Aristocrats (26 page)

For a determined girl like Susan it was an obvious step to move from aping Kitty Fisher’s clothes and worshipping actors from the distance of her box to falling in love. O’Brien epitomised the glamour of the stage: he trod the boards in major roles and lived on friendly terms with Garrick and Foote. Each night he pandered to the romantic dreams and sexual longings of a thousand adoring fans. Susan wanted his stage declarations of love to become real and she wanted him for herself. Wrapped in the lascivious gaze of the Covent Garden crowd, O’Brien seemed to her more desirable and a greater prize than all the dukes of St James’s.

William O’Brien was a rising star, a protégé of Garrick who had come from Dublin in the late 1750s taking leading roles in Farquhar’s
The Recruiting Officer
and one of the century’s smash hits, Townley’s
High Life Below Stairs. High Life Below Stairs
was, like Gay’s
Beggar’s Opera
and Foote’s
Mayor of Garrett
, a comedy which used low life to criticise high society. O’Brien played Lovel, a rich young colonial, who disguised himself as a servant and took employment under his own butler. Thus O’Brien, who was an actor pure and simple, took the part of a West India merchant who played the role of a servant. For Susan, who had already toyed with reversing the roles traditionally played by men and women, this confusion was at the heart of his attraction.

O’Brien could impersonate a gentleman just as well off the stage as on it. As a result of his success he quickly found his way into his audience’s houses. By the early 1760s he was at Holland House helping out with private theatricals, and he and Susan came face to face. Susan was already in love with
O’Brien’s stage persona. Now that he was at Holland House the socially disruptive nature of his presence in her world, a mocking commentary on the supposedly separate milieux of drawing-room and stage, made him irresistible. On a visit to Barton in the summer of 1762, Susan seized the initiative. With Sarah’s connivance she wrote O’Brien a note which invited him to contrast the reserve of her world with the enchanting expressiveness of his. It ran:

In my silence see the lover,

True love is by silence known

In my eyes you’ll best discover

All the power of your own.

O’Brien responded to this verse with a torrent of language which exactly suited Susan’s desire. ‘There never was a more eloquent, unaffected mark of love than your last letter – the tender simplicity of it enchants me – I have done nothing but write and tear answers to it continually – I can’t find language strong enough to express the feeling of my heart. What return can I ever make you for your economy … Can my whole life spent in attention to you be any kind of equivalent – take it – do what you will: I shall resign my whole soul to your keeping. I will hear, see, and believe nothing but what you would have me. You was determined to fix me yours to the last period of my days, and you have.’

O’Brien recognised immediately that Susan wanted to overturn the notional sexual order. She would ‘govern’, he would ‘cultivate’ and sign over his will to hers. Everything about the affair overturned accepted principles of courtship and social order. Instead of a gentleman picking up an actress, as was the accepted custom in the theatres, a woman of fashion was seducing an actor. Through the winter season of 1763–64, Susan and O’Brien met often. O’Brien would check each night in the theatre appointments book to see whether the Foxes’ box was filled by the family or whether they had
sold on their seats to somebody else. Trusted theatre employees smuggled Susan notes in the box as she sat apparently attentive to the show before her. O’Brien also often appeared at Miss Read’s studio, where Susan was sitting for her portrait clad in a fur-trimmed gown and a wide-brimmed hat.

In the spring of 1764, Susan’s parents discovered the affair. O’Brien’s reaction was suitably histrionic, and his subsequent letter to Susan was a skilful blend of sexual directness and the sorts of gestures expected of a tragic hero. ‘I am distracted – I don’t know what I do or say. I sit down ten times in a day [and] write a sheet of paper full of incoherencies and almost madness which when I read over I throw into the fire – start up and walk ten miles in the hour in my room, backwards and forwards with you in my heart, in my hand, in my mouth … Do forget me, give me up at once – don’t let me dishonour the happiness and elevated joys that you were born to – let me despair and die – it’s no matter. I was born to be unfortunate – to know you, to love you, to lose you – to – and to lose you? No, I must not, cannot, will not give you up … Can’t I supply the place of father, mother? You would be that and more to me, and what is all the world if the mind’s unhappy, if we must sigh for
something unpossessed
?’

