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

by Stella Tillyard

  Sarah sunned herself unashamedly in the warm rays of her sons’ glory. She received letters of praise on their behalf from Wellington and they themselves seconded his approbation. ‘Such as your children are,’ Charles Napier told her, ‘they are your work.’ Soon she began to be credited with unusual wisdom, like the blind seers of legend. She became an early example of the revered widow, a type that Queen Victoria would turn into a cult. It helped, of course, that her sons, William Napier in particular, were thought to be almost inhumanly handsome, figures of Mars personified. The novelist Amelia Opie said of William Napier, ‘I never saw a handsomer man! I could not help looking at him. He is very black, with black moustachios.’

  As something of a type, representative of suffering but glorious widowhood, Sarah was a repository for others’ imaginings. But she was never a cipher. She retained both her acuity and her Foxite beliefs. But from about 1808 onwards, Sarah’s commentary on the Crown became progressively less acerbic: a diffuse patriotism and an increasingly sentimental loyalty to the royal family were added to her social and political shrewdness. She began to think of George III as a figurehead rather than a fool and ruminating on the King’s possible death in 1809 she wrote that ‘the decease of a good old King who certainly is altogether beloved by his subjects will leave a deep impression of sorrow.’ Susan O’Brien, visiting Sarah in 1817, noted with surprise that her earlier hostility both to the monarch and the Crown had dwindled. Sarah was moving with the times, sharing in a general softening of attitudes towards the monarch and the monarchy and in a national mood of greater insularity and more strident militarism.

  Emily was bewildered by Sarah’s dedication to the abstractions of military life and astonished at her declaration that she could not ‘be a mother when glory was in question’. But Emily had not changed with the times. She remained true to the way of life and patterns of thought which she had established in the 1760s. She was still a believer in reason, a disciple of Rousseau and Voltaire, cosmopolitan, hostile to a vaguely defined militarism and Francophile to the core. She never, in her voluminous correspondence, praised the Hanoverian monarchy and she looked on the war as a horror which prevented her going to France. Age did not change her. She lost none of her extravagance or any of her faculties. In the summer of 1809, when she was seventy-seven, Emily sat for her portrait to Sir Martin Archer Shee. She sat firmly upright and gazed away from the viewer, much as she had done when she sat to Reynolds half a century before. The vulnerability of that earlier portrait had gone. In the place of the beautiful countess sat an old woman with a cap of black lace, determined and somewhat distant. ‘It will not be what you were at 20 or 40,’ Ogilvie wrote, ‘but it will be the most beautiful woman of your age in the kingdom.’

  Ogilvie nurtured their love through the winter of Emily’s old age, coaxing it gently as if they were still young and she would never die. He still sent her love letters when he went away; in August 1812 he wrote from Dublin, ‘I last night after dinner received your letter of the 6th written as beautifully and with as steady a hand as the first letter I had the happiness of receiving from you about forty five years ago. How can I ever be sufficiently thankful to Providence for continuing the blessing of my life to me, and with a degree of health and strength that enable you to bear up against the infirmities of old age and to enjoy the different objects that attach you to life, or how can I ever be sufficiently grateful to you dearest Emily for the steadiness and warmth of your attachment to me. Be assured, my beloved Emily that I am thoroughly sensible of and properly grateful for the one and the other … I can truly assure you that from the first moment of our attachment to this instant you have been the first and reigning object of my thought and feeling and that you will continue to be so till the last hour of my life and that no other object has ever engaged my affections or interfered with my attachment to you.’

  Ogilvie, at seventy, still acted like a young man, planning, investing, travelling and building. He assumed that Emily could maintain her youthfulness too. For a long time she did. In 1811 Sarah described her as ‘in wonderful health for 80’. She still dined out, visited her children and went to nursery garden for plants (‘to the detriment of my pocket’). Her grandson ‘little Eddy’ who had lived with her since Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s death, absorbed much of her attention when he arrived home from Eton in the holidays. Emily watched her grandchildren’s political development carefully. While Fox was alive she had taken ‘little Eddy’ on ritual visits to St Anne’s Hill. After Fox’s death, when his mantle passed to the third Lord Holland, Emily looked to Holland House for guidance. In 1808 she asked Lord Holland for help in sending the young Duke of Leinster, just out of Eton, some suitable Foxite reading. ‘You would I trust, help to form, steady and fix his principles in the political way particularly; you can’t imagine how much I have this at heart!’

