Aristocrats (51 page)

Sarah’s description of the army at Southampton made it clear why soldiers were viewed with such alarm by those who strove to uphold propriety. The scene in Napier’s lodgings violated several of the hierarchies by which the household, the nation and the state were conventionally supposed to be ordered. In the first place, social distinction was cast aside.
Officers (including aristocrats like Napier), conscripted soldiers, craftsmen and casual labourers from the lowest ranks of society mixed together without the ‘ceremonies’, as Sarah called them, that accompanied and helped define class relations. Secondly, women of all sorts were crowded together. In Napier’s cramped hot rooms, officers’ wives and young unmarried girls like Louisa Napier, who were supposed to be protected from any open expression of sexuality, rubbed shoulders with ‘women of the town’ who had come to recruit officers for amorous intrigue. Finally, this sort of scene was a violation of the conventional ordering of space within a dwelling. Aristocratic houses like Castletown had carefully planned gradations of space. Business visitors, labourers and servants went round to the offices through a side entrance. Personal callers waited in the chilly expanse of the entrance hall and were then led to drawing-room, long gallery or parlour depending on their state of intimacy with the Conollys. Even in humble households these divisions applied: visitors were received in the front room, but the family lived mainly in the back. Napier’s lodgings jumbled together everybody everywhere. On occasions Sarah received friends and even officers in her bedroom. Small wonder, then, that soldiers epitomised danger for those anxious to maintain hierarchies of all sorts, and epitomised glamour for those who were allured by the breaking of taboos.

Sarah enjoyed this blurring of boundaries, and she seized the opportunity it offered to take on some of Napier’s work herself. While he made decisions about movements of troops and supplies in one room, in another she organised and paid recruiting officers who were raising a company, claiming in justification that Madame de Sévigné’s daughter had done the same thing more than a century before. When she had raised 30 out of the 100 men Napier needed she wrote triumphantly to Susan, ‘None of these would have been got but for
me
.’

Even when the army left Sarah maintained her good spirits, buoyed up by a sense of achievement and a string of notes
from her husband. Tender letters arrived from Ostend, Flushing and from Camp Wairloos in Flanders. ‘I consider every hour which I am without you as so much lost in my life.’ ‘For heaven’s sake, Sally, think that on your care of yourself depends my hope of future happiness: whilst you are well I am comfortable in any situation.’ ‘I am very well and yours soul and body.’

Lord Moira’s army had a less than glorious sojourn in the Low Countries. Napier was back in England in July, one of many thousands of soldiers who retreated from the Continent in the face of French advances. Both he and Sarah reached Ireland a few weeks later, Napier to recruit in the north, Sarah to re-establish herself at Celbridge to supervise the education of her children.

The Napier boys went to a religiously mixed local school where they learned good Latin, a smattering of mathematics and a tolerance for their schoolfellows, the sons of Celbridge’s prosperous families. It was a different education from that of their cousins or father. They learned no French, which was increasingly seen as a feminine accomplishment rather than a language of civility and cosmopolitan, aristocratic conversation. Teaching of Latin expanded to fill the place left by this shift.

But Latin’s associations were very different from those of French. For a long time Latin had been associated with statesmanship. Young men read reams of satires, poetry and speeches and polished their oratory to the curves of Latin cadences. At the peak of their careers they had themselves carved, senatorially, in togas, so that the beer bellies of John Bull were enfolded in the drapery of Cicero. Latin meant things Roman, too. From Stowe to Chiswick and Kingsgate, gentlemen built houses for retirement, in self-consciously ‘Roman’, often specifically ‘Virgilian’ designs.

But this was changing. Latin was increasingly seen as the language of empire and of war, Caesar on the march rather than Virgil at rest. With the expansion of the ambit of Latin
came a new sense of self for the boys who learned it. The Napiers defined themselves not so much as members of a European aristocracy, as their aunts and uncles had done, but as servants of empire cast in the mould of classical heroes: literary still, but with a different literature.

The Napiers’ destinies were never in doubt. George Napier kept a portrait of Frederick the Great in his study to remind himself and his sons of the man he regarded as the greatest modern soldier before Napoleon. Their politics would be radical but monarchist: a cult of Fox and a demonology of Pitt held sway in the Napier household. Their private lives were to be governed by propriety and domesticity, free from the expense of illegitimate children and the bouts of venereal disease that dogged Emily’s sons.

Much of what Sarah and Napier demanded of their sons they achieved. Her five boys turned into three generals, one captain in the navy and only one barrister. In her old age, Sarah liked to spurn any credit for their success. She gave the laurels to her husband, saying, ‘as they rose out of infancy I left them to their father’s management and studied to become the friend not the tutoress of my sons.’ But she was disingenuous. Napier taught his sons military engineering, swordsmanship and a sense of duty and honour; Sarah watched over everything else. First and foremost she gave them a sense of life as literature, and a storehouse of literary references by which they interpreted their own feelings and actions. Her favourite texts, particularly Pope’s Homer, became their touchstones. William Napier whiled away time in quarters on the Spanish Peninsula by reciting chunks of the
Iliad
and astonished his fellow officers by his memory of ancient history, romances and chivalrous poetry. Before battles, Charles James Napier comforted himself with tales of the heroism of ancient heroes and he loved to describe his situation by quoting theirs. Literature served militarism. It cauterised the pain, squalor and boredom of the battlefield and dignified butchery with glorious precedents. William
Napier absorbed his mother’s love of literature so well that he transcribed war into words, writing in several volumes and rolling prose a history of the Peninsular Campaign that, for his readers, elevated war into a work of art.

