Aristocrats (18 page)

Sarah was ‘very proud’ but nonplussed by such undressed expressions of admiration. She was more at ease flirting with wits and responding coquettishly to carefully turned phrases. Horace Walpole she pronounced ‘charming’: ‘One thing is that he commends me prodigiously, I mean flatters me.’ She also revelled in the company of a poet, ‘who I disliked till I heard he said I was like a rose and now I like him.’ Such men paid Sarah exaggerated compliments whose over-ripeness fitted perfectly with her ironic presentation of herself. ‘Lady
Rochford and he [Horace Walpole] have found out the last beauty in me that anybody else would think of finding, which is that my hoggy paws are pretty.’ The difficulty with the Prince of Wales was that he was sincere. As Caroline put it, ‘he coloured as he spoke to me of her.’

Sarah continued to appear at drawing-rooms throughout December 1759, and the Prince of Wales grew increasingly excited and miserable. He became ‘grave and thoughtful’ and put his change of mood down to a ‘daily increasing admiration of the fair sex’. But this admiration was anything but pleasant. George described it as a ‘combat in my breast’ and a ‘struggle’ between ‘the boiling youth of twenty one years and prudence’. He was overwhelmed with guilt and fantasies of marriage at the same time. Lonely as he had been for so long, George was unable to conceive of love as expandable and inclusive. Side by side with his infatuation ran an inner dialogue of conflict and betrayal in which, as he put it, ‘I must either lose my friend or my love’.

By the end of 1759 Bute was becoming suspicious about the Prince’s feelings and intentions. He pressed George for a confession. But although he sent Bute two letters of anguished contrition, George kept his secret and went on seeing Sarah. They had a long conversation at the Twelfth Night Ball on 6 January 1760, an elaborate function which rounded off two weeks of Christmas entertainments at Court. To keep Sarah talking, and to build up a favourable picture of her that he could present to Bute, George asked her about her sisters. Did Louisa govern Conolly or the other way round? What was life like in Dublin? At Carton? What did Sarah do when there was no company at Carton? Sarah replied to the last question that either she or Louisa had been used to read to Emily because of her eyes. George construed the conversation thus: ‘her voice is sweet, she seems sensible, has a thorough sense of her obligations to Lady Kildare,’ and concluded miserably, ‘in short she is everything I can form to myself lovely.’

By this time, the Prince’s attentions to Sarah had caught Henry Fox’s eye. They gave him perfect material for his teasing and ‘worrying’. ‘Mr. Fox says he is in love with me and diverts himself prodigiously,’ Sarah reported to Emily. Nobody, except for Bute, realised that the Prince was serious, although Sarah uncharacteristically hid details of the Twelfth Night conversation from Caroline and her husband. ‘I would not tell it [to] Mr. Fox and my sister for fear of Mr. Fox’s worrying me about it.’

In early January 1760, Sarah need not have been too concerned. Caroline, in particular, was too busy sifting through the social, political and material prospects of London’s eligible bachelors to think much about the Prince of Wales. By the end of January she had fixed upon George Spencer, the young and immensely wealthy Duke of Marlborough. Her researches had shown that there were some drawbacks to the match, she told Emily, but ‘his fortune, title, figure are just what one would wish’. Caroline had gone to a ball at which the nineteen-year-old Duke ‘seemed charmed with Sal’. Before long Caroline’s hope had been transformed into a rumour which reached the Prince of Wales. ‘The other day I heard it suggested as if the Duke of Marlborough made up to her. I shift’d my grief till retired to my chamber where I remained for several hours in the depth of despair.’

The addition of jealousy to the explosive mixture of passion and guilt in George’s heart finally drove him to confess his feelings to Bute. One night during the spring of 1760, the Prince sat down and trustingly confided his troubles to his friend, ‘feeling culpable in having kept you so long in the dark’. George’s story made sad telling. He was, he wrote, ‘struck’ with Sarah’s first appearance at St James’s and since then he said, ‘my passion has been increased every time I have since beheld her.’ But despite having ‘flattered himself’ that Bute would permit him to marry Sarah, the Prince protested ‘before God that I have never had any improper thought with regard to her.’

