Aristocrats
Contents
About the Author
Stella Tillyard is a British author and historian born in 1957. She studied English literature at Oxford University and then became a Knox Fellow at Harvard. She completed her PhD on twentieth century art criticism in 1985, and went on to teach English literature and art history at Harvard and at UCLA. Sh reviews for the
Sunday Times
and is a frequent contributor to Radio 4.
Her best known work,
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832
won the History Today Award, the Fawcett Prize and the Meilleur Livre Etranger and was made into a critically-acclaimed BBC/WGBH Masterpiece Theatre series in 1999.
ALSO BY STELLA TILLYARD
The Impact of Modernism
Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald 1763–1798
A Royal Affair
Tides of War
For Deborah Colvin and Allen Martens, who encouraged me
Aristocrats
Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740–1832
Stella Tillyard
Preface
'Sally's fears for her little one are, thank God, over. The nursing scheme would not do; she had quantities of milk, which makes one regret the more that it would not do, but her nipple could not be drawn out without the greatest difficulty, and the child not being strong could not do it. It was ill from being kept from the breast for so long, but now it has a good clean nurse, sucks, sleeps and thrives.’
This letter, written by Lady Caroline Fox to Emily, Duchess of Leinster about their sister Sarah is, in parts, so blatantly modern that it is hard to believe that it is dated 6 June 1769, and that it is almost 225 years old. It is not just the ‘thank God’ and the nipples. Its anxiety and relief create a resonant feeling that seems to erase the centuries between its writing and our reading.
Thousands of such letters – between sisters, husbands and wives, servants and employers, parents and children – are the raw material for this book. It tells the story of Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, a story of high politics, romance, family life and tragedy that begins in 1744 as the Jacobites were planning their last, desperate assault on the Hanoverian throne and ends in 1832, five years before the beginning of the Victorian age. Nearly a century’s worth of letters, and from them time and again we get this sense of
intimacy. And it is not just that the Lennox sisters write in a way which makes us feel close to them; they also write about things that are as important to us as they were to them. They discuss love, marriage, food, clothes, political ideas and scandals, war, books, period pains. Everything from conception to death is there, written in voices that we have scarcely ever heard, the voices of eighteenth-century women.
But when we look again, sympathy dissolves into strangeness. Caroline Fox’s frank description of breast-feeding problems may be modern, but wet nursing is not. When she worries about a son who is ill, we immediately sympathise, but the doctors’ cures – mercury sulphide and ground woodlice – make us recoil. Emily and her husband grumble about their large family, but large means not 4 children or even 7, but 19. Caroline sends Emily news of Sarah’s impending marriage and notes with apparent sincerity, ‘happily for her she is not the least in love’. These vignettes make us aware of the distance which separates their response to love, marriage, child-rearing and scientific knowledge from ours, and may make us feel they are beyond our reach and understanding.
This sense of distance is heightened because the Lennox sisters’ circumstances were extraordinary. They were rich and well educated, speaking French almost as well as English. Their connections gave them access to the newest ideas, the latest books and plays, the most fashionable thinkers, painters, doctors and all the products of the new consumer age. They were the daughters of one Cabinet minister and duke and sisters of another. Caroline Lennox married a man who, if he had played his cards better, might have become prime minister, and she was the mother of the most famous opposition politician of the eighteenth century. Emily Lennox married the senior peer of Ireland, and one of her sons became a prominent republican revolutionary. Louisa married Ireland’s richest man. Sarah caught the eye of the young George III and, half resisting, half complying, allowed herself to toy with the idea of being made Queen of England. There
is little familiar here, except for the way in which male lives and opinions shaped female ones.
Despite all this – the scores of servants, country houses and ruling families – the intimacy remains; there is a dual sense of closeness and distance. It is this feeling, and the mixture of sympathy and astonishment that it evokes, that I have tried to capture in the pages that follow. I have written the book as a narrative so that commentary intrudes as little as possible on the Lennox sisters’ lives and their emotional freshness. But I have framed the narrative with a prologue and an epilogue and broken it with short sections between chapters. I hope these breaks will not only bring readers up short and remind them of the distance between the eighteenth century and our own, but also hint at continuity. These are not, as sections between chapters usually are, discourses on memory, history or war. They are descriptions of things we share, ordinary milestones of innumerable lives: birth, naming, marriage and death.
Finally I have tried to make this book an amalgam of biography and history. The astonishing richness of my sources – thousands of letters, pictures, household accounts and rules, an inventory, library lists, travel journals, prayers, verses, autopsies, maps, parks and buildings – has allowed me to build up a picture of the every day as well as the dramatic in the Lennox sisters’ lives. I have tried to merge genres in the belief that biography (especially biography that deals, as this does, with romance and royalty) often gives intimacy without context, and history without biography offers context without the warmth of individual lives. And what lives they were!
Prologue
On a bleak spring evening in 1741 a crowd gathered in a dark, narrow London street. At its edge well-to-do City merchants on their way westwards through Hatton Garden mingled with the wretched and curious poor, washed up from tenements to the North, East and South, looking for a handout or a meal. In the middle, dozens of women in their best clothes jostled and flowed towards the door of a large double-fronted house like filings drawn towards a magnet. The light filtering out of the house windows sent dim rays over the crowd, illuminating little bundles tied in rags and wrapped in flannel blankets; some sleeping, some gazing about, some sick and crying. All the women gathered round the door carried these small emblems of shame and poverty.
