Aristocrats (35 page)

By the time they were twelve the Black Rock children, as they quickly came to be called, could write their own apologies and endearments to their mother. Before they could write, Emily relied on Ogilvie to copy down requests for presents and expressions of love. Letters from Frescati were filled
with tender messages. ‘I asked [Lucy] if she would send a kiss to Mama and she said yes, yes, yes, dear Mama, where is Mama? Why don’t she come, give Lucy raisins – Lucy want Mama.’ ‘Eddy will write Monday and bids me tell your Grace that he dotes on you and hopes you will take care of yourself. I asked Lucy what I should say to Mama for her and she told me, “Lucy good, Love her mama. Raisins and cakes, and for Louisa,” and kisses me very pleasantly.’

Glimpses of plump, bare bottoms, sounds of kissing lips and pictures of tight hugs and squeezes rose off the pages of Ogilvie’s letters. As he wrote out the children’s thousands of kisses, was he adding his own desires to theirs, making of their messages an amatory code and conducting with Emily an epistolary romance every bit as illicit and delicious as that of Julie and Saint Preux in
La Nouvelle Héloïse
? His letters seemed to throb with double meanings. ‘We received the asparagus and we told Lucy who sent them to her. She is very far from forgetting your Grace. She puts her little arms about my neck and squeezes and kisses me very often to show me how she will hug her dearest mama.’ The most innocuous reports might be amorous messages. When, for instance, Ogilvie wrote about the children tumbling in the hay, he must have known that hay making (as comments about Sarah hay making in Holland House park had shown) not only had idyllic connotations but also sexual overtones. If Ogilvie’s notes were love letters in disguise, their message could only mean one thing: that he passionately desired their recipient and he wanted her to know it.

Perhaps Emily made the first advance. Perhaps it was between the lines rather than between the sheets that the approach was made and the affair was for some time epistolary and not physical. But by 1771 Emily and her awkward tutor with the outdated wig and the despised Scottish accent were in love. For Emily romantic love was a newly defined and a newly felt emotion and one that was tumultuous and devastating, wreaking havoc with the way she perceived and
organised her life. Instead of admitting the affair to her friends and sisters, as she might have done if it had been a flirtation with an Irish peer or an English earl, Emily hid her passion, nourishing it in secret with letters and notes. It was an epistolary passion worthy of
La Nouvelle Héloïse
itself. Deception, unnecessary for well managed flirtations, was at the heart of Emily’s new feeling. Only Mrs Lynch the housekeeper and Rowley, Emily’s maid, knew what was going on, and they were well rewarded for their connivance. Bound tightly together with paper, pens and sealing wax, Emily and Ogilvie deceived everyone, the Duke, the children and her sisters alike, and created for themselves a secret world where their romance flourished and grew unchecked.

PART THREE

‘Are you not delighted with our dear little Sally’s thinking herself with child?’

Caroline to Emily, 14 June 1768.

‘I am very glad you have bought that place at the Black Rock,’ wrote Emily’s seventeen-year-old son and heir, the Marquis of Kildare, in 1766. William was much too old to benefit from the Black Rock regime. By 1766 he had left Eton, a plump and hesitant young man whose lack of aptitudes and ambition were unfavourably compared with the shining talents of his cousin Charles Fox. While he remained the second son, Emily and the Duke regarded William’s rotund simplicity as endearing. But when Ophaly died in 1765, William became his father’s heir and something had to be done with him. His parents debated their son’s future. In the summer of 1766 Emily consulted Caroline who recommended a foreign military academy. But the Duke despaired, writing from London where he had gone to consult William about his plans: ‘Indeed my Emily, I am always glad to hear your opinion upon every subject and particularly about the children, who you
know are equally in our care. Of all the difficulties I was ever under, what to do with William is the greatest I ever had, or I hope shall ever have, and yet there is no harm in him … In regard to geography, mathematics and what is called belles letters, how is it possible to do more than advise him at his age?… It is to be hoped, as parts break out at different ages, his will some time or other.’

