Aristocrats (10 page)

Inevitably, when Emily and her husband were parted, money talk filled their correspondence and lust breathed hotly through it. Sometimes writing was troublesome for Emily because she had weak eyes; others were often inveigled into wielding the pen. But money was secret. In 1757 she wrote from Holland House to her husband, ‘I employ a secretary out of prudence, my right eye being a little weak.’ But after a paragraph about her debts and her need for a ‘birthday gown and perhaps one sack, or two at most, for the winter’, she forgot her blindness and seized the pen. ‘I cannot, my sweet Jemmy, end this by my secretary; for I cannot let anybody but myself tell you what I always feel in regard to money; indeed it is what I should not attempt to express. Your goodness, your kindness to me always affect me so strongly when I talk or think on that subject, that I am too much moved to let any other person be witness to it.’ Kildare was gratified by these tones of sexual conspiracy, and Emily got her debts paid. Sometimes Kildare was alarmed by the quantities of silk dresses, jewels, rolls of taffeta, yards of hand-painted wallpaper, bundles of books and expanses of carpet that Emily ordered. ‘My love, my love, it is very great pleasure to write for things to be sent to one; but the paying is not so when it is inconvenient,’ he wrote in 1759. But a few days later he was reporting, ‘I have performed all the commissions that belong to you. As to pictures, tables, brooches, they have not been enquired after yet, and I am afraid to look for them. They will cost so much and this year I fear will be
my ruin. Carton will cost so much and no money coming in.’ Pleading poverty gave Kildare no defence against Emily’s charms. If he said he could not afford something, she had only to hint that she might go elsewhere to procure it, and he capitulated. Once she set her heart on having some diamonds reset in the latest fashion and went slyly about getting her way. ‘You know, my dear Lord Kildare,’ she began, softening him up, ‘you did once consent to my altering my buckle. Now I wish it more than ever … such contrivances they have now got to pick one’s pocket, and you know your poor Emily cannot resist temptation. So, my dear, my sweet Lord Kildare, don’t be angry.’ Then she approached the problem indirectly, mingling flattery and teasing, raising the sexual temperature, ‘it was very polite and right in you to invite those ladies to Canon. I assure [you] I am not at all jealous of any of them, unless it is Mrs. Clements; who is so pretty, so young, so gentle and so unaffected that I think there is some danger of your falling in love with her. If you do, Mr. Clements shall be my lover and then I may afford to new-set my diamonds as often as I please.’ Expensively reset, the diamonds duly arrived. Emily declared them ‘charming’, and wrote to Kildare, ‘how good you are about the buckle’.

Sporadic attempts at economy punctuated this litany to the heady new world of consumption. Emily did little to curb her own habits, but every now and then she cast a weary eye over household expenditure and made minute and totally ineffectual adjustments. ‘Yesterday … I looked over the house accounts. It’s well I did for you would have been ruined in fruit cakes and tarts if I had not made a little regulation about it.’ ‘I must tell you that I have made myself quite mistress of the dairy knowledge … and have also got some hints about soap etc that will be very useful to me; for since my dear Lord K. leaves me so much at liberty to please myself about my house I am determined to show him I can save his money as well as spend it.’ But Emily could not save and she felt much more at home justifying extravagance than attempting economies. The passages at Carton dripped with water – in the
winter, she wrote, ‘which shows, my love, the necessity of having very often fires almost all over the house. We must never be sparing in the article of coals.’ So the debts mounted. Like many creditworthy aristocrats Emily schemed to juggle deficits so that they seemed to match incomes. During a ruinous visit to London in 1757 she wrote to Kildare: ‘my scheme is to pay my old bills only, and any of the trifling new ones; but it would be too much to pay all indeed. Besides the people here never worry one for money you know.’

