Aristocrats (15 page)
Sometimes the flow of news and ideas faltered. Twice in the 1750s Emily and Caroline disagreed and their letters became more formal and less frequent. The first coolness, in 1754, was about politics. During the 1740s, the Irish exchequer had accumulated a large surplus which the Westminster government demanded. The Patriot Party, to which Kildare belonged, claimed the surplus and treated it as a symbol of Ireland’s right to greater local autonomy. To get redress, Kildare decided to bypass ‘the Castle’, as the Westminster government in Dublin was called, and take the matter directly to the King.
In the spring of 1754, Kildare arrived in London with a long petition addressed to the monarch which justified both himself and his party and laid out their joint grievances. Kildare’s presence was an embarrassment to Fox, who had already written angrily to his brother: ‘Lord Kildare has deceived himself or been deceived most egregiously, and must be much mortified.’ The duties of Fox’s office bound him to rebuff his brother-in- law, while the duties of family bound him to support him.
Fox was unwilling to lose even the smallest political battle on behalf of his brother-in-law. So he tied Kildare up in bureaucratic knots, sending him to fruitless appointments with ministers, but persuading him not to push his luck as far as the King himself. The long petition languished unread in Kildare’s trunk. But Kildare’s mission was not wasted, because the memorial raised his reputation among Dublin’s Protestants. Scorned in Westminster, Kildare became something of a figurehead in Dublin. A medal was struck, showing him like a dragon, guarding Ireland’s money from the English predator. Bonfires were lit in Dublin that gave off golden sparks of Irish defiance. Yet this local triumph had a familial cost. From the 1750s onwards Irish politics were to be a difficult matter for the whole family.
The second dispute, in 1758, was conducted more in innuendoes than open accusations; but feelings ran high on both sides. Ostensibly about the futures of Louisa and Sarah, now almost fifteen and thirteen, its real subjects were Emily’s comfort and Caroline’s self-esteem. Caroline had always assumed that Louisa and Sarah would be sent to London to be floated on the English marriage market. In the autumn of 1758 she began to make arrangements for Louisa’s arrival, hoping to reclaim her father’s posthumous good opinion by finding her sister an eligible husband.
Emily had few intentions of letting Louisa go. To Louisa and Sarah, Emily, at twenty-six, was at once mother and sister. They looked up to her as a figure of authority and confided in her as an equal; Sarah called her both ‘dearest siss’ and ‘Queen of Ireland’. Emily was determined not to lose the pleasure of this enviable position. So she and Kildare began looking round for a suitable Irish husband for Louisa. Caroline was hurt and the dispute was referred to their brother. Trying to keep the peace, the third Duke declared that Emily and Caroline would be equally good guardians. Emily, used to being flattered, was offended; Caroline was hurt at Emily’s offence which she construed as a slight to her: ‘the thing I
took to heart was your seeming to think my brother’s having an equal good opinion of me as you was an offence to you. I can’t look upon that in any other light.’ The hurt rankled. Caroline was angered that her elopement was held against her capabilities as a sister and she wanted Louisa with her precisely so that she could wipe away what she saw as the stain of her father’s will.
Emily declared they might disagree even more if they lived closer together. But Caroline swept away this attempt to smooth over their differences. ‘I believe the contrary, at least I know myself I’m much oftener disposed to be angry at people when they are absent; its easier to explain things when together.’ But Emily disregarded Caroline’s claims and pressed on in the search for a husband for Louisa. Her first choice Louisa rejected out of hand. The second, twenty-year-old Thomas Conolly, Louisa accepted. From the Kildares’ point of view, Conolly was the perfect match. He was the richest man in Ireland and, although he was without political experience himself, his family had been connected with nationalist politics for half a century and so he could be counted on to support Kildare and the Patriot Party. Outweighing all this, for Emily, was the fact that Conolly’s park was next to her own and Castletown, his mansion, was the nearest big house to Carton. Married to Conolly, Louisa would scarcely even be leaving home, and Emily could look forward to a lifetime of comfortable chats and sisterly service.
PART TWO
‘I can never deserve all he does for me’.
