Aristocrats (47 page)

Sufficient pressure was put on Napier to make him transfer
his commission from the 25th to the 80th Regiment, which was due to see active service in America. He left Sussex with his wife and children in the spring of 1779, going to Leith in Scotland and the Channel Islands before finally leaving for New York in a convoy of merchant and transport ships, accompanied by two fleets of warships, at the end of May. They arrived in Brooklyn at the end of August and stayed for the rest of the year. ‘I am happy to think you have so much reason to be satisfied with the Napiers as I find you are,’ Louisa told Sarah. ‘I pity you very much for having been obliged to refuse seeing him before he went. But it was certainly right, for it is impossible (I think) to keep the right medium upon such occasions.’ Once the Napiers had left, Louisa slackened her vigilance, reasonably certain that Sarah would not attempt a clandestine correspondence and would soon forget the affair.

But if Napier did not write, Sarah followed his movements carefully. ‘I’ve had accounts that some friends of mine are safely arrived in New York,’ she wrote cheerfully to Emily on 15 December 1779. She also became uncharacteristically circumspect, saying nothing about Napier to Susan O’Brien and revealing little to Louisa. Early in 1780, Sarah learned that Napier had been ill in New York but had eventually recovered and gone down to Charlestown where his regiment was besieging the town. A few weeks later she had some more news. Mrs Napier, left in New York, had succumbed to the same fever, and died.

Some time during the next year, Napier proposed to Sarah and she accepted. Louisa and Emily acquiesced in her choice, although the Duke of Richmond, unwilling to forfeit his role as protector, demurred. Only after all the arrangements for her wedding were complete did Sarah write to Susan, giving a highly selective version of the progress of her affair and going on to say: ‘he says he has known me long enough to judge of my character, that he has a peculiar turn of mind which prevents him being mortified about my character, that he don’t
marry me out of vanity to brag of my merits, but because he is convinced that my character and disposition, such as it is, suits his, and that if I love him he has not the least doubt of our being happy. He knows I do love him, and being certain of that he laughs at every objection that is started for he says that loving me to the degree he does, he is quite sure never to repent marrying me.’

At the age of thirty-six, Sarah came to her own decision. She was not swayed by her brother’s disapproval or Susan’s dismay and she and Napier were married in Goodwood parish church, with Lady Albemarle as their witness, on 27 August 1781. After the wedding she told everyone of her happiness and confidence in the future. Much later she said simply that Napier ‘made me like this world’.

Napier reconciled Sarah to life. Through his eyes she saw herself and the world about her transformed. His temperament and career allowed her to inhabit the role of wife so completely that she ceased to live an inner and an outer life, one of fantasy, the other of day-to-day grind. She was an officer’s wife, living out dreams of her husband’s valour and glory; she was a household economist, managing their small income and modest quarters; and she was a mother, producing, year after year, children whom she bred up to revere their father and follow in his footsteps. Their first child, Charles James Napier was born on 10 August 1782; his arrival was open and joyful, very different from the birth of Louisa Bunbury fourteen years before. With a characteristic Gallic flourish, Sarah told Susan, ‘je suis enchantée de mon fils’.

8 November 1792

In White’s Hotel near the Petit Palais preparations for a grand dinner were almost complete. Swags of bunting in red, white and blue ran round the hall, fastened to panelling and picture rails with swirling rosettes. Tiny
tricolores
were arranged on the tables like bunches of flowers. Flags of the French Republic and banners of regiments in the Republican armies hung
suspended from the ceiling swaying gently in the heat that rose from fireplaces and sconces. A military band tuned up in one corner of the room, strident piccolos and cornets celebrating French victories in the Low Countries in the first year of the Republic.

The band struck up triumphal music – the Marseillaise, marching songs. A crowd of men and women poured into the hall: French, English, American, Prussian, Dutch, Austrian, Italian. They called themselves Friends of the Rights of Man, in honour of Tom Paine. Servants came in with food and wine; glasses clinked, laughter and conversation filled the room.

