you are disappointed at Astley’s marriage, though with his peculiar habits, nothing was more likely, & now he has adopted a colonial life, his Lucy and her family will not interfere in any way with this.’55 Louisa was one of the kinder commentators: ‘I hope Lucy is good-tempered — where did he meet her — in darling aristocratic Ireland or mercantile England — Is she pretty or what caught him — did not the sisters ever see her — has she no father or mother or Uncles or Aunts or cousins —’56 ‘Darling aristocratic Ireland’, however, as Louisa well knew, would be no more forgiving than her own family if the daughters of Lord and Lady George made unsuitable marriages: if she had had any doubt, the demeaning examination of her own marriage in the House of Lords would have brought it home to her. By March 1858, she was enduring the rigours of the Dublin season, with its round of balls and teas and dances and drawing-rooms, where the débutantes had to be not only seen but also openly displayed on the marriage market. Despite her position and her friendships with the Lord Lieutenant and Lady Campbell, Louisa did not enjoy it, and wanted nothing more than to escape with the girls and her nine-year-old son:
We went to the drawingroom & dinner at the Castle afterward, & that is the amount of our gaieties — & we shall prob. have nothing or little more to do with them. We are all well and little George better — the delicacy is his portion & will be I fear for some years — stomach not head is the weak point. We shall be so glad to get out of this — as we are squeezed to death & have no Piano. The girls practise daily at a friend’s, whose house we have had for two months during their absence in England.57
She was very miserable: hoping Fanny and her family felt well she added, sadly, ‘but nobody can in March’.
Unfortunately for Louisa, she was about to be ‘squeezed to death’ again in her own house at Ballyare, largely due to the fame of her husband’s work in Gweedore. In June 1858, she had an unexpected visit from the Lord Lieutenant and his retinue. Ballyare, though a fine house, was not a large one and, as he wrote to Lady Campbell, Lord Carlisle was embarrassed to find that, in undertaking what he described as ‘Hilliad’, he had placed a strain on the accommodation. He was not too embarrassed, however, to give a critical assessment of the young ladies’ musical abilities:
I wished to have found time to write to you on Hilliad. The aggregate result of my visit is great liking and admiration, so I do not mind letting a few flings escape me. My conscience rather smote me on arriving at Ballyare — on foot, as they did not trust the four horse to drive up so limited a space, and there is the further peculiarity of there being no door to the house; we got in by bending much under a very low window. It struck me as cruelty to have imposed ourselves on so small a precinct, but I was reconciled when I found that the Wards only got leave to come to them in consequence of my visit. I like him — Norah and Cassandra sang to us: they are near being Muses, Sybills, Sirens, but stop just a little short of any of these. The next night we spent in Gweedore, and there indeed was space, comfort, luxury, good cheer, good waiting, to our hearts’ content. The drawback was 9 continuous hours in a perfectly open carriage in fierce rain. However it quite answered to us: he has done marvels, and the scenery is superb. My reception throughout has been a marvel to me.58
Quite apart from the fact that he was just as oblivious of Louisa’s presence as Thomas Carlyle had been nine years before, one other fact in that glowing report, casually dropped, deserves attention. The fact that the Wards were staying there in June 1858 is significant for, less than a year later, Norah was to marry Somerset Ward. His family’s presence in the house suggests an engagement, perhaps the reason that Louisa seemed so certain in her letter to Fanny in the spring that she had almost done with the round of the season.
