Louisa made her mark by absenting herself emotionally in the midst of her more volatile and expressive siblings. Sarah noticed that Louisa did not like to make ‘a fuss’ and that she enjoyed ‘doing good to all around her’. Louisa claimed she disliked ‘affectation’ by which people drew attention to themselves; so much so indeed that if she was upset she would take extra pains not to show it. ‘When my mind is occupied with vexation,’ she wrote to Emily in 1776, when she was thirty-two, ‘I do not love to speak of it to anybody … and think my safest way upon most occasions is to hold my tongue.’
This silence, a dam that restrained high feeling and bad temper, created its own emotional drama. Louisa used her stillness to have others scurrying around her, wondering what they should do for her, wondering what her opinions and needs were. During one family crisis she wrote to Emily, ‘remember, my dearest sister, I will not be considered,’ thus deftly adopting a stance which put Emily in the wrong whatever she did. Sarah watched the same diminutive play of emotion unfold when Louisa paid her a visit in 1776. Louisa, Sarah wrote to Emily, was ‘very naughty, I assure you, about her health … I wish you would give her a serious lecture about it. Do you know that if I had not had a fire made in her room here she would have come to this damp … house from town with the colic and never ordered one, because it did not signify, she said.’ Once or twice Louisa’s reserve drove Sarah beyond guilt and into exasperation. ‘Louisa carries her delicacy too far,’ Sarah burst out to Emily in 1776. ‘She ought to express the whole of her feelings and let us judge ourselves at what rate we value them.’ Most of the time, however, Sarah felt simply guilty.
When the fifteen-year-old Louisa arrived in London in the spring of 1759, Caroline was impressed. ‘I can’t say enough of sweet Louisa. Indeed, my dear siss, she does you honour. There never was anything so natural, so easy and pretty as her behaviour is, she dances charmingly.’ Two weeks later she added: ‘Louisa is vastly liked, not thought near as handsome as you, but she is so well behaved, gentle, modest and civil, and seems to have so much sense and propriety about her its impossible but that she should please. I shall think her handsomer than Sal because she has so very pretty a figure.’
Louisa described herself as tall and well built. Others thought her handsome but not pretty, the distinction lying in her having a good figure rather than a beautiful face. Caroline praised her sister’s ‘presence’, a bosom whose size and amplitude conformed to the taste of the times. While she was in London Louisa went to Allan Ramsay’s studio and posed for her portrait. The picture was paid for by Caroline and destined for the gallery at Holland House. Caroline may have insisted on Louisa standing to show off her figure, even though a full-length portrait, especially if both hands were showing, was extremely expensive. Ramsay made a quick sketch of Louisa, taking note of her dark hair drawn tightly on top of her head, her plump hands and forearms, and the tipped-up nose, small mouth and soft chin she shared with her sisters. In the finished portrait, Louisa looks a good deal older than her fifteen years. She holds a bunch of grapes which hint at the wine and youthful merriment she was enjoying during the London season, and is wearing a salmon-pink court dress with three deep ruffles on the sleeves, two ruched frills round the skirt and seven rows of gathered ribbon across the stomacher.
Ramsay’s studio was only one site that had to be visited in the busy weeks of the London season. Louisa and Conolly plunged into a round of assemblies, balls, trips, plays and operas. Many of these had some sort of political intention or overtone since politics and pleasure were indivisible; the Conollys were being presented at Court and initiated into the world of the Whig aristocracy at the same time. On 23 March, the third Duke of Richmond gave a ball for his sister, and by 10 April Louisa and Tom Conolly had kissed the King’s hand, attended three operas, two plays, numerous assemblies and one ridotto. The latter, a mixed entertainment of music and dancing that combined an informal concert with cheerful dances, the shy Louisa declared she liked ‘of all things’.
