Aristocrats (11 page)
Kildare did not always follow his wife’s hints about his political conduct. Obsessed with duty and probity, he was fatally hostile to expediency. Often he was so busy detecting a wrong that he neglected his own career. Friends noted that he would go out of his way to detect a politically insignificant subordinate in a lie and Caroline, with a touch of impatience, commented to Emily on Kildare’s ‘great veracity’.
Kildare was in London on political business several times in the years after he and Emily were married. Politics brought Kildare and Fox together and Emily and Caroline got to know one another again after a separation of four years. Caroline hoped that Emily would smooth the way towards a reconciliation with her parents, but Emily was soundly rebuffed. The winter of 1747 was a difficult one for Caroline. Rejected again by her parents, she began also to suspect that Fox was unfaithful. In the aristocratic circles in which Foxes and Richmonds moved, young unmarried men often had quite settled relationships with lower-class women, especially servant girls, women of the town and actresses. Fox was no exception; he now had two children by his mistress Ally, a barely literate woman whom he had installed in the west country with a small pension. After marriage, affairs were openly tolerated, although liaisons with childless wives, who might thus produce heirs of doubtful patrimony, were frowned upon.
This was changing; notions of domestic felicity and a greater marital fidelity were beginning to make inroads into Caroline’s circle amongst both men and women. They were creating a schizophrenic outlook towards men’s behaviour.
Caroline approved of ‘gallantry’ for her brothers, and she was to encourage her sons’ affairs, saying that being ‘in love’ was very good for boys. But from her own husband she wanted a commitment that any affairs he might have would be confined to the level of sex with servant girls. She was not prepared to tolerate a mistress, certainly not a mistress from her own circle. Mistresses were fine, she suggested, but not in her household or life.
In the winter of 1747 she suspected that Fox was straying. That year her annual trip to Bath made her feel lonely and depressed. She disliked herself for her peevishness but for several weeks she was unwilling to confront Fox with her anxieties, and she turned her anger on herself, writing only, ‘if you was ill natured I should be better to you’. The preparation of bark and bitters that her doctor prescribed suited her mood but did nothing to cure her suspicions. Finally, on 20 February 1748, three weeks after her arrival, she told Henry what was on her mind. She dated her letter ‘Ste’s birthday’ and noted by the date, ‘this time three years [ago] you began not to love me so much’. The accusation poured out, jumbled and confused by misery. ‘I was never so much convinced of your being tired of me as I have been for a month before I left London and ever since I came here. Nothing but your coming to see me can convince me you wish to be with me. I’m vexed to the greatest degree in the world and don’t care whether I ever get well or no.’ Caroline was certain that Henry had ‘
particular reasons’
for wanting her out of London. She wrote on, underlining her words with angry certainty, ‘give me your word and honour not to
vex me (you know what I mean)
.’
Caroline’s accusation of infidelity arose as much from her need to create a scenario that would put her in the wrong as from any evidence of Fox’s waning affection. The plan succeeded to perfection. Fox sent off a furious letter of denial and, hard on its heels, an assurance of his love for her. It was one long, ungainly sentence, as bulky and inelegant as its
writer. During a meeting of the Privy Council Fox scribbled to his wife, ‘wherever I am, whatever doing, you are always in my thoughts, deservedly their object and the object of the fondest and, except about dear Ste, the only fond ones my mind admits of.’ Caroline was crushed. ‘In the first place my dear, dear life, I beg you a thousand pardons for my two simple foolish letters. Do forgive me and tell me so and never reproach me again and I’ll endeavour to mend.’
