Aristocrats (32 page)

Castletown’s servants were a small cost in. proportion to the food and wine bills. In 1787 Louisa paid £80 19s. od. for 153 dishes of fresh seafood and £47 2s. 7d. for her cheese from the grocer. Eighty pounds bought her the annual services of 10 footmen or maids, while £47 was almost half the yearly cost of her steward. There were other costs incurred in the employment of servants. They were fed, warmed, clothed and housed and, as part of their wages, they received uniforms and, sometimes, cast-off clothing. They also got 2 lb of sugar a month each (but had to buy their own tea to go with it). None the less labour was cheap, so cheap that employing local people became a form of charity. At times of great economic hardship in Ireland, Louisa employed scores of local families on the Castletown estate, seeing the offer of employment not as a gain to herself (which it undoubtedly was) but as her contribution to the relief of suffering.

If one rhythm sounding through country houses was that of the bell and another that of the seasons, a third was that of life itself. It was in the country house that children were mostly conceived, educated and groomed for the world. There the pleasures and griefs of family life were played out. One measure of the quotidian was the account book with its
record of constant small disbursements. Another was the letter book. Scarcely a post went by without a letter from Caroline to Emily, from Emily to her husband, from Louisa to Sarah, which did not record the most ordinary events – good nights, bad nights, bumps, scratches, rashes, headaches, flowers coming up and hay coming in. Day after day, week after week life accumulated in tiny, steady droplets, giving the sisters, as the years went by, a rich medley of commonplace events to remember and write about.

Carton ran to the body’s time as, with annual or biennial regularity Emily gave birth, endured her monthly confinement (from which she was welcomed impatiently by her amorous husband), ovulated and became pregnant again. ‘You will always be breeding; I wonder you are not ashamed of yourself,’ Caroline wrote.

Whether she became pregnant or not, every woman was conscious of her body’s clock, and charted her transition from childhood to womanhood by its monthly rhythm. Louisa began to menstruate at fourteen in the year before her wedding, thus becoming ‘a woman’, as Caroline put it, before she was married. A few years into her marriage she had a miscarriage and, although she occasionally took the waters in hopes of returning fertility, she never conceived again. By the end of the 1760s, when she was in her mid-twenties, she had almost given up hope of ever having a child.

Sarah also failed to produce a baby. As the 1760s wore on her sisters began to suspect that the reason lay in her marriage rather than her body. Whereas Louisa compensated for her childlessness by becoming an extra mother to the Carton brood, Sarah shunned young couples with children. Instead she sought the company of single men and childless couples like the Duke and Duchess of Richmond and continued, as much as possible, to lead a rakish, metropolitan life.

None the less, like her sisters, Sarah was attentive to her body’s changes. For all of them, menstruation was associated with physical and mental distress. ‘At
certain
times, my poor
nerves are very bad, and it would be hard to say how they are affected. I am so full of
odd
whims, I will try the lime flower tea,’ Louisa wrote. Periods were habitually referred to as the ‘French lady’s visit’ and having one’s period was ‘being the French lady’, being that is, in a familiar but different state. As Emily’s daughter Charlotte wrote in 1779, ‘I have within these few days been rather worse by being the French lady, at which time there is no telling how very ill I am.’

Periods were at best a slight discomfort, at worst a serious inconvenience. Menstrual rags made ordinary life difficult. Some women, like Charlotte Fitzgerald, took to their beds. Others, like Caroline, stayed at home and raged at their body’s bad timing. In 1759, when Louisa was first in London after her wedding, Caroline wrote to Emily, ‘I must tell you Louisa and Conolly come here Monday, stay till Saturday, then go to Goodwood, where they stay two days. I shall not be able to go with them, I much fear, which is a great disappointment to me. But ’twill be a time I can’t. I shall be glad to be old, to be rid of
that
plague. Yours C. Fox.’ By the late 1760s Caroline’s discomfort increased and she began to think that the menopause was upon her. While old age might have seemed attractive a few years before, getting to it promised to be difficult, as she hinted in 1766. ‘I seem to have been out of order a week, ten days and a fortnight’s end, never get beyond three weeks scarcely. I own I dread disorders of that kind, particularly as I am now past forty-three, something of that kind may be beginning.’

