Aristocrats (36 page)

Ostensibly Caroline had chosen Naples as their destination for Henry’s sake. But she found plenty to do beyond her hostess’s duties. Ruins were her speciality. Pompeii and Herculanium were close by, bountiful founts for speculation, moralising and imagining the past. In fact Caroline was a good deal more enthusiastic about Naples than her husband. At sixty-one, he was bored and tired of life, practising not the art of the connoisseur but the
ars morendi
, the art of dying in style. ‘My distemper is incurable,’ he wrote, ‘it is, I find, old age.’ ‘I have no symptom of asthma, dropsy or distemper. I am in no pain, in no danger, but now and then very languid,
and growing feeble, I think, in mind as well as body. I manage both extremely; sitting as now in the warm and clear sunshine and thinking of nothing that can (I won’t say vex me) but even employ the understanding of a boy above ten years old.’ Gradually, almost against his own wishes, Lord Holland revived. He began teasing his new daughter-in-law and jotting down verses. By the time he and Caroline went back over the Alps in April 1767, Henry was scribbling couplets all the way, one of which described his life as a retired statesman in Virgilian terms: ‘resolved my life to spend / in idle cheerfulness the Muses’ friend.’

Switzerland was the Foxes’ last stop. Henry and Caroline paused there only to visit Voltaire at Ferney, and then hurried on to Paris, Calais, Kingsgate and home. Charles Fox and William Fitzgerald stayed on the Continent, the former to perfect Italian and his amatory strategy, the latter to continue the Grand Tour and his military training. William was an un-enthusiastic tourist, seeing the sights, doing his lessons but always longing to go home. Emily complained that his letters were unintelligible and had to ask Caroline how he spent his time.

Before he left Naples, William bought several copies of Sir William Hamilton’s book of etchings of Etruscan vases. One went to Castletown where Sarah and Louisa used it extensively in their decorative schemes for the long gallery. He also sent home the first of many Grand Tour consignments, a mixture of antiques, curios and junk, ‘a box with some lava, snuff boxes and a bit of different sort of stuff that comes out of Vesuvius’, whose contents were shared amongst the Black Rock and Carton children.

From Naples William and his tutor Bolle travelled to Rome, the epicentre of the Grand Tour, where he dutifully studied mathematics and dancing, hunted for antiquities and kissed the Pope’s toe (‘NB,’ he wrote, ‘it was very sweet’). But he felt as if he was suffering an exile rather than an education and in May 1767, when he had been abroad for nearly a
year he wrote home, ‘I must own Cecilia’s letter makes me wish myself at Waterstone, but as people can’t always have their wishes I am very happy as I am. You still make me more happy with the thoughts of your being content with my conduct.’

Pronouncing Rome ‘rather a dull place’ William and Bolle made for Florence. There William hired Conolly’s old Italian tutor, attended ‘conversazione’ held by the British Minister Sir Horace Mann, bought vases and copies of Old Masters and amused himself with six or seven other Old Etonians who had converged on the city. Just as William was beginning to enjoy himself, Emily received a letter from Caroline saying that young men only went there for two things, art (or virtue, as it was called) and sex (or gallantry as she dubbed it). Since William’s interests obviously lay with the latter rather than the former it might, she said, be time to move him to Germany before he became a
cicisbeo
to an Italian woman and stayed for ever.

Emily reacted swiftly. ‘As to the voyage to Vienna, [it] came a little abruptly,’ William wrote in the autumn of 1767. He did move on, but managed to spin out the journey, lingering in Turin and making a detour to Nice where Caroline and Henry were spending the winter. Not until November 1768 did he finally arrive on Teutonic soil, settling in Vienna for a winter’s worth of military training. By then he felt he was on his way home. Dresden, with its famous picture collection and the china factory at Meissen, where William was surprised to see ‘many girls painting’, and Berlin (‘swarming with soldiers’) were followed by a quick swing through south Germany and Switzerland. The Grand Tour ended where it had begun, in France. In May 1769, almost three years after they set out, William and Bolle were back in Lyons, physically and financially exhausted.