Despite this social whirl, Louisa was miserable. She was lonely for Carton, for Sarah and, above all, for Emily. When Emily hinted that she might accompany Kildare to London when he came on business in the summer of 1759, Louisa replied, garbling her words with delight, ‘be so good as to excuse this scribbling, but I really am so excessively overjoyed to think I so soon shall be so happy as to see you that I really don’t know what I am doing or what I’m about. This is so charming a surprise. I really want words to express my joy.’ Emily did not come and Caroline reported that ‘poor dear Louisa cried sadly the whole afternoon about it’.
Louisa did not forget the anxiety and loneliness of her London sojourn. Years later when she was decorating the long gallery at Castletown she selected an engraving called ‘La Nouvelle Épouse’ and had it copied in oils and placed on the wall above her husband’s portrait. The engraving came from a seven-volume illustrated encyclopedia of the ancient world, Bernard de Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (1719–24). The book’s plates were accompanied by an explanatory text; in this one, Montfaucon wrote, the bride was weeping because she was leaving home for the first time. In the Castletown panel, she sits on a tomb-like wall, covering her eyes with a cloak, while a cupid stands awkward and unemployed near a servant who is trying to wash away the bride’s unhappiness.
As the spring of 1759 matured into summer, it was Emily’s turn to feel anxious. She suspected that Conolly was planning to live in England for good, and she wanted Louisa back. At the end of May Emily wrote impatiently to Kildare, who had arrived without her in London, ‘I am sure you might easily dissuade her from buying a house in London. And you might at the same time commend your own wife to her for readily agreeing from prudent motives to give up that you had in London, tho’ she was fond of it and had still more reason to love England than Louisa can, having been bred up there.’
But not for nothing had Emily kept Louisa and Sarah so close to her. By the time she left Ireland for London, Louisa had grown into the uneasy mentality of the colonist. She loved Ireland but was ashamed of it in the face of English snobbery and distanced from it by virtue of her English birth. Yet she was unhappy anywhere else. Louisa lived in a colonial limbo mistrusted by both the English she lived amongst and the Irish she had left. She tried to overcome her dislike of England, writing to her sister in 1759, ‘now though one may be partial to Ireland, as I am, yet one need not find fault with this place … Are you not of my opinion, my dear sister, that one should try not to make oneself disagreeable to any nation?’ But England was not her home and she came to think of herself as Irish, a definition that was to bring her great anguish in the years to come.
Louisa was home by the autumn. But for the next few years she and Conolly went backwards and forwards between England and Ireland, spending the sporting seasons at Castletown and going to London for parliamentary sessions. In 1761 Conolly was elected to the Irish Parliament as MP for Londonderry, and after that unless Irish affairs were on the Westminster agenda, he seldom attended the English House of Commons. Castletown became the focus of the Conollys’ lives. They became more and more reluctant to leave it, even for social occasions, preferring to hold open house rather than accept invitations. As time went on Louisa and Tom fused with their house in the minds of their friends and Castletown became one of those almost-living symbols of Ascendancy life so lauded by apologists and decried by opponents.
Life at Castletown changed with the weather and the seasons, closer at all times to the demands and offerings of the land than the hectic amalgam of town and country life at Holland House. Louisa gave her guests hospitality rather then wit. After a day’s riding friends looked forward to immense dinners followed by a gentle hand of cards. They did not expect Charles Fox’s prodigious brilliance, Henry’s wit or Caroline’s serious conversation.
In summer, when Dublin was empty, Castletown life revolved around racing and, after 12 August, shooting, both predominantly but not exclusively p
leasures for men. Early rising was called for on days of organised sport which would take them a considerable distance from the house. On other days, guests and their hosts got up about eight o’clock, several hours after their servants, and they came together for breakfast at nine-thirty or ten. Before breakfast Louisa often wrote letters or went over her accounts. After breakfast the party would divide. Some went out to ride, pay calls or walk through the grounds, Louisa’s favoured outdoor occupation. ‘This is a most lovely day,’ she wrote in February 1768, ‘a white frost with fine sunshine. I am going out with all the dogs to take a long trudge all over the place, which is a pleasant thing to do.’ Women and old people settled down to several hours of work accompanied by readings, mostly from novels, poetry, histories, sermons and books of travels. Sewing of all sorts was the main occupation for women, but it was varied by drawing, which Louisa enjoyed, copying and colouring prints or making plans for houses, offices and rooms. Women embroidered bed hangings, chair seats, fire screens, waistcoats and gowns. They worked lace into ruffles and wove silk into ribbons. When they got bored they passed their work on to servants to be finished. ‘I have begun my gown, its vastly pretty, the stripes go on like lightening, but the flowers are a little tedious,’ wrote Sarah on a country sojourn in 1760, holding out little hope that the finished garment would be all her own work. In another letter she added, ‘I am grown a great workwoman lately.’
