Aristocrats (3 page)
For a woman at Court, waiting on the Queen was the highest available position. It marked the limit of her possible career. But for men, the Bedchamber was only the beginning: an ambitious courtier used the job as a jumping off point. He saw and perhaps helped determine who was in and who was out of favour and he was ideally placed to lobby the monarch for a better position. Caroline’s father, however, was ambitious not for advancement but for sobriety and dignity. He stayed on for seven years, the picture of steadiness but not of success. The King called him an affectionate and sincere friend, and in 1735 rewarded him with the Mastership of the Horse, a step up in rank but sideways into the royal stable. There Richmond managed the monarch’s movement from palace to palace and from England to the Continent faithfully
until his death. It was his job to accompany the retinue wherever it went in England. When George departed for Hanover at the beginning of each summer, the Duke went as far as Harwich, where he handed the King over to the Royal Navy and to his Hanoverian counterpart and gratefully departed for Goodwood and other pursuits.
Richmond’s life was not all courtly business. The Duke inherited his father’s interest in Freemasonry, enjoyed practical jokes and revelled in the theatre. When he sat to Philips in the late 1740s, he presented himself as both courtier and collector and a private man. He put on formal but by no means ducal dress, alluding to his station by wearing the royal-blue ribbon of the Order of the Garter. One hand he kept gloved like that of a courtier, the other left bare like that of a man about to greet his onlooker in an intimate and informal way. On the table he put a document referring to himself as Master of the Horse. Behind him, opening out of the formal drawing-room is the library at Richmond House, a secluded room with leather-bound volumes ranged along its shelves. In the doorway stands a draped classical figure, gesturing at once to the Duke’s status as a man of learning, his position in the Society of Antiquaries and his love of collecting.
Richmond collected ideas as well as objects. As a follower of Newton and something of a gentleman scientist, he patronised research into marine life in the Solent and built up a collection of exotic plants and animals. He belonged to the Royal Society and often entertained scientists and savants who toured Europe’s drawing-rooms explaining the latest theories and discoveries. Medicine was another of his hobbies and he was an eager participant in new operations and cures, believing that the body could be the site of learning as well as the home of the soul.
Objects of all sorts accompanied new ideas into Richmond’s houses. He amassed statuary and paintings, and became president of both the Royal Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Arts. But his special passion was for plants
and animals. Newton had brought order to the physical universe, so the story ran, and now scores of collectors were trying to do the same for flora and fauna, with menageries and botanical gardens.
In the 1730s scores of animals were brought to Goodwood and many were eventually housed in heated catacombs under the park. In this menagerie were five wolves, two tigers, two lions, three bears, two leopards, a chimpanzee, three racoons, an armadillo and a host of lesser birds and beasts. The Duke was constantly on the look out for rarities and chafed at failure to secure them. His fellow courtier Lord Hervey, who was not an animal lover, joked that the erotic behaviour of Richmond’s animals was ‘an allegorical epitomy of the whole matrimonial world’. But the Duke’s interest in the animal kingdom was more than simply materialistic. He felt that capturing and cataloguing the beasts of the wild brought them out from disordered nature into the ambit of human rationality. By virtue of being studied, animals became almost human, and they certainly became beloved. When a lioness from the menagerie died, Richmond built her a magnificent tomb in the Goodwood grounds where she reposes in marble amongst the trees.
Owning a menagerie, then, involved much more than admiration of animals. Acquisition and taxonomy were forms of conquest, of bringing strange species under man’s control. Richmond’s collections were part of the explosion in consumption that accompanied industrialisation and the acquisition of foreign territories. The Duke wanted as many animals and plants (he was particularly keen on trees that could fit in with prevailing tastes in landscaping) from all over the world and he paid a lot of money for rare animals and seeds and hired experts to find and look after them. Tigers came from India, lions from Africa, monkeys from the East Indies, vultures and bears from Europe and North America, cedars from Lebanon and maples from New England.
