Even the sheep wars, however, were overshadowed by the shocking eviction in 1861 of forty-seven families by Lord George’s neighbour, John George Adair. Two hundred and forty-four people, including one hundred and fifty-nine children, were left homeless as twenty-eight houses on the Derryveagh estate were either levelled or unroofed, and over eleven thousand acres of land, itself almost barren, left desolate. Adair had had the land only since 1859: a quarrel over trespassing sheep and hunting rights had escalated, and Adair’s steward, James Murray, was murdered in November 1860. Following the precedent of the sheep wars, where some of the Scots shepherds had claimed, falsely, that they were entitled to compensation for sheep that had in fact not been killed but had died of exposure, Murray appears to have colluded with the shepherds on the Adair estate to perpetrate a similar fraud. He paid dearly for his wrongdoing, as did the families Adair suspected of having had a hand in the killing, all of whom were then evicted in the spring of 1861, and most of whom could not afterwards find work or a place to live.14 On Lord George’s estate, however, matters appeared to settle: yet, the memory of the sheep wars and the knowledge of what had occurred on Adair’s neighbouring estate would linger long afterwards.
For Louisa in Ballyare, this gradual disintegration of her husband’s philanthropic enterprise, though incomprehensible to her, could not be allowed to interfere with her priority, the care of her family. She might not have been able to understand the tenants’ point of view but, subject as she was to increasingly severe and debilitating headaches, she could show sympathy for the afflictions of others in the family: a kindly letter of 1863 shows her giving detailed instructions on travelling in Donegal to her nephew Henry Knight, Montagu’s son, a naval cadet plagued with chronic seasickness:
Whenever you get to Lough Foyle come to see us if you can get leave — if you go to Lough Swilly you will be only 8 miles from us — & a car to Rathmullan will bring you with care — From Derry you must have a car to Fort Stewart ferry — cross in a boat & on here — If you can say when you come we will have a car in readiness for you. The ferry boats cross the odd hours from the Derry side, but you can [ask] for a special boat if you get here when the others are gone — Derry is 9 miles from the Ferry & we are 4 miles this side of it — very stormy weather now — you must have been well tossed — I heard from Uncle Charles today & was sorry to hear Papa was poorly — I wish he would go abroad for a few weeks & drink mineral waters to wash out the gout.15
‘Papa’ was Louisa’s eldest brother Edward who, like Charles and Louisa herself, was increasingly subject to gout. By the 1860s, almost all of the Knight siblings were beginning to feel their age. The exception was Marianne, as bright, energetic and lively as she had always been and content in her life at Chawton Rectory. A description of her at Lizzy’s house at Dane Court in 1864, calming an agitated daughter of Lizzy’s, Florence Rice, confirms the impression of a woman able to cope without fuss or hysteria: ‘Floss looks very poorly,’ Lizzy wrote, ‘and burst into tears as soon as she came into the room. Aunt May hurried her off “to take off her things” and she soon recovered poor dear and has been cheerful ever since.’16
The Garden Book which Marianne had begun shortly after she moved to Chawton acts as a kind of objective correlative for her state of mind, indeed for her life, during most of the 1860s. The source of her contentment lay in her care for her brother, for visiting family and, by extension or through substitution, for the plants and trees all around her. She grew roses exotically or improbably named ‘La Séduisante’, ‘Adelaide d’Orleans’, ‘Imperatrice Eugenie’ and even, with a nod to the still fairly recent Crimean war, ‘Lord Raglan’. Her hyacinths – ‘Jenny Lind’ and ‘King of the Netherlands’ – sat together, history and society reflected even in the tranquillity of a rectory garden. She wrote about the care of geraniums and heathers, noted her own solutions for ridding fruit trees of insects and polishing tiles, wrote out her recipes, or ‘receipts’, for herb soup, steamed red cabbage, Rockhampton barley water, gingerbread flats, brandy cherries and, perhaps surprisingly for a lady who had travelled no farther than Ireland, ‘Indian curry’.17 It is a record of thrift as well as of happiness: Marianne had only her annuity of £200 per year, and Charles was no more wealthy than she.18 Yet, the book records their care of the poor and distressed in the parish, work they had begun years before when they were still the comfortable son and daughter of the Great House at Godmersham.
