Aristocrats (57 page)
Occasionally and paradoxically however, change could emphasise continuity. Several of Emily’s and Sarah’s children married within the family or within the family circle and with marriage came a sense of time coming round again. Lord Henry Fitzgerald married Charlotte, Baroness de Ros, the grand-daughter of Henry Fox’s friend, Charles Hanbury Williams. Looking round the sumptuous de Ros estate at Thames Ditton in Surrey gave Sarah what she called ‘Holland House feels’. Mimi Ogilvie also married into the Holland House circle. Her husband was Charles Beauclerk, son of the notorious Topham Beauclerk and his saintly wife, Lady Di. Sarah’s fifth son, Henry, married Caroline Bennett, one of the Duke of Richmond’s illegitimate daughters. William Napier married Caroline Amelia Fox, daughter of General Henry Fox, Caroline’s ‘little Harry’. Richard Napier married into the extended Conolly family. The most unlikely circle was completed several years after Sarah’s death when her daughter Emily married Sir Henry Bunbury, the nephew and heir of her first husband, Sir Charles Bunbury.
As family matters like these became more important,
politics loosened its hold on Sarah’s imagination. ‘I have no opinion on political subjects now,’ she told Susan in May 1806. This was an exaggeration, of course. She was excited when Charles Fox at last came back into government in 1806, but her high hopes of the new ministry were dashed by Fox’s death that September. When the Duke of Richmond died in December of the same year, one chapter in the family history was finally closed: political disagreement would no longer be so blatantly personalised within the family. Henceforth, for Sarah, international affairs became far more interesting than goings on at Westminster. It was war that held her attention now. Her new heroes were General Moore (under whose command her sons were enlisted) and Napoleon. All her anxieties were centred on her sons who left, one by one, for the Continent and the fighting.
Louisa let politics slip more completely than Sarah. After Conolly’s death she stopped following Westminster affairs unless they dealt with Ireland. Her life had always had a religious rather than a political foundation and after the rebellion she had every reason to think about her relations with others (especially her tenants and labourers) in religious rather than political terms. Many of those Louisa lived amongst saw life in the same way, even those who had had great hopes of the rebellion, and many came to regard her philanthropic activities with admiration.
Louisa had been known in the Castletown neighbourhood as a modest woman who carefully fulfilled the customary (if not customarily observed) duties as mistress of a great house. But now she began to give her life to these activities. Castletown’s public rooms were largely shut up. Louisa, Emily and their guests lived in the long gallery and its anterooms. Louisa entertained very little and dressed more severely than ever. An old Castletown servant wrote, ‘I remember often seeing her pass out of the garden to the house, dressed in her usual long, light-grey cloth pelisse, or surtout, having huge side pockets, and those pockets stuck full of the largest parsnips
and carrots, their small ends appearing; these being doubtless for the poor, who were permitted to come to the house two or three times a week for food.’
Louisa’s first charitable exercise was to build a church by the Celbridge gates at Castletown. ‘She is quite a child about building a church here and persuades herself it is a kind of duty in her to give up her time and thought to it as well as her money,’ Sarah wrote in 1805. The church, intended for Celbridge’s Protestants, was built by Castletown labourers with local stone. Before it was finally finished in 1813, Louisa had moved on to a much bigger project, a school for Celbridge’s children. ‘We have got quite a creditable school of 45 children held (as it was first thought) for Protestant children, but I have had the satisfaction of seeing many Catholics among them. I asked no questions, but examined their writing and spelling equally, and pleased myself with the thought that I had Catholics and Protestants all mixed up as they should be … and growing together in their childhood, in all probability will make them grow up with cordiality towards each other.’ In this way an educational project became a religious one, something that could, to Louisa’s mind, heal the rifts which the rebellion had brought so starkly into the open.
At first the children were taught only reading, writing and arithmetic. But after 1814 the school began to expand. Two lodges were converted into quarters for cooks and teachers, and Louisa reroofed Conolly’s old kennels and began an ‘industrial school’ there. Boys were taught trades like carpentry, shoemaking, tailoring and basket making, while girls learned domestic husbandry and economy. All were encouraged to read, write and learn to keep simple accounts. Thrift, self-sufficiency and ecumenical religious observance were Louisa’s priorities. She spent a good deal of time and money on the school. She designed the buildings, engaged the masters, judged the children’s work and wrote rules and prayers for them all.
