Aristocrats (55 page)

The passage Emily transcribed was a justification of rebellion. Using Priestley as her authority, as she had always used texts to make sense of her life, Emily determinedly memorialised her son as a martyr whom time would vindicate. Priestley said that rebellion was justified if government was oppressive, because a government was made for the happiness of its subjects. So an oppressive government was unconstitutional and should not be protected ‘from the generous attack of the noble and daring patriot’. Priestley went on and Emily added her own underlinings: ‘if the bold attempt be precipitate and unsuccessful the government will be sure to term it rebellion, but the censure cannot make
the thing itself less glorious
. The memory of such brave tho’ unfortunate friends of liberty and of the rights of Mankind as that of Harmodius and Aristogiton among the Athenians and Russell and Sidney in our own country, will be held in everlasting honour by their grateful fellow citizens, and
History will speak another language than laws.
’

This passage came from a fairly obscure pamphlet by Priestley put out in 1768 by a triumvirate of radical publishers during the height of Wilkes’s attack on parliamentary prerogative, entitled
An Essay on the First Principles of Government; and on the Nature of Political, Civil and Religious Liberty
. There was no collected edition of Priestley’s works in which Emily might have found it in the 1790s. She may have read it when it came out. The Duke of Leinster, interested like Wilkes in attacking Westminster (though not for the same reasons), may have bought it and put it in the Carton library. Edward Fitzgerald may have brought it to his mother’s attention. But however she got the pamphlet it was rare and radical stuff for a duchess to be reading and suggests that her researches in radical politics went far further than she ever suggested in her letters.

Between 4 June, when Edward Fitzgerald died, and 9 September, when Emily finally wrote to Louisa, the rebellion had been brutally crushed, resulting in heavy casualties which reflected the relative strength of government and insurgents. About 30,000 rebels died – some in pitched battles, many more in reprisals and indiscriminate murders – while 2,000 troops and loyalists were killed.

For Ireland the outcome of the rebellion was Union with Great Britain. For the Lennox family it was reunion and reconciliation. When the rebellion broke out the family had never been more divided. They disagreed about the war in Europe, about the French Revolution, about the monarch and the British government. None of this changed, and the old alliance between Lennoxes, Foxes and Leinsters was never re-forged. But the horrors of the rebellion made everyone – Sarah and the Duke of Richmond, in particular – determined to paper over the cracks. Sarah went on grumbling, of course; she grumbled that Louisa too easily forgave a government that first allowed Edward Fitzgerald to die and then took his estate from his widow and children, and she grumbled that Conolly had lost his nerve after the rebellion and become an abject supporter of government reprisals. But after the end of 1798, when Napier took a government post – Controller of Army Accounts in Ireland – these criticisms lost their sting, and Sarah tried to abide by a tacit agreement to leave politics out of family relations.

This injunction was easiest for Emily, who had been practising secrecy for some time. It was attractive to Louisa who wanted to forget the way in which she had acted during the rebellion. It was hardest for Sarah who had made politics the basis for good or bad relations with the male members of her family. She violated the new apolitical spirit all the time. Politics was still the air she breathed. But she did try to put politics aside, particularly in relations with her brother.

The Duke of Richmond and Lord George Lennox were the main beneficiaries of this truce. Richmond had offered a temporary refuge at Goodwood to Lord Edward’s wife Pamela,
and his sisters were impressed by his kindness. After Edward’s death Richmond arranged for Pamela to travel to her relations in Hamburg (with the promise of a pension from the family which was hardly ever paid). ‘My brother’s conduct on this occasion has made a deep impression on me,’ Sarah wrote. Emily was grateful to her brother as well. Letters of thanks and visits to Goodwood restored the conventional hierarchy among the Lennox siblings and allowed them to enter the nineteenth century publicly united.

PART THREE

‘What a day I have lived to see, when my heart strings were torn from me’.

Louisa to the 3rd Duke of Richmond, 3 May 1803
.

