Aristocrats (16 page)

Louisa was not ashamed of Conolly. She had already decided how to treat him. He was her ‘flea’, her ‘tormenting flea’ and also her ‘dear flea’: a constant irritant of which she was nevertheless fond. He hopped about, guileless and full of muscle. As time went on Louisa adapted herself to ‘flea’. She came to depend on his presence and to dread his trips away from home when, let loose from her restraint, he might gamble, drink and make foolish political decisions. At home she watched over him, nursing his ailments and entertaining his sporting guests. Sarah once wrote to Emily about the way in which Louisa came to implicate herself in Conolly’s hypochondria: ‘if Louisa has written at all, I am sure she has given you an idea of his being very ill, which you must not say I deny, for it is really so odd a fancy of his, and so rooted, so much adopted by her, that I’m convinced both of them would think me very unfeeling if they hear how lightly it is treated by every soul … His weakness admits of three hours ride and two of walking every morning, and the spitting increased by what he terms want of appetite; -viz: two plates of soup, three pork steaks, half a chicken and tart. Dearest Louisa is deaf; but why she should be blind I cannot guess.’

Simultaneously artless and inscrutable, Louisa baffled her family. Caroline, Emily and Sarah reached for superlatives to describe her, as if exact language was inadequate to her merits. Writing to a friend in the mid-1750s, Emily said, ‘As for Louisa, I really think that in my life I never knew or heard of anything equal to the sweetness and gentleness of her disposition. She is indeed as yet quite an angel. She is mildness itself. It is not in nature to ruffle the sweetness of her temper one single instant.’ Emily continued, indulging in her fondness for ‘storybook’ analogies, ‘one may say of her as Lord Hastings says in the play of Jane Shore,

Without one jarring atom was she formed

and gentleness and joy made up her being

which I think the prettiest character that can be given any woman.’

Caroline and Sarah agreed with Emily that something otherworldly surrounded their sister. ‘That angel Louisa’, ‘that sweet angel’, Caroline called her, and Sarah said she was ‘a dear angel’ whom people ‘worshipped’. Louisa’s place in the Lennox family was that of a lodestone of virtue, a standard of goodness against which her brothers and sisters measured their waywardness and depravity. Sarah, in particular, used her older sister for self-chastisement and encouragement. ‘She is an angel and I’m a weak, unsteady, thoughtless, vain creature.’ ‘My angelic sister’s character … raises me above my own weak nature sometimes.’

Quietness was one of Louisa’s greatest strengths, the more so because her siblings believed in expressing their emotions forcefully. Sandwiched between Emily’s queenly claims to emotional dominance and Sarah’s volubility, Louisa became at an early age mistress of the judicious silence. Sarah would have liked her sister to join in gossipy dissections of people and events, partly because Louisa’s reserve made Sarah feel tarnished and guilty. But Louisa never did, and Sarah wrote with a touch of exasperation, ‘dearest Louisa! How does she contrive to keep out of all scrapes? Why, by holding her tongue, to be sure. She is closeness itself, for the deuce a word will she utter that can be turned into any form but that she gave it.’

Louisa believed in battening down strong feelings. Towards the end of her life she wrote to her brother, ‘nobody is more likely than me to be drawn out of the right path where their passions are engaged. I am sensible of possessing very strong ones by nature, in so much, that I have made it a constant duty with myself to regulate them, and trust that upon the whole I have been able to subdue them very much. But on
some occasions throughout life I confess they have been stronger than my good resolutions.’

Louisa managed her silent gestures and eloquent reserve with great skill. They were her ways of securing attention and love. Early on in her life Louisa had forged a connection between doing good and being loved. Unlike Emily, who demanded love as a right, Louisa came to believe that love had to be earned, something not inevitable but hard won and reciprocal. Louisa had far lower expectations of her desserts than Emily or even Caroline, uncertain though the latter might be in some respects. Almost all her life her ambition was to please first Emily, then Conolly, Sarah and her other brothers and sisters. Yet the rewards, she felt, were great and lasting because she did not, like Caroline, feel happiness must inevitably be snatched away. ‘Thinking good of one’s fellow creatures is the most heartfelt satisfaction,’ she said, and described herself as ‘one of the happiest and luckiest of women’. By making herself useful, Louisa made herself important and beloved in the family. In return her family doted on her. When pressed to name a favourite sibling, all her brothers and sisters named her. Louisa was, as Sarah said, their ‘sheet anchor in all things’.

