Jane Austen (21 page)

Fanny was just into her teens, an age when girls are hypercritical. If Jane’s reputation had rested on her talent as a poet we should never have heard of her. These doggerel verses may have had something to do with Fanny’s later conviction that her aunt was ever so slightly common.

In August 1806 Jane and her mother visited their relative the Revd Thomas Leigh of Adlestrop. Mrs Austen was proud of being a Leigh. Her family had owned Adlestrop Park in Gloucestershire near the Oxfordshire border since the Reformation. The original house, built by her great-grandfather, was knocked down halfway through the eighteenth century and replaced with a neo-Gothic building in the newest fashionable style. The occupant was a first cousin once removed, James Henry Leigh, married to the Honourable Julia, daughter of Lord Saye and Sele. Mrs Austen did not look to these grand relatives for hospitality but, as always, feeling at home in clerical company went to the rectory alongside where her cousin Thomas, an elderly widower, lived with his maiden sister, Elizabeth, who was Cassandra’s godmother. Thomas, on visits to Steventon, had customarily tipped the children, and Jane and Cassandra had visited Adlestrop in July 1794.

The Revd Mr Leigh had grandiose ideas. He had commissioned the famous improver, Humphrey Repton, to enclose the village green, move the cottages, make a new entrance to the rectory and open up the back of the house. A new garden had been landscaped, abutting the garden of Adlestrop House. A stream of water was diverted through a flower garden, down the hill over ledges of rock and into a distant lake. It was visible equally from the mansion and the parsonage. From
Mansfield Park
we learn that Rep ton’s fees were five guineas a day. Five pounds had been three months’ allowance for Jane while her father was alive and was a lower servant’s annual wage. The improvements at Adlestrop Rectory are remarkably similar to the ones suggested by Henry Crawford in the novel to Edmund Bertram, who drily answers that he will have to be satisfied with more use and less beauty.

While the Austens were at Adlestrop Rectory the grandest relative of all, the Honourable Mary Leigh, died on 2 July 1806 at Stoneleigh Abbey in Staffordshire. In her will she left the mansion and huge estate to the cadet branch of the family the Adlestrop Leighs. They were to go to the Revd Thomas Leigh for his lifetime, then to Mrs Austen’s brother James Leigh-Perrot, and eventually to James Henry Leigh of Adlestrop Park Neither Revd Thomas Leigh nor James Leigh-Perrot had any children and neither was young. The family lawyer expected that the two old men would relinquish their claims if paid off with reasonable sums. What, at their time of life, could they want with an ancestral pile? The lawyer, who should have looked at the rectory to see the scale of Thomas Leigh’s territorial ambition, had mistaken his man. The natural heir was James Henry Leigh but Thomas Leigh seized on his legacy as a piece of glorious good fortune and set off for Staffordshire at once, whirling his guests with him.

Between Kenilworth and Leamington, the Stoneleigh Abbey estate is superbly sited, the Avon winding through its pleasure grounds and deer park. Originally a Cistercian monastery founded by King Henry II, whose escutcheon is on the gatehouse, it is still occupied. Abbeys and other religious houses passed into the hands of Protestant gentry in the sixteenth century when Henry VIII abolished the Roman Catholic monasteries. The Leighs, who had the place from 1561, had been on the Royalist side in the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, when the Cromwellians cut off the head of King Charles I. Seven years before he met his grim fate, the King rested at Stoneleigh Abbey in 1642. He had marched to Coventry on his way to Nottingham but found the gates of the city shut against him. Harassed and exhausted, the King tried his luck instead at Stoneleigh and received a warm and loyal welcome with generous hospitality from his devoted subject Sir Thomas Leigh. In 1836 a flower painting at Stoneleigh was found to have been painted over a portrait of King Charles I by Sir Anthony Van Dyck. The Leighs supported all the Stuarts and from the time the Catholic Stuart King James II fled from England in 1688, the successive Lords Leigh refused to sit in the House of Lords or have anything to do with public life. This fastidious aloofness lasted well into Jane Austen’s lifetime. In her
History of England from the Reign of Henry IV to the Death of Charles I
by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian’, written when Jane was fifteen, she followed family tradition in passionately defending the Stuarts, especially Mary Queen of Scots, and vilifying King Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth I.

Stoneleigh had been added to between 1714 and 1726, when the huge west wing was built. The estimate for erecting it, exclusive of materials and gear such as ladders and ropes, the demolition of the old building and the digging of new foundations, was £545 for three storeys or £463 for two. The three-storey option was chosen. Sumptuous interior decorations cost extra.

