The five days after Sarah came to the Foxes’ house in Piccadilly passed in a welter of furtive preparation. Carriages, messengers and letters came and went, closely watched by the denizens of Grub Street and St James’s. Cecilia arrived from Barton with the baby and its nurse. Bunbury often walked from Spring Gardens along Pall Mall and up the gentle slope of the Haymarket to Piccadilly. But his conversations with Sarah were fruitless. She refused to return to him. Nor did she respond to the call of older affections and family duties; the Duke of Richmond, when he arrived, found her adamant in her objection. Gordon, everyone knew, waited beyond the pale of the family circle and it was to him, despite her denials, that she was going, accepting that once she left Piccadilly she would begin an exile from the family that might last forever.
Louisa spent the time before Sarah’s departure dazed. Although she had known more than the rest of the family about Sarah’s affair with Gordon, she ‘would not understand how far matters had gone’ as Caroline had put it, and now she seemed too full of misery to take anything in or give anything out. Cecilia told Emily that Louisa ‘seemed to have lost all sense of love or feeling whatsoever, her voice sounded quite contracted so that she could scarcely bring out her words.’ Louisa could not write and, for a few days, went deaf, as if she refused to hear any more bad news. Making arrangements for Sarah’s journey and concealment was left first to Caroline and then, because she did not want to know where Sarah was going, to Charles James Fox.
On Sunday 26 February 1769 the family dispersed, uncertain when they would be together again. Charles Fox went with Sarah, the baby and her wet nurse to a boarding house in Redbridge near Southampton, where she registered as a Mrs Gore awaiting the arrival of her husband. The Duke of Richmond, with Louisa and Conolly in his carriage, left London for Goodwood. Caroline took Cecilia to Holland House because she seemed unwell. Sir Charles Bunbury and his brother Harry, a caricaturist whose gentle eye recorded the foibles of the rich in town parks and country pursuits, followed soon afterwards.
Caroline had encouraged Sarah’s departure, but was desperate and overwrought after her sisters left, writing to Emily the next day: ‘Indeed, my sweet sister, she is amiable to a degree, notwithstanding this horrid step she has taken. Her mind is not yet totally corrupted … She flatters us with a return and that she shall repent … My dear sister, what letters you receive from me – Good God! It makes a good mind shudder with horror to relate these fatal events.’
After a few days everyone was calmer. But nobody was happier. Those left behind speculated anxiously about the outcome of Sarah’s flight and worried about its widening effects within the family circle. Caroline absolved Bunbury from blame but cast around for other victims in an effort to save Sarah herself. Her accusatory pen pointed at the Duchess of Richmond, friend of both Gordon and the egregious Duke of Dorset and she wrote splenetically ‘I shall always hate her’. The Duke of Richmond was in a difficult position. He wanted to help Sarah – if possible by prising her away from Gordon and offering her the sanctuary of Goodwood – but such a gesture might appear to accept the Duchess’s complicity in the affair. He beat a dignified retreat from the débâcle, announcing that he was going to his estate at Aubigny for an extended sojourn.
At Carton, Emily was full of anxiety and enquiry, writing daily to Piccadilly, Holland House and Goodwood. What had happened, she asked repeatedly, where was Sarah now, how were Louisa and Cecilia, who was Lord William Gordon? She got few replies. Two weeks after Sarah’s departure, Louisa was still unable to pick up her pen; Cecilia was protected by her sisters from information that might compromise her reputation and chance in the marriage market. She could only write to Emily, ‘You desire I will write more particulars about our poor unhappy sister. Why, my dear Mama, it is not in my power for I do not at all know where she is. It certainly was properer I should neither see nor have anything to do with her.’ So it was left to Caroline to tell Emily the whole story, a task which she undertook with gloomy enjoyment and lawyerly accuracy, beginning, ‘Lord William and she it seems got acquainted last autumn twelvemonth when I was at Nice,’ and ending, ‘I have wrote all this at your desire of knowing more particulars. Henceforward I shall seldom mention her. She wishes to be forgot, poor soul! To think of all her amiable qualities distracts one. Even this step, had she been a worse woman, she would not have taken.’ Her verdict on Lord William Gordon was brief and unsparing: he was a ‘beggar and mad’. Elsewhere she added, ‘several of his family are shut up.’