Out of the noise, somebody called for silence. Toasts were shouted out from different tables, half heard in the applause. ‘Tom Paine and the new way of making good books known by royal proclamation and King’s Bench prosecution!’ ‘The English patriots, Priestley, Fox, Sheridan, Christie, Cooper, Tooke and Mackintosh!’ ‘The Lady Defenders of the Revolution, especially Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Barbauld!’ Cheering and stamping. ‘To the coming Convention of Great Britain and Ireland!’ ‘To the speedy abolition of hereditary titles and feudal distinctions in England!’ ‘To the people of Ireland; and may government profit by the example of France, and reform prevent revolution!’ Shouts, more cheers and a toast for the band: ‘May the patriotic airs of the German Legion (Ça Ira, Marseillaise, etc.) soon become the favourite music of every army, and may the soldier and citizen join in the chorus!’

In the uproar several men stood up, amongst them Lord Edward Fitzgerald, solid and small, with closely cropped hair and a pock-marked face. Silence fell and one by one they solemnly renounced their hereditary titles. Glasses were raised and Republican wine replaced the holy water of baptism. Edward Fitzgerald was renamed le Citoyen Edouard Fitzgerald, Sir Robert Smythe the plain Robert Smythe. For one heady moment, casting privilege aside, they believed in their new identities, reborn into a new life.

Chapter 5

Old Age

PART ONE

‘Nothing can ever diminish my domestic comfort and happiness but illness and death’.

Sarah to Susan, 25 February 1783
.

The Napier family grew fast. Emily, George, William, Richard, Henry, Caroline and Cecilia, named either for sisters or for kings, had joined Charles James by 1791. The family income did not increase in the same way. By Sarah’s old standards it was very small. She had five hundred a year, the interest on her fortune which she was allowed as part of her divorce settlement with Sir Charles Bunbury. Napier, having sold his commission in the 80th Regiment of Foot, had nothing. Napier’s poverty allowed Sarah to campaign for preferment on his behalf. In between confinements she devoted herself to her husband’s cause, haranguing relatives and friends who might have commissions, sinecures or salaried employment at their disposal.

Napier did not stay without a salary for long. In March 1782, Lord North’s government, weakened by years of battering from the opposition over the American war, finally collapsed. In the new administration, Charles Fox was Secretary of State and the Duke of Richmond Master of the
Ordnance. General Conway, the Duke of Richmond’s step-father-in-law was Commander-in-Chief of the army and Charles Keppel, Sarah’s cousin, was made 1st Lord of the Admiralty. With relatives so thick on the government benches, Sarah hoped for a juicy sinecure. Indeed, Richmond quickly found Napier a job, Superintendent of the Woolwich Laboratory, in charge of gunpowder production for the nation. Equally quickly, Sarah identified its defects: hard work, low pay and the need to live in London. ‘His place will never exceed £300 a year, which being a most uncertain income and requiring such close attendance that he must not quit London for one week even, makes it
pas grande chose
,’ she grumbled to Susan. Comparing Napier’s salary with her brother’s easy income of £20,000 a year she became daily less grateful for his patronage. Very soon she was writing round her relatives in search of a better place for him. But her blunt approaches were misplaced anyway: the King so hated the coalition that took office after Rockingham’s death in July 1782 that he refused every appeal for patronage. All Sarah could expect was an office directly under the control of one of her relatives and these Napier sought only as a last resort.

