Emily had few intentions of letting Louisa go. To Louisa and Sarah, Emily, at twenty-six, was at once mother and sister. They looked up to her as a figure of authority and confided in her as an equal; Sarah called her both ‘dearest siss’ and ‘Queen of Ireland’. Emily was determined not to lose the pleasure of this enviable position. So she and Kildare began looking round for a suitable Irish husband for Louisa. Caroline was hurt and the dispute was referred to their brother. Trying to keep the peace, the third Duke declared that Emily and Caroline would be equally good guardians. Emily, used to being flattered, was offended; Caroline was hurt at Emily’s offence which she construed as a slight to her: ‘the thing I took to heart was your seeming to think my brother’s having an equal good opinion of me as you was an offence to you. I can’t look upon that in any other light.’ The hurt rankled. Caroline was angered that her elopement was held against her capabilities as a sister and she wanted Louisa with her precisely so that she could wipe away what she saw as the stain of her father’s will.
Emily declared they might disagree even more if they lived closer together. But Caroline swept away this attempt to smooth over their differences. ‘I believe the contrary, at least I know myself I’m much oftener disposed to be angry at people when they are absent; its easier to explain things when together.’ But Emily disregarded Caroline’s claims and pressed on in the search for a husband for Louisa. Her first choice Louisa rejected out of hand. The second, twenty-year-old Thomas Conolly, Louisa accepted. From the Kildares’ point of view, Conolly was the perfect match. He was the richest man in Ireland and, although he was without political experience himself, his family had been connected with nationalist politics for half a century and so he could be counted on to support Kildare and the Patriot Party. Outweighing all this, for Emily, was the fact that Conolly’s park was next to her own and Castletown, his mansion, was the nearest big house to Carton. Married to Conolly, Louisa would scarcely even be leaving home, and Emily could look forward to a lifetime of comfortable chats and sisterly service.
PART TWO
‘I can never deserve all he does for me’.
Louisa to Emily, 10 April 1759.
Thomas Conolly had an education appropriate to a young man of vast fortune. Painted by Mengs in Rome, Conolly dressed for the occasion in an elaborate brocaded coat. He gestured towards a line of marble muses whose attire, instruments and place under a huge marble column vaguely suggested a knowledge of classical learning and antiquities. Beyond such a gesture, Conolly had little interest in the ancient world. Rome and the rest of the Grand Tour made little impression on him. When he returned to Ireland he took up the life of a country gentleman with unaffected pleasure. He cut his hair short and curling round the ears and swapped his grand clothes for a simple cravat and riding-coat. In Conolly’s portrait by Reynolds, painted in about 1760 for the Holland House gallery, the classical props are abandoned. Conolly wears an olive-green overcoat and a white shirt. In the background a rapidly brushed swirl of clouds, good practice for a studio assistant, suggests only the out of doors. No books or speeches show that Conolly aspires to be a dilettante or politician. Reynolds painted Conolly open faced and slightly open mouthed, an honest man in a country setting. Eight years later, firmly established in his identity of ‘Squire Conolly’, he was painted again, by the Irish artist Healy. This time one of Conolly’s race horses, huge and gaunt, fills the centre of the painting, while Conolly, modestly taking a subsidiary role, is almost edged off the side.
By 1768, when this last picture was made, Conolly was thirty. He was a formidably strong man, liable to fits of hypochondria if deprived of hunting, racing and ‘rough riding’ over his estate. As this painting showed, horses were Conolly’s greatest pleasure; he was quite content to share any canvas with his charger, his trainer and a groom. His house he shared with sporting companions from many walks of life. Happy days in his calendar were those marked by equestrian achievement in the field or on the track.
Conolly scrawled enough figures in his account books to show that racing, hunting and gambling on horses cost him a great deal. In 1776 he lost a small fortune at Almack’s Club in London. As Louisa put it, ‘the dear soul was so often called there by bets upon his horses that it drew him into a little gambling. The money he lost (happily) won’t really hurt him … It was reported he had ruined himself, but I am sure his losses altogether were under £10,000.’ Such a reverse would have ruined many prosperous country gentlemen, but Louisa could afford her insouciance; by the 1770s Conolly’s rent round was bringing in around £25,000 a year.
