Two books helped me reconstruct Fox’s career at the War Office and in Parliament in the late 1740s: A. J. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline, Officership and Administration in the British Army 1714–63, 1985, and The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington, ed. John Carswell and C. A. Duelle, 1965. The Earl of Ilchester’s Home of the Hollands 1605–1820, 1937, Leslie Mitchell’s Holland House, 1980, and Holland House, 1875, by Princess Marie Liechtenstein, all contained useful information about the Foxes’ acquisition of and improvements to Holland House. Details of the first Duke of Richmond’s fireworks are found in Horace Walpole’s correspondence and Christopher Hogwood, Handel, 1984.
Chapter Two
Part One For the life and career of the third Duke of Richmond (whose personal papers all appear to have been burned after his death), see Alison Gilbert Olson, The Radical Duke. Career and Correspondence of Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond, 1961, and M. M. Reese, Goodwood’s Oak. The Life and Times of the third Duke of Richmond, Lennox and Aubigny, 1987. Hardwicke’s Marriage Act is described in J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 1979, and changing attitudes to marriage in Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, 1977. The most accessible edition of Madame de Sévigné’s letters is edited by Leonard Tancock, 1982. There is an extensive literature about letter writing, which includes Bruce Redford, The Converse of the Pen. Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth Century Familiar Letter, 1986, Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity. Approaches to a Form, 1982, and Elizabeth C. Goldsmith ed., Writing in the Female Voice. Essays on Epistolary Literature, 1989.
Part Two Brief histories of the Conolly family are found in Lena Boylan, The Conollys of Castletown. Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, 1968, and Brian Fitzgerald, Lady Louisa Conolly 1743–1821. An Anglo-Irish Biography, 1950.
Part Three Biographies of George III include Stanley Ayling, George the Third, 1972, and John Brooke, King George III, 1972. Nesta Pain, George III at Home, 1975, gives details of the monarch’s obsessive domesticity after his marriage and The Diaries of Colonel the Hon. Robert Fulke Greville, 1930, describe his madness. The Correspondence of George III contains his letters to Lord Bute. Sir Lewis Namier’s Crossroads of Power. Essays on Eighteenth Century England, 1962, discusses the political turmoil in the years after George’s accession, as does J. Brewer, ‘The Misfortunes of Lord Bute’, Historical Journal, 1973. The 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer contains the service of matrimony in use when Sarah married Bunbury.
Chapter Three
Part One Alec Clifton-Taylor’s Six English Towns, 1978, gives a picture of Bury St Edmunds in the eighteenth century. Caroline’s furnishings at Holland House are deduced from the inventory of 1775 printed for the sale of that year as Catalogue of Furniture and Effects in Holland House, 1775. For the Foxes’ patronage of Reynolds and Ramsay, see Nicholas Penny ed., Reynolds, 1986, and Alistair Smart, Ramsay, 1992. Richard Wendorf discusses Reynolds’s portrait of Sarah in The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait Painting in Stuart and Georgian England, 1990, as does Malcolm Warner in ‘The Sources and Meanings of Reynolds’s “Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces”’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 15. The Foxes’ friends are almost all to be found in the DNB and in the four volumes of J. H. Jesse, Selwyn and his Contemporaries, 1843–44. Roger Lonsdale’s Eighteenth Century Women Poets, 1989, prints Mrs Greville’s poem on sensibility and a summary of her career. The very different world of blue stockings is described in Sylvia Myers’s The Blue Stocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth Century England, 1990. Early feminist thought is discussed in Katharine Rodgers’s Feminism in the Eighteenth Century, 1982, while Vivien Jones’s anthology of writing about women, Women in the Eighteenth Century. Constructions of Femininity, 1990, sets feminism in the context of other writing about women.
Two books helped my understanding of women’s salons in Paris in the mid-century, La Duchesse d’Abrantès, Une Soirée Chez Madame Geoffrin, 1831, and Janet Aldis, Madame Geoffrin, her Salon and her Times 1750–1777, 1905. From a plethora of books on London, I should mention two, Mary Cathcart Borer’s An Illustrated Guide to London in 1800, 1988, and W. Roth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century, 1896. Ronald Paulson discusses the literary use of metaphors of the stage in Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding, 1979. Highfill, Bunnin and Langhans’s Biographical Dictionary of the London Stage 1660–1880, 1987, describes playhouses, productions and actors’ careers, including that of William O’Brien.
A good discussion of theories of gambling in France is found in John Dunkley, Gambling, A Social and Moral Problem in France 1685–1792, 1985. John Ashton’s The History of Gambling in England, 1898, describes what games were played where, when and how. Sir George Otto Trevelyan’s leisurely and orotund The Early History of Charles James Fox, 1880, describes the Fox brothers’ gambling and Charles James Fox’s conduct in Parliament in the early 1770s, while C. W. and P. Cunnington’s Handbook of English Costume in the Eighteenth Century, 1972, gives details of his sartorial habits.
