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

by Stella Tillyard

  Three people had been left the uneasy possessors of Emily’s secret when she sailed away: Louisa, William and Lady Barrymore. William found the burden too heavy to bear and left Ireland soon after his mother, planning to keep out of the way in London for a few weeks. Inevitably, though, he met family friends who wanted to know the truth about his mother’s relationship with Ogilvie and he was soon scurrying back to Ireland to lie low at Carton. Lady Barrymore dropped judicious hints in Dublin drawing-rooms suggesting a wedding sometime in the future, while Louisa wrote to and visited family and friends by turns, ‘setting things right’ as she put it, with the Jocelyns, Rodens, the Clements, old Lady Clanbrassil, Mrs Crosbie, the two Mrs Nicholsons, Mrs Vesey, Lord Russborough, Mrs Greville and various Macartneys: all Emily’s particular friends. Together Louisa and William tackled old Lady Kildare, worried that she might object to Emily’s marriage more on her late son’s than her grandson’s behalf. William dutifully reported their conversation to his mother, saying, ‘we reasoned with her much on the subject, and I think we parted with her more reconciled.’ As usual the old Countess rose to the occasion. She wrote to Emily applauding her choice and decrying her haste; then she moved swiftly on to a recipe for eye drops.

  Louisa’s approaches to the Lennox side of the family were cautious and gradual. Her first letter to Sarah, written two days after the emotional scenes at Emily Fitzgerald’s wedding, was evasive and contained. ‘The new married couple are to set out today for Bellamont Forest. They were married at Carton and all came here yesterday. She looks so happy its pleasant to see her and I hope he will be sensible of her merit, but he is so odd that he frightens one.’ But Louisa could not withhold her news for long. Lady Barrymore had already dropped a hint about Emily’s intention to marry Ogilvie to Lady Ailesbury, who had passed it on to her daughter the Duchess of Richmond, and now everyone at Goodwood was agog to know the truth of what had already happened and what might happen in the future. On 25 August Louisa declared that the Earl of Bellamont was ‘a bad man’; on 4 September she admitted she felt uneasy and ‘unsettled’. By this time Sarah had guessed the cause of Louisa’s anxiety and asked point blank for confirmation or denial of Emily’s marriage to Ogilvie. Noting on the letter front ‘read this to yourself’, Louisa replied carefully to Sarah’s request, following the plan she had agreed with William and Lady Barrymore and which she thus described to Emily: ‘I say we suspect that things may be in time … This we tell in confidence as our own opinions, but positively assert that things are not yet concluded.’

  To Sarah, Louisa wrote: ‘These reports about her being married are at present quite without foundation. But there is so great a partiality that I would not answer for its being always the case; and to say the truth, I should fear that these reports were likely to determine an event of that sort, as nothing but parting with him will prevent people saying worse if it should not end in marriage, and that step of parting with him would be the most cruel thing she could do by her children.’ Louisa offered two separate explanations for the marriage. The first was that marriage was forced on Emily by rumours; indeed that scandal had determined Emily upon a course by no means inevitable. The second, which Louisa threw in for good measure, was that the children needed Ogilvie and that the wedding was thus for their sake.

  Both reasons rang hollow because the Goodwood household knew as well as Louisa that Emily would never be manoeuvred into a position of disadvantage. Louisa herself knew, but was unable to admit, that Emily’s affair with Ogilvie was not a sudden romance born from grief and vulnerability, but a long-standing liaison based on shared interests and an active, mutual passion. At Goodwood, Sarah and the Duchess of Richmond easily saw through Louisa’s queasy reasoning. The Duchess said that if Emily had no feelings for Ogilvie then there was absolutely nothing wrong with keeping him on as an employee. Sarah wrote to Louisa saying that she suspected that Ogilvie had been in love with Emily for some time. The Duke of Richmond added that he thought that Emily returned Ogilvie’s feelings. Louisa was astonished at Sarah’s perspicacity, writing to Emily six weeks after the Nelly sailed: ‘[Sarah’s] loving you is not extraordinary, but her knowledge of the human heart is a little so I do think. Do you know that from what she picked up from me some years ago, and from you, when you were in England, the thought of his being in love with you had come into her head more than once, and when she told me the last time I saw her that we should spoil him, she meant it for a hint … She knows the exact progress your heart made and understands how this attachment came about as well as if she had read your mind … She says that Mr. Ogilvie could not but fall in love with you when he saw your character in the brightest light, which he had an opportunity of doing more than anybody, as you talked to him about your children.’ After a few weeks the red herrings about Bellamont’s scandal-mongering and the welfare of the children were quietly dropped.