Somerset Ward had not, however, been the first to seek Norah’s hand. The vivacious, pretty fourteen-year-old who had so delighted her aunts and cousins in 1850 had gone on to win the heart, as Marianne had done forty years earlier, of one of her own cousins. Edward Bridges Rice, Lizzy’s eldest son, had courted Norah despite a considerable disparity in their ages. He was sixteen years older; yet, he was captivated by her and, though later to make a happy marriage to Cecilia Harcourt in 1864, he was still vulnerable on the subject of Norah in the early 1860s, as his sister Marianne Sophia noticed: ‘Poor fellow,’ she wrote, ‘I hope Norah will not sadden him, he said rather bitterly that he daresayed he could do without her — somebody else that is nice is what to turn his thoughts.’59 Norah, however, had made her choice, and married Captain the Hon. Somerset Ward, two and a half years her senior, on 28 April 1859. The couple went to live at Isle O’Valla House, outside the picturesque coastal town of Strangford, County Down, only a few miles from the great house of Castle Ward.60
Norah’s wedding was the first of many; the young Knights of Godmersham, whom Jane Austen knew, had grown middle-aged and given place to their children. Godmersham would never be home again: a letter from Edward Knight to his sister Fanny on New Year’s day 1858 shows, despite its charm and kindness, how very far from thinking of making it his base he was. ‘Instead of a merry party in the Drawing room,’ he wrote, ‘smells of smoke in the Passages & Cakey’s stories of the goings on in “the room”, here am I … alone in my father’s Study, thinking of old times, & almost beginning to be sentimental in my old age.’ He was not, however, going to give into sentimentality: he had come to support his brother George, Jane’s ‘itty Dordy’, at the funeral of his wife, Hilaire, and just as his own father had checked regularly on draughty, uninhabited Chawton, he now made the reverse journey to the house at Godmersham. ‘I go home tomorrow,’ he wrote towards the end of his letter, ‘and have no plan of leaving it again just at present.’61
Edward’s children, too, were well-grown. Montagu, his eldest son by his second marriage, to Adela Portal, had completed his first half at Eton, and his daughter Georgina, one of the children of his first marriage to Mary Knatchbull, was to be married in August 1858. As Marianne Sophia Rice wrote to her sister, the tension at the wedding was palpable, not least because Fanny Knatchbull displayed an old prejudice against the entire Portal family, including Edward’s entirely blameless children from his marriage to Adela Portal:
Yes, it makes me very angry Aunt K’s inveterate prejudice about Portals and she is the last person I should have told about ‘red-faced one’ which Derby heard in the train the day before the wedding and Uncle Charles told Aunt K. Don’t tell anyone else — I haven’t. I like her very much, she is a very nice girl I think, very affectionate and altogether nice. People think her very plain I mean Uncle Charles, Aunt May, etc. She is plain certainly, but I don’t think so very … I saw At. K hating them all — with no reason, for they are very nice children, all of them, and very nicely behaved and brought-up it appeared to me. Charlie is a nice little boy, but hideous.62
Yet, despite the unkind remarks, there was nothing more hurtful going on at this wedding than at most, which, given all the anger and resentment over Edward’s marriages and disposal of Godmersham, was in itself remarkable. Indeed, as the decade of the 1850s closed, everyone did seem more at ease. Marianne Sophia stayed during Georgina’s wedding at the Rectory at Chawton, with Charles and Marianne. ‘We were so comfortable at the rectory,’ she wrote, ‘and liked our short visit so much. Uncle Charles and Aunt May are so comfortable.’63 Godmersham was gone, in effect if not in fact. Yet, with Marianne’s happy resettlement at Chawton, the safe return of almost all the young soldiers and sailors from two terrible wars, and the beginning of the marriages of the next generation, it did appear at last that
the extended Austen/Knight family had reached a state approaching equilibrium.
Chapter 7: ‘I Can’t Live by Myself’
Life After Godmersham
1860–1881
She considered it as an act of indispensable duty to clear away the claims of creditors, with all the expedition which the most comprehensive retrenchments could secure, and saw no dignity in any thing short of it.