When Mrs Austen and her daughters visited in August 1806 they ate fish from the pond and venison from the park, with pigeons, rabbits and poultry from the estate, in a large and noble parlour hung round with family portraits. It was a long way from cold souse and orange wine at Steventon. Mrs Austen was impressed by the size of the house, so big that neither she nor the new owner could easily find their way about. Mrs Austen jokingly suggested setting up signposts. There were forty-five windows in the front and a long flight of steps leading to a large hall. On the right was the dining room and within it the breakfast room where the guests usually sat. The Austens enjoyed the spot as, together with the chapel, it had the best view

Mrs Austen had expected grandeur but was overwhelmed by beauty. I had pictured to myself long avenues, dark rookeries and dismal yew trees,’ she wrote to James’s wife Mary. Instead, she found large and beautiful woods full of delightful walks. The kitchen garden and orchard, over four and a half acres, had so much fruit that it rotted on the trees despite the depredations of blackbirds and thrushes.

To the left of the hall was the best drawing room, with a smaller one inside. These rooms were rather gloomy, with brown wainscot and dark crimson furniture. Behind them was the old picture gallery and the state bedroom, also gloomy, with a high dark crimson velvet bed. This may have been the one in which the ill-fated King Charles I slept. Behind the hall and the parlours were a passage that crossed the house, three staircases and two small sitting rooms. There were twenty-six bedrooms in the new part of the house and many good ones in the old. Another gallery displayed modern prints on a buff-coloured wallpaper and there was a large billiard room. The house was kept spotless. If you were to cut your finger I do not think you could find a cobweb to wrap it up in,’ wrote Mrs Austen, alluding to an ancient remedy mentioned in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

They enjoyed their visit, enlivened by the arrival of their agreeable relative George Cooke, and Jane had many a good laugh at the irritating Lady Saye and Sele, a relative of theirs, who visited. She was the mother of ‘the adultress’. Lady Saye and Sele was the widow of Lord Saye and Sele, who had committed suicide by cutting his throat after stabbing himself with a sword and trying to drown himself.

When Mrs Austen and her daughters were with her, Lady Saye and Sele was offered some boiled chicken. She refused, adding pathetically that after her husband had destroyed himself she had eaten nothing but boiled chicken for a fortnight, and had not been able to touch it since.

Lady Saye and Sele was self-absorbed and less than tactful. In 1782 she had met the novelist Fanny Burney, already a celebrity, and insisted, ‘I must introduce you to my sister, Lady Hawke… She has written a novel herself, so you are sister authoresses! A most elegant thing! It’s called
The Mausoleum of Julia
. Lord Hawke himself says it’s all poetry!’

Lady Saye and Sele, unaware that her sister’s outpourings were hardly comparable with Fanny Burney’s artistic and professional achievement, gushed to the best-selling author of
Evelina
that Lady Hawke’s effusion was to be
privately
printed, naturally Probably this crass woman was equally patronizing to the young Jane Austen, then totally unknown, but whose fame was to eclipse even that of Fanny Burney.

While in Staffordshire, Mrs Austen and the ‘girls’ called on Mrs Austen’s nephew, the Revd Edward Cooper, who with his sister Jane had often stayed at Steventon (they had no mother, she having died in an epidemic). He became curate at Harpsden, Mrs Austen’s girlhood home. Unfortunately Edward was less than likeable and in his pomposity and insensitivity seems to have borne some resemblance to Mr Collins in
Pride and Prejudice
. When her brother Edward Knight’s wife Elizabeth died two years later Jane hoped that Edward Cooper would not send ‘one of his letters of cruel comfort’. He had recently published a volume of his sermons. His eldest son, Edward-Philip Cooper, although not yet twelve, was already precociously pompous, composing sermons and domineering over his brothers and sisters. When Edward-Philip was sent to Rugby in 1809 Jane hoped that being just one raw schoolboy among others would do him good and rub the corners off.