Kildare might grumble about paying for his wife’s enslavement, to novelty, but he pandered to it by making explicit the connection he made between sex and money, writing after the coronation of George III, which Emily had attended, loaded with finery, ‘I gave … five guineas for Mrs. Ciber, for dressing you for the coronation, and would give more than I could name to have the pleasure of undressing you myself.’ Indeed Kildare did not really want the spending spree to stop and he often contributed to the mounting debts himself with presents for his wife. Stockings were his particular favourite. They reminded him of the beautiful flesh they would so enticingly cover. Kildare knew that Emily was fond of stockings that had been ‘clocked’ or elaborately embroidered with silk. She bought them in London and from there her husband wrote excitedly in 1762: ‘I find I exceed your commission in regard to your stockings with coloured clocks. I bespoke two pairs with bright blue, two pairs with green and two pairs with pink clocks … I am sure when you have them on, your dear legs will set them off. I will bespoke you six more pairs with white clocks; you mean to have them embroidered I suppose, therefore [I] shall make you a present of the dozen. The writing about your stockings and dear, pretty legs makes me feel what is not to be expressed.’ When the stockings came back from the seamstress, Kildare was excited anew. ‘I think they are very pretty and when upon your dear pretty legs will look much better – Oh! What would I give to see them. I must stop here, for if I was to let myself go on to express what
I feel by being absent, I should put my eyes out.’ But he did go on, adding in his next letter, I ‘long very much for the acknowledgment [your] dear, dear legs are to make for the trouble I have had upon their account, and make no doubt but that I shall be amply rewarded for the care I have had about them.’ After the stockings had finally arrived at Carton, Emily wrote coyly, ‘Henry [one of the little boys] admires clocked stockings as much as you do; he is forever peeping under my petticoats – what nonsense I do fill my letters with.’ But she never made any declarations of passion to her husband, contenting herself with mildly titillating, fond and flirtatious replies to his declarations of need. Kildare once remarked with sober sadness, ‘you have never mentioned or hinted at feeling the effect of my happiest moments.’

Emily’s first child George, whose courtesy title was Lord Ophaly, was born in January 1748, less than a year after her marriage. Emily was sixteen years old. George was followed by a tribe of siblings so large that occasionally Emily and Kildare failed to recognise their children when they came back from sojourns in London or Dublin. Arriving home from a trip to London in 1762, Emily ‘was sitting down by myself very quietly to write to my dear Jemmy,’ when ‘a dear little child run in to me and puts its arms round my neck; who should it be but sweet Henry! I did not know him the least in the world … Three months makes a surprising change at his age, but yet I wonder I did not know him.’

William followed George in 1749 and after him came Caroline in 1750, Emily in 1752 and Henrietta in 1753. Little Caroline died in 1754 and when Emily’s next child was born, right on cue in 1755, she too was named Caroline, only to follow her namesake into a very early grave. A third son, Charles, was born in 1756. So the family grew. Now and then Emily and Kildare complained about the size of their family. They worried about how their younger children would survive when they grew up, particularly the girls who could not, given their parents’ profligacy, count on much money. But
they were proud parents all the same. Emily’s mother-in-law noticed that they were very particular about their children’s upbringing. Old Lady Kildare was exasperated with them, Emily reported to her husband and said, ‘you and I were both so exact and had so much fiddle faddle about our children! You indeed were worse again than me, she would not be your servant nor your child for the world, you was so tiresome.’

Emily found the ever-repeating cycle of pregnancy, childbirth and confinement tedious. But she never regretted her large family and she was fond of each of her children. In 1762, three months after the birth of Sophia, she began to suspect – rightly as it turned out – that she was already pregnant again. She soon got the better of her annoyance and wrote to Kildare, ‘I have resolved not to grumble! After all, are not my pretty babes a blessing? When I look round at them all, does not my heart rejoice at the sight, and overflow with tenderness? Why then repine? They are good, they are healthy, they are pretty; God Almighty bless them; if they gave me pain, they now make up for it by giving me pleasure.’

Emily loved the routine of the country and the nursery. She plunged herself into domestic life and extracted great pleasure from events that bored her husband. ‘Henry naked is the dearest little being on earth,’ she would exclaim and demanded regular bulletins from the nursery if she was away. ‘Pray tell me something of dear little Charles – if he begins to walk, and how he likes his shoes and stockings.’ ‘My love to the dear girls. Kiss my Charles, my dear, dear pretty little Charles, and tell me something about him when you write.’ ‘Dear little Charles is lame; he has a sore leg. I have quite a hospital here. He is mighty comical about it and calls it the gout.’ If Kildare was away, Emily regaled him with chatty details; she told him the story of her days for her own enjoyment rather than his. ‘I am sure you will be glad to hear I have a fine bed of double jonquils in bloom, which delights me. You know I have a passion for them. You can’t expect any news from hence I am sure; a chatty letter you don’t love,
but I can’t help making mine a little so; ’tis quite natural to me, so pray excuse it.’

Writing was a great pleasure to Emily and she never went anywhere without her writing case. She once wrote to Fox, ‘I believe I explain myself sadly but I have scribbled this in a minute while in the coach waiting for Lord K.… I had no intention of writing to you but having nothing else to do took up my pen and you know how I go on once I begin.’ Exuberant letters of two or three sheets of paper regularly arrived for Kildare when he was away. Emily grumbled about servants, reported on progress from the nursery, flattered, cajoled and begged for money. She wrote out the story of her life with the panache of a born story-teller and sprinkled her letters liberally with terms of endearment. ‘Believe me ever your tender, affectionate and dutiful wife,’ she wrote, ‘yours sick or well’ or ‘God bless you, my sweetest, dear Jemmy.’ Kildare replied in kind. ‘I am, my dear Emily, yours most tenderly,’ or ‘Adieu, my dearest Emily, till we meet. Yours ever, K.’ Once he went so far as to write her a poem:

Careless am I let who will reign

O’er Britain’s Isle.