Eventually it was agreed that William would go to a military academy in France and from there would set out on the Grand Tour, a journey which would, the Duke hoped, give him a patina of learning and manners. For the first few months of the Grand Tour William would have company because the Fox family had decided to travel
en masse
to Italy in the autumn of 1766.

After the success of her trips to Paris in 1764 and 1765, Caroline was prepared to venture further afield. She had many motives for her journey and its destination. Ste Fox, recently married to Mary Fitzpatrick, a tiny, intelligent girl much to Caroline’s liking, wanted to resume his continental peregrinations. Charles Fox was attracted by the literary and amatory reputation of Italy, and Henry Fox was prepared to spend a winter in the Mediterranean for his health. Caroline wanted desperately to keep her husband interested enough in life to pull himself out of his trough of boredom and morbidity and Italy excited her because she would, she hoped, see her Roman history books come to life there. ‘I love the notion of seeing all the places one has read of in Roman history, where great men have been and great things done,’ she explained to Emily.

Paris had prompted Caroline to new areas of reading and study. After 1764 she supplemented her reading of novels and histories with travel writings and maps, spending hours with big maps spread out on her desk in a window seat in her apartment. ‘I wanted some new reading to be interested about, having read so much in my lifetime, and story books begin to tire me; besides they are read in a minute, and the
passion I have taken for maps and geography with this new kind of reading make it quite a business.’ Now Caroline wanted to see some of the countries she read about although she worried about the length of the journey and especially about crossing the Alps, an ascent which few English women hazarded, despite the well publicised bravado of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who had crossed Mont Cenis from France to Italy in September 1739.

Timorous as she was about travel, Caroline was in a buoyant enough mood that summer to lay the spectre of disaster at sea and discomfort on land. She was delighted with Ste’s marriage and with her daughter-in-law. ‘Ste is in such spirits its quite charming to see him,’ she wrote in March. ‘He talks so reasonably about his views with regard to marriage, and he has such delicacy and refinement, in a rational way not a romantic one, that I’m quite charmed with him.’ ‘I do think him lucky with his infirmities (for so one must call his deafness and his size) to get such a delightful girl that loves him. I am indeed vastly satisfied with this match.’ Caroline was not possessive about Ste. She gave him up happily to Mary and, savouring the feeling of age that it brought her, looked forward to being a grandmother.

Lord Holland was cheerful too, calling his son ‘a lucky dog’. Mary Fitzpatrick’s arrival in the family meant another woman to tease with enquiries about sex and pregnancy and to embarrass with saucy couplets and stage whispers. He had had a bout of low spirits and poor health in the spring and Sarah often came over from Spring Gardens to cheer him up. Sometimes Bunbury came too, and Caroline worked hard at liking him. He ‘mends upon acquaintance,’ she told Emily, and ominously stressed how happy he made Sarah. By the summer Lord Holland had recovered and was amusing himself in Kent building follies in the grounds of his Kingsgate estate that, by their decrepitude, appealed to his mordant assessment of his own broken constitution.

Plans for Italy solidified. The group was to be Caroline and
Lord Holland, Charles and Harry Fox, Emily’s William and his tutor Bolle, Ste and his wife Mary, Clotworthy Upton, an old hand at Continental travel, and Sarah, with their servants, carriages and baggage. In the end Sarah did not go, promising herself a Paris trip in the winter instead. The party met at Lyons in October and then divided for the journey to Italy; Charles, William, Bolle and Lord Holland embarked by boat for Marseilles and a sea journey to Naples. Upton, Caroline and Harry left to cross the Alps and descend to Turin and Florence. Mary and Ste went to visit his old haunts in Geneva, promising to meet Caroline’s party before their Alpine crossing. ‘William is very good humoured and agreeable and seems to like us all,’ Caroline wrote to Emily before they set off.

