Aristocrats (56 page)

Given the strength of Louisa’s belief in the value of fidelity and the degree of trust she had placed in Conolly, Emily was justifiably anxious about Louisa’s ability to recast the way in which she understood and described her marriage. How could she cope when she discovered that her adored husband had for years kept a mistress? But Louisa was consistent. She preferred to push aside the revelation rather than change her mind about her husband. ‘My rooted affection for him remains unshaken,’ she wrote, ‘and I cherish the hope that when Death … shall again unite us, I shall not be disappointed of that pure love, that with me, had begun this side of the grave. The worth and excellence of his character I can contemplate with pleasure, and venerate the same, making his opinions … my chief guide.’ So she went on as she had always done, feeling that Conolly in heaven was scarcely further than the next room and sure that the explanation that he would eventually give her would vindicate her trust.

If Louisa did not change, Castletown quickly did. Louisa had a substantial income of her own now. She could decide upon the size of her household, the use to which the buildings were put and the number and scope of her philanthropic activities. She immediately began to economise, citing Conolly’s debts as the reason. But her shrinking household reflected her
own intentions and careful personality. She had never been interested in display or grandeur; she loved to economise and hated waste. She also wanted to put as much money and time as possible into charitable activities.

Sarah watched the Castletown household diminish in size and opulence. She was horrified, unable to understand that Louisa derived pleasure from economy. Sarah had always regarded Louisa as first and foremost a munificent hostess who spread largesse in her immediate family circle and used her pin money alone for charity. The devoted philanthropist she saw emerging from the silken cocoon of aristocratic marriage was less to her liking. ‘Her family is to be on the 4th of June thus reordered,’ Sarah wrote to her son Charles after Conolly’s death, ‘from about 60 in the hall and 12 in the steward’s room and never less than 10 in parlour, her whole family, herself and company will never exceed 20. Three quarters of the house to be shut up as the rest will do. The farms to be let. The two lawns, wood are kept only. Thus, my love, you will arrive to see the
close
of a great, a noble, a generous, benevolent, charitable and hospitable establishment.’

A year after Conolly’s death, Napier’s health, which had been worrying Sarah for years, became much worse. Napier’s slenderness became emaciation and the soreness in his gums became a debilitating pain that spread down his throat. Sarah told Susan, ‘long sufferings have wasted him almost to an
atrophy
.’ Napier thought he was going to die in February 1804. But he continued his work and recovered slightly in the spring. In the summer he relapsed and Sarah decided to take him to Bristol. The melancholy party set off in June; Napier exhausted and coughing, Sarah, whose sight was already failing, and the three girls, Louisa, Caroline and Cecilia. Napier rallied briefly in Bristol and Sarah, convinced by optimistic doctors, believed he would recover. ‘Those who pretend to know assure me that I am almost a convalescent,’ Napier wrote at the end of July, adding mordantly, ‘I can’t say that
my own sensations are in union with theirs.’ He was right. On 13 October, aged fifty-three, he died.

Napier had given Sarah a reason for living, and after his death she could at times see no point in carrying on. Everything she had done had been for him, she thought. ‘I have lost him who made me like this world. It is now a dreary expanse, where I see thinly scattered a few beloved objects whose welfare and prosperity have still such strong hold on my heart as to keep it alive to whatever concerns them. But its
pleasant prospects
are all vanished! … While he lived I saw all objects through the medium of my own happiness. Even the joy occasioned by advantages falling to the share of any of my children was doubled because I shared it
with him
… To endeavour to be worthy of his love gave animation to my existence. From his precepts and example I was taught to bear adversity, to make any sacrifice to duty with cheerfulness, not to value life
too
much and never to cease being grateful for the many blessings which it had pleased God to bestow on us.’

Despite her misery Sarah did not slip back into the corrosive self-hatred of the days before her marriage. Devotion to Napier had indeed made the world seem a better place. In so doing it had changed Sarah too, giving her an envelope of self- esteem and a feeling of being loved that made grief bearable.