While she was in Naples, Caroline received disturbing reports
about Sarah, who was in Paris with Bunbury and Lord Carlisle. Caroline described Carlisle not only as Charles Fox’s friend but as ‘Sally’s cicisbeo’, adding, ‘’tis a sweet youth’. Nobody, except himself, took Carlisle’s passion for Sarah seriously. Much more worrying were the new alliances that she struck up in Paris. Caroline wrote to Emily, who had passed on Sarah’s reports of a crowd of foppish young men, ‘I am sorry dear Sal says I imposed on her un fagot de jeunes Français, because it makes me fear she has been flirting with some of them.’ Sarah had been happy in Paris before. Now that Caroline was away and Holland House lent to the Duke of Richmond she was without her London base and she decided to return to Paris, eager to recapture such self-esteem as the admiration of the
saloniers
could give her.

Sarah went to Paris in a mood that combined ‘low spirits’ with reckless abandon. After four years of marriage her self-hatred was as biting as ever. She described herself as a ‘pig’, fat and brutish and, before she left, shut herself away in her rooms at Barton for four weeks with a ‘nervous fever’. Rousing herself from this torpor, she sparkled and flirted in Parisian drawing-rooms, eclipsing her husband and earning the censure of Madame du Deffand. It was as if, having maintained for years the fiction of her happy marriage, Sarah now determined to make its failure quite clear, acting the part of bored wife and Parisian coquette to the hilt.

The group in which Sarah moved was made up of relatives and associates of Caroline’s friends the Duc de Choiseul and the Prince de Conti. They were the court’s radicals, many belonging to the Club à l’Anglaise, aping English manners and declaring their adherence to English liberties. Prominent among them was the Duc de Lauzun, a Parisian Casanova who prided himself on seducing the beauties of the day. Bored with his current mistress Madame de Cambise (who went on to become the mistress of the Duke of Richmond), Lauzun determined to practise his skills on Sarah, writing in his memoirs: ‘she is tall; her figure is inclined to stoutness, her
hair of the most elegant black and of a perfect growth; her bosom of dazzling whiteness and fresh as rose leaves. Eyes full of fire and character spoke the seductive and artless graces of her mind … Lady Sarah was kind, sensitive, frank, not to say impulsive, but unfortunately coquettish and fickle.’ Lauzun described Sarah in terms as predictable as her behaviour was to become.

For two months Sarah flirted and lost at cards, attended by her husband, Lauzun and an increasingly desperate Lord Carlisle. Madame du Deffand, reporting to an eager Horace Walpole, concluded that Sarah had ‘some secret motives’ for her behaviour, adding shrewdly, ‘she seeks diversion’. She was right: it was not that Sarah wanted a lover, it was that she no longer wanted her husband. Lauzun was baffled. Her flirtations led him on but gave him no reward. ‘Lady Sarah loved me warmly and granted me nothing,’ he wrote in his memoirs, claiming that Sarah told him, ‘As we [Englishwomen] choose our husbands, it is less permissible to us not to love them, and the crime of deceiving them is never forgiven us.’ Underlying this remark was guilt that she no longer loved her husband and might deceive him.

Sarah was teetering on the edge of the precipice of adultery all through her Paris stay, half willing herself back, half throwing herself over. She had nothing and everything to lose: nothing of her husband’s love or her own self-esteem, everything of society’s approbation. Lacking the confidence that Caroline and Emily had to make their own rules, Sarah clung unhappily to rules that others made for her, already tormenting herself for breaking them. She wanted to be an irreproachable wife, to have children, love her husband and run her household. Even a discreet affair of the sort Emily and Caroline readily countenanced in their friends would shatter that illusion. And Sarah was not discreet. If she was going to have a lover she would conform to the most lurid pictures painted of adulteresses. For her there was no middle way, she was unable to flout the clichés of social relationships. She could either be the good wife or the flagrant whore.
As she flirted in Paris Sarah came to realise that she had already ceased to be the former. So it was only a matter of time before she was flamboyantly and disastrously unfaithful.

Letters and her sisters were her last lifeline. With their help she might avoid the precipice. When she came back to Barton in the spring of 1767, Sarah sent Louisa a string of letters that were replete with hints about her behaviour and emphasised her self-reproach and low spirits. Louisa and Emily failed to take these cries for help seriously. Just as they had deceived themselves about her marriage, so they now deceived themselves about its collapse, abandoning Sarah when she needed them most, hoping against hope for discretion and an affair which could be contained within the bounds of gallantry.

Sarah inferred that her behaviour in Paris had been balanced on a knife edge between flirtation and adultery. Louisa buried the revelation, replying ‘low spirits proceed from the body’s not being well, and in order to compose yourself, fix that in your mind and don’t torment yourself with thinking you have done this thing or t’other thing wrong, or foolishly, in short don’t take yourself to task when you feel low spirited.’ Louisa concluded that in Paris Sarah was simply ‘extremely diverted and was taken up with … amusements and never had one bad thought about anybody or anything the whole time.’