  Gradually time took its toll. In 1813 Emily suddenly grew old. ‘Little Eddy’ embarked for the Peninsula in February and his departure left her low and ‘not well’. She revived in the summer. Ogilvie thought her well enough for him to go to Ireland for several weeks, from where he sent a last, loving note on 16 July. It ended, ‘God bless you, I am your most tenderly affectionate husband WO.’ But from then on, Emily’s ‘constitution of iron’, as she called it, steadily failed. In the spring of 1814 she had a bout of pneumonia, from which she seemed to recover. ‘Thank God the attack is over,’ wrote her daughter Cecilia. ‘She has thrown off an illness which would have killed anyone but herself. When I came yesterday they thought she had not two hours to live, but today she is well. Pulse calm, head quiet, heat gone.’ But Emily’s invincibility was only imagined by a family which she had dominated majestically for so long. In the third week of March illness returned, and on the 27 March she died. She was eighty-two years old, a woman who had had two husbands, twenty-two children and many secrets.

  Emily’s death made Louisa feel she was next in line. ‘At 70 one has a right to expect that death may carry one off any day,’ she told Sarah, as if she looked forward to the event. None the less Louisa was still active and well. In the spring of 1814, immediately after Emily’s funeral, she set off with Emily Napier on a trip to Holland and Brussels. ‘Here I am at the age of 70 able to please all the young people about me, and could do more, if prudence did not stop me,’ she said. The party toured museums and manufacturies, and hobnobbed with the English diplomatic corps and the Dutch royal family. Louisa visited charitable institutions to garner hints for her Castletown projects. On the way back to Ireland they visited Napiers, assorted Fitzgeralds scattered up the course of the Thames and the new generation of Lennoxes installed at Goodwood. The year 1815 was spent at Castletown, but in the following year Louisa and Emily Napier joined Sarah at Brighton, and in 1817 Louisa went back to Brussels.

  Sarah was much less mobile than her sister, although her conversation, Susan O’Brien noted in 1817, was ‘just as free and wide ranging as it had ever been’. Sarah was ‘altered in appearance’ Susan wrote, ‘but not in intellect or in her usual style of conversation. She is happy in her family’s attention and affection.’ Sarah was contented, as far as her blindness and dependence on others would allow. After the peace of 1815 she paid visits to her sons in turn, accompanied by Louisa Napier. Sarah’s days, when she was at home in Cadogan Place, followed an unvarying pattern. After a family breakfast she went to her own room, where she received visitors and wrote letters. At about five o’clock she dined and then sat in the drawing-room, the sightless cynosure of all eyes. Adored by her sons and attended by Louisa and her daughters-in-law, Sarah sat, like a rock in the sea, blind and immobile but determining what happened in the space around her. She had a happy old age, although Louisa Napier, visitors noticed, seemed bitter and often angry, particularly as Sarah, like the old actress that she was, always stole the limelight.

  In 1818 the darkness before Sarah’s eyes began to spread slowly over her mind. When Louisa arrived in London that year she was shocked at her sist
er’s deterioration. ‘She is very weak and her appetite is bad. Her mind appears to be quite composed and at times she converses as usual. But her general state is that of sleepiness over her faculties and she does not say that she suffers.’ Sarah drifted in and out of contact with the world, sometimes chatting with animation, sometimes nodding into purgatorial sleep. More and more she sat and allowed others to do things for her. She made the long journey to Castletown in 1819 and stayed for several months. Although she seemed happy there with Louisa, Emily Napier reported that her mother was difficult and demanding.