Sarah cried with her children and with Louisa and Susan O’Brien, who both came hurriedly to Bristol when they learned that Napier was dying. Expressing grief and anger at her loss was a help. But none the less, she was dazed that in the face of annihilation, ordinary life went on. She felt paralysed, stunned by the enormity of the contrast between the quotidian and the eternal. ‘My mind
feels in prison
, it brings to me those sensations which I ever supposed were felt by the Royal Family of France in the Temple. Here
we are
, but it
must end
!’

Napier left Sarah everything and made her responsible for all his affairs. To his sons he bequeathed his weapons, ‘the example of my long and faithful services to my King and
country’ and a warning against Republican ideas. His daughters got no mention in his will and no inheritance. Just before he died Napier also sent his son William a long letter about ‘the duties of an officer and a gentleman’ which ended, ‘keep this letter and show it to your elder brothers that they may remind you of its contents should pleasure or passion ever tempt you to swerve from the principles it is intended to inculcate.’ He also charged his sons to prove their piety to God and their affection towards their parents by serving King and country with honour. For the rest of their lives Sarah’s sons strove to live up to his injunctions and his example; their father, they believed, had told them what they should do and their mother had given them the means to do it.

Sarah was completing the first letter of her widowhood to Susan when a messenger arrived. ‘Just as I had finished writing new misfortune comes on me! The poor Duke of Leinster is no more! … Ah me! What havoc does death make in a circle where I enjoyed all happiness. Death comes remorseless and sinks them in the tomb.’

In destroying some bonds death reminded everyone of the importance of others. Sarah and Louisa turned to Emily in their distress and she turned to them for comfort when the Duke of Leinster died. Their old relationship, at once sisterly and maternal, was reaffirmed. In November 1804 they all met in London and used the comfort of old certainties to alleviate new distress. ‘I passed three hours yesterday with my two dear sisters,’ Emily wrote to her daughter Lucy. ‘All hearts opened to each other’s griefs. Our sorrows and our comforts all passed in review before us from their early childhood. Oh what a heartfelt satisfaction to hear them say as they both held me in their arms that the precepts I had early instilled had been of such use to them and been the comfort and support of their lives, that they owed more to me than to any human being … I found both these dear hearts in perfect unison with my own. Griefs have this effect!’

Sarah inherited all Napier’s debts. They were small compared with Conolly’s, but so were his assets. Sarah
economised by moving in with Louisa; on the one hand she made light of her poverty, on the other she listed all the calls upon her income. ‘I have
no
right to complain, for nobody need
starve
with £500 pr. anm; tho’ I certainly cannot do justice to my six unprovided children, nor can I assist in the smallest degree my three eldest … In short,
I want help very much
.’ Very soon she was looking around for a way of increasing her income. Believing firmly that Napier had died in the King’s service just as surely as if he had fallen in battle, Sarah decided to lobby the Crown for a pension as a reward for his exertions. She wrote a long memorial to the King extoling Napier’s virtues and had, for some time, high hopes of success. But as 1805 wore on without any reply, she decided that a more personal approach might yield dividends and planned to appeal to George III as a fellow sufferer from failing sight. ‘Do you think,’ she asked Susan in July, ‘that if I S.N. wrote you S. O’B. a letter full of details of my situation with
some
remarks on the sympathetic feelings of one blind person for another … do you think you could with natural propriety send it to Lady Ilchester as an interesting letter to you and without a word more? Do you think she would
talk of it
(I desire no more) before the King?’ Sarah was careful to insist that she must be talked of before the Queen as a fat old lady down on her luck. Her friend Lady Charleville was instructed to tell the Queen that Sarah was ‘still well looking and pleasing – but she has quite given up figure and appearance and dresses in all respects as an old woman.’ This pathetic picture was painted to disguise the real nature of Sarah’s supplication, a blatant attempt to reap a reward for the humiliations she had suffered at the King’s hands forty years before. Her appeal to sentiment worked. The King granted her £800 a year, a sum she always insisted was in recognition of Napier’s services, but which was none the less granted directly to herself and her children.