Although Louisa’s reply did not invite further confidences, Sarah continued to drop hints about her state of mind throughout the spring of 1767. They increased after Lauzun visited Barton in March and Bunbury left for Bath complaining of a bad stomach. In his memoirs Lauzun claimed that while Bunbury was away, Sarah had at last given in to him and they became lovers. Sarah did not admit it, but her letters to Castletown became so disquieting that Louisa put them to the flame. ‘I burnt your note instantly,’ she wrote to Sarah in March; and again in May, ‘I have burnt your letter.’ Meanwhile Louisa’s admonitions to happiness continued, although by May a note of warning had crept into them, a suggestion
that Sarah owed it to herself and to others to be happy. ‘I hope you are cheerful, for indeed you must always be that, for it is wrong in a Dear heart like yours to be otherwise, for its showing oneself dissatisfied which I am sure you have no reason to be.’ Thus another burden, that of failing to do her duty by those who loved her, was laid on Sarah’s sinking heart.

Lauzun did not stay long at Barton. He claimed in his memoirs that Sarah became rapidly disenchanted with him. Bunbury came back from Bath, Lauzun returned to Paris. In June Sarah and Bunbury went to Spa in Belgium to take the waters. He still had a stomach complaint, she was ‘wore to death with routing’ as she put it to Susan and was, besides, still seeking distraction. ‘My spirits are vastly lowered since you saw me,’ she wrote to Susan in New York.

Spa continued the slide. Sarah danced, drank and gambled, easing herself into her new role as a woman of dubious reputation. She wrote to Selwyn of her cheerfulness, but she did not enjoy her own transgression and the more she flirted the more her self-hatred increased. Even Bunbury began to take a sardonic interest in his wife’s activities. Dragging himself away from billiards, faro and quinze, Bunbury wrote a few lines to Selwyn. ‘I cannot help … sending you two lines of the satire that has been made here, as a specimen of the poetical abilities of the author. Speaking of Lady Sarah’s finery he says,

For as for Shrewsbury’s, and all such trumpery,

To them she prefers her black-legged Bunbury.

The author very probably had lost money to me, and paid me thus.’ No one, Bunbury implied, would suggest that Sarah loved her husband unless he had an ulterior and, probably, financial motive.

By the autumn of 1767, when they returned from Spa, Sarah’s reputation had sunk low enough for gossip to spread
both across the Atlantic and across the pages of London’s scandal sheets. When Susan picked it up she acted with characteristic directness. Far from pretending as Sarah’s sisters did that nothing was happening, Susan confronted Sarah with the stories. But it was by now too late for Sarah to grasp the lifeline. She wrote defensively, ‘I have not at present any guess of what or how you have heard of me. I know what might be the foundation of many stories, but they must have been improved I fancy, before they could reach so far. I do not desire to hear any more particulars.’ But she added sadly, ‘that I have in every action of my life kept up the very good education I have had is, I fear, too much for me to say.’ In the autumn and winter of 1767–68, Sarah was up in London often dining at Holland House and then going on to Richmond House for cards and chat. In October, Caroline, Henry and Charles Fox, with the disconsolate Carlisle in tow, left for Paris and Nice. After that Sarah went to Richmond House more frequently. Besides her brother and the Duchess there was often another man, Lord William Gordon, who quickly joined her circle of admirers.

Still the gossip about Sarah persisted. Rumours of a number of lovers, a story of an affair with an actor, another of an assignation in a Covent Garden
bagnio
: these were the stuff of gossip columns and stories in the sorts of monthly magazines Sarah herself used to read, the
Town and Country Magazine
and, going down a peg, the
Covent Garden Journal
. Sarah’s life, or the rumours that swirled around it, eventually did become material for scandal sheets, and its plot line was remarkably similar to the ‘true stories’ found in fiction sections of magazines like the
Town and Country
, whose titles bore less than subtle witness to their subject matter: ‘The Beauty Punished: A Moral Tale’, ‘The Dastardly Lover’, ‘The Wrong Sister’, ‘The Unfortunate Relapse: A Moral Tale’. Such stories, as Sarah knew well, had one, very simple plot. They told of innocence corrupted and pushed from disaster to destitution or death.