  With varying degrees of amazement and reluctance members of the family came to understand that Emily and Ogilvie were in love and that their marriage was either concluded or inevitable. While her siblings shifted, turned and became reconciled, Emily herself waited, using Louisa as a conduit to family approbation, allowing her daughter Charlotte to give news of the party’s progress through France and leaving Ogilvie the difficult task of putting his relationship with Louisa on to a footing of familial friendship. The second Duke of Leinster was shocked by his mother’s insouciance but he was far too much in awe of her to do anything other than accept her marriage and eventual return to Ireland, contenting himself with writing on 11 September 1774: ‘I confess my pride will be hurt and I feel sorry for it, and though I shall never feel pleasant at the sight of Mr. O. – from the idea – yet if properly managed we may live in friendship, though not in that degree of intimacy that perhaps you might wish or require us, yet a line must be drawn. Let what will happen, I shall not divulge your secret, nor will I give you up.’

  The Duke and Duchess of Richmond, older and more knowing than the young Duke of Leinster, discounted their own pride and concentrated on the difficulties Emily might encounter by marrying someone who was not only her social inferior but had also been, until recently, receiving wages from her husband. They were accustomed to thinking of Ogilvie – if they thought of him at all – as a man who took orders and they had no idea how to receive him as one of the family; and this was especially true for Louisa who had known Ogilvie for six years as a tutor. But Louisa needed her sister’s love and wanted to be generous towards Ogilvie. On 13 September she sat down and confessed to Emily both her anxieties and her determination to overcome them. ‘My feelings about it have just been these. Two or three days at most, I believe, my pride was a little hurt. I am not sure it was my own pride; I rather think it was the prejudice of the world which one imbibes insensibly more than one thinks. But the more I consider it, the less I have to say about it. I agree with Sally, who says that one thinks it more desirable for you not to change your situation at all, but if you do I am clear in my opinion that it is the best match you can make … Give my affectionate sisterly love to Mr. Ogilvie, for whom I feel it … God bless you, my dearest, dearest, sister; I do love you with all my heart and soul.’

  Once Emily’s wedding was announced as certain, Sarah was her sister’s most vociferous supporter. Love and revere Emily as she did, Sarah also saw advantages for herself in her sister’s marriage. She relished both the drama of the event and the feeling that Emily’s effrontery threw her own misdemeanours into the past and she was delighted that there were now two scapegraces in the family. Sarah was also shrewd enough to recognise Ogilvie’s importance to Emily and she lavished upon him her most grandiloquent sentences. ‘Though I am not known to Mr. Ogilvie by sight, yet I flatter myself I am enough known to him by my affection for you as to give me a right to begin my acquaintance with him now more personally … I flatter myself that he will one day come among us and take as a right that regard, affection and esteem which everybody who knows you ought to be already inclined t
o give him from his being your choice.’ Sarah wrote on, happy to have a crisis to relieve the boredom of Halnaker and complete her reconciliation with her sister. Ogilvie was in no position to cavil at Sarah’s degradation. So Sarah’s happiness was genuine and untrammelled: she had nothing to lose and much to gain. From her isolation in Sussex she looked joyfully forward to weeks at Black Rock chatting to her sister while little Louisa played with her Leinster cousins.

