Aristocrats (13 page)

Ste’s illness produced a more than usual leniency in his parents. Caroline gave and forgave him anything, longing only for him to get well. At the age of six Ste was a regular visitor to the Haymarket and Drury Lane. ‘I did give Ste a general leave to go to the play whenever he chose it,’ she wrote to Henry in 1751. Charles soon joined his brother in the box. By the time Charles was five he was reading every play he could find. At six he had graduated to novels and poetry and Caroline began to teach him Roman history. Stories about the Foxes’ indulgence were legion. Charles declared his
intention of taking apart a fob watch. His father stood by murmuring, ‘well, if you must, you must’. Once a grand dinner was held at Holland House for some visiting foreign dignitaries. The Fox children were brought in for dessert. Charles, still a toddler in petticoats, said he wanted to bathe in a huge bowl of cream that stood on the table. Despite Caroline’s remonstrances, Fox ordered the dish to be put down on the floor and there, in full view of some of Europe’s most powerful politicians, the little boy slopped and slid to his heart’s content in the cool, thick liquid. Another time Fox lifted Charles up on the table and put him on top of a prize joint of roast beef so that the child could sit astride the symbol of England itself, a living image of Fox’s hopes for his sons. This indulgence scandalised more disciplinarian parents, but Fox insisted that it had a rationale, saying of Charles, ‘Let nothing be done to break his spirit. The world will do that business fast enough.’ Caroline wrote to Emily with a mixture of pride and apology, ‘you know this is reckoned such a house of liberty for children.’

In the Spring of 1753, politics swept Fox away from the jollity at Holland House. For the first and perhaps the last time in his life, Fox took a principled rather than a pragmatic stand on a political issue. He lost his temper and his case, and he came to feel that the episode marked a turning point in his career. The proposal that caused such anguish did not seem to many to be worth the time and passion that Fox lavished upon it; it was a Bill to regulate and tighten the marriage laws, introduced and sponsored by the Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke.

Hardwicke’s initiative was purely administrative, designed to stop the abuses which widespread clandestine marriages caused. But Fox took it personally as an attack on his elopement with Caroline and on the honour of his family. He was a committed libertarian in social matters (more so, indeed, than Caroline), believing that people should suit themselves and the state should not meddle in affairs of the heart. He fought
vehemently against the Bill in Parliament. He shouted and gesticulated towards the House of Lords, where Hardwicke sat, and astonished fellow MPs (who thought of him as a consummately pragmatic politician) by his anger and imprudence.

The vote, when it came, was resoundingly in favour of the Bill. When he had calmed down, Fox was horrified to realise that he had made an implacable enemy of the Lord Chancellor. ‘I despise the invective and I despise the recantation; I despise the scurrility (for scurrility I must call it) and I reject the adulation,’ Hardwicke declared, adding that Fox was ‘a dark, gloomy and insidious genius who was an engine of personality and faction.’

This disastrous foray into the politics of belief left Fox shaken. Abstract notions like liberty and conscience, which he had used in the debate, had not been conspicuous elements in his political creed. Stepping off the safe ground of pragmatism Fox had cast himself onto a sea of self-doubt. While he continued to assert his veracity his confidence in his own political style was damaged, as if, having once lost control of himself, he might do it again and again. Rather than let that happen Fox imperceptibly but inexorably began to reduce his ambitions. During the next crisis of his political career in 1755, he appeared to outsiders to be artificially constrained from fulfilling his ambition and talent. His family were in no doubt that the affair of the Marriage Bill had weakened his confidence. Emily wrote to Kildare on that occasion, ‘he seems in vast doubts how to act and always says he has committed one fault never to be retrieved; and that I believe is what prevents his acting with as much spirit as he would have done once. I know this is my sister’s opinion.’ Fox had risked and perhaps lost his political career for his beliefs. Henceforth he stayed within the compass of the familiar: quid pro quos, payoffs and pragmatic dealings.