Part Two Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh’s The Woman’s Domain. Women and the English Country House, 1990, discusses women’s role in estate management over four hundred years. The Guide to Castletown House by Paul Caffrey, and Margaret Ann Keller’s The Long Gallery of Castletown House, Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, 1979, both describe Louisa’s work on the Castletown interior. Fiona Hunt, ‘The Print Room at Castletown House’ (BA Thesis, Trinity College, Dublin), has identified many of the prints in the print-room. The room is also described by Christopher Moore in Fenlon, Figgis and Marshall eds., New Perspectives; Studies in Art History in Honour of Anne Crookshank, 1987.
Attitudes to childbirth are discussed in J. S. Lewis, In the Family Way. Childbirth in the British Aristocracy 1760–1860, 1988. Wet nursing is described in George D. Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk. The Wet Nursing Business in France, 1715–1914, 1982. The Catalogue of the Library of Holland House, 1775, lists the different medical textbooks there. Children’s education in the round is the subject of John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England, 1973, while the education of aristocratic boys is described in George C. Brauer jr, The Education of a Gentleman. Theories of Gentlemanly Education in England 1660–1775, 1959. Rousseau’s Émile or On Education was published in 1762 while Eloisa or a Series of Original Letters Collected and Published by J. J. Rousseau appeared a year earlier. Rousseau’s attitudes towards women and his brief sojourn in England are described in Joel Swartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1984, and Sir Gavin de Beer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his World, 1972, respectively. Changing attitudes towards marriage are discussed in Lawrence Stone The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, 1977 and John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse. British Marriages 1600 to the Present, 1985. The reciprocal relationships between love in life and literature is the subject of Joseph Boone’s Tradition Counter Tradition. Love and the Form of Fiction, 1987, while John Mullan considers fiction and theories of feeling and sensibility in Sentiment and Sociability. The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, 1988.
Part Three Travellers’ impressions of Naples and Sir William Hamilton are described in Flora Fraser, Beloved Emma, The Life of Emma Lady Hamilton, 1986. The Duc de Lauzun’s claims to have been Sarah’s lover are made in Memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, 1928.
Chapter Four
Part One Town and Country Magazine, April and August 1769, and the London Chronicle both carried details of Sarah’s elopement. E. R. Curtis deals with the affair in great detail in Lady Sarah Lennox. An Irrepressible Stuart 1745–1826, 1947. The testimonies of Bunbury’s servants are quoted from the records of the Consistory Court of the Bishops of London Depositions books. Laurence Stone’s Road to Divorce. England 1530–1987, 1990, describes the relationships between suits for criminal conversation, separations and parliamentary divorce.
The Journal of the House of Lords prints the evidence against Sarah and the Act granting Bunbury a divorce in the journals for 1776. Lady Mary Coke’s gossip is from The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, 4 vol., 1889–96.
Part Two Mrs Delany’s letter about the marriage of Ogilvie and Emily is from Lady Llanover ed., Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, 6 vol., 1861–2. Gossip about Ogilvie’s antecedents and early career is found twice in The Farington Diary, by Joseph Farington, R. A., ed. James Greig, 1922–28. Charlotte Fitzgerald’s diary is quoted in Hon. Charles P. Strutt, The Strutt Family of Terling 1650–1873, 1939.
Chapter Five
Part One The White’s Hotel dinner and Tom Paine’s sojourn in Paris were written up in the following newspapers: Dublin Evening Post, 6 Dec 1792, The Annual Register for 1792, London Chronicle, Dec 1792, The World, Dec 1792. For Paine and other English émigrés in Paris see Audrey Williamson, Thomas Paine; his Life, Work and Times, 1973; Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, 1976; J. G. Alger, Englishmen in the French Revolution, 1889.
Amongst the corpus of literature devoted to the Napier brothers I have made particular use of the following: Stephen Gwynn, A Brotherhood of Heroes. Being Memorials of Charles, George and William Napier, 1910; General W. E. Napier ed., Passages in the Early Military Life of General Sir George T. Napier KCB, written by Himself, 1884; Lieutenant-General Sir William Napier, KCB, The Life and Opinions of Sir Charles James Napier, 4 vol., 1857; H. A. Bruce, MP, The Life of Sir William Napier, 2 vol., 1864; C. J. Napier, An Essay on the Present State of Ireland, 1839; Rosamund Lawrence, Charles Napier, Friend and Fighter 1782–1853, 1952. Priscilla Napier’s The Sword Dance. Lady Sarah Lennox and the Napiers, 1971, tells Sarah’s story as part of the Napier family history.
