At various stages along the way I have been grateful for the ideas and advice of Louise Lippincott, with whom I discussed sublime portraiture; Teri Edelstein; Amanda Vickery who has kept me au courant with the latest developments in feminist historiography; Susie Steinbach; Robert Illiffe, who told me about Newton’s conquest of aristocratic drawing-rooms; and Ann Bermingham. Sally Laird and Charles Jennings asked me useful questions and shared many a gossipy lunch. Rachel Watson asked for (and I hope has got) information about landaus and broughams and other Georgette Heyerish conveyances. Brian Allen helped me with portraits, provenances and the peerage. Peter Mandler, Juliet Gardiner, Claire l’Enfant and Dawn Colvin all read the manuscript; their comments have helped enormously with revisions. Anne McDermid has been unflaggingly supportive of the project. Jenny Uglow has been a marvellous editor.
Many people, on both sides of the Irish Sea, have made the writing of this book possible. First I must thank Guy Strutt, who entertained me at Terling, lent me typescripts and books and introduced me to Eleanor Burgess. By copying Louisa Conolly’s letters to Sarah Lennox, Eleanor Burgess has effectively saved them from oblivion. She not only gave them to me, but also gave me meals, information and Irish contacts; I cannot be too grateful to her. The present Duke of Leinster greeted my unexpected appearance with calm and fortitude. He showed me the book of Household Rules which I used to reconstruct life at Carton in the 1760s. Lord Napier and Ettrick similarly coped with my anxious enquiries about generations of Napiers, Lennox-Napiers and so on. David Legg-Willis, Valerie Griffiths and the staff at Goodwood House generously gave me prints and showed me about the park. The Earl Bathurst and Mrs Charlotte Morrison have been generous with permissions. When I turned up unannounced at Carton the staff who watch over the empty house showed me round and let me take pictures. At Castletown successive curators and staff allowed me to walk about at will, moving carpets and furniture and taking photographs in a way unthinkable in an English country house. In Celbridge Mrs Lena Boylan showed me typescripts of manuscripts salvaged from Castletown, and the staff of St Raphael’s, Celbridge, showed me round Sarah’s house which is in their grounds. Desmond Guinness showed me his pictures and gave me invaluable contacts and Marianne Faithfull showed me round her house. Desmond FitzGerald, Anne Crookshank, Eleanor Grene and Dennis Fitzgerald gave me references and encouragement. Dick Hill gave me tea and an exhibition of Irish charm that was without parallel.
Picture acknowledgments
Unless otherwise stated, pictures have come from private collections and are reproduced by kind permission of the owners. Copyrights and permissions for the remaining pictures are as follows:
Colour: No. 6. Sir Joshua Reynolds, British, 1723–1792, Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, oil on canvas, 1765, 242 x 151.5 cm, Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Kimball Collection, 1922.4468, photograph © 1993, The Art Institute of Chicago. All Rights Reserved.
Black and white: Nos. 4, 9, 11, 15, 45, 46, 47, 60, Copyright British Museum. Nos. 14, 19, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 48, by courtesy of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London. No. 16, Copyright Guildhall Library, Corporation of London. No. 25, by courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums. Bequest of Elizabeth Sears Warren. Nos. 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, by permission of the British Library.
MANUSCRIPT SOURCES
Some of the following archives are extremely large. I have noted only the parts of the archives which have been of use to me.
Bodleian Library
Napier Papers
General Correspondence of George and Sarah Napier: Includes drafts of letters, including letters from Sarah to Charles James Fox and her brother the third Duke of Richmond, and some of their replies. Correspondents include Louisa Conolly (a series from 1814–20, mostly about travelling on the Continent and setting up her school at Castletown) and Lord and Lady Moira. There are a few letters from Emily, Duchess of Leinster, Pamela Fitzgerald and Susan O’Brien. Hon. George Napier’s will. Misc. accounts, inventories relating to Sarah’s widowhood and old age.
British Library
Add. MS. 30.990
A bundle of miscellaneous letters to Emily, Duchess of Leinster mostly concerning the events of 1798, with a series of letters from Lord Edward Fitzgerald from 1796–7.
Holland House Papers
Correspondence of Lady Susan Fox-Strangways and her parents, 1749–69.
Correspondence of Lady Sarah Lennox and Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, 1761–1817.
