Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832

by Stella Tillyard

  The house at Black Rock was ready for occupation in the summer of 1766. Emily called the house Frescati, perhaps after the town of Frascati outside Rome where fashionable villas clustered along the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Just as it was finished Rousseau himself fled Paris and made for England. Nothing if not wholehearted when her mind was set on a project, Emily decided to offer him the post of tutor to Charles Fitzgerald and her younger children. She wrote to Rousseau, then holed up in Derbyshire in a state of advanced paranoia, and offered him ‘an elegant retreat if he would educate her children’. Rousseau declined her offer, leaving England in May 1767, pursued as much by demons of his own making as by real foes of his ideas. The Duke then hurriedly hired another tutor who was installed at Black Rock in January 1767. Although Louisa reported that ‘Charles has got a tutor who seems vastly good humoured and gentle with him’, the arrangement was unsuccessful and the Duke began to look among the teachers in Dublin for a replacement.

  A few months later a candidate emerged, as unknown as Rousseau was celebrated. His name was William Ogilvie. Ogilvie was a Scot who had been working for some years as a teacher in Dublin. Recommended to the Duke of Leinster as a good classical scholar, mathematician and French speaker, Ogilvie was hired for Charles Fitzgerald at first but on the understanding that he would teach the younger Fitzgerald children as they became old enough to move to Black Rock.

  Emily’s boys had had personal servants before, men to talk French and ‘be about them’, as she put it. But they had never had a tutor, and Emily was not sure what Ogilvie’s status within the household should be. Should he be given tallow candles for his room, which would indicate that, like previous companions to her sons, he was first and foremost a servant? Or should he have wax candles, as befitted a gentleman employee or friend of the family? Emily was undecided, but her friend, Lady Leitrim, who was with her when Ogilvie was announced, declared, ‘Oh moulds will do, till we see a little’.

  At the beginning of 1768, Ogilvie and Lord Charles Fitzgerald were installed at Black Rock, pursuing a vigorous programme of Rousseauian exercise and less than Rousseauian book learning. In between digging in the garden, catching chickens, working in the stables and receiving visits from Louisa and his parents, Charles learned Latin grammar and read Latin verse (laboriously translating that story of forbidden love, Pyramus and Thisbe, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses). He read French (that old Lennox favourite Gil Blas), English history and, for amusement, Fielding’s Tom Thumb. Along with such school work Charles did drawing and sewing. He became so proficient at the latter that Emily said that he should become a master tailor.

  As the brood at Carton and family confidence in Ogilvie grew, more and more children were taken over to Black Rock, and the girls were taught alongside the boys. By the end of the decade, Henry, Sophia, Edward and Robert were all there. A couple of years later Ogilvie also had Fanny, Lucy and Louisa.

  The journey from Carton to Black Rock and back could easily be accomplished in a day with good horses, and Emily came over about once a week to check on her children’s health and progress. In the summer she often stayed for days at a time, particularly after Louisa and Tom Conolly bought the house (or ‘cottage’ as they called it) next door. In her absence, Ogilvie was a meticulous correspondent, writing once or twice a week from the study where he kept his books. Ogilvie wrote about everything: every ache, pain, boil and scratch; the children’s progress in learning or ‘business’ as he called it; their games and toys and the books he himself read in the evenings. Gradually his role expanded from that of tutor pure and simple. He became master of a whole household, running a dairy, laundry, stables and extensive gardens. He nursed the children when they were sick, and ran errands for Emily in Dublin, sending her books, clothing and advice about her health.

  In between their visits, Ogilvie kept Emily and the Duke of Leinster informed about their children’s progress with a constant stream of notes. He loved the children and referred to them as if they were his own, writing in 1769, ‘Lord Charles and all my dear little folks are very well and business goes on uncommonly well. I have the honour to be, with greatest respect, your Grace’s most humble servant.’ Initially notes from Ogilvie only survived as postscripts to the children’s letters. By 1771, however, Emily was carefully keeping everything that came from Black Rock.