Just over £100 of Sarah’s pension went to Emily Napier, the portions for Louisa, Cecilia and Caroline Napier who all
lived with her were added to Sarah’s own share, and brought her income up to a grand total of something like £1,200 a year. Some of this was invested to provide money for the Napier girls after Sarah’s death. Some went to pay off debts. Celbridge was sold, and although she was never paid in full for it, the house was no longer a drain on Sarah’s income. So with Louisa Napier in charge of domestic economy and household accounts, Sarah and her daughters could live in comfort, if not splendour. None the less she often borrowed money. Charles Napier lent, or gave, his mother £475 in 1808, £136 in 1814 and small sums thereafter.

After the pensions were announced, Sarah was in good spirits. ‘My dear sister and I pass our present time between preparations for going to England for a year and the pleasant prospect we have of the excellent situations of our nine children (for she calls them hers too),’ she told Susan in the spring of 1806. By May Louisa and Sarah were established at Hans Place off Sloane Street in Kensington. Sarah decided to stay on in London and bought a house round the corner in Cadogan Place for £1,600. This purchase fixed a pattern of life that changed little in the years to come. Sarah stayed in London, visited and cared for by her children. Louisa lived with Emily Napier at Castletown. Charitable activities took more and more of Louisa’s time, but she came to England occasionally. Emily spent her winters in London and her summers in Wimbledon, where Ogilvie had bought a cottage a few years before. ‘Quite a little thing,’ Emily told Lucy in 1799. ‘Can’t be called a place for it is merely a little bit of kitchen garden surrounded with roses and honeysuckles and one little field; … It is not at all the sort of thing you would like, nor should I some years ago; but it exactly suits me now, for I really cannot walk without feeling so much inconvenience afterwards from it that it takes off from all the pleasure in it.’ Ogilvie insisted that winters were spent in their new house, 44 Grosvenor Place. ‘In this I don’t entirely agree with him,’ Emily confided to Lucy. ‘For with the help of a good map
and a story book, the evenings, I think, in winter go off very well. But certainly being in the way of seeing my friends, which one always is in London, is pleasant too; so perhaps he is right.’ She still kept to the timetable of the London season. ‘My sister Leinster is a
point de reunion
to many, and
so
well,’ Sarah noted in 1806. ‘She went to Mrs. Fox’s ball and she herself gives assemblies.’

Old age brought new anxieties and rhythms. Instead of slowing down, as convention had it, life seemed to speed up. Atrophy of bodies, loss of friends and a concomitant sense of the past disappearing combined to heighten a sense of change. Not only family and friends were lost: surroundings changed and, as they did so, brought memory rushing back. Anything might bring the past out of forgotten experiences. In 1807, Louisa stayed a night in a Dublin hotel, Lennon’s, which had been constructed out of houses that she remembered from her youth. ‘I remember the rooms so well where we used to dance,’ she wrote to Emily. ‘It is so odd to look back at those distant times and the variety of
feels
are very very much missed. So many that we loved are gone and so many that we now know not
then
in existence.’

For Sarah and Emily it was books rather than places which brought the past back. Sarah was being read Marmontel’s
Memoirs
in 1806. They reminded her not simply of her sojourns in Paris in the 1760s when ‘I knew the man a little’, but that her life, as she now thought of it, had not yet then begun. For her part, Emily read the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. They made her think of her long dead mother and of changing manners. Lady Mary, Emily noted in a letter to her niece Caroline Fox, had been ‘very gallant’ in her heyday of the 1730s and 1740s, and her conversation was blunt and direct. ‘I am apt to think that want of delicacy was very much the fashion in those days,’ although by the 1750s and 1760s it was ‘going off’, ‘but I still remember it was retained by all those who were reckoned
wits
among the old
ones, and there was always a fan held up to the face when their jokes were repeated before any young people by those of middle age.’

Emily was not sentimental; she did not find a golden age of aristocratic licence in past behaviour and she was inclined by temperament and principle to see a correlation between change and amelioration. But she did notice a difference in the way in which women of her class chose and were allowed to behave. She herself had been a convert to some of the changes brought about by notions of sensibility, particularly the idea of marriage as a union of love, and she had reaped the benefits of these ideas being taken up by men. But looking back to the days when Mrs Greville lay on a
chaise-longue
in ‘undress’ at Holland House and Lady Townshend paraded her command of ribald innuendo made her aware that she had lived to see the inner worlds of women of her class transformed.