Gordon was certainly poor, the second son of the third Duke of Gordon, an army officer by profession. He had just made himself even poorer by selling his commission, convinced that his affair with Sarah would ruin his chances of promotion. Madness was in the family too. Lord William’s younger brother George who gave his name to the anti-Catholic riots of 1780, was subsequently confined in Bedlam for many years and ended his life rejecting the fervent Protestantism of his youth for Judaism. Lord William himself was regarded by the Lennox family as moody and unpredictable. Yet as a lover Gordon was, so the Town and Country Magazine declared, replete with attractions. ‘He had many recommendations both personal and mental, which made him esteemed by all his acquaintance, and particularly by the ladies. His figure was tall and genteel, his features regular and expressive, his hair remarkably fine, and his whole person completely elegant: add to this, the happy art of pleasing in conversation and convincing in argument, founded on great natural parts, cultivated by a classical education.’ Sarah saw in Gordon not only a man who could skilfully translate lust into passion but also a character quite unlike her husband’s. Where Bunbury was predictable, fair and safe, Gordon was moody and odd, a man whose self-absorption, when enlarged to include his love for Sarah, could pass for absorption in another, so that solipsism and love became intertwined and indistinguishable. Sarah and Gordon came to one another looking at themselves; both found dissatisfaction within that was the driving force of their affair.
Gordon lopped off his title and his last syllable, tied back his red hair and attired himself as plain Mr Gore. Then he rode from Knole to Redbridge to be met by his putative wife. Once the family got word that Gordon and Sarah were together, they abandoned her, declaring in unison that she could not hope for forgiveness until she left him and showed remorse for her behaviour. Besides, another disaster was looming that engrossed everyone’s attention as soon as Sarah had gone.
Sarah’s abrupt flight from Barton had left Cecilia Lennox stranded there. According to the Duke of Leinster, her presence meant that she was open to suggestions of complicity in Sarah’s immorality. In an abrupt letter to Caroline and Henry, the Duke demanded Cecilia’s immediate return to Ireland. He hinted that although Sarah had gone, Cecilia was not perhaps in the best of hands. Caroline replied carefully to this outburst of propriety. Sending Cecilia back to Ireland precipitously without Louisa or Conolly, she said, would seem precisely as if they all had something to hide. ‘To have her go off in such a hurry would look like doubting her conduct and as if we suspected her of being concerned in her unhappy sister’s affair.’ As a reply to any nascent rumours, Caroline recommended that Cecilia should go about in public as much as possible.
Thwarted and rebuffed by this decisiveness, the Duke scribbled back the sort of letter he sent more often to Carton servants than to members of his family. He wanted Cecilia back, he wrote; and then he suggested that the second Duke of Richmond had been quite right to entrust his younger children to Emily and himself. Caroline was ‘indolent’ and ‘careless’ about her sisters, and Holland House was no place for innocent young women to be. As proof he cited Sarah’s marriage, contrasting it with Louisa’s. One was the product of Holland House and its laxity. The other was arranged, carefully and so much more successfully, at Carton, under his own watchful eye.
The Duke’s letter hit Caroline’s age-old wound, the memory of her father’s will of twenty years before. All the anger and pain of her own banishment from the family came surging back.
It flooded over the anxiety of Sarah’s departure and spilled into a feeling that now, as before, Henry Fox had been insulted unjustly. Long-forgotten fury and resentment burst out, joined now by an overwhelming feeling of injustice. No one, she felt, had been more solicitous about Sarah and Cecilia than she. If Louisa had fetched Sarah back from Knole, it was she who had tried to prevent her seeing Gordon after the birth of their child, she who had brought Sarah and Bunbury together to try to prevent a final split and she who had arranged for Sarah’s retirement in the country. Moreover since those terrible days she had kept Cecilia close by her, carefully watching her health and reputation. Only a week or two before the débâcle she had suggested that Cecilia should go to France for the winter because she seemed unwell and offered not only to take her but also to make the journey on her behalf saying, ‘its being right for her will determine us’.
