Aristocrats (20 page)

The Duke and Duchess of Richmond, Susan Fox-Strang-ways and a crowd of Holland House servants took their seats. Dr Francis walked to the altar and turned round, waiting for Sarah and Bunbury to come and stand in front of him. They came up hesitantly, Sarah stooping, Bunbury carrying himself with self-conscious dignity.

‘Dearly beloved,’ Dr Francis began, shifting his gaze from Sarah and Bunbury to the guests, ‘we are gathered here together in the sight of God.’ Everyone relaxed, soothed by the familiar incantation. Nobody listened closely to the words of the marriage service. Dr Francis read through the reasons for matrimony. ‘First it was ordained for the procreation of children,’ he chanted. ‘Secondly it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication. Thirdly it was ordained for the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have for the other.’ Children, constancy, companionship: they were solemn undertakings and ones which Sarah and Bunbury had hardly considered.

Dr Francis turned to Bunbury and asked the famous questions: ‘Wilt thou have this woman as thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance, in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour and
keep her in sickness and in health and forsaking all other keep thee only unto her as long as ye both shall live?’ ‘I will,’ Bunbury replied; and ‘I will,’ said Sarah too.

The service continued – the ring, the blessing, a prayer and holy communion. Bunbury slipped the ring on to Sarah’s finger and she became a wife. As the married couple turned away and walked down the aisle, a tear, reflecting the panes of the chapel windows, rolled slowly down Dr Francis’s plump cheek.

Chapter 3

Homes, Education and Adultery

PART ONE

‘Our gallery advances so much, ’twill soon be ready for all the pictures’.

Caroline to Emily, 8 August 1762
.

The day after the wedding Sarah wrote to Emily, signing herself ‘Sarah Bunbury’ for the first time. It was a short letter merely announcing her marriage and Bunbury’s intention to leave London immediately for his country house in Suffolk. Unlike Louisa, Sarah was settling where she had no friends and no family. She was a hesitant traveller. ‘I go to Barton tomorrow or the next day to stay the rest of the summer. I don’t quite like going to a strange place for so long, but Mr. Bunbury has set his heart upon being there this summer.’ A cryptic postscript read: ‘I was not as frightened as Louisa was yesterday, but I make good what Lady B[arrymore] used to say, that we lively people were much more afraid than grave sober folks, for I am ten thousand times more terrified now than she was the second day. Hers was shyness at first, which one always gets the better of; but real dislike I am sure is not so easy to get over.’

Sarah’s fear had grown up swiftly after the ceremony. The wedding night, the slippery loss of virginity in the flickering
candle-light, had terrified her. Between the removal of the gown that Caroline had given her and the squawking of the peacocks and pheasants on the Holland House terrace, Sarah was transformed. Innocence gave way to experience, the maiden to the wife and the bibulous optimism of the wedding breakfast to the settled despair of ‘real dislike’. As soon as they became man and wife the couple dropped their courting characters. Bunbury’s flood of letters and verses abruptly dried up and Sarah’s lively flirtations were overcome by a melancholy restlessness.

To everyone’s surprise, Sarah took to following Bunbury about like a dog. Through the long summer recess she stayed at his side as he went about his daily life as county MP and country squire. ‘I am in a constant fear of making him angry,’ Sarah confessed to Emily in September, ‘for though he loves me, yet not one in ten like to have their wives tagging after them constantly; and that is what I cannot help doing, for, whenever he is absent an hour even, I am watching for his return and follow him to the stables etc, and, in short, am vastly troublesome … I can see he don’t like it and I will get the better of it.’ Sarah eyed her husband incessantly, scrutinising him for signs of tenderness, appalled at his distant beauty. She attributed her vigilance to jealousy and interpreted her jealousy as a sign of love. ‘Pray do not tell anybody of my jealousy, for if it came to Mr. Fox’s ears – Lord have mercy upon me!’ she begged Emily, adding, ‘I don’t know if, in the main, it is not better for me, as it will keep up my love for him.’

