Aristocrats (5 page)

Before Caroline’s impassioned letter of commitment could reach him, Henry had already dispatched another laying out his plan. They could be married secretly and quietly at the home of a discreet friend of his, Charles Hanbury Williams. After the ceremony, Caroline could go straight home again and stay there till the day before her parents left for Goodwood. Then she could leave Richmond House and join him. Too much scandal might harm Fox politically; the best outcome he could now hope for was a quiet wedding and an even quieter parting with the Duke and Duchess that would not make him an undesirable political ally. Caroline agreed for her own reasons. She was still terrified about what she was going to do and guilty about her parents’ reaction. But any lingering filial piety was quickly being replaced by anger. After all, she wrote to Henry, it was her parents who were actually responsible for her precipitate step. ‘Good God. That they should have obliged me to this – you don’t know what I have suffered from yesterday.’

At first everything went smoothly. Caroline slipped out of Richmond House on the morning of 2 May 1744. By the Cupola in Whitehall she said goodbye to her twelve-year-old sister, Emily – a parting she still remembered with emotion twenty-five years later – and went to Hanbury Williams’s house in Conduit Street. There Henry Fox and Caroline Lennox were married. Hanbury Williams and the Duke of
Marlborough, an old crony of Fox’s from the days of his friendship with Lord Hervey, and painted with them by Hogarth, were the only witnesses. The clergyman did not know who he was marrying and was equally ignorant of the scandal about to break about their ears. The party did not linger to savour the moment. Caroline went back to break the news to her parents and Fox sat down to add a letter to her revelations. Now that the victory was his he did not pull his punches. ‘My Lord Duke. When there was not the least hope left that the Duchess or your Grace would ever consent, and Lady Caroline was obliged to choose between disobeying you and leaving me for a very great while, probably for ever, she chose what I fear you will never forgive her, and is my wife.’ After the triumphant crescendo of this opening sentence Fox came down to more mundane matters and asked the Duke to let Caroline stay in his house till they left for Goodwood. But he was cock-a-hoop and he couldn’t hide his joy of victory. Signing off, he declared, with dare-devil irony and consummate rudeness, ‘I am with the greatest deference and humility, my Lord, your Grace’s most submissive, most respectful and most sincere humble servant.’ He meant exactly the opposite and the Duke knew it.

The Duke was insulted and furious at being beaten. He refused to allow Caroline to stay a single night with him, and before the ink was dry on Fox’s letter, Caroline was back at Hanbury Williams’s house. She had been banished by her mother and father from her childhood homes and the companionship of her siblings. Now she was alone with the man and the marriage she had chosen for love.

PART TWO

‘You are always in my thoughts’.

Henry Fox to Caroline, 8 March 1748
.

The Duke of Richmond slammed the door on his eldest daughter and hurried back into his library to write to her husband. His worst fears had been realised; the Lennox family was about to be plunged into scandal once again. After a lifetime of probity his name would be on every tongue. And on every tongue he would hear Fox’s triumph. He could have kept quiet and slunk off to Goodwood. But he wanted revenge and in the end anger got the better of discretion. So he wrote to Fox, ‘I shall make no secret to the world of the injuries done me and my eternal resentment,’ and concluded his short note with insult to match insult. ‘Write no more to me. For if you do, I shall burn your letters without reading anything more than your name which must ever be disagreeable to me.’ Then the Duke sent notes to all the guests invited to a ball he and the Duchess were to have held at Richmond House that evening. He cancelled the ball and told everybody why. Within a matter of hours the story was all over fashionable London. As Fox’s friend Hanbury Williams put it, it ‘filled the rooms of Kensington’ and was hotly debated at White’s, Henry’s club. Hanbury Williams himself went to Covent Garden on the night of the wedding, and watched as the news went from box to box. It was ‘exactly like fire in a train of gunpowder,’ he said.

