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

by Stella Tillyard

  In May 1797 the harbingers of rebellion were discovered at Castletown and Celbridge: servants suspected of being United Irishmen and members of a party who had been breaking into houses in the neighbourhood and seizing arms. ‘Our footman and twelve Castletown servants and workmen have been taken up as housebreakers and United Irishmen,’ Sarah told Susan. Sarah, unlike Emily, was on the spot. She could see that for the moment these ramshackle revolutionaries posed no threat to the political order and she responded to the news with a detachment that continued throughout the rebellion. Her anger was reserved for the Dublin administration whose ‘real and manifest cruelties and oppressions’ she saw as the cause of disaster. Disaffection was the government’s fault, she said. The mass of the population turned to a few Republicans for help only because neither the government nor the ‘supine’ opposition had offered any hope of emancipation and reform of the penal laws. Rebellion was wrong, she concluded, but explicable; yet Republicanism was abhorrent. Despite their cults of Napoleon and Caesar the Napiers described themselves as staunch adherents to the settlement of 1688 and advocated government by a compact between King, Lords and Commons. However much they demanded a limited role for the monarch and however much they railed against George III, they remained monarchists, opposed to ‘democratic’ or Republican movements.

  Sarah’s coolness in the face of rebellion came partly from her political assessment, partly from her sense of being an outsider. She believed that the population was overwhelmingly loyal and that the ‘great weight of Monarchists’ would mean that rebellion was localised and insignificant. She had little to fear she said. She and Napier had little to lose either: no income from Irish land, no government offices or estates. Sarah waited for the rebellion with a clear conscience and the sangfroid she believed appropriate in a military wife.

  Louisa reacted to the arrests of the Castletown workmen with anything but detachment. She had developed a Manichaean attitude towards the local people, believing that those who were not with her were against her and persistently confusing disaffection towards Dublin and Westminster with disloyalty towards herself. Moreover, she asserted that because she had consistently set politics and religion aside in her dealings with her tenants, so they should now do the same and see her as an individual rather than a representative of a government she did not support. She explained later why the arrests upset her. ‘My feeling so much as I did arose from the very great mortification I felt in having spent near 40 years (in what I considered a laudable pursuit) in vain. After having shown the greatest goodwill to the different classes around me, without ever once having been conscious of a moment’s pride or severity towards them, and not even suffering my amusements to be independent of their advantages, I had flattered myself with the hope of possessing their friendship and confidence and then when ill advisers came to them with new proposals, that they would at least have consulted me before they engaged in so deep a business.’

  When the contract of paternalism was shattered, Louisa had no way to describe her servants except as hostile or faithful. Equally, she had no other way to frame her own position, reasoning that hostility to the government meant sympathy for the rebels. So with fractured logic, Louisa put herself in the government camp, ‘against’ the disaffected, preferring not to see shades of loyalty or alliances of expediency. For the previous forty years she had thought of herself as Irish – ‘we Paddy’s’ she used to say, or ‘we Irish’. Her failure to understand or stand aside from definition by opposition meant that by 1798 she had pushed herself into saying ‘we’ and meaning the Irish government.

  So for Louisa, 1798 represented a crisis of self-definition. She was temperamentally unable to write, as the Napiers did, ‘we have never in word, thought or deed, contributed to the misfortune of this ill-fated country and sympathising in the distress of others is our only misfortune individually.’ In other ways, too, Louisa was connected to the existing social hierarchy. Conolly’s enormous income came mostly from Irish lands (lands which, rumour hinted, might be passed to Catholics or Frenchmen in a successful revolution); and there was Castletown, its park and comforts. ‘I am obliged to say us now,’ Louisa wrote to her brother in June 1798, ‘for although Mr. Conolly has ever opposed the votes of the government, he will stand by any existing government rather than none.’ Louisa recognised the inadequacy of her own taxonomy; she was reluctant to stand by the government. But she could not think in any other way. After the rebellion she wanted desperately to forget what had happened and clung to paternalism as her only refuge. She redoubled her charitable efforts and insisted upon displays of harmony between Catholics and Protestants, and rich and poor.

