Bunbury eventually initiated and got a parliamentary divorce. (It went through in 1776.) But at the beginning he asked for nothing more than a judicial separation in Doctors’ Commons. The case of Bunbury v. Bunbury had three stages. First, on 22 April 1769, Bunbury’s lawyers filed a ‘libel’ which laid down the grounds (in this case adultery) upon which he wanted a separation. Second, various witnesses, all called by Bunbury’s lawyers, made depositions to the court between 22 April and 22 May. Sarah could have offered a defence at this point, with witnesses of her own, but she was too far away in Scotland and too far gone in self-abasement to attempt one. Third, the court pronounced sentence.
Roger Rush, Bunbury’s valet, Charles Brown, a servant at Barton and John Swale, Bunbury’s lawyer, all testified to the truth of the libel: that Bunbury and Sarah had not met or had sexual intercourse since Sarah left London to go to Barton (something necessary to prove for legal reasons), and that Gordon and Sarah had committed adultery. Margaret Frost, another Barton servant (and sister to Sarah’s maid who stayed with her) and Martha Bissell, the owner of the Redbridge boarding house, eagerly supplied corroborative details, which they could repeat outside the courtroom for the benefit of the press and a fat fee. Mrs Bissell, speaking in well schooled legalese, stated that Gordon and Sarah had ‘carnal knowledge of each other and thereby committed adultery together’. Margaret Frost declared that the miscreant couple ‘lived and cohabited together as man and wife, and went by the name of Mr. and Mrs. Gore and lay in the same apartment in which there was but one bed.’ Her deposition continued, ‘in the morning before she went away the deponent went into the said Lady Sarah Bunbury’s bed chamber in order to ask her ladyship if she had any commands to London and the deponent then and there saw the said Lady Sarah Bunbury and William Gordon Esquire, commonly called Lord William Gordon, naked and in bed together.’
On 17 June the court, faced with this uncontested evidence, pronounced Bunbury’s libel to be correct and authorised a judicial separation. The libel, now the verdict, declared that ‘Lady Sarah Bunbury, being of a loose and abandoned disposition and being wholly unmindful of her conjugal vow etc did carry on a lewd and adulterous conversation with Lord William Gordon.’
A separation made Sarah’s position even more public. It nullified her marriage contract and called for a separate maintenance agreement in which the couple’s finances would be reordered. It also protected Bunbury’s estate from claims by any further children born to Sarah and her lover. Little Louisa Bunbury was still legally Bunbury’s child, but de facto she was now a bastard with an uncertain future and fortune.
By the time Mrs Bissell had given her testimony to Bunbury’s lawyers, Sarah and Gordon had left her house, driven north to Scotland by the winds of scandal. They took refuge in Carolside, a house near Relstone in Berwickshire lent to them by a friend of Gordon’s. But rumour quickly found them. In its August 1769 issue, the Town and Country conjured up for its readers a meeting in a lowly retreat modelled on storybooks whose plots turned on concealed identities and coincidental meetings. Under the heading ‘Amorous Intelligence’ its writer, ‘T L’, reported, ‘knocking at the door of a cottage to obtain information’. Lord William Gordon opened the door and offered him hospitality in the house where to his ‘infinite surprise’ he found ‘the charming and accomplished LSB’. ‘TL’ concluded, with an eye to the following month’s copy, ‘I was greatly astonished to find that a mutual satisfaction seemed to reign in their countenances, that they dwelt with pleasure on their reciprocal passion, which was still visibly glowing in its primitive ardour. Nay, the very step that had in some measure banished them from the world and driven them to their present retreat afforded them a solace for any little temporary wants – and they glorified in having risked ALL FOR LOVE.’