The overland travellers went east from Lyons, followed the Val d’Isère, crossed the southern Alps by Mont Cenis and came down to Susa and Turin on the Italian side. It was not a hazardous journey provided the weather was good, but it was an unfamiliar one to English travellers. Amongst the Foxes’ immediate circle, Horace Walpole had lived to tell the tale and Clotworthy Upton had been to Italy almost a dozen times. The ascent up Mont Cenis was spectacular. Travellers were carried in sedan chairs up a narrow mountain path bounded by rocks and vertiginous precipices by experienced Swiss guides who knew every inch of the terrain and made a living off the mountain’s inhospitable slopes.

‘As for the crossing of Mount Cenis itself,’ Caroline wrote to Emily, ‘I will not attempt to describe it, but refer you to some of your men acquaintances who have done it.’ She admitted to being frightened and uncomfortable, troubled by her period but forced to continue the journey none the less: ‘only think, sweet siss, I was unluckily out of order just the day I passed Mount Cenis.’ When she did pluck up courage to look around her, ‘the sight was indeed glorious’, but scarcely susceptible to the kinds of moral reflections she was so fond of. Her response to the fog, the mountain and the vagaries of her own natural calendar was one of annoyance and fear.

Travelling through Savoy, with its pines, Scots firs, waterfalls and high mountain views, was another matter. Caroline was at ease enough to philosophise and enjoy herself. ‘What a number of reflections such a journey makes one make on the great and wonderful works of the Creator; and also how the love of gain causes us to break through all difficulties. One would imagine no human beings would ever have thought of passing the bounds nature seems there to have placed between France and Savoy; but the silk trade carried on between this place and Lyons has conquered those difficulties and mules loaded with that commodity and others continually pass and repass.’

Caroline looked about her and saw the civilising results of commerce everywhere. Unlike commentators who believed that trade brought nothing but grotesque luxury, debauchery and an abandonment of morals, Caroline believed, like many Whigs and most of her immediate circle, that industriousness improved man’s lot. What happier people could there be than the busy Swiss she asked when she reached Geneva? ‘Tis all bourgeois in this place; one sees everywhere industry, comfort and excessive cleanliness … There are no beggars here, no stealing, no murders or disorders happen; everyone is employed, everyone obliged to keep in their own station.’ Despite her love of the past, Caroline believed that the modern world far surpassed the ancient in education, politics, hygiene, architecture and to crown its achievements had developed the art of printing, in which the Romans had so signally failed.

From Turin Caroline travelled with Ste, Mary, Harry and Upton to Bologna, Florence and Rome, commenting all the way on habits of dress, manners of the Italians (the women she noted censoriously thought only of flirtation, ‘they have no education at all’), landscape and trade. All the time her reading, especially in literature, moulded the way she saw, as she herself was well aware. ‘I could not have imagined anything in the style of the country about Florence, it really
resembles what one reads in story books and fairy tales.
The Traveller
justly observes of Italy “man is the only thing that dwindles there”; perhaps I don’t say it right, but something to that purpose.’

Emily too saw through literature, despite the fact that she had never crossed the English Channel or the Alps. In her mind she saw the Rhône, down which William, Charles and Lord Holland travelled to Marseilles as ‘terrible’, because Madame de Sévigné had called it so. Caroline put her right. ‘There is certainly no danger in that terrible Rhone described by Madame de Sévigné,’ she wrote.

By the middle of November they were in Rome. Caroline was delighted to be there at last, proclaiming the city ‘the heart of Empire, muse of heroes and delight of gods’. As the rest of the party trekked round the ruins, Mary Fox sat to Battoni for the Holland House gallery, wearing a travelling habit and holding a dog. Then they moved on to Naples, met up with the sea travellers and settled down to four months of assemblies, statue collecting and ogling remains. Caroline held a ‘conversazione’ of her own once a week, inviting expatriates and nobles from the Neapolitan court to talk (in French), play cards and keep up Lord Holland’s spirits. As usual she denied any interest in being a hostess, saying simply, ‘I own whether I like people or not I can’t bear not returning civilities in a foreign country.’