Aristocrats (4 page)

Fox was not a handsome man. He was short, stout and pear shaped, weighing in at over twelve stone. His face was dominated by a double chin, a heavy black jaw and eyebrows that jumped out of his face like rippling caterpillars. But this ungainliness was offset by qualities that Caroline found very attractive. He read widely, wrote verses and had a talent for friendship and domesticity. Even his reputation for atheism, gambling and womanising (made flesh in an illegitimate child of a year and another not yet out of the womb, who was born in 1744) were irresistible to her. Here rolled up in one hirsute form was the personification of the forbidden; and Fox offered it all to her with such persuasive charm that she was overwhelmed.

Caroline and Fox had met at Goodwood in the 1730s and on many occasions since in Whitehall drawing-rooms and at the theatre. By the beginning of the next decade Fox was looking for a way out of his bachelor life. His brother Stephen had recently got married (albeit to the thirteen-year-old daughter of one of Fox’s mistresses) and to everyone’s surprise had given up Hervey and settled down to an unimpeachable life as a father and country squire. Fox was mildly envious. He fell in love with Caroline, sensing that she could offer him companionship, devotion and a few good contacts besides.

Caroline’s parents were happy to entertain Fox as a friend but adamant that he was impossible as a suitor. They recoiled from Fox’s naked ambition, his thirst for power and money and his reputation for atheism. They despised his fortune as too little and his presumption as too great. But Fox had made up his mind. Sometime in March 1744 he met Caroline at the
theatre and asked her to marry him. Caroline said neither yes nor no. She replied, true to the etiquette of such proposals, that Henry had her permission to approach her father and seek her hand. But it was an acceptance, however demurely given, and from that moment on Henry’s confidence rarely faltered. He went straight round to the Richmond family box and asked the Duke for an interview. The next day he went to Richmond House and claimed Caroline’s hand. Caroline, he told the Duke, had no objections if he could overcome any scruples her parents might have. And, Fox added triumphantly, ‘she wish’d me success’, which was as near a declaration of love and intent as propriety would allow a woman in her position.

The Duke and Duchess were horrified and furious. Their own arranged marriage had turned out for the best and they planned to choose a suitable husband for their daughter. A paunchy, ex-Tory career politician, whose learning frightened them and whose brother had carried on a long affair with their friend Lord Hervey, was not their idea of an eligible man. The Duchess refused to entertain Fox’s proposal at all, and declared that in six month’s time he would thank her for her perspicacity. ‘What makes her Grace think so I don’t know,’ Fox snorted angrily in reply. The Duke, eager for propriety and dignity, decided to treat the affair as an unfortunate episode that would fade away quietly provided good behaviour was maintained by both sides. He wanted, he wrote to Fox after his visit, to retain his friend’s good opinion. But something suggested to the Duke that Fox was unlikely to retreat to lick his wounds with gentlemanly dignity. So he added a less than subtle threat as well. Fox, he said, should think no more of the affair. It was over and finished. But if he was foolish enough to persist he would be ruined.

Fox was lashed to fury by the phrase. Hiding his anger under the cloak of his charm, he took up his pen against the Duke on 8 March. He was fairly certain that the contest was going to go his way; he was eloquent, determined and angry.
He knew he had a fair amount to lose. The Duke could not ruin him politically, he was not a powerful enough figure in Court or Parliament for that, but he could make his life uncomfortable by cutting off his access to the monarch. On the other hand, Fox had a lot to gain. If the match came off and he could placate the Duke and Duchess, Fox would instantly rise up the social ladder, and if the Duke accepted the marriage he could smooth his way to lucrative offices with a word in the King’s ear. Most of all though, Fox wanted Caroline. It was unfortunate but inevitable that in his tussle with the Duke, Caroline was to be Henry’s main weapon. He knew that the worse he was painted to her, the more Caroline would love him, because it was the idea of him as a wicked and excessive man that had overwhelmed her in the first place.