Louisa to Emily, 10 April 1759
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Thomas Conolly had an education appropriate to a young man of vast fortune. Painted by Mengs in Rome, Conolly dressed for the occasion in an elaborate brocaded coat. He
gestured towards a line of marble muses whose attire, instruments and place under a huge marble column vaguely suggested a knowledge of classical learning and antiquities. Beyond such a gesture, Conolly had little interest in the ancient world. Rome and the rest of the Grand Tour made little impression on him. When he returned to Ireland he took up the life of a country gentleman with unaffected pleasure. He cut his hair short and curling round the ears and swapped his grand clothes for a simple cravat and riding-coat. In Conolly’s portrait by Reynolds, painted in about 1760 for the Holland House gallery, the classical props are abandoned. Conolly wears an olive-green overcoat and a white shirt. In the background a rapidly brushed swirl of clouds, good practice for a studio assistant, suggests only the out of doors. No books or speeches show that Conolly aspires to be a dilettante or politician. Reynolds painted Conolly open faced and slightly open mouthed, an honest man in a country setting. Eight years later, firmly established in his identity of ‘Squire Conolly’, he was painted again, by the Irish artist Healy. This time one of Conolly’s race horses, huge and gaunt, fills the centre of the painting, while Conolly, modestly taking a subsidiary role, is almost edged off the side.
By 1768, when this last picture was made, Conolly was thirty. He was a formidably strong man, liable to fits of hypochondria if deprived of hunting, racing and ‘rough riding’ over his estate. As this painting showed, horses were Conolly’s greatest pleasure; he was quite content to share any canvas with his charger, his trainer and a groom. His house he shared with sporting companions from many walks of life. Happy days in his calendar were those marked by equestrian achievement in the field or on the track.
Conolly scrawled enough figures in his account books to show that racing, hunting and gambling on horses cost him a great deal. In 1776 he lost a small fortune at Almack’s Club in London. As Louisa put it, ‘the dear soul was so often called there by bets upon his horses that it drew him into a little
gambling. The money he lost (happily) won’t really hurt him … It was reported he had ruined himself, but I am sure his losses altogether were under £10,000.’ Such a reverse would have ruined many prosperous country gentlemen, but Louisa could afford her insouciance; by the 1770s Conolly’s rent round was bringing in around £25,000 a year.
This wealth was new, made by Thomas Conolly’s great uncle, William ‘Speaker’ Conolly in the years after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Land sequestered from defeated Jacobites was bought up by William III’s supporters; fortunes were made and the Protestant Ascendancy secured. In the turbulence humble men, William Conolly among them, pushed their way to prominence. The son of Protestant innkeepers from Donegal, Conolly trained as a lawyer, but soon moved from settling land deals to making them. At the same time he acted as Collector and Receiver of revenue for the government, thus ensuring a steady supply of cash to finance his purchases. After his election as MP for Donegal, he quickly built up a political machine that rivalled his land-holdings in size, and ended his career as Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, spokesman for Irish Protestant nationalism and the richest man in Ireland. He had extensive lands in the north and west of the island, a large Dublin house and Castletown, a magnificent ‘pile of building’, twelve miles to the west of the capital. In 1729 Conolly died and his property and fortune passed to his brother Patrick and thence to Louisa’s Thomas Conolly, who inherited in 1754.
Despite the fact that Thomas Conolly’s mother was an English aristocrat, from the Wentworth family, he was seen as irremediably Irish and had to pay a high premium for a well connected English bride. The settlement for Louisa, made before their marriage, was his exchange for entering ducal and courtly circles. Lands with an annual rent-roll of £6,178 were settled on Louisa to provide a widow’s pension and fortunes for younger children. For the time being these rents supplied the £3,000 a year Conolly paid his mother. On top of this
money, Louisa had several hundred pounds a year of ‘pin money’ to do what she liked with. On the Lennox side, the Duke of Richmond handed over to Conolly Louisa’s £10,000, owed her from her father’s will. For Conolly the marriage meant an alliance with the Kildares, Richmonds and Foxes. For Louisa it meant wealth and proximity to her sister. The young couple were married on 30 December 1758. Louisa was fifteen, her husband twenty. Still smarting from her defeat in their recent quarrel, Caroline wrote tersely to Emily with her ‘sincere congratulations to you on this happy occasion,’ adding, ‘I will not interrupt your present joy by entering into any more of the particulars now subsisting between us.’
When Louisa married Conolly she also married his house. In the years to come she bestowed immense devotion on the fabric of each. In 1758 Castletown was, like its proprietor, a sturdy but undecorated structure, outwardly complete but unfinished inside. It had no hothouses, nurseries or landscaping.
