Aristocrats (41 page)

In 1768, Lord Holland, by now sixty-three and feeling his years, had written to a friend: ‘I cannot help feeling, even in the midst of so amiable a family, the truth of what Bishop Hough said, that the length of days is not a desirable thing. I often cry out Oh! wearisome condition of mortality.’ Nothing changed his mind in the years that followed despite his sons beginning their parliamentary careers. Both Charles and Ste entered Parliament in 1768, Ste to make brief appearances, Charles to take the House by storm, dazzling everyone with his brilliant oratory. But Lord Holland did not regard Charles’s triumphs as sufficient compensation for the ill treatment he believed himself to have suffered from the monarch (who had refused him an earldom), from his political allies (who had deserted him) and from the press and City aldermen (who were now questioning his accounts as Paymaster). ‘Honesty is not the best policy’ and ‘good nature does not meet with the return it ought to do’ were his new political truths.

In the summer of 1770, when he and Caroline returned from Nice, Lord Holland took to a wheelchair, a sturdy machine built with wood and iron to support his growing weight. He was pushed about the green lawns of Holland
House, winked at by its mullioned windows and shaded by cedar trees whose age mocked at his infirmities. On wet days he was stationed by the fireside in the drawing-room. Both he and Caroline avoided the picture gallery, occupied by those they never saw now. Emily, reading a folio volume with the Duke of Leinster near by; Sarah, leaning out of a window with Charles and Susan; the Duke of Richmond and his Duchess; Sir Charles Bunbury wearing frilled cuffs and a gleaming white cravat: the gallery’s optimistic display of family unity and happiness was another mockery and another cause for bitterness.

Thinking about her sons’ affairs, Caroline needed a calmness which she had rarely had even in more cheerful times. Ste and Charles had become notorious at Newmarket and all along St James’s for the magnitude both of their bets and of their losses. Night after night Ste and Charles met at Almack’s, sometimes riding down from Newmarket for the purpose. Inside the gaming room of the club they exchanged coins and promissory notes for rouleaux or tokens of fifty pounds each, stacked them on the green-baize table tops and began to play. Their embroidered frock-coats were turned inside out for luck, or replaced by plain great-coats. Over their lace cuffs they pulled pieces of leather, like those worn by the Holland House footmen when they cleaned the plate. To crown this costume gamblers wore high hats with broad brims covered in flowers and ribbons, claiming that they prevented carefully arranged curls from disorder and sensitive eyes from the light. This attire failed to bring the Fox brothers any luck. They were notorious and insouciant losers: hundreds and then thousands of pounds disappeared in a night’s sitting.

Lord Holland hated to see his sons dissipate money accrued in order to lend muscle to their political ambitions. It was Charles’s losses that hurt him most because it was Charles he had groomed for political success from the time twenty years before when he had sat him on top of the side of
beef at Holland House. In 1772 and 1773 relations between loving father and errant son frayed. ‘Never let Charles know how excessively he afflicts me,’ Henry wrote to Ste in the summer of 1772. Caroline reacted with much less detachment, regarding her sons’ indulgence as an unfavourable verdict on her motherhood. Because Ste was her favourite son it was he who distressed her most. In the summer of 1773, Lord Holland tried to stave off disaster by paying off some of his eldest son’s creditors in return for a promise from Ste that the profligacy would stop. Ste signed the agreement but carried on gambling, and Caroline wrote angrily to him a few days later, ‘you have played again, lost 3000 pounds, God knows how much more perhaps, for after this what dependence can be had upon your resolution? You will, you must inevitably be ruined. I’m hurt, I’m angry and will trust myself to say no more.’ But she did, scribbling through her tears, ‘remember your promise. Let your name be scratched out of every club in London if you expect ever to be received by your afflicted mother. Lord Holland knows nothing of this. I wish to keep it from him, but cannot answer for myself. Oh Ste, what misery you bring on and will do to all you love.’ Caroline told Henry everything. He was still her fountainhead, the source of her self-esteem and, she felt, the only confidant she had left. Ste gambled again and his creditors, alerted by Lord Holland’s earlier payments, closed in for the kill.