Fox’s understanding of the nature of Caroline’s love was his strongest card and he played it relentlessly. He knew that the Duke could not understand why Caroline had fallen in love with such an unsuitable man, and in his most bumptious moments he egged the Duke on to denounce him, knowing that it would only make him seem more attractive than ever. He also knew that the Duke was an indulgent father who would never willingly hurt his daughter. ‘Serious, considerate, sincere, older far in mind than in years, with a heart as tender but as firm as ever yet was formed, does your Grace think she could take a fancy lightly? Or that she could ever alter?’ Fox demanded in his letter of 8 March 1744. ‘Indeed, my Lord, she will not, and your Grace is deciding on the happiness or misery of her whole life, not of a few months only.’ He suggested that Richmond try to talk Caroline out of her unhappiness, delighting in getting his adversary to do his work for him. ‘You only can smooth and help her under this affliction. Pray, my dear Lord, find leisure to speak to her some time.’

Fox had a reply to the Duke’s veiled threat of ruin too. Richmond had hinted that Henry was simply too poor to marry Caroline. If Caroline came to him without permission
and without a dowry, Fox would never be able to meet her financial expectations. ‘Surely
ruin
is too strong a word,’ Fox retorted angrily, and folded a statement of his fortune and financial affairs into his letter. The match might not come off, he went on, but ‘I beg you … cast your eye on the inclosed.’ He didn’t want to influence the Duke in his favour, he said, only to point out that ‘you may think me a little less unjustifiable when you see that, tho’ infinitely far from answering her desert or your Grace’s expectations, it would not have been quite ruinous.’ Fox was stung by the Duke’s imputation of his poverty partly because he was by most standards a wealthy man and partly because he longed and schemed to be much wealthier than he was.

The next day, 9 March, Fox went to see the Duke again. The meeting went well; Richmond was polite and said he could return. Fox scented victory, and sent a note to the Duchess on 12 March, saying that because she was still hostile to the match and would not want to see him, he had decided to write rather than visit. Her husband, Fox went on, had asked him two days ago how he could be so sure of Caroline if she had not given him any secret commitment: where did his confidence come from, the bewildered Duke had asked, if everything was above board? The reason was, he told the Duchess, that he knew Caroline’s heart better than she did herself. ‘Your Grace will perhaps say as the Duke of Richmond did – if so unengaged why was I so sure of her? When she found your Graces would not consent she might have rejected me: and so, indeed, madam, she might with honour; maybe she thought she should. I alone knew she could not; and if this must end unhappily ’tis I have been to blame in taking so much care to hide from herself the impression I had made, lest she alarm’d should give your Grace the alarm too soon. Long and constantly observant of every movement of her heart, the most unaffected and sincere that ever was, I knew (what she knows now but never knew till she was bid to gel the better of it) its attachment to be unalterable.’ He concluded by asking the Duchess how she thought he could press
on with his suit if he thought Caroline was going to change her mind.

These tortuous sentences and this tortured reasoning threw the Duchess into a rage. She took Fox’s implication that he knew Caroline better than she did very badly. Fox’s visits were disagreeable she said, and his letters were more disagreeable still. Both had better stop. She was shocked and offended at his imposition. Fox acknowledged that he had made an error, but he was far from cowed. ‘I am in such a situation,’ he wrote, ‘that I am pretty sure whatever I say it will offend.’ He decided on a tactical withdrawal; to all outward appearances there would be no more contact between himself and Caroline, no more visits to the Duke and no more letters. For her part the Duchess declared that the whole affair was over.

For a month there was a stalemate. It was getting near the end of the season; the Duke and Duchess hoped, as April went by, that they could hang on until the beginning of May and then take Caroline down to Goodwood. There, friends could not act as go-betweens, messages were more difficult to deliver and servants to bribe. Caroline would be cut off from Henry for seven or eight months and the tactical victory would be theirs. Secluded in the country, the Duke and Duchess believed, Caroline would come to her senses and remember exactly what she owed her parents. As April passed, the Duke began to hint to the Duke of Newcastle, his neighbour and friend, that Caroline’s ardour had cooled. Newcastle passed the message on to his younger brother Henry Pelham who passed it to his good friend Henry Fox. Fox, successful and cool-headed gambler that he was, decided immediately to raise the stakes. He wrote to the Duke on 19 April. It was six weeks since he had spoken one word to Caroline, he said disingenuously, sticking to the letter but not the spirit of the truth, and maybe it was true that Caroline’s disposition had altered. ‘If it be altered,’ he went on, ‘if it be ever so little altered, let her tell me so. I shall, unwillingly, but instantly believe her, and never, whatever I may wish, attempt
to bring it back again.’ By this time Henry could well afford such rhetorical gestures. He wasn’t speaking to Caroline, it was true, but he was secretly writing to her, keeping alive the delicious sense of transgression and wickedness that made the misery she was enduring all worth while. Throughout March and April love hardened her resolve and guilt and excitement kept her on tenterhooks.