Behind the Duke of Leinster’s letter Caroline detected a disapproval of her husband that was more than political, a suggestion that the atheistical, free-thinking Fox ways had grafted immorality onto her own indolence. Since it was Fox around whom she had built her world, Caroline saw in the Duke’s letter a blow to the sense of herself that she had so painstakingly built over the last twenty-five years, as sister to Emily, Louisa, Sarah and Cecilia, as mother to Ste, Charles and Harry and, above all, as wife to Henry Fox.
Caroline was too hurt by the Duke of Leinster’s letter to defend herself or even demand an apology. But angry recriminations flew around embroiling the whole family. Both parties eventually appealed to the Duke of Richmond. The Duke of Leinster was ‘very anxious to clear himself to you’, as Louisa put it to her brother. Caroline demanded reassurance that she had not failed or shirked her duties. This she got. As discreetly as he could the Duke of Richmond supported his sister. But his approbation was not enough to restore Caroline’s wounded self-esteem. She was determined to retaliate. Anger, pain, loyalty to her husband and a flaming sense of injustice combined to get the better of any urge to caution that she might have had. She lashed out furiously, determined to stave off an inner collapse with retaliation. No one at Carton escaped her fury. In a miserably angry moment she attacked Emily, accusing her of ‘want of affection’ and siding with her husband. Louisa tried to mediate, saying, ‘the misfortune of my sister Holland’s manner is, that she is warm, and if she says anything against anybody, she is apt to make use of the strongest expressions.’ But the damage was done. Emily was hurt and drawn into the quarrel on her husband’s behalf. In the stand-off between the Duke’s mental rigidity and moral probity on the one hand, and Caroline’s passionate and unbridled anger on the other, something of great importance was lost: twenty-five years of sisterly confidence, love and dependence.
After March 1769 no more letters passed between Holland House and Carton for a long time. When they began to arrive again it was death’s messenger who brought them. In a matter of weeks the correspondence and trust of decades was stopped. Emily no longer saw Caroline’s sprawling handwriting on the thick wads of paper sealed with busts of classical heroes, statesmen and writers. Caroline’s pleasure at unfolding Emily’s exquisitely written pages was gone. Everything that the letters implied was jeopardised. In the place of news, and confessions and gossip there was silence. Emily confided increasingly in William Ogilvie, Caroline turned her anxious eyes on to the troubles of her own family. Only occasionally was the gulf bridged by a message or report sent through Louisa.
The breach between Holland House and Carton, like Sarah’s débâcle, reverberated through the family. The Duke of Richmond took Caroline’s part and so relations between Goodwood and Carton became strained, even though those between Goodwood and Holland House were rocky. With Sarah gone, the third Duke of Richmond remained close only to Louisa and his brother Lord George Lennox. Emily had been on cordial but not close terms with her brother but her husband’s conduct meant that she could write only indirectly, through Louisa. Other relatives were drawn in. The Duke of Leinster’s sister and her husband Lord Hillsborough, intimate at Holland House for some time, now cut it from their London itinerary.
Louisa, still only twenty-five years old, was in a responsible and difficult position. She was everyone’s confidante, the only figure in the family to have kept the trust of all concerned. She was also the only person who could straddle the widening gaps between the parties. Maintaining impartiality was important for her because she needed to feel trusted and beloved. But this time even Louisa took sides, although she was careful to confide only in her brother. On 11 May 1769 she wrote to Richmond: ‘It is most excessively vexatious to think of his behaviour to Lady Holland. I am more vexed at it now than ever, for I have so much reason to love him, yet cannot change my opinion with regard to that affair. I have great hopes that my two sisters will be as comfortable as ever, in loving one another as they used to do. My sister Leinster has never changed and is quite reasonable in not worrying at any anger of my sister Holland’s and she hopes time will do something in her favour.’ After a few months a pattern of communication between Caroline and Emily was established. Caroline wrote her news to Louisa, who passed on her letters to Emily. ‘My sister Holland continues to write pleasant letters which I show to my sister L. and make her very happy,’ Louisa told Sarah in 1771. Using her knowledge of the nature of family letters, Caroline thus managed to keep the channels of communication open and ready for a resumption of a direct and acknowledged correspondence.
