Architecture too was putting up a façade of order and dignity to hide thieving, quackery, grief and pain. Outside the Pump Room and the Baths the sick spilled out on to the pavement. Paralysed by strokes, swollen with dropsy and blinded by diabetes, patients were wheeled about the streets, their bandaged legs stuck out in front of them, their sightless eyes swivelling giddily about. Lame soldiers hobbled past them. Around these cripples swirled a crowd of nurses and doctors. Anxious relatives passed the time of day with acquaintances and looked for signs of improvement. Healthy hangers-on sneaked into pastry shops or made for the parks. Beside the pavements orderly terraces were rising, their fronts decorated by ranks of tall, upright columns. The regularity, certainty and serenity of the Palladian terraces built in Bath after 1725 contradicted and contained the fear, the sickness and the social chaos they surveyed.
The monumental Palladian building at Bath was the brainchild of the architect John Wood, who moved there in 1727. Wood was a visionary who gradually imposed on the town a fantastic dream of using domestic architecture to re-create what he saw as the mystical harmony embodied in the great buildings of the past. In his vision, Bath was to be re-created, using the medium of Italian-derived Palladianism, as a place where buildings echoed the measured and mystical deliberations of a mélange of great leaders of former times, Druids and ancient Britons worshipping at stone circles, Romans in the Forum and the Coliseum, Greeks in the amphitheatre. The new city was to be senatorial and magical at the same time. Dignity and mystical harmony would replace, or at least disguise, the dissolution of gambling and death. Wood planned a Forum, a Circus and an Imperial Gymnasium. Health and activity were the keynotes of Wood’s planned city. He described the Circus as a place ‘for the exhibition of sport’. Athletes would display their prowess in the gymnasium.
Perhaps these temples of health and ritualised activity were too grotesque ever to be built in a city whose prosperity was founded on the sick and the lame. But some of Wood’s schemes did come off, and his son, who built the stately Royal Crescent in the 1760s, inherited his father’s notions of grandeur without his eccentric fantasy of a temple to youth and health in the midst of age and illness.
Caroline found lodgings in South Parade, one side of the Forum, which had been completed in 1743. It was a fashionable place to stay, close to open fields but only a short walk from the Pump Room and baths. Caroline was pleased with her lodgings, but she worried about Henry and fretted over Ste. ‘You don’t expect I suppose to hear I am in vast good spirits yet,’ she wrote on her first day there. ‘You know I always tense myself with some melancholy apprehensions of what may happen. The two things that hang on my spirits at present are the fear that you should not love me when I return to you and the fear of Ste’s catching the small pox.’ Caroline was anxious and alone. Without Henry to reassure her about Ste and to reiterate his love, her fear grew bigger and bigger. ‘If anything should happen to you or him, or you should grow not to love me I believe I should go mad. He is infinitely dearer to me than anything in the world except you. Do comfort me about it in your letter. Pray, pray, dearest angel, write often to me and believe me tho’ I do vex you sometimes I love you with the truest and tenderest affection.’
The next day Caroline left her card with Lady Bell Finch, Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Amelia, George II’s unmarried daughter. Her visit was a matter of duty, one of the rituals by which Bath high society tried to hold its head above the mass of humanity thronging the streets. ‘I went according to the form here,’ Caroline grumbled. ‘I did not much care to wait on her as she never visited me in town but was told it was necessary for those who went to court.’