While at Stoneleigh the Austens visited Warwick Castle. It was Stoneleigh Abbey, though, with its ancient grandeur, that offered Jane Austen ‘copy’. It became a partial model for Sotherton in
Mansfield Park
, Thomas Leigh held family prayers every morning in the old chapel, hung with black in honour of the departed owner. Then came breakfast, which consisted of chocolate, coffee or tea, plum cake, pound cake, hot rolls, cold rolls, bread and butter. Mrs Austen restricted herself to dry toast. Such matters were seen to by the house steward, a fine, large, respectable-looking man’. Mr Leigh was busy with his agent, Joseph Hill, a great part of the day. We think of Sir Thomas Bertram in
Mansfield Park
, who spent the morning after his arrival from Antigua with his steward. Mr Hill was a correspondent of Jane Austen’s favourite moral poet, William Cowper.

Mrs Austen was impressed with the dairy, doubtless looking back to the one she had managed during her early married life. Awed, she told James’s wife Mary that one servant was called the baker and did nothing but bake and brew beer. A household on this scale might employ as many as forty servants at an annual cost of some £7,000. Stoneleigh employed eighteen menservants, as well as a large complement of females. The new master had to fit them all out with mourning clothes.

This visit to Stoneleigh was Jane Austen’s main experience at first hand of high life. Her relatives lived in a genuine stately home, even grander than Godmersham, with a lifestyle to suit. It was a far cry from lodgings at Bath or the small house in Southampton where Mrs Austen and the girls later shared a home with Frank and his wife. Mrs Austen must have hoped that this childless cousin, newly enriched, might do something for her, a struggling widow with two unmarried daughters past the age when they were likely to get husbands. She relied even more, however, on her brother James Leigh-Perrot, whom she had followed to Bath.

Jane too expected a legacy and was bitterly disappointed with the outcome. To her dismay and that of her brother Henry, the Revd Thomas Leigh, coming late into property and wealth, at the age of seventy-two took on a new lease of life, dashing about the countryside between Adlestrop, Stoneleigh and London. He retained his Adlestrop stipend, employing a curate to do the actual work.

His elderly sister, Elizabeth Leigh, coming from a quiet rectory in the Gloucestershire countryside, was bewildered to find herself mistress of the grandeurs of Stoneleigh. Her idea of hospitality was reading sermons aloud to her guests. When Jane’s brother James and his family visited on 28 August 1809 she wandered disconsolately around the house trying to find out which of the eighty bedrooms had been set aside for Caroline and the maid allocated to her. She knew Caroline was supposed to be put near her mother, Mary, but couldn’t find the mother’s room either. She went into several rooms, turning down bedclothes to see whether or not sheets had been put on the beds. Eventually she asked if the little girl, then only four years old, might stay up till after prayers at nine o’clock and then she promised to find out from one of the housemaids where the guests had been put. Disoriented, Elizabeth had gone up the wrong staircase. It never occurred to this innocent lady, fresh from a country rectory, simply to ring the bell for her housekeeper.

Henry was gloomily convinced that Thomas Leigh would live for ever. Still infected with the fashionable rage for ‘improvement’, Thomas went so far as to make enquiries about landscaping the Stoneleigh gardens, a hobby only possible for the seriously rich. James Leigh-Perrot decided cash in the hand was better than an inheritance in the bush, so was trying to sell his claim for immediate profit. He settled for £24,000 down, and claimed an annuity of £2,000 from James Henry Leigh, plus two buck and two doe deer every year from the Park.

Jane took a dim view of this calculation, considering it to be mean, a Vile compromise’. Thomas lived on another seven years, leaving not a penny to his cousin Mrs Austen or her dowerless daughters. Uncle James Leigh-Perrot lived on till 1817, the year of Jane Austen’s own death. He left everything to his wife. At her death £24,000 was to go to James Austen, who was his executor, descending to his heirs, and £1,000 each to James’s brothers and sisters. James died in 1819 and did not live to collect. In June 1808 Jane wrote bitterly to Cassandra, ‘Indeed I do not know where we are to get our legacy, but we will keep a sharp lookout.’ She was not joking. Mrs Leigh-Perrot did not die till 1836, when £1,000 went to each of Mrs Austen’s surviving children. Only Edward, Henry, Cassandra, Frank and Charles were left. The residue went to James’s son, James-Edward, later author of the
Memoir
of his Aunt Jane.

W
HEN IN
1806 Mrs Austen and her daughters left Bath for good, they went first to Clifton, now part of Bristol, with ‘happy feelings of escape’. In October they went to Steventon, where Frank and his young wife had been staying, and from there they all moved to Southampton, then a city of 8,000 people, to share a house. When Frank was home, the house must surely have been crowded, but when he was at sea the company of her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law was intended to be welcome to his wife.