Aristocrats (39 page)
After March 1769 no more letters passed between Holland House and Carton for a long time. When they began to arrive again it was death’s messenger who brought them. In a matter of weeks the correspondence and trust of decades was stopped. Emily no longer saw Caroline’s sprawling handwriting on the thick wads of paper sealed with busts of classical heroes, statesmen and writers. Caroline’s pleasure at unfolding Emily’s exquisitely written pages was gone. Everything that the letters implied was jeopardised. In the place of news, and confessions and gossip there was silence. Emily confided increasingly in William Ogilvie, Caroline turned her anxious eyes on to the troubles of her own family. Only occasionally was the gulf bridged by a message or report sent through Louisa.
The breach between Holland House and Carton, like Sarah’s débâcle, reverberated through the family. The Duke of Richmond took Caroline’s part and so relations between Goodwood and Carton became strained, even though those between Goodwood and Holland House were rocky. With
Sarah gone, the third Duke of Richmond remained close only to Louisa and his brother Lord George Lennox. Emily had been on cordial but not close terms with her brother but her husband’s conduct meant that she could write only indirectly, through Louisa. Other relatives were drawn in. The Duke of Leinster’s sister and her husband Lord Hillsborough, intimate at Holland House for some time, now cut it from their London itinerary.
Louisa, still only twenty-five years old, was in a responsible and difficult position. She was everyone’s confidante, the only figure in the family to have kept the trust of all concerned. She was also the only person who could straddle the widening gaps between the parties. Maintaining impartiality was important for her because she needed to feel trusted and beloved. But this time even Louisa took sides, although she was careful to confide only in her brother. On 11 May 1769 she wrote to Richmond: ‘It is most excessively vexatious to think of his behaviour to Lady Holland. I am more vexed at it now than ever, for I have so much reason to love him, yet cannot change my opinion with regard to that affair. I have great hopes that my two sisters will be as comfortable as ever, in loving one another as they used to do. My sister Leinster has never changed and is quite reasonable in not worrying at any anger of my sister Holland’s and she hopes time will do something in her favour.’ After a few months a pattern of communication between Caroline and Emily was established. Caroline wrote her news to Louisa, who passed on her letters to Emily. ‘My sister Holland continues to write pleasant letters which I show to my sister L. and make her very happy,’ Louisa told Sarah in 1771. Using her knowledge of the nature of family letters, Caroline thus managed to keep the channels of communication open and ready for a resumption of a direct and acknowledged correspondence.
By May 1769 the Lennox family party that had abruptly gathered in London in February was dispersed as well as shattered. At the end of March Conolly left for Ireland. After a
diversion via Goodwood Louisa picked up Cecilia from Holland House and followed him at the end of April. The Foxes went to Kingsgate. Caroline did not much like the Kent shore, where the plants battered by the wind grew twisted and stunted. But now it suited her angry mood. ‘I passed my summer agreeably enough, though I had many things to vex me,’ she wrote in her journal. Bunbury, meanwhile, went between Newmarket, Barton and London, seeing relatives, horse-dealers and, ominously for Sarah, lawyers.
Sarah had no idea that her affair had led to a breach between Caroline and Emily. While the quarrel was boiling in London and Carton, she and Gordon were in semi-seclusion at Red-bridge, living as man and wife. Charles Bunbury, meanwhile, was reaching a decision about his own future. While Sarah stayed with him he was prepared to countenance her adultery. It was her leaving that amounted to betrayal, exposing him to ridicule and scandal. As soon as Sarah left Holland House, Bunbury decided on a separation.
A separation was not necessarily or even usually a prelude to divorce. Divorce was very expensive. Except in cases of annulment (on the grounds of non-consummation, for instance), which were dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, divorce could only be secured by a private Act of Parliament, and cost hundreds of pounds. Scores of thousands of couples simply separated, formally or informally. ‘Private’ separations, as they were known, had dubious legal status, but were a way of formalising a mutually agreeable split. A separation deed was drawn up in which the husband agreed to provide an annual maintenance allowance for his dependants, usually balanced by an undertaking from the wife’s trustees to absolve him from any future responsibility for her debts. There were clauses guaranteeing the wife the right to make contracts and behave as if she were a single woman with regard to her financial affairs, her choice of abode and so on.
The whole settlement was drawn up by lawyers and guaranteed by trustees. Its legal status was dicey but the solemnity that surrounded its acceptance was supposed to ensure that all parties stuck by its provisions.