  There were two easy routes to Emily’s attention, children and books. Ogilvie could and did write constantly about both. He read voraciously in the evenings, sitting in his study with his wig off and a bust of Cicero gazing down on him. Details of his reactions were thrown into his accounts of daily life at Black Rock. He read Sterne in the early 1770s but found it heavy going, in contrast with Diderot, which he read ‘with more pleasure’. Fielding had his unqualified admiration and, although he thought Smollett pedantic and unpolished he enjoyed Humphry Clinker too. But it was upon Emily’s children that Ogilvie lavished the bulk of his attention, both during the day and in his evening letters. ‘Business goes on delightfully,’ he reported in 1771, ‘I shall say nothing of Latin, but they are improved much in their English and I give time and pains enough to French to expect they are the better for it. We likewise do geography and I make Henry draw every second day … The other days we learn arithmetic.’ Edward Fitzgerald, already at the age of eight a prolific letter writer and a favourite with his mother, added a few days later, ‘Oh, about geography, I have learned the lakes and mountains and seas and [rivers] of Europe since you were last here.’

  One evening in the summer of 1771, Ogilvie sat down in his study and described the daily timetable at Black Rock. In the morning the children swam in the sea and then did school work until nine o’clock when they went next door to Louisa Conolly’s for breakfast. At ten or half past they came back and settled down to their school work until about one o’clock. Then they played croquet, bowls and other games, or dug in the garden until dinner time. On dull days they played chess while the little ones ran about. After dinner the children played and splashed in the sea until about five o’clock, when the older ones did a last hour or so of school work. At seven or half past seven they all trooped back to Louisa’s for tea and supper and came back to bed at eight. For the rest of the evening, if he wasn’t going out to see friends in Dublin, Ogilvie could ‘settle to read’ and write his letters.

  Sometimes, while other tutors – Mr Warren the drawing master or Mr Luck who taught fencing, dancing and deportment – were with the children, Ogilvie, sitting near by, described the scene. ‘Eddy is just eating a crust as long and thick as his arm. I stole a piece from him as he was drawing a square so he has laid down his pencil and says it is better to eat his bread first … He has begun his square again with a “now square, nobody’ll eat your bread”. Eddy is crying out, “O Monstrous O Monstrous; indeed I’ll never draw, there’s an end of it. Indeed Mr. Warren, I cannot draw it, there’s the truth of the matter for you. I must try again, I must try again.”’

  Ogilvie did much more than preside over the children’s education. He took the boys fishing in the bay and to Dublin for the theatre. All the children dug their gardens with him, obeying Rousseau’s injunction to teach children the value of property by giving them land to till and make their own through cultivation. In summer they cut and made hay together. ‘We had very favourable weather for our hay, which was made up Saturday night. Your Grace was very right in imagining that dear Lady Lucy had been a very happy being in the midst of it, for she was so indeed. From four o’clock till after seven she never rested but was as busy at work with her fork pitching as any of us, the happiest, busiest face I ever saw. We shall cut our other field next Friday and Saturday so that it will be in the best order for hay making this day se’enight, when we hope your Grace will enjoy the pleasure of seeing them all tumble in the midst of it … They all desire a thousand kisses to their dearest Mama.’

  Ogilvie never stood on his dignity with the Fitzgerald children. Acting as their nurse in times of sickness did not compromise his
sense of manliness. He performed the most motherly, or nursemaidly, of tasks cheerfully, carrying the toddlers to the beach in his arms, sitting beside them in the night if they had coughs or fevers and watching eagerly for the babies’ first steps and words. ‘We have been diverting ourselves with dear little Louisa attempting to walk in the nine pin alley. The wind throws her down poor little thing, and at every two or three steps she plumps down; but never hurts herself, for she is so puissante par en bas that her sitting part always comes first to the ground.’

  Discipline accompanied jollity. Ogilvie was a consistent and careful disciplinarian, slow to intervene and moderate in his admonitions. If reason failed he sent naughty children to bed where they lay until dejection and boredom got the better of waywardness. If children apologised for their wrongdoing Ogilvie breathed a sigh of relief and allowed them up again.