Correspondence of William O’Brien and Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, 1763–1805. Correspondence of Lady Susan Fox-Strangways and Caroline and Henry Fox, Baroness and First Lord Holland, 1763–66.
General correspondence of William O’Brien, including an autobiographical fragment which confirms that his family was Catholic. Journal of Lady Susan O’Brien (née Fox-Strangways).
Correspondence of Henry Fox and Lady Caroline Fox, 1744–69.
Correspondence of Henry and Caroline Fox and the second Duke and Duchess of Richmond, 1743–50, including autopsies of the Duke and Duchess of 1750 and 1751 respectively.
Correspondence of the third Duke of Richmond and Henry Fox, 1750–65.
Correspondence of Emily, Countess of Kildare and James, Earl of Kildare, subsequently first Duke and Duchess of Leinster with Henry and Caroline Fox, 1748–66.
Correspondence of Charles James Fox with his parents, 1763–65.
Correspondence of Stephen Fox, second Lord Holland with his parents, 1756–73.
Correspondence of Henry Fox and his brother and sister-in-law, first Lord and Lady Ilchester, 1742–70.
Correspondence of the second Lord Holland and his wife, 1774.
Travel Journals of Lady Caroline Fox, 1763–70. Account book of Lady Caroline Fox, 1773.
Misc. papers relating to leases and purchases of land by Henry Fox, 1749–67. Misc. verses in various hands, collected and written by Henry Fox.
Correspondence of Sir William Bunbury and Henry Fox, 1762.
Correspondence of Lady Hervey and Henry Fox, 1750–53.
Correspondence of Alison Cooper to Henry Fox about his illegitimate children by her, 1765.
Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster and William Ogilvie with the third Lord and Lady Holland, 1798–1808. General correspondence of Hon. Caroline Fox, including letters from her great-aunts, Emily, Duchess of Leinster, Lady Louisa Conolly and Lady Sarah Napier (née Lennox).
NOTE The letters between Sarah Lennox and Susan Fox-Strangways were almost all published in 1902 as The Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox, edited by the Countess of Ilchester and Lord Stavordale. The edition also included the ‘Memoir on the Events Attending the Death of George 3 by Henry Fox, first Lord Holland’, and ‘Captain Henry Napier’s Memoir of Lady Sarah’s Early Life’, taken from the manuscript version now in the Napier Papers in the Bodleian Library. I have followed this edition in matters of naming (Caroline Fox’s notoriously difficult handwriting often allows for several different readings of words and names), punctuation (upon which it rarely follows its largely unpunctuated originals) and so on.
The Holland House archive is vast. The logic of its assembly seems to have been dictated by an urge to document the life of Charles James Fox. Because of this almost every letter of any political significance has survived. So have letters between Charles James Fox’s relatives (the often ‘trivial’ correspondence between his parents, for instance) that his survivors thought might have some bearing upon his life. But, by the same token, much has disappeared. Although we know from internal evidence that she wrote at least once a fortnight to her sister, the only letters from Emily to Caroline that survive are those sent jointly with her husband or those addressed to Henry Fox. Similarly, there are no letters from Louisa or Sarah to Caroline. Letters from the Lennox sisters do crop up in some numbers addressed to later Holland generations – the third Lord Holland and Caroline Fox, in particular.
Napier Papers
General correspondence of
George and Lady Sarah Napier, mainly drafts of letters to Lord and Lady Moira, Lady Ailesbury and General Conway.
Correspondence between George and Lady Sarah Napier and their son Charles James Napier, 1801–1809.
Accounts relating to the sale of the Napiers’ house in Celbridge, Co. Kildare.
Correspondence between George and Charles James Napier, mostly after 1826.
Correspondence between Emily Napier and Charles James Napier, mostly after 1821.
Journal of Hon. George Napier, 1779.
Greater London Record Office
Records of the Consistory Court of the Bishops of London, 1769.
Irish Georgian Society
Correspondence between Lady Louisa Conolly and Lady Sarah Lennox, 1759–1820.
