Aristocrats (37 page)

Sarah had played the part of tragic heroine often enough. She had been Jane Shore, the wronged queen, at Holland House theatricals in 1763 when she was eighteen, and she had played Cleopatra in Dryden’s
All For Love
at Ste Fox’s house in Wiltshire. But now, at twenty-two, she seemed bent on descending from heroically tragic parts to the sordidity of second-rate popular fiction, in which heroines died without the catharsis to which higher dramatic forms aspired.

In the spring of 1768, Louisa came to England and stayed at Barton with Sarah. Bunbury was away once more, but Lord William Gordon was staying. When Louisa left for Castletown in April he was still there and as spring turned to summer she was writing, ‘pray always make my compliments to Lord William if he is still with you because you know what a favourite of mine he is.’

Eventually Lord William went back to London. At the end of May Sarah sat down in her closet at Barton and wrote two letters, one to Susan in New York, the other to Louisa at Castletown. Her first letter hit a note of frenetic chat. ‘My dear Lady Susan … I’m vastly glad to hear you don’t know what low spirits are, ’tis a sign you are very well, but I hear you are grown very fat; do you know I’m not the least altered since you saw me, neither fatter nor thinner.’ The second was very different, although it explained Sarah’s preoccupation with her body’s shape. It revealed that she was pregnant.

When Sarah announced her pregnancy the family reacted as if the rumours about her behaviour in the last two years had been just stories in the wind. Congratulations poured into Barton from Goodwood, from Stoke in Sussex where Lord George Lennox lived with his wife Louisa and the beginnings of a large family, from Carton and from Castletown. Only Caroline gave any hint of anxiety. She acknowledged that there might be some truth in the tales that still swirled around London, although she refused to make any connection between the rumours and the possible parentage of Sarah’s child. ‘Our dear sweet amiable Sally with the best of hearts,
and the most delightful good qualities, which makes me love her as well as I do my own children, has, at least I fear she has, … an imprudence in her conduct which makes our ill natured world abuse her most unmercifully.’ This oblique statement was as far as Caroline would go. After that she followed Bunbury’s lead in saying nothing and hoping that after six barren years the marriage had come to fruition.

Now and again Caroline had to dampen rumour and assure Emily that there was no truth in ‘the ill-natured stories about [Sarah] that may have reached Ireland’. Emily and Louisa, responding to the hint, concentrated entirely on practical details and expressions of joy. Mingled with their delight was the hope that a child would domesticate Sarah. Louisa wrote at the beginning of July 1768: ‘it is absolutely impossible for you to guess, my sweet Sally, at the pleasure I must feel in thinking of your situation.’ Emily ‘is as much delighted; she enjoys for you the thought of your home being made so delightful to you … Not but that you were very happy before, but this will be such an addition, and we both agree in thinking of the comfort of it to you, so much more than in the worldly consideration of your having an heir for the estate, tho’ that is pleasant too.’

In this way the act of collective self-deception that was Sarah’s life ran on. Louisa dreamed of Sarah’s child, ‘a little girl just like yourself running about in a white frock and a long blue ribbon in its cap.’ Contrary to conventional longing, no one seemed very eager for a boy, least of all Sarah herself, who had always loved the Carton boys more than their sisters. At the back of everyone’s minds was the property law: if Sarah’s child was not her husband’s it was better that it should be a girl than a boy who would inherit the Bunbury lands and title without a genuine right.

Such fears were replaced by practical advice as the time of Sarah’s lying-in approached. Louisa and Cecilia Lennox prepared to travel to London to be with Sarah during the birth and the confinement. Cecilia, now aged eighteen, had seen
plenty of babies. They had been born constantly around her in Dublin and, she said, she understood them, ‘better than anybody, and won’t let it be swathed and pinned and rolled up tight like a bundle but let it be all loose like Mama’s children and not allow one pin to be about it.’ Sarah went to Brighton and Goodwood in the early months of her pregnancy, travelling up to London in October. She hired Mrs Moss, the nurse-keeper Emily used when she lay in in London, arranged a room for the birth, told her doctor to expect the baby sometime in November and, tired and very large, awaited its arrival.

