Aristocrats (29 page)
The print-room was only one of several improvements to
Castletown that were being made simultaneously through the 1760s and 1770s. As the Castletown account books show, plastering, gilding, glazing, tiling, carpentry and painting in various parts of the house continued unabated for decades. Conolly’s incomplete and haphazard accounts record a steady stream of large disbursements: in 1766, £150 for ‘carpenter’s bill for work at Castletown’, in 1767 ‘plastering £14’, ‘slating £42.14.4’, ‘Bowers paid in full on account of carpentry work £175.8.1’, ‘paid Tilbury the bill for glazing this house £67.3.3’, ‘paid Tilbury his bill in full for glazing hot houses, melon beds etc’, ‘paid Mr. Carnoss his bill of painters’ work done on the whole house £251.0.2½’, ‘paid Cavinagh his bill of iron work £101.1.1’; in 1768, ‘paid Bowers on account of hot houses, espaliers etc £150.0’, ‘paid Mr. Cranfield for carving and gilding drawing rooms, dining room etc, £223.1.5’. Year after year the payments went on, until by the turn of the century, Conolly had spent £25,000. It was a huge sum but, for him, little more than a year’s income. Besides, Castletown, as he made clear in a letter of 1773, took the place of children. ‘I had no occasion to save money, having no children, and I flatter myself that the money I spent annually was rationally employed by living, not extravagantly, but like a gentleman.’
In the 1770s, Louisa’s major decorative project was the Castletown long gallery. The long gallery ran the length of the house at the back. Its eight windows looked north across formal gardens and parkland to the huge brick folly known as the Obelisk that looked like nothing more than a giant factory chimney. Louisa turned the gallery into an informal living-room that made the state rooms almost obsolete except for the grandest of occasions. The original gallery, bare and cheerless, was transformed into a painted room which, by virtue of its length and two fireplaces, could be used for several occupations simultaneously. By the end of 1774 the gallery was complete except for the painted decorations. The coved ceiling was heavily gilded but otherwise left blank. From each
of its three compartments hung a big two-tiered Venetian chandelier, swagging solidified into glass, in pink, blue and clear crystal. The ends of the room were dominated by fireplaces, over which hung portraits of Tom and Louisa, his by Mengs, hers by Reynolds. On the walls were French mirrors, several bookcases and plinths with classical busts. The spaces in between were to be filled in with paintings by an English decorative artist, Mr Reily. Louisa had seen Reily working at Goodwood and engaged him to come to Castletown as soon as his job for the Duke of Richmond was completed. Reily arrived, somewhat reluctantly, in Ireland in the summer of 1775. Unlike most painters he worked not at piece rates but by the month. At less than £100 a year he was reckoned a bargain. As Sarah put it, ‘his taste, his execution, his diligence and his price are really a treasure, and will not be met with again. For Mr. Conolly and Louisa [cannot in conscience] to give him so little as a £100 a year and [they] mean to add a little more to it.’
Sarah and Louisa chose the subjects for the long gallery decorations together. Their sources were the books of engravings from the antique and from Renaissance painters which were staple fare of gentlemen’s libraries, frequently brought back from the Grand Tour.
L’Antiquité expliquée
, the books of engravings by the French engraver Montfaucon, provided Louisa and Sarah with many of their originals. They knew it well; Reynolds had used the volumes to provide him with patterns for the jug and serpent-ringed urn in his portrait of Sarah sacrificing to the Graces.
Sarah and Louisa picked out four engravings from Montfaucon and Reily turned them into oil panels: a marriage ceremony taken from a Roman marble frieze, which showed the bride and groom being prepared for their wedding; the young bride weeping as she leaves her home for the first time; the wife and her first child; and a group of women spinning and preparing cloth. The two remaining panels, derived from engravings of Sir William Hamilton’s collections of Greek
vases, showed the daughters of Atlas, captured and taken from their homes by pirates in the service of the King of Egypt because of their beauty and wisdom.