Caroline was right that she had been neglected for the past couple of years. But Fox’s attentions were paid not to another woman but to the duties of office. Conflict in Europe still raged and as Secretary at War, Fox was in the thick of it. Logistical and financial arrangements took up most of his time. If troops moved or went abroad the War Office staff took them from place to place on paper. Horses, carts, matériel, food, clothing and medicines travelled with them. Camps, billets, stabling, fuel and food were prepared at their destinations. Troop ships, slapping emptily at naval docksides, had to be waiting for regiments travelling to Europe or to far-flung and dangerous imperial outposts: Bermuda, the Bahamas, Antigua, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, New York. The War Office drew up army budgets, the Treasury issued money and the Pay Office spent it. Although the War Office came with perks like lodgings and patronage, large sums of money did not pass through the Secretary’s hands. Fox did not grow rich there. In a will made round about 1748, he left the relatively modest sum of £8,000 and a pension for Caroline of £1,100 a year. He disliked the job, moreover, on grounds of morality as well as expediency, understanding that distilled into the ledgers in his office were the disease, death and frustration of armies on the move and at war. He quoted Voltaire on war’s human cost. ‘Amongst all the variety of wishes for peace or war, the lives of mankind have never once been mentioned’ and, without being prepared to lose his job for it, believed in peace. Caroline was much more forthright in her denunciation of war, declaring that war was ‘a disgrace
to human nature’. She called the military profession ‘the murdering trade’ and said, ‘it would grieve me beyond measure to have any of my sons take to it.’ But the War Office was a good position from which to launch a bid for the highest political office. Because all military appointments went through the Crown, Fox saw a good deal of the King. He was active in the House of Commons and close to officials in the Treasury. So he determined to make the most of it and work out a
modus vivendi
with the Commander-in-Chief of the army, George II’s unpopular brother, the Duke of Cumberland. Gradually Fox came to like Cumberland who was, like himself, a corpulent and clever man, and they struck up a political alliance that lasted the length of Fox’s tenure.
During the War of Austrian Succession, Cumberland, or the Captain-General, as he was called, was in charge of a British army that was busy but not notably successful. By 1747, seven years after the outbreak of war, there was a military stalemate and Henry Pelham was determined to end the war. In 1747 he decided to call a general election before making any pacific overtures to the French. Capitalising on the anti-Jacobite mood after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie, he campaigned on an anti-Tory rather than an antiwar ticket, and was returned with an increased majority. Secret negotiations had in fact been under way for over a year and in 1748 they were successfully wound up in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
After Aix-la-Chapelle, Pelham and his ministers quickly cut the size of the army. Fox was busy moving troops back to Britain and disbanding regiments. When the first flurry of decommissioning subsided, dust began to settle again on the ledgers at the War Office and Fox had time for Holland House and family life.
The Duke of Richmond had been keeping a shrewd eye on the career of the Secretary at War. As Fox rose in prominence he also rose in his father-in-law’s estimation. By the early spring of 1748, Richmond was prodding his friend Newcastle
to move Fox up from the War Office. ‘I have but one word to trouble you with,’ he wrote during a Cabinet reshuffle in February 1748, ‘which is to tell you that if Harry Fox should be Secretary of State, the Duchess and I should be vastly happy, though we still wish him the Paymaster’s place, as it is less precarious and a better thing for his family’s sake.’ Fox had been changing in the Duke’s mind. ‘Mr. Fox’ now sometimes gave way to ‘Fox’ and even to ‘Harry Fox’. Fox was successful, popular and no longer a man to scorn. The Duke acknowledged as much, writing, early in 1748, to an ex-mistress from whom he had been separated for many years. ‘My family is numerous; four girls and two boys. The eldest girl, Caroline, married against our wishes a man infinitely beneath her, so we do not see her; but I must tell you this man by his merits and talents is bound to make a name for himself in this country.’ Now that he was a grandparent, Richmond felt that second-hand news about the family in Holland House, passed on by Emily, was no longer enough. He wanted to see Ste and to chat with Fox. So the Duke and Duchess admitted defeat, swallowed their pride and allowed Henry Fox into their family. The preceding four years had turned the tables of affection and need. The Duke’s long letter to Caroline, sent via Fox on 26 March 1748, was ostensibly a gracious offer of reconciliation. But although Caroline and Fox were careful to send grateful replies that fell in with this fiction, both the Foxes and the Richmonds knew that the contest between Henry and the Duke had finally been settled in Fox’s favour.
Because his letter to Caroline was in effect a declaration of love and a document of surrender, Richmond was as careful to lay out the ways in which Caroline had delayed the reconciliation as he was to emphasise that he was prepared to forget the past. The Duke began his letter with a résumé of Caroline’s faults, a face-saving device that did little to make her feel loved. His long letter opened: ‘My dear Caroline, Although the same reason for my displeasure with you exists now, as much as it did the day you offended me, and that the forgiving you is a bad example to my other children, yet they are so
young, that was I to stay until they were settled, the consequence might in all likelihood be that we should never see you as long as we lived, which thoughts our hearts could not bear. So the conflict between reason and nature is over, and the tenderness of parents has gotten the better, and your dear mother and I have determined to see and forgive both you and Mr. Fox.’