By May 1820, 300 children were coming to the schools, staggered through the day in batches of 75. Louisa was surprised at these numbers, which proved, she said, ‘the
necessity of these day schools, for we cannot say that Celbridge is a remarkably populous place.’ The cardinal lessons she wanted the pupils to learn were, she said, ‘the necessity of justice against the hardship of injustice, the necessity of truth against the mischief of lies’ and ‘the necessity of loving one another against that careless indifference about the happiness of others, which has been known to produce the sufferings of oppression, tyranny and even cruelty.’
Louisa stressed that learning had two linked effects. It could produce individual prosperity and happiness and it could also make for an increase in general trade and thus bring about what Caroline Fox had called ‘the civilising effects of commerce’. Religious tolerance was what Louisa wanted most of all. One poem that she wrote ended, ‘no disrespectful word touching religion shall be spoke by Protestants to Catholics or from Catholics to Protestants.’
Castletown, contrary to Sarah’s gloomy prognostications, was still a busy place, just as full of people as it had ever been. But now less was consumed inside the house and more distributed to those beyond the gates. Instead of decorating indoors or building gazebos and temples for herself, Louisa constructed workshops and built a giant press for extracting oil from beech nuts, almonds and walnuts. When hard times hit during and after the Napoleonic wars she employed as many labourers as she could. Not everyone was interested in joining in her schemes for greater industry and prosperity. She berated Celbridge’s labouring women for their ‘idleness’ because, she said, they did not want to weave or spin to earn cash. But many of Celbridge’s inhabitants felt gratitude and even love for Louisa as they watched Castletown become, year by year, less of a centre for sport and entertainment and more of a monument to philanthropy.
Louisa’s schools were her main occupation late in life. But they did not stop her travelling. She was in England in 1806, arriving too late for Charles Fox’s death, but just in time to be there when the Duke of Richmond died at Goodwood at the
end of the year. Sarah thereafter claimed most of her attention when she came to England.
Sarah’s increasing blindness made day-to-day life difficult and dull. She relied more and more on Louisa Napier and visitors to entertain her. But she endured her blindness stoically and described it almost as if it afflicted someone else. ‘Phipps tells me of a most charming cataract, which he is to rid me of when I am quite blind, so I wait with patience and no confidence,’ she told Susan in March 1807. She had already lost the sight of her right eye and with the left could only see in one blurred circle. She could write, word by word, but she could not read and needed a constant companion. In 1810 an oculist performed a gruelling and painful operation on the defunct right eye, working on the principle that organs responded sympathetically and that he might thus induce the left eye to work. The operation was a failure. Sarah insisted that her lack of sight was providential because it meant that she could not see the sufferings of her younger daughters, both of whom developed consumption. Cecilia Napier died in 1808 and Caroline in 1810. ‘Time and death rob me each day of the use I might put my eyes to and lessen their loss,’ Sarah said.
Sarah did not mind being read to, but she hated not being able to write. In 1808 Louisa devised a writing-table for her which was made, Emily told Lucy Fitzgerald, ‘very ingeniously and cleverly from Louisa’s directions and plans’ by a local carpenter. ‘By means of springs, grooves etc she can write; a scrawl as you may guess, but perfectly legible. And this is a very great pleasure to her and employs her hours. She hates it seems to dictate and it used to worry her and make her nervous. Now she writes all herself in her scrawly way and Caroline copies it afterwards into a fair hand.’ Soon special paper was added to the machine and Sarah’s letters were sent as they were written, the large words constrained to regularity by being written between pieces of wood which were moved, line by line, down the page. ‘By a most delightful invention of your aunt’ and Richard’s I am enabled to write this
with my own hand upon carbonic paper, invented by Wedgwood for taking copies,’ Sarah explained to William Napier.