  Abandoning first sight and then memory, Sarah’s body seemed to be taking her, faculty by faculty, out of life. But in the end it was Louisa who fell ill first. In 1821 she succumbed to a painful wasting disease, diagnosed by her doctors as an abscess of the hip. Louisa expected death. For two months, in the spring of 1821, she settled her affairs and tried to prepare Emily Napier for life without her. She ordered a tent to be erected on the Castletown lawn in front of the house and she often sat in it, gazing not into the empyrean where her dead husband awaited her, but at a worldly creation, the house she had cherished with fierce obsessiveness for sixty-five years. Louisa made no secret of her approaching death and she parted from her worldly interests in turn, bidding farewell to her house, with its cottages, woods and lake; to the Liffey that tumbled over the rocks she had put on its bottom in a half-hearted attempt at the picturesque; to her family of servants; to the masters and pupils in her school; to the inhabitants of Celbridge and to her beloved Emily Napier.

  Louisa looked forward to heaven. A few weeks before her death she said to Emily Napier, ‘the idea of those that I shall meet again, my dear brothers and sisters, my beloved husband, Oh how impatient I feel when I think the time is drawing near when we are to meet again.’ Before that reunion, she thought (as many theologians and believers did) that there would be a period of chastisement when she could right all her wrongs, and when her guilts, especially about her wealth and her conduct during the rebellion, would be washed away for ever. She would, she said, ‘be happy to be allowed to make expiation for all the faults I have committed before I am allowed to partake of the fullness of eternal happiness, and I like to think that all the poor people whom I might have assisted, and that in my prosperity I neglected, will be witness to the justice of the punishment I receive and will forgive me.’

  After a long and debilitating attack of pain and fever, Louisa’s doctor, Crampton, told her she would soon die. She calmly sent for the minister who was to conduct her funeral and told him that she wanted her coffin to be placed alongside Thomas Conolly’s in the family vault. She asked that her workers and servants attend her burial. Then she made her will and waited for the end. A few days later she died in Emily Napier’s arms.

  After Louisa’s death, a delegation from Celbridge asked George Napier if the inhabitants of the town could see her body before it was put into the coffin. George Napier agreed, and made arrangements for local people to go up and see her body as it lay, dressed and prepared for burial, in her bedchamber. He watched from a recess as people filed past the body and years later, when the Victorian cult of death had given him prose suitable to the emotional intensity of the occasion, he recorded their reactions in his memoirs. One white-haired old man fell to his knees beside Louisa’s bed, kissed her cold hand and sobbed out, ‘Oh my dear, sweet lady, my long tried, my only friend, why have you left this poor creature to die alone? You who used to come to his bedside when he was sick, and cheer him up with your good word, and give him the drop of soup and the bit of meat, and tell him to have comfort, and now you’ve gone before me after all. But I’ll not stay long, I’ll follow you, for you’ll clear the way for a poor sinner like myself and God will receive me from you.’ Then he crossed himself, laid her hand gently down and, his face streaming with tears, tottered out of the room. A younger man knelt by the bed, kissed Louisa’s hand and exclaimed, ‘Protestant, Catholic, what is it but a name? But look at her, look at the tears of the poor, the old, the young, the infirm, the helpless and tell me ye priests, if these are not her passports to heaven? No, no, if the soul of our sweet Lady Louisa, the poor man’s friend and comforter is not gone to heaven, then there is no God, no mercy for the human race. Protestant, Catholic, what is it but a name?’ A few weeks later the Roman Catholic men of Celbridge sent Emily and George Napier an address, signed by 17 men on behalf of the whole parish. It contained a paean to Louisa’s religious tolerance and worldly liberality. ‘In her,’ it said, ‘the poor have lost a comforter and protector, the middle class a patroness and adviser and the higher orders an amiable lady and inestimable friend.’

  As soon as the sun rose on the morning of Louisa’s funeral people began to collect in the park in front of the house. By the time everything was ready, hundreds (George Napier said thousands) were assembled; people from all over the county and beyond. They waited in front of the wide steps to Castletown’s front door and watched as the coffin came out, carried by Louisa’s labourers. When the coffin appeared everyone in the crowd took their hats off and knelt down. An eerie silence settled over the scene.