Superficially Fox’s ambitions were not blunted by the events of 1753. seemed as bullish and as eager for the highest political office as he had been a year earlier when he
confided in Lord Hillsborough that ‘he resolved to push for his turn: not by opposition, for he said he had a family and could not afford to part with his emoluments, but if accident should happen he pretended to succeed: that, indeed, Mr. Pelham’s life was as good as his, and he could not oppose him; but that he should endeavour to look upon himself as next.’ Fox’s chance came in 1754 when Pelham suddenly died of a seizure, and peace, both at home and abroad, died with him. Two candidates vied to fill Pelham’s positions of head of the Commons and First Lord of the Treasury: Fox himself and his rival William Pitt. Fox was Secretary at War, Pitt was Paymaster of the Forces. Between them and high office stood the Duke of Newcastle, whose determination to bring neither into prominence was stiffened by the Chancellor Lord Hardwicke. Hardwicke naturally opposed any move to bring Fox into the upper echelons of the government. The King disliked Pitt. So Newcastle took the Treasuryship for himself. His own position of Secretary of State for the Northern Department (the equivalent of the American Secretary of State or British Foreign Secretary) he ceded to the diplomat Sir Thomas Robinson, who thus became the government’s chief spokesman in the Commons. The combined force of Fox and Pitt acting together in the House was too much for Robinson; Newcastle decided that he must break up the strange alliance they had struck up. A Cabinet position and other sweeteners were offered to the one who would stop tormenting the government. It was Fox who accepted Newcastle’s offer. Unable to wait until the Treasuryship fell into his lap, convinced that Hardwicke would block him at every turn and afraid of Pitt’s steely, prim reserve, Fox decided to leapfrog over Pitt and try to approach the Treasury by degrees. In December 1754, Fox became a member of the Cabinet and one of the Regency Council appointed to govern when the monarch was in Hanover.

At first things went Fox’s way, helped it seemed by the disintegration of peace in Europe and the North Atlantic.
Disputes between France and Britain about the way to carve up the North American continent broke out into naval skirmishes and land confrontations in May 1755. The House of Commons, still without any official leader, was in equal disarray. Once again either Fox or Pitt would have to be appeased if Newcastle was to hold his fragile administration together and once again it was, in the end, Fox who rose to the bait. Despite Hardwicke’s opposition Fox was elevated to the office of Secretary of State and Leader of the House of Commons. Pitt was dismissed in November 1755 for his opposition to government policy and returned to the sidelines to await his turn.

On the Continent the merry-go-round of alliances was whirling faster and faster. The European powers were once more making fervid preparations for war. By March 1756 the French had assembled expeditionary forces to strike both at the English mainland and at Minorca, Britain’s chief Mediterranean base. The British sent reinforcements too late. Minorca fell and the reverberations threatened Newcastle’s government. ‘The rage of the people increases daily,’ Fox wrote, certain that as Secretary of State and Leader of the House he would be blamed. Fox was anxious and dithering; Caroline reported that he was in very low spirits. He was beginning to lose stomach for the fight. Facts and figures not international affairs were Fox’s strong points, and taking on the burden of government foreign affairs with only lukewarm support from the King and the Duke of Newcastle was a catastrophic error from which he could find no way out. Fox knew that his career was drawing to a crisis and that the prize of the Treasury had slipped from his grasp. Rather than carry the can for the government in the Minorca affair, he resigned. Newcastle and Hardwicke were unable to find anyone to replace him in the Commons and, with war going badly and Pitt menacing them in the House, they both handed in their resignations as well. Only the King now stood between Pitt and power. In desperation George turned back to Fox and asked him to form a ministry. Fox tried, but not very hard,
because he knew that Pitt would refuse to join. ‘I can’t much blame him,’ Fox wrote. He abandoned the attempt. On 4 December 1756, Pitt, with the Duke of Devonshire as Treasury minister, took over the government. Fox’s political career was all but over: the next year he took the politically worthless job of Paymaster of the Forces.

Thwarted in his political ambition, Fox was determined to become rich. The war that had broken out on the lands and seas of Europe and America was to be the most expensive ever fought. At any time the Paymastership was one of the most lucrative of government offices, as Fox’s father knew well. In wartime, and particularly in this war, the key to the Pay Office unlocked enormous riches. Because the price for his wealth was to be political oblivion, Fox was determined to milk the Pay Office for everything it could provide. In the next seven years he garnered a fortune rumoured to be £400,000. Despite public hostility and detailed enquiries, nobody then or since has been able to prove that it came from anything other than the accepted practice of lending out and reinvesting the vast sums of government money that went through the Paymaster’s hands in wartime. In this way, dripping with money and loaded with opprobrium, Fox ended his political career. The ‘boisterous and impetuous torrent’ as Pitt called Fox, was diverted into the political backwaters. In 1757 he set his course towards an ocean of money upon which he intended to float his sons towards the power he had lost. Henceforth his hopes rested with his family.