Henry ended his letter of 19 April with a hint that was mingled with a threat. If Caroline wouldn’t back down, wouldn’t it be better to accept the situation? ‘If she will abide by her unworthy choice – I don’t know or presume to think that she will – but if she will, don’t make it worse. Perhaps your Grace may have dissuaded her … But if she does persist, for God’s sake permit it; and that the Duchess and your Grace would see her and own her afterwards is all I should ever hope for.’ Here Henry made a blunder that may have given the Duke pause for thought and suggested the need for decisive action. If the wedding was given the Duke’s blessing there would be no need for him to see and own his daughter ‘afterwards’ – he would be there all along. Only if the wedding was secret would Caroline need a separate meeting with her parents. Henry’s plans and thoughts were running away with him.

The Duke remained implacable and grew increasingly suspicious. He pressed ahead with his plans to whisk Caroline away to Goodwood the day his duties at Court no longer demanded his presence in London. Fox sensed that time was running out. He sent his friend Henry Pelham to intercede on his behalf with the Duke and gave him instructions to hint that if Richmond continued to be adamant, Caroline might take matters into her own hands.

Towards the end of April, with only a couple of weeks of the season left, Fox decided to act. On the morning of the 27th, he and Caroline met in secret. He was miserable, he told her, and he couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing her for seven or eight months. This brief meeting Fox followed with a letter which he urged Caroline to read carefully. In it he reiterated his desperate unhappiness and his dread of being
parted from her. The necessary conclusion he left dangling in the April air; the next day he would write again and plead with her to come away with him. For the moment he just wanted her to understand and sympathise with his misery.

Caroline’s parents believed that love could blossom within the institution of aristocratic marriage. It had always had a place there. Although children were married against their wishes, treated as elements of the property of a large estate, in most cases fondness and financial and dynastic considerations went hand in hand to the altar. Within certain limits children were allowed to choose and most chose within their family’s circle of acquaintance because it was there that opportunity lay. Children only got into trouble if they selected a partner from beyond the agreed boundaries. Caroline’s later conduct suggested that as far as others were concerned she was every bit as conventional as her parents and looked for financial and political advantage as well as affection in marriages that she had a hand in. But as far as she herself was concerned she was determined to put love in front of her parents’ wishes and interests. Looking in books and plays and at the world around her she saw plenty of examples of successful marriages based on love. Besides she chose to believe that her parents were wrong about Fox’s prospects and thus their own interests; although he could never recover from the fact that his father had started life as a humble grammar-school boy, Fox could become a successful politician and a rich man.

It was a moment of crisis: if Caroline made a mistake her gesture would have the double consequence of making her miserable and proving her parents’ contention that arranged marriages turned out best. But she did not hesitate. She read Fox’s letter, grasped its purport and determined to act decisively. No matter what it cost her, they would elope. Straight away she wrote back a letter which mingled fear, excitement and elation in equal parts. ‘I am vastly frightened to think of what I am going to do. I dare not reflect upon it. I fear they will never forgive me, I hope you won’t suspect me
now of being altered but believe me this is the greatest proof of love it is possible for me to give you. Adieu.’

This letter signalled Caroline’s intention to begin a new kind of life, a life in which she and Fox controlled their own emotional destiny. Much as she would have preferred her parents’ consent, she recognised that without it her married life would be begun unencumbered by their advice or conventions. She and Henry (who had been orphaned long ago) were free to create their own way of life and their own kind of marriage: there were no manuals of behaviour for eloping couples except those written in story books.