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

by Stella Tillyard

  Between 4 June, when Edward Fitzgerald died, and 9 September, when Emily finally wrote to Louisa, the rebellion had been brutally crushed, resulting in heavy casualties which reflected the relative strength of government and insurgents. About 30,000 rebels died – some in pitched battles, many more in reprisals and indiscriminate murders – while 2,000 troops and loyalists were killed.

  For Ireland the outcome of the rebellion was Union with Great Britain. For the Lennox family it was reunion and reconciliation. When the rebellion broke out the family had never been more divided. They disagreed about the war in Europe, about the French Revolution, about the monarch and the British government. None of this changed, and the old alliance between Lennoxes, Foxes and Leinsters was never re-forged. But the horrors of the rebellion made everyone – Sarah and the Duke of Richmond, in particular – determined to paper over the cracks. Sarah went on grumbling, of course; she grumbled that Louisa too easily forgave a government that first allowed Edward Fitzgerald to die and then took his estate from his widow and children, and she grumbled that Conolly had lost his nerve after the rebellion and become an abject supporter of government reprisals. But after the end of 1798, when Napier took a government post – Controller of Army Accounts in Ireland – these criticisms lost their sting, and Sarah tried to abide by a tacit agreement to leave politics out of family relations.

  This injunction was easiest for Emily, who had been practising secrecy for some time. It was attractive to Louisa who wanted to forget the way in which she had acted during the rebellion. It was hardest for Sarah who had made politics the basis for good or bad relations with the male members of her family. She violated the new apolitical spirit all the time. Politics was still the air she breathed. But she did try to put politics aside, particularly in relations with her brother.

  The Duke of Richmond and Lord George Lennox were the main beneficiaries of this truce. Richmond had offered a temporary refuge at Goodwood to Lord Edward’s wife Pamela, and his sisters were impressed by his kindness. After Edward’s death Richmond arranged for Pamela to travel to her relations in Hamburg (with the promise of a pension from the family which was hardly ever paid). ‘My brother’s conduct on this occasion has made a deep impression on me,’ Sarah wrote. Emily was grateful to her brother as well. Letters of thanks and visits to Goodwood restored the conventional hierarchy among the Lennox siblings and allowed them to enter the nineteenth century publicly united.

  PART THREE

  ‘What a day I have lived to see, when my heart strings were torn from me’.

  Louisa to the 3rd Duke of Richmond, 3 May 1803.

  Emily, Louisa and Sarah began the new century with a sense of having seen too much and endured too many deaths. Emily observed that, contrary to what she had read and thought, old age did nothing to blunt her ability to feel. Thinking about Lord Edward’s death brought all her other dead children back to her: George Fitzgerald, her last son who died when he was ten; her first George, Lord Ophaly who had died in 1765; Gerald Fitzgerald who had disappeared in 1788; Louisa Fitzgerald, nursed so tenderly by Ogilvie at Black Rock; and all her other dead infants, a Charlotte, two Carolines, Fanny, Augustus, Henrietta and another Louisa. By 1800, 12 of Emily’s 22 children were already dead, all victims of childhood illness except Gerald, who had gone down with the ship in which he was serving.

  Outward events mirrored the sisters’ inner weariness. Revolution, war in Europe and a realisation that the old century had ended in destruction rather than hope all combined to give them a feeling of approaching ends. Louisa said in 1801 that at fifty-eight she could not expect to live long, and decided then and there that she was entering her old age. Sarah was fifty-five in 1800. Her eyes bothered her but she was full of energy still. She worried less for herself than for Napier, cooped up in a Dublin office ‘like the black hole at Calcutta’, working through an immense backlog of army accounts.

  Emily was sixty-nine. She still grieved for Edward and at times now saw her life as a tragedy. In 1803, on the anniversary of Edward’s death, a day she always passed in mourning, she wrote to her daughter Lucy, ‘the loss of my child is always one of those melancholy thoughts that return almost as often as at first and depress my spirits often and are not entirely absorb’d in the great misery and calamity of my life.’ None the less, she was still vigorous. She gave assemblies at her house in Harley Street, wrote letters, read and demanded the unceasing attention of her husband and children.