At three o’clock everyone dined. In the long summer evenings after dinner the party walked into the gardens, taking tea there if it was warm, watching the Liffey ooze its way to Dublin. Sometimes they drove out into the green countryside. Card tables were put up for their return, and as night fell people broke up into small groups. Some played cards, others chatted, worked, looked at prints, planned sporting and political strategy or played chess. Supper was served at ten o’clock and by midnight everybody except hardened drinkers and busy gamblers had gone to bed.
This summer timetable carried on through long visits by family members and constant exchange between Castletown and Carton. Two or three times in spring and summer Castletown was decked out for what Sarah described as ‘fêtes’, outdoor parties for servants, locals and workpeople, and grander affairs to benefit charitable institutions. Through all this activity, week in week out, Louisa kept up the running of the house. She made up accounts in a small, meticulous hand with scrupulous care. Growing, buying, provisioning, cleaning, cooking were not her responsibility, but she had to keep track of what was being done and how much was being spent. Whenever there was an empty house, decorators moved in to make an alternative bustle and Louisa kept watch over them too.
Winter routines were different because Dublin was full of parliamentarians and government officials and the season was in full swing. Louisa rarely stayed at the Conollys’ Dublin house, preferring to issue invitations to Castletown instead. Guests drove out from Dublin for dinner. As usual the list was long and mixed. Relatives, huntsmen, clerics and sometimes a carefully vetted actress or two sat out the long winter evenings. In December, Louisa held what Sarah called ‘a month’s round of different parties’, and discharged the social obligations she had incurred by refusing invitations. If Parliament was sitting, Conolly might stay in their town house. If not he was usually chasing foxes across his acres. Louisa went into town to the theatre and to charity concerts (although she admitted preferring cheerful ensemble singing to any instrumental playing), and occasionally visited friends there.
But it was at Castletown that Louisa was most happy and content. On a quiet winter’s day eighteen years after her marriage she sat down and wrote to Emily, ‘I always was very fond of this place, but living so much at it as I have done of late has made my partiality increase for it, and ’tis amazing what constant amusement and employment I find for myself. We have been a great deal alone, which has made it still more delightful for me, as I find that is what Mr. Conolly likes best.’
PART THREE
‘He is in love with her’.
Henry Fox, Memoir, April-May 1761.
Sarah made her London début at the age of fourteen in circumstances totally different from those that had smoothed Louisa’s path. Louisa had much to give her confidence besides her own pretty figure. Her marriage had made her rich and secure. She had nothing to ask of her brothers or Caroline and she was ready, despite her shyness, to take her place alongside them as a hostess and a companion. London was a glorious playground and money no object. Sarah, in contrast, came unmarried to London with £10,000 and a good name. Everyone understood that she was there to find a suitable husband and that the pleasures of the capital must be inseparable from that arduous search.
Sarah’s greatest asset was her sexual allure; her greatest handicap was that she was unaware of the effect she had upon others. Like her sisters, Sarah construed life as a drama or a tale. For Caroline, life cast itself as a fable or a morality tale in which she and her family were the principal sufferers. Emily saw life as a full-blown Rousseauian melodrama of which she was heroine and subject. Louisa, in contrast, used the life of Christ as her narrative model. To Sarah life was a comedy of manners that existed to reveal her follies. She was the shrewdest and coolest observer of human folly in the family, but life did not become real for her until she had told it to others. She was in consequence a compulsive gossip and story-teller. Gossip and intrigue, solidified into stories, were also ways of temporarily arresting the flux of sensation and event through which she felt herself drifting. But when she retold her own story, Sarah made herself into a figure of fun, a character for ironic and comic treatment who acted, or fumbled, her way through life more according to social and familial dictate than her own desires.
