Aristocrats (23 page)

In the end Fox had to settle for a barony, hanging on to the Pay Office for a couple of years but forced to retreat to the House of Lords to lick his wounds. He gained the title Lord Holland, Baron of Foxley, Wiltshire, but lost all political credibility. Realising his error, Fox broke with Shelburne, and when Rigby and Calcraft, his two closest friends in the Commons, sided with Shelburne, he quarrelled with them too. Baffled and mortified, Fox sought refuge in verse, and Caroline as usual in a letter to Emily: ‘You have no conception,’ she wrote, ‘of the court Lord Shelburne has paid us all last year, trying every means to get into our utmost confidence and into Mr. Fox’s favour by Charles, Sal and me; it appears now so plain I’m surprised I was the dupe of it … ’Twas a most unlucky thing for Mr. Fox he came in last year, and I should for ever lament the share I had in it (prevailed on and persuaded by Mr. Calcraft and Lord Shelburne) did I not think without his coming in Peace would not have been made; indeed it seemed right at the time.’ She was horrified by Fox’s fall from grace partly because it exposed her emotional investment in his success. ‘I can’t help feeling mortified
at his ceasing to be of consequence, though I would neither have him in power nor in opposition. Such is the frailty of the human mind; but my vanity is hurt.’

Fox tried to hide his bitterness, writing to Caroline in April 1763, ‘I have done right and am got to that ease I always wished for; not with the grace I had a right to expect, but I am got there.’ But ease was not to be his lot. Exposed and outmanoeuvred by Bute and Shelburne, he was left to soak up public wrath over the Peace of Paris. It did not escape the notice of the press that Fox had made a huge fortune from the war. Pushing through a treaty which many felt gave too much territory to the French was, so the satires ran, adding insult to the injury done to the country by his ambition and greed.

With the end of every war in the eighteenth century came a period of political turmoil that was accompanied by calls to reform the processes of government. For several years after 1763, Fox was pilloried as the ‘public defaulter of unaccounted millions’; a man who epitomised not only the corruption of those in high places but also the baseness of politicians who reaped rewards and then sold the impoverished nation short. So Fox’s dreams of peaceful retirement were misplaced. Wherever he was, in Belgium or Paris, Naples or Florence, newspapers and pamphlets brimming with vitriolic attack reached him. Satirical poets had a field day; Charles Churchill attacked him in his ‘Epistle to William Hogarth’, Thomas Gray lampooned him in ‘On Lord Holland’s Seat near Margate’. Fox said that hostile verses were ‘unanswerable and must be endured’. But after he retired from active politics in 1763, and particularly after he gave up the Pay Office in 1765, he seemed listless and diminished. Politics had been his bedrock and stimulant for thirty years, fuelling his self-esteem, good humour and domestic happiness. Without it he gradually lost the will to live.

Fox’s troubles brought back Caroline’s stomach complaint and low spirits. After the final humiliation she decided they should go abroad. They would see Ste, take the waters at the
Belgian resort of Spa and spend several months in Paris. The peace of 1763 opened up the Continent to aristocrats and those Caroline called ‘rich citizens’ whose zeal for travel had gone unassuaged for seven years. The British came as swaggering victors, representatives of Europe’s new dominant political and economic power. For twenty years after the Peace of Paris English aristocrats wandered Europe buying up pictures, furniture, clothes, statues and ideas with an economic bravado that only just concealed their cultural humility. Even Caroline, part French and almost bilingual, wrote to Emily before she set off, ‘we shall return all fine and foreign’. Francophiles like Fox looked towards French philosophers – Voltaire in particular – for ways of thinking about the world. Many spoke and read French fluently and could compete creditably in the contests of wit and gallantry that dominated Paris drawing-rooms. None the less they came as humble supplicants to the temples of the arts. In the salons they gulped in the latest theories and literary controversies that divided the ‘philosophes’. In Italy, connoisseurs with golden pockets prostrated themselves before the compositions of Italian baroque painting or the delicacies of ‘Etruscan’ vases. In Switzerland devout Voltaireans made their way to Ferney outside Geneva to attend the master’s own amateur theatricals or catch a gem-like phrase as it fell from his lips. Some came away with a curt greeting from the decrepit sage; others were treated to an orotund aphorism. Second-generation adherents like Ste Fox were warmly greeted as the sons of Voltairean fathers. Almost everybody left with their faith restored, adoring the old cynic whose creed counselled against faith and adoration.