This wealth was new, made by Thomas Conolly’s great uncle, William ‘Speaker’ Conolly in the years after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Land sequestered from defeated Jacobites was bought up by William III’s supporters; fortunes were made and the Protestant Ascendancy secured. In the turbulence humble men, William Conolly among them, pushed their way to prominence. The son of Protestant innkeepers from Donegal, Conolly trained as a lawyer, but soon moved from settling land deals to making them. At the same time he acted as Collector and Receiver of revenue for the government, thus ensuring a steady supply of cash to finance his purchases. After his election as MP for Donegal, he quickly built up a political machine that rivalled his land-holdings in size, and ended his career as Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, spokesman for Irish Protestant nationalism and the richest man in Ireland. He had extensive lands in the north and west of the island, a large Dublin house and Castletown, a magnificent ‘pile of building’, twelve miles to the west of the capital. In 1729 Conolly died and his property and fortune passed to his brother Patrick and thence to Louisa’s Thomas Conolly, who inherited in 1754.
Despite the fact that Thomas Conolly’s mother was an English aristocrat, from the Wentworth family, he was seen as irremediably Irish and had to pay a high premium for a well connected English bride. The settlement for Louisa, made before their marriage, was his exchange for entering ducal and courtly circles. Lands with an annual rent-roll of £6,178 were settled on Louisa to provide a widow’s pension and fortunes for younger children. For the time being these rents supplied the £3,000 a year Conolly paid his mother. On top of this money, Louisa had several hundred pounds a year of ‘pin money’ to do what she liked with. On the Lennox side, the Duke of Richmond handed over to Conolly Louisa’s £10,000, owed her from her father’s will. For Conolly the marriage meant an alliance with the Kildares, Richmonds and Foxes. For Louisa it meant wealth and proximity to her sister. The young couple were married on 30 December 1758. Louisa was fifteen, her husband twenty. Still smarting from her defeat in their recent quarrel, Caroline wrote tersely to Emily with her ‘sincere congratulations to you on this happy occasion,’ adding, ‘I will not interrupt your present joy by entering into any more of the particulars now subsisting between us.’
When Louisa married Conolly she also married his house. In the years to come she bestowed immense devotion on the fabric of each. In 1758 Castletown was, like its proprietor, a sturdy but undecorated structure, outwardly complete but unfinished inside. It had no hothouses, nurseries or landscaping.
Castletown has an exterior as severe as those of many Dublin town houses. It stands on flat ground by the banks of the Liffey, which meanders sluggishly through the park. The south-facing front is a flat rectangle of shining, dense, cream-coloured limestone, four storeys high, thirteen windows and 140 feet wide. A simple columned porch outlines the entrance, from which two shallow flights of steps flow to the driveway in wide undulations. The same stark regularity is repeated round the sides of the house and along its north front. From the upstairs windows the blue humps of the Wicklow Mountains dominate the southern skyline.
Castletown house, as originally planned in the 1720s by its Italian architect, Alessandro Galilei, was a Palladian box on such a huge scale that its geometry was transformed into monumentality. It did not stay so simple long. Very soon an element of the rococo crept into the design; a hint of the sumptuousness that
was played off against plainness in Ascendancy life. Edward Lovett Pearce, an Irish architect, added two curving colonnades that, with a suggestion of caprice and two necklace-like rows of sculpted urns, link the main house to its satellite offices and kitchens. To the right and east of the main block sit the stables and kennels, to the left are the kitchens and household offices. Castletown’s unfinished interior offered Louisa endless scope for what she and her sisters called ‘business’. Decoration, landscaping and building occupied Louisa for 25 years.