When Ste’s finances collapsed in the autumn of 1773, Lord Holland decided to clear all his son’s debts completely, freeing his own income and estates for his grandchildren. Puffing and wheezing, overweight and distraught, Lord Holland sat with his chair rolled up to a table and signed paper after paper. He sold stock and annuities, spare bundles of land and unwanted effects. In the middle of the task, on 5 October, he had a stroke.

It was a mild stroke, mainly affecting his vision, making him see objects doubled and distorted. But to Caroline it presaged his end and with it the end of her world. She was in no
doubt who should carry responsibility for her husband’s illness and death: all those whom he had loved and trusted and who had betrayed him. ‘Oh Ste, this last attack, whatever it was, I’m confident has been owing to the disagreeable business he has of late been engaged in on your account. Lord Holland’s ill state of health, I’m persuaded, is solely owing to the vexations of his mind, which have been too powerful for a benevolent, friendly-feeling heart like his. Rigby, Calcraft etc, etc, began; the Duke of Leinster, Lord Hillsborough, Sarah greatly contributed; and Charles and you have put the finishing touch. How painful this idea must be to you I know. Charles does not feel it, but he will sorely one day; so he ought. And indeed Ste, fondly as I once loved you both, I do not scruple distressing you by telling you how much you are in the wrong. Indeed, indeed, you ought to feel it and let it be deeply imprinted on your mind.’

Caroline wrote on and on, as if the act of writing down her feelings could expunge them, hoping against hope that anger might get the better of her love for her sons and leave her uncaring and unburdened. In her heart she knew that she could neither forget nor cease to love them and the knowledge only added to her pain. ‘As for myself, perhaps you have done me no harm, only contributed to wean me from the afflictions of this life and make me look more comfortably towards a better where … happiness was intended for us. As for Charles, I must endeavour to drive him from my thoughts entirely; happy shall I be if I can accomplish it.’

Lord Holland did recover. He was well enough to take pleasure in the birth of his grandson Henry at the end of November and to discharge debts accrued by Charles Fox to the tune of £140,000. Sometimes he was alert and even cheerful, as if after a wait longer than he had wished, the end of the journey raised his spirits. But his memory was patchy and his powerful constitution gradually failing. Nobody expected him to last the winter, but he did. Caroline took him to Bath and to Ste’s house in Wiltshire, where he sat in his chair,
heavy and immobile, rousing himself now and again when his grandson was brought to him or his grand-daughter Caroline clambered on to his knees. As the weeks passed he stopped fretting about his sons and, sloughing off the world, wanted only to be with them and to feel their love.

Friends noticed that while Lord Holland seemed to be sliding painlessly out of life, Caroline was often in agony. Pain in her back sometimes made her unable to walk upstairs. She had lost her plumpness, a ‘falling away’ friends ascribed to family troubles, and she bled continually, a sign, she thought, of the menopause. The doctors in Bath and London, in whom she had for so long placed money and faith, assured her that she would soon get well and she believed them. ‘Please God to restore my health, I do not despair of being a tolerable comfortable old woman.’

About the time of Lord Holland’s stroke, Caroline’s round about enquiries about the Carton family brought news which she received with a mixture of emotions: anxiety, then a sense of satisfaction mixed with guilt. Louisa reported that the Duke of Leinster was unwell. He had for some time suffered from asthma, but he was now troubled by a new complaint, diagnosed as gout. His feet had swollen and the swelling travelled quickly up to his knees, filling his legs with fluid. Emily was ‘vastly vexed’, as Louisa put it, because her husband was a difficult patient, an active man who chafed at idleness. But Emily had no fears that her husband’s life was in danger.

The Duke of Leinster’s doctors – Quin in the country and Smyth in town – had another opinion. They pronounced the gout dropsical, the sort of disorder that presaged a lingering death as the kidneys failed and the body gradually became saturated with fluid. The Duke sat in Leinster House with his legs out on a stool. While he grumbled at his inertia, Dr Quin took William Ogilvie aside and told him that the Duke was going to die. He was entrusting the knowledge and the task of telling the Duchess the news to Ogilvie because he occupied a special position within the family.

Ogilvie immediately told Louisa the doctor’s conclusion, and they shared the secret until Louisa told Sarah who told Caroline and the rest of the family. By 7 November water had filled the Duke’s legs as high as his thighs. He lay in his bed now, free of pain, in good spirits, stoically waiting to die. Everyone knew that once the fluid reached his lungs, death would follow quickly. Emily, Louisa wrote, ‘is unhappy about it, and I believe has very little hope in her own mind.’ But Emily did not confide in Louisa, who stayed at Castletown. She poured out her heart to Ogilvie, who came up to Dublin from Black Rock every day during the last stages of the Duke’s illness.