Together these panels, framed in gold and grouped across the south wall and around the portraits of Tom and Louisa at each end of the room, offered a melancholy commentary upon marriage from the woman’s vantage point. Beautiful and intelligent women captured by barbarians, a daughter mourning her childhood home, a bride nervously awaiting the ceremony and, finally, wives carrying out their marital duties of child-rearing and domestic husbandry – none of these offered a positive gloss on an institution that was central to women’s lives. There are no pictures of courtship, no snuggling couples or classical lovers and no happy family groups. Together they seem to provide an alternative narrative to the publicly joyful union between Tom and Louisa, suggesting at the very least that married life is built on a sacrifice of childhood happiness. Sarah’s bleak vision of her own marriage may, especially by 1775, have contributed to the pessimism of the images; even so, Louisa made no attempt to stop this negative picture taking shape on her walls. On the contrary, she was delighted with the scheme, and even took the lion’s share of the credit for its selection, writing to Emily in June 1777, ‘Mr. Reily is now painting our gallery in a most beautiful way. Sarah’s taste is putting the ornaments together and mine in picking them out so that we flatter ourselves that it must be charming as Mr. Reily executes them so well.’ Discreet as ever, Louisa, even if she was aware of the sad portrait of marriage she was putting up, remained silent about it and never offered a hint about her own interpretation of the pictures.
As if to take the sting out of the message of the panels, Louisa and Sarah planned a plethora of more lighthearted decorations in the gallery, vignettes, roundels and statues which gestured towards happier aspects of married life at Castletown. Tom Conolly’s passion for sport and its attendant revelries was given ample due. In a niche between the
two doors on the south wall stands a busty statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt. Dotted round the room are panels showing bacchanalian rites, medallions with Cupid and Bacchus, small paintings of a lion adorned with grape and vine leaves, a lady with silver dishes, a peasant pouring wine from a sack and dancing women.
Sarah arranged Louisa’s selections in groups, Reily copied them and another decorative artist (perhaps Thomas Ryder) filled in the blanks with leaves, flowers, swags and scrolls. Complementing the allusions to Tom Conolly’s convivial sporting life were indications of Louisa’s more contemplative aspirations: busts of Homer, Venus, Hesiod, Plato, Cicero, Niobe, Sappho and Julius Caesar. Supporting this gallery of distinguished ancients were Pindar, Hesiod (again), Philemon, Gracchus, Cato, Hypocrates, Zeno and Socrates, whose painted eyes gazed out over their heads from medallions on the wall. Opposite them, on the north wall, Apollo and the nine Muses, each surrounded by their props and symbols, stared back. Joining all the figures were layer upon layer of temples, masks, cornucopias, eagles, griffons, leaves, cupids and bows. When Louisa, Sarah and their decorators had finished not a square foot of wall was left uncovered. The paintings surged round niches, over bookcases and up mirrors. They were stopped only by the wainscoting and cornices. The effect was idiosyncratic and amateurish, but it gave the room exactly the informality that Louisa wanted. When it was finally finished at the end of 1775 she wrote delightedly to Emily: ‘’tis the most comfortable room you ever saw, and quite warm; supper at one end and the company at the other and I am writing in one of the piers at a distance from them all,’ adding it ‘really is a charming room for there are such a variety of occupations in it that people cannot be formal.’
The same desire for informality governed Louisa’s schemes to transform the forbidding flatness of Castletown’s park. Just as she broke up the length of the gallery into several
spaces, so she began to fragment the surface outside, putting a shrubbery here, a lake there, creating vistas, walks and flower gardens. In the early 1760s she built herself a ‘cottage’ by the river, a garden house which served some of the same purposes as Waterstone at Carton. The cottage – really a well appointed little house that theatrically declared its modesty – was a place where Louisa went without her servants. Multi-coloured pheasants strutted stiffly about; the Liffey wandered sinuously by.
Observers came gradually to notice a contrast between this sort of cottage and those beyond the Castletown gates. But Louisa, when it was first built at any rate, saw her cottage as a symbol for a rural idyll whose contrast was with the city and the Court rather than a mean subsistence life. Sitting in her cottage one warm June morning in 1764, when she was twenty years old, she wrote to Sarah (who was still smarting from rumours of her complicity in Susan’s elopement): ‘You say in your letter Do I think there are no liars but in London? I think that there are in every great town and I therefore detest a town and wish to live as little as possible in them. I must only describe to you my delightful pleasant situation. I am sitting in an alcove in my cottage with a park before it, in the wood three quarters of a mile from the house, a lovely fine day, the grass looking very green, honeysuckles and roses in abundance, mignonette coming up, seringa all out, the birds singing, the fresh air all about … my work and my book by me, inkstand as you may perceive and a little comfortable table and chairs, two stands with china bowls, filled with immense nosegays.’ The only thing lacking from this bucolic picture was a rippling stream. The sluggish Liffey had to do the duty of a babbling brook and Louisa soon became impatient with its dilatoriness, calling it ‘my troublesome tho’ beautiful Liffey’, and tried to make the river foam by piling up rocks on its bed. The river continued unperturbed, held up very little by her efforts.
