Aristocrats (12 page)

Charles Frederick, Controller of His Majesty’s Fireworks, organised the show. In the middle of the garden stood a triumphal arch with lamps burning on its roof. It was a symbol of unity and of military might. At the four corners of the garden conical pyramids, like miniature helter-skelters lit up with spiralling lights, each supported an illuminated crown in honour of the Duke’s royal guests. Between them, ranged along the terrace, were huge Catherine wheels. Wooden rings, anchored to the river bottom, bobbed on the water. Further out into the river lay a barge laden with sky rockets, and from there Mr Frederick orchestrated the fiery performance: ‘200 water mines, 20 air balloons, 200 fire trees, 5000 water rockets, 5000 sky rockets, 100 fire showers, 20 suns and a hundred stars’ lent lustre to the occasion.

The show started on the river. Rockets shot dizzyingly into the black night sky. The hot jets sped upwards until their tops exploded into golden palm trees, whose leaves fell towards the water. At the surface they crashed into their reflections, hissed and expired. Their ghosts, wraiths of steam, drifted like white muslin handkerchiefs over the upturned faces of the crowd. In an interval the plop-plop of the roman candles, burning on the wooden rings beneath the railings, accentuated the calm. Then explosions from a battery of mortars reeled against the side of Richmond House, rebounded and collided with oncoming waves of sound. Noise sprays rose in the air and then followed the tracks of their fiery brethren towards the burning water. Next the Catherine wheels were lit on the terrace. As they turned faster and faster they whistled and creaked. Their whirling petals gave off showers of incandescent pollen that fell to the ground in shimmering arcs. Faces glowed and then faded away. Finally the triumphal arch was illuminated and, as the noise died down, light spread across the crowd packed into the garden and lit up the royal barge on the river. Music and dancing began. At two in the morning the Duke leant against the railings on the terrace and sang patriotic songs for his guests and family.

8 August 1750

With alternate thrills of hot and cold the Duke lay shivering in a fever at Godalming. Sedgwick, his secretary, sat anxiously by him. Wormwood,
Artemisia absinthium
, dark, bitter and oily, was prescribed to bring down the Duke’s temperature. The Duke drank it, hardly aware of his surroundings. He lay between damp sheets, confused by fever and weakened by dehydration. Days and nights passed blurrily in the darkened room. Gradually the house filled up. From London, Truesdale and Middleton, the family doctors, came with medicines and assistants. The Duke’s landau brought the Duchess and her servants from Goodwood. Relatives and friends came in and went quietly out. In the midst of
this muffled commotion the Duke travelled alone into the dark extinction of death. Slowly but surely fever pulled him into the void from life, light and happiness. On the tenth day the Duke died.

A few hours later Middleton took off his frock-coat and rolled up his fine white cotton sleeves. He picked up his knife, pressed it against the dead Duke’s soft, resisting stomach and then pressed harder until the skin broke and parted. Middleton cut a deep, straight line down the Duke’s navel. He sliced through the pinky-grey skin, the gelatinous yellow layer of fat and the thick red muscle wall. From the thin skin of the peritoneum Middleton’s warm, gloveless hands pulled out the cold intestines and burrowed down into the pelvic cavity to reach the bladder. Picking up a small steel scalpel he slit the bladder open. The bladder was irritated and inflamed like a small balloon but there was no trace of any stones.

Left alone in the room to refine and practise his diagnostic skills, Middleton rummaged about amongst the dead Duke’s cold and solidifying organs. He split open a section of intestines and examined the stomach. After some time he carefully put the pieces back again, pressing down the grey, sausage-like intestines, and threaded a length of cat gut through the eye of a large needle. He tied a knot in the end of the thread and, pulling the severed skin together, sewed the body up with a line of stitches that ran in parallel down the abdomen. Then he washed his hands in a basin standing on the floor. The Duke’s body, cleaned and dressed, was prepared to make its final journey to a dark vault in Chichester Cathedral.

