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

by Stella Tillyard

  In fact, Emily’s daughters had political opinions every bit as strong as those of her sons. Lucy and Sophia sided with Fox; Charlotte, who had recently married a Pittite MP, Joseph Strutt, took her husband’s part. By the early 1790s the rift between Lucy and Charlotte was wide. Charlotte was ‘Mr. Strutt in petticoats and he is Charlotte in trousers and both old Maids,’ Lucy wrote in 1793, furious that neither were proud of ‘the dear Cousin and his love of Liberty’.

  Try as she might, Emily could neither ignore her children’s political beliefs nor hide her own. Politics got everywhere: into the boudoir, onto the dinner table and between the pages of the most motherly letters. Politics altered love itself; and although at times of national and familial calm it dropped into the background, it was always there. After 1789, Emily’s relations with her children were subtly altered. She increasingly avoided political discussions in letters and concentrated on family matters; what to eat after an attack of gout; the sorrows of weaning a child from the breast; births, deaths, weddings. But still politics crept in. Reporting on a forthcoming christening at Carton in 1791, she could not help noting with approval, ‘the whole family is to be dressed in buff and blue’, the colours of Foxite opposition.

  After the Regency crisis, Sarah and Emily finally gave up hope of preferment for their husbands. Sarah settled down at Celbridge in her ‘new, dear, cheerful, comfortable, pretty house’ with her ‘very pretty little flock of brats’. She still thought of herself as impoverished but said that Conolly’s help and her annuity made them ‘quite easy, for we can feed, clothe, and keep (at a common school in the village) our boys, though we can neither have carriages, dress, company or many luxuries.’

  As Sarah bedded down, Emily prepared to leave. At the end of the 1780s she shifted her base to London (‘Dr Papa does not love Ireland,’ she confessed to her daughter Lucy). Then she set about finding husbands for her remaining daughters, Lucy, Sophia, Cecilia and Mimi. Harley Street was soon filled with visitors and she especially welcomed young Foxite politicians like Lord Foley and Charles Grey. Emily would happily have married her daughters to any young men of fortune, but she selected men who clustered around Fox. Their presence in Harley Street gave a good indication of her own political opinions. Prominent amongst her visitors was Lord Grey, later prime minister and architect of the Reform Bill. Grey was an outspoken supporter of the French Revolution and he continued to support it even after the fall of the monarchy in 1792, when many early enthusiasts turned cold. In April 1792 he founded the Society of the Friends of the People, to press for parliamentary reform. Grey opposed the war with France that started in 1793 and remained Francophile and Foxite right through the dark days of 1794, when the tumbrils rolled through Parisian streets and Fox was widely regarded and caricatured as a regicidal sans culotte wielding a dagger and wearing the revolutionists’ ‘bonnet rouge’. Emily, meanwhile seems to have been scheming to marry him to one of her daughters. In September 1794 she wrote to Lucy, ‘you will say I am persuading you to marry Lord Grey, for that is the way you dear girls exaggerate. I am only talking reason to you, which you won’t listen to.’

  Emily’s partiality towards Grey may have been based partly on his association with Fox (although the two men did not see eye to eye on the question of parliamentary reform). But she could not have been unaware that Grey’s radical sympathies were, by 1794, regarded by many as dangerously democratic and probably Republican.

  Attitudes towards France and the French Revolution had shifted markedly between 1789 and 1793. By 1793, to be openly Francophile, as Emily was, was seen by some as an aberrant and almost seditious stance. In 1789 the Whig opposition had welcomed the revolution as a new 1688, a new Glorious Revolution that could plant English liberties in French soil. Radicals – many non-conformist, a few aristocratic – saw events in France as a progression of the American Revolution, and hoped that the removal of privilege, political equality and parliamentary reform would now spread across the Channel. The years just before and just after 1789 saw the most sustained radical and reformist activity since the English Civil War nearly a hundred and fifty years earlier.