Emily, Louisa and Sarah began the new century with a sense of having seen too much and endured too many deaths. Emily observed that, contrary to what she had read and thought, old age did nothing to blunt her ability to feel. Thinking about Lord Edward’s death brought all her other dead children back to her: George Fitzgerald, her last son who died when he was ten; her first George, Lord Ophaly who had died in 1765; Gerald Fitzgerald who had disappeared in 1788; Louisa Fitzgerald, nursed so tenderly by Ogilvie at Black Rock; and all her other dead infants, a Charlotte, two Carolines, Fanny, Augustus, Henrietta and another Louisa. By 1800, 12 of Emily’s 22 children were already dead, all victims of childhood illness except Gerald, who had gone down with the ship in which he was serving.

Outward events mirrored the sisters’ inner weariness. Revolution, war in Europe and a realisation that the old century had ended in destruction rather than hope all combined to give them a feeling of approaching ends. Louisa said in 1801 that at fifty-eight she could not expect to live long, and decided then and there that she was entering her old age.
Sarah was fifty-five in 1800. Her eyes bothered her but she was full of energy still. She worried less for herself than for Napier, cooped up in a Dublin office ‘like the black hole at Calcutta’, working through an immense backlog of army accounts.

Emily was sixty-nine. She still grieved for Edward and at times now saw her life as a tragedy. In 1803, on the anniversary of Edward’s death, a day she always passed in mourning, she wrote to her daughter Lucy, ‘the loss of my child is always one of those melancholy thoughts that return almost as often as at first and depress my spirits often and are not entirely absorb’d in the great misery and calamity of my life.’ None the less, she was still vigorous. She gave assemblies at her house in Harley Street, wrote letters, read and demanded the unceasing attention of her husband and children.

For the first few years of the nineteenth century tid-bits of family news went back and forth across the Irish sea; Conolly’s asthma, Napier’s sore gums and weak chest, news of children’s marriages and old people’s deaths. Sometimes the correspondents travelled too. In July 1801, Louisa spent a few weeks with Emily and then went with Ogilvie and the youngest members of Emily’s household to Brighton for bathing and sea air. The next year she and Conolly were in England again, going to London, Goodwood and then Harrogate. Emily Napier, now almost twenty, accompanied Louisa everywhere. Louisa made half-hearted attempts to introduce Emily to prospective husbands, but both accepted that she was to sacrifice her future to her aunt’s old age and that filial devotion must make up for married love. In her dreams Louisa transformed herself from aunt to lover in a guilty effort at recompense. ‘I certainly never cease thinking of you, and dreamt of you the whole night,’ Louisa wrote to Emily in 1807. ‘In short, my love, my attachment to you is such, that it is like a lover’s. I have not words to express all that passes in my heart and thoughts about you.’

In 1803 the news from Ireland became more sombre. Conolly’s asthma attacks got worse and he succumbed to what the doctors called ‘influenza’. After a week’s illness, on 27 April 1803 he died in Louisa’s arms. To the last he was self-deprecating. ‘The last articulate words that he uttered (holding my hand) were, “I have left you all I could, knowing that you will make better use of it than I ever should”,’ Louisa reported to the Duke of Richmond.

In the months that followed Conolly’s death Louisa clung to these words. They gave her a reason for going on; Conolly had left everything in her hands and she had to carry out his wishes. To begin with, however, she could do nothing. For a week she lay in her closet at Castletown with Emily Napier constantly by her side. Sarah was at Castletown too. She made sure that Louisa was never alone and tried, as she put it, to ‘bring her about by slow degrees to
use herself
to misery, for misery was in every room, in every face, in every thing around her’. Sarah believed that grief should be extracted from the sufferer as a disease was drawn out of the body and consequently took every opportunity to remind Louisa of her loss. Louisa had always taken the opposite view. She hid her strongest feelings, believing that their exposure would be damaging and foolish. Emily complained that Sarah was making Louisa worse, ‘foreseeing nothing for dear Louisa but endless misery’ and the Duke of Richmond, asserting his newly rediscovered authority wrote to Napier hinting that Sarah should leave Louisa alone to grieve in her own way. Sarah went back to her house in Celbridge and Emily reported that when she did return to Castletown, ‘she was astonished at the change she found in Louisa for the better.’