Charles James Fox’s brief period in office is described in John Cannon, The Fox-North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782–4, 1969. Leslie Mitchell’s Charles James Fox, 1992, discusses Fox’s attitudes to the French Revolution and Republic. Fox’s marriage and death are related in I. M. Davis, The Harlot and the Statesman, c.1986.
Part Two No account of the Irish Rebellion could be told without Thomas Pakenham’s classic The Year of Liberty. The Story of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798, 1969. Marianne Elliott’s Wolfe Tone, Prophet of Irish Independence, 1989, and Partners in Revolution: the United Irishmen and France, 1982, was similarly indispensable in clearing a way through the Irish underground of the 1790s. David Dickson’s New Foundations: Ireland 1600–1800, 1987, takes the story up to the point of Union. Anthony Malcolmson brought to my attention an anonymous pamphlet, Protestant Ascendancy and Catholic Emancipation Reconciled by a Legislative Union, published by a radical London printer in 1800 and rumoured to be by William Ogilvie. The pamphlet argues that the Union is in the best interests of Catholics because they will only achieve emancipation with the help of radicals at Westminster. There is no reference to the pamphlet in any family correspondence, nothing to confirm or deny that Ogilvie was its author. Its view is consistent with that taken by the Napiers and some English Whigs.
Several lives of Lord Edward Fitzgerald print letters and extracts from diaries that have since been lost. The earliest is Thomas Moore’s The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, 2 vol., 1831. Moore seems to have been given free access to letters and papers in the hands of Mimi Beauclerk, which are now lost. These seem to have included many letters from Edward to Emily, letters from Emily to Mimi and perhaps to other friends, and a good deal of misc. material. Gerald Campbell’s Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald, 1904, prints extracts from diaries and letters written by Lucy Fitzgerald that I have been unable to trace.
Part Three The Marlay Letters, 1718–1820, 1937, ed. R. Warwick Bond, a selection of correspondence to members of the Charleville family, includes letters from Louisa and Sarah about the deaths of both Napier and Conolly, as well as letters from Sarah about the monarch and her efforts to get a pension. Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, 1992, points up the increasingly conservative and militaristic views held by many in the two decades after the French Revolution. Finally, Marmontel’s Memoirs were published in 1805.
Note on the Leinster Papers, National Library of Ireland
At first sight this huge collection looks like a coherent archive, an ‘autobiography’ of sorts, put together and frequently annoted by Emily as a record of her life. There are gaps, most notably in the years between 1769 and 1774. But these are easily explicable; Emily, like Caroline, could have destroyed all the papers that referred to the Fox–Leinster quarrels of 1769 and with them all reference to Sarah’s elopement and the death of the first Duke of Leinster. The collection, with the exception of the series between Emily and William Ogilvie, more or less comes to a halt in 1794, and thus appears to have been separated from what must have been an equally bulky second part, covering the years between 1794 and Emily’s death in 1814.
When we consider what is not in the collection, however, doubts begin to surface about its shape being determined by either Emily’s own ‘editing’ or by simple loss. We know that the second half of the collection (or at least some of it) survived until the 1830s; Thomas Moore, biographer of Edward Fitzgerald, printed in his biography of 1831 both letters that are now in the NLI and letters from post-1794 that are now lost. Thus neither Emily nor Ogilvie (who left the family papers to his daughter Mimi Beauclerk) separated the parts.
Two other doubts arise. The first is that there are no letters in the archive from any male members of the Fox–Lennox family: Henry Fox, the third Duke of Richmond, Lord George Lennox, and most surprisingly, Charles James Fox. Indeed, there is no specifically ‘political’ correspondence at all. In their insistence on sisters, husbands and children the Leinster Papers seem the mirror image of the Holland House Papers.
Secondly, 1794 as a cut-off date for the collection could be seen, in the light of the above, to be anything but arbitrary. With the Terror reaching its bloody conclusion in Paris and Foxites like Emily and Lord Edward Fitzgerald who had walked an ideological tightrope between Francophilia and loyalty to the British Crown under great pressure, the family correspondence must have been tense and anxious and can only have become more so as Edward Fitzgerald went underground and the rebellion in Ireland approached.
Taking all this into account, it is possible that the letters post-1794, together with other political material, were removed. A collector interested in politics might have taken out this material and abandoned the rest, discarding all the letters now in the NLI as domestic and trivial. Alternatively a family member may, after 1830, have sifted through the whole collection and produced a new version of Emily’s life, eliminating everything politically or morally compromising. At any rate it seems fairly clear that after the deaths of Emily and Ogilvie the collection shrank. Although both hand and motive remain obscure, its shrinkage seems too considered to be simple ‘natural wastage’.
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Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 Page 50