  By 1792 this early euphoria had given way to polarisation and hardening of attitudes, and the government and conservatives had seized the political initiative from the opposition and the reformers. The Paris Insurrection and the September Massacres, the subsequent Edict of Fraternity, execution of the King and Queen, abolition of the monarchy and advent of the Terror changed the opinion that many held of the character of the revolution. Many now saw it not so much as 1688 but as 1642, not as a Glorious Revolution but as another regicidal tyranny. The Whig opposition fell into disarray and Pitt’s government mobilised political support to begin stamping out radical activity in Britain. By 1793 supporters of the revolution were already a minority and by 1794 politicians like Fox and Grey who denounced the war with France could only count on the support of 30 or 40 of their fellow MPs, 200 less than a few years before.

  Yet Grey’s politics may have seemed to Emily mild in comparison with the republican enthusiasms of her son, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. When Edward returned from his visit to Paris in 1792 she wrote: ‘he is mad about French affairs – the levelling principle, and indeed seems entirely engrossed by these subjects, upon which he converses in a charming pleasant way. Though I fear he has made out a system to himself too perfect for this world, and which to bring about would be the cause of much disorder, and much blood would be spilt. This he denies … One must not say the mob before him, but the people. I think it charming to hear talked of, but I fear they will never realise it.’

  Edward’s conversion to Republicanism had a sudden birth in Paris at the end of 1792, but its gestation had been slow, nourished by a tradition of political opposition (both Irish and Foxite), a sojourn in North America and a long immersion in the works of Rousseau, Voltaire and English radicals like Priestley and Paine.

  Edward joined the British army in 1780, at the age of seventeen, and soon afterwards embarked for America, where he fought in North Carolina ‘against the cause of Liberty’, as he later described it. At the end of the American wars in 1783 he was put on half pay and desultorily studied fortifications in between attending the Irish Parliament as one of his brother’s members. In 1788 he went to North America again, to Nova Scotia in Canada. By this time his Foxite commitment to generalised notions of liberty was romanticised with a strong dose of French noble savagery. He applauded in Canada both the ‘equality’ of the white settlers, amongst whom ‘there are no gentlemen’ and the unencumbered life of the Indian ‘savages’, who had none of ‘our fictitious, ridiculous wants’ and were ‘what nature intended we should be’. Edward was enchanted with the Indians’ way of life, writing to Emily, ‘My dearest mother, if it was not for you, I believe I should never go home’, and transposing, for her amusement, life in Harley Street with Indian life in Halifax, Nova Scotia. If they had all been savages, he wrote, ‘there would be then no cases of looking forward to the fortune for children – of thinking how you are to live; no separations in families, one in Ireland, one in England: no devilish politics, no fashions, customs, duties or appearances to the world to interfere with one’s happiness. Instead of being served and supported by servants, everything here is done by one’s relations – by the people one loves; and the mutual obligations you must be under increase your love for each other, … Now the dear Ciss and Mimi, instead of being with Mrs. Lynch, would be carrying wood and fetching water, while ladies Lucy and Sophia were collecting and drying fish. As for you dear mother, you would be smoking your pipe. Ogilvie and us boys, after having brought in our game, would be lying about the fire while our squaws were helping the ladies to cook, or taking care of our papouses: all this in a fine wood, beside some beautiful lake, which when you are tired of, you could in ten minutes, without any baggage, get into your canoes and off with you elsewhere.’

  Edward returned to England in 1790, in time to celebrate what Fox called ‘the noblest cause th
at ever was in the hand of Man’, the French Revolution, which had begun a year earlier. He celebrated his Foxite connections by an affair with Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s wife (who died giving birth to his child), and went to Paris in 1792, where he stayed with Paine and renounced his title. Finally he proved his radical sympathies by marrying Pamela Sims, the illegitimate daughter of Philippe ‘Égalité’, the Duc d’Orléans. In 1792, after early French military success, he saw in the Parisians a cameraderie that made them like the Indians of Nova Scotia and a greatness which made them citizens of the world. ‘All their pamphlets, all their pieces, all their songs extol their achievements but as the effect of the principle they are contending for, and rejoice at their success as the triumph of humanity. All the defeats of their enemies they impute to their disgust at the cause for which they fight. In the coffeehouses and playhouses, every man calls the other camerade, frère, and with a stranger immediately begins, “Ah! nous sommes tous frères, tous hommes, nos victoires sont pour vous, pour tout le monde.”’