Only Emily looked forward to her period. Any discomfort it brought was offset by the emphatic message that for the moment at least she was free from pregnancy. Despite her love for her children, Emily often longed for a respite from childbearing, so she was happy to be able to report to Kildare in 1762 (barely three months after the birth of her daughter Sophia) that her fears of pregnancy were unfounded. ‘The complaint I mentioned in my last letter goes on very well and puts me quite out of all doubt, which is a vast comfort; but I
am exceeding low with it, more so than I ever was in my life.’ Others waited anxiously with Emily for her period to arrive. ‘I shall be fidgety about you till I hear of the next French lady’s visit,’ wrote Louisa in the 1770s.

All too often, though, Emily’s predictions were right, and she began another pregnancy. As time went on and her family grew, she developed a thorough knowledge, fashionable and practical, of the protocols and procedures of childbirth. Rather than give way to worries about the dangers of childbirth she organised her pregnancies around a series of practical rituals which allowed her to go her own queenly way and to become the undisputed obstetric authority within the extended family. Her plan for pregnancy and childbirth was very simple and very effective; in all her labours she never had a still birth and only lost one new-born baby, Caroline in 1755, who died after four weeks.

A successful pregnancy, Emily believed, was one which was lived as usual. ‘More people have hurt their health by fear of miscarrying than by its happening,’ she declared. She advised good food and plenty of rest and exercise. If walking was out of the question (as it certainly was for Emily with her regal indolence and her muscles slackened by multiple pregnancies), a daily rattle in a bouncing carriage was a necessity. Some ‘7 or 8 mile everyday’ in a post-chaise ‘along a jumbling road … to jumble you’ could, Emily asserted, make ‘labour so much easier.’ She herself was often to be seen being driven about the Carton desmesne by her hump-backed coachman in her beloved pea-green one-horse chaise.

When she suspected that her lying-in was close (or, as Louisa put it, she was ‘about to pig’), Emily moved to Leinster House in Dublin to prepare for the birth. Following contemporary aristocratic fashion Emily always had a man she referred to as ‘the doctor’ in attendance at the birth. He was a surgeon or an ‘accoucheur’, as especially trained male-midwives called themselves. Hovering outside the door of the birth chamber would be a nurse-keeper, whose job it was to
wash and clothe the child, and a wet nurse. Inside, apart from the doctor and any other attending servants, would be Louisa, Cecilia or Sarah. The Duke of Leinster never mentioned being in the birth chamber, but if he was in the house at all, he was probably near at hand: Henry Fox was close enough to Caroline when Charles Fox was born to be able to see his son before he was dressed, which since it was mid-winter must have been as soon as he was washed and dried. Emily’s older childen would be near by too, eating cake and drinking what her son William described as ‘this delicious caudle’. Caudle was a rich spicy wine prepared especially for the attendants to drink during and after childbirth.

As she became a connoisseur of childbirth Emily concentrated more and more on the circumstances rather than the process of labour. She insisted that her room be light, with the curtains drawn back if it was daytime, and plenty of candles if it was night. This was contrary to the common practice of darkening the birth chamber, as was her belief in open windows and fresh air. As her confidence grew she continued daily life, and the story she wrote of it, right up until the onset of labour. ‘Only think how delightful it is, my dearest sister, to have a letter of yours to answer, wrote on the day that you were brought to bed,’ Louisa wrote in 1770, when Emily was thirty-nine, adding, ‘’tis a sign of your having been so well.’ Once or twice Emily described her labours as ‘tedious’ but, although she said her children had caused her pain, she never referred to childbirth itself as a painful process, psychologically or physically.

As soon as her children were born, Emily handed them over to servants. Following the advice of John Locke in his
Thoughts on Education
, she insisted that they should be lightly clothed, without pins or swaddling. Although she was a believer in breast-feeding, Emily did not breast feed any of her own children. There was a popular belief that breast-feeding could damage the eyes. Emily, who suffered all her life from painful and debilitating eye inflammation (alleviated
by applying leeches), handed every one of her children over to a wet nurse on her doctor’s orders. It was something she regretted all her life. ‘Mama,’ said her son George to her one morning in the late 1770s, ‘“don’t the mothers of calves give them suck?” “Yes”, says I. “And why then did you not give me suck for you are my mother like the cows are the mothers of the little calves.” Was not this quite cutting? It went to my heart and I was ready to cry, but I told him that the naughty doctors and people would not let me and so I got Ryley to do it for me.’