18–19 December 1768

Sarah lay in a bath. Her belly rose like an island out of the warm water. She twisted and turned, trying to distract herself from the itching rash that covered her body. As she wallowed, exhausted by her weight and a succession of broken nights, the light in the room darkened. Maids brought candles and stoked up the fire. Soon afterwards her labour began.

She watched herself, as if from a great distance, travel up the hill of pain, dragged up to the top, exhaling and sliding trembling down the other side. People around her – the doctors, Louisa holding her hand – receded as she climbed away from them and came closer again when she reached the bottom. As the contractions came more quickly she stopped watching and the times of waiting on the plateau got shorter. Time stretched out into red seconds, refusing to move on. Hours seemed to pass and the doctors were still looking inside her, peering, consulting, feeling. When they said push, she began to push, sinking her mind into her abdomen, becoming a great muscle, forcing the burden out. Slithering and then rushing on a tide of blood the baby was born.

Sarah’s milk came in quantity. But her nipples, sunk into the engorged breasts, refused to pop out. The baby, christened Louisa in the Holland House chapel, fed weakly,
snatching at the breast, unable to hang on long enough to bring the milk down. Hurriedly, to Sarah’s distress, a wet nurse was found. Soon little Louisa Bunbury nestled and grunted against a surrogate bosom. She sucked, slept and grew folds of fat and dimples. Sarah slept too. Lying among the pillows she was, to the casual observer, the image of contented motherhood. She adored her child and recovered well from labour. Caroline visited her sister constantly and reported to Emily that Sarah ‘is grown vastly fat during her pregnancy; looks beautiful, the very picture of my poor mother.’

Belying the scene of contented nurturing was an air of frenetic concern. The house in Spring Gardens bulged with anxiety. Caroline admitted that she felt ‘worried and uncomfortable’. Louisa Conolly was in a kind of trance, busy with practical details, scurrying about on the surface of life. Cecilia Lennox, who had come to take care of the baby, often found herself alone in the drawing-room while Sarah and her husband stayed in their apartments.

In the privacy of her chamber Sarah wept and confessed, tormenting herself with guilt and self-hatred. Charles Bunbury knew (and so it emerged did Caroline, Louisa, and most of London, from ladies-in-waiting to gutter journalists) that Lord William Gordon had been Sarah’s lover for some time. He also knew that Louisa Bunbury was not his child. Something had always been wrong in his sexual relationship with Sarah. Whatever it was, it precluded conception. Bunbury was either impotent or uninterested or both. Gordon and Sarah were neither. Husband, wife and lover all knew that little Louisa was a cuckoo in the Bunbury nest.

Bunbury offered to bring Louisa up as his own child if Sarah would renounce Gordon and stay with him. He wanted to avoid public humiliation and besides, the baby, belching and blowing in the nursery above him, might be his only chance of a family. Sarah rejected the proposal and was unmoved by the entreaties of Caroline and Louisa, who grasped
at this way of saving her from destitution and scandal. She was drunk with guilt. Guilt was Sarah’s aphrodisiac and it was a perfect accessory to her self-hatred. She was determined upon her own downfall and all efforts to save her from herself were fruitless. When Bunbury offered her a lifeline, she produced a multitude of reasons for refusing it. ‘To breed up another’s child in Sir Charles’ house, to be looked upon as a virtuous woman, she could not bear.’ ‘Self-reproach stung her to death,’ she said. Besides, Gordon had a right to his own child and it would be better if she left her husband and went to him.

Chapter 4

Disaster and Renewal

PART ONE

‘’tis a most strange, dreadful and horrid affair’.

Caroline to Emily, 21 February 1769.

Christmas came joylessly. In the house in Spring Gardens birth seemed little cause for celebration. Conolly arrived from Ireland and took Cecilia Lennox down to Goodwood. The Fox brothers left Caroline’s house in Piccadilly and went to Ste’s estate in Wiltshire to eat, drink, hunt and gamble away the holidays. Charles Bunbury left London to spend Christmas with his family at Barton. At the New Year Louisa left too, joining Conolly, Cecilia and her brothers at Goodwood. Only Caroline stayed on in London, nervously guarding Sarah against gossip and flight. She knew that Gordon was close at hand, but even her vigilance could not stop him walking back and forth in the Privy Garden in the hope of seeing Sarah and his child. Sarah saw him out of the window one day in early January, when Caroline was not with her. She called Gordon in to see the child and instantly fell back into what she called the ‘delirium’ of her passion for him.