Louisa coped with the transition from wife to widow by working through Conolly’s papers. ‘A great deal is left for me to do and the fulfilling all his benevolent intentions will become an object for the remainder of my life, when it shall please God to permit our reunion.’ Conolly had left Louisa Castletown for life, with a jointure of £2,500 a year, the sum
agreed in their marriage settlement. There were legacies for servants and £10,000 to be divided amongst Sarah’s children. There were also huge liabilities: personal debts, arrears of income tax, loans and interest on loans left unpaid for many years. In law these debts all passed to the heir to the estate, Admiral Pakenham, who had married Conolly’s niece and would inherit Castletown when Louisa died. But Louisa felt that Conolly had given her the duty of discharging the debts and she began working slowly through them with the same care that she had always given to her household accounts.

Emily knew that buried in Tom Conolly’s accounts was a secret that the family had kept for many years. She waited apprehensively as Louisa went through her husband’s scribbled and haphazard records. It took Louisa 13 months to find what Emily feared was there; payments for lodging, for gifts, an unexplained annuity perhaps. When she found these accounts she believed that her siblings were completely in ignorance and explained to her brother: ‘I met with a blow which almost overcame me. That of a mistress having been in question for many years back. You know enough of the mould in which I am cast to comprehend what such a discovery cost me, but I am determined on behaving towards his memory as I would have endeavoured (at least) to have done towards himself. Resignation, patience and no complaint are the way to shut the door against one’s worst enemy, one’s own passions; and jealousy having always been a strong ingredient in my composition, I resolved on giving it no admittance, for women cannot be judges of men’s sentiment upon that subject. It would be the height of ingratitude in me to doubt his love for me after the unremitting proofs he gave me of it, tho’ I cannot judge the mixture that attended it.’

Emily had for years hidden her knowledge of Conolly’s mistress from Louisa, conniving in his deception both because she did not want to see her sister wounded, and because she had been largely responsible for bringing about the marriage. So for her own sake and for Louisa’s Emily
stayed silent. Louisa had always proclaimed her marriage to be the bedrock upon which she had built a happy life. She knew very well that Conolly had little intelligence or political
savoir-faire
. But she had come to feel that he offered her trust and fidelity instead.

From the very first, Louisa had put enormous store by her husband’s faithfulness. Her position was an unusual one. Despite the increasing fashionableness of domestic felicity towards the end of the century, aristocratic women were given little expectation, upon marriage, that their husbands would be faithful. Before her marriage to Napier, Sarah subscribed cheerfully to the view that male adultery was no worse, and just as commonplace as gambling and drunkenness. Louisa did not agree. In a letter written some time in the early 1770s she explained why. ‘I cannot undertake to answer that part of your letter at length, where you condemn me for saying that my heart would be broke by the inconstancy of my husband, because it would take up more time than I have at present at my disposal. But as shortly as I can, I will. In
primis
, I am
sure
that you are perfectly
right
, and recommend the only good and wise conduct, and the only one to bring back a husband, and it is certainly what I should try at. But I fear I could not do it. I own to you that I feel myself in the wrong, for I don’t find in myself the least disposition towards making an allowance for my husband being a human creature, and like all other men. I have let myself go too far, expecting him to be all perfection in that
one
particular, and have allowed myself to place my greatest happiness in consequence of it; and ’tho ’tis my firm belief that as yet it has been the case, and that in all human probability ’tis likely now to continue, yet I do mean to take myself to task about it, for I feel I am wrong. I know myself to be [of] a most jealous disposition, and my natural violence would add to it, so that I have always dreaded the least spark of it, for fear that it should lead me wrong … In the case of another I can make allowances and see the human creature in the action can be very miserable
without being unreasonable and hard. Now with my husband I fear I should be both, and all things put together makes me think that if one’s heart can be broke by vexation, such a situation would have that effect upon me; and I should feel I was doing wrong at the same time, which would be an additional vexation. I don’t quite agree with you that drunkenness or gaming is as bad to the wife as inconstancy. I am sure its worse for the men, as its hurting an amiable character, which love does not. But a wife, I think, can make more allowances for these faults than for one which wounds her love so deeply. I don’t know how it is, but I can never dwell a moment on the thought of losing my husband’s love, without feeling it is the worst misfortune that can happen to me.’