The Prince added to his confession an abject appeal. ‘If you can devise any method for my keeping my love without forfeiting your friendship, I shall be more bound to you than ever.’ Then, in a suicidal gesture, he resigned everything, casting himself into Bute’s hands in a gesture of pathetic self-abasement. ‘On the whole let me preserve your friendship, and tho’ my heart should break, I shall have the happy reflection in dying that I have not been altogether unworthy of the best of friends, tho’ unfortunate in other things.’ Bute was not moved by this desperate call for help and replied with brutal insincerity, ‘God knows, my dear Sir, I with the utmost grief tell it to you, the case admits not of the smallest doubt.’ The Prince of Wales wrote back humbly, ‘my Dearest Friend has thoroughly convinced me of the impropriety of marrying a countrywoman.’

Lord Bute had good reasons for expunging the Prince’s hopes. Marriage between George and Sarah Lennox would raise the Foxes and Richmonds to even greater political eminence, and Fox’s triumph would be Bute’s annihilation. Bute recognised that his best hope for continued domination and thus for political office was to urge upon the Prince a loveless marriage with a German princess, and as soon as George had written to renounce Sarah he began to hint that the Prince should look abroad for a suitable wife. George agreed to a search but refused an immediate marriage; and although he had abandoned hope of Sarah, he continued to indulge his love for her even while his courtiers ransacked the Almanach de Gotha for a German bride.

Now that he had confessed and renounced his infatuation, the Prince’s guilt lifted and his attentions to Sarah became more marked. They continued to meet throughout the spring of 1760 until the end of the season in May. The season over, and husband hunting temporarily suspended, Sarah and Caroline left London for a prolonged country perambulation. They spent some time at Goodwood, where Sarah was ‘exceedingly pleased and happy’ and Caroline kept a wary and
disapproving eye on her sisters-in-law. In September they went to Woburn, the country seat of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford. By the beginning of October they were back at Holland House, Sarah to plan and perform private theatricals with Susan Fox-Strangways, Charles and Ste Fox and Emily’s oldest sons George and William Fitzgerald, and Caroline to supervise repairs on the house. In the years since Henry Fox became Paymaster improvements to Holland House had proceeded apace. Caroline had put a greenhouse and an aviary on the flat roof of the portico outside her dressing-room window so that she could wander out and look at birds and plants while she was reading and writing in the mornings. She was fitting up the chapel and starting a picture gallery, commissioning portraits of the family as they passed through London. ‘We are so busy here, you can’t imagine, spending an immense deal of money,’ she told Emily in the autumn of 1760.

This cheerful activity was interrupted on 25 October by the old King’s death. George II had got up early, had breakfast and retired as usual to the lavatory. While he was sitting there he had a massive heart attack and died
in situ
. The manner of the King’s demise hastened his descent from the heights of majesty to the level of the ordinary man. A few weeks after his death the
Gentleman’s Magazine
printed a large and detailed engraving of his ruptured heart.

The King’s eventual death had been much debated, not least by his heir and Lord Bute, but the suddenness with which the Prince of Wales was translated into George III surprised everybody. ‘A young King opens a new scene here, which excites one’s curiosity and causes great speculation,’ wrote Caroline to Emily, as if she had never known the awkward, shy Prince who lurked behind his grandfather’s shoulder at drawing-rooms and birthdays. Sarah and Susan were delighted by the new reign too. They looked forward to a young and lively Court, to the coronation and even to the burial of the old King. Intoxicated by the prospect of balls
and parties Sarah declared with self-conscious exaggeration that she was ‘absolutely in love with the King’.

The King was certainly still in love with Sarah. Now that he had confessed to Bute his love seemed legal, and he was determined to savour the sensations of romance even while he was throwing it away. George began practising the language of love – which he mixed with the peremptory speech of those used to being obeyed – on Susan Fox-Strangways. At a drawing-room in March 1761, he told Susan that he would like an English queen and then added, ‘what do you think of your friend? You know who I mean, don’t you think her the fittest?’ Emboldened by this start, the King progressed to Sarah herself. At a drawing-room a week later he asked Sarah if she had seen Susan and if she had, had Susan told her about their conversation. ‘Yes,’ replied Sarah, and then fell silent.