Bath offered Caroline a chance to rest as much as a cure for her stomach trouble. For the first week she couldn’t drink the waters because she was menstruating. A month later she had to stop because she thought she was pregnant and was too embarrassed to ask a doctor if pregnancy and the waters went together. ‘I can’t possibly ask the doctor about drinking the waters (for its so vastly queer to have you come for a week and to be breeding immediately that I will keep it a vast secret for some time if it should prove so) but I know it is not right for Garnier when I came to Bath begged me to be very sure I was not breeding.’ Instead she walked about in the fields around the town and played endless dull and soothing games of cards for small stakes. Cards gave Caroline all her life a modest thrill of the forbidden. She disapproved of them in principle but she was easily persuaded to join a table. At Bath she justified herself as an observer of the exotic social mix that thronged assemblies and hung around the games. ‘My whist party (for I could not avoid playing a little) were Lady Fitzwilliam … Lord Brooke and some other men, of which there are a curious collection here. Lady Bateman and Lady Bell Finch have a highwayman and a tape merchant in their quincy party.’ She sat to Hoare, one of the crowd of painters who made a living from the boredom of Bath’s wealthier visitors and she read a good deal. Philosophy and history were interspersed with political pamphlets and newspapers. ‘I have read le Canapé, couleur de feu. ’Tis the filthiest most disagreeable book I ever read,’ she wrote with relish, and she re-read Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion with more sober enjoyment, siding with its royalist apologia which explained the rebellion as a series of accidents rather than the result of monarchical despotism.
Mostly she was engrossed with Ste. Fears about his catching smallpox subsided when she had a more obvious complaint to worry about. Ste got a cough. At the same time, Henry sent news from London that little Harry had died of a fever. All Caroline’s grief was diverted into terror that Ste would die too. ‘I’m so frightened about Ste. Do tell me what to do if I should lose him. I could never be happy again. My dear angel, you don’t know what I suffer. I think there was too much done for my dear little child in town.’
Caroline hinted that Harry had been killed with kindness and perhaps a surfeit of drugs too. Certainly by the mid-eighteenth century fashionable society was drowning in a tidal wave of potions and syrups. Avalanches of powders and hailstorms of pills engulfed the sick and the well alike. Doctors were setting up offices by the mansions of the rich. They were well connected and well organised, but the opinions and prescriptions they gave for large fees were scarcely distinguishable from the cheaper remedies offered by quacks who toured the streets. Do-it-yourself health manuals poured from the presses into nurseries and libraries. They offered instant consultations with the written word of famous physicians. With them came a new medical language which dressed up seventeenth-century theories of the humours with a new verbal patina that threw a glittering cloak of wisdom and impenetrability over its initiates.
Despite her reservations about Harry’s treatment, Caroline was dazzled by doctors and struggled to master this new language. ‘Lady Curzon … lost a little boy of a year old that had the whooping cough and she says when they opened him up they found he had a twisting of the guts which they attributed to his taking too much of the oxymel of squills and convulsive powder mixed with it. She said it had what she called excoriated his bowels. I don’t understand the word but beg your advice about it.’ Austere though she professed to be in matters of food or alcohol, medical ingestion called forth in her almost boundless extravagance. Multiple consultations, powders to ward off illness, pills to carry it away, repeated visits from doctors: all were ordered and paid for. Medicine had become a luxury commodity in the new world of goods.
At some point consumption and caring were intermingled. Desperate parents watching beloved children killed in hours by raging fevers or crippled and stunted by disease easily came to believe that doing something was better than inactive, agonising waiting for the workings of God’s will. More doctors rattled through the night streets, more pills changed hands, more money, more medical talk and, by and large, no more cures. Doctors had few spectacular successes, although smallpox inoculation was eagerly used and advertised by the aristocracy and demonstrated that cures were possible. But doctors both benefited from and adv
ertised new attitudes towards sickness and the body. Old fatalistic notions about illness were being swept away. Hope and prescriptions were replacing inertia and prayer. That hope was often only a white powder in a screw of paper that had been given the sanction of the regular copperplate of a medical hand. In the apothecary’s shop, drugs were like luminous beacons. Syrups lay thickly in crystal vials with cut-glass stoppers. Plum-red, royal-blue and emerald-green decanters twinkled at customers from the windows. Conical mounds of powder, pall-black, earthy-brown and bluey white, squatted on the shelves. All beckoned onlookers with promises of action and cure.