The English travelled in style, with clothes, medicines, horses and servants. Caroline took two maids to France, along with a personal hairdresser. Fox took his own valet, as did Charles and Harry, plucked out of school for the trip. During the ‘tedious voyage of fifteen hours’ between the North Foreland and Calais, Caroline sat in her post-chaise on
the deck of the cross-Channel packet. The carriage was strapped firmly to the deck and Caroline’s stomach rolled with the boat as it ploughed its way from Kent to France. Once travellers had landed on the Continent, they made rapid and calculable progress if they stuck to the post-routes; they simply planned and checked their journeys by the printed timetables for the post-coaches. After they landed the Foxes gaped not only at the battlefields of Ramillies and Malplaquet, as if to certify their national identity before a long season amongst the French, but also at the lace shops of Brussels. A week after landing the Foxes were comfortably installed in the Hôtel Treville, the first of their three Parisian addresses.

Before long the whole family had moved to the Hôtel de Montagu. ‘I was much determined against liking Paris,’ Caroline wrote to Emily, ‘but I find I do; ’tis a pretty place indeed, so full of fine hotels and large shady gardens to them, the streets so well paved and no black smoke in the town … I’m sure you would all … be diverted to see me go by in my berlin all over glass and gilding, with my hoop and my millions of curls and my rouge and my lace liveries.’ As they began to pay calls – on the liberal and Anglophile Duc d’Orléans, on the Prince de Conti and, for form’s sake on the English Ambassador – Caroline realised that Parisian life was just as she had hoped: replete with gossip and intrigue, but less riven by political faction than life in London. In the shady gardens of the ‘grands hôtels’, with their formal walks and crunchy gravel, and in the airy drawing-rooms where curtains billowed from long, open windows, the talk was anything but political, prompting Caroline to the conclusion that France was a ‘pretty quiet country … where people so sensibly trifle away life with ease and good humour, the same people contented keeping company with one another for sixty years, no parties or interest to divide them.’ Fontainebleau, where the monarch held court, was the centre of such party intrigue as the nation’s political and social systems allowed. Paris had its own life and rules. Caroline entered eagerly into the niceties of salon life, able to admit now that she was not on home
ground, that those people she was most curious about were the philosophers and writers whose work she had read. She soon became an
habituée
of Madame Geoffrin’s famous Wednesday salon in the rue Saint-Honoré, where Diderot, Marmontel, d’Alembert, Grimm and other literary lions went through their paces for the benefit of admirers. ‘Madame Geoffrin n’est pas noble, but very fond of the English, is constantly at home of an evening, and sees all sorts of company, dévots, savants, beaux-esprits, petits-maîtres robins, etc, etc,’ Caroline wrote, explaining to Emily that ‘these are what make a dévote, elle ne porte point de rouge, elle fréquente les églises, elle ne joue point, elle ne soupe point, elle ne va point aux spectacles’.

Caroline relished the ostentatious austerity of the dévots, she was curious about the savants and she was happy to forgo the habit of a lifetime and eschew political talk. Her great-grandmother’s legend, her father’s memory and the good offices of Horace Walpole and Lady Hervey furnished them with many contacts and, as one of the architects of the Peace of Paris, Fox was cordially treated in the French capital. Two or three times a day they paid visits or received guests. Mornings were often turned over to shopping for china, clothing and furniture. Caroline had a good many commissions from Emily, and Henry Fox, back in England briefly in the autumn of 1764, sent her a long shopping list. ‘Send me at least two vases like the Duchess of Hamilton’s and, if you wish, two more that you may like, for ourselves. Send me the large clock at Poirier’s which I thought too big for Sir Jacob Downing with a long genteel figure in bronze reclined … You’ll say I’m extravagant. But why should not I treat myself as well as other people? Send a spring gown, a negligee for Lady Suke too.’ Besides these commissions Caroline bought a large quantity of furniture for Holland House and clothes for Sarah and herself. Her sisters, nieces and nephews in Ireland were not forgotten; assorted presents for Emily and her children went in the diplomatic bag. ‘By the French
Ambassador’s things I have sent you two biscuit china figures which I admire vastly, but you’ll not get them this great while. I hope dear little Charles will by this time have got his knife, which I sent him. There are also three geneva stone necklaces for the girls, and a new-fashioned pincushion and scissors, one for Emily t’other for Harriet.’ ‘Let me know if you are fond of china set in ormolu. I admire it vastly and, if you do, will send you some, but would know your taste first as ’tis very dear.’ ‘I send you two story books.’ ‘Indeed you shall have the green vases, set your heart at rest.’