PERSUASION
In the years following the loss of Godmersham, Marianne seemed well settled in Chawton. Yet, there was no escaping the fact that this home, too, depended on the goodwill of her eldest brother Edward, and the continued health of her younger brother, Charles. If either Edward or Charles were to die, Marianne would be left once more without a home. None of her remaining brothers would be in a position to offer her refuge and, while she knew she would always be welcome as a visitor in the houses of her sisters, they were in reality no more secure than she. If their husbands were to die, they might well find their continued residence in their comfortable homes in question. Fanny, Lady Knatchbull, had already experienced this in 1849, when she had been obliged on the death of her husband to leave Mersham le Hatch, and Lizzy’s husband, Edward Rice, was in poor health. Louisa was even less secure, for Lord George Hill’s estate would pass on his death not to her son, but to her stepson Arthur who, though also her nephew, would have it within his power to follow the example of his uncle, Edward Knight, and dispose of the house without reference to its occupants. Louisa had to hope that he would regard her not simply as his aunt but as the dowager, traditionally permitted to stay in the Irish Big House ‘for her day’.1
Louisa’s legal position had always been tenuous in the eyes of the law, and she had already endured the distress of a parliamentary investigation of her marriage. For her, uniquely among her siblings, the good opinion of Irish society was as necessary as the maintenance of position in England. The marriage of her stepdaughter Norah Hill to Somerset Ward in 1859 had been a welcome social success, consolidating two already powerful political families, the Bangors and the Downshires. Apart from the happiness of the young couple, there was no doubt that both families’ influence in society and politics could be further strengthened by such a suitable alliance. Lord George’s philanthropic efforts and natural gift for publicity had won him the reputation of having saved Gweedore from the worst ravages of the famine: indeed, by 1851, the population, which had been 3,997 ten years before, had increased to 4,300, and it would rise over the next thirty years by another thousand.2 Yet, this apparent calm was to some extent illusory for, by the time of Norah’s wedding, Lord George had a number of opponents who took the view that he had not supported but colonised the land. While his enterprise had been highly successful, subdivision of land continued, no large town had developed, and the district ‘had the dubious distinction of having the lowest poor law valuation per capita (6s. 6d.) in the west’.3
Some prefiguring of this growing dissatisfaction had been apparent as early as 1849, when Lord George, escorting an admiring Thomas Carlyle round Bunbeg with all its improvements, was approached by a distressed Irish squire, reduced to begging in the streets. Carlyle tells the story almost as an aside:
Ancient Irish squire actually ‘begging’ here; follows about in blue camlet cloak, always some cock-and-bull story, which Lord George, unable to escape by artifice, coldly declares in words that he can’t listen to. Strange old squire; whisky all along and late failure of potatoes have done it; gets no rent, won’t sell, ‘a perfect pest,’ the fisher calls him.4
This oddly jarring tale serves as a reminder that there were, and remain to the present day, varying opinions of Lord George’s enterprise. The changes to the system did not benefit everyone, and it is both remarkable and disappointing to observe that neither Carlyle nor Lord George showed any compassion towards the old squire. Moreover, while there seems no doubt that Lord George tried his best to help his tenants, it appears that a substantial number of the population felt that they too had been dispossessed through the establishment of his businesses and his reorganisation of their farming practices.
Though, as historian Peter Gray puts it, ‘the success of Lord George’s paternalist improvements in Donegal was a model for all landowners’, the very term ‘paternalist’ suggests the source of the difficulties inherent in the scheme. As Gray explains, despite the fact that he was considered an exemplary landlord, Lord George’s methods ‘were not without controversy, and a tenant backlash forced him to discontinue his work in 1856’.5 This backlash, almost impossible to imagine ten years earlier as the famine took hold, occurred when Lord George introduced English and Scottish sheep farmers as the next part of his plan of improvement. As a consequence, the animosity growing among an increasingly dissatisfied tenantry in the years following the famine began to find expression. Previously, as Lord George had been relatively tolerant of older farming practices and had not been over zealous in asserting his property rights, the changes he introduced to the area had not occasioned widespread resentment. Though he had altered a well-established settlement pattern he had, as Brendan Mac Suibhne points out, ‘improved agricultural production; stimulated a more monetised and market-oriented economy; increased the consumption of shop goods; created more agricultural employment; developed the tourist industry and facilitated the expansion of state services in the area.’6
Despite the fact that Lord George had encountered some opposition at the outset of his enterprise, no general outcry had ensued, at least partly because the mill, grain store and shop he had introduced were seen to be of benefit to more than the landlords and because, as letters between Louisa and Fanny show, it was known that he had used his own money to ensure a supply of meal to his tenants during the famine. Lord George listened to his tenants, tried to see their point of view and preferred, when it did not conflict with his own interests, to maintain good relations with them. Where his interests were threatened, however, he was quite prepared to protect them.7As W.E. Vaughan remarks: ‘Lord George Hill was able to enforce a monopoly for his shop in Gweedore by threatening rivals with eviction; but few landlords had such a command of territory.’8 That command was strengthened by respect, even among those who doubted his motives, for the fact that he lived on the land, spoke the language and, during the time of the great famine, worked to bring relief to his tenants.
