Aristocrats (65 page)

At various stages along the way I have been grateful for the ideas and advice of Louise Lippincott, with whom I discussed sublime portraiture; Teri Edelstein; Amanda Vickery who has kept me
au courant
with the latest developments in feminist historiography; Susie Steinbach; Robert Illiffe, who told me about Newton’s conquest of aristocratic drawing-rooms; and Ann Bermingham. Sally Laird and Charles Jennings asked me useful questions and shared many a gossipy lunch. Rachel Watson asked for (and I hope has got) information about landaus and broughams and other Georgette Heyerish conveyances. Brian Allen helped me with portraits, provenances and the peerage. Peter Mandler, Juliet Gardiner, Claire l’Enfant and Dawn Colvin all read the manuscript; their comments have helped enormously with revisions. Anne McDermid has been unflaggingly supportive of the project. Jenny Uglow has been a marvellous editor.

Many people, on both sides of the Irish Sea, have made the writing of this book possible. First I must thank Guy Strutt, who entertained me at Terling, lent me typescripts and books and introduced me to Eleanor Burgess. By copying Louisa Conolly’s letters to Sarah Lennox, Eleanor Burgess has effectively saved them from oblivion. She not only gave them to me, but also gave me meals, information and Irish contacts; I cannot be too grateful to her. The present Duke of Leinster greeted my unexpected appearance with calm and fortitude. He showed me the book of Household Rules which I used to reconstruct life at Carton in the 1760s. Lord Napier and
Ettrick similarly coped with my anxious enquiries about generations of Napiers, Lennox-Napiers and so on. David Legg-Willis, Valerie Griffiths and the staff at Goodwood House generously gave me prints and showed me about the park. The Earl Bathurst and Mrs Charlotte Morrison have been generous with permissions. When I turned up unannounced at Carton the staff who watch over the empty house showed me round and let me take pictures. At Castletown successive curators and staff allowed me to walk about at will, moving carpets and furniture and taking photographs in a way unthinkable in an English country house. In Celbridge Mrs Lena Boylan showed me typescripts of manuscripts salvaged from Castletown, and the staff of St Raphael’s, Celbridge, showed me round Sarah’s house which is in their grounds. Desmond Guinness showed me his pictures and gave me invaluable contacts and Marianne Faithfull showed me round her house. Desmond FitzGerald, Anne Crook-shank, Eleanor Grene and Dennis Fitzgerald gave me references and encouragement. Dick Hill gave me tea and an exhibition of Irish charm that was without parallel.

Picture acknowledgments

Unless otherwise stated, pictures have come from private collections and are reproduced by kind permission of the owners. Copyrights and permissions for the remaining pictures are as follows:

Colour: No. 6. Sir Joshua Reynolds, British, 1723–1792, Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, oil on canvas, 1765, 242 x 151.5 cm, Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Kimball Collection, 1922.4468, photograph © 1993, The Art Institute of Chicago. All Rights Reserved.

Black and white: Nos. 4, 9, 11, 15, 45, 46, 47, 60, Copyright British Museum. Nos. 14, 19, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 48, by courtesy of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London. No. 16, Copyright Guildhall Library, Corporation of London. No. 25, by courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums. Bequest of Elizabeth Sears Warren. Nos. 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, by permission of the British Library.

Sources and Bibliography

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

Some of the following archives are extremely large. I have noted only the parts of the archives which have been of use to me.

Bodleian Library

Napier Papers

General Correspondence of George and Sarah Napier: Includes drafts of letters, including letters from Sarah to Charles James Fox and her brother the third Duke of Richmond, and some of their replies. Correspondents include Louisa Conolly (a series from 1814–20, mostly about travelling on the Continent and setting up her school at Castletown) and Lord and Lady Moira. There are a few letters from Emily, Duchess of Leinster, Pamela Fitzgerald and Susan O’Brien. Hon. George Napier’s will. Misc. accounts, inventories relating to Sarah’s widowhood and old age.

British Library

Add. MS. 30.990

A bundle of miscellaneous letters to Emily, Duchess of Leinster mostly concerning the events of 1798, with a series of letters from Lord Edward Fitzgerald from 1796–7.

Holland House Papers

Correspondence of Lady Susan Fox-Strangways and her parents, 1749–69.

