Aristocrats (19 page)
For the next three weeks, while the formal proposals for Princess Charlotte’s hand were being made in Germany, Sarah went regularly to Court. But although the King ‘spoke and looked with great fondness’, Emily reported to Fox that he said ‘nothing in particular’. On 1 July a Privy Council meeting was called for the 8th, and on the 4th Fox was told that its purpose was to announce the King’s marriage.
Sarah was mortified by Fox’s news, not because she was fond of the King but because she had been deceived. ‘Luckily for me,’ she wrote to Susan, ‘I did not love him, and only liked him. Nor did the title weigh anything with me … The thing I am most angry at is looking so like a fool.’ The trial was over, Sarah had played her part as best she could, and now she wanted, she said, to enjoy the marriage and coronation festivities like any other woman of fashion. ‘I wonder if they will name me train bearer,’ she wrote to Susan on 16 July. ‘I wish they would, tho’ they abuse me and call me names, for its the best way of seeing the Coronation.’
But try as she might, Sarah could not forget the affair. She felt and continued to feel tainted, as if the King’s duplicity had been her own. Her failure confirmed her self-hatred and her role as the plaything of others. In the weeks leading up to the wedding Sarah diverted herself by looking after a sick squirrel, translating the damage done to herself on to the care of another frail creature. But in a bathetic comment on her loss of dignity the squirrel died. Sarah hurriedly found a hedgehog, an animal whose prickly self-defence she could have used with gratitude. The hedgehog came down to breakfast with her and she kissed it constantly. Fox noticed the hedgehog’s analgesic role with a mixture of irony and concern and Sarah herself remembered it tenderly thirty-five years later.
As time went on Sarah’s memory erased some parts of the humiliation and distorted others to fit the King’s later history.
In Henry Fox’s account, written as the drama unfolded, Sarah’s conversation with the King in March 1761 was extremely brief. In reply to his enquiries about the exchange with Susan Fox-Strangways, Sarah had simply answered ‘nothing’. But Sarah, retelling the story much later embellished it, weaving her knowledge of the King’s madness through the eighteenth-century cult of Shakespeare and playing Cordelia to his deranged despotic Lear. Sarah described the King taking her into a large window recess and saying, ‘“has your friend told you my conversation with her?” “Yes, Sir.” “And what do you think of it? Tell me for my happiness depends upon it!” “Nothing Sir.” … upon which he left her abruptly, exclaiming pettishly, “Nothing comes of nothing”.’
It was half a century before Sarah overcame her sense of humiliation. In 1805 she wrote to a friend, ‘Why do you ask me if ever the King had much sense? Read his reign, good madam, and judge for yourself.’ Sarah did eventually move with the times, sharing in a general softening of attitudes towards the Crown in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and after the end of the Napoleonic wars she surprised friends by the warmth of her monarchism. But she always insisted, ‘I still rejoice that I was never Queen, and so I shall to my life’s end.’
George III did not forget Sarah, although he did not talk about her for many years. But when he fell ill with porphyria in 1788 his raving mind travelled back to his youth and disinterred the love which had been safely buried for thirty years. The salient feature of George III’s illness was what Robert Fulke Greville, one of his equerries, called his ‘talking very fast on [a] variety of subjects, incoherently and imprudently’. The King was not so incoherent, however, that his doctors and minders could not discern that this imprudence consisted of an avalanche of sex talk: random sexual fantasy, disgust at the Queen, spicy allusions to Lady Pembroke, a woman he had greatly admired in the early 1760s, and now and then sly asides in which he seemed to shake off his raving
and reach a hidden truth that served his amorous ramblings. On 16 January 1789, for instance, the King asked Greville ‘to go and look for Paley’s Philosophy, in which he told me that I should find that tho’ the law said that Man might have but only one wife, yet that Nature allowed more.’
In this mix of sense and nonsense Sarah was not forgotten. On 22 February, the King told the Lord Chancellor that ‘he had had an attachment thirty years ago’ and earlier he declared that he had renounced the woman he loved and married another chosen from the Almanach de Gotha. In 1805, many years after his recovery, the King put that memory to the service of patronage. After a solicitation which Sarah described as ‘a letter full of details of my situation with some remarks on the sympathetic feelings of one blind person to another’, he awarded her a pension of £800 a year.