  After the arrests of 1797 Louisa lived in unhappiness, clinging to those servants and tenants who professed their loyalty, but expecting betrayal. ‘We all suffer much from the misery it has given my sister, finding ingratitude in so many and such old servants,’ Sarah wrote with mixed asperity and sympathy. ‘That is what cuts one to the heart, for it damps all her pleasure, which consisted in doing good to all around her.’

  In the spring of 1798, amidst reports that the French were preparing another invasion fleet for Ireland, and rumours that the United Irishmen were organising an underground army and stirring disaffection amongst the Celbridge poor, Napier began to garrison Castletown and his own house. In the fields of loyal tenants who farmed the land around, Napier had ditches dug in parallel lines of defence, and earthworks thrown up at the peripheries where sentries could watch for an attack. Preparations for defence seemed to confirm the imminence of attack. But reports of a coherent plan of rebellion and well organised army of rebels were only partially true. Napier’s preparations for war were far more practical than those of the United Irish leadership.

  Responsibility for rebellion lay with the United Irish leaders in Dublin. Despite the presence of a large underground army (put at about 280,000 men in some membership returns), the United leaders were divided about the timing and course of any uprising. There was supposed to be a plan co-ordinated with a possible French attack. But communications with exiles in Paris were confused: Wolfe Tone, Napper Tandy and Edward Lewins all claimed to speak for the United Irish there. Some of the Dublin executive wanted a definite French commitment, others wanted to rise without French support. While they dithered and argued, support for rebellion in the counties reached a pitch in February 1798 and then sank rapidly when no word came from Dublin to rise.

  At the end of February, before any decisions were taken, Arthur O’Connor was arrested in England on his way to France. On 12 March the government decimated the Dublin leadership of the United Irishmen by arresting almost all of them as they gathered to discuss strategy at the house of a wool-merchant, Oliver Bond. Only three members of the Dublin Executive, as the Dublin leadership was called, escaped. Of these, only Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had avoided arrest because he had turned up at Bond’s so late, was in Dublin.

  Lord Edward went into hiding and, with a new executive, the Dublin United leaders tried to continue preparation for a rising. As they did so, support in the countryside was ebbing away. On 30 March 1798 martial law was proclaimed throughout the country; disarming, arrests and terror followed. Everywhere, and often amongst the yeomanry and militia quartered on the population, Orange emblems fluttered, symbols of Protestantism and loyalty that damned all Catholics as traitors. Martial law bred reprisals. Fears on the Catholic side of massacres by Orangemen within the militia and yeomanry and on the loyalist side of rebel seizures of property polarised loyalties. By late spring of 1798 the heterogeneity of the United Irish movement was gone. It had become an organisation Catholic at the core, with secular Protestants at the top. Even in Ulster, where Dissenters had played such an important part, most Protestants, fearful for their lives and property, put themselves under Orange protection.

  In Dublin and surrounding counties, terrified United Irishmen looked to Lord Edward Fitzgerald for ah announcement that he was to lead an immediate rebellion. But as the
rump of the United Irish leadership contemplated the impoverishment and demoralisation of the movement, their belief grew in the necessity of French help. Hoping for a French invasion in May, they tried to keep their followers calm. Lord Edward, moving between safe houses in Dublin and preoccupied with avoiding arrest, was no longer aware of the fears of United Irishmen in the countryside. He and the other Dublin leaders drifted into a half-farcical limbo. They discussed military strategy for a French-led rebellion even while some, including Lord Edward, argued for a rising without French help. They made plans for a National Assembly for the new Irish Republic. Lord Edward, in a crazy reprise of his days as a youthful amateur at Holland House, disguised himself as a woman and visited his wife Pamela. Moving between hideouts he put on a pig-tailed wig and a countryman’s great-coat. Once, safely installed in new lodgings, he left his boots outside the door with his name carefully written around the inside.