By May 1769 the Lennox family party that had abruptly gathered in London in February was dispersed as well as shattered. At the end of March Conolly left for Ireland. After a diversion via Goodwood Louisa picked up Cecilia from Holland House and followed him at the end of April. The Foxes went to Kingsgate. Caroline did not much like the Kent shore, where the plants battered by the wind grew twisted and stunted. But now it suited her angry mood. ‘I passed my summer agreeably enough, though I had many things to vex me,’ she wrote in her journal. Bunbury, meanwhile, went between Newmarket, Barton and London, seeing relatives, horse-dealers and, ominously for Sarah, lawyers.
Sarah had no idea that her affair had led to a breach between Caroline and Emily. While the quarrel was boiling in London and Carton, she and Gordon were in semi-seclusion at Redbridge, living as man and wife. Charles Bunbury, meanwhile, was reaching a decision about his own future. While Sarah stayed with him he was prepared to countenance her adultery. It was her leaving that amounted to betrayal, exposing him to ridicule and scandal. As soon as Sarah left Holland House, Bunbury decided on a separation.
A separation was not necessarily or even usually a prelude to divorce. Divorce was very expensive. Except in cases of annulment (on the grounds of non-consummation, for instance), which were dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, divorce could only be secured by a private Act of Parliament, and cost hundreds of pounds. Scores of thousands of couples simply separated, formally or informally. ‘Private’ separations, as they were known, had dubious legal status, but were a way of formalising a mutually agreeable split. A separation deed was drawn up in which the husband agreed to provide an annual maintenance allowance for his dependants, usually balanced by an undertaking from the wife’s trustees to absolve him from any future responsibility for her debts. There were clauses guaranteeing the wife the right to make contracts and behave as if she were a single woman with regard to her financial affairs, her choice of abode and so on. The whole settlement was drawn up by lawyers and guaranteed by trustees. Its legal status was dicey but the solemnity that surrounded its acceptance was supposed to ensure that all parties stuck by its provisions.
In a judicial separation case husband (or very occasionally the wife) had to justify his desire for a separation before the London Consistory Court, the Ecclesiastical Court that ruled on Canon Law. The Consistory Court was generally known as ‘Doctors’ Commons’ after the building in which it sat. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred (the exceptions were in cases of non-consummation or gross cruelty by husbands), justificatio
n took the form of proof of wifely adultery. Many separations involved affairs on both sides. But since a wife could not divorce her husband for adultery it was her behaviour that was offered in evidence, even if the desire to separate was mutual.
Before the case got to Doctors’ Commons, a husband might take civil action for damages by filing what was known as a suit for ‘criminal conversation’ against his wife’s lover. A ‘crim. con.’ suit was decided according to Common Law and held in the King’s Bench Court. It could, by means of witnesses, statements and a jury verdict, establish a wife’s guilt and the husband’s right to compensation from her lover. Often however, crim. con. suits were used, not so much to punish the lover financially as to lay the groundwork for a judicial separation or divorce. Charles Bunbury, knowing that Gordon was penniless and in no position to pay damages, and desirous of as little publicity as possible, went through the motions of a crim. con. suit, but reserved most of his energies for the case in the Consistory Court at Doctors’ Commons.
After a judicial separation in Doctors’ Commons, a parliamentary divorce might follow. Initially used by aristocrats who wanted to secure their estates to legitimate heirs, after the mid-century parliamentary divorce became available to anyone with determination and several hundred pounds. Even so, there were only a few more than a hundred parliamentary divorces in the eighteenth century: unless the parties (or more usually the husbands) wanted to marry again, separation and cohabitation were cheaper and less spectacular. Divorcees (like Caroline’s friend Lady Di Beauclerk who was divorced in 1768) often remarried again immediately. Long-term divorcees were thin on the ground and the social limbo in which divorced women existed was partly the result of their extreme rarity. Nobody knew how to treat them or whether, once remarried, the stain of their adultery was wiped away.
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 Page 30