But it was in England, not Ireland, that Tom and Louisa spent the first couple of years of their married life. Early in 1759 they left Dublin for Park Gate in Cheshire, arriving there on 13 March after what Louisa called ‘a charming passage of thirteen hours in the night air’. Park Gate was a small port with a large custom house and a harbour deep enough to take the ships that churned back and forth across the Irish Sea. Now it lies mired and silted up in the muddy chocolate skirts of the Dee estuary. But two hundred years ago it was the favourite landing place for passengers from Dublin. The alternative was Holyhead in Wales, which was closer to Dublin but further from London. Park Gate made sense for Tom and Louisa because their first destination was Stretton Hall in Staffordshire, the Conolly family seat in England. At Stretton Louisa looked around her with the eagle eye of prospective ownership and pronounced the house ‘a sweet, dear, lovely, pretty place’. Her new Conolly relatives, delighted with the marriage, used much the same adjectives about her. But Louisa was also lost without her sisters and she clung to Conolly for comfort, writing to Emily, ‘I hate to have Mr Conolly leave me at all … for then I feel quite forlorn, as if I wanted somebody. You have no notion, my dearest sister, how happy I am to have so sweet a picture of you as I have to wear constantly; its the greatest pleasure almost I have, to look at it so constantly as I do.’ Louisa’s initiation at Stretton over, she and Conolly proceeded nervously to London, to be presented at Court and at Holland House.
Henry Fox, quick to serve the family interest, had written to Conolly at Park Gate, offering him the vacant parliamentary seat of Malmesbury, which was up for sale to a suitable candidate at four or five hundred pounds. But although Malmesbury was the primary subject of his letter, Fox was also writing to make sure that Louisa and Conolly would not upset Caroline by appearing visibly taken aback when they saw Ste’s twitching and trembling. Ste was still very ill. ‘As yet there is no amendment in my dearest child,’ Caroline told Emily. ‘He will be better for some hours, almost a whole day sometimes, then be as bad as ever again. Wilmot, Duncan, Truesdale, Ranby and a Doctor Reeves out of the city attend him; he is now taking tin. As yet nothing seems to have any effect.’ Fox’s caution was in vain; Louisa was horrified by Ste and Caroline noticed it. But Caroline, in her turn, was shocked by Conolly. On 3 April, a week after Louisa’s arrival, Caroline wrote carefully to Emily, ‘Mr Conolly seems vastly good natured’. But by 17 April she had thrown this caution to the winds: ‘You must indeed be partial to Conolly not to think him immensely silly, dear siss; sure, he is a tiresome boy, and one feels sorry he is so, he seems so exceedingly good natured. I can but think how miserable I should have been at Louisa’s age to have had such a husband. I hope and believe she won’t find it out ever, but I should have thought it dreadful.’ Caroline’s criticism offended Emily, who replied that Conolly did not ‘want sense’, although to Kildare she wrote, ‘I should never think of comparing you to poor Conolly in anything’. Memories of the recent quarrel still lingered and Caroline hurried to make up for her blunder. Conolly, she agreed, was not stupid, but ‘in company he is dreadful sometimes’. By the middle of June Caroline had decided that Conolly was bumptiously childish rather than simply empty headed. ‘To be sure he is reckoned a mighty silly boy, but … I feel to love him, he is so good natured, neither is it a kind of silly way I dislike so much as others. I look upon him as a boy of ten or eleven years old, and treat him as such. I only dread her feeling ashamed of him sometimes.’
Louisa was not ashamed of Conolly. She had already decided how to treat him. He was her ‘flea’, her ‘tormenting flea’ and also her ‘dear flea’: a constant irritant of which she was nevertheless fond. He hopped about, guileless and full of muscle. As time went on Louisa adapted herself to ‘flea’. She came to depend on his presence and to dread his trips away from home when, let loose from her restraint, he might gamble, drink and make foolish political decisions. At home she watched over him, nursing his ailments and entertaining his sporting guests. Sarah once wrote to Emily about the way in which Louisa came to implicate herself in Conolly’s hypochondria: ‘if Louisa has written at all, I am sure she has given you an idea of his being very ill, which you must not say I deny, for it is really so odd a fancy of his, and so rooted, so much adopted by her, that I’m convinced both of them would think me very unfeeling if they hear how lightly it is treated by every soul … His weakness admits of three hours ride and two of walking every morning, and the spitting increased by what he terms want of appetite; -viz: two plates of soup, three pork steaks, half a chicken and tart. Dearest Louisa is deaf; but why she should be blind I cannot guess.’