NOTE These letters are the originals from which the Bunbury Letter Books in the West Suffolk Record Office were copied. Besides the main correspondence, they include many letters from Louisa Conolly to her brother the third Duke of Richmond, letters from Louisa Conolly to Emily Napier and miscellaneous papers written by members of the Napier family about Louisa Conolly’s death. Absent from the collection is any material relating to the events of 1798. This was extracted by the original buyer from the Bunbury family, Mr McPeake, before he gave the collection to Hubert Butler, who passed it to the Irish Georgian Society. These Irish Georgian Society Manuscripts have now gone missing. But by good fortune they were meticulously copied by Mrs Eleanor Burgess in the 1960s and she generously allowed me to use them.
National Library of Ireland
Leinster Papers
Correspondence of Emily, first Duchess of Leinster, consisting of:
Letters between Emily, Duchess of Leinster and James, Duke of Leinster, 1759–62.
Letters between Emily, Duchess of Leinster and William Ogilvie, 1771–1813.
Letters from Lady Caroline Fox to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1756–74.
Letters from Lady Sarah Lennox to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1759–94.
Letters from Lady Cecilia Lennox to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1769.
Letters from Lord Edward Fitzgerald to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1771–92.
Letters from William, Lord Offaly to his mother Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1765–94. Letters from other Fitzgerald children, Charles, Henry, Robert, Charlotte, Sophia and Lucy to their mother Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1768–94. General correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster, including letters from the Countess of Kildare, Lady Barrymore and Lady Clanbrassil.
NOTE This collection of 1,770 letters contains few letters sent after 1794, with the exception of the correspondence between Emily and William Ogilvie. Apart from letters sent by Emily to her husbands it consists entirely of correspondence received.
A carefully selected part of the collection was edited by Brian Fitzgerald and published as Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster, as follows:
Vol. 1, 1949: Letters of Emily, Duchess of Leinster; James, First Duke of Leinster; Caroline Fox, Lady Holland.
Vol. 2, 1953: Letters of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Lady Sarah Napier (née Lennox).
Vol. 3, 1957: Letters of Lady Louisa Conolly and William, Marquis of Kildare (second Duke of Leinster). NB. This later volume contains no letters written by William after 1769 and thus no reference to Emily’s second marriage.
Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
de Ros Papers
Uncatalogued letters from the de Ros family papers, mainly letters which came into the archive via Lord Henry Fitzgerald, who married Charlotte de Ros in 1791, all dated post-1789.
Downshire Papers
Bundle of letters from William Ogilvie to Lord Downshire, 1815–25.
Leinster Papers
Letters of William, Lord Offaly to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1756–60s.
General correspondence of William, second Duke of Leinster.
Letters and papers relating to the affairs of 1798.
Correspondence and papers of the third Duke of Leinster.
McPeake Papers
Photocopies of material mostly relating to the events of 1798 but covering the years 1783–1815. Includes the selections from the papers now in the possession of the Irish Georgian Society.
Terling, Essex
Strutt Papers
Bundle of letters from James, first Duke of Leinster to Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 1766.
Letters from Emily, Duchess of Leinster to her daughter, Lady Lucy Foley (née Fitzgerald), 1791–1810. General correspondence of Lady Lucy Foley, including letters from her Fitzgerald siblings, William Ogilvie and Lady Louisa Conolly. General correspondence between Lady Lucy Foley and members of the Strutt family.
Letters from Emily, Duchess of Leinster to her daughter Lady Charlotte Strutt (née Fitzgerald), 1793–1804.
Trinity College Dublin
Conolly Papers
Castletown Accounts, which include:
Tradesmen’s receipt books, 1777–1806.
Servants’ wages receipts, 1763–70, 1785–96.
Land agents’ account books of lands in counties Dublin and Kildare.
Prices of groceries, 1782–5, 1790–95.
Memoranda of the consumption of different foods tabulated, 1783–87.
Monthly and quarterly accounts of house bills, servants’ bills, tradesmen’s bills, 1758–78.
Servants and household accounts, 1791–1803.
Expenses of hounds in food and wages, 1787–88.
Castletown expenses and tradesmen’s bills, 1792–97.
Personal account books of Thomas Conolly, 1766, 1767–70, 1775–84.
Accounts of the servants, windows and hearths at Castletown for tax purposes. Dairy accounts, 1798–99.
Alphabetical list of the library at Castletown, c.1780.
West Suffolk Record Office
Bunbury Papers
Bunbury letter books: 36 volumes, in copy books, of letters from Lady Louisa Conolly to Lady Sarah Lennox, 1761–1821, together with misc. other papers relating to Louisa’s life, all in the hands of Emily Bunbury (née Napier).
