Aristocrats (49 page)

Emily still regarded herself as a woman of fashion. She retained her love of novelty in literature and dress and she kept her cosmopolitan outlook. As the 1780s wore on and especially after the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, anti-Gallic chauvinism swept the British Isles, even creeping into Emily’s family. The Duke of Leinster might just as well not have gone on his long and expensive Grand Tour in the 1760s. Since inheriting he had stayed put in Ireland and now confessed to his mother ‘I hate
Monsieur
’. But Emily kept her Francophilia. She was more likely to go to Nice than Brighton for a dose of sea air, she filled Frescati with French furniture and fireplaces and when Rousseau’s
Confessions
appeared from 1781 she reverently put each volume beside his other works on her library shelves.

While Emily maintained the demeanour and establishment of a metropolitan hostess, Louisa cultivated a determined eccentricity in dress, manner and acquaintance. Castletown was very much a country house. Dogs trotted about and lolled in the long gallery with the family in the evenings, ‘perfuming the air not a little’ as Louisa put it. The Conollys entertained on Sundays, which Sarah called ‘a kind of public day’ at Castletown. Louisa rarely went out except to occasional official functions, to Carton and to Black Rock. Friends came to stay at Christmas when there was still a round of entertainments and parties. Louisa spent most of the
day, weather permitting, outside, wearing sturdy boots and a riding habit. After Emily Napier arrived, Louisa carried her around in her arms, accompanied by a footman who took turns with the plump little burden.

As time went on Louisa began to look beyond the Castletown gates and to take an interest in the ‘middling sort’ and the poor. She started to visit the labourers and their families who lived in Celbridge, on the edge of her estate. On journeys away from Castletown she studied the lives of others with anthropological fervour. In September 1782 she sent Sarah a report of one such field trip in the north of Ireland, dinner with a family ‘in the middling rank of life’. ‘They played on the flute, guitar, musical glasses and sung, and seemed so happy that it was a pleasure to see them. “So,” thinks I, in my own mind, “here are a sort of people totally unknown, but just in their small neighbourhood, and of course not sought after, and whom probably in the great world, would not only pass unnoticed but would be reckoned vulgar (and which I believe they are) that to me are very pleasant people and at a venture (if I must decide) I should prefer to
Lady Melbourne, Lady Jersey
, the
Duchess of Devonshire
etc, etc, etc …” In short, my dear Sal, merit is
the
thing to admire, and whatever station we find it in we must like it, approve of the possessors of it.’ Louisa also went about incognito using her reading as a guidebook to help her place people she met from other walks of life. In 1783 she and Conolly dined at the Ordinary Inn at Matlock in Derbyshire, ‘where the company was completely mixed. Some
rich
looking traders from Sheffield, some housekeepers, some second rank fine people, a quiet lawyer and his wife, and us. We arrived at the Inn before suppertime, … [and] for the fun of it joined the company. I saw some of the company very curious to know who we were, a prating lady attacked Mr. Conolly and gave
her
opinion about all the beauties in London. She was exactly the character of the witty ladies in a vulgar story book.’ Louisa stood the company at her end of the long table
a bottle of wine and ‘quite enjoyed seeing the good people so comfortable’. But eventually a servant revealed that Louisa was connected to the Duke of Richmond and their secret was out. ‘The prating Miss immediately held her tongue, my Sheffield friend looked at me with respect, and the fun ended. So I went to bed, but had been much entertained first.’

Such adventures were exciting exploits rather than part of everyday life. Louisa did not develop a politics to go with her cult of the ordinary. Rank had to stay, she believed, because through it God allowed men to exercise charity and loving kindness. But poverty could, and should, be alleviated. Louisa insisted that the material gap between rich and poor was too wide, leading to excess on the one hand and thieving on the other.

Like Emily, Louisa stayed plump as the years went by, and her complexion, roughened by hours out of doors, kept its rubicund glow. A pastel drawn in the 1780s shows her hair falling in big curls round her neck, still showing brown through the powder. Her chin filled out as she grew older and her nose sharpened. A white gauze neckerchief encircles her shoulders and with an informality that she insisted upon for all but the grandest occasions, she wears a soft white ‘dormeuse’ cap trimmed with lace.