  Emily was far more capricious. Towards minor transgressions she was indulgent, allowing one of the toddlers to call her a ‘hag … and all she can think of that is abusive,’ adding, ‘’tis a dear thing and its naughtiness mighty pretty.’ But she could quickly lose her temper and order a beating. The children adored and feared her. When he was twelve, Charles Fitzgerald sat down and wrote his mother an abject apology after he misbehaved. Emily kept it, noting on the back, ‘Dr. little Charles’ penitent letter wrote quite by himself, 1768’. ‘My dear Mama,’ the letter ran, ‘I am very sorry that I have given you so much grief. I dun a great many things very improper and beneath a gentleman and below my rank. I am very sorry for my ill behaviour I have disobeyed you and Mr. Ogilvie Mama wich to be chure wass very improper. I own I am vastly distrest. I hope you will be so good as to forgive me. i give you my word and honour my dear Mama that I will never do such a thing again.’

  By the time they were twelve the Black Rock children, as they quickly came to be called, could write their own apologies and endearments to their mother. Before they could write, Emily relied on Ogilvie to copy down requests for presents and expressions of love. Letters from Frescati were filled with tender messages. ‘I asked [Lucy] if she would send a kiss to Mama and she said yes, yes, yes, dear Mama, where is Mama? Why don’t she come, give Lucy raisins – Lucy want Mama.’ ‘Eddy will write Monday and bids me tell your Grace that he dotes on you and hopes you will take care of yourself. I asked Lucy what I should say to Mama for her and she told me, “Lucy good, Love her mama. Raisins and cakes, and for Louisa,” and kisses me very pleasantly.’

  Glimpses of plump, bare bottoms, sounds of kissing lips and pictures of tight hugs and squeezes rose off the pages of Ogilvie’s letters. As he wrote out the children’s thousands of kisses, was he adding his own desires to theirs, making of their messages an amatory code and conducting with Emily an epistolary romance every bit as illicit and delicious as that of Julie and Saint Preux in La Nouvelle Héloïse? His letters seemed to throb with double meanings. ‘We received the asparagus and we told Lucy who sent them to her. She is very far from forgetting your Grace. She puts her little arms about my neck and squeezes and kisses me very often to show me how she will hug her dearest mama.’ The most innocuous reports might be amorous messages. When, for instance, Ogilvie wrote about the children tumbling in the hay, he must have known that hay making (as comments about Sarah hay making in Holland House park had shown) not only had idyllic connotations but also sexual overtones. If Ogilvie’s notes were love letters in disguise, their message could only mean one thing: that he passionately desired their recipient and he wanted her to know it.

  Perhaps Emily made the first advance. Perhaps it was between the lines rather than between the sheets that the approach was made and the affair was for some time epistolary and not physical. But by 1771 Emily and her awkward tutor with the outdated wig and the despised Scottish accent were in love. For Emily romantic love was a newly defined and a newly felt emotion and one that was tumultuous and devastating, wreaking havoc with the way she perceived and organised her life. Instead of admitting the affair to her friends and sisters, as she might have done if it had been a flirtation with an Irish peer or an English earl, Emily hid her passion, nourishing it in secret with letters and notes. It was an epistolary passion worthy of La Nouvelle Héloïse itself. Deception, unnecessary for well managed flirtations, was at the heart of Emily’s new feeling. Only Mrs Lynch the housekeeper and Rowley, Emily’s maid, knew what was going on, and they were well rewarded for their connivance. Bound tightly together with paper, pens and sealing wax, Emily and Ogilvie deceived everyone, the Duke, the children and her sisters alike, and created for themselves a secret world where their romance flourished and grew unchecked.

  PART THREE

  ‘Are you not delighted with our dear little Sally’s thinking herself with child?’

  Caroline to Emily, 14 June 1768.