The women of Goodwood also went on this journey of discovery and ownership. In the 1730s naval captains returning
to Portsmouth often sailed home with sacks full of shells for the Duchess and her daughters. The Duchess, Caroline and, as soon as she was old enough to help, Emily spent hours arranging the shells into intricate patterns which were built into a grotto in the park. The shell grotto was a tiny, vaulted room where the discarded houses of sea-creatures, flung by the seas on to distant beaches, were carefully sorted and assembled into a rococo caprice that celebrated nature’s diversity, man’s seafaring prowess and women’s artifice. Cornucopias of shells were filled with shell fruits and shell sweetcorn. Shells covered the walls like stuccoed plaster. They were woven into ribbons and bows, twisted into ropes and written in initials: CR for the Duke, EL for Emily Lennox and CL for Caroline.
The shell house was a microcosm of the Lennox family’s world, displaying a love for order, rationality and the modernity represented by the natural sciences. But it was also about impersonation and play, plain on the outside, riotous and eccentric within, a place where shells were turned into apples and pears and ribbons. Science and feeling, order and capriciousness mingled together. It was crucial to the family that rationality and sentiment were not exclusive; the Duke and his children always wanted to show both.
Growing up in this world of exalted sense and feeling, Caroline Lennox inherited her parents’ belief in rationality and politeness and openly stressed their emphasis on feeling and passion. But she also came to long for a world in which there could be, sometimes, if not privacy, then seclusion and time for private reflection.
From the very beginning, Caroline was an anxious little girl, living her life in what she later called a ‘hurry of spirits’. She loved reading and stories and, as a child, developed what became a lifelong taste for Roman history. From her parents she imbibed strong notions of probity, duty and family loyalty, and constantly worried that she might not live up to their expectations of good behaviour. None the less, she was a
self-possessed and mature girl, assured in company and schooled in the art of polite conversation. Because her early years were spent without nursery companions, Caroline was the centre of the family world; attention was lavished on her both by her parents and by the ageing Louise de Kéroualle when the Lennox family visited her for the winter season of 1728. She got used to being painted, with her mother, with a pony or acting in Dryden’s
Indian Emperor
at the age of nine.
Yet it was not an altogether happy childhood. The Duke and Duchess had little success in producing a son and heir, and Caroline matured in an atmosphere of anxiety about childbirth and sadness about infant sickness and death. Two boys were born, in 1724 and 1730, but neither lived very long. These deaths devastated the household because each swept away the chance to secure the dynasty. Worse still, from Caroline’s point of view, her young sister Louisa, born in 1725, died of a fever at the age of three. By that time Caroline was five years old and well able to understand that death was unsparing and inevitable.
This early experience of death left Caroline pessimistic and fearful. She came to feel that any joy she had was bound to be snatched away, and she also became obsessed with the frailty of young children. ‘Want of spirits,’ she said, was her ‘natural disposition’ and she believed that because experience had told her that ‘joy and happiness’ were not to be had, her melancholy was fully justified. If she did feel happy she tended to regard her situation with mistrust and work herself back into a state of unease: ‘I can’t but always reflect how much more than my share of happiness I have enjoyed already, and that very reflection makes me dread what is to come.’
Caroline tried to temper her habitual sense of foreboding with the consolations of religion. ‘For,’ she said, ‘without religion, the life of man is a wild, fluttering, inconsistent thing without any certain scope or design.’ But Caroline’s faith was no more than conventional and it never made up for life’s sorrows or obliterated her fear of death. It was in fact to men and
women rather than God that she turned for understanding. She liked to study the behaviour of the ‘human species’ as she called it and she read constantly, at home, out of doors in the formal gardens at Goodwood or by the Thames at Richmond House. Histories, geography, philosophy, travels, letters, memoirs of courtly life, plays, novels, scandal sheets, criminal confessions were, in London and the country, her company and her education. Aristocratic girls got no formal schooling: a series of masters and intermittent parental instruction supplemented her own restless enquiry after knowledge. So it was from the word of man rather than of God that Caroline constructed her understanding of the world. ‘I love a likeness to a storybook,’ she exclaimed, and she found such likenesses in the intrigues and scandals of her parents’ circle. And to the inventors of movable type she was proportionately grateful; printing, she declared – along with the great savants of her day – ‘has made a more total change in this world than any other thing.’ Aphorisms of this sort appealed to Caroline, partly because she had a very good memory and could recall them at will, partly because she enjoyed the display of learning (though not, she always said, of wit) for its own sake.
