Aristocrats (17 page)
At three o’clock everyone dined. In the long summer evenings after dinner the party walked into the gardens, taking tea there if it was warm, watching the Liffey ooze its way to Dublin. Sometimes they drove out into the green countryside. Card tables were put up for their return, and as night fell people broke up into small groups. Some played cards, others chatted, worked, looked at prints, planned sporting and political strategy or played chess. Supper was served at ten
o’clock and by midnight everybody except hardened drinkers and busy gamblers had gone to bed.
This summer timetable carried on through long visits by family members and constant exchange between Castletown and Carton. Two or three times in spring and summer Castletown was decked out for what Sarah described as ‘fêtes’, outdoor parties for servants, locals and workpeople, and grander affairs to benefit charitable institutions. Through all this activity, week in week out, Louisa kept up the running of the house. She made up accounts in a small, meticulous hand with scrupulous care. Growing, buying, provisioning, cleaning, cooking were not her responsibility, but she had to keep track of what was being done and how much was being spent. Whenever there was an empty house, decorators moved in to make an alternative bustle and Louisa kept watch over them too.
Winter routines were different because Dublin was full of parliamentarians and government officials and the season was in full swing. Louisa rarely stayed at the Conollys’ Dublin house, preferring to issue invitations to Castletown instead. Guests drove out from Dublin for dinner. As usual the list was long and mixed. Relatives, huntsmen, clerics and sometimes a carefully vetted actress or two sat out the long winter evenings. In December, Louisa held what Sarah called ‘a month’s round of different parties’, and discharged the social obligations she had incurred by refusing invitations. If Parliament was sitting, Conolly might stay in their town house. If not he was usually chasing foxes across his acres. Louisa went into town to the theatre and to charity concerts (although she admitted preferring cheerful ensemble singing to any instrumental playing), and occasionally visited friends there.
But it was at Castletown that Louisa was most happy and content. On a quiet winter’s day eighteen years after her marriage she sat down and wrote to Emily, ‘I always was very fond of this place, but living so much at it as I have done of late has made my partiality increase for it, and ’tis amazing
what constant amusement and employment I find for myself. We have been a great deal alone, which has made it still more delightful for me, as I find that is what Mr. Conolly likes best.’
PART THREE
‘He is in love with her’.
Henry Fox, Memoir, April-May 1761
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Sarah made her London début at the age of fourteen in circumstances totally different from those that had smoothed Louisa’s path. Louisa had much to give her confidence besides her own pretty figure. Her marriage had made her rich and secure. She had nothing to ask of her brothers or Caroline and she was ready, despite her shyness, to take her place alongside them as a hostess and a companion. London was a glorious playground and money no object. Sarah, in contrast, came unmarried to London with £10,000 and a good name. Everyone understood that she was there to find a suitable husband and that the pleasures of the capital must be inseparable from that arduous search.
Sarah’s greatest asset was her sexual allure; her greatest handicap was that she was unaware of the effect she had upon others. Like her sisters, Sarah construed life as a drama or a tale. For Caroline, life cast itself as a fable or a morality tale in which she and her family were the principal sufferers. Emily saw life as a full-blown Rousseauian melodrama of which she was heroine and subject. Louisa, in contrast, used the life of Christ as her narrative model. To Sarah life was a comedy of manners that existed to reveal her follies. She was the shrewdest and coolest observer of human folly in the family, but life did not become real for her until she had told it to others. She was in consequence a compulsive gossip and story-teller. Gossip and intrigue, solidified into stories, were also ways of temporarily arresting the flux of sensation and event through
which she felt herself drifting. But when she retold her own story, Sarah made herself into a figure of fun, a character for ironic and comic treatment who acted, or fumbled, her way through life more according to social and familial dictate than her own desires.