Caroline was soon an ardent believer in the new medicine. Ste was its beneficiary and, in the end, its victim. When he started coughing and twitching in Bath in December 1746, Caroline sent at once for the local apothecary. Later on she brought in two well-known Bath doctors, Pearce and Harrington, who confidently announced that the little boy had worms. Caroline still wanted the opinion of her London doctors. ‘I should be easier if I was near Garnier and Truesdale for I have a great opinion of them.’ Nevertheless she pressed on with the prescribed cures. Ethiops mineral, a black powder which turned white in the light, was followed by calomel. Calomel was less emollient than it sounded; in fact it was Ethiops mineral under another name and consisted of pure mercury sulphide. Oxymel of squills, a syrup concocted of vinegar, honey and ground up bulbs of the scilla plant, was soon added to the mercury. Ste was learning to talk and take medicine at the same time. He bravely endured blistering and, as a coda, was given mellipidus, a preparation made of ground-up woodlice. Caroline’s doctors had some trouble getting this because, they said, live woodlice were hard to find in the country. Ste’s illness was the beginning of a long torment for himself and his mother.
All the medicines Ste was given had a similar effect. They brought things out of the body and, the story went, purged it of poisons. There were powders, like mercury sulphide, which made the patient vomit. Others produced diarrhoea, fevers and sweats. Bleeding and cupping drew off excess blood. Blisters and boils gathered pus and poisons to the surface of the skin. Medicines allowed the body to express illness and produce its own graphic account of distress. Caroline and her sisters saw this bodily expression as a close relative of emotion. Emotion was the expression of feeling, pain the expression of sickness. Expressing emotion also had a physical component, it was in part the expulsion of bad feeling, which ensured that destructive feelings did not get bottled up in the body. So tears assuaged grief and simultaneously indicated that the body was expelling harmful feelings that might otherwise cause illness. New medical techniques that stressed action rather than inertia sat easily with Caroline’s belief in the value of emotion; getting out passion and getting out poison could go hand in hand.
During the month of January 1747, Ste got better, although his shuddering and twitching did not stop. Caroline filled her letters with his naughtiness and misdeeds and pronounced herself a satisfied mother. ‘I feel great comfort and satisfaction in sitting in the room next to dear Ste,’ she wrote to Henry one evening a few days before they left Bath. ‘Indeed the greatest pleasure I shall have in life next to being with you is to take care of Ste and whatever other children I may have. For people of my stupid disposition who don’t love the great world have nothing better to do than take care of their children.’ While Caroline was convalescing, Henry had been busy politicking in London. Since their marriage he had risen fast. He was watched from a discreet distance with mingled dismay and amazement by his father-in-law who, through the medium of his friend the Duke of Newcastle, was well apprised of Henry’s manoeuvring.
Once he had become a friend of Lord Hervey’s and a Whig, Fox came under the aegis and tutelage of Hervey’s political boss Sir Robert Walpole. By 1735, Walpole, as First Lord of the Treasury and effective leader of the House of Commons, had been in power for nearly fifteen years. He controlled the House with a masterful and heady blend of bribery, preferment and personal charm. With the King in one pocket and the Commons in the other, Walpole was virtually unassailable when no more was demanded of his pragmatic policies than they could supply. He realised that, by not moving into the House of Lords, as the man who became First Lord of the Treasury customarily had, he could hang on to the Commons and the Cabinet at the same time and, if the King’s support was added to that, he could combine in himself all the most important bases of power.
Walpole had no party in the House of Commons, only a crowd of supporters who voted with the government, some from principle, others for profit, others, like the young Henry Fox, for political advancement. On the floor of the House and in the labyrinth of the Palace of Westminster, Walpole’s most trustworthy and sturdy lieutenant in the Commons was Henry Pelham, younger brother to the Duke of Newcastle, and it was to Pelham that Fox attached himself. He had chosen the right man. In 1742, three years into a trade war with Spain that had escalated into a full-scale European conflict known as the War of Austrian Succession, Walpole was toppled. After a year of instability, Henry Pelham became First Lord of the Treasury and it was then that Fox got his Treasury post.
Pelham’s authority was much less secure than that of his mentor. Unlike Walpole he did not have the complete confidence of the monarch. After Walpole’s demise, George II relied on John, Lord Carteret, to conduct foreign policy, instead of Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle, who was nominally in charge as the Secretary of State. Newcastle and Pelham begrudged the huge sums of money needed to wage a Continental war. But Carteret, a polymathic diplomat and famous drinker, endorsed the Hanoverian aim of a peaceful Germany at all costs. George was desperate to secure the peace and autonomy of Hanover from the territorial ambitions of other states, and he gratefully employed Carteret in the byzantine negotiations between crowned heads that went on behind the movements of money and troops.