Already Sarah was edging towards unpleasant conclusions. If her jealousy was a sign of love, what did Bunbury’s complete lack of jealousy mean, and what could be the reason for her own sudden disinclination to flirt? For Sarah’s hound-like shadowing owed less to jealousy than to a need for signs of love; even a hint of tenderness on Bunbury’s part would do. As the summer of 1762 wore on, Sarah stopped writing and she stopped flirting. Her need to act flamboyant parts and to
tell stories was squashed under a larger fear that Bunbury might treat coquettish behaviour with a benign indifference. That might confirm what Sarah already suspected – that her husband neither loved nor desired her.

At first her sisters were sanguine about Bunbury’s equanimity, hopefully attributing it to the new fashion for homeliness. Caroline told Emily that ‘Mr. Bunbury is sobriety itself, and very domestic, and don’t appear to have any little teasing ways with him, so that she may be just as happy with him as if he was more lively.’ Louisa reported back to Sarah herself that Bunbury ‘has, by all accounts, one of the most amiable dispositions that ever was; is very sensible and good natured.’ But to the third Duke of Richmond, she passed on a very different report. ‘Don’t say I said so, but I hear terrible accounts of his coldness and reservedness.’ None the less, she qualified her anxiety by asserting, ‘he is vastly fond of her though and I know she dotes upon him.’

Thus it was that Sarah’s marriage rapidly became an experience of collective self-deception by her siblings. Everyone maintained that Sarah’s marriage had been a love match forged in freedom, but they all knew that Sarah had been forced into a quick choice by familial as well as social pressures. So all the sisters dulled their foreboding with recitations of Bunbury’s good nature and Sarah’s happiness. But everyone – Caroline, Emily, Fox, Kildare and Louisa – had created Sarah’s marriage, commending Bunbury and urging her on; and everyone would bear responsibility if the fragile ship of her felicity was swept towards the rocks.

No one connived more eagerly in this act of collective delusion than Sarah herself. Like her sisters, Sarah was determined not to delve behind the façade of her cheerfulness and jealousy. She began to live a life of the surface, busy at Barton and in Bury St Edmunds. She entertained friends and neighbours and set about planning flower gardens, walks and shrubberies. ‘I must be in pursuit of something,’ she said. But she was running rather than chasing, fleeing from the spectre
of a lonely life and trying frantically to escape from herself. She lacked money, which in big enough doses could keep aristocratic marriages alive, so her distractions had to be modest. First she asked Emily to send her an Irish wolfhound. Then she found a loquacious parrot. She abandoned reading alone and, in the summer evenings, worked feverishly on handkerchiefs and a gown while Mr Bunbury’s sister read volumes of French memoirs. She tried to make Barton feel like home, tending her garden as a way of rooting herself in her new environment. ‘I have set my heart upon being
settled
,’ she said. To Susan Fox-Strangways she wrote, with her accustomed note of supplication, ‘I have planted all the trees you bid me and others that I have thought of. I have fished out two cedars as high as a chair and flourishing charmingly; is not that a treasure?’

When horticulture paled, Sarah turned to the opiate of country society. Bury was a thriving market town. Two small streams, the Lark and the Linnet, rippled past the ruins of an abbey sacked in the fourteenth century by a citizenry who had since settled into model constituents. Around the flinty remains were the town houses of local landowners, the assembly rooms and a theatre. Behind and above these grand buildings was a grid-based town with houses of brick and stucco; white, cream and yellowy pink, all wreathed in the heady smell of malt and hops drifting out from the town brewery. Just above the abbey stood the imposing Angel Hotel where successful local candidates, Charles Bunbury amongst them, distributed dark local ale to their cheering supporters. In October, Bury fair brought a noisy mixture of animals, performers and mountebanks to the town centre; for two weeks a closed and secretive rural society opened itself up to the latest scientific curiosities, the newest travelling quacks and a caravan of horse dealers, prize fighters, print sellers and trinket merchants. Away from the packed squares and streets the local gentry ate and drank in town houses and inns. ‘Sally in her letters seems quite worn out with visiting. She was engaged in no less than eight different turtle feasts in the town of
Bury last time I heard from her,’ Caroline reported to Emily in October 1762.