Thus in her old age, Sarah was prepared to turn her place in the King’s heart to her advantage. In the months immediately succeeding the announcement of the King’s marriage, however, it seemed to brand her as an outcast and a failure. Caroline made matters worse by saying that it would be wrong for Sarah to attend the royal wedding especially because, as the eldest unmarried Duke’s daughter, she would be premier bridesmaid and well within sight of the King throughout the proceedings. Henry Fox approved of Sarah’s being there for exactly the same reason. Forcing the King to compare Sarah with Charlotte of Mecklenburg was Fox’s only available revenge. ‘Well Sal,’ he said to Sarah, ‘you are the first
vargin
in England and you shall take your place in spite of them all as chief bridesmaid, and the King shall behold your pretty face and repent.’
The royal ceremonial over, Caroline and Emily, with their attendant husbands, turned back to the serious business of the next few months, finding Sarah a husband. In Caroline’s scheming to catch the Duke of Marlborough she had paraded Sarah at Ranelagh. But although the Duke came he ‘walked all
night’ with Lady Caroline Russell, whom he eventually married. ‘Is this not quite mortifying?’ Emily asked Kildare in September 1761, adding, ‘this is an unlucky year for our poor little Sal.’ Caroline came up with a substitute, Lord Errol, a Scottish peer of vast stature, moderate income and small attraction for Sarah, who dubbed him ‘Ajax’ and refused him. Caroline smarted from her failure and wrote waspishly to Emily in mid-December, ‘that’s over so we will say no more about it. I hope she will be happy when she marries, and that she may get married before her pretty face gets too common.’ A few weeks later she added, ‘here are all the good matches going by her … some girls have all the luck.’ Although Sarah was still only sixteen, her spinsterhood was becoming a liability for everyone.
Caroline’s self-esteem was bound up in finding a good match for her younger sister, especially since Emily had succeeded so spectacularly with Louisa and Thomas Conolly. But as one bachelor after another passed Sarah by, Caroline retreated from the fray, saying self-righteously that she was not fit to pronounce on suitable candidates because her own marriage was so extraordinary as to make her forget the common lot. ‘One so likely to make a woman happy as Lord Errol she will probably not meet with, as I believe they are very scarce. But my ideas of happiness in marriage are I find so different from most women’s that I can’t judge for anybody else, but feel more thankful every day of my life for my own happy lot.’
Nobody came out well from this scramble for marital security; not Caroline who first took up and repudiated the challenge; not Fox, who initially pushed Sarah towards the King and then declared that marrying for love was devoutly to be wished; not Emily and Kildare, who nurtured her in Ireland and then abandoned her to her fate in London; and not Sarah herself, who against her better judgement allowed others to take control of her life.
Even before the end of the débâcle with the King, Sarah
was feeling tainted and unloved. She said that the only reason she was not married was ‘that I am not liked’. Although still only fifteen, she felt that time was running out although, she confided to Emily, ‘I don’t quite despair as seventeen is generally the age people are married in England; for they look upon 15 as quite a child. I don’t quite approve of that custom. But after 17 I intend to go to Ireland, and take Massie Hall, by Carton, and so settle myself for life.’
By the late autumn of 1761, the marital pool was drained. Sarah was anxious enough to note down carefully some advice from Ste Fox, who with the sagacity of sixteen told her: ‘Don’t refuse a good match when you can get it, and don’t go to plays and operas too often.’ In December a new suitor, Thomas Charles Bunbury, had emerged out of the crowd of Whigs and gossips who came to talk politics with Henry Fox at Holland House. Bunbury was MP for the county of Suffolk. He was, at twenty-two, noted as a dilettante and wit but regarded as a politician of such ineptitude that he once divided the House of Commons and found himself in a minority of one. Sarah described him as like ‘a Marquis in a French story book’, smooth, handsome, foppish and lugubrious. When Bunbury began to pay her attention, Sarah hurried to tell Susan about it, ‘to lay the case before you and ask for your advice’. But this time she added with the defensive caution born out of repeated failure, ‘we don’t always agree about these sort of things you know’.