Was Sarah’s behaviour the result of a grand passion? Was she indeed, as the Town and Country suggested, playing Cleopatra to Gordon’s Antony, overcome by love and ready to jeopardise everything for it? Sarah left Bunbury and Barton from choice rather than necessity. She could have stayed with her husband, kept her slightly tarnished reputation and her social position. She could even, after a decent interval, have resumed her affair with Gordon. Bunbury demanded an end to it more because it had begun to hurt his public stature than because it trampled on his private feelings. He had after all let the affair, or flirtation, with Lauzun run its course and rumour had it that Sarah’s lovers were legion. Sarah’s refusal to give Gordon up, her public renunciation of respectability and the blame she loaded on to herself spoke of other imperatives. As her family and her social circle cast her off Sarah reconciled two warring parts of herself. She was no longer a woman whose low opinion of herself was at odds with the beautiful and intelligent woman others saw. Others now estimated her as she estimated herself, as worthless, as the ‘pig’ with the ‘hoggy paws’, ‘abandoned and undeserving’. Sarah came to rest on the bottom and her sinking explained her self-hatred so well that she welcomed and even gloried in her fall. Sarah loved Gordon because he was the vehicle of her self-chastisement. But once he had helped her to her nadir Gordon had little more to offer, and Sarah could now begin to climb very slowly out of the pit. She had kept her lifelines – pen, ink and paper – and she began to write, cautiously at first and then in reams, to Louisa.
Initially Sarah’s letters from Scotland consisted entirely of confessions of guilt and declarations of hopelessness. Then, as she began to build up a new sense of herself and find faults in her lover, they became enquiries about help and requests for reinstatement in the family. Her sisters put a price on read-mission. Caroline had always been prepared to have Sarah back, but her condition was, as she put it, ‘a life of penitence’. Louisa, unaware that she was making Sarah the scapegoat for family misfortune, demanded misery too. ‘She is very unhappy,’ Louisa wrote to the Duke of Richmond in July 1769, ‘and we who love her cannot wish her otherwise.’
Sarah stayed with Gordon in Scotland all through the summer and autumn of 1769, writing long letters to Louisa, searching for forgiveness. The terms of her rehabilitation gradually became clear. She had to renounce Gordon, put herself at the disposal of her family and constantly display a penitent countenance and mind. She could have her child with her but no friends and no company other than family and servants. In return the family would undertake to look after her and little Louisa and would forgive her aberrant behaviour.
While Sarah was pondering these harsh terms the rest of the family were once again caught up in tragedy and dispute. Cecilia Lennox was ill with a dry cough and wasting disease. Bristol waters were prescribed by Dublin doctors and Cecilia set off for England, accompanied by William Ogilvie, in July 1769, ‘much grieved at leaving Ireland so soon again’. At the end of Cecilia’s course of waters, Caroline paid the bills and took her back to Kingsgate ‘very ill indeed’. Cecilia was frailer than ever and a warm dry climate seemed the only hope. Caroline arranged the trip. They would travel from Kingsgate to Paris and from Paris to Nice. Ostensibly, it was a family party; in fact it was for Cecilia. Charles, Harry and Lord Holland went only to keep Caroline company and to make it seem as if the journey was determined by pleasure rather than the desperate state of Cecilia’s health. Before they left Kingsgate Lord Holland wrote to a friend: ‘I am not going abroad on account of my own health. But I am going because Lady Holland’s good nature will not let her amiable sister, who is dying, go only with a servant. The worst of it is, there are no hopes, but it would be cruel to tell her so, and never was more melancholy journey undertaken.’
By the time the party reached Paris at the end of October, Caroline’s anger had burst out from under her dejection. She felt deserted by her siblings. The Duke of Richmond was hunting at Aubigny, Louisa and Emily stayed put in Ireland and Sarah was still lost to the family. She, derided by the Duke of Leinster as being careless of her sisters, was left to accompany Cecilia on a hopeless journey and watch her die. To her daughter-in-law Mary Caroline wrote on 1 November, ‘whe
n I think of the trouble, plague and distress my own family have brought me into … [I] determine fully to have done with them when this sad event is over and trouble myself no more about anyone but my own children and yours.’ At the same time she wrote to Louisa asking why nobody had helped with the expenses of Bristol and the Paris journey, adding angrily that the family had ‘imposed a hard task upon her’.
Caroline’s task did not last much longer. Cecilia died quietly, ‘without a pang or a fight’ in the afternoon of 13 November 1769 as Caroline watched over her. Her departure from the world was as muted as her life in it. At the end her only regret was that Emily was not with her.
Grief and anger mixed together drove Caroline to her writing-table. Unwilling to reopen any communication with Carton, she wrote to the Duke of Richmond, to Louisa and, repeatedly, to Ste and Mary. ‘These are melancholy times my dear Ste,’ she wrote a few hours after Cecilia’s death, adding, ‘many, many things I have had to vex me of late.’ Paris failed to distract her. ‘Nothing here amuses me that I used to like,’ she said, so the party left soon afterwards for the south.