  ‘I am very glad you have bought that place at the Black Rock,’ wrote Emily’s seventeen-year-old son and heir, the Marquis of Kildare, in 1766. William was much too old to benefit from the Black Rock regime. By 1766 he had left Eton, a plump and hesitant young man whose lack of aptitudes and ambition were unfavourably compared with the shining talents of his cousin Charles Fox. While he remained the second son, Emily and the Duke regarded William’s rotund simplicity as endearing. But when Ophaly died in 1765, William became his father’s heir and something had to be done with him. His parents debated their son’s future. In the summer of 1766 Emily consulted Caroline who recommended a foreign military academy. But the Duke despaired, writing from London where he had gone to consult William about his plans: ‘Indeed my Emily, I am always glad to hear your opinion upon every subject and particularly about the children, who you know are equally in our care. Of all the difficulties I was ever under, what to do with William is the greatest I ever had, or I hope shall ever have, and yet there is no harm in him … In regard to geography, mathematics and what is called belles letters, how is it possible to do more than advise him at his age?… It is to be hoped, as parts break out at different ages, his will some time or other.’

  Eventually it was agreed that William would go to a military academy in France and from there would set out on the Grand Tour, a journey which would, the Duke hoped, give him a patina of learning and manners. For the first few months of the Grand Tour William would have company because the Fox family had decided to travel en masse to Italy in the autumn of 1766.

  After the success of her trips to Paris in 1764 and 1765, Caroline was prepared to venture further afield. She had many motives for her journey and its destination. Ste Fox, recently married to Mary Fitzpatrick, a tiny, intelligent girl much to Caroline’s liking, wanted to resume his continental peregrinations. Charles Fox was attracted by the literary and amatory reputation of Italy, and Henry Fox was prepared to spend a winter in the Mediterranean for his health. Caroline wanted desperately to keep her husband interested enough in life to pull himself out of his trough of boredom and morbidity and Italy excited her because she would, she hoped, see her Roman history books come to life there. ‘I love the notion of seeing all the places one has read of in Roman history, where great men have been and great things done,’ she explained to Emily.

  Paris had prompted Caroline to new areas of reading and study. After 1764 she supplemented her reading of novels and histories with travel writings and maps, spending hours with big maps spread out on her desk in a window seat in her apartment. ‘I wanted some new reading to be interested about, having read so much in my lifetime, and story books begin to tire me; besides they are read in a minute, and the passion I have taken for maps and geography with this new kind of reading make it quite a business.’ Now Caroline wanted to see some of the countries she read about although she worried about the length of the journey and especially about crossing the Alps, an ascent which few English women hazarded, despite the well publicised bravado of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who had crossed Mont Cenis from France to Italy in September 1739.

  Timorous as she was about travel, Caroline was in a buoyant enough mood tha
t summer to lay the spectre of disaster at sea and discomfort on land. She was delighted with Ste’s marriage and with her daughter-in-law. ‘Ste is in such spirits its quite charming to see him,’ she wrote in March. ‘He talks so reasonably about his views with regard to marriage, and he has such delicacy and refinement, in a rational way not a romantic one, that I’m quite charmed with him.’ ‘I do think him lucky with his infirmities (for so one must call his deafness and his size) to get such a delightful girl that loves him. I am indeed vastly satisfied with this match.’ Caroline was not possessive about Ste. She gave him up happily to Mary and, savouring the feeling of age that it brought her, looked forward to being a grandmother.

  Lord Holland was cheerful too, calling his son ‘a lucky dog’. Mary Fitzpatrick’s arrival in the family meant another woman to tease with enquiries about sex and pregnancy and to embarrass with saucy couplets and stage whispers. He had had a bout of low spirits and poor health in the spring and Sarah often came over from Spring Gardens to cheer him up. Sometimes Bunbury came too, and Caroline worked hard at liking him. He ‘mends upon acquaintance,’ she told Emily, and ominously stressed how happy he made Sarah. By the summer Lord Holland had recovered and was amusing himself in Kent building follies in the grounds of his Kingsgate estate that, by their decrepitude, appealed to his mordant assessment of his own broken constitution.