In 1755 Caroline had had another son, named Henry after both his father and the Foxes’ second son who had died as an infant in 1746. Henry, or Harry as his parents always called him, could not displace Charles in his father’s heart. None the less, Fox could never resist a baby. He wrote to Caroline in 1756, ‘Charles is very well and very pert and very argumentative. I rode to Holland House this morning and found Harry … in the park, looking cold but very well. I called him Squeaker and he looked at me and laughed, but upon the whole seemed to like my horse better than me.’

Caroline reported similarly trivial but treasured incidents to Emily in Ireland. By the early 1750s they were writing every week or fortnight, usually on folio or half-folio sheets of paper, but sometimes on several smaller sheets. Before dispatch, letters were folded and sealed with wax into a compact parcel about the size of a pocket diary. The recipient’s address was written on the smooth side of the packet. ‘Ly Car. Fox. Pay Office,’ Emily wrote, while Caroline addressed letters to ‘Countess of Kildare, Carton. Co. Kildare’. In cities, letters were collected and delivered, usually by the same person, at given times during the day, centrally sorted and dispatched by coach to their destinations. Caroline and Emily could confidently assume that London news would reach Ireland in five or six days and that letters would rarely go astray. Letters posted outside London – from Bath to Dublin, for instance – went by the ‘cross post’, a sorting and dispatching system that bypassed London.

Post to and from the Continent was equally simple, although it was sometimes disrupted by war, weather or quarrels between post masters and heads of state. Letters from Europe came addressed in the language of their country of origin. ‘A Miladi Car. Fox, A Londres,’ they announced, or ‘A la Comtesse de Kildare, A Dublin.’ In wartime letters from Europe were often entrusted to friends or naval officers, but in peacetime the ordinary post was fast and efficient enough to guarantee a regular correspondence.

Emily and Caroline saw themselves as self-conscious letter writers with ‘formed’ styles. Like polite conversation, letter writing was an accomplishment with its own complex rules, as Caroline revealed when she told Emily how ashamed she was that Ste Fox still wrote like a child at the age of seventeen. ‘His letters are quite a schoolboy’s. He is well, hopes we are, and compliments to everybody. Adieu. Yours Most Sincerely.’ Emily’s daughter, in contrast, received Caroline’s praise for epistolary skill. ‘I wrote to your daughter Emily … She is a delightful correspondent, her style quite formed. I have given her some account of Voltaire.’

The Lennox sisters believed that epistolary style should conform to an aesthetic and that letters were to some extent performances whose success could be measured against a set of rules. They were public displays in other ways too. Letters were for family consumption, to be read aloud. Thoughts that were exclusive to writer and reader would often be included on a separate sheet of paper that could be removed before the rest did its round of the drawing-room. In 1756 Emily wrote a flirtatious note to Henry Fox teasing him for flouting this convention. ‘What a creature you are! I receive your letter before a thousand people. “A letter from Mr. Fox, oh we shall have some news.” Everybody waits with impatience till I have read it. I open it with an important face and then behold it’s full of nonsense and indeed such stuff as is not decent to shew to any creature.’

What were the elements of epistolary style, the ‘forms’ that the Lennox sisters set so much store by? Commentators described letter writing as an art that at once informed, entertained and revealed the self. The most perfect style was both artless and arch, intimate and allusive, with frequent gestures towards a rarefied culture of print. Male writers backed up their revelations and observations with Latin maxims and verses. Women like Caroline and Emily, lacking a classical education, used contemporary French and English writers for the same purpose. Emily liked jokey allusions to French comic novels and English plays and poetry. Caroline inclined towards aphorism. She often quoted from the
Spectator
, which she said she ‘knew by heart’ and also favoured La Rochefoucault, La Bruyère, Rousseau and, inevitably, Voltaire. ‘Voltaire says somewhere, la dévotion est la ressource ordinaire des âmes sensibles. Perhaps there are people good to do their duty without it. I know I am not.’ ‘I like Martin’s answer to Candide’s asking, pourquoi ce monde a-t-il été fait? Pour nous faire enrager replies Martin; which thought comes naturally into one’s head on several occasions, tho’ its a false maxim.’ Pride of place as both moral authority and stylistic
model went to Madame de Sévigné, whose letters were required reading for self-conscious English letter writers in the eighteenth century.