Better news for the family arrived at Carton and Nice at the beginning of December. Sarah had left Lord William Gordon and was going to Goodwood with little Louisa Bunbury. She promised not to return to Gordon and to live a penitent and retired life under her brother’s protection. Even so, Caroline kept her distance, calling herself Sarah’s friend rather than sister and raising immediate doubts about the plan’s success. ‘I am as glad as any of her friends at the step she has taken, but should be more glad had I much dependence on the steadiness of her reputation. However, one must hope for the future and be pleased with the present.’ Of all the family, Caroline was the most tolerant of moral frailty. If her verdict on Sarah’s rehabilitation was so lukewarm, the attitudes of Louisa and the Duke of Leinster would be much more stringent and Sarah’s course of penitence would be a long one.
Sarah arrived at Goodwood in early December 1769. She stayed in the main house for a few weeks and then moved, with her child, maid and nurse, to Halnaker, a small manor house on the estate. Halnaker was an old-fashioned house, stone on the ground floor, half timbering above with mullioned windows and deep embrasures; a house lacking all the comforts of modernity. Sarah was immediately lonely there. Gordon returned to his family in Scotland. Neither parted unwillingly, but both had regrets, Sarah for her child, Lord William for himself. Although she was sensitive to the mention of Gordon’s name for years to come, Sarah’s remorse saw off the best part of lust, leaving only regret and memory. Once installed at Goodwood she did not want Lord William back.
What Sarah did want and what her future offered was a problem that engrossed the whole family. She was only twenty-four and her beauty and vivacity would soon return. It seemed unlikely that she would spend the rest of her life in complete retirement. But she was ostracised from society. Respectable men and women, her erstwhile friends and acquaintances, would not or could not see and receive her. When there were guests at Goodwood she had to stay out of sight. Even her relatives were careful. Conolly was nervous about having her at Castletown and Louisa nursed his wishes to the point of excess. The Duke of Leinster barred her categorically from visiting or even writing to Emily. Holland House was Sarah’s best hope of a respite from Sussex, but until Caroline’s anger against the family died down even its doors were closed to her.
After their early anger had subsided Emily and Caroline both expressed their wish that Bunbury would divorce Sarah and that eventually she might marry again, even if she refused to marry Gordon. Louisa and the Duke of Richmond, on the other hand, strongly urged that Sarah should return to Bunbury and live a life of humble contrition. Still full of guilt and desperate for the family’s forgiveness, Sarah agreed, saying that going back to Barton was the only restitution she could make for her crime.
While the family waited for Bunbury to decide Sarah’s fate, the Duke and Louisa urged on Sarah the necessity of behaviour that reflected her situation. Just as before Sarah had studied how to please the King now she practised the display of penitence. At first her demeanour of settled sadness was everything that Louisa and the Duke of Richmond demanded, and she was careful that her behaviour and dress showed an equal desire for atonement. Louisa, arriving at Goodwood in the New Year, described Sarah’s manner to Emily with satisfaction. ‘She likes this quiet life of all things, and seems to have attention to the most trifling things. One thing is her dress. She means to study whatever is cheapest and plainest. And she does dress quite plain, no conceits of any sort.’ And when Louisa suggested that a local painter come and give them lessons in oils, Sarah, unpowdered and sombrely dressed, asked on cue, ‘was he a neat, fine gentleman, because if he was she thought it would not be so proper for her to see him.’
Louisa Bunbury softened Louisa’s heart by calling her ‘Aunt’, ‘quite plainly’. But Sarah came in for frequent chastisement. ‘She tells my brother and I everything she thinks, and is so desirous of being set right where she is wrong and very ready to accuse herself of doing wrong,’ Louisa reported to Emily. Sarah pleased Louisa by saying that ‘her situation’ was ‘the best that she could have wished for herself at present’.