Caroline thought she had done her job of chaperoning well enough to leave with Lord Holland for Wiltshire as soon as
Bunbury returned from Barton and Cecilia came up from Goodwood. At the end of January Sarah left her house in Spring Gardens and went with Cecilia, the baby and its nurse to Suffolk, where the Bunbury family was assembled to greet its newest member. Her husband stayed in London.

At Barton Sarah’s moods swung wildly. The euphoria of the birth had worn off and she was often remote and distracted. Cecilia felt neglected, having to sit with Bunbury’s sister Mrs Soames while Sarah stayed in her own rooms or trudged about the grounds by herself. The disaster came on Sunday 19 February, arriving slowly and then gathering other events and people into itself like a snowball picking up everything in its path. At first it was Sarah’s disgrace, then Bunbury’s, then a collapse which engulfed the whole extended Lennox family.

Sarah went out for a walk and never came back. Cecilia and the Soameses waited through the morning hours and on into dinner time, when a note finally arrived for Mr Soames from Sarah ‘taking leave of them for ever’, as Caroline put it later. Sarah had left not only tiny Louisa, but also Cecilia Lennox, stranded amongst strangers who were angry and distraught. In the grounds she had met Lord William and they had left Suffolk hurrying south. After crossing the Thames into Kent, they arrived in the afternoon at Knole, a rambling mansion lent to them by their friend the Duke of Dorset. Knole was big enough to hide the most conspicuous of runaways, but Sarah did not bother or even wish to conceal her whereabouts. She sent a note to Caroline in which she begged for her child, apologised for her deeds and explained where she was.

Sarah was bent on ruining her reputation in the most public way possible. Only a few days after her flight from Barton, newspapers which had collected evidence against her, disappointed of their expectations of a large fee to keep quiet, began to publicise her story. The
Chronicle
, a London scandal sheet, printed a summary of a letter purportedly written by Sarah to her husband. ‘A very sensible and pathetic letter has
been received from a lady lately absconded, in which she acknowledges great gratitude to the person to whom it was addressed; and that the step she has at present taken was in consequence of so strong an attachment to a certain Gentleman, that had she not pursued this measure it might have affected her life; that therefore, finding it impossible to be happy without the possession of that gentleman, she thought proper thus publicly to withdraw herself rather than clandestinely to raise to the name and fortune of the former person a number of illegitimate children; and this resolution still further led her to confess her suspicions respecting her last child.’

Once she had left her husband Sarah and her story entered the public world. She became not just a source of trouble to her family but also a juicy item of news. In coffee houses and taverns, in modest parlours and spacious libraries, men and women pored over the details of her life, sighed at or sympathised with her folly and recounted the story to their friends. Sarah had neither the money nor the desire to pay newspapers to keep silent; they were just one of the ways in which she was allowing herself to be punished. Scandal turned Sarah instantly into what she called herself at the nadir of her self-hatred, ‘la peste publique’.

Any aristocratic scandal was valuable to newspapers at a time when many readers were openly hostile both to the idea of aristocratic government and to the idea of aristocratic sexual licence and saw the corruption of one reflected in the corruption of the other. But Sarah’s story, as the
Town and Country Magazine
made clear in a detailed account of the affair published in April 1769, was especially good copy because of her own royal blood and her unfortunate connection with the reigning monarch. The
Town and Country
went so far as to hint that Sarah only married Bunbury ‘through pique and disappointment’ because she had failed to win a far bigger prize, and concluded with salacious piety, ‘rank and beauty have been her ruin’. Sarah’s life had become
a source of half-envious ridicule for respectable readers, a text for the titillation of the prudish and a vehicle for anti-government commentators who were riding high after their champion John Wilkes’s election for Middlesex the previous year. The
Town and Country
concluded its account with a moral which excused its own symbiotic relationship to the events it condemned: ‘the world are now divided in their opinion whether B— deserves most pity or contempt. This we shall leave the reader to determine; only observing, that this history may serve as a lesson to deter the vainglorious part of mankind from choosing their helpmates for life from motives of false ambition or, having chosen them, to pay less attention to their wives than their horses.’