Just as Fox feared, his political enemies tried to make capital out of the scandal by closing ranks against him. Horace Walpole, with his usual combination of exaggeration and drama, summarised the reaction of the Duke’s Whig friends. ‘The town has been in a great bustle about a private match; but which, by the ingenuity of the ministry has been made politics. Mr. Fox fell in love with Lady Caroline Lennox, asked for her, was refused and stole her. His father was a
footman; her great-grandfather was a King;
hinc illae lacrimae
! All the blood Royal have been up in arms. The Duke of Marlborough, who was a friend of the Richmonds, gave her away. If His Majesty’s Princess Caroline had been stolen, there could not have been more noise made. The Pelhams, who are much attached to the Richmonds, but who tried to make Fox and all that set theirs, wisely entered the quarrel, and now don’t know how to get out of it.’

The affair rumbled on. Hanbury Williams, glancing again at its political context, wrote to Fox on 15 May: ‘Time that overcomes, eats up, or buries all things has not yet made the least impression upon the story of the loves of Henry and Caroline. It still lives, grows and flourishes under the patronage of their Graces of Newcastle and Grafton and Mr. Pelham. But in spite of them the town grows cool and will take the tender lovers’ part.’ Hanbury Williams remembered what the scandal-mongers tended to forget, that Henry Fox was deeply in love with his bride and that he had married for love. He wrote consolingly to his friend, ‘You have made a very
prudent choice
. Your good sense and your good nature (its true) will be well employed for life; you have the properest object for ’em in your arms, who had sense enough to distinguish your merit and love enough to prefer it to all things.’ Hanbury Williams set the tone for what the wider world came to understand about the Foxes’ marriage. Outsiders saw a well matched and happily united couple. What they saw was much, if not all, of the story. Love, freely chosen and passionately given, flowed around and between Caroline and Mr Fox, as she always called him to friends, charming everybody who met them. Their love was supported on the one hand by intelligence, mutual interests and commitment and on the other by a companionship that Caroline thought was rare amongst married couples.

In the early days, Henry and Caroline were thrown together as co-conspirators. She could not visit her family and she felt betrayed by her parents; his parents were dead and his
brother was buried in a rural idyll from which he rarely emerged. Caroline was forbidden to see her sister Emily, on whom she had relied in the heady days of her courtship, and she had few friends of her own whom she knew independently of her family. Her father had refused to see any of his friends who called on his daughter, so Caroline’s acquaintance was reduced to a trickle. Fox, on the other hand, was surrounded by cronies and admirers; from the very beginning Caroline thought of him as constantly tempted away from her by company.

Immediately after their wedding there was a quiet period, which corresponded with the end of the London season and the winding down of parliamentary business. In the summer of 1744, Henry and Caroline travelled to Cheltenham, where he entertained her while she drank the mineral water to recover her shattered nerves. Caroline had what she later was bitterly to call a luxury, her husband’s company. She immediately began to rely on him to relieve her spirits when they sagged. Slowly she began to identify her happiness with his. Henry became her world. She became fascinated by politicians, especially if they had subtle, legal minds. Henry’s successes and failures became her own and she embraced his opinions with unwavering partisanship. So despite her notional and lofty disapproval of politics she began to follow Westminster machinations with avidity. Fox’s ambition became her own (although she refused to admit it for twenty years) and the loyalty that she believed was owed to her family was, after the break with her parents, transferred to him.