Before long Sarah was putting together a new philosophy of life to go with her lack of funds. Now that she was remarried and newly respectable once more, Sarah could expect to re-enter some (if not all) of the drawing-rooms that had been closed to her for so long and there she might talk her way into a place for her husband. But Napier refused to play the game of favours given and received upon which preferment depended. Poverty for him was a matter of pride. So Sarah, too, began to turn against using her connections for profit. As doors slowly opened to her she declined to step through them, scorning those who had cut her off when she left Sir Charles Bunbury. She rejected aristocratic, drawing-room life, except within her immediate family, and set up, in justification, two contrasts. One was between ‘
degenerating
or rather
bending to the times
’ as she put it, and upright and
unflinching probity. The other was between the world of the drawing-room, and what she called her own ‘domestic comfort and happiness’. By the mid-1780s these two contrasts had bcome partly fused. The first fusion produced a cliché: aristocratic culture, with its dependence on sinecures and places, was ‘degenerate’; the family, ‘domestic happiness’ offered a far more secure foundation for happiness. The second produced a new definition of manliness. The honest man, devoted equally to his family and his country, who lived to serve rather than to profit, became Sarah’s new ideal. Gone were the ‘foppish’ aristocrats she had admired in her youth. Gone too the wild imprudence of men like Lord William Gordon, whom she now saw as unprincipled and a wasted talent. In their place was Napier, six feet tall, active in the service of his country; a man who wore his poverty as a badge of virtue. ‘Mr. Napier would not take anything on the score of perquisites,’ she explained to Susan in 1782, adding in a later letter, ‘Mr. N. has the
esprit
and
rage du service
beyond imagination … He has served near 20 years, is a deserving officer.’ Napier had inscribed one of his journals with the motto
‘acti laboris jocundi sunt!’
(
sic
) and this determination to find joy in work was eagerly seconded by Sarah, who saw herself as Napier’s partner, a soldier’s wife prepared to share every exigency demanded in the nation’s service.

In the early 1780s, these connections were tenuous. But Charles James Fox added for Sarah a political dimension to her views and helped to translate them from a set of ideas into a way of life. From the mid-1780s onwards, Fox came to represent, for his family and for thousands of others, some kind of political equivalent to Sarah’s new ideal of disinterested service to the nation. Already, by July 1782, when Fox dramatically resigned from the government, citing undue royal influence, Sarah was writing, ‘I am so far from thinking he seeks greatness, that I am sure greatness pursues him into gaming houses.’ After Fox’s Bill for the reform of the East India Company was defeated in December 1783 she declared
him to be ‘a great man’, saying, ‘’tis the cause of humanity he supported’. As the decades passed, Sarah saw an ever-closer connection between the honourable, impoverished Napier family and the disinterested popular politics of Fox.

Sarah was not alone in advancing her husband’s claim to patronage. When Fox and Richmond came into office in July 1782, Emily lost no time in putting pen to paper on Ogilvie’s behalf. Since their visit to England in 1779, Ogilvie and Emily had been restless. They wanted to leave Aubigny but were unsure where to settle. Emily favoured Ireland. She wanted to enjoy her late motherhood at Frescati and to make ‘Black Rock children’ of her young brood – ten-year-old Lucy, eight-year-old George and little Cecilia and Mimi Ogilvie. But Ogilvie was worried about his return to a country he had left as a humble tutor, anxious enough about his new role as a gentleman to feel that his identity might slip if he was confronted in the Dublin streets by former pupils.

Emily got her way. The family moved to Black Rock in the spring of 1781 and Ogilvie began gingerly doing the rounds of Dublin drawing-rooms. By now he was carefully dressed and could behave as gentlemen thought he should. But he remained guarded and suspicious with those he did not know well. Stupidity or inattention seemed to him to be deliberate neglect and he saw contempt for his origins and old life in the eyes of those he met. Many men, especially in Ireland, had made their way to dizzy heights from beginnings they wished to forget. But hardly any had done it solely by marriage.

Emily thought that gossip about Ogilvie’s origins would be silenced by a successful entry into both the Irish House of Commons and Dublin’s best drawing-rooms. She had high hopes of Ogilvie’s entry into Dublin society. Like Sarah she had developed a new ideal of manliness. Hers was a cult, not of birth or service, but of ability. Ogilvie, she repeated over and over, was a man of ‘sense’, and she was determined that her choice should be vindicated in the only arena she knew,
the world of politics and government. She wanted his intelligence to be rewarded with enough social and political influence to restore her to something like her former glory in Dublin. This time, though, she would be the wife not of the first man of birth but of the first man in ability.