  Lord Edward had none of his mother’s capacity for secrecy and decisive action. Plans were made but no one in Dublin could take the decision either to halt or to call the rebellion. While in the countryside terror slipped into terrorism, followed by arrests, reprisals and panic, Lord Edward took walks at night along Dublin’s canals, jumping from the tow-path into half-submerged barges by the bank. One day, in a bathetic echo of his carefree life at Frescati, he did some digging in the garden of the house where he was hiding.

  The Irish Chancellor, Lord Clare, had given Ogilvie assurances that the government would connive at Lord Edward’s escape even before he went into hiding. When he refused to go, the family realised the depth of his involvement. Sarah expressed little surprise when she heard that he had narrowly escaped arrest at Bond’s. Publicly in letters that the censors read, she might maintain his innocence. But privately she wrote, ‘my mind sank within me’. A week later Sarah’s suspicions were confirmed by an acquaintance with government contacts. In a diary she was keeping to read to Napier, who had a serious fever, she wrote, ‘Mr. Henry says … entre nous, there was a committee, and that government say they knew of it a month ago; that delegates of each province send their delegates to Dublin and that Edward was to order for Leinster how they were to proceed.’ Lord Edward was in fact commander for the whole of the United Irish forces under Dublin control. Apart from this misconception Sarah’s information was correct.

  Sarah’s immediate worries were for Pamela, Lord Edward’s wife, and for Emily. ‘We know nothing yet of how my poor sister will take it – I fear very badly,’ Sarah wrote on 15 March, three days after the arrests in Dublin. But Emily had already decided how to present herself in misfortune. In the letter to her sisters that she wrote after hearing the news, she reasserted her earliest role, that of mother, figurehead and refuge, declining to give the censors confirmation of her misery. ‘22nd March. I know my dearest sisters will wish to have a line from myself. I know their dear hearts suffer on my account; thank God I have nothing to fear for my beloved Eddy. I am not in the least nervous, my health very good, and you know my dear sisters how mercifully I have ever been supported in trying occasions. Try, my dear Louisa not to abandon your dear mind to despair about the times. Let us cherish hope. You, my dear Sarah, have had the severest of all trials in your fears for your husband’s life from a fever … I rejoice to hear he is better … God bless you all.’ With this magnificent display of stoicism, Emily reaffirmed her matriarchal authority. The ‘we three’ of the last decade, the sense that Sarah had had of an equal sisterhood, was overlaid once more with a knowledge of Emily’s pre-eminence. ‘We three’ they were, but also two and one.

  But even as this old hierarchy was being restored, the relationship between Louisa and Sarah, in which Sarah played the part first of renegade then of impoverished supplicant, was changing. Sarah had always castigated herself for weakness and contrasted her own wickedness with Louisa’s goodness and strength. Now the position seemed to be reversed. Louisa became more terrified as the rebellion came closer. At the end of March 1798 she allowed the army to search Castletown for concealed weapons, an act tantamount in Sarah’s eyes to throwing in her hand with the government. And when some Catholic prisoners were set free from nearby Naas gaol she expressed fear rather than pleasure. ‘She was not glad the prisoners were released,’ Sarah wrote in her running diary. After years of emotional subservience and in the midst of worries about her husband, the rebellion and Lord Edward’s safety, Sarah took a modest, written revenge. ‘What perversion in the noblest nature may be compassed by cunning, by nerves and by habits of hearing terror rung in her ears for years! I had neither time nor thoughts to answer, argue or try to convince her.’ When Emily’s letter of the 22nd arrived Sarah wrote, ‘I am charmed with her elevated spirit and character, and trust it will save her from many hours of misery which poor Louisa passes so unnecessarily for want of using her reason.’ Finding herself stronger than Louisa lessened Sarah’s sense of dependence by creating for the first time in their relationship an equality of failure.