Bunbury came constantly to Holland House in December 1761 and he followed Sarah on the round of Court and social events as well. Caroline took heart from this langorous shadowing and began to enquire about his background, employing her aunt Lady Albemarle as sleuth. Lady Albemarle reported that Bunbury’s parents, Sir William and Lady Bunbury, had an estate of five thousand a year and two good houses at Barton and Mildenhall in Suffolk. They were ‘very retired people, very fond of their children, and very good kind of people.’ Sir William was prepared to give Charles, as
his heir, £2,000 a year and ‘a house in town and country’. The Foxes, Kildares and, later, the Duke of Richmond, all regarded such financial provision as nugatory, especially for young people of fashion who lived in London and went to Court. ‘Both so young as they are, and in high life, they will not have the prudence to live within their income,’ Caroline wrote to Emily when Lady Albemarle’s report reached her.
None the less the affair progressed. At the end of January Caroline noted on the bottom of a letter to Emily, ‘today a long copy of verses (he is a poet), full of sighs, miseries, pains etc etc etc.’ Initially Caroline was ambivalent about the courtship. Bunbury was without Fox’s driving ambition, Kildare’s name or Conolly’s fortune. On the other hand, ‘it is a thing one can’t advise her against,’ she said, because there were no more eligible bachelors queuing for his place.
As the marriage began to look more certain, Caroline warmed to it, pleased that her duties as matchmaker would soon be over. ‘I have quite made up my mind to like it. He seems a grave young man of elegant, ingenious turn; now he is in love, mighty delicate and sentimental. He is a scholar and a poet.’ Sarah too warmed to her task, flirting outrageously. ‘I do suspect, now she sees she is sure of him and of our consent, no difficulties in the case, that she has a mind to coquette a little and tease him,’ Caroline wrote disapprovingly.
By the middle of February 1762 the formal proposals had been made and a marriage settlement drawn up between Henry Fox, the Duke of Richmond and Sir William Bunbury. As the details of the Baronet’s financial affairs emerged a new consensus formed amongst Sarah’s relations: the marriage could only be described as a ‘love match’ because the couple were bound to be very poor. Caroline said that ‘nothing but liking him immensely can make the match tolerable. They will never have more than £2,500 [a year] in hard money.’ Henry Fox also conceded that Bunbury was ‘not rich enough’, but sanguinely said, ’tis a match of her own making and happiness don’t depend on money.’ In reply to Fox’s
details of Sir William Bunbury’s fortune, the Duke of Richmond, with his characteristic blend of pedantry and concern, sounded a prophetic note of caution. ‘I can only observe how very bad a match this is. And ’tis the greater pity as I think one may say from past observation that Sarah’s temper is not so unalterable but that she might have done without him … How difficult it is to persuade one’s friends to do what is for their own happiness.’
In the midst of this barrage of commentary the principals in the affair made their way slowly towards the altar, revealing nothing to their families of their feelings. Their silence was drowned by the mounting chorus of criticism from Sarah’s siblings. As Bunbury’s financial prospects were gradually revealed to be less than glowing, so observers discovered that the lovers themselves seemed cool and distant. Lord Kildare arrived in London on business at the end of April 1762 and found Bunbury less a ‘beauty’ than he had been told and less ardent than he expected. ‘Lady Sarah is just the same as she was; but neither she nor Mr. Bunbury seem to be much in love according to my notion of being in love.’ Caroline, Fox and the Fox children all agreed: ‘the young pair, as our boys observe, are the coolest of lovers.’ By the middle of May Caroline began to see defects in Mr Bunbury’s character, although for her own sake as much as for Sarah’s she still gave him the benefit of the doubt. ‘I believe he is one of those kind of people one can’t find any fault with, and yet that don’t grow more pleasing upon acquaintance … With regard to her happiness one very great fault he has which I must mention, he despises story books.’
At the beginning of April 1762, the wedding had been set for the middle of May, but neither the bride nor the groom seemed impatient for the ceremony. On 15 May Henry Fox wrote to Dr Francis, the minister who was to officiate at the wedding admitting that ‘it is impossible to say with exactness when the wedding will be’. The tentative date of 25 May came and then Bunbury put off the wedding for a week, prompting
Caroline to write angrily to Emily, ‘I feel most exceedingly peevish with him, am convinced myself ’tis that he don’t chose to miss the B[ute] House ball … happily for her she is not the least in love with him.’ But, inexorably, the reluctant couple approached the altar.
2 June 1762
A small party, richly dressed in silk and velvet, walked out of the damask-lined drawing-room of Holland House, into the entrance hall and through the iron gates of the chapel. The chapel was two storeys high, with round arched windows down the east side and an Inigo Jones ceiling. It had new pews and fresh paint and gilding, white like a bride, twinkling in the evening light.