Correspondence of Lady Sarah Lennox and Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, 1761–1817.

Correspondence of William O’Brien and Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, 1763–1805. Correspondence of Lady
Susan Fox-Strangways and Caroline and Henry Fox, Baroness and First Lord Holland, 1763–66.

General correspondence of William O’Brien, including an autobiographical fragment which confirms that his family was Catholic. Journal of Lady Susan O’Brien (née Fox-Strangways).

Correspondence of Henry Fox and Lady Caroline Fox, 1744–69.

Correspondence of Henry and Caroline Fox and the second Duke and Duchess of Richmond, 1743–50, including autopsies of the Duke and Duchess of 1750 and 1751 respectively.

Correspondence of the third Duke of Richmond and Henry Fox, 1750–65.

Correspondence of Emily, Countess of Kildare and James, Earl of Kildare, subsequently first Duke and Duchess of Leinster with Henry and Caroline Fox, 1748–66.

Correspondence of Charles James Fox with his parents, 1763–65.

Correspondence of Stephen Fox, second Lord Holland with his parents, 1756–73.

Correspondence of Henry Fox and his brother and sister-in-law, first Lord and Lady Ilchester, 1742–70.

Correspondence of the second Lord Holland and his wife, 1774.

Travel Journals of Lady Caroline Fox, 1763–70. Account book of Lady Caroline Fox, 1773.

Misc. papers relating to leases and purchases of land by Henry Fox, 1749–67. Misc. verses in various hands, collected and written by Henry Fox.

Correspondence of Sir William Bunbury and Henry Fox, 1762.

Correspondence of Lady Hervey and Henry Fox, 1750–53.

Correspondence of Alison Cooper to Henry Fox about his illegitimate children by her, 1765.

Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster and William Ogilvie with the third Lord and Lady Holland, 1798–1808. General correspondence of Hon. Caroline Fox, including letters from her great-aunts, Emily, Duchess of Leinster, Lady Louisa Conolly and Lady Sarah Napier (née Lennox).

NOTE
The letters between Sarah Lennox and Susan Fox-Strangways were almost all published in 1902 as
The Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox
, edited by the Countess of Ilchester and
Lord Stavordale. The edition also included the ‘Memoir on the Events Attending the Death of George 3 by Henry Fox, first Lord Holland’, and ‘Captain Henry Napier’s Memoir of Lady Sarah’s Early Life’, taken from the manuscript version now in the Napier Papers in the Bodleian Library. I have followed this edition in matters of naming (Caroline Fox’s notoriously difficult handwriting often allows for several different readings of words and names), punctuation (upon which it rarely follows its largely unpunctuated originals) and so on.

The Holland House archive is vast. The logic of its assembly seems to have been dictated by an urge to document the life of Charles James Fox. Because of this almost every letter of any political significance has survived. So have letters between Charles James Fox’s relatives (the often ‘trivial’ correspondence between his parents, for instance) that his survivors thought might have some bearing upon his life. But, by the same token, much has disappeared. Although we know from internal evidence that she wrote at least once a fortnight to her sister, the only letters from Emily to Caroline that survive are those sent jointly with her husband or those addressed to Henry Fox. Similarly, there are no letters from Louisa or Sarah to Caroline. Letters from the Lennox sisters do crop up in some numbers addressed to later Holland generations – the third Lord Holland and Caroline Fox, in particular.

Napier Papers

General correspondence of George and Lady Sarah Napier, mainly drafts of letters to Lord and Lady Moira, Lady Ailesbury and General Conway.

Correspondence between George and Lady Sarah Napier and their son Charles James Napier, 1801–1809.

Accounts relating to the sale of the Napiers’ house in Celbridge, Co. Kildare.

Correspondence between George and Charles James Napier, mostly after 1826.

Correspondence between Emily Napier and Charles James Napier, mostly after 1821.

Journal of Hon. George Napier, 1779.

Greater London Record Office

Records of the Consistory Court of the Bishops of London, 1769.

Irish Georgian Society

Correspondence between Lady Louisa Conolly and Lady Sarah Lennox, 1759–1820.