A year later the Duchess, too, was dead. Two sons and three daughters passed into her eldest children’s care. Caroline and Emily were no longer daughters in the world’s eyes. They were mothers, wives, sisters. At first grief drowned out their
parents’ voices and to bystanders the Duke and Duchess became paintings on the wall and remembered voices that faded to the written word as the years went by. But as their grief died down, Emily and Caroline, still daughters in their minds, began to hear their parents speak. So began a colloquy that would go on until they in their turn left the world to their grieving children. Caroline and Emily joined in the huge mute conversation humanity carries on with the dead that stretches back through the ages as, with silent self-justifications and voiceless wrangles, children whisper to parents and they, children in their turn, lisp confidences to lost mothers and fathers. On the walls of Holland House and Goodwood, the Duke and Duchess were immobile and mute. In their children’s minds they flitted in and out, watchful, loving, censorious, always listening, and still alive.

Chapter 2

Louisa and Sarah

PART ONE

‘You have been very good indeed to the family on this occasion’.

3 rd Duke of Richmond to Henry Fox, 30 November 1750
.

'Poor dear Lady Kildare is in the utmost affliction, for she loved her father extremely, and is very unhappy about the poor Duchess of Richmond, whom I pity very much. I am doing all I can to keep her from sinking under her grief, as she can’t cry enough to ease herself. I have had her out in the one horse chaise alone three hours this morning, which I think she is the better for. I don’t leave her for a minute.’ The Earl of Kildare thus reported Emily’s misery to Fox after the Duke’s death in 1750.

Kildare deferred to Fox because Fox was now
de facto
head of the family. With the Duchess’s death in 1751, all family relations changed again. In his will, the Duke, who had forgiven but not forgotten Caroline’s elopement, passed over his eldest daughter in assigning homes and mentors for his younger children and entrusted the three little girls to Emily’s care if the Duchess died. So now Louisa, aged eight, Sarah six and
Cecilia little more than a year old, were sent to Ireland. Carton House became their home and Emily became a second mother to them. The two boys, Charles, now third Duke of Richmond, and Lord George Lennox, continued their education in England and abroad. Richmond was an amorous and pedantic schoolboy of fifteen when his father died and he looked to Fox for guidance, calling him his ‘best friend’ and his ‘second father’.

Despite his youth, the third Duke had gradually to assume his father’s mantle. As he grew up his brother and sisters endowed him with the age-old rights accompanied by the duties and responsibilities that rested with heads of families. He would help search for suitable husbands for the younger children and reserved the right of veto over any they chose for themselves. Marriage settlements, annuities and wills were his to discuss and settle. In quarrels he acted as arbiter and at times of crisis he provided safe haven and money. Exasperated though they might be by his preachy stubbornness, his siblings deferred to their brother and depended on him to defend the family’s interests. Caroline was now a Fox and Emily a Kildare, but neither in their own minds ceased being a part of the Lennox family. So the Duke’s influence was considerable.

The third Duke went on the Grand Tour when his father died, and he stayed abroad until January 1756. Fox, sometime renegade and outcast, now protected the interests of an extended family created by two generations of Richmond marriages. For the moment the family was united. Kildare and the third Duke of Richmond joined Fox’s political circle as did Kildare’s brother-in-law the Earl of Hillsborough, an Irish peer who lived largely in England and spent a good deal of time at Holland House, to Caroline’s occasional chagrin. At the periphery of political although not always of family affairs were Henry’s brother Stephen Fox and, from the other side, Lord Albemarle, a career soldier and diplomat who had married the second Duke of Richmond’s sister. Albemarle
and Stephen Fox spent little time in London, but they lent weight to the Fox and Richmond interests in the west country. Other relations, Cadogans, Digbys and Brudenells, also stood within the pale. Beyond them the family branched into a plethora of ‘cousins’, as more remote relations were indiscriminately dubbed. Such relationships grew fainter with distance, spreading out like ripples in a pond, but the blood tie remained; Caroline and Emily even acknowledged the Old and Young Pretenders, descendants of their great-grandfather’s brother, as cousins.