Louisa and, to a lesser extent the Duke of Richmond, wanted Sarah to suffer for the havoc she had unwittingly unleashed in the family. Louisa was bearing a heavy burden, carrying the confidences of all her siblings and entrusted by them with the task of gluing the broken vessel of family happiness back together again. Some of this anxiety she passed on to Sarah as a need to share out the misery. To herself Louisa explained her pleasure at Sarah’s misery a different way. It was, as she told Emily, a happiness at recognising Sarah’s underlying goodness of heart. ‘From her own account of herself, moments of cheerfulness was the most she could brag of, for happiness she had not, and the idea of wrong was so constantly present to her thoughts that she could never drive it away. I own I feel great pleasure when she relates all she suffered, for I have the happiness of discovering such a perfect good mind throughout it all.’
Louisa also had other reasons for wanting Sarah to plumb the full depths of remorse. In the first place, Sarah’s affair threatened to undermine one of the foundations of Louisa’s life. Louisa had always believed that doing good and being good brought happiness and, above all, love. Virtue secured her place in the family. If Sarah’s crime went not only unpunished, but swiftly forgiven, and if Sarah was just as loved as an adulteress as a wife, then Louisa’s life, based on goodness and service, was devalued. Louisa needed Sarah to feel miserable to confirm her own sense of worth.
In the second place, part of Louisa (and a part that, unlike Caroline, she had never managed to work into the fabric of her life) was fascinated by misdemeanour. Back in London in February 1770, Louisa went to a masquerade in Soho. At first she said she would not dress up but simply disguise herself with a mask of white trimmed with gold. But at the last minute she changed her mind and went dressed as an abbess in a white-corded gown, beads, gauze, black veil and ‘scarlet knot to tie the diamond cross’. As everyone knew, an abbess was not so much a figure of goodness as a symbol of depravity, the common name for a Covent Garden procuress, a keeper of prostitutes and doyen of brothels. So Louisa saw herself as both protectress and procuress, an ambiguous figure who had not only tried to save Sarah from her fate but had also connived at it, turning a blind eye to her sister’s affair. She enjoyed the evening enormously, writing to Emily, ‘I was never more diverted than at the masquerade; it was one of the prettiest sights I ever saw.’ But Louisa could only play at being bad. As soon as her costume came off she tried to shed her guilty delight in transgression and frowned even more strongly upon it in everyday life. Sarah embodied sinfulness and she must regret her behaviour.
But Sarah’s regret could not be everlasting. Another, more mundane life had to take the place of grandiloquent sorrow, especially since Bunbury showed no sign of wanting her back. Gradually her spirits improved and she start
ed to want more than family approbation for her remorse. By the summer of 1770, she was often cheerful for days at a time. She loved her precocious daughter, carefully recording her first babbles, syllables and words, and she was happy at Goodwood if there was a family party she could join. In the spring of 1771 Sarah visited Louisa, Caroline and Lord Holland in Bath, a place where a woman ostracised from London society could go with impunity. Caroline was delighted to see her and noted in her journal, ‘Miss Bunbury a charming child’. After this reconciliation with Caroline, Sarah eased her way back into the family circle. She saw Ste and Charles James Fox and she visited her aunt Lady Albemarle. The O’Briens arrived back from New York in 1770 and Sarah soon became intimate with Susan again. Sarah’s transgression meant it was now hard to decide whose morality was the more compromised, the lady turned adulteress or the heiress who had married the actor: they were equally degraded and outcast.
Louisa was anxious about Sarah’s rehabilitation. She wrote and counselled caution and deception. No one must think that Sarah was too cheerful. ‘You have so little disguise that when you feel in spirits you allow your natural vitality to appear. I dislike disguise as much as anybody can do, and yet I think in your case a little is absolutely necessary … I would have you use disguise enough to look grave.’ As late as 1772, nearly four years after Louisa Bunbury’s birth, Louisa was still watching Sarah for signs that she might slip back into frivolity and immorality. She told her sister not to be too cheerful in public and warned her against the company of men, especially men who might lead her astray. Charles James Fox, who combined free thought with charm, was an especial risk, in Louisa’s view, not just to Sarah but to every woman. ‘Dear Charles,’ she wrote, ‘it seems so odd to talk of him as if of a dangerous person, but indeed he is to you or to any young woman with whom he converses freely … His free notions with respect to religion and women are his greatest faults.’ Army officers, too, were the object of Louisa’s censure; they joined glamour to immorality.
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 Page 31