  For the first few years of the nineteenth century tidbits of family news went back and forth across the Irish sea; Conolly’s asthma, Napier’s sore gums and weak chest, news of children’s marriages and old people’s deaths. Sometimes the correspondents travelled too. In July 1801, Louisa spent a few weeks with Emily and then went with Ogilvie and the youngest members of Emily’s household to Brighton for bathing and sea air. The next year she and Conolly were in England again, going to London, Goodwood and then Harrogate. Emily Napier, now almost twenty, accompanied Louisa everywhere. Louisa made half-hearted attempts to introduce Emily to prospective husbands, but both accepted that she was to sacrifice her future to her aunt’s old age and that filial devotion must make up for married love. In her dreams Louisa transformed herself from aunt to lover in a guilty effort at recompense. ‘I certainly never cease thinking of you, and dreamt of you the whole night,’ Louisa wrote to Emily in 1807. ‘In short, my love, my attachment to you is such, that it is like a lover’s. I have not words to express all that passes in my heart and thoughts about you.’

  In 1803 the news from Ireland became more sombre. Conolly’s asthma attacks got worse and he succumbed to what the doctors called ‘influenza’. After a week’s illness, on 27 April 1803 he died in Louisa’s arms. To the last he was self-deprecating. ‘The last articulate words that he uttered (holding my hand) were, “I have left you all I could, knowing that you will make better use of it than I ever should”,’ Louisa reported to the Duke of Richmond.

  In the months that followed Conolly’s death Louisa clung to these words. They gave her a reason for going on; Conolly had left everything in her hands and she had to carry out his wishes. To begin with, however, she could do nothing. For a week she lay in her closet at Castletown with Emily Napier constantly by her side. Sarah was at Castletown too. She made sure that Louisa was never alone and tried, as she put it, to ‘bring her about by slow degrees to use herself to misery, for misery was in every room, in every face, in every thing around her’. Sarah believed that grief should be extracted from the sufferer as a disease was drawn out of the body and consequently took every opportunity to remind Louisa of her loss. Louisa had always taken the opposite view. She hid her strongest feelings, believing that their exposure would be damaging and foolish. Emily complained that Sarah was making Louisa worse, ‘foreseeing nothing for dear Louisa but endless misery’ and the Duke of Richmond, asserting his newly rediscovered authority wrote to Napier hinting that Sarah should leave Louisa alone to grieve in her own way. Sarah went back to her house in Celbridge and Emily reported that when she did return to Castletown, ‘she was astonished at the change she found in Louisa for the better.’

  Louisa coped with the transition from wife to widow by working through Conolly’s papers. ‘A great deal is left for me to do and the fulfilling all his benevolent intentions will become an object for the remainder of my life, when it shall please God to permit our reunion.’ Conolly had left Louisa Castletown for life, with a jointure of £2,500 a year, the sum agreed in their marriage settlement. There were legacies for servants and £10,000 to be divided amongst Sarah’s children. There were also huge liabilities: personal debts, arrears of income tax, loans and interest on loans left unpaid for many years. In law these debts all passed to the heir to the estate, Admiral Pakenham, who had married Conolly’s niece and would inherit Castletown when Louisa died. But Louisa felt that Conolly had given her the duty of discharging the debts and she began working slowly through them with the same care that she had always given to h
er household accounts.

  Emily knew that buried in Tom Conolly’s accounts was a secret that the family had kept for many years. She waited apprehensively as Louisa went through her husband’s scribbled and haphazard records. It took Louisa 13 months to find what Emily feared was there; payments for lodging, for gifts, an unexplained annuity perhaps. When she found these accounts she believed that her siblings were completely in ignorance and explained to her brother: ‘I met with a blow which almost overcame me. That of a mistress having been in question for many years back. You know enough of the mould in which I am cast to comprehend what such a discovery cost me, but I am determined on behaving towards his memory as I would have endeavoured (at least) to have done towards himself. Resignation, patience and no complaint are the way to shut the door against one’s worst enemy, one’s own passions; and jealousy having always been a strong ingredient in my composition, I resolved on giving it no admittance, for women cannot be judges of men’s sentiment upon that subject. It would be the height of ingratitude in me to doubt his love for me after the unremitting proofs he gave me of it, tho’ I cannot judge the mixture that attended it.’