In a judicial separation case husband (or very occasionally the wife) had to justify his desire for a separation before the London Consistory Court, the Ecclesiastical Court that ruled on Canon Law. The Consistory Court was generally known as ‘Doctors’ Commons’ after the building in which it sat. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred (the exceptions were in cases of non-consummation or gross cruelty by husbands), justification took the form of proof of wifely adultery. Many separations involved affairs on both sides. But since a wife could not divorce her husband for adultery it was her behaviour that was offered in evidence, even if the desire to separate was mutual.
Before the case got to Doctors’ Commons, a husband might take civil action for damages by filing what was known as a suit for ‘criminal conversation’ against his wife’s lover. A ‘crim. con.’ suit was decided according to Common Law and held in the King’s Bench Court. It could, by means of witnesses, statements and a jury verdict, establish a wife’s guilt and the husband’s right to compensation from her lover. Often however, crim. con. suits were used, not so much to punish the lover financially as to lay the groundwork for a judicial separation or divorce. Charles Bunbury, knowing that Gordon was penniless and in no position to pay damages, and desirous of as little publicity as possible, went through the motions of a crim. con. suit, but reserved most of his energies for the case in the Consistory Court at Doctors’ Commons.
After a judicial separation in Doctors’ Commons, a parliamentary divorce might follow. Initially used by aristocrats who wanted to secure their estates to legitimate heirs, after the mid-century parliamentary divorce became available to anyone with determination and several hundred pounds.
Even so, there were only a few more than a hundred parliamentary divorces in the eighteenth century: unless the parties (or more usually the husbands) wanted to marry again, separation and cohabitation were cheaper and less spectacular. Divorcees (like Caroline’s friend Lady Di Beauclerk who was divorced in 1768) often remarried again immediately. Long-term divorcees were thin on the ground and the social limbo in which divorced women existed was partly the result of their extreme rarity. Nobody knew how to treat them or whether, once remarried, the stain of their adultery was wiped away.
Bunbury eventually initiated and got a parliamentary divorce. (It went through in 1776.) But at the beginning he asked for nothing more than a judicial separation in Doctors’ Commons. The case of
Bunbury v. Bunbury
had three stages. First, on 22 April 1769, Bunbury’s lawyers filed a ‘libel’ which laid down the grounds (in this case adultery) upon which he wanted a separation. Second, various witnesses, all called by Bunbury’s lawyers, made depositions to the court between 22 April and 22 May. Sarah could have offered a defence at this point, with witnesses of her own, but she was too far away in Scotland and too far gone in self-abasement to attempt one. Third, the court pronounced sentence.
Roger Rush, Bunbury’s valet, Charles Brown, a servant at Barton and John Swale, Bunbury’s lawyer, all testified to the truth of the libel: that Bunbury and Sarah had not met or had sexual intercourse since Sarah left London to go to Barton (something necessary to prove for legal reasons), and that Gordon and Sarah had committed adultery. Margaret Frost, another Barton servant (and sister to Sarah’s maid who stayed with her) and Martha Bissell, the owner of the Redbridge boarding house, eagerly supplied corroborative details, which they could repeat outside the courtroom for the benefit of the press and a fat fee. Mrs Bissell, speaking in well schooled legalese, stated that Gordon and Sarah had ‘carnal knowledge
of each other and thereby committed adultery together’. Margaret Frost declared that the miscreant couple ‘lived and cohabited together as man and wife, and went by the name of Mr. and Mrs. Gore and lay in the same apartment in which there was but one bed.’ Her deposition continued, ‘in the morning before she went away the deponent went into the said Lady Sarah Bunbury’s bed chamber in order to ask her ladyship if she had any commands to London and the deponent then and there saw the said Lady Sarah Bunbury and William Gordon Esquire, commonly called Lord William Gordon, naked and in bed together.’
On 17 June the court, faced with this uncontested evidence, pronounced Bunbury’s libel to be correct and authorised a judicial separation. The libel, now the verdict, declared that ‘Lady Sarah Bunbury, being of a loose and abandoned disposition and being wholly unmindful of her conjugal vow etc did carry on a lewd and adulterous conversation with Lord William Gordon.’
A separation made Sarah’s position even more public. It nullified her marriage contract and called for a separate maintenance agreement in which the couple’s finances would be reordered. It also protected Bunbury’s estate from claims by any further children born to Sarah and her lover. Little Louisa Bunbury was still legally Bunbury’s child, but
de facto
she was now a bastard with an uncertain future and fortune.