  The funeral procession formed. The coffin was carried high up by Louisa’s workmen, surrounded by mourners from all the local gentry families, led by the Duke of Leinster. On the word for the procession to move forward, the crowd rose from its knees and silently closed round the coffin. With the uncanny quiet punctuated by wails from the women, the crowd moved off to the church Louisa had built by the Celbridge gate. While the minister read the funeral service the Catholics waited, hats off, outside the church. After the service the bearers lifted the coffin up again and carried it down the length of Celbridge main street to the family vault in the old Protestant church. There Louisa’s mortal remains were lowered slowly down beside her husband’s bone-filled coffin. A way had to be cleared in the crowd for Emily Napier to reach the entrance to the vault. The sea of people parted and she walked in, threw herself on Louisa’s coffin and sobbed. ‘After some time,’ George Napier recorded, ‘I gently took her away and ascending the stairs she again passed through the people, who had not moved, but waited her return, and as she moved along leaning on my arm, her heart almost ready to burst with convulsive sobs, they tried to soothe and cheer her with every endearing expression of affection and love and gratitude, calling on her to remain with them and not leave Castletown.’

  Emily and George stayed three months. They transferred the Schools of Industry to a board of trustees, handed over Castletown to Thomas Pakenham and then left for England. Emily probably carried out Louisa’s instructions about her private papers, burning them all. Then she had to decide about her own future. Emily had never felt close to Sarah. She nursed a bitterness about her mother’s guiltless handing over of her to Louisa, despite the fact that she loved her aunt with an intensity that bordered on worship. She did not want to live by herself. So she set up home with George Napier and looked after his house and children. A decade after Louisa’s death, Emily Napier married, becoming Mrs Henry Bunbury, a proud and successful mistress of Barton House.

  Sarah had mind enough to know that Louisa was dead and feeling enough to mourn. Soon afterwards she began to fade. A friend noted that ‘since Lady Louisa’s death Lady Sarah has had no enjoyment in life.’ Her memory flickered intermittently, then gave out, leaving her mind and body immobile. Susan O’Brien went to visit Sarah in London in 1825 and came away horrified. Sarah was blind and mumbling. The memory that had sustained a friendship of 65 years was gone. Susan talked, and conjured up their past together. But Sarah had no recollections now. The disaster of her first marriage and the triumph of her second were equally laid waste in the empty places in her mind. She had forgotten the King’s proposal just as surely as she had forgotten the birth of her son Charles James Napier and her anxiety that, if she stopped looking at him, he would stop breathing. ‘I went to see my poor decayed friend S.N.,’ Susan wrote in her diary, ‘and a greater decay of nature cannot be! Al
as what a lesson!’ But Sarah offered no lessons; her sightless eyes and vacant head had become only the subjects for others’ imaginings. She had only to sit life out; and sit and wait she did until she died a year later in October 1826.

  WHEN ALL THE Lennoxes were dead, Ogilvie remained, the last survivor of his generation. He was still a man interested in conquest, determined to tame what seemed beyond his control. He was seventy-four when he became a widower, eighty-six when Sarah died. He called himself a recluse, someone no longer interested in human hearts. Instead he turned to the elements. As befitted a man from the margins who had reached the firm ground of financial probity and polite society, he concerned himself with barriers and boundaries, in particular with harbours and shore lines. For years he studied sea defences and harbour building and dreamed up ways to make safe places away from the destructive sea. Sea walls, secure anchorages and life-boats became his obsessions.

  Ogilvie lived at Ardglass on the dark north-eastern shores of Ireland, a hundred miles from Dublin, alone in his castle with a small family of servants and a head full of schemes to tame the sea. He was still a man of enormous vitality, who seemed to defy nature (and ‘throw off the years’ as Louisa had put it) by becoming more youthful as he aged. Only a few wisps of hair remained on his wind-browned head, but he was as wiry as ever. The forbidding manner was still there too, reinforced by austere dress and months of solitude. As he strode along the shore he seemed to be pulled along as much by his own preternatural energy as by the wind that tugged at his black hat and thick frock-coat. To one side of him the sea crashed in and withdrew; to the other sheep with cunning eyes nibbled the spongy grass. Between them Ogilvie walked with undeviating purpose, a man who had always made other men afraid.