From her earliest childhood Sarah had been a pawn in the scandal-ridden mix of politics and personalities that constituted the Court of George II. The second Duke of Richmond had been proud of Sarah’s prettiness, her way with words and her ‘rough and showy’ Lennox complexion. One day in the late 1740s, as a band of courtiers accompanied the King and Queen through the Broad Walk in Kensington Gardens, Sarah broke away from her governess, toddled up to the King and burst out in her prettiest French, ‘Comment vous portez vous, Monsieur le Roi? Vous avez une grande et belle maison ici, n’est-ce pas?’ Then, in imitation of an elaborate and much practised court ritual, she dropped a low curtsey in front of the monarch and made a temporary conquest of his heart.
As a result of this infant indiscretion, Sarah became a royal plaything. She was often summoned to Kensington Palace to amuse the old King. Once, George II picked her up, put her in a tall Chinese jar and closed the lid. Sarah came through this trial of spirit splendidly, discerning like a seasoned diva the inmost wishes of her audience. She sat down in the bottom of the jar and launched into a song that was bound to warm a Hanoverian heart, ‘Marlbrough s’en va-t-en guerre’.
While it was unusual for a child and a monarch to play together in such a way, kings were anything but magical beings to court families. For salaried officials like Lord Hervey and the second Duke of Richmond the sight of the monarch was often accompanied by the descent of overwhelming boredom. Despite the fact that King and courtiers alike knew that they were participating in the rituals by which majesty transmuted itself from the ordinary to the magical, and that knowledge lent gravity to court occasions, life at Court was dull precisely because its purpose was to divest the King of the quotidian. As Caroline Fox observed, the King had to ‘play the King’, and in the act the pettiness and idiosyncrasies that form the compelling interest of human lives had to be shorn away. Courtiers, bound up in this alchemy of ritual, soon stopped associating the monarchy with glamour or mystique.
Sometimes the stultifying sameness of courtly life was shattered. New reigns and royal marriages brought an invigorating sense of excitement to courts, as credulous appointees and inexperienced monarchs fumbled with the machinery of kingship. But when the engine of ceremony began to run smoothly once again, befuddlement and stagnation would settle ove
r the royal palaces.
Sarah remembered and retold the stories of her youthful encounters with George II not because they were remarkable but because they served to confirm her place in the world. She was a royal plaything, a drifting flibbertigibbet who caught the scenarios others threw her and acted them superbly well. Not until she was middle-aged was Sarah able to choose and set a course through life to which she held in the face of family disapproval and that she arrived at from some degree of self-knowledge and self-interest.
Everyone agreed that Sarah was a pretty girl. But to her sisters she was very little more. Emily declared, ‘to my taste Sarah is merely a pretty, lively looking girl and that is all. She has not one good feature … Her face is so little and squeezed, which never turns out pretty.’ Caroline noticed that Sarah’s attractions did not lie simply in her face. ‘Her manner is vastly engaging and she is immensely pretty,’ she wrote soon after Sarah arrived in London in the autumn of 1759. ‘Sarah seems to have more observation and cleverness about her than Louisa,’ she added. But she was very critical of Sarah’s way of coming into a room: Sarah held herself awkwardly, she said, stooping her shoulders and dropping her head forward. She also danced badly and had a scrofulous scalp. ‘I’m seriously hurt tho’ with her disguising that sweet little figure of hers by holding herself as she does … She has not the least air; its a thousand pities.’ Sarah was equally disparaging when she talked about herself. She had, she said, small eyes and a long and turned-up nose that managed both to grow longer and to turn up more as the years went by. Her legs were bad and she was in constant danger of passing over the fateful border between plumpness and fat.
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 Page 13