Sarah cultivated an even more matronly air, dressing with self-conscious modesty. When she was drawn in the late 1780s or early 1790s she wore her hair simply drawn back, topped by a mob cap with a dark velvet trimming, which was held on by a handkerchief tied under the chin. A white gauze handkerchief chastely covered her shoulder and chest, tucking carefully into the front of her gown. For good measure she added a lace mantilla or shawl. This modest portrait was a far cry from the voluptuousness of her portrait by Reynolds of 1764–5 in which she was scantily clad, with her hair uncovered, her neck, chest and even her foot almost bare. Sacrificing to the Graces in 1764, Sarah was herself the sacrificial centre of the painting, offering her body to the world. Her later portrait was drawn to fit a much smaller pocket, of course. But
Sarah’s aims were different too. Contentment, serenity and modesty were the qualities she now wanted to show the world.

Nobody doubted Sarah’s happiness. On her birthday in 1783 she wrote to Susan, ‘Feby 25th, 1783 … this is my birthday. I am 38 and I see nothing “new under the sun” except that till I was past 36 I find I never knew what
real happiness
was, which from my marriage with Mr. Napier till now is much greater than I had any idea of as existing in human life … indeed, if I am to judge from the
present
of the
future
, nothing can ever diminish my domestic comfort and happiness but illness or death, for you know I mind poverty as little as anybody.’ Louisa had sealed Sarah’s happiness with sisterly approval, writing the year before: ‘I know
full well
, my dearest Sally, what that love is, and that nothing can ever equal it. I am going perhaps to surprise you by saying, that I don’t believe you ever experienced what I call
real love
before, and you never
knew
what the first of all happiness was, till now. I have perceived by several of your letters that you understand that point
much better
than you did, at least
my
vanity makes me think so, because your ideas correspond so much more to my own.’

Sarah basked in her sister’s approbation. Her remarriage which, by mutual agreement, was described as a union of love in marked contrast to the mad passion of her affair with Gordon, rehabilitated her at Castletown and with many of Louisa’s friends. Napier astutely befriended Conolly, and their friendship swept away Conolly’s lingering doubts about having Sarah in his house. Sarah could never undo all the social damage of her adultery and separation. But, paradoxically, the increasingly conservative temper of the times came to her aid. Louisa and her friends pointed to Sarah’s handsome, ever-growing family as a justification of her actions. Without the separation and divorce, they could hint, Sarah would never have become the model of motherhood and domestic felicity that she now was.

To begin with Sarah and Napier, who was waiting eagerly for the resumption of war, were only visitors at Castletown. but as the peace lengthened, they settled down and joined in the round of visits that was at the heart of family life. Between Dublin, Castletown, Black Rock and Carton there were constant journeys. At Black Rock, Edward Fitzgerald toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer. But he confessed to finding the Irish Parliament more exciting than Mansfield and Rousseau easier than Blackstone. Emily’s girls read French with her and travelled to Dublin to learn drawing and deportment.

In 1787 Sarah and Napier decided to settle in Ireland for good. With Conolly’s help they bought a house in Celbridge a few hundred yards from Louisa’s gates. It was solid and unadorned, three storeys high and seven windows wide, set on a slope above the main street in a small park of its own. By her old standards it was modest – a house for a merchant with an income of a thousand pounds a year, redolent of prosperity rather than aristocracy. Sarah’s few acres hardly kept the town at bay; the local board school, which her boys attended, was just down the street.

Looking back, the second half of the 1780s seemed to all the sisters a golden time of fecundity and tranquillity. ‘The happiest years of any of our lives,’ was how Ogilvie described them. But that happiness was remembered through the disasters that came afterwards. At the time, anxiety, grief and anger sometimes broke through into quotidian pleasures, blotting happiness out completely.

Soon after Sarah arrived at Castletown in the summer of 1785, Louisa Bunbury’s consumptive symptoms got worse. By the autumn Sarah had given up hope. Louisa died at the end of the year. Sarah grieved openly and well; after three months the needs of other lives brought her back into the world. ‘My 4 little children have
all
had different illnesses and kept my mind much employed, and of course their recovery gives a new spring to my spirits, which has been very useful to me,’ she wrote in March.