Though now they resembled the old rector Mr Papillon and his unmarried sister, who had been so consistently if gently satirised in Jane’s letters, they had no complaints. A list in the Garden Book for Christmas 1867 reveals that their provision for the poor included jerseys, blankets, hand-knitted socks, ‘linsey gowns’ and ‘crochet shawls’. Some of these may have been Marianne’s own handwork for, like her aunt Jane, who commended her skill when she was seven years old, Marianne was an expert needlewoman; some of their gifts to the poor may have been the work of Lord George’s tenants, as the socks and mittens sent to their family and acquaintance in the Crimea had so often been. The gowns and blankets came from Marianne’s own wardrobe; the jerseys belonged to Charles. At the top of a page written in late 1867, after noting that four shillings and sixpence had been given ‘to help get a greatcoat’ for one of the parishioners, she wrote, in brackets, ‘Charley’.19 At the top of the page is the note ‘relieved by me’ and underneath, ringed, the words ‘& by Charles’. What Marianne did not record on that page was that her brother Charles had died, two months before.
Unlike his sister, Charles had become very frail in late middle age. By October 1867, aged only sixty-three, his health began to cause such grave alarm that Marianne and John, the brother closest in age and sympathy to him, sat at his bedside, just as Charles and Marianne had done with their brother Henry, and Charles himself had done when John was stricken with smallpox. Now that Charles was failing, it fell to Marianne, John, and John’s wife Margaret to tend to their brother. Despite all their care, he sank slowly and painfully, dying on 13 October 1867. A few days later, Margaret wrote to her sister-in-law Lizzy Rice, addressing her rather strangely as ‘Aunt Lizzy’, giving a moving account of his last days. He had been a somewhat reluctant clergyman, without an overpowering vocation for the life; his diaries show a frustrated naturalist, most fully himself in the company of a few siblings or friends, or with plants, birds, dogs and horses. Margaret Knight’s account, however, shows a man at last at peace with himself and his maker, dying in ‘sweet calmness and perfect resignation to God’s will’.20 ‘I had the privilege,’ Margaret wrote to her sister-in-law, with perhaps more emotion than tact, ‘of being with him constantly, night and day. I gladly write to give you any little details that I know you will love to have.’ She continued:
His death was like his lovely peaceful life, no doubts or fears disturbed his mind but all was perfect rest and trust and faith … ‘He would have liked a few years longer had it been so ordained’ but he added ‘God’s time is best, and pardoned and saved, I am ready to go — I have no wish to live’ — One night, as I stood by his side after various expressions, such as these ‘Where am I going to —? What is it! I cannot understand’ he added in a surprised voice ‘Papa!! Papa!! Yes — it is — (then he smiled & nodded 2 or 3 times and waved his hand) how wonderful!!’ — And then this — ‘I see thousands — thousands (raising his voice) how beautiful!! Heavenly! — heavenly — heavenly! Jesus my Saviour’ — ‘Salvation! Glorious thought’ —21
Though Charles seems to have experienced in the last days of his life a final, glorious vision of Heaven, and to have felt the certainty of reunion with his beloved father, the family was greatly grieved at his slow dying. Yet, as Margaret recalled, ‘He was the one to cheer and comfort us when we told him we could not let him go, we could not do without him.’ Margaret was at pains to emphasise her own loss, and her own share of the nursing, hinting perhaps that Lizzy might have done more: ‘It is grievous to us all to lose him (to me I think really as
much as any of you for I have been his constant daily companion by the hour together).’ For her sister-in-law Marianne, however, she had nothing but praise, and a compassionate acknowledgement that hers was the greatest grief of all:
For Aunt May I cannot express my sympathy and sorrow! For it is a doubly bitter trial to her — She is herself under it all, & you know what that means — she sends her love & thanks for yr letter, & she did not write yesterday because there was nothing to say. My husband & I are staying entirely with her, only too glad to give her the least atom of comfort, but we are a sorrowful trio! My husband is completely upset. I never saw him in such deep distress, he loved his brother very dearly, as all who ever knew him must — Dearest Uncle Charles, no one will ever supply his place!22
Margaret’s letter is revealing, not just of her genuine affection for her brother-in-law, but also of a rather defensive sense of her own right to have a place within the family, which may emphasise how very tightly knit it was, and how difficult it may have been for an outsider to enter that closed circle. Her letter speaks too of the enormous loss to John and Marianne. John, always deeply attached to Charles, had not had a very successful life. After Cassandra’s death, his grief was a matter of grave concern to his sisters; and when Godmersham passed away from the family, Fanny’s relief at his having found a wife to care for him was palpable.23 Yet, only a few years after his marriage, he was living in Bath in poor circumstances, for Margaret was not wealthy. After their one child was stillborn, they seem to have moved about in a rather directionless fashion.24 John needed the stability of family and, with his earliest mother-figure, Fanny, growing distant through illness and the decline of her faculties, he looked increasingly to Marianne and to Charles for friendship and guidance.
John was, nonetheless, not quite alone now that Charles was gone: Margaret, though delicate in health, emerges in her one surviving letter as a character of sufficient strength and spirit to ensure his care. In John’s own postscript to this letter, he gave full rein to his grief over Charles’s death, his compassion for May and his sense that Margaret would, indeed, help him recover:
I am sure you will like, my dearest Lizzy, what Margaret has told you, and you will love her when you know what a comfort she was to him — He said to her when she was giving him something — ‘dearest Marg: you are a great comfort & help to me — thank you darling!’ Poor dear darling May, she has borne up wonderfully, & is utterly miserable. I pray that I may never pass such days & nights as I passed by dearest Charles’ bed, waiting for him to die. I could not speak to him, although I wanted so much to do so, 50 things I wished to say but never said one, I knew that the first word would have brought on a burst of grief & I feared to distress him. Today I have looked at him for the last time & wished goodbye to the kindest, best and dearest Brother mortal ever had.25
It seems rather odd that Lizzy was to be persuaded to love her sister-in-law as though she had never met her, since John and Margaret had then been married for fourteen years. There remains an underlying sense that the youngest five of the Godmersham children not only formed a separate unit within the family, but were also slightly less regarded by the older, more comfortable Knights, rather as Jane and Cassandra Austen had been, in their unsought poverty. John had considered Fanny his mother, and to Lizzy, always between the two wings of the family, he signed off his letter most affectionately with ‘God bless you dearest Lizzy.’ None of his other brothers, however, seemed to inspire the affection he felt for Charles, a fact all the more remarkable as Charles was not the only brother to die in 1867. In August of that year, the family had already lost George, Jane’s ‘itty Dordy’, exasperating and greatly loved: yet, it was the loss of Charles which John found hardest to bear.
For Marianne, however, ‘under it all’ and ‘utterly miserable’, there was no spouse to give comfort and assurance that life would someday resume. Once again, she would be dependent for a place to live on the decision of her eldest brother Edward, who had not shown himself to be remarkably compassionate over the loss of Godmersham. It is difficult to decide whether Margaret’s reminding Lizzy that she knew what ‘under it all’ meant, indicates a depressive tendency in the otherwise resolutely cheerful Marianne, or whether Margaret simply meant that Lizzy, having lost so many members of her own family, might understand what it was to be bowed down by grief to the extent that communication became impossible.