Simultaneously artless and inscrutable, Louisa baffled her family. Caroline, Emily and Sarah reached for superlatives to describe her, as if exact language was inadequate to her merits. Writing to a friend in the mid-1750s, Emily said, ‘As for Louisa, I really think that in my life I never knew or heard of anything equal to the sweetness and gentleness of her disposition. She is indeed as yet quite an angel. She is mildness itself. It is not in nature to ruffle the sweetness of her temper one single instant.’ Emily continued, indulging in her fondness for ‘storybook’ analogies, ‘one may say of her as Lord Hastings says in the play of Jane Shore,
Without one jarring atom was she formed
and gentleness and joy made up her being
which I think the prettiest character that can be given any woman.’
Caroline and Sarah agreed with Emily that something otherworldly surrounded their sister. ‘That angel Louisa’, ‘that sweet angel’, Caroline called her, and Sarah said she was ‘a dear angel’ whom people ‘worshipped’. Louisa’s place in the Lennox family was that of a lodestone of virtue, a standard of goodness against which her brothers and sisters measured their waywardness and depravity. Sarah, in particular, used her older sister for self-chastisement and encouragement. ‘She is an angel and I’m a weak, unsteady, thoughtless, vain creature.’ ‘My angelic sister’s character … raises me above my own weak nature sometimes.’
Quietness was one of Louisa’s greatest strengths, the more so because her siblings believed in expressing their emotions forcefully. Sandwiched between Emily’s queenly claims to emotional dominance and Sarah’s volubility, Louisa became at an early age mistress of the judicious silence. Sarah would have liked her sister to join in gossipy dissections of people and events, partly because Louisa’s reserve made Sarah feel tarnished and guilty. But Louisa never did, and Sarah wrote with a touch of exasperation, ‘dearest Louisa! How does she contrive to keep out of all scrapes? Why, by holding her tongue, to be sure. She is closeness itself, for the deuce a word will she utter that can be turned into any form but that she gave it.’
Louisa believed in battening down strong feelings. Towards the end of her life she wrote to her brother, ‘nobody is more likely than me to be drawn out of the right path where their passions are engaged. I am sensible of possessing very strong ones by nature, in so much, that I have made it a constant duty with myself to regulate them, and trust that upon the whole I have been able to subdue them very much. But on some occasions throughout life I confess they have been stronger than my good resolutions.’
Louisa managed her silent gestures and eloquent reserve with great skill. They were her ways of securing attention and love. Early on in her life Louisa had forged a connection between doing good and being loved. Unlike Emily, who demanded love as a right, Louisa came to believe that love had to be earned, something not inevitab
le but hard won and reciprocal. Louisa had far lower expectations of her desserts than Emily or even Caroline, uncertain though the latter might be in some respects. Almost all her life her ambition was to please first Emily, then Conolly, Sarah and her other brothers and sisters. Yet the rewards, she felt, were great and lasting because she did not, like Caroline, feel happiness must inevitably be snatched away. ‘Thinking good of one’s fellow creatures is the most heartfelt satisfaction,’ she said, and described herself as ‘one of the happiest and luckiest of women’. By making herself useful, Louisa made herself important and beloved in the family. In return her family doted on her. When pressed to name a favourite sibling, all her brothers and sisters named her. Louisa was, as Sarah said, their ‘sheet anchor in all things’.
As a young woman Louisa wanted nothing more than to please Emily and be loved by her. She was a very willing subject in Emily’s empire of charm. When they parted in 1759, Louisa sent her sister declarations of love that were supplications before the altar of a deity. ‘No one can love another better than I do you, my dear sweet sister. I beseech you believe this from your ever loving and most affectionate L. A. Conolly.’ ‘I don’t know how to express my obligations to you for such kind advice as you gave me in the beginning of your letter. Indeed, I take it so kindly, and feel so happy with it, that I read over your letter with the greatest pleasure imaginable to find you still continue the same goodness to me you always had and which I shall never be so ungrateful as to forget. You know, my sweet sister, how sincere I always am in my professions of love or gratitude towards you.’
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 Page 12