Much to Henry Fox’s chagrin, Sarah did not play her part well on this occasion, and she was unable to make good her failure because, on a visit to Somerset in March 1761, she fell off a horse and broke her leg. The injury kept her in the country for several weeks so Fox, despite his vestigial scepticism, went to Court in her stead and engaged the King in conversation. After some small-talk, Fox skilfully brought the conversation round to Sarah, noting in a memo he jotted down the next day, ‘Now I have you’. The King’s face twisted in sympathy as Fox described Sarah’s fall and pain. Fox pressed his advantage home, playing the King like an instrument and harping on the theme of Sarah’s injury. ‘Then came the same countenance and expressions of uneasiness, which I rather increased by talking again of the pain the motion of the coach gave; and then relieved by assuring that she had nothing hard to bear now but the confinement.’

Fox had been the first to laugh at George’s marked attention to Sarah and to treat it as a pretext to tease her. But after this conversation he was certain that the King was deeply infatuated. Fox decided that if Sarah played her cards right she could be a queen and that he himself would, at the very least,
secure an earldom. By 1761 Fox had few ambitions left. He was immensely wealthy and he had abandoned his hectic pursuit of the highest political office. But he desperately wanted to seal his career with a title, for himself and for his family, and Sarah’s elevation would make an earldom easy fruit.

Once Fox decided to enter the fray, he went about it with the skill and attention to detail that was the hallmark of his political success. He sent strict instructions about how Sarah was to behave on her return to London. As she convalesced, Sarah learned her lines, repeating them for Susan with an irony that bordered on self-hatred. ‘I am allowed to mutter a little, provided the words astonished, surprised, understand and meaning are heard.’ ‘What a task it is! God send that I may be able to go through with it’. ‘I am working myself up to consider what depends on it … The very thought of it makes me sick in my stomach already.’

On 22 May 1761 Sarah returned to London, her leg mended and her speeches prepared. ‘Well today is come to nothing,’ she wrote to Susan after her first appearance at Court. The next meeting seemed more propitious. She went, chaperoned by Fox, to the play and the King appeared in the box next to theirs, showing ‘great pleasure on seeing her’. Two days before she came back he had finally picked a bride, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a plain, unremarkable girl of seventeen. So when Sarah reappeared George felt, if not lighthearted, at least free to immerse himself in the tide of love that swept over him. At a birthday ball on 1 June, he ‘had no eyes but for her and hardly talked to anybody else.’ Henry Fox was jubilant. ‘He is in love with her,’ he wrote triumphantly in his running notes. Sarah, eager to please and by now fully in Fox’s confidence, reported faithfully everything the King said to her.

Fox’s manoeuvring and the King’s dog-like devotion did not go unnoticed. When Fox left London for the country in the second week of June, it was rumoured that he had deliberately left Sarah alone and unchaperoned in Holland House.
Horace Walpole reported that while Fox was absent, Sarah had orders to dress up every morning in simple country dress, go out into the grounds of Holland House by a road along which the King drove every day, and rake hay becomingly
déshabillée
.

This Marie Antoinettish story was fabricated or exaggerated, although Sarah did ride out in the Holland House grounds each day, perhaps in hopes of intercepting the King on his way to Court. Walpole’s report may have originated in a print that was doing the rounds of the Court which showed a courting couple in the grounds of Holland House. The engraving was cheekily entitled ‘Palemon and Lavinia’: Palemon was one of the noble lovers in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’, while Lavinia was a legendary princess given in marriage to seal a political alliance. In the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Palemon only triumphed because his rival fell from his horse, so his name on the print added a sly reference to Sarah’s recent accident. The engraving shows Palemon clasping Lavinia’s hand to his bosom in a stagy gesture of ardour while she, casting her eyes demurely towards the ground, avoids his passionate gaze. Lavinia wears a straw bonnet and a simple country dress without hoops or lace. In the background, Holland House, half concealed behind a magisterial royal oak, identifies the lovers as George III and Sarah Lennox.

In fact when the Foxes went to the country, Sarah was anything but alone. The whole family had assembled in London in anticipation of the coronation, and now they watched the final act of the drama. In the absence of Caroline it was Emily (heavily pregnant as usual) who took Sarah to Court on 18 June and Emily who wrote to Fox that the King had said to Sarah plainly and fervently, ‘for God’s sake remember what I hinted to Lady Susan Strangways before you went to the country’. Emily and Fox believed that this speech must be followed by a declaration. They did not realise that the King was saying goodbye. It was the last time he would talk to Sarah intimately and, like a child denied a wish, he raised his
voice and then repeated his statement: ‘For God’s sake remember what I said to Lady Susan before you went to the country, and believe I have the strongest attachment.’