Castletown has an exterior as severe as those of many Dublin town houses. It stands on flat ground by the banks of the Liffey, which meanders sluggishly through the park. The south-facing front is a flat rectangle of shining, dense, cream-coloured limestone, four storeys high, thirteen windows and 140 feet wide. A simple columned porch outlines the entrance, from which two shallow flights of steps flow to the driveway in wide undulations. The same stark regularity is repeated round the sides of the house and along its north front. From the upstairs windows the blue humps of the Wicklow Mountains dominate the southern skyline.
Castletown house, as originally planned in the 1720s by its Italian architect, Alessandro Galilei, was a Palladian box on such a huge scale that its geometry was transformed into monumentality. It did not stay so simple long. Very soon an element of the rococo crept into the design; a hint of the sumptuousness that was played off against plainness in
Ascendancy life. Edward Lovett Pearce, an Irish architect, added two curving colonnades that, with a suggestion of caprice and two necklace-like rows of sculpted urns, link the main house to its satellite offices and kitchens. To the right and east of the main block sit the stables and kennels, to the left are the kitchens and household offices. Castletown’s unfinished interior offered Louisa endless scope for what she and her sisters called ‘business’. Decoration, landscaping and building occupied Louisa for 25 years.
But it was in England, not Ireland, that Tom and Louisa spent the first couple of years of their married life. Early in 1759 they left Dublin for Park Gate in Cheshire, arriving there on 13 March after what Louisa called ‘a charming passage of thirteen hours in the night air’. Park Gate was a small port with a large custom house and a harbour deep enough to take the ships that churned back and forth across the Irish Sea. Now it lies mired and silted up in the muddy chocolate skirts of the Dee estuary. But two hundred years ago it was the favourite landing place for passengers from Dublin. The alternative was Holyhead in Wales, which was closer to Dublin but further from London. Park Gate made sense for Tom and Louisa because their first destination was Stretton Hall in Staffordshire, the Conolly family seat in England. At Stretton Louisa looked around her with the eagle eye of prospective ownership and pronounced the house ‘a sweet, dear, lovely, pretty place’. Her new Conolly relatives, delighted with the marriage, used much the same adjectives about her. But Louisa was also lost without her sisters and she clung to Conolly for comfort, writing to Emily, ‘I hate to have Mr Conolly leave me at all … for then I feel quite forlorn, as if I wanted somebody. You have no notion, my dearest sister, how happy I am to have so sweet a picture of you as I have to wear constantly; its the greatest pleasure almost I have, to look at it so constantly as I do.’ Louisa’s initiation at Stretton over, she and Conolly proceeded nervously to London, to be presented at Court and at Holland House.
Henry Fox, quick to serve the family interest, had written to Conolly at Park Gate, offering him the vacant parliamentary seat of Malmesbury, which was up for sale to a suitable candidate at four or five hundred pounds. But although Malmesbury was the primary subject of his letter, Fox was also writing to make sure that Louisa and Conolly would not upset Caroline by appearing visibly taken aback when they saw Ste’s twitching and trembling. Ste was still very ill. ‘As yet there is no amendment in my dearest child,’ Caroline told Emily. ‘He will be better for some hours, almost a whole day sometimes, then be as bad as ever again. Wilmot, Duncan, Truesdale, Ranby and a Doctor Reeves out of the city attend him; he is now taking tin. As yet nothing seems to have any effect.’ Fox’s caution was in vain; Louisa was horrified by Ste and Caroline noticed it. But Caroline, in her turn, was shocked by Conolly. On 3 April, a week after Louisa’s arrival, Caroline wrote carefully to Emily, ‘Mr Conolly seems vastly good natured’. But by 17 April she had thrown this caution to the winds: ‘You must indeed be partial to Conolly not to think him immensely silly, dear siss; sure, he is a tiresome boy, and one feels sorry he is so, he seems so exceedingly good natured. I can but think how miserable I should have been at Louisa’s age to have had such a husband. I hope and believe she won’t find it out ever, but I should have thought it dreadful.’ Caroline’s criticism offended Emily, who replied that Conolly did not ‘want sense’, although to Kildare she wrote, ‘I should never think of comparing you to poor Conolly in anything’. Memories of the recent quarrel still lingered and Caroline hurried to make up for her blunder. Conolly, she agreed, was not stupid, but ‘in company he is dreadful sometimes’. By the middle of June Caroline had decided that Conolly was bumptiously childish rather than simply empty headed. ‘To be sure he is reckoned a mighty silly boy, but … I feel to love him, he is so good natured, neither is it a kind of silly way I dislike so much as others. I look upon him as a boy of ten or eleven years old,
and treat him as such. I only dread her feeling ashamed of him sometimes.’