Times changed during the 1850s and, while the Knights, Knatchbulls, Rices and the Hills themselves were concerned with the economic and personal consequences of the Crimean war, agrarian crime became a distinct problem in Gweedore. Tenants felt less inclined to allow themselves to be told where they might or might not graze their cattle. One of Lord George’s bailiffs had his boat destroyed; a wall on the Hill estate was demolished; cattle belonging to his agriculturalist had their tails docked; papers relating to the estate and rents were stolen from Lord George’s office; and his gamekeeper was set upon when he accompanied a process server. Lord George was by nature neither unkind nor ungenerous. Yet, his patience was tried. He took the view that providence had sent this harsh lesson to be heeded by all, landlords and tenants alike. He was not a wealthy man, having sunk most of his 1836 inheritance first into the acquisition of the estate, and subsequently into trying to ensure a supply of food for his tenants during the famine. In addition, he had five children to launch in life – commissions to purchase or university fees to pay for his sons and seasons to finance and marriages to broker for his two daughters – if their place in society was to be maintained.
Lord George clearly felt it necessary to review his own practices, and began raising rents, calling in fees and fines which he had waived in better days. He did not adopt the stringent measures introduced by some of his fellow landlords and, where he raised rents, was less draconian than the rest, allowing some abatement. In 1854, significantly, he stopped his old practice of ignoring tenants’ stock trespassing on his land and began impounding strays and levying fees. It was at this time that he began leasing land to Engl
ish and Scottish sheep farmers. For the first time, tenants on his estates were denied grazing on rough pastures to which they believed they would always have access rights. Donegal, as part of the historic province of Ulster, believed in the ‘Ulster custom’ of tenant right.9 Lord George’s tenants were affronted to see fields let to those they regarded as outsiders and, as the harvest was again poor, the parish priest, Father Doherty, began to be called in by the tenants to plead their cause. Father Doherty tried to obtain relief from the Lord Lieutenant: he failed, but managed to obtain Indian meal in Dunfanaghy for them. This shift was significant: the priest now took the role assumed during the famine by Lord George. Soon, Lord George himself – who referred to Father Doherty as ‘the obnoxious priest’ – appeared to his tenants to be part of the problem.10 As W.E. Vaughan puts it:
the introduction of imported Scots sheep, accompanied by Scots shepherds, had caused an outbreak of serious disorder on Lord George Hill’s estate ... the tenants killed hundreds of sheep because they feared eviction; several tenants were convicted of maliciously killing the sheep and one was transported and several imprisoned.11
Unlike the wars in the Crimea and India, where the enemy seemed clearly identifiable, this insidious war at home was one of attrition, where threats and cruelties, large and small, pitted landlord and tenant against one another. Different, too, from post-famine dissatisfaction, which has been compared to the reaction in Scotland to the Highland Clearances, the misery of the sheep war was exacerbated by the active presence of a highly-organised network known as the Molly Maguires: their campaign of terror was met by the introduction of extra police and increased taxes, which the residents of Gweedore struggled to pay.12 While an uneasy peace was re-established by the end of the decade, matters were never again quite as they had been: smallholders might indeed have regained access to the rough pasture which had been denied to them, but their rents now incorporated grazing fees.13 As Lord George welcomed his son home from India and gave his daughter in marriage to a veteran of both the Crimea and the Mutiny, he was already landlord to a new generation, lacking even limited trust in landlord–tenant relations.
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