Books supplied emotion as well as instruction; they made her cry and laugh, and Caroline fervently believed in the importance of passion and its expression. She regarded herself as a woman of strong feelings, ‘apt to cry’ as she put it, and she intensely disliked people who were even-tempered or reserved. Emotional coldness was akin to bad behaviour in her creed, besides being bad for well-being. Caroline easily lost her temper if she was provoked or neglected and with it her equanimity and tranquillity. Then she demanded both attention and solitude. ‘I find when I have anything on my mind I’m much better when I live quietly and sit at home reading or working and have time to reason myself into submitting myself to my affliction. At all times any hurry puts me more out of humour and out of spirits than anything.’ Sketching out her ideal kind of life, Caroline laid great stress on a quietness which was almost wholly lacking at Goodwood and at
Richmond House. ‘Living alone suits my disposition best, at least passing a good deal of my time so. I love to saunter about the gardens, looking at plants etc by myself or being shut up in my dressing room reading or writing.’
When her sense of oppression lifted, Caroline was the last person to want complete seclusion. She enjoyed company more than she realised and had considerable social poise. From her earliest childhood she had been at home in the drawing-room and, if the company was sufficiently serious to suit her ideas of good taste, she delighted in formal assemblies, where people worked their way around conversational groups. She professed to hate political chat and gossip about people she did not know, but gossip about people she did know was quite another matter. There she was unashamedly curious. Taking her cue from scandal sheets and novels, she used to question servants about their employers. She loved to dig over the gossip of the day with women friends – ‘a little nap, a little chat and now and then a little cards’ – and regarded herself as a connoisseur of human nature.
There was another side to this intelligent, worried, poised and slightly pedantic young woman – an irresistible pull towards those things she professed to dislike: wit, recklessness, bustle and ambition. ‘I don’t think wit a necessary ingredient at all,’ she said severely. But wit fascinated her, and so did excess, that quality of her grandfather’s which her father had worked so hard to suppress in himself and his family. While she wrote peevishly, ‘I am apt to grudge people their victuals,’ she secretly found appetite – a hunger for women, for power, for food, for cards, for the latest extravagant fashions – overwhelmingly attractive.
This horrified fascination for what she thought of as wickedness was encapsulated in Caroline’s attitude towards Voltaire. Voltaire had come into the acquaintance of her family circle during his exile in England between 1726 and 1729, when Caroline was a little girl. As a young woman she read his
Lettres philosophiques
, which appealed to her love of
aphorism and of explanations of the human condition. When
Candide
appeared, Caroline couldn’t put it down or stop thinking about it. The book was a satire on optimism, and as such in tune with Caroline’s own sense that life was fraught with dangers. She felt she shouldn’t like it but she did, and therein lay its peculiar fascination. ‘Candide is a wicked book to be sure, but infinitely clever in my opinion, and diverts me vastly.’ And again, see-sawing backwards and forwards between disgust and delight, ‘there is wit in it, but the plan of it is gloomy and wicked to a degree. I think there are some droll things in it; its mighty entertaining.’
Round about 1742, when she was nineteen years old, reckoned a beauty and destined by her parents for a great match, Caroline met a Voltaire of her own, Henry Fox, and fell deeply and passionately in love with him. In 1742 Henry Fox was thirty-seven years old, an ambitious and able Member of Parliament, obsessed with politics and particularly with managing the tricky affairs of the House of Commons.
The Duke and Duchess could not decide whether it was Fox’s antecedents or his behaviour that they disapproved of most. Fox’s father, Sir Stephen Fox, had been a Tory servant of the Crown who had made his name and fortune as Paymaster General of Charles II’s forces at the end of the previous century. At first Fox looked set to follow his father’s footsteps. After Eton and Oxford (where he astonished fellow students by reciting reams of Latin verse from memory) he travelled on the Continent. By the 1730s his sights were set on Parliament. But by then to be a Tory was to be condemned to the back benches. After the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, which was supported by a sprinkling of Tories, Toryism was tainted with treachery and disloyalty towards the Hanoverian dynasty; it offered no hope for an ambitious politician. Nothing daunted, Fox changed sides and put himself under the tutelage of the Duke of Richmond’s fellow courtier Lord Hervey (who shortly afterwards began a long affair with
Fox’s brother Stephen). In 1735 Fox was elected Whig MP for Hindon. He moved quickly up the Whig hierarchy, impressing everyone with his command of detail, ability to manage men and cynical approach to political problems. In 1743 Fox was given a position at the Treasury, the first rung on the ladder to power.