  Even in his revolutionary enthusiasm, Edward never forgot Emily. He wrote constant vivid accounts of his devotion to her, like this one sent from Ireland in 1793: ‘I dote on being with you anywhere, but particularly in the country, as I think we always enjoy each other’s company more here than in town. I long for a little talk with you, sitting out in some pretty spot, of a fine day, with your long cane in your hand, working at some little weed at your feet, and looking down, talking all the time.’

  Lord Edward was confident that his mother shared a good many of his views (although he was equally certain that Ogilvie did not). Writing from Paris a couple of months after the Republic was declared and just after the French had scored resounding military victories in the Low Countries, he said, ‘I am glad Ogilvie warms up a little. I knew he would’, as if he was certain that his mother for one was cheered by the success of the Republican armies. Emily’s love for her favourite son predisposed her to like what he liked. But she was no cipher and, as if in proof, she consoled herself after his departure to Paris and then to Ireland with the writings of the radical chemist Joseph Priestley. No hint of this reading emerged in Emily’s letters. She had always been good at keeping her own counsel. For years she had kept her affair with Ogilvie a secret. The date of her marriage was still mysteriously imprecise and she had kept the probable secret of George Fitzgerald’s parentage from everyone, only referring to him once in her correspondence with Ogilvie as ‘your boy’. Now her political opinions – a desire for parliamentary reform, a dislike of a strong monarch, even an urge towards her son’s ‘democratic’ Utopia – were all concealed. Up to the middle of 1794 she seems to have supported Edward’s political stance, and even perhaps gone along with his wish to see the example of France repeated in Ireland, where he established himself in 1792, and quickly made contact with the radical United Irishmen. But as she realised the implications of his Republicanism – that after 1794 it meant rebellion and violence – and as it was made clear that he was a target for government spies, her enthusiasm waned. She began to long for him to stop his secret activities in Ireland. She became more circumspect than ever, and he, perhaps suspecting that his letters were read by government censors, wrote in 1794, ‘I won’t bore you with any more politics, dear mother, as I know you don’t like them.’

  Sarah’s volubility made up for Emily’s reserve. She staunchly supported Fox, calling him ‘more glorious than ever’ in 1793. She felt sympathy for the aims but abhorrence for the methods of the revolution as the Terror progressed. ‘I pity the deluded multitude and wish them success at home but ruin if they go one step out of France.’ Taking her cue from Fox she regarded war against France as a trumped-up excuse by European monarchs to extend their despotisms at home. But as a military wife she wanted victory. ‘I think our war the King’s war, very wrong and very foolish, but still I wish it success.’ Sarah welcomed war because war offered Napier hope of active service, after years as a half-pay captain.

  Early in 1794 Napier became a major and was appointed Deputy Quarter-Master General to Lord Moira’s army in Holland. Sarah’s new principles of duty and honour thus saw active service for the first time. They came through with colours flying. Sarah played her role as an impoverished major’s wife to the hilt, relishing its indignities and the contrast with the well-serviced comforts of Castletown and Celbridge. Leaving all her children behind except Napier’s daughter, who insisted on being with her father, and her son Charles, who was in training for his own enlistment, Sarah travelled down to Southampton, ‘like a poor Captain’s wife as I ought to do, in a chaise and pair, three of us (no maid) and one man on horseback.’

  At Southampton the army was assembling. Napier was recruiting troops and planning the move of men and matériel from England to the Continent. Officers in artillery regiments, sergeants in charge of men and arms, clerks who tried frantically to record the movements of supplies, wagoneers who wanted work and payment: all crowded into Napier’s rented quarters. Sarah described the scene in biblical language, as one of Babylonian chaos. ‘Various and constant are the occupations of Major Napier, and constant and unremitting is his attention. Ceremony don’t belong to his character and poverty makes us confine ourselves to cheap lodging with three small bedrooms and one parlour, into which are introduced about 20, 30 or more people of various denominations from 8 in the morning till 11 at night … All march in at all hours on business. To this must be added “les dames de la ville”, now and then wives of officers, officers themselves sometimes on duty, sometimes as visitors, half a dozen very young men, who, belonging to the departments, call in and run in and out like children for a hat or a paper forgot.’ ‘I have no place to be but in this coffee-room of his,’ she added cheerfully.