In the late autumn of 1744, the Foxes returned to London and moved into a house in Conduit Street, close to Henry’s Treasury office and a few minutes’ walk from Caroline’s old home in Whitehall. Willy-nilly, and despite her professed love of solitude, Caroline became something of a political hostess. Fox loved domesticity and encouraged friends, acquaintances and supplicants to call on him at home. Caroline was jealous, complaining that Henry was indiscriminate
about company. It was the beginning of a battle which went on as long as their marriage. Henry never budged because he knew that Caroline envied and loved him for his excessive conviviality, and after an outburst of pique, she always apologised abjectly. For his part, Fox had no regrets about leaving his bachelor life behind him. While he still loved gambling, drinking and women, he settled down. Fox’s strategy for a happy marriage was very simple but it took time and commitment. In the first place he transferred his club to his house and sat there in domestic comfort while the witty, the friendly and the curious came to call. In the second place he recognised that Caroline was his intellectual equal; if he had the greater learning and better memory, she was a shrewder and more dispassionate judge of character. He often discussed political business with her, and although she professed to despise politics, she was always forthright in her opinions. They read, talked and walked out together in the evenings, chatting over the events of the day and the contents of the newspapers. The ‘good nature’ that Fox was famous for amongst his friends spread over his home, catching up Caroline and their children, guests and servants. Melancholy and boredom rather than anger and guilt were Fox’s nemeses. Provided he had friends to tease and entertain with stories, bad poetry, political news and gossip, he was usually happy. He rarely lost his temper and, if he sank into fatalism, a visit from a friend would usually lift him out of it; he wanted so much to be liked that the effort and pleasure of entertaining made him forget his lethargy.

When Caroline went away he wrote to her constantly. ‘I know you love writing so pray let me hear from you three or four times a week,’ Caroline ordered when they were parted in the early years of their marriage. Fox’s letters to her were portmanteaux for his thoughts: capacious, rambling, sometimes inconsequential and often flirtatious. If a bit of gossip came his way he sent it. He would tease Caroline with stories of beautiful women he had met and charm her with assurances of love and fidelity. He sent books and gossip sheets
and wrote wherever he happened to be. Letters came to her from the House of Commons or from the Council Chamber, where once he took up his pen during a lull in the discussion. He wrote from White’s or from his office. Sometimes he would scribble notes in his sprawling, octopus-like italic hand between courses at the dinner table.

Apart from one another, Henry and Caroline shared another abiding obsession, their children. When their son Stephen – named for Henry’s brother and always called Ste – was born in 1745, they fell in love all over again, with their child and with one another. They thought Ste was the most beautiful, most intelligent, most charming child ever born and they never tired of telling one another so. Henry was proud to have become part of a family. Fatherhood bound him even more closely to his open and freewheeling domestic life. He went on to become famous, even infamous, in the annals of fatherhood, partly because he was so indulgent towards his children and partly because he conspicuously spent so much time with them. Motherhood transformed Caroline’s life too. For the first year of her marriage she had sunk herself into Henry’s life and personality. Now she added a new love that was almost as great as her love for her husband, although characteristically she added a gloomy caveat to her adoration: ‘As for Ste, I don’t expect he should love me as well as I do him. That’s never the case with a mother and son.’ She was devoted to Ste from the moment of his birth. For her second son, Harry, born in 1746, she had little love to spare. She hoped it would come with time. Meanwhile she was merely anxious about him because he did not seem very strong.

Caroline’s almost perpetual state of foreboding was both dampened and inflamed by the happiness of marriage and motherhood. On the one hand she felt loved and secure. As she wrote to Henry in 1746, ‘indeed, my dear angel, I am often low spirited and vapourish. [But] I can never seriously think myself very unhappy while you love me and are well.’ But on the other hand, Caroline’s anxieties were heightened
precisely because she was so content. Sooner or later all that joy would have to be paid for.

In the early years of her marriage Caroline’s anxieties fixed on the health of her older son. Her own memories of two heirs to the Richmond title dying in infancy, as well as her observation of death all around her crystallised into an obsession with Ste’s well-being. She was never very well either, constantly plagued with debilitating stomach troubles which made her nauseous and fretful. Immediately after the wedding in 1744, Caroline had gone to Cheltenham to take the waters. In the autumn of 1746 she was ill again. This time she travelled with Ste, who was now getting on for eighteen months old, his nurse and her maid Milward to the fashionable resort of Bath. Henry stayed in London with the baby and a mass of political business.