  As Emily’s entourage travelled slowly from Bordeaux, where the Nelly had docked in the middle of September, and up the valley of the Garonne river to Toulouse, Charlotte Fitzgerald coyly recorded its progress in fictionalised form. She kept a diary in which Emily was called ‘Stella’, that most literary of heroines, and Mr. Ogilvie was ‘Davy’. At first the entries were commonplace. There was little to report from Bordeaux or on the road except for the minutiae of health, weather and travel. But on 26 October 1774 Charlotte recorded, as if it were the final chapter of a novel, a more important event. ‘After breakfast Stella, Davy and Charlotte had a very interesting conversation on a subject which Davy and Charlotte had been conversing on before breakfast and which determined Stella upon a certain point … Returned to dinner to the Inn where the Reverend Mr. Ellison, a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, was waiting for them. As dearest Stella had been engaged for some time to marry Davy, she was prevailed upon by his entreaties to embrace this favourable opportunity of an English clergyman, and condescended to make Davy the happiest of men by fulfilling that engagement on which the happiness of life depended. The marriage ceremony was performed by Mr. Ellison after dinner in the presence of Charlotte and Mrs. Rowley, the lovely Stella’s woman. Stella was as beautiful as an angel. Mr. Ellison went away soon after that. Charlotte wrote letters and the lovely and adorable Stella and Davy spent a happy, dear evening.’

  Mr Ellison the clergyman was the excuse rather than the reason for this ceremony. Perhaps the real cause lay dividing in Emily’s womb: she was or soon would be pregnant again. Though she might have an affair with Mr Ogilvie and even travel through France with him, she could not, after the announcement of their engagement, have his child without publicly becoming his wife.

  The family had been warned to expect Emily’s announcement. But they did not know why Emily had hurried into matrimony so soon and they were surprised that she risked extra censure by marrying Ogilvie while she was conspicuously a widow, draped in black and still in mourning for her first husband. To marry so soon after the Duke of Leinster’s death suggested a lack of reverence for his memory, an immoderate passion for his successor, a sudden need for legitimacy, or all three. Despite her support for her sister, Sarah could not resist reporting, on 11 December, that the Duke of Richmond and Lord George Lennox ‘think it will hurt you vastly in the world to have married within even a year after your mourning; and they are vastly hurt at its being before the mourning was out.’ But in the wider world, talk of Emily’s haste was drowned out in wonder at the fact of the wedding itself. Mrs Delany, the famous conchologist, gossip and creator of cutouts, wrote to a friend: ‘I mentioned the Duchess of Leinster’s marriage to her son’s tutor. People wonder at her marriage, as she is reckoned one of the proudest and most expensive women in the world. But perhaps she thought it incumbent (as Lady Brown says of Her Grace) “to marry and make an honest man of him”.’

  Emily’s response to this sort of gossip was silence; to her brother’s disapproval it was a disarming letter in which she accepted some of his criticisms, deflected others and won everybody round. ‘I am content that you should call me a fool, and an old fool, that you should blame me and say you did not think me capable of such a folly; talk me over, say what you please, but remember that all I ask of you is your affection and tenderness.’ Sarah was amazed and impressed. Describing Emily’s letter to Susan O’Brien, Sarah wrote: ‘My brother says there is no resisting her owning herself in the wrong and begging so hard to be loved … I assure you, my sister gains friends instead of losing any by her manner.’