Despite the turtles and the visits, life in Suffolk lacked the excitement and cosmopolitan diversity of both Carton and Holland House. Sarah fought isolation and self-knowledge with a string of visitors. Caroline and Fox came first, in the middle of July, barely six weeks after Sarah’s wedding. Although Sarah was ‘as pert or more so than ever’, delighted with Fox’s familiar and reassuring bawdy talk, Caroline was quickly bored with country life. ‘The people there pass their whole life in dining and visiting about,’ she complained. In August Bunbury went to a house party, leaving Sarah and his sister alone at Barton. Soon after his departure, thirteen-year-old Charles Fox came for ten days. Then Susan Fox-Strang-ways arrived and stayed until mid-October, when races at Newmarket and the Bury fair filled the house with gamblers and horse-fanciers. Gossiping and versifying with Susan and jaunting from track to town with Bunbury’s friends kept Sarah from watching her husband too closely. A little while after Susan left, Sarah felt courageous enough to put self-deception to paper. ‘You have made a mighty pretty discovery, Miss, truly! “I can think there is happiness in the country with a person one loves.” Pray now who the devil would not be happy with a pretty place, a good house, good horses, greyhounds etc for hunting, so near Newmarket & £2,000 a year to spend? Add to this that I have a settled comfortable feel that I am doing so right, that all my friends love me and are with me as much as possible; in short that I have not one single thing on earth to be troubled about.’

Missing from this catalogue of bliss was Bunbury himself. At the heart of Sarah’s life was a blank space where her love for her husband and his for her might have been; a no-go area of anxiety and unhappiness carefully cordoned off from mention or examination. The nearest Sarah came to admitting the existence of this emotional black hole which, in spite of her best efforts kept pulling everything towards it, was to complain of boredom or ‘wretched spirits’ that could be
attributed to temporary domestic disappointment. ‘You need not have envied me,’ she wrote to Susan in October, ‘for my devil of a horse is as lame as a dog and Mr. B. has been coursing, hunting and doing every pleasant thing on earth and poor me sat fretting and fuming at home.’ She longed to see Emily’s children and dreamed of Carton and home. ‘Believe me, dear sister, when I think of you it is not to be conceived how I long to go to you and see my dear little girls, and in short twenty people and things … I sit here and fancy myself there and think of what I shall do and where I shall go.’

At first Sarah hoped that Fox and Kildare might be able to fix Bunbury’s appointment as Secretary to the next Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, but his chances were destroyed by a change of administration. A later scheme that he should accompany the British Ambassador, Lord Hertford, to Paris also fell through. The historian David Hume took the job and also took Paris by storm, surprising and enraging his upstaged employer. Sarah and her husband stayed in England, she to dream of Ireland, he of training a Newmarket winner. Gradually she came to realise that her husband’s first love was for horses; the more indifferent he became to Sarah’s body the more absorbed he was by horseflesh.

Unable to go back to Emily, Carton and her childhood life, Sarah did the next best thing. As soon as she decently could, she left for Holland House. ‘Sal and Mr. Bunbury are here,’ Caroline reported to Emily on 7 December 1762. ‘She is just as she was, pretty and good humoured as an angel.’ The House was sitting; Conolly had come over (although he spent most of the time out with the Charlton hunt at Goodwood); Kildare was expected. Emily’s heir George, her second son, the slow and amiable William and Charles Fox were all about to come back from Eton. Susan Fox-Strangways was on her way up from the west country. Holland House was alive with political gossip and plans for the coming season. While Bunbury went to the House of Commons, Sarah plunged gratefully back into her former life.

Although Holland House still belonged to the Mr Edwardes from whom it had been leased, the Foxes continued to make interior alterations, to buy up parcels of land around it and to plant the grounds in expectation of the estate eventually becoming their own. With the help of the naturalist Peter Collinson they moved walls and paths, laid down a bowling green and planted trees and shrubs throughout the sixty-four acres of the park. Caroline decorated the lawns with pheasants, peacocks and pedigree cows, whose white bulks moved slowly against the green of grass and trees, manuring as they went. Gardening, with its biblical overtones of Edenic tranquillity and its English associations with virtue and peacefulness, hardly needed literary justification. But Caroline quoted
Candide
all the same. Writing to Emily in the autumn of 1764 she said, ‘My chief work is now clearing and cutting down trees to let in peeps here and there, and also to prevent the trees killing and over-running one another as they did at Goodwood … nothing truer than
il faut cultiver son jardin
to relieve the many cares of human nature.’