As a young woman Louisa wanted nothing more than to please Emily and be loved by her. She was a very willing subject in Emily’s empire of charm. When they parted in 1759, Louisa sent her sister declarations of love that were supplications before the altar of a deity. ‘No one can love another better than I do you, my dear sweet sister. I beseech you believe this from your ever loving and most affectionate L. A. Conolly.’ ‘I don’t know how to express my obligations to you for such kind advice as you gave me in the beginning of your letter. Indeed, I take it so kindly, and feel so happy with it, that I read over your letter with the greatest pleasure imaginable to find you still continue the same goodness to me you always had and which I shall never be so ungrateful as to forget. You know, my sweet sister, how sincere I always am in my professions of love or gratitude towards you.’

Louisa made her mark by absenting herself emotionally in the midst of her more volatile and expressive siblings. Sarah noticed that Louisa did not like to make ‘a fuss’ and that she enjoyed ‘doing good to all around her’. Louisa claimed she disliked ‘affectation’ by which people drew attention to themselves; so much so indeed that if she was upset she would take extra pains not to show it. ‘When my mind is occupied with vexation,’ she wrote to Emily in 1776, when she was thirty-two, ‘I do not love to speak of it to anybody … and think my safest way upon most occasions is to hold my tongue.’

This silence, a dam that restrained high feeling and bad temper, created its own emotional drama. Louisa used her stillness to have others scurrying around her, wondering what they should do for her, wondering what her opinions and needs were. During one family crisis she wrote to Emily, ‘remember, my dearest sister, I will not be considered,’ thus deftly adopting a stance which put Emily in the wrong whatever she did. Sarah watched the same diminutive play of emotion unfold when Louisa paid her a visit in 1776. Louisa, Sarah wrote to Emily, was ‘very naughty, I assure you, about her health … I wish you would give her a serious lecture about it. Do you know that if I had not had a fire made in her room here she would have come to this damp … house from town with the colic and never ordered one, because it did not signify, she said.’ Once or twice Louisa’s reserve drove Sarah beyond guilt and into exasperation. ‘Louisa carries her delicacy too far,’ Sarah burst out to Emily in 1776. ‘She ought to express the whole of her feelings and let us judge ourselves at what rate we value them.’ Most of the time, however, Sarah felt simply guilty.

When the fifteen-year-old Louisa arrived in London in the spring of 1759, Caroline was impressed. ‘I can’t say enough of sweet Louisa. Indeed, my dear siss, she does you honour. There never was anything so natural, so easy and pretty as her behaviour is, she dances charmingly.’ Two weeks later she added: ‘Louisa is vastly liked, not thought near as handsome
as you, but she is so well behaved, gentle, modest and civil, and seems to have so much sense and propriety about her its impossible but that she should please. I shall think her handsomer than Sal because she has so very pretty a figure.’

Louisa described herself as tall and well built. Others thought her handsome but not pretty, the distinction lying in her having a good figure rather than a beautiful face. Caroline praised her sister’s ‘presence’, a bosom whose size and amplitude conformed to the taste of the times. While she was in London Louisa went to Allan Ramsay’s studio and posed for her portrait. The picture was paid for by Caroline and destined for the gallery at Holland House. Caroline may have insisted on Louisa standing to show off her figure, even though a full-length portrait, especially if both hands were showing, was extremely expensive. Ramsay made a quick sketch of Louisa, taking note of her dark hair drawn tightly on top of her head, her plump hands and forearms, and the tipped-up nose, small mouth and soft chin she shared with her sisters. In the finished portrait, Louisa looks a good deal older than her fifteen years. She holds a bunch of grapes which hint at the wine and youthful merriment she was enjoying during the London season, and is wearing a salmon-pink court dress with three deep ruffles on the sleeves, two ruched frills round the skirt and seven rows of gathered ribbon across the stomacher.

Ramsay’s studio was only one site that had to be visited in the busy weeks of the London season. Louisa and Conolly plunged into a round of assemblies, balls, trips, plays and operas. Many of these had some sort of political intention or overtone since politics and pleasure were indivisible; the Conollys were being presented at Court and initiated into the world of the Whig aristocracy at the same time. On 23 March, the third Duke of Richmond gave a ball for his sister, and by 10 April Louisa and Tom Conolly had kissed the King’s hand, attended three operas, two plays, numerous assemblies and one
ridotto
. The latter, a mixed entertainment of music and
dancing that combined an informal concert with cheerful dances, the shy Louisa declared she liked ‘of all things’.

Despite this social whirl, Louisa was miserable. She was lonely for Carton, for Sarah and, above all, for Emily. When Emily hinted that she might accompany Kildare to London when he came on business in the summer of 1759, Louisa replied, garbling her words with delight, ‘be so good as to excuse this scribbling, but I really am so excessively overjoyed to think I so soon shall be so happy as to see you that I really don’t know what I am doing or what I’m about. This is so charming a surprise. I really want words to express my joy.’ Emily did not come and Caroline reported that ‘poor dear Louisa cried sadly the whole afternoon about it’.