  Three months after the marriage ceremony in Toulouse Emily and Ogilvie seemed to have swept away all the major obstacles to the family’s acceptance of their unorthodox union. Louisa had busied herself creating a pedigree for Ogilvie. ‘I don’t exactly know Mr. Ogilvie’s age, he is related to Lord Finletta, and was disappointed by the late Lord of that name, of being provided for, as he had promised to do something for him; but having some dispute with him on that account, he came to Ireland where he had some friends, who assisted him in setting up a school, I believe the very first in Dublin … This is his history, which does not in any shape contradict what we heard about his being of a good gentleman’s family.’ But a genealogy was not really necessary; everyone knew that Ogilvie was a man of obscure origins and a good education and everyone knew that Emily was infatuated with him. She had managed the transition from adulteress to wife with magnificent aplomb, picking up a house and some extra cash on the way. But now she and Ogilvie faced a much greater, more mundane challenge. They had to forge a set of rules to live by and work out ways to manage their emotions, their children, their friends, finances and everyday life.

  PART THREE

  ‘Joy of my heart, charm of my life, comfort of my soul’

  Emily to Ogilvie, 5 July 1777.

  From the very beginning of their married life it was obvious that Emily and Ogilvie would not adhere to the friendly, courteous, frequently distant model of aristocratic unions. Both of them saw passion and emotional entanglement as the driving force in their relationship. When she fell in love with Ogilie the central features of Emily’s life were transformed and marriage to him fixed this change irrevocably. Emily’s children and sisters had previously taken pride of place in her heart. Now Ogilvie emphatically came first; and if Louisa and Sarah accepted the change as they accepted everything that Emily dealt out to them, many of the Fitzgerald children did not. Lucy and Sophia, in particular, resented their stepfather’s dominance and their mother’s love for him. They battled against Ogilvie all their lives, trying hopelessly to win their mother back.

  For a decade after her marriage, Emily was enfolded in the drama of her passion for Ogilvie, calling her feeling ‘the madness of love’ and luxuriating in its extremity. When Ogilvie went away, Emily described herself as ‘whimpering like a fool’, bereft of his body and his conversation. None the less, this was no one-sided dependence. On the strength both of their previous relationship, her passion and fashionable conventions of marital fidelity, Emily made demands on her husband that she had never made upon the Duke of Leinster. She wanted Ogilvie by her side every day and she asked for absolute fidelity from him. Even a glance at another woman was tantamount to a betrayal. In 1778, Emily became convinced that Ogilvie was attracted to one of their servants; a common occurrence at Carton, but now something that aroused suspicion and torment. ‘I own to you, I fret constantly,’ she wrote to Ogilvie, after nursing her jealousy for weeks. ‘Why should I conceal it? Your manner and looks with that girl Marianne … have haunted me, and your wanting so precipitously to get her out of the house seems to confirm to me that my fears are not without foundation. You see by this how high an opinion I have of your heart, honour, humanity and sentiments towards me, since the same circumstances could be looked upon in direct opposite light. But I know you so well, my dear William, that I am certain you would wish to remove any object that you thought likely to cause me any inconvenience, but, at the same time I have the strongest dependence on your never acting contrary to the love you have shown me. I cannot help being jealous of what your intentions may sometimes be.’

  Emily’s obsessional jealousy climbed to extravagant heights whenever Ogilvie went away. In 1777 he was briefly in London, and Emily convinced herself that every woman in the drawing-rooms was plotting to snatch her humble balding husband from her arms. She wrote to him in a fever of imagined disaster. ‘God knows, my angel, if the beauties of the age will but spare me one dear heart on which depends my all, I would willing
ly let them enjoy the triumph of beauty. But when I think that by their allurements and to gratify the vanity of a moment they may rob me of all my heart holds dear, I feel to hate them.’

  Emily’s fears, her ‘nervous horrors’ and ‘sinkings’ were real enough, despite being unfounded. But her jealousy was not purely self-destructive. She felt with Ogilvie, as she had never felt with the Duke, that she had a right to feel jealous and a right to make demands upon her husband. So her outbursts, however abject, were founded on a new kind of confidence: that the needs and rights in this marriage were finely balanced. Although she may have doubted it temporarily Emily also knew that Ogilvie was, as he told Sarah, a ‘fool’ about her and that he needed her as much as she needed him.