Catalogue of the library at Holland House, 1775. Inventory of Furniture and Effects at Holland House, 1775.
Papers of Sir Charles Bunbury, relating to the affairs of Henry Fox, first Lord Holland at his death, including 1771 rent book for Holland House, letter book with details of money owed to Fox as Paymaster of the Forces, other papers related to Fox’s tenure at the Pay Office.
West Sussex Record Office
Goodwood Papers
Correspondence of the second Duke of Richmond and his wife, mainly from the late 1730s.
Letters from the Earl of Kildare about his marriage to Lady Emily Lennox, 1746–7.
Letters from Emily, Countess of Kildare, to her parents, 1748–50.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chapter One
Prologue and Part One
Ruth K. McClure’s Coram’s Children. The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century, 1981, gives details (taken from the charity’s minute books) of the opening of the Foundling Hospital. Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lewis, Charity Costumes, 1978, the same authors’ Costumes for Births, Marriages and Deaths, 1972, and Anne Buck, Dress in Eighteenth-Century England, 1979, provide information on the clothes of foundling children, and details of the century’s costumes and fashions: I have used them throughout the book. Images of London. Views by Travellers and Emigrés 1550–1920, describes the second Duke of Richmond’s commission from Canaletto of the two views from Richmond House. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: his Life, Art and Times, 1971, also contains information about the Foundling Hospital as well as a description and analysis of ‘The Indian Emperor’, his painting of amateur theatricals which shows Caroline Lennox, aged nine, on the stage, her parents in the audience and a bust of Newton surveying the proceedings. The Earl of March, A Duke and His Friends. The Life and Letters of the Second Duke of Richmond, 1911, contains information about the career of the second Duke of Richmond, toge
ther with excerpts from his letters. Robert Halsband’s, Lord Hervey, an Eighteenth Century Courtier, 1973, tells the story of Hervey’s friendship with Stephen and Henry Fox, describes the marriage of Stephen Fox to the thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Strangways-Horner and gives details of Hervey’s relations with the second Duke of Richmond at the Court of George II. The Earl of Ilchester’s Henry Fox, First Lord Holland, his Family and Relations, 2 vols., 1920, is a sympathetic account of Fox’s political career. Its account of Fox’s friendships and its use of the vast Holland House archive cut several corners for me.
Part Two Peter Clark, ed., The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1984, Sir John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, 1953, and R. S. Neale, Bath 1680–1850: a Social History, 1981, were all useful in constructing my picture of Bath. John Brooke’s The House of Commons, 1968, together with the DNB have been invaluable in tracing the political fortunes of the male figures in my narrative. John B. Owen, The Eighteenth Century 1714–1815, 1974, Stanley Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 1976, Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 1989, have similarly helped my understanding of the ideological and political underpinnings of the Whig élite in the mid-eighteenth century.
Part Three Four books provided sumptuous accounts of Dublin’s architecture and of the building of Irish country houses, Carton and Castletown prominent among them: Desmond Guinness, Georgian Dublin, 1979; Dan Cruickshank, Georgian Buildings in Great Britain and Ireland, 1985; Maurice Craig, Architecture of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1800, 1982; and Jacqueline O’Brien and Desmond Guinness, Great Irish Houses and Castles, 1992. Without the work of Roy Foster, Marianne Elliott and other Irish historians I could have provided no account of the waves of colonisation in Ireland and the heterogeneous society they created. Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland 1600–1972, 1988, and J. C. Beckett’s, A Short History of Ireland, 1952, were both invaluable. A. P. W. Malcolmson described the marriage settlement of Emily Lennox and James, Earl of Kildare and put it into the context of other Anglo-Irish marriages in The Pursuit of the Heiress. Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland 1750–1820,1982. Brian Fitzgerald’s Emily, Duchess of Leinster 1731–1814. A Study of her Life and Times, 1949, is an early, impressionistic but loving life of Emily which concentrates on her first marriage and life at Carton. Emily’s description of the English landscape she admired has a parallel in contemporary landscape painting which has been admirably explored by John Barrell in The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Paintings 1730–1840, 1980. The implications of the poses of Reynolds’s portraits of Emily and Kildare have been discussed in Michael Fried’s classic, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot, 1980.
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 Page 49