By May, Louisa Bunbury’s memory was less insistent. ‘In
the same half hour I can laugh and in a few minutes feel
un serrement de coeur
, as if all nature was darkened before my eyes and I had no further business on this earth. I reproach myself for having, only for one hour, forgot my loss, and I revive it with all the strength of my imagination.’ Soon Louisa was an intermittent and less disturbing ghost, casting shade but not darkness, almost crowded out of memory by Sarah’s new family.

Louisa Bunbury’s death closed the saga of Sarah’s adultery and separation. But in doing so it revived her memory of her first marriage, the affair with Gordon and the changes in her life since Napier’s proposal. It reminded her, too, of her brother’s dislike of her marriage and the fact that he, the primary trustee of her divorce settlement, had control of her income. Sarah decided that she wanted Napier to have control of her annuity of £500 a year. The Duke of Richmond refused to cede it. A rancorous quarrel ensued, ostensibly about money, but really about Sarah’s new sense of herself.

Sarah’s brother had provided for her from the time she left Gordon in the winter of 1769 until, and beyond, her divorce. Although she had an annuity (wrested with some difficulty from Bunbury), the Duke still housed her and gave her the protection of his good name. Sarah could not control her annuity herself, but she wanted Napier to have that role. She no longer saw herself as a ne’er-do-well aristocrat, but as a military wife and respectable mother. Richmond, well aware that Sarah was challenging his familial authority by her demands, refused to budge.

Sarah lost her attempt to wrest her annuity from her brother’s control. Afterwards her dislike of him increased. She seized every opportunity of making him feel isolated and uncomfortable. As usual, Charles Fox and national politics were her chosen weapons. Events of the late 1780s gave her plenty of opportunities for fights.

In late October 1788 George III went mad, so mad that ‘he called Mr. Pitt a rascal and Mr. Fox his friend’. The King became unable to carry out his constitutional duties and a
Regency, which would put the Prince of Wales at the head of government, seemed likely. Charles Fox and his supporters, who had sided with the Prince in his oedipal struggle with his father, sensed that they might be able to seize the government from Pitt. The horizon seemed especially bright for the opposition in Ireland. If the Prince of Wales were appointed Regent he would be able to bring his supporters to power there, even if he failed to dislodge Pitt from Westminster, because the Irish government was directly under Crown control.

In December 1788, while the King struggled and raved at Kew, Emily sent Ogilvie to London in the hope that he might become a go-between in negotiations between the English and Irish opposition. Emily called the Prince of Wales ‘tiresome’, although she sympathised with his extravagance and thought he had been badly treated by the refusal of both Parliament and the King to pay his debts. She expressed concern for the King’s sufferings, but she longed for a Regency that might bring Fox to power, explaining to her daughter Charlotte, ‘I am sure the Prince has been as unhappy as any of [the King’s] children, for he has an excellent heart. His situation is a very delicate one; we expect with impatience to hear that he is declared Regent.’ Ogilvie was nervous that Conolly and the Duke of Leinster might resent his unofficial mission. But Emily brushed his worries aside. ‘They forget, dear souls, both of them, that they have not given reason by their conduct in politics to make it safe for people to trust them, and also that their abilities being esteemed with reason
très médiocre
, men of sense will always be applied to first, notwithstanding their greatness.’ Emily hoped that when the Prince became Regent and Charles Fox assumed power in London her choice of husband would be justified and that Ogilvie would, by virtue of his intelligence, take his rightful place in Irish government.

Instead the opposite happened. In March 1789 the King recovered and the Foxites were execrated anew. The Fitzgerald
family emerged from the crisis split by different loyalties, spreading the quarrel among the Lennox children down into the next generation. Sarah, fervently Foxite, described the politics of Emily’s sons soon after the King’s recovery. ‘The Duke of Leinster is stout … Charles Fitzgerald is a Pittite and is to have a good place, we hear. Henry is a valiant knight and scorns to change his buff and blue. Robert is a Pittite and chargé d’affaires, secrétaire et plénipotentiaire à Paris; … as he never was in Parliament, was a Pittite from choice, got this place from his uncle … I own I do not
regret
his being on that side; but I am provoked at Charles who does it only for a dirty thousand a year, a sinecure! Dear Edward is also a thorough Foxite.’