It was the last day of October before Marianne could bring herself to write to her eldest sister, and by implication, to Louisa in Ireland. Fanny was staying with their niece, the former Fanny Rice, now the recently-widowed Lady Winchilsea. By the time Marianne wrote, she had collected herself sufficiently to send commiserations to her nephew Reginald Knatchbull and his wife, who had just lost a baby, and to make kind and detailed enquiries about her niece, Fanny. Whatever her feelings may have been at the time of Charles’s death, it is clear that she was not prepared to indulge them. On the contrary, she was readying herself to uproot and, once again, move on:
I have a joint letter from you & Lou to thank you for — My love to her and thanks for hers. Poor dear Reginald and Maria! I am so very sorry for them, of course they are very miserable, & will be most likely till another Baby arrives — poor little dear thing! What sad things keep happening, but they will end in time, and the … happiness that I pray we may all enjoy in another world, will never end… Fanny will have told you that William’s son Edw’d has accepted this Living for 5 Years! We are so very glad not to have a stranger here & he is, & always has been so highly spoken of, & so very popular, wherever he has been, that I think the people will like him better than they w’d anybody else, after our kind, gentle, darling Charles. Drst Ed. very kindly lets me stay on for 3 or 4 months, & will not have the Presentation made out till then — that I may have time to make arrangements. This being the case, and there being constant things for me to do, & see about, I mean to put off paying any visits, except to Lizzy till I leave this for good, so don’t mind, drst Fanny, if I leave you out this time! I shd not like to be away long, & I hope to return here in a fortnight, from the 18th Nov., on which day, our little melancholy party will probably break up — Johnny and Marg’t will go back to their house & I, to D. Court. Mr Rice kindly asked them to go with me wh[ich] we should all have very much liked, but Marg: continues so weak & unwell, her Dr says she muct have complete rest, & not take such a long journey; so they sorrowfully will have soon, I am afraid, to write, & put off their visit — drst Charley has left me all he had — it is not much, as he lost money like the rest of us, & spent more than £1000 in altering this house — but every little helps, when one has not much — I mean to live with Johnny and Marg: they like it, and I can’t live by myself. We don’t know yet, where — it will depend on Edw’d — when he has made up his mind, of course I shall let you all know — but whilst things are so continuing unsettled, there’s no use saying more — the days pass sorrowfully away! We can scarcely yet, believe that we shall never again in this world, see dearest Charley’s lovely face, or hear his sweet voice! So like Papa, in character, as well as in features! He was universally loved by all who knew him! as the quantities of kind, feeling letters we have received abundantly testify. I must send you such a nice, affec’ate one, from his old friend, Archdeacon Crawley! I am sure you will like it: and will you let drst Lizzy see it please, & beg her to send it back to me. I had a better acc’t the other day of Lou’s head, I am thankful to say … We all send our best love to you, dearest Fanny.26
It is a brave letter, minimising her own great distress, and overlooking entirely her brother Edward’s fairly brisk requirement that she quit this home too within three months. Charles had indeed left her all he had. His will, a simple document barely ten lines long, made her his sole beneficiary. No equivalent of the ‘Ulster Custom’ existed for sisters of the clergymen who had improved the property; and, as Marianne knew, the money lost fifty years earlier when Henry Austen’s bank failed had caused great financial hard
ship not only to their father but also to his five youngest children.
Yet, like Charles, Marianne had never lacked courage: just as he had nursed John through smallpox, she had performed the same office for Reginald, the nephew she asks about in this letter, when he had the disease at the age of thirty-two. Nonetheless, the death of Charles called for more than her usual fortitude. He was the brother closest in age to her when they were children; and they had lived for fourteen years in harmonious quietude following the loss of Godmersham, she turning for solace to the garden, he to reading and ornithology. Marianne accepted, like Jane Austen before her, her brother Edward’s continuing power to decide where she and her youngest brother and his ailing wife would live. It does not seem to have occurred to her or to any of the family that Edward might have offered her a home in Chawton House with his family. Like his father, he does not seem to have thought it necessary to do much more for his sister than give her time to consider her position. He was, however, more generous than Sense and Sensibility’s John Dashwood: he appears to have made a house available, for shortly afterwards Marianne, John and Margaret were living at Highway House, near Bentley in Hampshire. Marianne said little and made the best of it, rather more in the spirit of Elinor Dashwood than her literary namesake.
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