When her sons left home Sarah wrote to them constantly, alert to any slip in their standards of behaviour or even any slump in their deportment. They tried hard to be the sons she wanted. As they worked their way up the army hierarchies her image was never far from their minds. Charles James Napier who, as a young man had longed to leave the army, calling it a ‘trade in blood’, dreamed of his ‘beloved mother’ before he blew up the fort of Imamghar, in his campaign to capture the Indian province of Sind, a mission that earned him temporary opprobrium but secured his place in the heart of the nation and the history of empire. Much earlier he wrote to her saying simply, ‘we are what you have made us.’

The Napiers exaggerated to please their mother. Politics and social experience as well as family imperatives helped to shape their attitudes. All the Napier brothers felt themselves to be outsiders, not rich enough to hobnob with their social equals and not English enough to feel comfortable at Court or in Westminster. They were one step further away from money and the sources of political power than their parents, without substantial legacies or landed property. Moreover, their politics, learned on their parents’ laps and on visits to Fox at St Anne’s Hill, were made active and practical by their experience of the atrocities of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

PART TWO

1798, ‘fatal year’.

Emily’s note on a letter from Edward Fitzgerald
.

The Napiers had not been back in Ireland long before Sarah began to notice that the people of middle rank and the poor
who laboured in the fields around Celbridge were openly expressing disaffection with London and Dublin. Some justified their opposition by talking of Irish nationalism, others used the language of universal rights laid out so popularly by Tom Paine in
The Rights of Man
. Proselytizers in the north were successfully popularising, among Roman Catholics and Protestants alike, a radicalism that looked to Paine for ideas and France for their expression. Radical enthusiasm in Ireland had the same origins and engines as that on the mainland, but the mixture of a Protestant administration and a largely Catholic population gave nationalism and republicanism an added twist. When Napier returned from Londonderry at the end of 1794, he reported that dissension was rife in Belfast and the surrounding counties.

Everywhere the situation was confusing. Opposition to Dublin and Westminster was fractured; alliances were volatile. By 1795 people began to sense enemies all around, and individuals began to lead double lives. The respectable Belfast printer by day was a United Irishman at night, meeting with others in secret after 1794 and committed increasingly to armed rebellion. A Catholic silk merchant and United Irishman had yet another identity, that of government informer. A servant might bring his master a glass of wine on a silver tray and then, after hours, become a ‘Defender’ cutting down trees to make pike handles, forswearing allegiance to state and Protestants alike.

Enmities hardened in a worsening economic climate of rising taxes, falling land revenues and a decline in manufacturing. Reactionary Protestants disliked anyone who promised emancipation for Dissenters and Catholics and pledged themselves to Westminster as long as Westminster upheld Protestant dominance. Republican Protestants, both Dissenters and aristocrats, spoke of universal rights, secular republicanism and, eventually, freedom from Westminster. Forward-looking Roman Catholics hoped for emancipation: while denouncing Dublin they remained loyal to Westminster, believing that emancipation could emanate only from
England. Other Catholics wanted a Roman Catholic state free from Protestants, and created for their pedigree a Gaelic past of Catholic kings, Gaelic songs and Irish jigs. They styled themselves ‘Defenders’ and formed a large underground network.

Even these identities were fluid. After 1794 the Catholic Defenders, who were nationalist and ‘Gaelic’, merged with the secular, republican, United Irishmen. Hybrids began to appear: Catholics who mistrusted Protestants but spoke the language of universal rights found in
The Rights of Man
; Protestants who subscribed to Paine but talked of Irish nationalism. United Irish leaders upheld cosmopolitan values and Gaelic trappings simultaneously. Arthur O’Connor was a secular Protestant barrister who, with ludicrous self aggrandisement and an eye to his Catholic followers, called himself ‘King of Connaught’. Edward Fitzgerald, Paine worshipper and Francophile, danced Irish jigs to the music of pipers, sang patriotic songs and celebrated St Patrick’s day. Concealed in a chest he kept a uniform to be worn on the first day of the Irish Republic. It was a crazy amalgam of the Gaelic and the French. The green suit was decorated with red braid. It had rose-coloured cuffs and a cape. Rounding off the ensemble was a giant red cap of liberty with a green rim and a large silk tassel bobbing at the top.

So as the political and economic crisis deepened, the fanciful and the macabre jostled side by side. Ordinary life went on but the sense of impending doom grew. Men and women, in streets and shops, taverns and fields, became worried about soldiers in billets and garrisons. The army and the militia, always a source of grievance, were increasingly objects of fear. Many of the elements of Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror’, begun in 1794 to suppress radical activity throughout the kingdom, were soon apparent: the imprisonment of printers and journalists, the development of spy networks and loyalist informers and, eventually, the imprisonment of radicals for the utterance of so called ‘seditious words’ and the suspension
of
habeas corpus
. Looking back, people identified 1795 as the point of no return, the year in which the prologue to the rebellion began.

Between 1795 and 1796, Defender and United Irish networks merged into one United Irish movement. Reactionary Protestants formed so called ‘Orange lodges’, groups pledged to uphold what they thought of as the Williamite settlement, which were largely impervious to United Irish revolutionary politics. Reports of ‘Orange’ atrocities spread. Some Dublin Protestants threw in their lot with Westminster, others with more militant (but usually anti-Catholic) Protestants in Dublin Castle. Still others, like Thomas Conolly, vacillated, siding first with Westminster, then against it, clinging to the language of paternalism and economic justice, eschewing discussion of rights and earning nobody’s respect. ‘Patriot’ politicians like the Duke of Leinster were outpaced by events. Their opposition to Westminster now looked so pale as to seem like support, and they retreated from the fray disowned by former friends and enemies alike.