  Sarah’s description of the army at Southampton made it clear why soldiers were viewed with such alarm by those who strove to uphold propriety. The scene in Napier’s lodgings violated several of the hierarchies by which the household, the nation and the state were conventionally supposed to be ordered. In the first place, social distinction was cast aside. Officers (including aristocrats like Napier), conscripted soldiers, craftsmen and casual labourers from the lowest ranks of society mixed together without the ‘ceremonies’, as Sarah called them, that accompanied and helped define class relations. Secondly, women of all sorts were crowded together. In Napier’s cramped hot rooms, officers’ wives and young unmarried girls like Louisa Napier, who were supposed to be protected from any open expression of sexuality, rubbed shoulders with ‘women of the town’ who had come to recruit officers for amorous intrigue. Finally, this sort of scene was a violation of the conventional ordering of space within a dwelling. Aristocratic houses like Castletown had carefully planned gradations of space. Business visitors, labourers and servants went round to the offices through a side entrance. Personal callers waited in the chilly expanse of the entrance hall and were then led to drawing-room, long gallery or parlour depending on their state of intimacy with the Conollys. Even in humble households these divisions applied: visitors were received in the front room, but the family lived mainly in the back. Napier’s lodgings jumbled together everybody everywhere. On occasions Sarah received friends and even officers in her bedroom. Small wonder, then, that soldiers epitomised danger for those anxious to maintain hierarchies of all sorts, and epitomised glamour for those who were allured by the breaking of taboos.

  Sarah enjoyed this blurring of boundaries, and she seized the opportunity it offered to take on some of Napier’s work herself. While he made decisions about movements of troops and supplies in one room, in another she organised and paid recruiting officers who were raising a company, claiming in justification that Madame de Sévigné’s daughter had done the same thing more than a century before. When she had raised 30 out of the 100 men Napier needed she wrote triumphantly to Susan, ‘None of these would have been got but for me.’

  Even when the army left Sarah maintained her good spirits, buoyed up by a sense of ac
hievement and a string of notes from her husband. Tender letters arrived from Ostend, Flushing and from Camp Wairloos in Flanders. ‘I consider every hour which I am without you as so much lost in my life.’ ‘For heaven’s sake, Sally, think that on your care of yourself depends my hope of future happiness: whilst you are well I am comfortable in any situation.’ ‘I am very well and yours soul and body.’

  Lord Moira’s army had a less than glorious sojourn in the Low Countries. Napier was back in England in July, one of many thousands of soldiers who retreated from the Continent in the face of French advances. Both he and Sarah reached Ireland a few weeks later, Napier to recruit in the north, Sarah to re-establish herself at Celbridge to supervise the education of her children.

  The Napier boys went to a religiously mixed local school where they learned good Latin, a smattering of mathematics and a tolerance for their schoolfellows, the sons of Celbridge’s prosperous families. It was a different education from that of their cousins or father. They learned no French, which was increasingly seen as a feminine accomplishment rather than a language of civility and cosmopolitan, aristocratic conversation. Teaching of Latin expanded to fill the place left by this shift.

  But Latin’s associations were very different from those of French. For a long time Latin had been associated with statesmanship. Young men read reams of satires, poetry and speeches and polished their oratory to the curves of Latin cadences. At the peak of their careers they had themselves carved, senatorially, in togas, so that the beer bellies of John Bull were enfolded in the drapery of Cicero. Latin meant things Roman, too. From Stowe to Chiswick and Kingsgate, gentlemen built houses for retirement, in self-consciously ‘Roman’, often specifically ‘Virgilian’ designs.