For an hour the crowd ebbed and surged and waited. Then at eight o’clock, in imitation of the mothers’ misery and sin, the light in the house’s entry way went out. The door opened. The crowd fell silent and a bell rang. A woman sprang forward and plunged with her child into the darkness. The door closed behind her.
Inside the house the woman was ushered into a room on the right of the hall. She gave her name but it was not written down. Then she watched as her child, a boy, was stripped layer by layer of the stain of her folly and poverty. First his
clothes were taken off and cast away. Then a little memento she had hoped would stay longer with him than she could was catalogued and set aside. Then Doctor Nesbitt, donating his services for the occasion, inspected the child and pronounced him sound. Finally he was given a number, One, as the first child in the hospital. Distraught and relieved, the mother looked on in silence. A few minutes later she was dismissed, came out of the house and lost herself in the darkness of the crowd. The door closed behind her.
Soon the bell rang again. Another woman darted up with her bundle, entered the house and returned empty-handed. The bell rang, again and again, until thirty women had taken in their children and come out without them and the Foundling Hospital was full.
For four days the house was quiet. The infants slept and sucked, motherless and nameless. Then, on the evening of 29 March, Hatton Garden was crowded and noisy once again. Heavy four-wheeled carriages, with lamps burning and footmen aloft, lumbered across the cobbles. On their sides were tiny emblems with mottoes curling underneath that dignified those inside. By the lighted entrance of number 61, the footmen jumped down and opened the heavy leather-covered doors. Noble men and noble women, physicians, merchants, doctors and Members of Parliament were handed out. Taking care to avoid the mud, they went inside and up the stairs. The state room on the first floor was alive with light. Light twinkled and sparkled from belts and buckles, from necklaces and ornaments. It lay puddled like mercury in the folds of silk gowns and in silver bowls and cups. Servants carrying candles went up and down the stairs and announced the new arrivals: the Duke of Bedford, President of the Hospital; the Earl and Countess of Pembroke; the Duke and Duchess of Richmond with their eldest daughter; William and Anne Hogarth; Lord and Lady Albemarle; Captain Robert Hudson; Mr Lewis Way. Their names rang out over the rustle of gowns, the clink of shoe buckles and the murmur of greetings.
The company sat and the Reverend Samuel Smith read evening prayers. Then the infants, numbered one to thirty, were brought in for christening. Beyond the impromptu font sat not their mothers and fathers but a surrogate family of the finest, wealthiest and worthiest in the land. The Reverend Samuel Smith took the first child from his nurse, approached the font and dabbed the baby’s forehead with holy water. The little child, newly clothed in lace and cotton, with a cap jammed tightly on his hairless head, was baptised Thomas Coram, after the hospital’s founder. Eunice Coram followed. The aristocracy lent the children their family names. Charlotte Finch was named for the Duchess of Somerset, John Russell for the Duke of Bedford, Charles Lennox for the Duke of Richmond, Sarah Cadogan for his wife. Caroline Lennox was named for the Duke’s daughter, an anxious, intelligent girl of eighteen sitting with her parents. Secure in their names, the rich and the mighty bestowed them on little children, sending them forth watered with greatness. Their impoverished, orphaned little doubles would, as long as they lived, reflect the importance of their patrons.
After the baptismal ceremony the company departed, clattering westwards in their carriages out of their namesakes’ lives. Lady Caroline Lennox, trundling back to Richmond House in Whitehall, left little Caroline to a life in the shadow. Darkness descends over her as it did over the house in Hatton Garden that night. Perhaps she became a servant, perhaps even a milliner or a mantua maker. But it was just as likely that, like one of Lady Caroline’s own children, she would die of a fever before she could understand that she had been orphaned into a life of misery.
Chapter 1
Caroline and Emily
PART ONE
‘I know the step I am going to take is a wrong one’.
Caroline to Henry Fox, 28 April 1744
.
At the age of eighteen, Caroline Lennox was a plump, nervous girl with hurried, wide-open dark-brown eyes, a small mouth dimpled at the corners and a full, soft chin inherited from her father, the second Duke of Richmond. Her eyebrows were straight and dark and long. Her nose turned up slightly at the end.
Caroline was born in Richmond House in Whitehall in 1723, the first of seven children of the Duke and Duchess who survived to maturity. Richmond House occupied a commanding position in London and Caroline grew up watching the world go past its windows. Her father had inherited a dilapidated brick house in Whitehall. In the 1730s a large chunk of his income was spent building an imposing three-storeyed pedimented modern residence with gardens on one side and stables the other. The drawing-room looked north over the Privy Garden, an open space with shrubs and grass which had once been part of the Royal Palace of Whitehall. Members of Parliament, clerks, messenger boys, friends and lovers met there to gossip, flirt and swap stories. To one side
of the Privy Garden stood the Banqueting House, decorated by Charles I, Caroline Lennox’s great-great-grandfather. Beyond that again the clean white spire of St Martin-in-the-Fields rose in front of the theatres in Covent Garden and Drury Lane and the slums of Seven Dials.