Caroline heard of the Duke’s imminent death in mid-November 1773. Although she had come to hate him, she never wanted death to be the means of settling the quarrel between them. She thought of Emily’s misery and of her own need for a confidante. The love she felt for her sister came welling up and overwhelmed her. Picking up her pen she wrote: ‘My dearest sister. Ill as I am and little able to write, I cannot resist sending you these few lines to express my concern to you for the present anxiety you suffer. God knows how much I should wish to be able to relieve it, and how sincerely I wish all may go better than your present fears allow you to think. Adieu, my dearest, best beloved sister; for that must ever be the case, notwithstanding all that has passed. I’m going soon to Bath. Yours most affectionately, C. Holland.’ With these words the quarrel of four and a half years was ended. Much later Emily turned the letter over and inscribed it in her tiny neat hand, ‘My sister Holland, after a long silence, November 23rd 1773’.

When Caroline wrote her note, the Duke had been dead for four days. By the time Emily received it, he had been buried in Christ Church Cathedral and she, dressed and veiled in black silk and lace, sat in the cheerless expanse of Leinster House receiving calls and answering letters of condolence. She wrote back thanking Caroline for her note and quickly received a
reply. ‘I cannot resist the pleasure of thanking my dear sister for her kind letter, so great a balm to my mind is the renewal of our long interrupted correspondence; every trace of the occasion of it is long wore out of my mind. I had the beginning of this winter burnt every paper that could record it, and should sooner have wrote to you but that I did not know whether in the anxious state of your mind it would be proper.’

Emily grieved for her husband. Despite the clouds of its later years – her growing love for Ogilvie, the Duke’s refusal to compromise in the quarrel with Caroline – it had been a successful marriage. For twenty-five years the Duke had loved his wife passionately. He had pandered to her pride, encouraged her extravagance and satisfied her vanity; and if, after Ophaly’s death and Ogilvie’s arrival, Emily had become dissatisfied with the terms of her marriage, widowhood offered no solution.

Soon to be Dowager Duchess of Leinster (although she refused to don the title except in the most public of circumstances, insisting that she was still simply the Duchess), Emily was living on a jointure and without the almost unlimited credit the Duke’s name and lands had secured. The Duke of Leinster’s will, however, was extremely generous, a recognition of Emily’s expensive habits. To the jointure of £3,000 a year agreed in their marriage settlement of 1747 he added another thousand pounds. Provision was made for younger sons and daughters (the boys were given land, the girls marriage portions) and while they were still in their mother’s care they were each given a yearly allowance. Emily had Carton and all its furnishings for life, provided she did not remarry or go to live in England. So she was not in straitened circumstances. It was her son William, who now assumed the title of second Duke, who would have to bear the burden. He still had to pay old Lady Kildare £3,000 a year. His mother’s £4,000 and the allowances for his siblings, along with the interest on debts of almost £150,000 virtually wiped out his income, and he did not even have Carton to retreat to.

Despite her prosperity, Emily was in a difficult position. The Duke’s death exposed her affair with Ogilvie. As long as he lived, his social standing and political influence protected her from Dublin gossip; only muted rumours about the Duchess and the tutor had so far crept about. Now nobody stood between Emily and exposure. Moreover, the Duke’s fertility had covered Emily’s infidelity: Lord George Simon Fitzgerald, born on 16 April 1773, was probably not the Duke’s son, but an Ogilvie, every bit as illegitimate as Louisa Bunbury.

Emily was not overcome with guilt about her affair as Sarah had been. She had had every intention of keeping her husband, her lover and her good name. Pushing the rules of aristocratic gallantry to the limit she managed her affair with great aplomb and discretion. But she was not prepared to give Ogilvie up – as rumour and convention demanded – when her husband died. Emily might borrow the form of Rousseau’s
La Nouvelle Héloïse
, but she spurned the conclusion. She was no Julie, to die with her passionate impulses thwarted. In a gesture of defiance she left Dublin and, summoning Ogilvie and the children from Black Rock, she took them all to Carton.