From her earliest childhood Sarah had been a pawn in the scandal-ridden mix of politics and personalities that constituted the Court of George II. The second Duke of Richmond had been proud of Sarah’s prettiness, her way with words and her ‘rough and showy’ Lennox complexion. One day in the late 1740s, as a band of courtiers accompanied the King and Queen through the Broad Walk in Kensington Gardens, Sarah broke away from her governess, toddled up to the King and burst out in her prettiest French, ‘Comment vous portez vous, Monsieur le Roi? Vous avez une grande et belle maison ici, n’est-ce pas?’ Then, in imitation of an elaborate and much practised court ritual, she dropped a low curtsey in front of the monarch and made a temporary conquest of his heart.
As a result of this infant indiscretion, Sarah became a royal plaything. She was often summoned to Kensington Palace to amuse the old King. Once, George II picked her up, put her in a tall Chinese jar and closed the lid. Sarah came through this trial of spirit splendidly, discerning like a seasoned diva the inmost wishes of her audience. She sat down in the bottom of the jar and launched into a song that was bound to warm a Hanoverian heart, ‘Marlbrough s’en va-t-en guerre’.
While it was unusual for a child and a monarch to play together in such a way, kings were anything but magical beings to court families. For salaried officials like Lord Hervey and the second Duke of Richmond the sight of the monarch was often accompanied by the descent of overwhelming boredom. Despite the fact that King and courtiers alike knew that they were participating in the rituals by which majesty transmuted itself from the ordinary to the magical, and that knowledge lent gravity to court occasions, life at Court was dull precisely because its purpose was to divest the King of the quotidian.
As Caroline Fox observed, the King had to ‘play the King’, and in the act the pettiness and idiosyncrasies that form the compelling interest of human lives had to be shorn away. Courtiers, bound up in this alchemy of ritual, soon stopped associating the monarchy with glamour or mystique.
Sometimes the stultifying sameness of courtly life was shattered. New reigns and royal marriages brought an invigorating sense of excitement to courts, as credulous appointees and inexperienced monarchs fumbled with the machinery of kingship. But when the engine of ceremony began to run smoothly once again, befuddlement and stagnation would settle over the royal palaces.
Sarah remembered and retold the stories of her youthful encounters with George II not because they were remarkable but because they served to confirm her place in the world. She was a royal plaything, a drifting flibbertigibbet who caught the scenarios others threw her and acted them superbly well. Not until she was middle-aged was Sarah able to choose and set a course through life to which she held in the face of family disapproval and that she arrived at from some degree of self-knowledge and self-interest.
Everyone agreed that Sarah was a pretty girl. But to her sisters she was very little more. Emily declared, ‘to my taste Sarah is merely a pretty, lively looking girl and that is all. She has not one good feature … Her face is so little and squeezed, which never turns out pretty.’ Caroline noticed that Sarah’s attractions did not lie simply in her face. ‘Her manner is vastly engaging and she is immensely pretty,’ she wrote soon after Sarah arrived in London in the autumn of 1759. ‘Sarah seems to have more observation and cleverness about her than Louisa,’ she added. But she was very critical of Sarah’s way of coming into a room: Sarah held herself awkwardly, she said, stooping her shoulders and dropping her head forward. She also danced badly and had a scrofulous scalp. ‘I’m seriously hurt tho’ with her disguising that sweet little figure of hers by holding herself as she does … She has not the least air; its a
thousand pities.’ Sarah was equally disparaging when she talked about herself. She had, she said, small eyes and a long and turned-up nose that managed both to grow longer and to turn up more as the years went by. Her legs were bad and she was in constant danger of passing over the fateful border between plumpness and fat.
Despite all this, Sarah bore comparison with her sisters well. ‘In England and in Ireland you will find ten to one people who will give it to her before any of the others,’ Emily wrote in surprise. It was left to men, to whom the codes of gallantry gave narrative licence, to explain that Sarah’s manner made an ordinary face and figure into an overwhelmingly attractive one. Henry Fox, after ticking off her good points, added in exasperation, ‘but this is not describing her’. She was, he concluded, ‘different from and prettyer than any other girl I ever saw.’ Horace Walpole, eager as ever to breathe scandal into innocence, saw, farsightedly as it turned out, the potential for social disaster in Sarah’s resplendent sexuality. ‘No Magdalen by Correggio was half so lovely and expressive,’ he said.