  Emily had for years hidden her knowledge of Conolly’s mistress from Louisa, conniving in his deception both because she did not want to see her sister wounded, and because she had been largely responsible for bringing about the marriage. So for her own sake and for Louisa’s Emily stayed silent. Louisa had always proclaimed her marriage to be the bedrock upon which she had built a happy life. She knew very well that Conolly had little intelligence or political savoir-faire. But she had come to feel that he offered her trust and fidelity instead.

  From the very first, Louisa had put enormous store by her husband’s faithfulness. Her position was an unusual one. Despite the increasing fashionableness of domestic felicity towards the end of the century, aristocratic women were given little expectation, upon marriage, that their husbands would be faithful. Before her marriage to Napier, Sarah subscribed cheerfully to the view that male adultery was no worse, and just as commonplace as gambling and drunkenness. Louisa did not agree. In a letter written some time in the early 1770s she explained why. ‘I cannot undertake to answer that part of your letter at length, where you condemn me for saying that my heart would be broke by the inconstancy of my husband, because it would take up more time than I have at present at my disposal. But as shortly as I can, I will. In primis, I am sure that you are perfectly right, and recommend the only good and wise conduct, and the only one to bring back a husband, and it is certainly what I should try at. But I fear I could not do it. I own to you that I feel myself in the wrong, for I don’t find in myself the least disposition towards making an allowance for my husband being a human creature, and like all other men. I have let myself go too far, expecting him to be all perfection in that one particular, and have allowed myself to place my greatest happiness in consequence of it; and ’tho ’tis my firm belief that as yet it has been the case, and that in all human probability ’tis likely now to continue, yet I do mean to take myself to task about it, for I feel I am wrong. I know myself to be [of] a most jealous disposition, and my natural violence would add to it, so that I have always dreaded the least spark of it, for fear that it should lead me wrong … In the case of another I can make allowances and see the human creature in the action can be very miserable without being unreasonable and hard. Now with my husband I fear I should be both, and all things put together makes me think that if one’s heart can be broke by vexation, such a situation would have that effect upon me; and I should feel I was doing wrong at the same time, which would be an additional vexation. I don’t quite agree with you that drunkenness or gaming is as bad to the wife as inconstancy. I am sure its worse for the men, as its hurting an amiable character, which love does not. But a wife, I think, can make more allowances for these faults than for one which wounds her love so deeply. I don’t know how it is, but I can never dwell a moment on the thought of losing my husband’s love, without feeling it is the worst misfortune that can happen to me.’

  Given the strength of Louisa’s belief in the value of fidelity and the degree of trust she had placed in Conolly, Emily was justifiably anxious about Louisa’s ability to recast the way in which she understood and described her marriage. How could she cope when she discovered that her adored husband had for years kept a mistress? But Louisa was consistent. She preferred to push aside the revelation rather than change her mind about her husband. ‘My rooted affection for him remains unshaken,’ she wrote, ‘and I cherish the hope that when Death … shall again unite us, I shall not be disappointed of that pure love, that with me, had begun this side of the grave. The worth and excellence of his character I can contemplate with pleasure, and venerate the same, making his opinions … my chief guide.’ So she went on as she had always done, feeling that Conolly in heaven was scarcely further than the next room and sure that the explanation that he would eventually give her would vindicate her trust.

  If Louisa did not change, Castletown quickly did. Louisa had a substantial income of her own now. She could decide upon the size of her household, the use to which the buildings were put and the number and scope of her philanthropic activities. She immediately began to economise, citing Conolly’s debts as the reason. But her shrinking household reflected her own intentions and careful personality. She had never been interested in display or grandeur; she loved to economise and hated waste. She also wanted to put as much money and time as possible into charitable activities.