Members of this extended family might vote with the Pelham ministry if they had parliamentary seats and might support one another’s extra-parliamentary ventures if they did not. They met socially and, as time went on, they intermarried. In return for votes and support those, like Henry Fox, who had powerful offices, expected and were expected to look after the family interests with places and emoluments. When the second Duke died, Fox, as Secretary at War, prepared the Duke’s younger son, Lord George Lennox, a schoolboy of thirteen, for a military career by buying him a commission and getting him sinecures to supplement his modest army pay. Similar distributions of pensions and offices amongst the family, and amongst those to whom the family felt beholden, went on throughout the century.

Complicating this picture of state-funded largesse were serious and lasting political quarrels which affected the women of the family just as acutely as its active politicians. There were also occasional disputes between women that spilled over into politics. By the end of the century family alliances were intact in some places and irrevocably fractured in others: the extended family was by no means synonymous with the happy family or with the political coterie.

The year 1751 saw the family grieving but united. The third Duke was surveying battlefields, studying botanical, geological and biological specimens in Europe’s newest museums, and seducing women in its most illustrious drawing-rooms,
pleasure gardens and brothels. He was accompanied by Abraham Trembley, a biologist and educationalist who had made a name for himself in one of the most contentious debates that convulsed scientific circles in the eighteenth century. Biologists and botanists, seized with taxonomic fever, were trying to establish the differences between plants and animals, carving up the natural world into mineral, vegetable and animal fiefdoms with the same enthusiasm that European nations were dividing each new-found uncolonised land. Trembley’s proof that the marine polyps that drifted on the Solent tides were not plants but animals made him famous, and his renown opened museums and cabinets, gardens and menageries to the young Duke in his charge. Of Richmond himself Trembley wrote, with some restraint, ‘he loves dogs prodigiously; he loves also the human race and the feminine race.’

While his older brother was learning military and amatory strategy, Lord George Lennox continued his own education at Westminster School. In London, Henry Fox’s job was made easy by peace. When Parliament reassembled after the summer recess in November 1751, Fox wrote happily to Hanbury Williams, ‘There never was such a session as this is likely to be. The halcyon days the poets wrote of cannot exceed its calmness. A bird might build her nest in the speaker’s chair, or in his peruke. There won’t be a debate that can disturb her.’

As the duties of the Secretary at War declined, Fox’s interest in his two children, and particularly in his younger son, grew. Charles had inherited his father’s hairiness, as Fox reported the day after he was born. ‘He is weakly, but likely to live. His skin hangs all shrivelled about him, his eyes stare, he has a black head of hair, and ’tis incredible how like a monkey he looked before he was dressed.’ From this inauspicious beginning, Charles grew into a handsome child. Abandoning any claims to disinterestedness, Fox wrote to Hanbury Williams when the boy was a year old, ‘Charles is playing by
me and surprises me with the éclat of his beauty every time he looks me in the face.’ Two years later Hoare painted him, resplendent in bandana and silks, plump and swarthy like his father.

When politicians came to Holland House they saw and reported on Fox the father as well as Fox the Secretary at War. MPs who knew Fox as a brilliant administrator and a ruthless manager of men were astonished at his fatherly sentimentality and concern. In the 1750s, England was at the beginning of a love affair with children and with domesticity that was swelled by and in turn fuelled an outpouring of sentimental novels, paintings of sweet infants and happy family groups and books of advice about raising and educating children. Visitors to great houses noticed children everywhere; they were spoiled, deferred to and adored. Astonished callers at Holland House were among the first to see affairs of state supplanted by childhood illness and parental pride and care. Richard Rigby, a protégé of the Duke of Bedford and soon of Fox himself, came to Holland House one afternoon in the 1750s to talk politics. But he stayed to administer alcoholic relief to an unhappy father. ‘I dined at Holland House, where, though I drank claret with the master of it till two o’clock in the morning, I could not wash away the sorrow he is in at the shocking condition his eldest son is in, a distemper they call Sanvitoss dance (I believe I spell it damnably), but it is a convulsion I think must kill him.’