After her sons left for the Continent in 1808, Richard Napier, who was the only one not in the armed forces, made Sarah a relief map of the Peninsula. Spain and Portugal were described by raised pieces of cardboard and, Emily said, ‘he has contrived by little pebbles to mark out the different places by feeling, very cleverly; the rivers by bits of twist. In short I find I can’t describe it well but the result is that she feels out any place she wants to find in a minute and diverts herself for hours with it.’ Emily was amazed at Sarah’s dedication to the ideals of militarism. ‘She is full of military ideas and Glory is what she principally looks for in her sons.’ In 1809 Emily noted that Sarah ‘is all anxiety for news from Spain, hopes the English army will not retreat and dreadful as it may appear to look to, she actually wishes a battle.’ The Peninsula campaign was a victory for the Napier cult of disinterested service and for the rarefied, literary militarism with which Sarah had inculcated her sons. George Napier lost an arm in the Battle of Cuidad Rodrigo; William Napier was badly wounded when a bullet lodged near his spine; both these injuries were worn with pride as evidence of their bravery. The laurels went to Charles James Napier, who was captured by the French at Corunna and presumed dead for three months. Sending word to his mother to tell her he was alive he quoted, ‘Hudibras, you lie. For I have been in battle slain/And yet I live to fight again.’
Sarah sunned herself unashamedly in the warm rays of her sons’ glory. She received letters of praise on their behalf from Wellington and they themselves seconded his approbation. ‘Such as your children are,’ Charles Napier told her, ‘they are
your
work.’ Soon she began to be credited with unusual wisdom, like the blind seers of legend. She became an early example of the revered widow, a type that Queen Victoria would turn into a cult. It helped, of course, that her sons, William Napier in particular, were thought to be almost inhumanly handsome, figures of Mars personified. The novelist
Amelia Opie said of William Napier, ‘I never saw a handsomer man! I could not help looking at him. He is very black, with black moustachios.’
As something of a type, representative of suffering but glorious widowhood, Sarah was a repository for others’ imaginings. But she was never a cipher. She retained both her acuity and her Foxite beliefs. But from about 1808 onwards, Sarah’s commentary on the Crown became progressively less acerbic: a diffuse patriotism and an increasingly sentimental loyalty to the royal family were added to her social and political shrewdness. She began to think of George III as a figurehead rather than a fool and ruminating on the King’s possible death in 1809 she wrote that ‘the decease of a good old King who certainly is altogether beloved by his subjects will leave a deep impression of sorrow.’ Susan O’Brien, visiting Sarah in 1817, noted with surprise that her earlier hostility both to the monarch and the Crown had dwindled. Sarah was moving with the times, sharing in a general softening of attitudes towards the monarch and the monarchy and in a national mood of greater insularity and more strident militarism.
Emily was bewildered by Sarah’s dedication to the abstractions of military life and astonished at her declaration that she could not ‘be a mother when glory was in question’. But Emily had not changed with the times. She remained true to the way of life and patterns of thought which she had established in the 1760s. She was still a believer in reason, a disciple of Rousseau and Voltaire, cosmopolitan, hostile to a vaguely defined militarism and Francophile to the core. She never, in her voluminous correspondence, praised the Hanoverian monarchy and she looked on the war as a horror which prevented her going to France. Age did not change her. She lost none of her extravagance or any of her faculties. In the summer of 1809, when she was seventy-seven, Emily sat for her portrait to Sir Martin Archer Shee. She sat firmly upright and gazed away from the viewer, much as she had done when she
sat to Reynolds half a century before. The vulnerability of that earlier portrait had gone. In the place of the beautiful countess sat an old woman with a cap of black lace, determined and somewhat distant. ‘It will not be what you were at 20 or 40,’ Ogilvie wrote, ‘but it will be the most beautiful woman of your age in the kingdom.’
Ogilvie nurtured their love through the winter of Emily’s old age, coaxing it gently as if they were still young and she would never die. He still sent her love letters when he went away; in August 1812 he wrote from Dublin, ‘I last night after dinner received your letter of the 6th written as beautifully and with as steady a hand as the first letter I had the happiness of receiving from you about forty five years ago. How can I ever be sufficiently thankful to Providence for continuing the blessing of my life to me, and with a degree of health and strength that enable you to bear up against the infirmities of old age and to enjoy the different objects that attach you to life, or how can I ever be sufficiently grateful to you dearest Emily for the steadiness and warmth of your attachment to me. Be assured, my beloved Emily that I am thoroughly sensible of and properly grateful for the one and the other … I can truly assure you that from the first moment of our attachment to this instant you have been the first and reigning object of my thought and feeling and that you will continue to be so till the last hour of my life and that no other object has ever engaged my affections or interfered with my attachment to you.’