  Sarah watched the Castletown household diminish in size and opulence. She was horrified, unable to understand that Louisa derived pleasure from economy. Sarah had always regarded Louisa as first and foremost a munificent hostess who spread largesse in her immediate family circle and used her pin money alone for charity. The devoted philanthropist she saw emerging from the silken cocoon of aristocratic marriage was less to her liking. ‘Her family is to be on the 4th of June thus reordered,’ Sarah wrote to her son Charles after Conolly’s death, ‘from about 60 in the hall and 12 in the steward’s room and never less than 10 in parlour, her whole family, herself and company will never exceed 20. Three quarters of the house to be shut up as the rest will do. The farms to be let. The two lawns, wood are kept only. Thus, my love, you will arrive to see the close of a great, a noble, a generous, benevolent, charitable and hospitable establishment.’

  A year after Conolly’s death, Napier’s health, which had been worrying Sarah for years, became much worse. Napier’s slenderness became emaciation and the soreness in his gums became a debilitating pain that spread down his throat. Sarah told Susan, ‘long sufferings have wasted him almost to an atrophy.’ Napier thought he was going to die in February 1804. But he continued his work and recovered slightly in the spring. In the summer he relapsed and Sarah decided to take him to Bristol. The melancholy party set off in June; Napier exhausted and coughing, Sarah, whose sight was already failing, and the three girls, Louisa, Caroline and Cecilia. Napier rallied briefly in Bristol and Sarah, convinced by optimistic doctors, believed he would recover. ‘Those who pretend to know assure me that I am almost a convalescent,’ Napier wrote at the end of July, adding mordantly, ‘I can’t say that my own sensations are in union with theirs.’ He was right. On 13 October, aged fifty-three, he died.

  Napier had given Sarah a reason for living, and after his death she could at times see no point in carrying on. Everything she had done had been for him, she thought. ‘I have lost him who made me like this world. It is now a dreary expanse, where I see thinly scattered a few beloved objects whose welfare and prosperity have still such strong hold on my heart as to keep it alive to whatever concerns them. But its pleasant prospects are all vanished! … While he lived I saw all objects through the medium of my own happiness. Even the joy occasioned by advantages falling to the share of any of my children was doubled because I shared it with him … To endeavour to be worthy of his love gave animation to my existence. From his precepts and example I was tau
ght to bear adversity, to make any sacrifice to duty with cheerfulness, not to value life too much and never to cease being grateful for the many blessings which it had pleased God to bestow on us.’

  Despite her misery Sarah did not slip back into the corrosive self-hatred of the days before her marriage. Devotion to Napier had indeed made the world seem a better place. In so doing it had changed Sarah too, giving her an envelope of self-esteem and a feeling of being loved that made grief bearable.

  Sarah cried with her children and with Louisa and Susan O’Brien, who both came hurriedly to Bristol when they learned that Napier was dying. Expressing grief and anger at her loss was a help. But none the less, she was dazed that in the face of annihilation, ordinary life went on. She felt paralysed, stunned by the enormity of the contrast between the quotidian and the eternal. ‘My mind feels in prison, it brings to me those sensations which I ever supposed were felt by the Royal Family of France in the Temple. Here we are, but it must end!’

  Napier left Sarah everything and made her responsible for all his affairs. To his sons he bequeathed his weapons, ‘the example of my long and faithful services to my King and country’ and a warning against Republican ideas. His daughters got no mention in his will and no inheritance. Just before he died Napier also sent his son William a long letter about ‘the duties of an officer and a gentleman’ which ended, ‘keep this letter and show it to your elder brothers that they may remind you of its contents should pleasure or passion ever tempt you to swerve from the principles it is intended to inculcate.’ He also charged his sons to prove their piety to God and their affection towards their parents by serving King and country with honour. For the rest of their lives Sarah’s sons strove to live up to his injunctions and his example; their father, they believed, had told them what they should do and their mother had given them the means to do it.