Louisa did not forget the anxiety and loneliness of her London sojourn. Years later when she was decorating the long gallery at Castletown she selected an engraving called ‘La Nouvelle Épouse’ and had it copied in oils and placed on the wall above her husband’s portrait. The engraving came from a seven-volume illustrated encyclopedia of the ancient world, Bernard de Montfaucon’s
L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures
(1719–24). The book’s plates were accompanied by an explanatory text; in this one, Montfaucon wrote, the bride was weeping because she was leaving home for the first time. In the Castletown panel, she sits on a tomb-like wall, covering her eyes with a cloak, while a cupid stands awkward and unemployed near a servant who is trying to wash away the bride’s unhappiness.

As the spring of 1759 matured into summer, it was Emily’s turn to feel anxious. She suspected that Conolly was planning to live in England for good, and she wanted Louisa back. At the end of May Emily wrote impatiently to Kildare, who had arrived without her in London, ‘I am sure you might easily dissuade her from buying a house in London. And you might at the same time commend your own wife to her for readily agreeing from prudent motives to give up that you had in London, tho’ she was fond of it and had still more reason to love England than Louisa can, having been bred up there.’

But not for nothing had Emily kept Louisa and Sarah so close to her. By the time she left Ireland for London, Louisa had grown into the uneasy mentality of the colonist. She loved Ireland but was ashamed of it in the face of English snobbery and distanced from it by virtue of her English birth. Yet she was unhappy anywhere else. Louisa lived in a colonial limbo mistrusted by both the English she lived amongst and the Irish she had left. She tried to overcome her dislike of England, writing to her sister in 1759, ‘now though one may be partial to Ireland, as I am, yet one need not find fault with this place … Are you not of my opinion, my dear sister, that one should try not to make oneself disagreeable to any nation?’ But England was not her home and she came to think of herself as Irish, a definition that was to bring her great anguish in the years to come.

Louisa was home by the autumn. But for the next few years she and Conolly went backwards and forwards between England and Ireland, spending the sporting seasons at Castletown and going to London for parliamentary sessions. In 1761 Conolly was elected to the Irish Parliament as MP for Londonderry, and after that unless Irish affairs were on the Westminster agenda, he seldom attended the English House of Commons. Castletown became the focus of the Conollys’ lives. They became more and more reluctant to leave it, even for social occasions, preferring to hold open house rather than accept invitations. As time went on Louisa and Tom fused with their house in the minds of their friends and Castletown became one of those almost-living symbols of Ascendancy life so lauded by apologists and decried by opponents.

Life at Castletown changed with the weather and the seasons, closer at all times to the demands and offerings of the land than the hectic amalgam of town and country life at Holland House. Louisa gave her guests hospitality rather then wit. After a day’s riding friends looked forward to immense dinners followed by a gentle hand of cards. They did not expect Charles Fox’s prodigious brilliance, Henry’s wit or Caroline’s serious conversation.

In summer, when Dublin was empty, Castletown life revolved around racing and, after 12 August, shooting, both predominantly but not exclusively pleasures for men. Early rising was called for on days of organised sport which would take them a considerable distance from the house. On other days, guests and their hosts got up about eight o’clock, several hours after their servants, and they came together for breakfast at nine-thirty or ten. Before breakfast Louisa often wrote letters or went over her accounts. After breakfast the party would divide. Some went out to ride, pay calls or walk through the grounds, Louisa’s favoured outdoor occupation. ‘This is a most lovely day,’ she wrote in February 1768, ‘a white frost with fine sunshine. I am going out with all the dogs to take a long
trudge
all over the place, which is a pleasant thing to do.’ Women and old people settled down to several hours of work accompanied by readings, mostly from novels, poetry, histories, sermons and books of travels. Sewing of all sorts was the main occupation for women, but it was varied by drawing, which Louisa enjoyed, copying and colouring prints or making plans for houses, offices and rooms. Women embroidered bed hangings, chair seats, fire screens, waistcoats and gowns. They worked lace into ruffles and wove silk into ribbons. When they got bored they passed their work on to servants to be finished. ‘I have begun my gown, its vastly pretty, the stripes go on like lightening, but the flowers are a little tedious,’ wrote Sarah on a country sojourn in 1760, holding out little hope that the finished garment would be all her own work. In another letter she added, ‘I am grown a great workwoman lately.’