For four years, between 1742 and 1746, the political turmoil at home matched the turbulence of the European war. George II fought and beat the French at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743, but the general drift of the war was in favour of the French and their allies, the Prussians and the Spanish. In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender (‘our cousin’ as the Lennox girls called him), took advantage of the confused and undefended state of the kingdom to land in Scotland. His advance south was ultimately destroyed not so much by the efficiency of the Duke of Cumberland as by apathy towards the Stuart cause. Gentlemen who for years had openly been toasting the King ‘over the water’ and marking the anniversary of the death of Charles I with theatrical mourning and demonstrations of grief, now feared for their property and their lives. Hasty conversions to the Hanoverian crown were seen all over the kingdom and the Young Pretender was forced to flee back into the land of sentiment and the imagination where he was immortalised as a romantic and unhappy splash of tartan in a Hanoverian grey reality. The King continued to rely on Carteret’s advice and in 1744 Pelham and his brother threatened to resign in protest. Carteret was eventually dismissed, but with the war going badly and with the 1745 rebellion threatening national self-confidence if not the Hanoverian settlement itself, the King continued to consult him behind the scenes. Patience with the monarch finally wore out, and in February 1746 virtually the whole administration, including Henry Fox and the Duke of Richmond, whose Mastership of the Horse brought an honorary Cabinet post, resigned. George II was unable to form a government with the shreds of Carteret’s support and he was forced, after a few weeks, to ask Newcastle and Pelham back on their own terms. Carteret was thrown into oblivion as a condition of their return. For the next eight years Pelham and his brother presided over a relatively stable administration.
At the beginning of the new government there was a period of shuffles and reshuffles of the Cabinet. It was in one of them that Fox got his chance. He became Secretary at War. The job brought a Cabinet post and a good deal of trouble. Europe was still in turmoil and no peace was in sight. Fox had wanted the post of Paymaster General of the Forces, a lesser though mor
e lucrative and easier job, reckoning that it offered a step up the political ladder without the political risks involved in taking the War Office. But that had gone to Fox’s rival Pitt, and ambition, of which Fox had a great deal, demanded that he accept the secretaryship. Refusal would signify faintheartedness and signal the premature end of his political career. But fainthearted was exactly what Fox was, as he freely confessed to his brother, ‘I fear I must take it, to quarrel with the army and … to do business from morning to night.’
Before Fox was offered the post, Newcastle had thought it prudent to reassure the Duke of Richmond that he would not have to do any business with his hated son-in-law. A deputy could stand in for Richmond when he needed to work with the War Office. Richmond tried to stop the appointment but Fox was by this time indispensable to the government and any duty of friendship that Newcastle owed to Richmond was rapidly cast aside by political expediency. Fox had become a more important political figure than his father-in- law and Richmond was made to realise it in no uncertain terms.
Having got the job, Henry and Caroline began looking around for a house to go with it. As a protégé of Walpole, Fox knew that splendid surroundings elevated a host and humbled his guests. Walpole had built Houghton, his country mansion, as a temple to power, a palace overflowing with the rewards of offices. Visitors there were stupefied by acres of plush damask and taffeta, sunk in the curves of French upholstery and overcome by the weight of gilded ceilings and golden picture-frames. Fox was looking out for a house on a smaller scale in which he could entertain and impress. What he and Caroline found, in the summer of 1746, was a house quite unlike the modern palaces successful politicians put up to demonstrate their exalted positions. It was a huge, decaying, unfashionable Jacobean mansion called Holland House, just on the western edge of London. Holland House came cheap, especially when its size was taken into account. It cost £102 16s. 9d. a year, not much more than the Foxes’ house in Conduit Street, but the price reflected its dilapidation and unfashionableness. Henry and Caroline took Holland House on an extendable lease for ninety-nine years.
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 Page 5