Castletown and Carton, with their cottages, lakes and
shady walks, stood at the centres of complexes of buildings whose scale was industrial rather than domestic. Around the main houses were offices, wash-houses, kitchens, coal-houses, stores, hothouses, ice-houses, potting-sheds and stables. Beyond them stood bakehouses, breweries, the granary, the tannery, the kitchen gardens and, by 1766, at Castletown, ‘very comfortable’ ‘octagon water closets’. In the park of each was a home farm which produced foodstuffs for consumption in the main house. Carton even had in the coach-house courtyard, a carriage wash. This lozenge-shaped arrangement of stone walls enabled the stable boys to reach up and polish the roofs of the Duke and Duchess’s carriages. As they drew up to grand front doors, their hosts, standing on the steps above them, would see the Leinster carriage gleaming from top to bottom.
Keeping this immense, almost factory-like unit going was the responsibility of its master and mistress and the task of their senior servants, the steward and the housekeeper. Emily and Louisa approached and executed their managerial duties with very different expectations and abilities. Emily was absorbed by her children and bored by household management. Louisa, on the other hand, was a meticulous housekeeper. She prided herself on the efficiency and loyalty of her staff or ‘family’ as they were known. Rich though she was, she worked closely with her housekeeper, butler and steward to cut costs and keep the household running smoothly. Nothing came in or went out of the house without her acquiescence and she made up the household accounts herself.
Households like those at Carton and Castletown had a complex command structure. At its apex were the master and mistress themselves. Beneath them came the steward who was both the main household officer and the bridge between the household and the world outside. Under him worked the housekeeper, the butler and the clerk of the kitchen. At Leinster House in Dublin a ‘maître d’hôtel’ took the place of the steward.
Bere, the Carton steward, was a man of considerable power. He collected rents (often not all that the Duke was owed) and, from the sanctuary of his office on the ground floor of the house, he ran the estate and paid the servants. In his charge were not only his own personal servant but also the pantry boy, the gentleman of the horse and the small army of servants who worked outside: lodge keepers and labourers, the farrier, the miller, the chandler, the brewer, the carters, wheelwrights, smiths, grooms, stable hands and even the shepherd who gazed glassy-eyed over the sheep in the park. The mill, the granary, the brewery and the tannery were all his province. On baking days it was his job to open the mill, weigh the grain as it went in, weigh the flour as it came out and to check those amounts against the weight of the finished loaves, in order to ensure, as the Duke of Leinster himself put it, ‘that nobody has stolen the flour’. In the same way Bere weighed the tallow and the candles into which it was made and he marked each cask of ale and small beer with levels and dates.
Bere had a heavy ring of keys that denoted other incarceratory duties. Keys to the gates of the park, keys to the mill, the granary, the brewhouse, the chandlery, the smithy, the carpenters’ shop, the stables and the offices: all these had to be unlocked and relocked, their contents checked against pilfering and their floors cleaned and polished. If something broke down – a carriage, a kitchen range or a bell pull – it was Bere’s responsibility to summon the wheelwrights, smiths or handymen and see that it was mended. Coaches and carriages – the heavy four-horse chaise for long journeys, the lighter, more compact landau for jaunts to Dublin and Emily’s beloved one-horse chaise in which she was driven on fine evenings around the Carton grounds – needed constant maintenance; many journeys were interrupted by broken axles or shafts and the Duke was a demanding traveller.
Day after day, as the huge household worked, ate and played, Bere had to tabulate all that it consumed: numbers of
candles used by stable hands, the quantities of loaves, the weight of butter, the barrels of beer and bags of apples. When supplies ran short it was his job to restock the pantry and the stores. Wherever possible supplies came from the Duke’s own tenants who reared cattle and grew grain in the rich lands of county Kildare. Once a month Bere took his accounts to the Duke, who signed them promptly, only to complain later to his wife about the cost of his own extravagance. ‘Bere has not brought near so much money from his circuit as he used to do,’ he complained in 1759, as if this rather than his own expensive habits and schemes for improvement explained the parlous state of his finances.