In between bouts of hectic spending, the whole family went to Spa in Belgium, where crowds of English, gouty, bilious or just worn out by the exertions of travel, went to drink the waters and lounge about. ‘The account of our life there I can give you in a few lines,’ Caroline wrote to Emily. ‘Ste made distant and humble love to Lady Spencer, rode out with Lord Spencer; Lord Holland s’ennuyait beaucoup, but could talk a lot of nonsense to Lady Bateman about drinking the waters in order to breed. Charles attached himself to every French coxcomb that came … As for me, I gambled with the gentlemen.’

After Spa the family went back to Paris, settling down for the winter at the Hôtel Rouac in the rue de Grenelle. Now that she had her husband away from politics and her beloved eldest son by her side, Caroline was temporarily content, weaving for herself a vision of Paris that chimed with her tranquillity. Her Paris was an easy city, where good conversation took precedence over the political intrigues she spurned with exaggerated dislike. ‘I’m not French like Lady Hervey,’ she wrote, ‘but I do think they are the only people who know how to put society on an agreeable foot; they don’t like us run after diversions, nor think themselves ennuyé unless something clever is going on; they are trifling, chatty and easy … Upon the whole I think every woman past thirty that really lives a Paris life among the French, and understands the language, and who likes conversation better than cards, will
prefer Paris to London.’ In her temporary calm, Caroline was able to forget the bitterness that she had felt towards her parents and to look back to her childhood, one of the very few times she ever did so in twenty years of correspondence with Emily. ‘I can easily account for my partiality to the French,’ she wrote, ‘it was early taken. You know my father had it strongly. We went when I was quite a child to Holland and France; the servants (and children of consequence) hated Holland and the Dutch and were violently fond of the Duchess of Portsmouth. It seems foolish but these early impressions remain with one.’

After their extended Parisian sojourn of 1763–64, Caroline and Lord Holland (as she reluctantly began to call Mr Fox) acquired a taste for continental travel. Caroline came back to Paris in 1765; the whole family travelled through France to Naples in 1766, and they were back again in France in both 1767 and 1769. Winters were spent at Holland House or in Piccadilly, summers at Kingsgate, Henry’s newly acquired estate on the windswept coast of Kent. Holland House still provided a London base for the whole family, although each of the sisters had their own London town house: the Kildares’ in Arlington Street, near Grosvenor Square, the Conollys’ in Whitehall and the Bunburys’ in Spring Gardens on the northwestern side of the Privy Garden.

It was important for all the members of the family to come to London from time to time. Bunbury, Kildare and Conolly came to deal with business affairs and to attend Parliament. Emily and Louisa returned to reassure themselves about their family identity and their fast-fading sense of Englishness, although Emily’s growing band of children meant she came less and less often. Everybody came for the pleasure gardens, the gambling, the print sellers, the theatre, the shopping and the social life.

The idea of London produced self-fulfilling edicts about the pace of metropolitan life that gave visitors a sense of self-
importance and were especially attractive to those like Sarah who had much to forget. Sarah plunged herself into the social whirl as soon as she arrived at Holland House or in Spring Gardens, declaring loudly that London was responsible for her full calendar. ‘My Dear Netty,’ she wrote to Susan in the spring of 1766, ‘I have been in town about a month and am not settled yet, for I have not a moment’s time to myself. The hurry of this town is inconceivable, for I declare I have been only once to the Play, Opera and Oratorio, to very few assemblies, and yet I cannot find a moment’s time to myself.’

London was the Western world’s first great metropolis. By the 1760s it lay sprawled over many square miles, reaching out of the old centres of Westminster and the City along riverbanks and coach routes like an octopus uncoiling its tentacles. On its outskirts half-joined villages were interspersed with a pea-green and chocolate-brown patchwork of vegetable gardens. Closer in were scrubby patches of ground spattered with red, magenta and ultramarine from dyers’ vats, and tenter grounds where taut ropes swayed in the sooty air like giant hairy worms. From these outlying settlements through the half-urban spaces of manufactories, vegetable gardens and stable yards the poor trudged miles to work in the city. In summer they walked in clouds of dust. Sand from London’s unmade roads, stirred up by feet and carriage wheels, turned and twisted in the half light. Everybody choked and complained. In winter they walked in the dark, on roads whose pot holes and ridges froze into slippery moraines.