Nothing on earth shall give me pain

So Emily smile.

It was not a success but Kildare was not interested in poetry or literature and never indulged in the versifying that went on at Holland House. He sat through a play willingly enough but he disliked reading. Political pamphlets, even when they concerned himself, he turned over to Emily. Reading was her province and, when she had her portrait painted by Reynolds in 1753, she chose to be seen with a book. At the centre of the picture lies a book. Emily marks her place in it with her index finger. She leans on her right hand and gazes out of the picture, lost in dreams. The viewer is shut out from her world and thoughts. Kildare, in the companion painting, looks
Straight at the viewer and, with a gesture of his right hand, invites him into the picture and to a tour of the Carton estate that nestles in the background. Kildare posed himself for Reynolds as a man of action, outdoors and in his military uniform, his hair brushed back and curled in a matter-of-fact manner. Where Emily is secluded and indoors he is engaged with the outside world, brisk, direct and beady eyed.

Conventional as these poses were, they showed the differences in temperament and occupation between Kildare and his wife. Politics and the care of his estates did indeed fill Kildare’s days. He was proud of what he called his ‘busy temper’, and bustled about his estates, concerned for his reputation, rent-roll and, perhaps to a lesser extent, his tenants’ welfare. None the less he relied heavily on Emily to guide him through the storms of political life. Under the guise of offering casual opinions, Emily often steered Kildare towards decisions or actions which he then adopted as his own. She was very careful, none the less, to disavow any influence in Kildare’s politics, even to Fox. In 1757 she wrote to Fox, ‘Lord K. is not governed by anybody in politics I assure you. In everything else he is as all good husbands ought [to be] by me.’ To Kildare she was less behind-hand. ‘I am glad to hear you say our affairs look well,’ she wrote in 1757, casually assuming that politics was shared business. ‘I hope you mean by that that the heads of our party are likely to be reasonable, which is all you can judge of as yet, and what I own I had my doubts about. Don’t let them work upon you to expect too many concessions from these people. Nobody could be more inclined to peaceable measures than you are, and I hope you will continue so.’ Then, moving swiftly to accommodate the well aired view that women had no part to play in public affairs, Emily concluded disingenuously, ‘my dear Jemmy has always used me to talk to him upon this subject and tell my mind freely so I hope he don’t think I have said too much.’

Emily liked the drama and the cut-and-thrust of political life. ‘I long for a good fight,’ she once wrote to Fox during an
acrimonious phase in Kildare’s political career. Political news and enquiries filled her letters. ‘So much for linen. Now as to politics,’ she began, or ‘I long to hear some account of this day’s transactions in the House of Commons’; ‘Pray write me all the politics you can’.

At first Emily was interested in politics as a drama played out by relatives and acquaintances. But as the century wore on she started to read about political issues, perhaps prompted by Kildare’s opposition to Westminster, perhaps by the pervading difference and strangeness of Ireland, perhaps simply from curiosity and conviction. She began to think about the constitution, about the rights and wrongs of the relationship between King, Parliament and people – what rights and what duties were involved in the compact into which they had engaged, and did Parliament exist for King or people? What happened if a government became despotic or unjust? Neither Fox nor Caroline were radicals; they accepted the status quo and concerned themselves with the business rather than the theory of government. Kildare was a reformer only in so far as he demanded more autonomy for the Irish House of Commons; government by Protestant oligarchy seemed right and proper to him. When John Wilkes attacked parliamentary prerogatives in the name of the people in the late 1760s, Caroline and Fox were vehemently opposed to him. But at some point Emily became a radical, not only idealistically interested in liberty but also prepared to countenance civil rights – access to offices, courts, information and religious emancipation – for a far wider section of the people than enjoyed them at the time (although in common with all her sisters, she never gave any indication that these liberties might belong to women as well as men). It may have been a gradual process, beginning in the late 1760s, gathering steam in the late 1770s when the foundation of the American republic offered a model of government that was an alternative to monarchical rule, and crystallising in the late 1780s with the French Revolution. Whenever and however the transformation took place, Emily was careful to keep it well hidden,
revealing her preferences in omissions rather than declarations. In all her long correspondence she never praised the English monarchy. She never expressed regret (as almost every one of her contemporaries did) about the execution of the French royal family. Her beliefs and feelings revealed themselves in her children’s views and the kinds of marriages she wished her daughters to make.