Richmond went on to criticise Caroline’s attempts at reconciliation through the intercession of her grandmother Lady Cadogan and then of Emily and Kildare. He warned her not to corrupt the morals of his remaining children and then finished his letter with hopes of seeing little Ste and holding his daughter in his arms once more. ‘One thing more of greatest importance to the future happiness of your family I must mention and recommend to you, which is that I trust to Mr. Fox’s honour, probity and good sense, as well as to yours, that your conversation ever hereafter with any of my children, especially my dear March, may be such as not to lead them to think children independent of their parents. We long to see your dear innocent child, and that has not a little contributed to our present tenderness to you … When we meet, let our affection be mutual and you may be sure that seeing you is proof of the sincerity of ours. So, my dear child, you and Mr. Fox may come here … and both be received in the arms of an affectionate father and mother.’
Caroline and Henry duly displayed the contrition and gratitude that satisfied the demands of family etiquette. Although Caroline never lost a trace of bitterness towards her parents and although the Duchess never fully forgave Fox, the benefits of reconciliation outweighed their nagging grievances. Caroline was reunited with her siblings and saw Sarah, who was born in 1745, a year after Caroline’s elopement, for the first time. The Duke and Duchess happily assumed the role of grandparents. Caroline and her mother were mothers together. The Duchess gave her daughter advice about Ste, who was only five days older than Sarah, and consoled her during the new pregnancy she soon announced.
Within a few months Richmond was a regular guest at Holland House. Fox once again played a masterly hand. In the hour of victory he adopted a flattering attitude of deference and gratitude towards his father-in-law. ‘I beg your Grace the moment you arrive to let me have your orders touching this turtle, which is now alive in salt water in Long Acre, and pray tell me what cook I must have.’ He sent the Duchess an expensive present, a snuff-box – both she and Caroline were fond of snuff – ordered from the Meissen factory by the devoted Hanbury Williams whom Fox seemed determined to include in both the beginning and the end of his rejection by the Richmond family. The little box, roughly two by two-and-a-half inches, had a gently domed lid. Its porcelain panels, set in Dresden gold, were painted with bouquets of flowers and the box was sealed with a shell-shaped clasp. But Fox’s present had a secret. Inside the lid was a portrait of Caroline herself, copied in the Meissen factory from a miniature Fox sent Hanbury Williams. But it was only Caroline’s image Fox gave back to her mother. Its original, he hinted, he kept for himself.
The Duchess accepted Fox’s present, but was never at ease with her son-in-law. Richmond and Fox, in contrast, were soon on excellent terms. They already knew one another well and their political interests were broadly similar. Notionally separated by a generation, there were in fact only four years between them and both were devoted fathers of young children. Richmond, fonder of his girls than his boys, liked to boast of his toddlers’ precociousness. Of Sarah he wrote delightedly to Fox at the end of 1749, when he was forty-eight and she four, ‘There is a cursed hard frost which is very hard upon fox hunters and planters. You are one of those I know that don’t comprehend anybody’s loving hunting, so I must entertain you with a question. Sha Sha ask’d her Mama, upon my being gone out in a bad rainy day, “Esceque Papa est obligé d’aller à la chasse ou escequ’il en a envie?” [
sic
].’ Henry was for the moment unable to compete with this infant bilingualism. But he had happily reported, at the beginning of that
year, the birth of another son born on 24 January 1749. The baby was christened Charles James in honour both of his Stuart ancestry and his grandfather, and his name was a public declaration of the reconciliation between the Fox and Richmond families.
Peace was officially declared in February 1749 and celebrated in late April with the first performance of Handel’s ‘Fireworks Music’ and fireworks in Green Park. The display was a failure. Huge Catherine wheels, nailed to posts near a specially constructed pavilion, obstinately refused to turn. Part of the building, replete with colonnades, statues of Greek gods and a bas-relief of the King, caught fire and burned to the ground. The Duke of Richmond, in an uncharacteristically economical gesture, bought up all the unused and unsuccessful fireworks and used them for a gigantic entertainment of his own. Richmond’s fireworks were a codicil to the peace and a declaration of his new happiness. Caroline and Fox, Emily and Kildare, and Richmond’s own younger children were all together for the first time. Emily had just presented her father with another grandson, born at the beginning of March, bringing his total to four. Fashionable London, invited to Richmond House, celebrated peace, fecundity and family unity.