  The rebellion also confirmed Sarah’s identity as a military wife who shared her husband’s duties. ‘I fight a good battle with myself and keep very equal in my attendance and manner to you,’ she wrote to Napier when he was sick, relishing the chance to use the military language that could transform her inner struggles from a drama into a battle. When an officer called at Celbridge and wanted to search the house she refused him. ‘I am your representative in this instance,’ she noted for her husband. Throughout the summer of 1798 Sarah’s prose kept its zest; anxiety and excitement ran hand in hand as she wrote. No matter how miserable the family became nor how close the rebellion, Sarah was conscious that she was living up fully to the standards of courage and honour Napier asked of her.

  In April 1798 the government began a ferocious campaign of disarming using the dispensations of martial law. Disarming started in the adjoining counties of Kildare, King’s, Queen’s and Tipperary to the south and west of Dublin, and by the middle of May had reached Celbridge and the neighbouring towns of Leixlip, Maynooth and Kilcock. A Scottish regiment, divided between the towns, plundered at will and threatened to burn houses. Still clinging on to her tattered paternalism, Louisa went from house to house in Celbridge, trying to persuade the angry and frightened inhabitants to give up their arms, effectively acting on behalf of the government. ‘I have spent days in entreaties and threats, to give up the horrid pikes. Some houses burnt at Kilcock yesterday produced the effect. Maynooth held out yesterday, though some houses were burnt and some people punished. This morning the people of Leixlip are bringing in their arms. Celbridge as yet holds out, though five houses are burning. Whether obstinacy or that they have them not, I cannot say. But you may imagine what Mr. Conolly and I suffer. He goes about entreating to the last – spent all yesterday out among them, and today is gone again. He goes from Maynooth to Leixlip and Celbridge and begins again and again to go round them.’

  Atrocities led to reprisals. Rebels who had not given up their arms waited in vain for word from Dublin. On the 17 May the remnants of the United Irish Executive, which now consisted of, among others, Lord Edward, Samuel Nielson and Francis Magan, who were respectively a fugitive, a drunkard and an informer, met in Lord Edward’s hiding place in Thomas Street. Letters were read out from United Irish committees in Dublin county remonstrating about their leaders’ vacillations. Still no decisions were taken.

  Lord Edward moved from house to house in Thomas St, ending up at the house of a feather merchant named Murphy. It was here, on 19 May, that the Dublin authorities caught up with him. The party sent to arrest him consisted of Major Sirr (the Chief of the Dublin police), a Major Swan with a party of half a dozen soldiers, and a Dublin editor and yeomanry officer called Ryan. They found Lord Edward in bed. He was nursing a heavy cold, propped up on pillows, and reading Gil Blas, a favourite book from his Black Rock years. When the men burst into the room, Lord Edward threw the book aside and leapt out of bed. He fought arrest violently and was wounded in the shoulder before he
was bundled out of the house, put into a sedan chair and driven to Dublin Castle.

  To be captured reading rather than intriguing was a fitting end to a career which seemed to his family to have been lived from a story or a play. Gil Blas, too, was an entirely appropriate book for a man whose life had all the elements of a picaresque romance. It was a comedy about a Spanish soldier’s son who impersonated his social betters, made and lost fortunes, fell in and out of love, was arrested, imprisoned, freed and, at the end, allowed to retire to the country with a modest fortune and a chastened spirit. Edward, however, could look forward to no such happy ending. After his arrest he was sent, with his shoulder wound festering in the heat, to Dublin’s gaol. Nobody had the courage to write directly to Emily and tell her that the government had arrested Edward and had enough evidence to send him to the gallows. For a long time nobody had the courage either to tell her that Edward was seriously wounded. It was not until 28 May that she was given an accurate version of her son’s arrest. ‘Mama was last night told of his being wounded,’ Lucy Fitzgerald recorded in her diary, adding, ‘why was it kept so long from her?’ Emily responded with decision. If her son was ill she must go to him, she said. Before she did she must try to get his trial delayed. Lord Henry Fitzgerald had already left. Emily said simply that she would follow as soon as possible.