Once her labour was over and the child dispatched to the nursery, Emily entered into her month-long confinement. Confinement was not only a time to rest, it was also a time to relish because all duties, both social and managerial, were suspended. Emily lay, sat and then lounged first in her bedchamber, then her dressing-room and finally her parlour. She was cosseted by her family and servants and visited by friends and relations. Because of the anxiety about her eyes, reading was proscribed for a week or two, so Emily chatted and played cards. On 10 August 1761, 11 days after having given birth to her fourth son, Henry, in London, Emily had got out of her bedchamber and into her dressing-room. She had just begun to write, and received a constant stream of visitors and relatives like her aunt Lady Albemarle. ‘I write a little a day … that I may not make my head giddy by too much at a time. Sarah’s being with me is mighty comfortable. The boys sit with me the whole evening. Last night I had my two Viscounts. Lady Harrington and her daughters the night before, besides Lady Albemarle and hers; which, added to my sister [Caroline] who has been here every evening, has kept me in a continual hurry of company and tired me a little; but I make up for it … by sleeping in a morning till twelve or one o’clock.’ Three days later she had got into her ‘outward room’, hired a new housekeeper and was dining on pheasant.

Confinement held two other joys for Emily. In the first place it was characterised by a social informality and jollity
and in the second it made her the cynosure of all eyes. Everybody came to her and their duty was to entertain their hostess rather than, as usually, the other way around. On 17 August Emily wrote again to her husband. ‘I have never been alone, some one body or other continually dropping in; … I had a Dutch cousin Bylande to see me t’other day, who the last time he was here in England found me lying-in “apparemment la famille de Mi Ladi doit être assez nombreuse,” says the man, which diverted Sarah and Lord Powerscourt prodigiously. They told him it was true for that I had done nothing but lie in ever since. Lord Powerscourt lounges away some part of every evening here. If he comes early we make him read
Tom Jones
to us, which diverts the boys.’

After her month’s confinement Emily went through the ceremony of churching, when women were readmitted to the outside world after childbirth. ‘For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of his goodness to give you safe deliverance, and hath preserved you in the great dangers of childbirth: you shall therefore give hearty thanks unto God,’ intoned the Maynooth minister or the Holland House chaplain at the beginning of the service. To which Emily was supposed to reply, ‘I am well pleased that the Lord hath heard the voice of my prayer; the snares of death compassed me round: and the pains of hell got hold upon me.’

Churching brought women back into daily life. It signalled that the ritual of childbirth was successfully completed and, in Emily’s case, that the cycle might begin again. After churching came sex. The Duke of Leinster had no hesitation in acting upon the service’s injunction that ‘children and the fruit of the womb are an heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord, … Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.’ Most of his children were born between 11 and 15 months apart. In May 1766, two months after the birth of Lord Gerald Fitzgerald, the Duke wrote to Emily from London, ‘I long, and yet fear to hear, if any consequences has happened from my being so happy with my Emily.’ This time they were
lucky: Emily had a year’s respite between the birth of Gerald and the conception of Augustus.

Emily loved her huge family. She cherished each child (although George, and after his death Charles and ‘Eddy’ were her favourites) and mourned even those lost at a very early age. When tiny Caroline died at four weeks she told her husband that although she had recovered quickly from the shock, she had been very upset, which convinced her ‘that there is a great deal more in what is called nature or instinct than I ever imagined before, for what else but such an impulse could make one feel so much for a poor little thing that does but just exist?’ Parents, nurse-keepers, family doctors, maids, relatives and even siblings all kept an eye on young children, watching anxiously for fevers or wasting diseases. Even the most trivial of childhood complaints – sores in the mouth or boils on the skin – were cause for alarm, because any infection could spread throughout the body and there were constant fears that a minor problem could be the token of something much more serious.