By the time Mrs Bissell had given her testimony to Bunbury’s lawyers, Sarah and Gordon had left her house, driven north to Scotland by the winds of scandal. They took refuge in Carolside, a house near Relstone in Berwickshire lent to them by a friend of Gordon’s. But rumour quickly found them. In its August 1769 issue, the
Town and Country
conjured up for its readers a meeting in a lowly retreat modelled on storybooks whose plots turned on concealed identities and coincidental meetings. Under the heading ‘Amorous Intelligence’ its writer, ‘T L’, reported, ‘knocking at the door of a cottage to obtain information’. Lord William Gordon opened
the door and offered him hospitality in the house where to his ‘infinite surprise’ he found ‘the charming and accomplished LSB’. ‘TL’ concluded, with an eye to the following month’s copy, ‘I was greatly astonished to find that a mutual satisfaction seemed to reign in their countenances, that they dwelt with pleasure on their reciprocal passion, which was still visibly glowing in its primitive ardour. Nay, the very step that had in some measure banished them from the world and driven them to their present retreat afforded them a solace for any little temporary wants – and they glorified in having risked ALL FOR LOVE.’
Was Sarah’s behaviour the result of a grand passion? Was she indeed, as the
Town and Country
suggested, playing Cleopatra to Gordon’s Antony, overcome by love and ready to jeopardise everything for it? Sarah left Bunbury and Barton from choice rather than necessity. She could have stayed with her husband, kept her slightly tarnished reputation and her social position. She could even, after a decent interval, have resumed her affair with Gordon. Bunbury demanded an end to it more because it had begun to hurt his public stature than because it trampled on his private feelings. He had after all let the affair, or flirtation, with Lauzun run its course and rumour had it that Sarah’s lovers were legion. Sarah’s refusal to give Gordon up, her public renunciation of respectability and the blame she loaded on to herself spoke of other imperatives. As her family and her social circle cast her off Sarah reconciled two warring parts of herself. She was no longer a woman whose low opinion of herself was at odds with the beautiful and intelligent woman others saw. Others now estimated her as she estimated herself, as worthless, as the ‘pig’ with the ‘hoggy paws’, ‘abandoned and undeserving’. Sarah came to rest on the bottom and her sinking explained her self-hatred so well that she welcomed and even gloried in her fall. Sarah loved Gordon because he was the vehicle of her self-chastisement. But once he had helped her to her nadir Gordon had little more to offer, and Sarah could now begin
to climb very slowly out of the pit. She had kept her lifelines – pen, ink and paper – and she began to write, cautiously at first and then in reams, to Louisa.
Initially Sarah’s letters from Scotland consisted entirely of confessions of guilt and declarations of hopelessness. Then, as she began to build up a new sense of herself and find faults in her lover, they became enquiries about help and requests for reinstatement in the family. Her sisters put a price on read-mission. Caroline had always been prepared to have Sarah back, but her condition was, as she put it, ‘a life of penitence’. Louisa, unaware that she was making Sarah the scapegoat for family misfortune, demanded misery too. ‘She is very unhappy,’ Louisa wrote to the Duke of Richmond in July 1769, ‘and we who love her cannot wish her otherwise.’
Sarah stayed with Gordon in Scotland all through the summer and autumn of 1769, writing long letters to Louisa, searching for forgiveness. The terms of her rehabilitation gradually became clear. She had to renounce Gordon, put herself at the disposal of her family and constantly display a penitent countenance and mind. She could have her child with her but no friends and no company other than family and servants. In return the family would undertake to look after her and little Louisa and would forgive her aberrant behaviour.
While Sarah was pondering these harsh terms the rest of the family were once again caught up in tragedy and dispute. Cecilia Lennox was ill with a dry cough and wasting disease. Bristol waters were prescribed by Dublin doctors and Cecilia set off for England, accompanied by William Ogilvie, in July 1769, ‘much grieved at leaving Ireland so soon again’. At the end of Cecilia’s course of waters, Caroline paid the bills and took her back to Kingsgate ‘very ill indeed’. Cecilia was frailer than ever and a warm dry climate seemed the only hope. Caroline arranged the trip. They would travel from Kingsgate to Paris and from Paris to Nice. Ostensibly, it was a family party; in fact it was for Cecilia. Charles, Harry and Lord Holland went only to keep Caroline company and to
make it seem as if the journey was determined by pleasure rather than the desperate state of Cecilia’s health. Before they left Kingsgate Lord Holland wrote to a friend: ‘I am not going abroad on account of my own health. But I am going because Lady Holland’s good nature will not let her amiable sister, who is dying, go only with a servant. The worst of it is, there are no hopes, but it would be cruel to tell her so, and never was more melancholy journey undertaken.’