At this point, Susan had either to finish the affair or push it quickly to its logical conclusion, a dénouement in which O’Brien would become by proxy the sort of gentleman he had so often played on the stage, and Susan, sinking down to Kitty Fisher level, would be debarred from London drawing-rooms as a ruined woman. Once they had taken the decision, O’Brien provided the stage directions, complete with mysterious stranger. ‘Your coming away I have planned in this manner; for you to be at Miss Read’s at ten o’clock and send away your servants and bid your man go home and bring you a cap or something which may make him think you are sitting for your picture and will take him one way while you go the other. Then walk to the china shop at the corner of
St. James St., where you will find a friend of mine who will put you into a chair, or if you think it better I’ll be there myself in a Hackney coach and bring you away to the church … my friend, if you think it the best way, will be dressed up in a plain green suit of clothes, by which you will be able to know him.’

Susan and O’Brien were married on 6 April 1764, in St George’s Covent Garden leaving hastily as soon as the ceremony was over for the safety of O’Brien’s villa at Dunstable in Bedfordshire. There they stayed for a few days not knowing what to do: no script had been written for this sort of affair. Five years before, the Lennoxes’ cousin, Lady Caroline Keppel, had eloped with her doctor, Robert Adair. That had been smoothed over eventually. Adair was, after all, a popular and successful surgeon. But an actor provoked desperation in Susan’s relatives. Lord and Lady Ilchester immediately denounced their daughter. Sarah thought it prudent to deny her own part in the affair, telling Susan, ‘I hope you will own I try’d to prevent what I hope in God will turn out better than is likely (in all human probability) this unfortunate step will.’ Louisa with no guilt to bear was more charitable. As she told Sarah, ‘I cannot think her wrong; you know my opinion of them kind of things is not a usual one, and I know it is an opinion that does not agree with the common ways of doing well in the world; but I do think that marrying the person you like is so much the first thing to be considered that everything else ought to give way to that.’ Henry and Caroline Fox, remembering their own elopement, said the same. Everyone else demanded that, as a first step, O’Brien leave the stage. Even when he had done so, however, nobody could countenance the newly wed couple in the family circle.

The O’Briens considered moving to Ireland, but Kildare and Conolly refused to receive them. Next a scheme was canvassed to find O’Brien a job in the East India Company and then pack them off to Madras. Susan angrily rejected this suggestion and scandalised everyone not only by failing to show
remorse for her actions but also by demanding support and money. Her parents refused both. After several tense weeks, Fox came up with a compromise that would placate his angry brother and satisfy the errant couple: he would give them a yearly annuity of £400 and buy them some land in New York if they would go to live in America and O’Brien left the theatre to set up as gentleman farmer. Outcast and penniless, Susan had little choice but to agree, but she made up for her capitulation by displaying the minimum of gratitude. The O’Briens landed in New York in September 1764 and for the next few years Sarah regularly received letters denouncing the philistine barbarity of the colonists, the lack of opportunity for newcomers, the harshness of the climate and their own extreme poverty. The O’Briens gradually came to share the colonists’ political views, but they disliked New York and failed to prosper. Most of their energy was dissipated looking eastwards, plotting their return.

Crises like that of Susan’s elopement with O’Brien produced a flurry of letters. Letters went between Holland House and Carton, Carton and Goodwood, Goodwood and Castletown, Castletown and Barton; each day the post brought fresh outpourings of sympathy and anxiety. While the sisters did not express any kind of joint opinion, they wrote round to report the news and to reassure one another of their constancy, shocked into a renewed appreciation of their loving relationships and family solidity. Support was especially important in this case for Sarah, because she had been implicated in Susan’s affair. In the face of London gossip about her complicity, and in full knowledge of her guilt, Sarah needed her sisters to demonstrate their love for her. So she wrote to Louisa, expressing her distress at the reports that were circulating about her, trusting her sister to bolster her self-esteem. Louisa replied on cue: ‘if people’s cursed tongues go on talking, make yourself easy, for as ’tis impossible for anything to behave better than you did, you may be sure ’tis only spite and envy
of your dear, sweet face; it can be nothing else when they find fault with the best heart, the most heavenly good mind and the strongest attachment to their husband and the best disposed creature in the world, all which I most sincerely think you are my dear sweet Sally.’ Ominously, only two years after Sarah’s marriage, Louisa felt it necessary to lay particular stress not only on Sarah’s innocence but also on her good wifely behaviour.