NOTE
These letters are the originals from which the Bunbury Letter Books in the West Suffolk Record Office were copied. Besides the main correspondence, they include many letters from Louisa Conolly to her brother the third Duke of Richmond, letters from Louisa Conolly to Emily Napier and miscellaneous papers written by members of the Napier family about Louisa Conolly’s death. Absent from the collection is any material relating to the events of 1798. This was extracted by the original buyer from the Bunbury family, Mr McPeake, before he gave the collection to Hubert Butler, who passed it to the Irish Georgian Society. These Irish Georgian Society Manuscripts have now gone missing. But by good fortune they were meticulously copied by Mrs Eleanor Burgess in the 1960s and she generously allowed me to use them.

National Library of Ireland

Leinster Papers

Correspondence of Emily, first Duchess of Leinster, consisting of:

Letters between Emily, Duchess of Leinster and James, Duke of Leinster, 1759–62.

Letters between Emily, Duchess of Leinster and William Ogilvie, 1771–1813.

Letters from Lady Caroline Fox to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1756–74.

Letters from Lady Sarah Lennox to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1759–94.

Letters from Lady Cecilia Lennox to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1769.

Letters from Lord Edward Fitzgerald to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1771–92.

Letters from William, Lord Offaly to his mother Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1765–94. Letters from other Fitzgerald children, Charles, Henry, Robert, Charlotte, Sophia and Lucy to their mother Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1768–94. General correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster, including letters from the Countess of Kildare, Lady Barrymore and Lady Clanbrassil.

NOTE
This collection of 1,770 letters contains few letters sent after 1794, with the exception of the correspondence between Emily and William Ogilvie. Apart from letters sent by
Emily to her husbands it consists entirely of correspondence received.

A carefully selected part of the collection was edited by Brian Fitzgerald and published as
Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster
, as follows:

Vol. 1, 1949: Letters of Emily, Duchess of Leinster; James, First Duke of Leinster; Caroline Fox, Lady Holland.

Vol. 2, 1953: Letters of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Lady Sarah Napier (née Lennox).

Vol. 3, 1957: Letters of Lady Louisa Conolly and William, Marquis of Kildare (second Duke of Leinster).
NB.
This later volume contains no letters written by William after 1769 and thus no reference to Emily’s second marriage.

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland

de Ros Papers

Uncatalogued letters from the de Ros family papers, mainly letters which came into the archive via Lord Henry Fitzgerald, who married Charlotte de Ros in 1791, all dated post-1789.

Downshire Papers

Bundle of letters from William Ogilvie to Lord Downshire, 1815–25.

Leinster Papers

Letters of William, Lord Offaly to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1756–60s.

General correspondence of William, second Duke of Leinster.

Letters and papers relating to the affairs of 1798.

Correspondence and papers of the third Duke of Leinster.

McPeake Papers

Photocopies of material mostly relating to the events of 1798 but covering the years 1783–1815. Includes the selections from the papers now in the possession of the Irish Georgian Society.

Terling, Essex

Strutt Papers

Bundle of letters from James, first Duke of Leinster to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1766.

Letters from Emily, Duchess of Leinster to her daughter, Lady Lucy Foley (née Fitzgerald), 1791–1810. General correspondence of Lady Lucy Foley, including letters from her Fitzgerald siblings, William Ogilvie and Lady Louisa Conolly. General correspondence between Lady Lucy Foley and members of the Strutt family.

Letters from Emily, Duchess of Leinster to her daughter Lady Charlotte Strutt (née Fitzgerald), 1793–1804.

Trinity College Dublin

Conolly Papers

Castletown Accounts, which include:

Tradesmen’s receipt books, 1777–1806.

Servants’ wages receipts, 1763–70, 1785–96.

Land agents’ account books of lands in counties Dublin and Kildare.

Prices of groceries, 1782–5, 1790–95.

Memoranda of the consumption of different foods tabulated, 1783–87.

Monthly and quarterly accounts of house bills, servants’ bills, tradesmen’s bills, 1758–78.

Servants and household accounts, 1791–1803.

Expenses of hounds in food and wages, 1787–88.

Castletown expenses and tradesmen’s bills, 1792–97.

Personal account books of Thomas Conolly, 1766, 1767–70, 1775–84.

Accounts of the servants, windows and hearths at Castletown for tax purposes. Dairy accounts, 1798–99.