Sarah arrived at Holland House in November 1759. Charles Fox was away at Eton, Harry was at Wandsworth and Ste, much recovered from his last bout of illness, was preparing to travel abroad. Caroline and Henry had provided a companion for Sarah none the less, Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, daughter of Henry’s brother Stephen. ‘She is not pretty. She is very fat, has a good complexion, large heavy eyes, a wide mouth and very fine light hair. I don’t know her yet,’ Sarah reported to Emily. Susan was decisive and confident and quickly swept Sarah away on a tide of schemes and imaginings. Sarah’s need for a confidante quickly got the better of her first impressions and she began to think of Susan as her bosom companion, her ‘true, sincere and amiable friend’. Very soon she agreed to allow Susan to vet and veto any suitors she might have, thus sharing control over the overriding priority of her London début, the search for a husband.
Other surprises were in store for Sarah when she came to Holland House from Carton. She was amazed to find Fox and Caroline so engaged in one another’s lives, reading and gossiping together, disagreeing and arguing in public. Used as she was to Emily’s effortless superiority, Sarah was horrified to see Caroline working to make Fox laugh, and disgusted that they made jokes together at Emily’s expense. Fox teased her about Emily’s financial profligacy, knowing that the joke would be passed on, which it duly was: ‘All this he sat telling me last night, grunting and groaning every minute, and saying, “Lord have mercy upon me. What an extravagant jade she is! How she does love buying! Lord help her!” And so he goes on for an hour like an old man in a play.’ Sarah was even more indiscreet about Ste. ‘Ste Fox is going to Geneva in three weeks. He is a very disagreeable boy and frightfully ugly.’ Caroline, enchanted with Sarah like everyone else, was simultaneously writing to Emily, ‘I hope Sal loves me. I do her, vastly.’
At the end of November Sarah was presented at Court, wearing blue and black feathers in her powdered hair, a black silk gown, cream lace ruffles (‘that Louisa gave me’) and white shoes. While she was renewing her acquaintance with the old King, the Prince of Wales, hovering behind his grandfather, caught her blushes and stammered replies to the King’s questions and fell head over heels in love with her.
When Sarah and the Prince of Wales first met, she was a seasoned campaigner in the social mêlée of Ascendancy Dublin, despite being only fourteen years old. The Prince, at twenty-one, was far less experienced in the ways of the world. Yet in a sense they were made for one another: neither was in control of their destiny. George’s father, Prince Frederick, died in 1751, leaving the young Prince caught between the demands of his mother, a series of tutors and the needs of the nation. He was slow and withdrawn. Casting round for a father figure, he fastened on Lord Bute, an impecunious Scot whose friendship with his mother was attributed to a ‘good
person, fine legs’ and ‘theatrical air of the greatest importance’. Bute quickly became everything to the lonely Prince of Wales: tutor, adviser, friend. He treated George with a mixture of deference and ferocity that played on the dual senses of majesty and worthlessness that were at the core of the future monarch’s character.
In June 1759, the Prince of Wales celebrated his twenty-first birthday. He was still a virgin and still ill at ease; less unhappy than he had been before his attachment to Bute, but none the less a pitiful figure, solemn, tortured and priggish. When Sarah was presented at Court a few months later he said very little to her. But what little he did say was more than enough for Sarah, who was hoping for a quick escape after the ordeal of talking to the King. ‘But what was worse than anything was that the Prince of Wales came when the King went,’ she wrote to Emily. The Prince was, however, too dazzled by Sarah to speak to her for long. Instead he walked over to where Caroline stood. After some time, George began to talk about Sarah. He was not used to paying compliments to women and his gaucherie was complicated by his sense of betrayal: he associated expressions of emotion and vulnerability with his feelings towards Lord Bute. Sarah, he told Caroline with awkward directness, was very tall and very pretty. When she was older and fatter she would be very handsome. He liked Louisa ‘very well’, but he liked Sarah better. She had lively eyes and ‘when she laughed they were little and pretty’.