Bolstering Sarah’s flagging sense of her own worth in this way was one of Louisa’s roles within the family. Whenever there was a period of difficulty Louisa had always offered unconditional love. But such expressions of affection were integral to the Lennox sisters’ idea of themselves; very few of their letters were without them. In spite of their marriages and children, Caroline and Emily, Louisa and Sarah continued to think of themselves as sisters, whose lives were complementary and entwined. ‘It is such a pleasure to have a dear sister one’s friend,’ Emily wrote once to Caroline. Sarah cherished the idea of her sisters being her friends in old age, saying ‘nothing but a mother or a sister can inspire that sort of friendship that occupies the mind so much late in life.’ Sisterhood and the love it brought was always there. They thought of one another in good and bad times alike; in disaster they wanted to be close together.

Louisa’s position amongst her siblings was the most serene. In her long life she never had any lasting quarrel with any of them. None the less, Emily held the emotional high ground. Caroline loved Emily with great intensity; she was her confidante and childhood companion. Caroline, unlike Emily, had known very little of Louisa and Sarah as they grew up at Carton, and she tended to see Emily and herself as a pair to which the younger sisters were subsidiary. There were twenty years between Caroline and Louisa and, for Caroline, they made a distance which could be greatly lessened by familiarity but never erased. Emily was the bridge between Caroline and the younger members of the family. Caroline was her special
friend, and yet she also commanded the affections of her younger sisters as second mother and sister. Louisa was eight when she came to Carton, Sarah six and little Cecilia scarcely a year old. Emily became the linchpin of their lives, mother and sister combined. Louisa, writing to her brother the third Duke of Richmond in 1768, when she was twenty-four, he thirty-three and Emily thirty-seven, explained their feelings. ‘It is one of my sister’s pleasures, the being with her, but if it was not my inclination, I should think it my duty to contribute as much as possible to make her comfortable, for added to the love I have for her as a sister, I owe her that due to a mother and do feel it for her. I must say that I do find her everyday more deserving and more comfortable and more pleasant than anybody.’ Sarah felt the same. Cecilia, born in 1750, had no memory of her English life, and simply called Emily ‘Mama’.

When it came to sharing secrets, Caroline confided in Emily. Everyone else confessed to Louisa when the burden of their own lives became too heavy. But sisterhood was not simply a matter of sharing troubles; sometimes it was found not in confidences but in lies. Nobody, for instance, told Louisa what they thought of Conolly. When she first arrived in London with her husband in 1759, Louisa wrote to Emily: ‘Pray, my dear sister, let me know honestly what my sister Caroline, and Mr. Fox say and think of Mr. Conolly … Though I have watched them I have not cleverness enough to know how it is with them.’ In her heart Louisa knew the answer. She called her husband ‘poor dear Tom Conolly’ as well as ‘my angel’ and ‘my dear Thomas’. But she would never hear these epithets offered by one of her sisters. Thus a fiction of regard was created, a fiction that maintained Louisa’s self-respect and cordial sisterly relations and, in the course of time, allowed fondness to supersede initial disdain. This fictitious web bound the sisters together; by 1768 Caroline could say of Conolly, ‘he seems to have the best heart in the world.’ So love grew on a carefully nurtured bed of concealment. Hoping for a similar transformation, Louisa
constantly expressed a fondness for Sir Charles Bunbury which she did not feel, saying, ‘my love to Mr Bunbury’, ‘I beg you will give my love to him.’

Despite several serious rifts the Lennox children never surrendered their closeness. It was tested and strengthened by their parents’ early death and it survived the sisters’ absorption into other families. Even Lord George Lennox, often abroad with the army, was welcomed by his siblings whenever he returned to the family fold, although few of his sisters spent much time with him and Sarah said he had ‘a remarkable, obstinate, vain and ponderous mind’. During serious illness or moments of danger like childbirth, the siblings called on one another for comfort and distraction. In crises the family closed ranks and did its best to stay together. Even comparative strangers noticed and commented upon what Louisa called ‘the Lennox affection for one another’.